The Good Boy (8 page)

So fuck it. “I’m tired,” he says. “I’m done talking about this.”

The stove timer goes
ting
and Sarah responds on reflex, an oven mitt, tongs. Pete would get up and fix the plate himself but then it would turn into a whole thing about how he should have barbecue sauce or a napkin when he really just wants to eat the fucking chicken leg with his hands and wipe his hands on his pants and throw his pants in the laundry and take a shower but it can never make simple sense like that, can it?

She gets another dish from the fridge and says, “There are beans. Do you want beans?”

This is the other thing Sarah does that drives him insane: she changes the subject. Even though he just said he was done talking about it, he knows she’s not done talking about it, and the ease with which she acts like she gives a shit whether or not he wants beans makes him want to choke her. Because he knows her agenda isn’t to feed him beans. It’s to drive him insane.

He says, “There is nothing wrong with our son.”

“I made them with bacon.”

“Jesus, Sarah. Say what you want to say.”

She puts the beans back, the chicken in front of him. “He has trouble with social cues. Difficulty making friends.”

“He’s in a new school.”

“He has unusual and all-absorbing interests. An inability to cope with change—”

“You might as well be talking about me.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Pete! God, I don’t know why I bother. You tell me to speak and then you don’t listen.”

“I listen.
Your
problem is that I don’t agree with you.”

“I don’t need you to agree. I need you to help.”

“What is it you want me to do?”

“Before,” she says, her grip firm this time on the back of the chair, “Joel was acting out because of you. Now, he’s acting like you.”

“You say that like I’m a bad guy. You say that like I haven’t done everything possible to make things right. But goddamm it, I asked you what you
want
me to
do.
You won’t ever tell me
that.
” He pushes back from the table.

She looks at him. It drives him more insane.

“Sarah. Say something.”

She very carefully pulls out the chair and very quietly sits and then very evenly she says, “Katherine called.”

“She called here?”

“Well, you don’t answer your phone.”

“Hah,” he says, so that she knows she wasn’t funny. “She must’ve heard about what happened at work today.”

Sarah looks away. “She’s the one who told me.”

“You knew.” Pete sits back and watches her watch the table and he wishes she had served him beans and barbecue sauce and a napkin so he could push it all back at her, make a scene and maybe a real mess and get up and storm out—yes it would be childish but so what?—she knew what to expect tonight. She knew the shit Pete was carrying when he walked in. And she chose to play it this way.

He pushes his plate aside, the uneaten chicken leg, and he finishes his beer. Then he says, “I think you want me to be the bad guy.”

She half opens her mouth, lip quivering, and if she has something to say the house phone stops her, an interruption even though she lets it go on ringing and he lets it go on ringing and they both wait for it to turn over to voice mail.

Once it does she says, “What now?”

And she means about White, of course, but the damn phone starts right up again and this time Pete says, “I’ll get it,” because he’s already so tired of lying.

4

The downstairs phone rings and Joel snaps awake, his joints dream-locked.

It’s dark outside his bedroom window, so it’s either getting late or it’s really early—impossible to tell which from the sky or a phone call.

He gets up and turns on his desk lamp, a swatch of light over last year’s Cook County K9 calendar—Butchie the dog of the month in July—and this season’s bullpen-autographed Cubs pendant, July the month his dad says they blew their playoff chances.

Then there’s the plate of cold chicken tenders, another wake-up call—this one as to why he was asleep in the first place. His stomach still feels greased, like after a large popcorn at the movies, except what he saw today wasn’t a movie, and nobody had to explain how they made it look real.

He switches off the light and jumps back into bed.

When he got home this afternoon his mom asked, “Do you have something to tell me?” like she was psychic, so he lied and said, “Yes, I have a headache,” which was true often enough to get him sent up to his room. At one point she came in to check on him and he pretended to be asleep. She left the chicken and a glass of milk and a plastic cup of applesauce. She also left a real bad feeling in Joel’s heart because she knew something was wrong. Said so. Said, “Jo Jo, I don’t know what I’m going to tell your dad.”

Joel studied the back of his eyelids as long as he could, then made up a cough and turned over.

After a while he got tired of pretending to be asleep, and that must have been when he actually fell asleep.

The phone rings again and pretty soon he hears his dad start up the stairs. He knows it’s his dad because the third step creaks under the stress of his weighted boots; so will the ninth, and the tenth. The house is old—“vintage” is what Joel’s mom kept calling it when they moved in last year; “bullshit” is what his dad said to that. He didn’t seem to want to move from their old newer house in Edison Park, but everybody kept saying this older new one would be the fresh start they needed, though it turned out there wasn’t much fresh about this house at all.

Mike said they moved because they needed money and the old-lady landlord offered it cheap. His mom said the old lady was lonely after she lost her husband and she wanted to move to an old-ladies’ home so
she
needed the money. Either way, here they are, his dad coming down the hallway, passing by Joel’s door to knock on Mike’s.

It’s a cop knock, backhanded. “McKenna,” he says, like he’s said it for the third time. This is probably because ever since his parents put something called smart limits on her phone, they play operator every night after nine.

“Yeah?” Mike says, sounding like the smart one.

“Telephone. A boy from school, something about math homework.”

Her door opens.

“You’ve got five minutes.”

Five minutes? That’s a long time for a girl who doesn’t ever do homework to talk about homework.

“Fine, Pete.” Mike shuts her door and locks it.

His dad starts back toward the steps and stops in front of Joel’s room. Joel tries to keep his breath even, to relax, to empty the expression from his face, but he shakes from the core, and there’s no way to hide that. He waits for the twist of the knob, the sticky latch, the leaky truth, but nothing happens; instead, his dad moves on down the hall without even trying the door. The tenth, ninth, and third step confirm he’s going, going, gone.

And then there’s Mike, from the other side of the shared wall: her cutest voice, every word sounding like
me.
Joel can’t make out what she’s saying but he’s not really trying, because lately all she ever talks about is how nobody lets her do anything—nobody being their parents and anything, whatever rule she feels like ignoring. Joel can’t sympathize because it seems like she gets away with everything.

“Me me me
me-me,
” she says, like some robot on the fritz. It’s so weird; they used to be friends. She never locked her door and she was always willing—interested, even—in explaining stuff. Like about their dad’s job when he had to protect the judge. And about how to take a joke. But since Mike started high school, it seems the only things they share anymore are two parents and a wall.

“Me me me,”
she says,
“Me ME, Zack.”

Joel sits up. Wants to throw up. Zack Fowler. Calling his sister.

He presses his ear to the wall and the muscles in his legs feel like they’re coming unstrung and it’s all he can do to hold himself there, still enough to listen. He waits for her to say something that will break through the panic; maybe she isn’t talking
to
Zack, but
about
him. Or maybe there is a different Zack in her grade, or at her new school.

Or else, what seems more like the truth—what Joel feels in his bones—is that it is Zack Fowler and there is no homework, just more trouble.

Joel slides down the wall. He always thought of Zack Fowler like one of his Most Wanted characters—the mythical sort people only tell stories about. Joel had only heard stories until he ran into Zack over the summer, and that sure gave him a story to tell: it started when Joel took Molly up on the tracks to prove he could squish coins on the rails. They’d climbed up through a hole in the fence at Bryn Mawr and knew it was off-limits, legal-wise, but they didn’t know access was forbidden to them specifically on account of Zack Fowler being up there with a girl named Linda Lee. When Zack saw Joel and Molly, he wanted to know if they’d gone up there to make out. They said no; Joel didn’t say he wasn’t even sure how that worked. Zack said they had to make out right there or else hand over all their money. They had nearly three dollars between them.

Molly was the one who really paid for it because she’d swiped her share of the rail money from her grandma’s change purse. Molly didn’t believe they would dent a single dime and had planned to return the change. When she went home broke, she wound up telling her grandma the whole thing. She was grounded for a week, and since her grandma wasn’t about to canvas the neighborhood looking for Zack Fowler and her two dollars, Molly had to make back the money by rubbing the old woman’s swollen, purple feet. Later, Molly told Joel it would’ve been less gross to just make out.

Joel gets up, straining to hear Mike from another spot on the wall, but all he can make out is
me, me, me.
After running into Zack today—a story he isn’t ever supposed to tell—he’s got to know if his name is part of the conversation. If this call is some kind of sideways threat.

He pulls on his school pants and sneaks out into the hallway to listen at Mike’s door.

She says, “Oh right, I’m a fucking cop’s kid so I never lied before.” To their mom’s horror, Mike says
fuck
a lot these days, but with enough spirit to make the word sound like a compliment. Or a nice surprise.

“I don’t know,” she says, “someone broke in?” Her laugh is nervous, voice strange, like she’s doing an imitation of herself. “It’s a dangerous neighborhood, Zack. Fucking cat burglars. Yeah, right? Aw, you’re terrible. Poor cat.”

Joel’s legs muscle up this time and he abandons Mike’s door, skips the creaky steps, and stops when his bare toes touch the family-room carpet, and that’s because he knows better than to interrupt and also because he hears his dad in there saying, “… Or that Butch was provoked. I don’t know the details of the suit yet but I bet they’ll try to take us out of service.”

“Where does that leave you?” Joel’s mom sounds like she’s been crying.

“I don’t know. Patrol. Unless White gets what he really wants—I’ll be lucky to get security work in Lincolnwood fucking mall.”

“What about your pension? What about our health insurance?”

“Look at you, Sarah: thinking about tomorrow all of a sudden.”

“I’m thinking about Joel. He needs to see someone. I don’t care if you think he’s just a kid, or that it’s just a headache. I want to take him back to Dr. Drake—”

“Because you think Joel is nuts.”

“And you think
I’m
nuts.”

“I think you’re overreacting.”

Joel retreats to a hiding spot in the hallway behind the potted oleander; no way he can go in there now. What would he say? That he made up the headache but what’s true, what’s actually aching, is his heart, and that’s because Zack Fowler killed Felis Catus? Zack Fowler, the same boy who’s calling about math homework? Then Joel’s dad would think he’s nuts—
What’s a Felis Catus?—
and his mom would think his dad is nuts—
How can you be so insensitive? Do something!
—and then they’d decide to ask McKenna for the truth and wouldn’t that melt everybody’s brain?

Mike would have to lie, of course, and then Joel would have to be nuts, just to put the Murphy world back in order. And Zack Fowler, who is on the phone with his sister right now—
not
talking about math but certainly calculating Joel’s doom—would get off scot-free.

Joel imagines his parents sitting there: his mom curled up at the far end of the couch, her face splotchy like it gets after drinking wine, one finger bookmarking her
Sibling Grief
paperback as she tries to think what to say. And his dad in the chair opposite the TV, newspaper clutched, the rest of him calm. He’s stripped down to a white V-neck, sweat rings at his armpits dried crisp, in stages, and he still wears his boots and pants, ready to go at a phone call. Joel tries to remember the last time he was home.

He can’t remember the last time his mom was happy.

Joel wishes he could go in there and admit that his head didn’t really hurt tonight. The headaches have worried her. Over the summer, they worried her enough to get Joel an appointment with an eye doctor, who said he could see 20/20, and a regular doctor, who said he had growing pains.

The whole train ride home from the regular doctor, Joel stared out the window while he imagined his head was growing instantaneously, like one of those capsules that expands in water to make a sponge dinosaur, or a seahorse. Except unlike the sponge, when his head grew full he was sure it wouldn’t float at all; it would be too heavy. It would break his neck.

As soon as he got home he looked up
growing pains,
a term defined as “neuralgic pains attributed to growth.”
Neuralgic
wasn’t in the dictionary but there was a whole page of other
neuro-
words that made him think that whatever growing pains were, they were all in his head, which made sense since that’s what always hurt. Most times on the right side, in the front. Sometimes so bad he would feel like throwing up. And one time worse than that, when he did throw up.