by Luke Geddes
He tossed the whistle to Ellie, who ignored it, curled her lip in disgust, and pushed her plate to the center of the table. She crossed her arms but remained seated, did not, as Keith assumed she would, go sullenly up to her room.
“You sure are chipper tonight,” Stacey said as she emptied the remains of her plate onto Keith’s.
“What’s not to be happy about? Tomorrow’s the big day.”
“The filming of the Mark and Grant show,” she said unnecessarily.
“Mark and Grant,” Ellie repeated.
“Mark and Grant,” Stacey said back, like they were playing a game in which Keith was not a participant.
Ellie said, “Mark and Grant are dead. Mutual erotic asphyxiation.” After a moment she added, “It means jerking off with a belt tied around your neck.”
Stacey took a sip of orange drink. “And you thought you wouldn’t learn anything in community college.”
The phone rang. Probably it was the producers calling to hammer out the details for tomorrow. Keith leapt out of his chair and answered hello, spewing potato and cornflake crumbs into the mouthpiece.
“Jimmy Daniels calling,” Jimmy Daniels said. Birds chirped in the background. “I know tomorrow’s a big day for you, so I wanted to clear the air.”
Keith licked up some of the crumbs and said he didn’t have time right this minute.
Jimmy continued anyway: “Figures to me I’ve been doing you a favor, sticking around as long as I have. So you won’t take it personal that I’m saying adios to the Heart of America.”
By way of response Keith burped, a tentative taste of vomit in the depths of his throat.
“Yep, got a new thing opening up in Delano, and you’ll never guess, it’s a co-venture with Margaret Byrd. Never got that glass stuff myself, but old ladies suck that shit down like red cream soda.”
This was fine. Nothing could spoil Keith’s newfound hopefulness. He wouldn’t let it. Sure, Jimmy was the Heart of America’s single most profitable dealer, often its only profitable dealer, but what did that matter? Filming tomorrow would go off without a hitch, Mark and Grant would make a generous offer on the mall, the light at the end of the tunnel, the rainbow after the storm, if you can see it you can be it, etc. Nothing at all to worry about.
“Way I see it, it was past time, this being my day job and all. And don’t take this personal, but your place kinda gives me the creeps now that they found out about the old man child molester. Business is business, know what I mean?” The deliberate silence that followed was undermined by cheerful bird chirps.
Keith said yes, he knew what Jimmy meant. The casserole, of which he by himself had eaten the majority, recongealed into one dense, cancer-like mass in his stomach.
“I know you’re in a bind, brother, so don’t worry, I’ll still be there for the taping. Give you some of that Jimmy Daniels charm. Consider it my parting gift.” Jimmy, of course, wouldn’t fail to mention on-camera his new private venture. “And listen, do you know anyone looking to buy a pet bird? I don’t know what breed, but they’re very decorative. Bought a lot of antique birdcages at an auction in Omaha—didn’t realize they came with birds. They’re pretty exotic but I could get you a good price.”
Keith hung up.
Back at the dinner table, Stacey asked who called.
“No one,” Keith said.
“It didn’t seem like no one.”
“It wasn’t anybody.”
“Stacey. Mom.”
“Don’t worry. Everything’s going to go off without a hitch.”
“Dad. I’m trying to tell you guys something.”
“Who’s worried? Is something wrong?” Stacey said as if it had occurred to her for the first time ever that something was wrong.
“Hey! Listen to me. You never listen when I’m serious,” Ellie said. She was never serious.
“It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Tomorrow’s the big day.”
“This is important. I made a decision.”
“You look anguished. Is your ringworm acting up again?”
“Keith. Dad. Come on.”
“Can we not talk about this when I’m trying to enjoy dinner with my—”
A shrill noise pierced the air. Ellie spit out the whistle and said, “Now are you listening?”
21 ELLIE
What Ellie had been trying to say at the dinner table was: Goodbye, I can’t take this anymore, I’m leaving, not just the room and this oppressive goddamn family but Wichita, forever and for good, right now. Instead she yelled, “Fuck this shit,” and stormed out the door. As she merged onto I-135 in Keith’s Bonneville, the exhilaration of escape vanished; she had no money (she’d forgotten her wallet), no clothes but the paint-flecked hoodie, paisley bell-bottoms, and men’s combat boots she was wearing, nothing packed at all, nowhere to go, and no place to stay when she arrived.
She ended up at the Professor’s studio apartment and there, on his pillowless sofa bed, she experienced what the addicts and depressives on exploitative reality shows referred to as “bottoming out” or “hitting rock bottom.” It was as the Professor, shirtless and wrapped in a stained sheet, described the central argument of his dissertation using his Troll dolls as visual aids that she saw how unglamorous self-destruction could be, how predictable and boring. What had brought her there was desperation. What she needed if she was ever really going to get out of Wichita was resolve. She was going to do something, not just to get a reaction or to see what would happen, but because she herself had decided she wanted to. She was going to be a person. “I’m done,” she’d said in the middle of the Professor’s point about common misconceptions of the term art brut, then got dressed and left.
“You’re still going to show my dolls to Mark and Grant, though, right?”
“I thought you said they weren’t dolls,” she’d replied and slammed the door.
Now, back home in her bedroom, she clicked “send” on a one-sentence email asking the Professor for a letter of recommendation and to otherwise never contact her again. What she would do next she did not know. There were many actions, both responsible and not, to be taken toward liberation—filling out scholarship applications, scouring the web for sketchy private loan companies the government had not gotten around to shutting down that did not require a cosign, phone-banking her limited social network in search of a friend dumb enough to let her sleep on their dorm room floor for an indefinite period of time—but each offered dispiritingly slow or unfavorable results.
She lay in bed staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars that had been stuck to the ceiling for as long as she could remember, until Keith knocked on the door. She knew it was him because her mother never knocked. The door creaked open. The yellow light from the hallway gave him a sallow complexion, or maybe that was just the way he naturally looked, his beady eyes sunk under dark bags, his teeth tiny and dull, his thinning hair tinged with dusty gray.
“Don’t come in,” she said.
Without a word he shut the door and moped away.
MONDAY CLOSING TIME AT THE HEART OF AMERICA
22 MARGARET
There was stalking and there was tailing, Margaret Byrd thought as her car idled in the parking lot of the strip mall where the yoga studio sat between a musty used bookstore and a dimly lit bakery. Stalking was something criminals and lovelorn psychopaths did with the intent of making their presence known, of intimating threat. Margaret had no interest in such histrionics. Even “tailing” was not quite right. What Margaret was up to (and she wasn’t, not really, “up to” anything) was more akin to—what was the word?—a kind of escorting, accompanying Patricia from one place to another, practically by mere coincidence. Margaret happened to find herself outside of Patricia’s yoga studio just as her Monday three o’clock class was ending. And if she happened by chance to bump into Patricia on her way out, and if they happened to get to talking and things happened to be just like they used to be, then, well, Margaret would surely be inclined to “go with the flow,�
� as Patricia would say.
Men and women began to file out of the yoga studio, sucking grotesquely on water bottle nipples and clutching rolled mats in their clammy armpits. Just the thought of the smell of strangers fresh from exercise nauseated Margaret. She turned up the air conditioner. After a few minutes, the initial flood of people had all gotten into their cars and left. A few stragglers stood in the parking lot chatting, but Patricia was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she was onto Margaret. Not that there was anything to be “onto,” so to speak. Margaret just happened to be here, that was all.
And what was the harm? This—whatever it was that Margaret was doing—was at the very least less intrusive than the phone calls, which she did sincerely regret. She didn’t know what had come over her, the things she whispered before hanging up and calling again and again.
Margaret was not ready for Patricia to emerge from the yoga studio door, to appear before her in the hyper-detail of real life. Even from across the distance of the parking lot, it was too much to take in. She had no photographs of Patricia (she cursed herself for taking no photographs, but she was not one to carry or own a camera, to squint through a viewfinder and demand a pose or smile or an utterance of “cheese,” and she had never owned or felt the need to own a smartphone), so for the past weeks her only images of her old friend had been in her mind. To see her now—so casual and yet somehow so elegant, in a neon-pink tank top to match the scrunchie that held her flaxen hair in a ponytail that draped against her slender, tan neck—was thrilling but also a painful reminder: Patricia had continued to exist and thrive and be Patricia despite her absence from Margaret’s life. It wasn’t fair that Patricia didn’t seem to need Margaret the way Margaret needed her.
Margaret started the car. Patricia lingered by the studio entrance. Holding the door for a soccer mom with severe bangs, she tilted her head, ponytail swaying, and laughed at something the woman said. Finally, the woman waved farewell, but not before Patricia touched her shoulder with the tip of her fingers and the two hugged briefly, chastely, for a period not exceeding more than three seconds, and went their separate ways.
Margaret squeezed the steering wheel till her knuckles popped. This woman, with her bangs that she probably thought exuded a charming air of insouciance but which really, in Margaret’s informed opinion, were plain sloppy, a pathetic imitation of Patricia’s deceptively laissez-faire earthiness—what could she even have to offer Patricia? Margaret had never seen her at the Heart of America. Perhaps she was not even a collector!
Margaret supposed it was for the best that Patricia had left #1-146. She’d be packed up and ready to move into Margaret’s new store, where she could have the pick of the lot. After all, it wouldn’t be called Pretty Patty’s Antiques Shoppe for nothing. Margaret could scarcely wait to tell her the news. Over the weekend she’d met up with Jimmy in Delano for an inspection of the premises. Although small and rough around the edges—the wood floors hadn’t been washed in decades and a heap of videotapes, many of them pornographic, remnants of the building’s previous tenants, lay abandoned in the corner—it showed tremendous potential; Jimmy hadn’t lied about the natural light. As she looked about, aisles and displays and exhibits of the finest antiques sprang into being, the sun through her glass casting a kaleidoscopic glow not just upon the floor and walls and ceiling but the very air—every molecule—within the building itself. In her mind, she stood before the threshold on grand opening day, her hand in Patricia’s as she threw open the doors and a crowd of collectors—true collectors, bespectacled from years of poring over research books, bedecked in long skirts and serious tweed—shuffled in to admire the redesigned space lit by Spanish chandeliers. And meanwhile, across town, the last unfortunate dwellers emerged bleary-eyed, under GOING OUT OF BUSINESS banners, from the failed Heart of America, Seymour and Lee among them, as the very building, perhaps under the psychic weight of so much accumulated junk, literally collapsed into rubble. “Well, it ain’t big enough to fit a Saturday-night orgy,” Jimmy said, spoiling the reverie, “but it’s sure as shit all ours.” Before Margaret could register her disgust, Jimmy pulled from his coat pocket the rolled lease contract. Any hesitation she felt dissipated upon seeing the words PRETTY PATTY’S ANTIQUES, LLC.
Patricia was now pulling out of her parking spot in her Volkswagen with the bumper sticker advertising a local craft microbrew her ex-husband had started. (It was permanently affixed, virtually irremovable—Margaret had even tried her patented solution for dissolving the residue off unseemly price stickers, eucalyptus oil and rubbing alcohol, to no effect.) Margaret escorted from a distance of three or four cars.
Ordinarily—that is, before their misunderstanding—Patricia and Margaret spent Monday evenings on the phone or at one or another’s houses watching the new Antiques Roadshow together, but it didn’t start until seven o’clock. Margaret didn’t know what Patricia did in the hours between yoga and the program’s airing, and she could only guess where Patricia was now headed. It wasn’t toward her home on Seneca Street, a spacious three-bedroom Victorian she’d gotten full ownership of after the divorce, decorated with the same elegant sparseness as her booth. Margaret loved being there, admiring Patricia’s aesthetic—little things Margaret could never have thought of, like a shelf of bell jars filled with different colors of glass marbles—but sometimes she’d notice something out of place, a pair of men’s work boots in the closet or a mismatched light switch plate in the upstairs bedroom; these things were artifacts of Patricia’s ex-husband, she knew, and Margaret hated him, not just for the ways he’d made Patricia suffer but for the history he shared with her, for the parts of Patricia he knew (not in a crude way) that Margaret never could. Margaret was not proud of it, but she felt the same rancor toward Patricia’s sons, all three high-school-aged and indistinguishable in their thick-necked, brooding reticence. Surely they took after their father. Margaret preferred them to not be around. She didn’t like to think of Patricia as a mother.
Margaret wondered if Patricia was on her way to pick them up from school. No doubt they’d be coming from some kind of sport practice, dirt-caked and stinking. But she drove right past the high school and onto Highway 54, accelerating nearly twenty miles over the speed limit. She was a speedy driver but not a ruthless or impatient one. Heavy-footed or absentminded, more like. A few times she’d missed the exit to an estate sale as Margaret fretted over all the glass that was surely being snatched out from under her as they dawdled their way back.
Margaret was a nervous driver. When she slowed to observe the posted speed limit, a hulking RV merged into the space between her car and Patricia’s. Her heart racing, she turned on her blinker, changed lanes, and prepared to pass. But every time she accelerated—she’d never before in her life brought the pedal so near to the floor—the RV’s speed matched hers and she could not overcome it without ramming into the slow-chugging pickup truck before her. She drove alongside, intermittently tapping her horn, for what seemed like miles before finally the RV yielded enough that she could maneuver her vehicle unsteadily into the opening behind Patricia’s Volkswagen.
By now it didn’t matter. She knew exactly where Patricia was heading. She could tell by the tableau before her—the familiar triptych of a QuikTrip gas station, a Spangles fast-food restaurant, and the burned-out husk of a Dairy Queen—and by the life-size beaming bearded faces of Mark and Grant from the hit series Pickin’ Fortunes, reproduced along with the Home Channel logo above the windshield on the RV she’d just passed.
Of course: she’d been so focused on escorting Patricia, she’d entirely forgotten. Today was the day they were filming at the Heart of America.
Patricia slowed, her eyes in the rearview widened with recognition. Margaret, feeling Patricia’s gaze and not knowing what to do, raised her hand and waved. With that brief distraction, her foot pressed the gas pedal it thought was the brake, and she collided into Patricia’s car, sending it nose-first into the ditch. Behind her, the RV screeched and, unable to halt it
s forward momentum, swerved into the shoulder, skidded off the road, and toppled onto its side with a terrifying but understated thud.
23 KEITH
Mark and Grant were very busy people. They were just late, Keith had insisted as the first wave of dealers shuffled off around five. They’d been due to arrive by three and it was now nearly closing time.
How he longed for the solace of his usual emotional numbness! This rapidly dissolving driblet of hope—that the Mark and Grant show could fix everything—was too volatile for his clunky old body. Being surrounded by old things all these years, day in and day out, some chemicals or an aura or curse had contaminated him. Who knew? If not for the Heart of America, his life could have been different. He could have kept his job at Boeing, picked up an innocuous hobby like bowling or making love to his wife every Wednesday night, raised his daughter without too many mistakes before sending her off to an expensive out-of-state college the fall after she graduated high school, and then, an uneventful span of years later, died content in the bliss of desireless ignorance, mortgage fully paid.
When the door jingled, Keith struggled to hope that he’d look up from the counter and find Mark and Grant’s beaming bearded personages as if they’d just stepped out of the television screen. It was only Delores, but he barely recognized her at first in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, her hair down, without makeup. “Delores Kovacs, one of the Heart of America’s local heroes. I’m sorry to tell you that Mark and Grant are running a little behind. It seems we may—”