The Kids Are Gonna Ask

by Gretchen Anthony

  [BEEP]

  Hey, Johnny, it’s your mama. Everbody’s tellin’ me they keep hearin’ your name. Are you gonna call me?

  [BEEP]

  Johhnnyy. Johhnnnyyy. Where’s my famuzz lil’ jun’ier? Mama looooves you. Johhnnnnyyyyy.

  [BEEP]

  [muffled noise]

  [Beep]

  [muffled noise]

  [BEEP]

  Johhnnnnnnyyyy.

  Twenty-Eight

  Jack

  All of Tybee knew about Thomas and Savannah in short order. Jack stopped to put gas in his truck and Artie Hinkle told him not to forget he always had condoms on a rack by the register.

  Sandra Beals put a new daiquiri on her menu called the “Who’s Your Daddy”—a blend of blue raspberry and pink champagne.

  Slush passed him on the landing, laughing and carrying a couple of buckets of bait shrimp. “How many of these babies are yours, you figure?”

  Jack ignored him but notched the insult on the tally he’d started keeping in his bones.

  When Jack was ten his mom took a job waitressing at the diner out by the highway, mostly lunch shifts while he was at school. He’d assumed she’d have to wear one of those waitress uniforms with the matching hat and pocket name tag like he saw on all the TV reruns of Alice and Happy Days, but instead she bought a new jean skirt and a couple of almost-too-tight T-shirts and came out looking more Tina Turner than Joanie Cunningham.

  Even Jack’s fifth-grade gut told him Hartwell, Colorado, wasn’t looking for a Tina Turner to call their own.

  “How are you going to lean over enough to wipe tables and stuff?”

  “It’s not that short, silly. Anyway, a lady has her ways.”

  Jack wasn’t convinced, but she’d also promised to use part of her tip money to help him buy the new parts he needed for the dirt bike he’d bought from Telo, one of his dad’s farmhands. Telo had tuned the engine and gotten it running for him, but it still needed new tires and one of the rims was shot. Plus, his dad told him he was going to have to pay for the gas himself.

  To Jack’s ten-year-old brain, he figured as soon as he had the money to get the bike running, he wouldn’t have to think about his mom’s legs sticking out from that short skirt anymore. And he wouldn’t have, if the kids at school hadn’t kept reminding him.

  “My mom won’t let my dad go to the diner for lunch no more. Says your mom’s asking for trouble and she’s not gonna let my dad be on the other end of it.”

  Even with that in his face, Jack managed to keep focused on just how much more money he needed. Thirty dollars. Twenty-five. Eighteen. Ten.

  He was short just two dollars and change and thinking about heading down to the junkyard to see if they wouldn’t let him pay the rest on credit when Snyder Bellus sneaked up to the blackboard and wrote, “Carla Thorson kissing service $5. Under the neck, extra.” Then he punched Jack in the arm on his way back to his desk.

  If Jack had been a fighter, he would have met Snyder Bellus after school and stomped him bloody. Would have grabbed him by the neck and squeezed until his head felt ready to pop. Then he’d let him go just long enough to lean over and catch his breath, and that’s the moment he’d slam his knee into the kid’s face. If all that didn’t bring him down, he’d grab him by the business and twist until he was gasping on all fours and crying for mercy.

  Then Jack would pull five dollars from his pocket, throw it in the kid’s face, and walk away.

  If he were the fighting type.

  But Jack wasn’t, and that day at school was the day he knew for sure. His instinct was set for slow burn. He learned he didn’t fight with his fists. He learned he’d been right about his mother’s skirt and Hartwell’s silent intolerance. And he learned that the worries you think are confined to the space in your head can just as well show up outside it, written in bright letters for all to see.

  * * *

  A few days after the interview revealed his identity, Janie found Jack at the dock. He was bringing in a group of twenty-somethings who’d come to Tybee for a bachelor party and who still stank like last night’s beer. They’d met Jack at 7:00 a.m. as instructed, and it wasn’t long before he could tell they hadn’t even gone to bed. It was the same stunt he’d pulled at their age, moving straight from the slopes to The Mine to a party with the after-work crowd and back onto the slopes in the morning.

  All four of the guys eyed Janie’s ass in her short shorts as she walked Jack’s way. She smiled and gave them a gratuitous shake.

  “Your afternoon group just canceled,” she said. “Their kid got the flu. I tried some of the other numbers who’d called looking for availability but no takers. Sorry.”

  Jack grabbed the neck of his T-shirt and wiped a layer of sweat and grime from his forehead. “I could use a shower, anyway.”

  She nodded. “Go home. Get the stink off. Then come meet Coop and me at the Pig ’n’ Whistle.”

  “Nah,” he said, trying to put her off. She didn’t budge.

  “You ain’t got nothing left in that apartment of yours to smash up. And sitting there alone trying to keep the world away isn’t gonna help.”

  That was as close as she came to the mess with Thomas and Savannah, but they both knew what she was saying.

  “Coop’s leaving in the morning for Tallahassee. Plus, you and I ain’t got nothing better to do until Ford comes back from Atlanta.”

  Janie’s boyfriend, Cooper, was an insurance adjuster for Allstate and went wherever the latest storm or flood left destruction to be cleaned up and insurance claims to be filed. He ran a whole office out of the back of his Honda minivan and could sometimes, depending on the size of the disaster, be gone for a month or so at a time. Janie was always saying Coop was off to somewhere or another in the morning.

  “I’ll give you until three o’clock.” She turned to go. “Then we’re coming to get you.”

  * * *

  Most of the bars on Tybee were for tourists and catered to vacationers—people who ought to be enjoying a drink in the middle of the day. But the Pig ’n’ Whistle was a local bar, a dank room filled with decaying Long John Silver decor. Jack always had the feeling that people went there because they didn’t have anywhere better to be. Himself included.

  By the time Jack arrived, Janie was on her second margarita and Cooper was making a serious dent on a pitcher of Bud. Jack ordered a Seven and Seven from Belle, the only waitress he’d ever seen at the Pig ’n’ Whistle.

  He downed his drink in one long drag and ordered another.

  Janie said, “You don’t have to tell us nothin’ if you don’t want to, Jack, but what’s your plan? You gonna leave Tybee and go meet up with your kids? Find a pot of gold and hand it over to Ford? What?”

  The whiskey was just starting to sing, a faint hum in his ears and at the back of his throat.

  After a pause Janie said, “’Cuz the way I see it, you got a nice, easy excuse for gettin’ out of your deal. Tell Ford you’re real sorry, but how were you to see this comin’? You don’t have no choice but to deal with it.”

  Cooper drained the last of his beer. “We doin’ food?”

  To which Janie told him he could do whatever he damn well pleased, but she wasn’t cooking.

  Cooper caught Belle’s eye and ordered a plate of nachos for the table, a side of onion rings and another pitcher of Bud.

  “You better not put any jalapeños on those nachos you just ordered or you’re gonna be up all night with indigestion,” Janie said.

  Coop ignored her and looked at Jack. “I got a kid.”

  “Yeah?” That was actually news. He lifted his eyes from his glass, ready to hear more.

  “Yeah, up in Macon. A girl. She’s in her twenties. I don’t see her much.”

  “Did you ever?”

  “Didn’t even know about her until she was five. Then o
nly when her ma needed money. She’d call and give me the business about not spendin’ any time with her and I’d bring cash. Wouldn’t hear from her again until she needed more.”

  “You never called her?” The whiskey had dulled Jack’s inhibitions just enough to call him out. “You just waited ’til they punched your ATM code?”

  “Pretty much,” Coop said. “To be honest, I don’t actually know if she is mine. I have my doubts. Doesn’t look like me. Doesn’t act like me. But the timeline sort of works out. And even if she weren’t mine, I hated the idea of her not having what she needed more than I hated taking responsibility.”

  “More to parental responsibility than sending money,” Jack said.

  “Maybe.”

  Though, what did Jack know about good parenting? His alcoholic mother wouldn’t leave him alone and his father looked right through him. There’d been more voice mails from his mom reporting more questions in Hartwell—What have you gotten yourssself messs’d up wth, juuunrr?—and Tybee was in his business, too. It didn’t seem long before all his worlds collided.

  “I don’t have any money. And I don’t have proof those kids are mine. But I can’t run. Not now that my name’s out there.” The whiskey was rushing warm and smooth through his veins, loosening his thoughts and letting them slip out before he could stop them.

  Janie shoved her margarita aside and leaned in. “I knew it.”

  “What?”

  “I knew you didn’t have the money to buy Ford out.”

  “Yeah, well, that makes two of us.”

  “Ford ain’t been nothing but good to you. Hiring a mountain boy from Colorado? We all said he was crazy. But he said he knew good and that you were it. And for the most part, he was right.”

  “You think that’s not already tearing me up? Ford’s never crossed me once in all my years working for him.”

  “Then why’d you go and promise?”

  He’d have thought that was a hard question to answer, but it wasn’t. “Because I wanted it to be true.”

  The words surprised him, but the logic wasn’t hard to follow. If he bought out Ford, he belonged there on Tybee. With a business, he had a reason to stay. And if he was on Tybee, he didn’t have to be in Hartwell. It was a long way round, but in the end, buying out Ford was nothing more than an expensive fuck you from Jack to his mom and dad.

  The fact that he couldn’t afford it just gave him another reason to drink.

  “Well,” Janie said, “I want fairies to come and fix my hair and clean my house every morning, but that ain’t happening neither.”

  “I’ll make it right,” Jack promised, hoping it was more than the whiskey talking. “Don’t know how yet. But I will.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Savannah

  A few nights later, Savannah lay awake in bed listening to the grandfather clock in the entryway chime the hours away. Trigg called several times to check on her, but Savannah didn’t take the calls. It was too exhausting to explain, and Trigg’s greatest skill was exhausting everyone she came into contact with.

  “I mean, not to be a bitch about it, Van,” she’d said in her last message, “but like, you did sort of get this guy’s identity outed on national TV. Maybe if you just went back on air and apologized or something. I mean, I totally know that wasn’t what you meant to happen, but—”

  It didn’t help any that their neighbor Tabby Melby had come by earlier to report on further events.

  “You know I love you all,” she had said. “But reporters are camping out in vans and have completely jammed up the street. I called the police no fewer than three times after spotting strangers creeping through my yard. Christine McElroy isn’t letting her three boys into the yard until the chaos is over. And have you seen Trygve Bane? He’s sitting on his front porch with a BB gun across his lap. I’m not a fan of firearms, but I can’t say I blame him.”

  Mrs. Melby had looked across the table at Savannah and Maggie. “Oh, I am sorry. Here I am, going on as if you brought this on yourselves. We’ll be just fine.” She wiped at the lipstick smudge on the rim of her drink. “But I’ve put a hold on my newspaper delivery until all this passes. The less I have to go outside, the better. Yesterday I went out to get the paper and a man wearing a Don’t Fiddle with the First Amendment T-shirt stuck a microphone in my face.”

  Savannah had smirked. Not because she was glad for what happened to Tabby, but because she knew the guy’s T-shirt almost certainly said, Don’t Fuck with the First Amendment. Nobody put “fiddle” on a shirt.

  After a flood of complaints, the police had barricaded their block with signs reading Local Traffic Only. Now, though, the paparazzi just parked their vans around the corner and down the side streets, spreading over a wider area.

  The parkway, however, was still open to foot traffic and the sidewalks across from their house had become irresistible to attention seekers. There was the carload of pro-life teenagers holding signs and shouting, “Your mother chose love when she chose life!” They were followed by the paternity rights activists who stuffed the neighbors’ mailboxes full of flyers about the glories of fatherhood.

  Earlier that evening, Savannah and Maggie had stood at the living room window and watched a group wearing Arms Around Our Children T-shirts form a human chain, arm in arm, down the block. Judging by the number of backpacks the activists wore, Maggie and Savannah figured the group planned to be there a lot longer than the hour it took for Mr. Melby to get fed up with not being able to pull out of his driveway and chase them away with his garden hose.

  The grandfather clock chimed, yet again.

  Savannah couldn’t lie still any longer. If nothing else, she knew that Chef Bart had baked one of his cheeseless hazelnut-ginger cheesecakes before leaving for the night.

  She crawled out of bed and threw on a sweatshirt. Starting down the stairs, the top board creaked under her weight like it always did, but the sound echoed so loudly in the dark house she flinched. Wasn’t the first time she thought of the ghosts among them. The row of photographs along the stairwell followed the descent of the McClair family—Maggie and Granddad, Maggie and Granddad and Mom, Maggie and Mom, then Maggie and Mom and Thomas and Savannah.

  Then, just Thomas and Savannah.

  She flipped on the kitchen light and saw the cheeseless cheesecake in the middle of the table. There was one slice missing, and it was on the plate in front of Maggie.

  “Hello, love,” Maggie said. “You couldn’t sleep, either?”

  “Nope.” She took a plate and fork for herself out of the cupboards.

  “We just need Thomas for the trifecta, I guess.” Maggie handed her the spatula she’d used for her slice. Savannah took it and sat down across the table.

  “Any more crazies out tonight?”

  “There was a candlelight vigil earlier,” Maggie said. “Hymns, mostly. I thought about throwing open the windows to accompany them on the piano. You know how I feel about a cappella.”

  Savannah wasn’t sorry she’d missed them.

  Maggie took a bite of cheesecake and scowled ever so faintly as she swallowed. She brought a hand up to her chest and kept it there.

  Savannah gave her a quizzical look. “Are you all right?”

  Maggie waved away the concern. “Oh yes. Just the travel catching up with me, I—”

  Her words were interrupted by the sound of crashing glass and Thomas screaming from the basement.

  “What on earth?” Maggie and Savannah sprang from the table and rushed to the door in the mudroom leading to the basement stairs. She went for the door just as it flew open, and a man Savannah had never seen before rushed past her, nearly knocking her to the floor.

  Now Savannah and Maggie were screaming, too.

  The guy panicked and ran around the room looking for escape like a trapped squirrel. Maggie grabbed a broom from a hook on the mudroom w
all and raised it as high as the ceiling would allow, then brought it down hard onto the square of his back. He yelped and brought his hands up over his head trying to protect himself.

  SWAT!

  “Get out of my house!” she screamed.

  SWAT!

  “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  SWAT!

  “Oh, just try to climb through that window, I dare you!”

  Savannah didn’t know where to turn or what to do. She thought about grabbing a broom or something of her own, but she’d have to run past the man to do it. She could grab a knife from the kitchen, but—no way. She quickly dialed 911 and told them what was happening.

  SWAT! Maggie went on hitting him.

  “Is this fun for you?”

  SWAT!

  “Didn’t expect Maggie McClair with a broom, did you?”

  SWAT!

  Savannah thought maybe if she closed her eyes and opened them again, she wouldn’t see what she was seeing, which was her grandmother, in the mudroom, wearing a kimono, in the middle of the night, hitting a stranger with a plastic broom while hollering.

  The intruder kept ping-ponging around the room as Thomas flew up the stairs from the basement wielding a baseball bat. Thomas nearly had the guy cornered when the sound of sirens woke a crucial receptor in the man’s tiny, rodent brain, and he was finally smart enough to launch himself through the mudroom door and out into the night.

  “Who in high holy hell was that?” Maggie screamed.

  Thomas took the broom from her hand, and Savannah curled up into a ball in a chair at the table. The tears came silently, without sobs, and Maggie wrapped her in her arms while Thomas opened the door to the police.