Grendel's Guide to Love and War

by A. E. Kaplan

  The next morning, I got a call from my father.

  “How’s it going?” he asked. “Mrs. Coffey hasn’t forgotten you yet, has she?”

  “No,” I lied. “Everything’s fine.” Another lie. “How is Tampa?”

  “Tampa’s fine. Tampa’s hot. You know. It’s the Gulf. Awfully humid.”

  It amazed me how we both seemed to be preternaturally able to have full-on conversations without actually saying anything. I wondered if normal people talked about the weather while the world was collapsing. Maybe it was a common conversation while the Titanic was going down:

  My, what a clear evening! You can really see the Milky Way tonight!

  Oh yes, it’s a little brisk for my taste, though. Wish I’d brought a sweater.

  He didn’t ask me about the parties. Since I had no good news on that front, I didn’t bring them up, either.

  I told him to stay cool, he told me to make sure I was eating enough fiber, and we hung up.

  I needed a break.

  I decided this after receiving a text from Ed later that afternoon, which read: You need a break.

  What have you in mind? I texted back.

  Wine flights?

  Where?

  Greenmont? Be there at two.

  I looked at the time on my phone; it was ten-thirty, and I’d spent the morning wiping down the kitchen counters because they were sticky and covered with ants. Minnie had taught me to make homemade ant bait with borax, but we were out. I was also out of milk, cereal, and paper towels.

  Also, I was on my last roll of toilet paper. Things were getting dire.

  At the grocery store, I stood in line behind an old man buying fifteen cans of Campbell’s soup. It was strange. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a man over sixty. It’s like they retire from whatever jobs they have and all succumb to heart attacks the next week.

  The checker was closer to my age, maybe a college student. She had brown skin and braids done up in this elaborate coil pattern and a name tag that read PAM. She was bagging his soup when the man turned around and looked at me.

  “I was young once, too, you know.”

  I did know. “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “And a damn sight better-looking than you.” The cashier winced. I didn’t—I was used to old people being blunt. It’s a double-edged sword: on the one hand, you always know where you stand; on the other, well, you get old guys at the grocery store calling you ugly.

  I smiled and tossed my twelve-pack of toilet paper onto the belt. “I believe it, sir.”

  He scowled, jabbing a finger in my direction. “Don’t patronize me, you little turd.”

  The cashier flinched and jumped back a step, and he turned toward her, making a face you’d expect to see on a junkyard dog. Her eyes went between him and me, and I reached out and grabbed the receipt off the cash register and shoved it at him before he could say whatever terrible thing was itching to get out of his mouth.

  He stumbled out the door, looking over his shoulder and making a rude gesture at me as the automatic doors slid closed.

  Pam and I slumped. “He comes in here every Tuesday,” she said. “Old racist bastard.”

  I put my basket in the stack on the other side of the register. “Yeah,” I said. And then “Yeah” again, because I didn’t really know what else to say.

  “Can’t the manager do something?” I asked finally, because it didn’t seem fair that she had to deal with this every Tuesday.

  “Nope. Said he’s been shopping here since before I was born, and I just have to deal.”

  “Sucks,” I said.

  “Eight-fifty an hour is not enough for this,” she said. “It is definitely not enough.” She handed me my bag and I nodded.

  I met Ed at Greenmont at two-fifteen, the real meaning of two o’clock, since one of us was always bound to be late. We pulled out the fake IDs we’d had made in Tolerville by some douchey UCV kid named Kale—yes, like the salad vegetable—and flashed them toward the woman running the tasting. She frowned but said nothing. The truth was, neither Ed nor I could pass as twenty-one in any universe; we were deeply, truly ensconced in our teen years. “Did you have to wear your Chucks?” I muttered to Ed.

  “Dude, it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t really care,” he said, nodding toward Edna, the forty-something in the floor-length crinkle skirt who was pouring for the wine snobs at the other end of the counter.

  Ed and I ordered the white tasting, which was a flight of five different whites, starting with a bland chardonnay and working our way up to an herbier viognier. In all honesty, I didn’t particularly love wine. Whatever magic Ed was tasting just wasn’t there for me, which made me a little sad. But wine was sort of an interesting academic experience for my tongue, trying to find whatever crazy flavors the vintner made up for the label.

  Redolent of smoky maple.

  Hints of apricot.

  Essence of pine.

  It was like poetry, I decided. On the other side of the counter, a couple in matching polo shirts nodded vigorously, agreeing with whatever tale Edna was spinning about flavors of gooseberries and cat pee or whatever.

  Anyway, I like all the different tastes, and I really like wineries, at least without the snobs. I like the giant barrels, and the acres of vines on the rolling hills, and the smell of the grapes and grass and vines in the hot summer sun. It’s just real somehow, this thing that people have been doing since the first caveman discovered that old grape juice makes you loopy.

  “I like this Riesling,” I said, swirling it in my glass. “Redolent of blackberries and peppercorns, am I right?”

  “Blueberries and juniper, I think,” he said. “But you’re close.” He slugged down the rest of his glass. “Are you better, dude?”

  I shrugged. I was less upset, I guess. But I also felt worse, because it was only ten days until my dad came home, and I hadn’t fixed the problem. I’d just made it worse.

  “If your dad comes back and this is still going on, what’ll happen?” Ed asked. “I mean, could he…”

  He went back to his glass of Riesling, not finishing because he knew as well as I did that there really wasn’t anything my dad could do. He couldn’t handle confrontation well enough to deal with Wolf or Rex. Calling the cops was the logical solution, but that’d been tried.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he’ll leave again.”

  Ed and I glanced at each other. I swallowed too much Riesling and choked, and Ed thumped me on the back. Leaving again, I thought, was the good outcome. Nervous breakdown was the one I was worried about. Or worse. Something nasty and sour in the wine uncoiled inside my stomach.

  After I’d wrecked my father’s car driving into a lamppost, my father hadn’t been able to look at me for days. Whether it was anger at me or shame at his breakdown, I never knew, but I knew this: my father was caught in a tide, and the farther he was pulled out, the harder it was for him to come back.

  Fail better. I didn’t want to fail better. I wanted…well, I wanted a lot of things. I wanted my dad to go back to the way he was before his brains got scrambled. I wanted my mom to be less dead, or at least to have known her better when she wasn’t dead. But I couldn’t make either of those things happen.

  I could shut down the parties, though. At least in theory.

  The pranks weren’t working, and I didn’t know what else to try. But I had to try something.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have to fix this, Ed. I don’t have a choice.”

  I ate Mrs. Coffey’s four-day-old casserole for dinner, wiped the ants off the counter again, and lay in my bed with my hands laced behind my head. I was listening to the recording of my interview with Mrs. DeLuca and trying to decide what else to ask her when the music next door suddenly cut off. My ears rang in the silence, and I got up to look out the window.

  The Rothgar house was pitch-dark.

  I went out to the kitchen to get a better look, and poured myself a glass of milk while I watched. H
ad the power gone out on its own?

  About five minutes later, a cop car pulled up. An officer got out, came to the door, and then left again.

  Five minutes later, the music was back full force. Thirty minutes later, it cut off again.

  I got out my phone and texted Willow.

  What the hell is this?

  It’s my life jeeeez hang on we’re in lockdown & I have to get away from the window.

  You’re in WHAT???

  There was a pause of a few minutes, then: I’ve had enough of this I’m coming over I hope you have food.

  She was at my door two minutes later, by which time the music had started back up again. I showed her into the kitchen and offered her some of Mrs. Coffey’s casserole, but she made a face and went for the cereal instead.

  “So what’s with the on-and-off thing? This is worse than having it on all the time.”

  She ate the cereal straight out of the bowl with no milk. “I know. God. Wolf and Rex got a police scanner. So now whenever they hear the cops are on their way, they stash everything in the basement and everybody hides in the dark until the cops leave again.”

  I grabbed a handful of cereal out of her bowl and ate it. “That’s…that’s actually pretty clever. Do they know who’s calling?”

  “I think it’s that Werm lady from across the street. The cops don’t seem to like her very much, though.”

  I smiled. Virginia Werm was no one’s favorite person. “They’ll probably stop coming once they realize the house is always quiet when they get there.”

  “I think Wolf’s counting on that.” She shoved the cereal bowl toward me. “I hope it works fast, though, because the whole thing is giving me a headache.”

  “How awful that must be for you. Lucky for me, I have no idea what that’s like.”

  She half laughed in response. Her toes were curled over the edge of the coffee table, toenails bearing the remnants of some mostly forgotten blue pedicure. I put my feet up next to hers, but then I felt my father’s judgment from eight hundred miles away and put them down on the floor instead.

  “I just don’t even get why Wolf’s here,” I went on. “Even if he quit his internship or whatever, why didn’t he go back to New York?”

  “He probably wanted to, but he owes Mom kind of big. Aunt Allie told you about his dad, right?”

  I shook my head. I was aware that Wolf probably had a father, but I didn’t even know what his name was or what he did for a living. I hoped she wasn’t about to tell me he was dead or suffering from some incurable disease, because I really wasn’t in the mood to feel sorry for Wolf Gates.

  “No?” She raised her eyebrows. “Huh. Yeah, he’s in jail.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “Who did he shoot?”

  “No one,” she said, rolling her eyes. “He’s in for some kind of financial fraud. I can’t remember the name for it. Anyway, his family had buckets of money until about five years ago, when his dad got caught siphoning money off federal contracts or something. The point is, Mom’s helping Wolf pay for college, so she kind of owns him right now.”

  I mulled that over for a while, trying to imagine what it would be like if your parent was not dead or sick but just a legitimately bad person. “Are you going to tell me that Wolf was a great guy before his dad got carted off and he lost all his money?”

  “Nope,” she said. “I’m not saying that at all.” She chewed her cereal with her mouth open while she reached into the bowl for the dregs. “You know, my mom always said no one could lie better than Uncle Theo, but I think she was wrong. I’ve never seen anyone lie like Wolf.”

  “You think it’s because he believes his own lies?”

  “I don’t think he believes them,” she said. “It’s more like he uses them to create the reality that he wants. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve seen him do it.”

  Just then, her cell buzzed in her pocket. She sighed and fished it out.

  “Well,” she said. “So much for my reprieve.” She flashed the screen at me, which said, Where da ducking hairball r u we need someone sober to ANSWER THE DOOR.

  “Ducking hairball?” I asked.

  “Autocorrect. I think.”

  “You could just not go,” I suggested.

  She stuck her empty bowl on the coffee table and got up. “Not worth it. Rex’s already pissy tonight. And Wolf’s sober enough to ask where I was if I don’t go back. He’s probably getting suspicious already.” She hovered a few inches in front of me, putting her chest at my eye level. “I’ll try to come back after I get rid of the cops.”

  I reached out and laced a finger into her front pocket. When I pulled left, her hip swayed left. If I pulled her forward just another inch, she’d be in my lap. It wasn’t an unpleasant prospect. “What if you didn’t get rid of them?”

  She went very still. “What are you saying?”

  I shrugged. “I hate the parties. You hate the parties.” I lifted my eyes up to her face, and she was looking at me with naked discomfort.

  She ran both hands through my hair and gave it a tug, setting the nerve endings in my scalp humming. Then she extracted my finger from her pocket and turned away.

  “I’ll come back later,” she said, both of us knowing full well that she wouldn’t.

  The music finally faded out around two (they were calling it an early night, I guess), and I was stunned by the quiet of the house with no one in it. Not that my dad is exactly loud, but the idea of him makes noise. I was acutely aware of every little rustle my body made when I rolled over in my bed, and the horrible sound of air going in and out of my lungs. There is nothing, I think, as annoying as being aware of your own breathing, because once you are thinking about it, it’s no longer automatic, and then you either have to keep thinking about it or you end up holding your breath, and it’s irritating as hell either way.

  I’d just made the decision to exhale when I heard a thump outside, and then my window slid open and I thought, Wolf Gates is climbing through my window and I am about to die. I reached for the bottle of wine I’d stashed under my bed, planning on braining him with it once he was close enough.

  So I was fairly surprised when the person climbing through my window was female-shaped, and even more surprised that this was a female person I was related to.

  I sat up as her feet made contact with the papers on my desk.

  “Damn,” my sister muttered, which is how I knew it was definitely her.

  I released the bottle and let it roll back under the bed. “We have a door,” I offered.

  “I have no keys, douche bag. I dropped them in the back of a cab in New York.”

  I didn’t ask why she hadn’t knocked. You don’t wake our dad up at three in the morning by banging on the door if you want to maintain any kind of psychological normality in the house. “He’s not here,” I said.

  “DC?”

  “Florida.”

  “Swell. For how long?”

  “Um,” I said. “Ten more days. No, wait. Nine.”

  She climbed down from the desk and flopped onto my bed while I turned on the lamp on my bedside table, mashing my face into my knees against the too-bright light.

  Zip’s hair was shorter than it had been, in some kind of funky layered bob. Her T-shirt was too big and her jeans were frayed at one knee.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She let out a dramatic sigh. “I broke up with Pasha.”

  After barely graduating from NYU with a degree in, of all things, drama, Zip had taken up with a Russian gangster type she’d met in a bar, and proceeded to be aggressively unemployed for the past fourteen months. I got a random phone call about once a month, usually consisting of her screaming into her phone in some loud public place that I was too scared to ask about after the first one turned out to be a methadone-and-manga party on the Upper East Side.

  “Oh. Like, I’m sorry?” I didn’t exactly mean for it to come out as a question, but there it was.

  “Whatever. He was a
jackass. Is a jackass. Present tense.”

  “Well,” I said. “To be fair, you don’t know that he’s still jackassing in the present tense. He may have become a wonderful human being in the last five minutes.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall. “He tried to get me involved with some friend of his who makes. Um. B movies.”

  “I thought you wanted to be an actress?”

  “Not that kind of actress.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yikes.”

  She dragged herself off my bed and raked her hands through her spiky hair. “I need something to drink.”

  “You know there’s no booze in the house,” I said, selfishly ignoring my half bottle of Shiraz.

  She rolled her eyes. “I know that, dimwit.” She wandered down the hall and I followed, because I knew there was no point trying to fall asleep now, and also because I wanted to know how she’d escaped from a life of Russian organized crime and potential porn stardom.

  She took a jar of Ovaltine from the pantry and the milk from the refrigerator. That’s when I knew things were really not good with her. When Zipora Grendel was reduced to drinking chocolate milk at three in the morning, things were dire indeed.

  I kept my voice low, mostly out of habit. “So what are you going to do now?”

  She swirled the milk in her glass. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “You could apply to graduate school.”

  She made a gagging noise.

  “You could, you know, get a job.”

  She gave me a dark look. “Gee, I never thought of that.” Zip’s drama major had been the source of much consternation to our father, and if she’d landed any roles since college, I hadn’t heard about it. She was, as she’d told me herself, too plain to play the ingénue and too pretty to play character. She was just in-between enough that nobody wanted her. Which sucked, but that’s theater, and was, in fact, more or less what Dad had predicted would happen. Though, to be frank, I’m not sure exactly how hard she’d tried.

  “So, like, what? You’re just here until…”

  She set her glass down on the counter harder than was strictly necessary. “I’m here until.”