“Why are you crying?” he mutters. It only makes her cry harder. He can’t say anything more. His throat constricts. He can only stand here with her; she’s too heavy to maneuver down the stairs. There’s too much weight on her now, a hefty girth, and here on the stairs, as if they’re on a platform above the others, everyone will surely stare at them. And now he can’t help but shed a tear himself, for Jenny and her miserable existence, for all that’s touching about her, for all the shit that has preceded this bizarre moment, for the child under the cardboard box, for the heat, for the prickling light, for the body leaning against his, so completely surrendered, this aura of defeat emanating from her. In the corner of his eye, he sees Frank glance alertly at them. Then Maloney enters his field of vision. Gently he nudges Thomas aside and takes Jenny into his arms so that Thomas can walk down the stairs. Sucking snot into his nose, Thomas feels love for Maloney. That too is making him bawl; what’s wrong with him? Patricia advances and gives him a forceful embrace. He puts one of his hands in her jacket pocket. His hands are cold as ice.
Little by little, the ragtag group pulls itself together and gets moving. Alice hops impatiently up and down, her teeth chattering. She’s wearing all-too few clothes, her short jacket and her just-as-short T-shirt underneath it revealing her stomach. Ernesto puts his arms around her. “I’m hungry,” one twin says to the other. “Me too,” says the other. “C’mon, Mom, can we go now?” “I have bananas in the car,” Helena says, finding her car keys. Frank helps Jenny give people directions to Café Rose. Kristin offers Thomas and Patricia a lift, because, as she puts it, “We’re not going home yet, we have to see this through to the end.” Maloney hails a taxi for Jenny, Alice, and Ernesto. The prison guard, who’s been talking with Luc, gives his thanks. “It’s back to the grind for me,” he says, adding that he was happy to “be here.” With his long legs he climbs onto his rusty bicycle and pedals doggedly down the alley.
The car smells of overripe bananas and dog. Patricia and Thomas have to sit with the girls on their laps in the back seat. “We’ll skip seatbelts, for once,” Kristin says, stroking Helena’s head. “Drive carefully, love.” Thomas feels chilled to the bone, he feels hunger and craves a cigarette, he feels nauseated and headachy. Too much saliva in his mouth, nerves that cause his eye to twitch. Kristin and Patricia chat during the drive, and every now and then Helena laughs pleasantly. The sounds penetrate Thomas, or rather they don’t; he hears only gibberish, nothing makes sense. The sun’s lower now, and he sees that the chestnuts have begun to bud; soon they’ll bloom. Soon it’ll be spring. Soon it’ll be summer. “It’ll be summer soon,” he hears himself say.
“We can’t wait until summer. You should visit us sooner than that—in the foreseeable future.” Kristin hands the bananas to the twins. “Right, Thomas? You have to promise me. We need to talk.” He nods. The twins shovel the bananas into their mouths and throw the peels onto the floor. “You’re so dumb,” one says.
“So are you,” says the other. “Nina threw her banana peel on the floor!”
“Pick it up, Nina.”
“So did she. Idiot,” says the other one, what is her name again? “I hate you.”
“Kids, knock it off, please. We’ve just been to a funeral.”
“So what? She still threw it on the floor.”
“And I’m not a kid.”
“Maya!”
“How’s school? Are you really in seventh grade?” Patricia’s voice, mild and calm. Something to hold onto, Thomas thinks, trying to focus on that voice. He closes his eyes, but his eyeballs skate back and forth under his lids; he’s too uneasy. They drive past the big parking garages, toward center city, then head west. Thomas feels Maya’s windbreaker against his knuckles and fingers. Her hair touches his face each time the car makes a turn. It tickles unbearably. He wants to get out of this car. And just like that they’ve arrived. Everything becomes clear: Thomas recognizes the place at once; and strangely, it calms him. It’s not far from his father’s apartment, but it’s in a neighborhood that hasn’t been renovated yet. No young trees here. Old, whitewashed gray houses, bicycles lying on the sidewalk. A tobacconist, a seedy little grocery. A few dogs lie in the sun, their snouts resting on their front paws, waiting on their masters. And there’s the bar on the ground floor of a tilting four-story building. Frank stands waving in the door. They tumble out of the car. With some difficulty Thomas gets to his feet. “Check out the curtains,” Patricia whispers. “Do you think they even have a jukebox?” Bright orange curtains with a thin green strip. On the window is painted: Beer wine music spirits. What is the word “music” doing there? And below that: One beer, One shot 10:00 A.M.-2:00 P.M. Alice is making out with Ernesto, tonguing him without restraint. Jenny rubs the mascara from her eyes and reapplies her lipstick, the color of which matches the curtains perfectly, Thomas thinks. I’m cold as ice, he thinks. I’m not here. But Patricia takes his hand and leads him up a few steps and into the smoky room. Luc, whom Frank called The Kid, is working the bar. “Welcome everybody! You can order whatever you’d like, it’s on me,” Frank shouts, “I hope we’ll have a lovely afternoon together.” Maloney’s already got his mitts on a pint. Small tables with red-checked cloths. A nauseating stench of toilet cleaner and alcohol. Three tables have been shoved together in the center of the room. “We’ve got some grub too,” Frank continues. “A little buffet. Please help yourselves.” The buffet consists of some bowls of chips and peanuts. Gummy bears and marshmallows. Pigs in a blanket. Ketchup and mustard in plastic bottles. A stack of paper plates and some red napkins, as well as a bowl piled with hardboiled eggs and red caviar. The egg yolks have a greenish tint, black edges. Thomas reels backward. The twins immediately begin gathering candy and chips. The others cluster at the bar. Luc’s busy making gin and tonics; he pours beer and white wine, and cola for the girls. Luc’s face: glowing. He has freckles across the bridge of his nose, creamy skin. Maloney asks for a shot of whiskey. Jenny watches Luc transfer boxed wine into a tall glass. She’s still wearing her gloves when he hands her the drink. It’s unbearable, Thomas thinks, ticked, all these people in this bar, my own family. This jovial friendliness. Trying to get on Frank’s good side even as they look down on him—at best—and at worst, scorn him. It makes him sick. Thomas skirts the buffet table and goes outside. As soon as the door closes behind him, he taps a cigarette out of his pack, and with his face bathed in sunlight and his back against the wall, he tries to control his hot flash of anger. But before it’s tamped down, Alice joins him. At first they smoke in silence. Then she says: “Are you actually sad?” He shakes his head vigorously.
“You think Mom’s acting?”
“What do you mean?”
“You think she’s pretending to be ‘mourning’?”
“In a way, maybe. I don’t think she’s crying over our father, but over a lot of other things. That happens sometimes. I don’t know.”
Alice loses herself staring at the sky, she inhales a deep puff of her cigarette. She rubs her closely shaved scalp. Then she looks at him with eyes that burn, boring into him. “I need a job.”
Thomas wrinkles his brow. “But you haven’t finished school. Shouldn’t you go back?”
She shrugs, flicks her cigarette away, and goes inside. Voices and laughter drift through the open door, then it slams with a thud. Thomas squats on the stoop and closes his eyes to the sun. His anger’s gone, replaced with this strange feeling that everything’s unreal; the law of gravity has been rescinded, and he’s floating in an empty, colorless room. Some dogs bark, someone calls out of a window, a motorcycle roars way down the street, the sounds gathering into something very familiar, and for one moment he’s back on his old street, ten years old, on the way to school with his books thrashing in his backpack and a taste of blood in his mouth, because once again he’s bitten his lip too hard. Walking along thinking of pleasant aromas. Cinnamon, beef soup, applesauce. To stand under newly washed sheets flapping in the breeze, letting them envelop
him. The coffee shop beside the school: the completely overwhelming pleasure he felt when the door was opened and the scent of coffee wafted into his nostrils like an explosion of aroma. The pure feeling of frost. The sun shined that day like it does today, spring, but the air was still cold, a shiver, and the previous evening he’d learned that their mother had died. Kristin had been the one who’d called; their father had answered. Thomas sat hunched over his homework in the kitchen, but the conversation thrust its way straight through division and geometry, there was no mistaking the subject. When their father hung up, Thomas heard him sit down in the armchair, the creaking and the crackling. Then silence. Jenny was already asleep. Thomas felt his own breathing growing thicker and thicker, the relentless deep freeze in his stomach intensifying. Their father turned on the television. Blood rushed to Thomas’s cheeks. Through a film of tears he stared at parallelograms and triangles. He stood and crept to the door, where he saw their father’s back and the TV screen. Some cowboys rode through a desert with raised rifles. “Was that Aunt Kristin?” he asked carefully. Their father grumbled.
“Was that about Mom?”
“You have good ears.”
“But was it about Mom?” Thomas planted the sharp point of his pencil into his side. A thin, sharp pain. Their father turned halfway round to look at him. “Your mother’s dead. She’s been sick, and now she’s dead. But it doesn’t change anything. To us she’s been dead a long time. Go do your homework now. It’s late. I’m off soon.”
Their father turned his attention back to the screen. Thomas struggled for air.
“She’s not dead to me,” he whispered.
“Maybe so, but now she is in fact truly dead. And you might as well get used to it.” Then he raised his voice menacingly: “Don’t stand there pouting, Thomas.”
His father rose heavily and stood in all his bulk, tall and big-boned. He stared at Thomas. “You’re not gonna stand there whimpering, are you?” His father sighed. “That doesn’t make any fucking sense. Have you forgotten that she left you? We haven’t heard a word from her since. Cut it out, goddamnit.” He got his jacket from the couch, put it on, zipped it up, and lit a cigarette. He shoved his lighter into his pants pocket and exhaled smoke. He gave Thomas a hard, dark glare that sent him back to the well-lit kitchen. Don’t sniffle, don’t say a word. His clear snot dripped on the floor. Then he heard the door bang shut and again he stuck himself with his pencil, poking it deeply in the skin just under his ribs.
The next day was incredibly sunny. He didn’t say anything to Jenny. Not before summer. He didn’t want to make her sad. He kept their mother’s death to himself, like a big, shaggy, twisted lump of darkness. It wasn’t until August, when they visited Kristin in her apartment, that he learned what had happened. Their mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was dead six months later. She’d been out of the country and was buried in the city in which she’d died, Kristin said, according to her own wishes. She didn’t want to be buried in the family plot. She didn’t want to go home. Kristin had been with her during her final days, and she’d made sure that she’d been buried. “Did she say anything about us?” Thomas asked following a pause, in which Jenny scratched at a mosquito bite while humming and rocking in her chair and swinging her legs back and forth. But Kristin had just shaken her head. “No. She had so much pain that she couldn’t really talk. She was taking a lot of medicine, which caused her to sleep a lot. But I’m certain that she thought about each of you.” Thomas knew this was a lie. Something Kristin only said to make them happy. How would a lie make him happy? That same day, toward evening, Kristin had pulled him aside and given him a small photograph of their mother: She’s sitting in a garden with him on her lap. Jenny’s looking out from the baby carriage beside them. Their mother smiles to the camera. A teapot and some cups are resting on a table. Behind them is a tree with a thick, enormous crown. Their mother’s one bare arm holds Thomas, the other rests on the back of the bench behind his head. She looks calm and laid back, almost tranquil. Her eyes are hidden behind large sunglasses. It was the same photograph he picked up from the floor in their father’s apartment, when Jenny got her toaster. Thomas opens his eyes. Now he thinks about the money. The microwave in the basement. Christ. He gets to his feet. Patricia stands in the doorway: “Where did you go? Aren’t you coming in? You can’t leave me alone in there, it’s not exactly fun.” He mumbles an apology and follows her inside. She holds the door for him. The first thing he sees is Maloney shooting craps with Fatso at a table to the right of the bar.
After three glasses of cognac and one beer, Thomas wants to turn to Frank and say: You need to tell me about the job that put Jacques away. But Frank beats him to it. He bares his rotting, blackened teeth in a smile, waves Thomas closer, pulls him down beside him on the bench under the window, and pushes yet another glass of cognac across to him. He says, “I thought of something . . . have you and Jenny been out to Jacques’s apartment recently?”
Thomas stiffens. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you must’ve inherited some things, right? Maybe you went out there to look at the furniture and all that. Or didn’t you?”
“No. We’ve inherited nothing. We’ve disclaimed everything, inheritance and debts.”
“Huh. Jacques had debts? I didn’t know that.”
“Why are you asking?”
Frank raises his glass and sips, then leans back. He fishes a cigarette out of a shiny case. “Just curious, my friend. And because I forgot a bag of mine last time I was there. But it’s just some dry cleaning, nothing terribly important. I seem to recall Jenny saying the two of you’d been out there, so I wanted to ask.”
Thomas stares at him. He doesn’t know what to say. His tongue is bloated and dry, pressed to the floor of his mouth. It doesn’t want to budge. Frank lights the cigarette and sucks on it, running his hand through his hair; smoke climbs upward and dissipates into faint spirals under the lamp. He smiles. “How are you doing otherwise? Jenny says you own a business?”
Jenny apparently says whatever she wants to whomever she wants. Thomas takes a slug of the amber-yellow cognac, which burns wonderfully in his throat. His tongue wants to move now.
“Yes, thank you. It’s going well.”
At that moment the two men turn toward the sound of a boisterous whooping, Maloney stomping on the floor, apparently having won a round.
“That’s my partner,” Thomas says.
“It’s good to have a partner,” Frank nods. “Your father was a great partner. He had class. You know what I mean? You could trust that guy. Now all I’ve got is Fatso, but that’s okay too.”
He straightens up and drops his hands to his thighs. The veins coil like fat worms under his skin. “Did you know this place was named after Fatso’s sister? She lives out in the country now, with some guy I think. You remember her from our street?” He runs his tongue around in his mouth, making smacking sounds, then rests his hands on the table. “She was a fine-looking woman. You remember Rose?”
Thomas nods.
“She was one pretty gal.” Frank scrapes his cigarette through the ashtray and leans back again. “So you haven’t found my bag?”
“No. We haven’t. Sorry.”
Frank stares at him. “That’s too bad.”
“Yeah.”
Though his mouth smiles, Frank’s eyes are hard and direct. “Then we’ll just have to hope it turns up someplace else.”
“Yeah.” Thomas empties his glass. Frank turns toward the back of the bar, and zones out. There’s a minute of silence. The sun blazes through the orange curtains. Fatso shakes the dice cup and the dice clatter onto the table. Luc says something to Alice, which causes her to hop from the barstool to illustrate something with her body. Standing on her tiptoes raising her hands toward the ceiling. They laugh. Thomas senses the pulse in one of his feet and wants to leave, but when Frank begins to rise, Thomas remains seated after all. He takes a deep breath. When he begins speaking, his voice sounds
like a loud whisper. “Why was Jacques nailed? What kind of job was it? Was he doing it on his own or were you all involved? And what about him, over there?” He nods in Luc’s direction.
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