The man with the gray ponytail came through her line three days later. “Oh great,” Grace said. “Crap.”
“Look, I wanted to say I’m sorry about the other day. I was, what do you call it, inappropriate.”
He raised his eyebrows at her expression. “What, you think I don’t know any good vocabulary words?”
Grace muttered “All right, fine,” not looking at him. She really was a snob sometimes. He had a basket of different kinds of produce—peaches, tomatoes, onions—that he had not sorted into bags, so that Grace had to do that and weigh them out. The store wasn’t busy and no one was lining up behind him.
“I bought us lunch too.” He put two tuna sandwiches and two bottles of juice on the conveyor belt. “You get a break? Come on outside and eat with me.”
“No, that’s OK. Thanks.”
“I won’t smoke. Promise.” He smiled, hamming it up. “What big teeth you have, Grandma.” He had such an odd face. Long and oversized, like a cartoon.
Another customer came up behind him. Grace said, “I don’t think I—”
“I’ll be outside.” He paid and scooped up his change. It took him a while to get out the door. He kept stopping and shifting the weight of the groceries, and hitching up his jeans, which seemed about to fall off his skinny hips.
When the crew leader told her to take her break, she looked through the front windows and saw him sitting at one of the tables in the shade. His back was to her and if he was doing anything at all, Grace couldn’t tell. She hadn’t decided about him, or rather, if she ought to bother about him at all, but now she took off her crew apron, hung it on the hook by the office, and stepped outside.
“I only have twenty minutes,” she announced, and he looked up at her and put his lips together and exhaled, a soft whistle.
“She don’t know how good she looks,” he said, as if to an invisible someone next to him.
“Please stop saying things like that.”
“Oh, I said it out loud? Sorry. Thought I was alone with my thoughts. You going to sit down?”
She sat. He’d unwrapped the sandwiches and set them out on paper plates, along with plastic forks and napkins. He asked if she was all right with tuna and Grace said that she was. He took a short-bladed knife from his pocket and used it to slice into one of the peaches and lay it out in segments on a separate plate. Then he did the same with a tomato, taking care to make the slices even and to fan them out. “Dig in,” he said, wiping the knife blade down and folding it shut. His hands weren’t large, but the fingers were long and swollen, either from arthritis or hard use. He wore two cheap-looking rings, one solid turquoise, the other alternating bands of turquoise and some red stone, and this one was worn around the base of his forefinger.
She was a little freaked out by the knife. Men she knew didn’t carry knives. “Are you a biker or something?”
“Define ‘biker.’ ”
She didn’t answer. Even in the shade it was hot. Currents of ticklish heat traveled across her bare legs. She ate some of the sandwich and used a fork to spear a piece of peach. She was too cautious around him to be very hungry. He was wearing a different T-shirt today, dark blue, with a faded white silhouette of two palm trees. He said, “My name’s Les, by the way.”
He held out his hand. He was one of those men who didn’t know that it was up to the lady to decide if she wanted to shake hands, though so many people were ignorant of this point that she couldn’t hold it against him. They shook, and Grace was glad that there wasn’t any funny business to it. “Les Moore,” he added.
“You’re kidding.”
“My dad thought it was funny.”
It was at least a little funny, though she wasn’t sure she believed him either. “See,” he said, “with a name like that, I’m a walking yin and yang. Like, happy and sad. Hot and cold. That’s how I come by my interest in it. Understand?”
“I guess so.” They each ate without speaking for a time. A coworker of Grace’s walked past their table, giving Grace a sidelong look. None of your damned business. She picked out a slice of tomato and put it in her mouth. It tasted watery.
“I’m not any hard-core biker. I was just having fun with you. I’m more of a philosopher type. I read a lot. I’m a self-educated person. You can look down on that if you want. I work at Plastipak, I’m a forklift operator. I guess you can look down on that too.”
“Why do you keep saying that, you don’t know me and you don’t know what I think about things.”
“I guess it’s another energy vibe I get from you.”
Grace rolled her eyes at this. Energy vibe was one more thing you might read on a T-shirt.
“I just meant, you’re particular. A pretty woman like yourself, I hope I can say that without you getting steamed, anyway, you have to be particular, you got good bait and you have to keep the scrub fish away.”
“That’s kind of gross.”
“It’s something my dad used to say. He was a character, my old dad was. Anyway, you have to be careful who you let get in close to you. Because every man who sees you wants to.”
“Everybody has boundaries,” Grace said after a moment. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to run some kind of scam, talk her into something. She wasn’t used to thinking of herself as all that pretty. Certainly not as irresistible. “Thank you for taking such an interest in my welfare.”
“You are welcome. You going to finish that sandwich before you run away again?”
“It’s a twenty-minute break. I told you.” She wrapped the rest of the sandwich in a napkin. “I’ll save it for later. Thank you for lunch.”
Les picked up her fork and put a peach slice on it. “One more bite. Open up.”
She opened her mouth and he put the peach up to her lips. It felt weird and unwholesome to be fed in this way, and she swallowed it down quickly. Then she stood. “All right, back to work. Thanks again.”
“Maybe next time I see you, we can talk a little more. Now you know I don’t bite.”
“OK,” Grace said, just to get away. Oddball, she thought.
Her brother called, all upset and aggrieved at their father, who had done and said more awful things. “Why do you even go over there?” Grace asked him. “Or don’t go over when you know he’s going to be home or don’t go over when you know he’s going to be drinking. Have some sense about it.” In the background she heard music playing, some churning, dark track she recognized from the show she’d gone to. His band had booked some other shows since, and Michael was happy about that.
“All my stuff is still there. I can’t always wait for him to clear out if I need something. Have you talked to him lately? He’s all worked up about Grandma’s house not being sold yet, he wants to change realtors again.”
“It has taken a while.” The sign out front now said New Price. Meaning it had been lowered once more. It was said to be a difficult market.
“So I was thinking, what if I moved in there?”
“At Grandma’s? No, come on.”
“Seriously. They show houses all the time with people living in them. I’d keep the place clean, it’s not like I’d be having big parties or anything. It’s not like we’d have band practice there.”
As soon as he said this, Grace had the inevitable image of parties, big parties, going on at the old house, cars parked up and down the brick streets, a bra draped over the realtor’s sign, the band playing in the living room, colored lights, pissed-off neighbors. Cops at the door. “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”
“Why not? It’s just sitting there empty. It’s not like I need the whole house, just one of the bedrooms.”
“What’s the matter with Jonesy’s?” Jonesy was the friend he’d been staying with.
“Ah, his girlfriend’s over there a lot now.”
It wasn’t hard for Grace to imagine all the ways that might cause problems. She said, “Have you asked Dad about the house?”
“I was hoping you could.”
“He’s not going to listen to me.”
“Like he ever listens to me? Just give it a shot, please?” He had to raise his voice over the music, an erupting volcano of noise. “Tell him it’s either that, or I might have to move back in with him. Ha.”
“All right, I’ll talk to him, but don’t get your hopes up. Try to come up with some other idea.” They said good-bye and Grace let her shell-shocked ears adjust back to a normal decibel range. She was just as glad her own apartment was too small for Michael to move in with her. She wondered if he was doing anything stupid with drugs, but there was no way to bring it up without going into nagging mode.
As soon as she agreed to talk to their father, she was sorry she’d done so. He was never going to give Michael permission to camp out at the empty house. It would only annoy him to be asked, and would probably make him associate Michael, irrationally, with the unsold real estate, and add another layer of grudge. So when she called her father, she said, “Michael needs money so he can get his own apartment.”
“He put you up to this, didn’t he.”
“No,” Grace said truthfully. “But I was thinking about what would be best for him.”
“What would be best for your brother is if he quit hiding behind women and fought his own fights.”
“Dad.”
“First your mother and now you.”
“Come on,” Grace said, but even as she denied it, the idea found a home in her. Was that what Michael did? Was she expected to be someone’s mommy now, God forbid? “Well, the two of you never listen to each other, you just start in hollering, so that’s why I’m the one talking to you, and I wish you’d help him get his own place. He can’t stay where he is and he’s afraid you don’t want him back home.”
“Huh.” If she was hoping her father was going to deny this, he didn’t.
“Dad? Why is it so hard for you and him to get along? Help me understand.”
A silence while her father did something away from the phone. Put something down, picked something up. Not a drink, at least she hoped not, since it was nine thirty on a Saturday morning. Or say it was a drink, say that things had unraveled that much for him since her mother died. Say she was a bad, neglectful daughter, who turned her back on her needy, messed-up, difficult father. She waited until he came back to the phone.
“Your mother said I didn’t like to see him having fun, screwing around, when I was always working.”
“Oh.” Grace considered this. She doubted if her mother had used the words “screwing around.” “He works hard at his music. You don’t give him enough credit.”
“And then his little druggie trip,” her father went on, either not hearing her feeble defense or dismissing it. “Yeah, he had his fun. It cost everybody else big-time, but who cares?”
“It was a mistake. It’s a disease. Addiction. It happens to people.” Like alcoholism, she could have said, but she knew her father, like most drunks, did not consider himself to be an alcoholic. A magical sifting of fairy dust descended and addled their vision.
“Drugs happen to people who play around and don’t take anything seriously.”
She didn’t say anything. She was tired of the clucking and fussing and ritual denials that were her part of the conversation.
“I’m sorry, Gracie, I know how I sound. Killjoy Dad. But I work hard, I always have, and it’s not just the work, it’s the stress and worry that go along with it. And then here’s your brother, who wants to live like a, what do they call it, a flower that doesn’t want to get a job. Like in the Bible.”
“A lily of the field that toils not, and neither does it spin.” Maybe he was drinking. A small, unwelcome alarm went off in her head. “OK, but the point of that verse is not to worry so much about material things. The Lord will provide, it’s saying.”
“Yeah, well, I have some utility bills that could use a little providing for.”
“Oh you’re hopeless.” She didn’t want to explore the depressing idea that her own lack of a high-paying, hard-charging career was of no real consequence because she was female. Only a son was invested with the full burden of her father’s expectations. “Would you please think about helping him? And maybe not looking down on him for playing music?” She considered bringing up Bruce Springsteen. Her father was a fan of Springsteen. She decided this would be unhelpful.
“Better he should think about getting a real job so he can pay his own freight.” There was a category of jobs that her father thought of as “real.” It excluded all jobs of the sort that Michael was able to acquire.
“All right,” Grace said. “Maybe you’re right, maybe he needs to up his game.” It was weak of her, she knew, to give in, agree with him, and what did she mean anyway, up his game? What sort of high-paying job was her druggie musician brother likely to stumble into? “But is it all right if he moves back home? Can you make an effort to get along, or at least leave each other alone?”
“As long as he shows some respect and stays out of my way.”
“I wish you could—”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just, I wish you could see him for who he is, not what he does.”
“You’re a good girl. Yes you are.”
“I don’t think so, Dad. I’m not very . . . warmhearted.”
“Warmhearted gives me a pain.”
And didn’t that all sound like a wholesome emotional climate. But it seemed like the best any of them could do, at least for now. Michael moved back into the house and he and their father seemed to come to some grumpy agreement about sharing space, or at least ignoring each other. Life seemed to be settling down, settling into place. The yoga institute brought in a visiting yogi who taught master classes and got Grace excited about her practice in a way that energized her. She made plans to go to a conference in Chicago later in the fall. She went out with a few friends in the evenings. She priced plane fares for a trip out west, to places she’d never been: Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, though checking fares was as far as she was going to get for now.
She talked with her uncle Mark about how they might set up a memorial for her mother, a garden, she had decided. She approached the park district about it. Michael thought the idea was “OK,” though he had no special enthusiasm for gardens. She was still waiting for the right time to talk about it with her father. He did not speak of Grace’s mother except in passing, or perhaps in drinking. That was when Grace might get a late-evening phone call. Her mother had been one hell of a woman. He wanted Grace to know that. He wanted everyone to know that. He dared anyone to say a word against her. Not that anyone was, to Grace’s knowledge. Her father and her brother kept their griefs separate and took no comfort from each other. That was sad. That was her family.
Les Moore came around the store often enough that her coworkers teased Grace about having a new boyfriend. Now that she was more used to him he didn’t seem so strange, only entertaining, in a goofy way. He was different from anyone she knew, but she had to remind herself there were more people like Les in the world than people like herself. People who didn’t have much of an education and who didn’t worry about it, people who worked for a paycheck instead of some windy, aspirational sense of personal fulfillment. Les worked second shift, three to eleven. No one else she knew worked that late into the night. She felt sheltered and naive and more than a little spoiled.
There were people who didn’t know or care what yoga was. Grace tried to explain it to Les, that it was a set of spiritual and physical practices that emphasized harmony and consciousness. Balance, in every sense of the word. Les said it sounded a lot like yin and yang, and Grace said it might. She was a little tired of hearing about yin and yang.
“I do push-ups,” Les offered. “I do curls with ten-pound weights. See?” He pushed his shirt sleeve up and flexed his biceps. She never knew what you were supposed to say when men did this. His arm was thin and hard, and the muscles looked as if pieces of broken crockery had been piled up and shoved beneath his skin
.
“Yoga is good for flexibility,” said Grace, a little primly.
“Flexibility, I like that in a woman.” He grinned, showing his big teeth. He often said things like that, flirtatious and sexual, which Grace tolerated because he was so outrageous, so unattractive, that it was comical. What was it with gray ponytails, why did anyone think that was a good look? He talked as if he’d had a lot of women, and maybe he had. Or maybe it was just bullshit. She was never sure with him.
He’d grown up here in town, but in a part she’d never had much to do with, the middle-aged subdivisions of small houses and duplexes built on slabs, the kind of places that must have looked run-down almost as soon as they were built. The streets were named Ivanhoe or Carriage Way or Essex Lane, like bad jokes meant to distract you from the shabbiness. His father had been a truck driver, an owner operator, who had up and died from meanness almost twenty years ago. That’s what it was, though the death certificate said heart attack. His mom was gone as well, she’d had female cancer. He guessed he wasn’t going to live all that long himself. It was just the breaks. Grace told him about her mother dying. Les said he knew how that one felt, he’d been down that road already and it was a tough one.
They didn’t know any of the same people. He’d gone to a different high school than Grace, and anyway he was almost fifteen years older than she was and they hardly ran in the same crowd. He and his friends spent their free time in driveways or garages, drinking beer and working, or not working, on projects like repainting boats or building cabinetry. Their cars had bumper stickers about guns (for) and taxes (against). Their kids rode ATVs and did unsafe stunts on backyard trampolines. Yes, she looked down on such things and yes, she was a hideous snob. Les didn’t have any kids, well, he did and he didn’t. He’d been married once. Or twice, but only one of them was legal. Both times to crazy women. He had one kid, a boy, but Les hadn’t seen him since he was a baby, his mother had made sure of that. Her whole family was crazy. Her old man got a sheriff’s star from a pawnshop and drove around the county pulling people over and pretending he was the law. Her brother liked to race as fast as he could on the old slab roads, and then one day him and his girlfriend slid two hundred feet trying not to hit a train but they went underneath it and got their heads cut off.
A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 23