All the way home, Arthur fiddled with his foil’s broken tip. He lodged a finger in his mouth. As they pulled into the driveway, he pulled his finger out and rubbed his hand against his shirt.
“The cups didn’t look dropped.”
Red was back at the fence, working the Weed Dragon like an expert. He’d certainly taken to that contraption. He was wearing pants, boots, even a long-sleeve T-shirt. Had she insulted his elbows once? Dusky smoke puffs rose from the fence post. How many weeds could be left standing after his work yesterday? Gina said, “Bone china makes a hard landing.”
“Madame does have some neat tarot cards. She showed me. Can I go back tomorrow for my reading?”
Did she say you’d be back? Gina almost let the words slip. “Honey. Grandma died a long time before you were born. OK? So there was never a chance for you to know her. So telling you certain things about her didn’t seem … right to us. Because then all you would know of her would be that one terrible thing. Do you understand?”
“I guess.” He picked at the foil like he was removing a splinter. Head hung low, hair sweeping his jaw, achingly beautiful. When they could afford the barber again, she might simply let his hair grow. “Did she die of natural causes?”
“No, she didn’t.” All these years later, finally telling the truth felt like a lie.
“OK.” Arthur clenched his fist. “Did I have a brother, Mom?”
Where did the truth lie in any answer to that question? “I was pregnant. When you were still very young. I lost the baby before he had a chance to be born.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“We did. You were still almost a baby.” Gina paused. They had explained it all very carefully to Arthur when Gina returned home from the hospital. Arthur could have babbled something to Dad. That’s how Madame Bozek would know. And how utterly typical of her father to keep secret that he knew, wait until revealing it would hurt Gina the most, and serve him best. “You were so young that soon you forgot. We wanted to forget. You know?”
“Yeah.” She reached out to stroke his hair. He moved away from her hand. “It still feels like lying, Mom.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Arthur headed inside. Gina hiked across the lawn. She should be furious with Dad. She’d always sworn to give Arthur a happy history he could take for granted into his own future, the family bedrock Red possessed and she did not. Put Grandma in the category of an inevitable passing. Pass down to him a comforting myth of life’s essential stability, death’s arrival at the natural time. But under her lurking remorse over whether she’d been selfish not to tell about the baby, she wondered whether Dad was really in the wrong to have revealed the family pain without her consent. Had she, in the end, been wrong to fabricate a sensible rhythm to life and death, deny her son the right to ask the same unanswerable questions Gina had asked all her life?
She thought she’d startle Red, who was midblast when she approached. But he turned calmly at her tap on his shoulder. “Why are you out here firing away? The yard looks great.”
“Just wanted to zap a few on the other side of the fence.”
“Why not let the girls do that?”
Red reached over the rail and ignited a patch of crabgrass. “We own it, remember? How was your dad?”
“Let’s just say the subject of money never came up.” Odd how much she longed to tell him about her mother and their baby boy, that they’d found each other in the next life. Whatever the next life meant to a couple of nonbelievers. At this rate, she would end up as loopy as Dad.
“Doesn’t matter now.” Red straightened and rubbed his back under the tank.
“It went well with the client?”
“The client was a no-show.”
An outcome Gina didn’t need Dad to foretell. “What did Jim say?”
“Jim was a no-show.”
“What? Jim wouldn’t do that.”
Red leaned the wand against a fence post and hoisted the tank higher on his shoulders. “Jim’s in jail. Guess he got creative with the books after he let you go. Probably that’s why he let you go.”
“Oh, my God.”
“No one to bail him out, either. He actually asked me to post the cash. Which I told him I’d be glad to do in a couple of weeks. After my first paycheck.”
“You landed a job?”
Red nodded and took up the wand.
“That’s wonderful, honey!” She wrapped her arms around his waist. Rammed her knuckles against the Dragon’s tank. The propane’s skunky odor clung to Red’s shirt. “When do you start?”
“They want me to start as soon as possible. I fly out on Monday.”
Gina peered into the goggles. “Where’s the job?”
“Qatar.”
Bull’s-eye. Madame Bozek and Dad could boast a perfect record on foretelling the Arnold’s fortunes. Gina’s lack of surprise chilled her to the bone.
“We’ll have to walk on the house, Gina,” Red continued. “Start all over. I’m afraid it’ll be on you to pack up and toss the key.”
“I guess there’s no scenario in which Arthur and I should … stay here.” What she meant was not subject Arthur to complete upheaval until Qatar proved to be a going concern, as Dad would say.
Red’s expression was inscrutable. “Well. At least that’s out in the open.”
“That’s not what I meant, Red.”
“Hard to know what you mean anymore, Gina.”
Gina fought back tears. She looked over the fence at the neighbors’ serene dahlias lining the bright, cherry-stained deck. She hadn’t watered the flowers, either, yet they thrived under her lack of care, stubbornly beautiful no matter what she did to them. “It’s not fair,” Gina murmured, “that their worst problem is yeast.”
Red followed her resentful gaze. “The cats have yeast?”
Gina shook her head. “Why on earth would the cats have yeast?”
“You’re always complaining about spores on their fur.”
Could the skin goop possibly be due to a yeast infection? The thought hadn’t occurred to her. “I meant the girls. Helen actually recommends blow drying the crotch every morning to prevent moisture buildup.”
“Good Lord, Ginny.” Red was surveying Candy’s evergreens. The trees looked more dispirited than ever in the glaring heat. The needle canopies drooped, lifeless and brown. “How would you know?”
Embarrassment at her snooping tied her tongue. She fibbed quickly. “Helen mentioned it once.”
“Guess you two are real pals now.” He hefted the Weed Dragon and prepared to move down the fence.
“Well, I had one, too, at the time, and it just came up. You know. Girl talk. Look, if we’re abandoning the house, why bother with those weeds?”
“Just feels good to watch something else go up in smoke.” Red torched a cluster of wild daisies on the other side of the fence. “There’s a market niche for you. Mobile crotch grooming. You can franchise the vans from your uncle. That would really please your dad.”
It took Gina a moment to realize he was cracking a joke. “We could call it Joltin’ Gina’s Pussy Salon.” She grinned.
“Girl Time Groom ’n Go.”
“Clean Cunts.”
Red squelched his laugh with a wince. “OK, that’s nasty.”
“What’s nasty?”
“Referring to the girls that way.”
“I wasn’t!” Gina protested. “Anyway, you’re not exactly one to talk. You don’t like them either.”
“At least I don’t call them dykes.”
“Helen uses that word!”
“You said it in front of Arthur.” Red leaned over the fence to blast another daisy patch. The eyes and petals vaporized. Webs of ash floated in the breeze. “And you didn’t use it the way Helen does.”
“I did not.” But Gina remembered a tart comment she’d lobbed after the property line squabble; Arthur’s startled expression; her halfhearted attempt to explain the reappropriation of slurs. Not
any worse than some of Red’s postdispute jibes.
“When you’re judgmental, Ginny, it’s for all the wrong reasons. Not that there’s ever any right reason to be judgmental.”
“Wait a minute. What are we talking about here, exactly?”
Red faced her, wand pointed at her tennis shoes as if her feet were the next weeds in line. “At least the girls don’t use their cunts for punishment.” Behind the goggles, sweat had pooled below Red’s eye sockets. His gray eyes swam before her, opaque and enormous.
“OK.” Gina drew a breath. “Mind telling me what that means?”
“You haven’t touched me in months.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it? When I tried to hug you yesterday you practically knocked me over.”
“I did not! I was reacting. You hit me with the wand.”
Red snapped off the goggles. Perspiration misted the air between them. “I haven’t seen your cunt in a year.”
“Hey.” Gina stepped back. “Quit saying that word.”
“Because you get to say what you want and I don’t?” He dropped the wand and slid the propane from his back. The tank landed with a thud between them. “Because you get to decide whether you’ll go or stay? Who deserves your love, and when?”
“That’s spectacularly unfair.”
A door slammed. Arthur’s voice called for her, reedy and thin.
Red looked her up and down. Objectively, the way he sized up a dimension on a plan. “Take off your shorts, then. Show me your cunt.”
“Jesus, Red.”
Arthur called to her again. “Shouldn’t we do the cats now, Mom?”
Red pulled the goggles over his eyes.
Arthur ran to the fence. His foil bobbed in his belt. Gina hurried over to him. “Leave that here, Arthur.” She spoke more sharply than she intended. “The last thing we need is to stab one of those cats.”
“Geez, Mom. We practice safety in class.” But Arthur leaned the sword against the rail, the jagged tip safely tucked in the grass, before hopping the fence.
Blitzen barreled out of the gloom like a ghastly tumbleweed. Gina snatched the cat up and deposited the slack sack of bones in her son’s arms, told him to clean the litter box in the basement, and fled to the kitchen.
She wet the towel hanging from the Jenn-Air at the kitchen sink and mopped her face raw. Out the window, the jade-green lawn and the sky’s metallic-blue canopy rippled under the brutal heat. Red was standing by the Rugged Rumpus, staring at the neighbors’ perfect lawn. How could he accuse her of unlovey behavior when he, too, had barely touched her since the downturn? Was he out to prove that she had no heart left? That she was unmerciful?
Was this the man who had divined her mother’s heart and then guarded her secrets until the moment Gina needed them revealed?
Arthur’s sneakers pounded up the basement stairs and glided into the laundry room. Gina dropped the towel in the sink. Red was facing the neighbors’ house, shading his brow with his hand as if searching for Gina in the window she was looking through.
Another thought struck her, then. Had Red known her mother might have meant to take Gina’s life, too?
His professional expertise and instinct would be to avoid catastrophe. In her place, the first thought Red would have had that day in her mother’s room was the monoxide, lighter than the air, rising to the ceiling. He would have guessed that while her mother was watching those flames lick the ceiling, she might not have been easing her own passing, but planning Gina’s.
She tried to hold her voice steady as she answered the running commentary Arthur was flinging over the clack of the EVO pellets cascading into the feeder.
“Wonder where Donder’s hiding.”
“Mmm.”
“I’ve never seen Blitzen without Donder practically riding on her back.”
“Yes, honey.”
“Do you think Blitzen’s acting funny?” This remark rode on a stream of caterwauling. “She won’t eat.”
“Pet her.”
“What?”
Gina wrung out the towel and replaced it on the Jenn-Air’s gleaming handle. “She won’t eat if you don’t pet her.”
The mewling was duly replaced by the prim clicking of frail teeth. Gina poured a glass of water, gulped a mouthful. A crystal decanter half-full of something amber stood next to the stainless-steel spice rack. Gina poured several shots worth of whatever luxury liquor the girls might store in crystal and drank it with one swallow. Scotch, naturally. She wandered over to the lovey notebook, turned over the leaves absently. A stash of blank notebooks must lie in wait somewhere to fill with future adoration. The women had turned every battle for equality and acceptance, from having kids to tying the knot against their home state’s law, even disputing a property line, into a celebration of love. With so little to fight for, had Gina and Red failed to love long enough and hard enough to last until the recovery?
The words blurred. She was on the verge of losing it when her gaze lighted on the girlish scrawl. Doc says Priscilla’s yeast infection could = oral sex! Arthur?
fucking clueless neighbors
Gina blinked away her tears. Arthur and Cil? They never spent any time together without Colt. She flipped through the notebook. The entry was one of the last, written after Helen had hired her to take care of the cats. Had they left the notebook out in plain sight, knowing Gina would snoop?
“Mom, there’s green slime all over the carpet. Like, a whole ocean’s worth.” Arthur’s deep voice rang from the living room.
Gina snapped the notebook shut. “Don’t exaggerate, Arthur.”
“No, Mom. For real.” Alarm dusted his tone.
“Bleach turns fabric green sometimes.”
“I don’t think that’s it. Come here, Mom.”
“You come here a minute, sweetheart.”
Arthur padded in, cradling Blitzen in his gangly arms. His throat’s sweet apple bobbed as if already denying what she was about to ask.
“Honey. Are you and Priscilla … boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“That’s gross, Mom.” Arthur clamped a hand on Blitzen’s squirming head.
“Arthur. This is important. Are you and Priscilla fooling around? Kissing, or … other stuff?”
“What? I really think you need to see this green goop. Come on!” He fled the kitchen.
Had his expression changed to guilt? His energy is expansive, Daughter. Was Dad’s observation on her son’s “rustlies” yet another prediction come true?
Through the patio slider, Gina saw that Red had strapped the Weed Dragon to his back again and was striding purposefully toward the fence. He hopped the railing nimbly, tank, wand, and safety goggles bouncing wildly. He pointed the Dragon’s nostril right at the first evergreen in line and pressed the trigger. A burst of flame roared from the nozzle. The tree ignited as obligingly as kindling.
“Mom! Come here.”
“Oh my God!” Gina flew to the slider, yanked the door wide, bolted down the deck stairs. Sunlight flooded her eyes as she ran headlong down the sloping lawn. She stumbled over a stick, regained her footing, limped the rest of the way to the tree line. Red stood with a hand at his hip. He was studying the flames with a tilt of the head she recognized from his working days, the affirming nod when all the dimensions on a drawing had fallen into place. A rogue clump of flames was dangerously close to jumping Candy’s mulch ring.
Red nodded at the flame’s progress, primed the wand, and took aim at the next evergreen.
“Red!” Gina shouted. “Red!”
With a sickening swoosh, the second tree lit up, flames arcing to the flawless sky. Another nod. Job well done.
Gina ran up, clutched his arm, gasping for breath. “Red! Are you crazy?”
“Yes.” He shook her off deliberately and aimed the nozzle at the next tree in line.
“Stop that.” She tried to band his chest in a tackle, but with the tank in the way she only succeeded in jiggling his arms. Ash and flaming
needles rained down into the lush grass. She hadn’t watered the lawn, either. The yard was bound to catch. She planted herself firmly in front of the Dragon’s nozzle.
Red studied her blankly behind the goggles. “Out of the way, Ginny.”
“No!”
“Out of the way, Ginny,” he repeated in the patient tone he used to tell Arthur to pick up his socks.
Another pump, and a hiss. Red shot the flame deftly under her arm, and the third tree went up. Sweat poured down Red’s cheeks. His eyes glowed behind the goggles’ foggy plastic. The middle trees sputtered, their wiry skeletons burning themselves out. The shrubs on either end flamed steadily. As brittle branches snapped and fell, a breeze sprang up. Smoke wrapped lazily around Gina. A patch of grass sprang into flames. Coughing, Gina whirled around, took the fence in one bound, and snatched up the bucket by the Rugged Rumpus. Empty. She should have remembered Arthur kicking it over.
“There’s a hose by the girls’ deck,” she cried to Red, who seemed not at all inclined to spring into action. “Red. Come on!”
Instead of running for the hose, Red primed the wand. Gina snatched up Arthur’s foil. She leaped back over the fence and thrust the splintered tip at Red’s wrist in time to prevent the next blast of flame.
“Cut it out, Ginny.” He rubbed his wrist, parried the wand.
Gina jabbed the wand with the foil. “Did you know my mother was trying to kill me?”
“What the …?” Red smacked the foil near the tip, almost knocking it out of Gina’s hand. “Did you know you’d turn out to be a lunatic, too?”
The slider jerked open. Arthur’s long legs rolled over the deck at full steam. He leaped the stairs and raced down the slope, wielding a bright red tank and black nozzle as adroitly as a third arm. For a confused moment, Gina thought he’d unearthed another flamethrower and was hurtling downhill to finish the job. He skidded to a stop, pulled a pin, unleashed a waterfall of cottony foam.
The girls would keep a commercial-grade extinguisher on hand for emergencies. Within moments the trees were cooling under a soothing white coat as fluffy as an early snow. Smoke trickled from the grass and sputtered out. Arthur cut the spray. The foam retracted into the nozzle with a moist hiccup. Red gave a nod and pulled the safety goggles up to his brow. “Nice work, Son.”
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