Mean Season

by Heather Cochran

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Sorry to wake you up,” I said.

  “What time is it?”

  I told him that it was early and he asked why I was there then, if it was so early. I told him about what I’d seen out of my window.

  “Oh,” he said. “Huh.” He yawned.

  “Momma doesn’t want them messing with Beau Ray or going through our garbage or any of that. What should I do?”

  “Did you call Judy?”

  “It’s three-thirty in the morning out there,” I told him.

  “That’s what she’s paid for. Go and talk to them if you want, if you’re so worried about the garbage.”

  “But they want to talk to you,” I pointed out.

  “But they don’t get to. At least not until I’ve showered.” He squinted up at me. “You should shower, too. You don’t want to look like that on television.”

  So I did—shower, I mean. And then I made some coffee, and it was not yet seven. Out the kitchen window, I could see a few people milling around. Just beyond our driveway, I made out a police car, which probably had a hand in keeping people away from our doorbell. I took the pot of coffee with me when I walked out onto the porch. As soon as one person saw me, everybody did, and there was a clattering of sound—camera equipment, I guess, and microphones and car doors. I put a finger to my lips to say, hey, keep it down. I explained how my brother was still sleeping.

  “Are you saying that Joshua Reed is your brother?” one of them asked me.

  I almost laughed.

  “No. Beau Ray. Beau Ray’s my brother, and believe me, you don’t want to mess with my mother if you wake him up.”

  “But Joshua Reed is also inside, isn’t he?”

  I said that yes, he was. One of them asked if Joshua would be doing interviews. Another wanted to know which bedroom he was sleeping in. Another asked for “the real reason” he was there. They kept talking at me, asking questions, and every once in a while, a bright light would shine in my eyes, and awfully quick, I found I didn’t like being the center of attention in that way.

  So I offered to make more coffee, and I said I didn’t know much, but that I would try to find out when Joshua might be available. I also told them to get in touch with Judy, and said that she’d be able to answer more of their questions than I could. Then I went back inside. I was glad that Momma had locked the shed where we kept our trash cans and that she’d nailed Posted: No Trespassing signs around our property, front to back. I realized that maybe she’d been right to be so cautious.

  Judy called that afternoon. It was the first time we’d spoken since she and Lars had left West Virginia, and maybe even the first time she’d spoken to Joshua in that time. His cell phone didn’t work at all in Pinecob and he never answered our home phone, so unless she’d called when I was at work, they hadn’t talked. Still, Judy seemed to know everything about the press, and even that Elise had come by the house a few days before.

  “It was in her best interests to cool things off,” Judy said. “She’s got her career to think of and her position in the industry.”

  The way she said it made me wonder whether Judy had spoken to Elise before or after the breakup visit.

  “How’s he doing?” Judy asked.

  “I guess fine,” I said. “He’s been busy reading those scripts that Lars sent. I haven’t talked to him that much,” I admitted. I didn’t tell her that it was because Joshua seemed to be avoiding me.

  “Good for you,” Judy said. “Don’t let him charm you.”

  I told her that he’d gone to AA. How Momma wouldn’t let him install satellite TV. How Momma had refused to keep the phone’s ringer on after 10:00 p.m. How I’d gotten a flurry of e-mails that day about the house arrest story.

  “So the news is out,” I said.

  “And people in town?” Judy asked.

  I said that we hadn’t told anyone about him being in the house, but now with the press vans clogging Prospect Street, a lot of people probably figured. When I’d gone to pick up Beau Ray from his class at the Y earlier in the day, the mother of one of his friends had asked me whether the rumors she’d heard were true. But Beau Ray had gotten a mini-seizure right after that, so I hadn’t been forced to answer. It was the first time that one of his seizures could actually have been called convenient.

  “Is he okay?” Judy asked.

  “Joshua or Beau Ray?”

  “Beau Ray. Is he going to be okay?”

  “You know,” I said. “It happens. Ever since the fall. We don’t really know. Sometimes, they’re practically nothing and he feels them coming on and has learned to lie down. A couple times, we’ve had to bring him to the hospital.”

  “I didn’t realize,” Judy said. “I didn’t realize there were still…aftershocks.”

  “That’s why someone ought to be with him most of the time,” I said. “Actually, Beau Ray and Joshua are getting along fine, and he loves the television vans,” I said.

  “Joshua’s always been good with the press,” Judy said.

  “I mean Beau Ray. He’s been out talking to the technicians since we got back from the Y. I’m not sure they’ll be able to shake him.”

  “Your mother’s not going to like that, is she?”

  “So long as he’s happy,” I told her.

  Chapter 6

  Sandy

  The next day was Sunday, and finally Sandy was back. It seemed amazing all that had happened while she was with her family at the beach. She called in the morning, said she’d made it home safe and when would be a good time to come by? I knew she wanted to meet Joshua, but she also said she wanted to talk to me about something, and it sounded important. I said to come by whenever. I told her to slip in the back way though, through Brown’s field and into our backyard, unless she wanted to deal with the reporters. She said that she didn’t think her vacation update was front-page news.

  Momma was at church and then meeting Bill Weintraub for lunch (which she hadn’t told me directly, but I knew all the same), and Beau Ray was out front with the television guys. Sandy and I sat on lounge chairs in the backyard, sipping iced tea. She had always looked like a cat to me, like a lion, especially in the summer after she’d worked on her sun. That day, Sandy was very tan, golden brown all over, from her hair to her toes. Even her eyes.

  Every year at the same time, the Wilsons closed their service station for two weeks and went to stay with Mr. Wilson’s brother who lived at Dewey Beach, in the Delaware part of the Delmarva Peninsula. Basically, it was a time for playing Chinese Checkers and Yahtzee, eating crab dinners and practicing putt-putt golf. I’d gone with her a few times when I was growing up. Her brother, Charlie, would bring his best friend and Sandy would bring me, and we’d spend the two weeks fighting, boys versus girls. Sandy and I would usually lose.

  That year, only Sandy and her parents had gone. Charlie’s boss had refused to give him time off, so Sandy had hours to kill by herself. She told me how she had explored Ocean City and Fenwick Island and Bethany Beach to the south, and Rehoboth to the north. In Rehoboth, she’d met Alice, who was around our age and also stuck with relatives on an extended family reunion. Sandy said that I really had to meet Alice one day. She was fearless, is how Sandy described her. Alice had wanted to break into the go-kart speedway after hours. She had tried to teach Sandy to surf. I said that, yeah, of course I wanted to meet her sometime.

  Sometimes, people give you big news—like, “I’m moving to Nebraska” or “I’m having an affair with my boss”—and you’re caught utterly unawares. You think, how is that possible? Do I even know you at all? And maybe the point is that you didn’t.

  But sometimes, what seems like it would be a surprise hits on the quieter side. Like a puzzle piece, missing for so long that you’d accepted the incomplete picture as finished. Click the piece into place, and you can finally see all you were meant to see.

  Sandy talking about the beach got me thinking. It got me thinking about all the fri
es with vinegar we had eaten on the boardwalk, the bikinis and sunglasses we had tried on, and the skeeball we’d played, trading in our winning tickets for sawdust-stuffed plush bears. It got me thinking about Barton Albert who had been Sandy’s boyfriend for three years, up until the year before. About the bars we’d gone to and the guys who’d bought us beer, and how she had always thanked them politely, then looked away. I’d always thought that was her version of hard-to-get.

  Now things were different. Or rather, something that had always existed had at last been revealed. Sandy said that she didn’t want anything between us to change, and neither did I. I felt closer to Sandy than I did to my blood sister, Susan. I didn’t want to lose that. I was about to say so when Joshua slid open the screen door and walked outside.

  “So you’re the famous Sandy,” he said. He was wearing sunglasses and shorts and the ankle sensor, of course, but that’s all. His hair curled around his ears and jawline. “Leanne talks about you a lot.”

  “Yup,” Sandy said.

  Joshua looked over at me. I thought about what he’d said on the phone two days before, how he’d described me to someone as a “fucking hick.” I hadn’t told Sandy all of what he had said. I felt too bad about it. It made me hate the sound of my voice and the look of everything I wore. It made me hate our house and the marigold planter made from a tire and our cars that both could have used new shocks and upholstery. Everything. It even made me hate Pinecob, and it seemed like a cop-out to hate my hometown, so long as I was still living in it. So with all this running through my mind, I’d hardly spoken to Joshua since, and if he had even noticed, he hadn’t asked why Vince’s things were suddenly gone from his room. I picked up the magazine lying beside my chair.

  “You’ve sure got a nice tan,” Joshua was saying to Sandy. “I need to work on mine.” He looked at his arms and flexed his triceps. I looked away.

  “I’ve been at the beach,” Sandy said.

  “Right. I guess that’s why I haven’t seen you around. You should come around. I get so bored during the day. I need to have some stimulating company,” Joshua said. “And a wading pool would be nice.”

  “Sorry, sweetpea,” Sandy said. “This nurse is working days until the end of the month at least. But if you lose an appendage and end up in the hospital, I’ll take real good care of you. Besides, you got Leanne,” Sandy said. She patted my hand. “She’s stimulating.”

  “Of course she is,” Joshua said quickly. He smiled. “But she’s got to be sick of me by now. Aren’t you, Leanne?”

  I looked up from the magazine and nodded.

  “See?” Joshua said.

  Sandy looked at me like she was trying to talk with only those golden eyes of hers. I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. I nodded, just enough so that she could see. Sandy had a very seductive smile. Her patients, men and women, were always falling for her. The Nightingale Effect, she called it, but I thought it was Sandy’s smile, and maybe the way she looked in her nurse’s uniform. She turned back to Joshua.

  “Okay,” she said, smiling at him.

  “Okay, what?” he asked.

  “It’s way too hot out here,” Sandy sighed, suddenly all girly. She gazed at him with her lion eyes. “I’ve got to get inside, where it’s dark.” She rose from her chair and stretched.

  I watched Joshua watch her.

  “And cool.” She smiled at him again. “You’re game, aren’t you?” she asked him. “I know you want to get inside.”

  Joshua smiled. “You know I do,” he said. He was looking at her like he couldn’t believe his luck.

  Sandy turned back to me for a second. “Leanne, you want anything?”

  I shook my head and watched them disappear into the dark of the house. I looked back at my magazine, but I couldn’t concentrate, so I sort of stared around the yard. I found myself staring at the trees behind the shed, the stand of dead oaks stripped bare by a gypsy moth hatch a few years earlier. There were maybe ten of them, all old trees and tall, and their craggy limbs still reached out, reminding me of the evil apple trees from the Wizard of Oz, grabbing for living creatures to hold onto.

  I sipped my iced tea and listened hard, but I couldn’t hear anything from inside the house. Most of me really trusted Sandy, especially now. But a lot of me was still jealous and itchy. I didn’t think I’d ever heard her so determined to charm. The way she had dropped her voice to a purr. The way she had stood there, waiting for him, her tan legs just a little farther apart than they needed to be. She’d never acted that way with any of the guys who crossed bars to offer her beer. I doubted that Barton Albert had ever received such treatment. Had Alice taught her this?

  A few minutes later, Sandy slid open the screen door and stepped back outside. She sat down at the end of my lounge chair and put her hand on my foot.

  “So?” I asked. “Did you? You know, anything?” Anyone else, it would have been hard to ask. But this was Sandy. We told each other everything and always had. Just about.

  “Are you kidding?” Sandy asked. Her voice was back to normal. “Do you actually think I’m different now than two weeks ago? I’m not different. I’m just more me now.”

  I was half embarrassed for being worried.

  “All I did in there was sit him down and point out a few relevant facts. Things he needed to hear and a few things I knew you’d never say yourself,” Sandy said.

  “What things?” I asked.

  “Just some things. He doesn’t know how good he’s got it here. Damn whiner.”

  “No, really, what things?”

  Sandy rolled her eyes. “I said that you were the best damn fan club president a guy like him could ever hope to have. And that if he didn’t behave, I’d tell you to quit. I said that you were exceptionally talented.”

  “At what? Talented how?”

  “I don’t know. Just talented. Make him guess.” She smiled at me. “Oh, and I told him that you were the valedictorian and the star of our tennis team and also the prom queen.”

  “What? I don’t even have a tennis racquet. Why?”

  Sandy looked a little embarrassed. “It just sort of came out. I wanted him to think you’re cool.”

  “So you had to lie? Am I that uncool?” I asked her.

  “No, no—I mean, that you’ve always been cool,” she said quickly. “Besides, the rest was all true.”

  “Great.”

  “Listen, I gotta go,” she said. “I got laundry. Talk to you tonight, okay? You sure you’re okay, about everything?”

  “I’m okay. We’re good. Let’s talk tonight. I do want to meet Alice.”

  Sandy nodded and left, walking out the way she’d arrived, through the trees at the edge of the backyard. She was gone by the time Joshua came back outside.

  “So,” he said. He sat down on Sandy’s lounge chair. I pretended to read my magazine. “She called me a butthole,” he said, and laughed a little.

  “She’s my best friend,” I said. “What did you expect?”

  Joshua nodded. I watched him out of the corner of my eye.

  “Anything else?” I asked. I realized then that it didn’t matter what sort of résumé Sandy had given me. He’d forget it, or hadn’t listened to begin with. It didn’t affect him.

  “That Sandy’s a little scary,” Joshua said. He turned to me like he was about to ask something, then he looked away. Then he looked back. “So is she really a lesbian?” he asked. “She told me she’s a lesbian.”

  I looked up from the magazine. “Yeah. She told me that, too.” I said. “She met someone when she was at the beach. I guess it all clicked.”

  “Huh,” Joshua said. “It’s a good thing they don’t all look like her. Life would be harder than it already is,” he said. He looked over at me. “You’re not one, are you?” I threw him the Cosmopolitan I’d been reading.

  “Fuck you,” I said, and got up to go inside.

  “Hey, I thought we weren’t supposed to swear around here!” he said right before I slid the glass doo
r closed.

  Chapter 7

  Sunday Shopping

  I think I already mentioned how I went to the Winn-Dixie pretty much every Sunday afternoon to buy groceries for the week ahead. That Sunday, Joshua’s seventh day, the first day of Sandy being back and me hearing that she was in love with a woman named Alice, just a day after all those vans started hanging around our driveway making noise and asking questions, that Sunday, maybe I was just a little pricklier than usual. It seemed a lot to take in a week. Momma and Beau Ray were apparently able to go on like nothing had changed. Maybe for them, not much had. I was the one who was only working half time, but couldn’t take any classes in my free hours. I was the one who was supposed to play hostess to some guy who alternated between wanting nothing to do with me and wanting me to run his errands or fawn over an old interview in which some geezer said he looked like Gregory Peck. Pretty as Joshua was, I can tell you, he didn’t look much like Mr. Peck.

  So maybe I was a little distracted that afternoon, because I didn’t even consider that anyone might follow me to the Winn-Dixie, or want to interview me about Joshua and what he liked to eat. But of course, that’s what happened.

  I’d gotten my cart and pulled out my shopping list. I always worked from a list, so it wouldn’t take me too long to buy everything for the week. Joshua had added a few requests, but for the most part, seemed content to eat whatever we put in front of him. I was surprised by that. I’d heard all these stories about L.A.-types wanting bottled water ice cubes and special nonfat bacon. Being from a small town himself, maybe Joshua had low expectations. Or maybe he just didn’t want to ask me for anything.

  Beau Ray’s old friend Max Campbell generally worked Sundays, so before I started shopping, I rolled my cart over to the door of the managers’ office and poked my head inside.

  “Hey, Max,” I said.

  He was watching TV with one of the guys from the butcher department. “Hey,” Max said. He stood up and came to the door. “Got the Gitlin Sunday list?”