Friday night when Glenn’s mother tells him there’s a man living at Annie’s he doesn’t believe her. He was there Sunday. Annie had to cancel their date yesterday to cover for another girl at work, but she rescheduled it for next week when she’ll be on days. His mother says she’s just trying to save him trouble later. Clare Hardesty’s seen the fellow’s car going in and out of there. Glenn doesn’t understand why she constantly has to tear his hopes down. They get into it in the kitchen, and Glenn’s father comes in rattling the Eagle.
“Why don’t you give her a call?” he suggests.
“Better,” his mother says, “take a drive over and see for yourself.”
Glenn calls and gets Annie. The girl she spelled last night is trading the favor. Annie laughs at the accusation.
“She’s probably seeing my mother’s car. I’m trying to get her out of the house more.”
Glenn lets it go, doesn’t say that Clare knows the Polara (she has a Dodge herself, an ugly little Dart). He tries to remember when she’s lied to him before and can’t. Up until this, everything has been his fault.
Annie reminds him of their date Thursday, says she’ll see him on Sunday.
“So?” his mother says when he gets off.
“It’s her mother’s car.”
His mother scoffs, blowing out a mouthful of air.
“Livvie,” his father says.
“I’ve tried,” she says. “No one can say I haven’t tried.”
Glenn wants to hurt her, to say to her face that she doesn’t love him, that she’s not his real mother, but doesn’t. His father gives him a pitying look (he’s always sorry, always trying to help him because he’s such a fuck-up), and as he has so often since he’s been home, Glenn turns and takes his jacket from the back door and leaves them without a word.
Not knowing who it is, Bomber snarls, then recognizes Glenn. The spotlight at the corner of the porch goes on—his father again—and the oak’s bare branches throw shadows over his truck. Bomber hears his keys and wants to go with him. Glenn lets him off the chain and the dog goes straight for the driver’s-side door.
On the way through town he stops at Keffalas’s for a six of Iron City. He needs to talk to Rafe, an old high school buddy he used to work with when he was still with Annie. He lives out past the middle school in the house his parents left him. The furniture is ash and cherry, the rugs frayed bare. When Glenn needed a place, Rafe was willing to give him a room. It didn’t last long, they were both too screwed up and lost their jobs. They would talk, nodding drunk, late at night when they knew they had to get up for work, of how Tara was the only thing Glenn had ever done right in his life. Rafe is sterile. He’d hold Glenn and sob, trying to explain himself. “You’ve got Tara, man, no matter what happens, you’ve got her, man.”
“Come on, man,” Glenn said, “don’t start this shit again.”
“You’re right,” Rafe would say, sniffling, trying to laugh. “You know I can’t help it.”
But now when Glenn turns into the muddy drive he sees Rafe’s place is dark except for a chore light over the garage. His Bronco’s gone. Bomber paws the window, thinking they’re going to get out.
“Take it easy,” Glenn scolds him. He cracks an Iron, slaps the magnetized opener back against the dash, but it falls into Bomber’s footwell. “My fucking day.”
He drives out to the lake and sits at a picnic table. Across the water the lights of summer cottages describe the shoreline. In the wind the beer feels warm. The swings creak. Bomber runs in and out of the dark, a blur. Glenn wonders what Nan would recommend. It’s been too cold, November; he hasn’t seen her in weeks. He has her number somewhere, and he can always look in the book.
The stars are up. He leans back against the table to watch them. Sometimes in church he thinks of Jesus stepping down out of the sky, pulling the night aside like a curtain and showing Glenn his blazing flesh, trailing the sword of judgment. Glenn has decided he is not saved yet, that Jesus sees his sin for what it is. When he kneels and closes his eyes for the Confession, he sees his father’s watery face, feels the scrape of the hose down his throat, the suction plunging his stomach. None of that has changed, he thinks. He can see himself doing it every day, every time he sees the aspirin hidden away from him in the downstairs bathroom medicine cabinet. “And deliver us,” he prays, “from evil. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory. Forever and ever. Amen.”
He thinks of his real father’s childhood beneath the lake, the dust of a small town summer. “Bullshit,” he says, and sees his mother drunk in the Pittsburgh bus station, asking servicemen for quarters. She was the one who put him up for adoption, not his father, but Glenn never blames her. “At least she tried,” he says, finds his beer’s dead and pops another. He closes his eyes, after a minute opens them. These ghosts won’t go away that easily.
The stars retreat and surge forth again; the wind rattles the trees. Glenn finishes the six and dunks the empties thunderously in a raccoon-proof trashcan. Bomber knows it’s time to go and waits for him at the door.
“I’m coming,” Glenn says, trudging uphill.
He has no intention of driving by Annie’s. Only as the high school exit comes up does he relent, angling the truck up the ramp and braking late for the stop sign. He’s not drunk, just buzzed enough to laugh at the giant, spotlit Big Boy in his checked overalls atop the Eat’n’Park. The drive-in bank says it’s past midnight and cold enough to snow. He turns left, away from the blue GAS and FOOD arrows, and the lights of town sparkle in Bomber’s window.
“That’s not where we’re from, buddy,” Glenn says, and pats him on the shoulder.
The streetlamp halfway down Turkey Hill sheds an empty circle over the road, painting its cracks and potholes black. Beyond it, far off as stars, glow the windows of the Cape. Glenn turns his lights and his motor off and coasts down the slope. He can’t see anything until he glides beneath the streetlamp, and then it’s too late to turn back.
In the drive sits Annie’s Maverick.
“Ha,” Glenn says, and shoves Bomber as if they’d bet on it and the dog has lost. He stops and Bomber almost falls into the footwell. They’re still a few hundred yards away, out of range in the dark. Above the house the water tower rises swimming pool blue, the tank patched with painted-over names. The woods are dark, the night above them searchlit by the passing traffic on the interstate. Last summer he and Annie took their sleeping bags into the field and with Tara between them watched the stars until the bugs got bad. He thinks he should show up Halloween night in disguise, maybe pin a cape on Bomber.
“What do you think?” he asks. “Superdog, Scooby Doo?”
Bomber cocks his head.
“You pick something then.”
Bomber paws his leg. He doesn’t know what’s going on, why they’re stopped so close to home.
“Okay, bud,” Glenn says, and starts the truck up. He’s hoping Annie’s either asleep or watching TV. With his lights off he does a three-point turn that becomes a five-pointer and sneaks up Turkey Hill in first.
At the T across from the Hardestys (asleep, the downstairs dark), Glenn flips on his lights. He has to wait for a car to pass, but the car slows—suddenly, as if the driver thinks Glenn is a cop—and then turns into Turkey Hill, its lights raking the truck, tossing up dust from the berm.
The car passes Glenn, then stops. He recognizes the taillights from work—a ’72 Charger—and makes the connection. It’s Barb and her boyfriend. The kitchen’s closed and they’re looking for a party. Glenn doesn’t know how he’s going to explain his being here and thinks the best way might be to confess right now, to back up and talk to them, say he knocked but no one was home.
He shifts into reverse and looks over his shoulder to see where he’s going. The Charger’s taillights flare, then return to normal, pulling away.
They’ve seen him, he thinks. He can’t leave.
He does a better three-pointer and heads back toward the house, already testi
ng excuses. The Charger is passing under the streetlamp, moving pretty good. He knows Brock likes to drive.
But it’s not Brock, Glenn sees, because the Charger doesn’t cut into the drive. It reaches the turnaround, lights shining on the guardrail, and slowly swings onto the dirt road that leads back to Marsden’s Pond. It’s a make-out place. In the summer they’d hear cars all night, glass smashing, whoops and howls. Every so often the cops would come. Since Glenn’s left, Annie has mentioned she has one of her father’s old guns if there’s any trouble, but there hasn’t been. He still worries about her. It’s his best and maybe his only reason for being here and, off the hook now and chivalrous with drink, he suddenly believes it’s true. He is her protector, whether she appreciates it or not.
He stops before the streetlamp and turns around again, this time keeping his lights on. If she hasn’t seen him yet she’s not going to.
At the intersection Glenn takes a left, then makes a U-turn and pulls the truck off to the side, kills the lights. He’s hidden by the trees but poking out enough so he can see the turnaround and the house. He wants to see the Charger come out again; he wants to be sure before he tells his mother. Bomber’s confused.
It’s foolish, he thinks after a few minutes. He has to get up for work tomorrow and he already has a headache from the beers. He’s about to give up when he sees a light moving through the woods.
It’s the Charger, backing up the dirt road. It comes out under the tower, swings its lights toward Glenn.
“That was fast,” he says.
He waits for it to come up Turkey Hill, but it doesn’t. It turns into the drive behind the Maverick and someone gets out. Glenn wipes his breath from the glass, and when that doesn’t work, jumps out of the truck and runs closer in the cold, shielding his eyes to see better as if it’s sunny. At this distance, in the glow from the windows, it could be Barb or Brock or anyone. The driver walks across the lawn. The door opens, and this new light is enough for Glenn to see that the driver is in fact Annie, her hair blazing, so that the taller person beside her, the one taking the bag from her and kissing her, is logically Brock.
Annie hates day shift, especially in winter, but it’s the only way she can keep her job. Barb has turned the other girls on nights against her; it’s impossible to work. Her time card keeps disappearing, and on the roster someone writes “Sleaze” by every mention of her name. Infuriatingly, Clare Hardesty has said that despite what everyone thinks, she will still sit for her, and when her mother spends the day visiting friends at the Overlook Home (where, ironically, Brock works), Annie reluctantly leaves Tara with Clare, whom she neither likes or can afford. Annie tends the few lunching couples in the main dining room, takes a tray of Manhattans to a table in the bar. By three it’s empty. On break she drinks her free Tab and watches the leaves stampede over the deserted golf course. The gay festoons of crepe paper strung for the upcoming Turkey Trot mock her. She ends up prepping for supper, chopping lettuce and decorating relish trays with the dropouts in the kitchen. All they play is classical because Michael the cook likes it, and driving to pick up Tara, she lets WDVE wail—Aerosmith, “Dream On.”
“Listen,” Glenn says over the phone, “I forgive you.”
She hangs up and the phone rings under her hand.
“We are all forgiven. I believe that. I have to believe that.”
“Please,” she says, “I don’t want to have to call the police.”
“You’re fucking him,” Glenn says, “right in our bed. How can you do that?”
Barb calls her once to make it clear that she doesn’t mind losing Brock. It’s Annie that’s hurt her, and she doesn’t know why.
“Why did you do it?” Barb asks, after bitching her out, telling her tearfully that she can never be her friend again. Annie can’t answer. She thinks of when Barb split with Mark, how she consoled her, the two of them sitting on Barb’s fire escape, drinking peppermint schnapps and listening to the PBA teams in the churchyard making the chain nets ring. When they had drained the pint she wrote Mark’s name on the foil and made Barb kiss it and throw it into the dumpster below. It smashed and the boys playing ball all looked.
“I don’t know. You know how sometimes you do crazy things.”
“No,” Barb accuses, in one word refuting her argument. “You do what you choose to do.”
“Then I don’t know,” Annie says. “It wasn’t him, or if it was it’s not anymore. And it wasn’t you, I swear to God I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“But you did.”
“I did,” Annie says. She’s tired of apologizing, and listens to the silence. She can’t go any lower.
“Was it worth it?” Barb asks. “Did you get what you wanted?”
“No.”
“Glenn called me. He sounded even more fucked-up than usual.”
“I know,” Annie says. “He’s been calling me every day. He’s been calling me at work.”
“So I hear,” Barb says. “You know what I say? I say you deserve whatever you get.”
“I can’t quit,” Annie says.
“That’s not my problem,” Barb says. “You’re a big girl. You did this to yourself. Just don’t expect me to talk to you. Stay out of my way.”
When they’re done, Annie is disappointed, as if she’d expected more. She’s surprised Barb called at all. I wouldn’t have, she thinks. The whole thing reminds her of high school, how easy it was to give herself to someone for a week, a month, how hard it is now. Trust wasn’t what she needed then (and still isn’t, she wishes; she’s young, it’s not her fault she fell in love). She doesn’t expect Barb to forgive her immediately.
Her mother’s not happy with her either. She says Annie could have told her about Brock, but then won’t come over when he’s there. Annie knows she thinks she’s a fool, that she does these things with no regard for the consequences. Whether it’s true or not, Annie thinks her mother should be on her side. They spar where Tara can’t hear them.
“Obviously you take after your father,” her mother lets slip.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Annie asks.
Her mother ignores her as if she’d never said it. “It’s not you I worry about, it’s Tara.”
“Everything is fine,” Annie insists. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Olive called me,” she says. Usually Glenn’s mother is a joke they share but not now. “It sounds like he’s taking it hard. You can’t blame him.”
“This has nothing to do with Glenn,” Annie says, but even she doesn’t believe it. She recognized his truck the other night. “He’s been calling me,” she admits. “Saying things.”
“He’s hurt. Surely you can see that.”
“I’m not afraid of him.”
“You know that you can always stay here if you want.”
“I have a home,” Annie says, tired of having to explain her life. They stop talking, call it a draw.
“Oh honey,” her mother says, not satisfied with the tie, “I wish you had told me.”
The only saving grace, Annie thinks, is Brock. To think she wanted him gone. His shift at the Overlook Home gets off at eleven. Three afternoons a week he watches Tara. He lets her ride his neck, swings her around by the feet. Watching cartoons, he reads the captions for her—“Acme Rocket Company,” “Tasmanius Horribilus”—explains what 4-F was. They stay in their pajamas all day, snuggling under her blanket. Like Glenn, he leaves the discipline to Annie, which is right because Tara’s not his daughter. If they were serious it would be different. Sometimes watching him sling her over his shoulders, Annie reconsiders him, thinks that now she can count on him—until he comes home at one in the morning reeking of weed. All she can think of is that he cheated on Barb. He apologizes, says he’s not used to living with a family.
“Then you had better get used to it quick,” she warns him, but only because she’s been working all day and had wanted to spend the few sane hours she has with him. In bed she forgives him, and they slee
p folded into each other.
Later that week they’re sleeping when Annie wakes to breaking glass, a dog barking far off. It’s too close to be coming from the pond. Again, in front. The clock radio says three-fifteen. She jostles Brock.
“I hope that’s not him,” he says, “because I will kick his fucking ass.” He rolls out of bed and lands feet-first as if he’s been ready for this. He takes his jeans off the closet doorknob and yanks them on over his pajama bottoms, lets the belt buckle dangle. From outside comes another crash, and across the hall Tara wakes up, complaining. Annie picks up Tara and follows Brock to the head of the stairs. She waits at the top while he goes down to the front door and with a finger lifts the curtain.
“It’s him,” Brock says, and before she has a chance to react, clicks the outside lights on and opens the door. “Hey!” he shouts. “Fuckhead!”
“Brock!” she whispers, trying to call him back in. She hears Glenn shouting something and rushes into the front room to see what’s happening. They keep the door shut to save on heat, and the chill makes her hold Tara closer, stroke her for warmth. She leaves the lights off and goes to the window.
Below, Glenn’s truck sits in the middle of the road, Glenn in the headlights, waving his arms, a beer in one hand. He’s lumbering drunk, surrounded by smashed bottles. Bomber’s in the cab, going nuts. Beyond the truck the field stretches black to the woods; the water tower glows like a blue moon.
“It’s Daddy,” Tara peeps.
“No, baby,” Annie says, “it’s someone else.”
“Daddy,” Tara shrieks, “Daddy.”
“Shush,” Annie says, “it’s not Daddy,” and squeezes her, turns so she can’t see. She sways as if Tara’s a baby again.
Brock stands in the frosted yard in his pajama top, barefoot, trying to reason with Glenn. Annie thinks of her father’s gun in her night table, the telephone by her side of the bed. Tara squirms in her grip, trying to see.
Glenn tosses his beer into the air and lets it shatter at his feet. He points at Brock, shakes his finger at him. Brock shrugs, palms up—what’s the trouble?—then waves Glenn toward him with both hands as if helping someone park a car. Glenn steps to the edge of the property; Brock moves toward him, then stops. They lean forward to bellow at each other over an invisible line. Bomber’s claws scrabble at the window.
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