by John Searles
“I haven’t decided yet. But I’m sure I’ll need you for something soon enough. So you have to promise you’ll be there for me when the time comes.”
“I promise,” I said. “Whatever you want. Whenever.”
“All right, then.” Edie puckered her lips, like we were going to have a showy stage kiss.
I stepped forward. My heart stomping in my chest like one of these new, unfamiliar shoes. Before she could back out, I put my lips against hers. She felt less soft than I would have imagined, and I could taste alcohol under the milk and cinnamon. The combination tasted strange but delicious. It was as if I were kissing a statue, though, because Edie just stood there, stiff. My heart was pounding fast enough for both of us. I felt like I had swum deep under water and everything was muted and slow, the way it is at the bottom of the ocean. No sound. No quick movements. Just our bodies. Just our lips. Blue all around. From somewhere far away I heard a dull humming noise. As hard as I tried to shut out the sound, my body swam toward it, back to the surface.
My mother’s horn.
Edie and I stopped and looked up at the rafters of the basement. Red and blue wires dangled above our heads like veins.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Remember,” she said, her voice serious. “You owe me.”
I nodded yes. She could have asked me to build her a whole new house and I would have agreed.
“Wait,” Edie said as I turned to go. She rustled around in a dark corner and produced a pair of men’s work shoes. Steel-toed and black. “They may be a little big. But you’ll grow into them.”
The horn was still blaring. No doubt it was Marnie pissed I had been gone so long. My mother would be too concerned about the neighbors to make all that racket.
I raced up the stairs, Edie trailing behind me. “I’ll show you out,” she said. “It’s a big house, and you might make a wrong turn.”
But I rushed ahead of her. Up the stairs and down an unfamiliar hall. I must have veered off course somewhere, because the horn was coming from behind me. I opened a door to my right. A closet filled with empty hangers. I turned and opened another door. A canopy bed, lacy peach curtains and pillows. Lying in the bed with his shirt off, hairy chest exposed, passed out, was my father. He rolled over at the noise, and I froze in the doorway. I had settled so easily into the idea that he simply wasn’t at Edie’s, and the new development confused me. I had finally kissed a woman, and I didn’t want it to be his girlfriend. Instead of waking him and telling him to come home, I closed the door and went back into the hall.
Before I knew it, Edie was standing right behind me, though she might have been there all along. “This way,” she said and led me through the maze to the front door. As I stepped outside, she ran her fingers along my chest. The motion made the smooth, hairless skin beneath my T-shirt burn.
“Sharon Tate,” I said.
“What?” Edie asked.
“That’s who you look like. That pregnant movie star who was stabbed to death.” I never read the paper, but the headline with her name came to me out of nowhere. I remembered her smiling photo, too.
Edie folded her arms in front of her as if to stop a chill. Somewhere in her house a clock was chiming. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I wasn’t sure if she was referring to the fact that she looked like a dead woman or if she was sorry that my father was in her bed. Maybe, I thought, she was sorry I couldn’t stay longer. Whatever she was trying to say, all I could do was keep walking.
When I got close to the car, I saw it was Marnie honking, just as I suspected. My mother was trying to pull her hand off the horn. For the first time they looked pathetic to me, like Lucy and Ethel bumbling along on an adventure, only without the laughs.
“Honey,” Marnie said, “you’ve been gone so damn long I’ve gone gray. And what’s with the shoes?”
“Never mind,” I told her, pulling them against me like a trophy from the other side. One foot was still bare, my sneaker left behind on Edie’s kitchen table.
“Did you find him?” my mother asked.
I swallowed hard and climbed into the backseat. “He wasn’t there. Edie borrowed his truck to move some furniture. She doesn’t know where he is.” I figured my father could deal with my lies if my mother called him on it.
“What kept you, then?” Marnie asked.
“It’s big in there. There are lots of places to get lost.” My voice cracked again, and I couldn’t help but smile. I sounded just like Leon and my father, I thought. Just for a moment I sounded like a man.
TWO
The morning Edie decided to call in her favor, I was standing under a tent at the Holedo policemen’s auction with my mother. It was a cool, drizzly November day, and the sound of raindrops on canvas made me think of knuckles cracking. Over and over.
“Do you think we’ll get what we want?” my mother asked. She was wearing a yellow plastic kerchief over her head. Beneath it, her hair was pulled back in a bun, leaving a funny-looking lump in the plastic.
“Probably not,” I said, practicing my new routine of telling her the exact opposite of what she wanted to hear.
The taxpayers’ association had funded a brand-new police station—or pigpen, as my father called it—on the other side of town. The new place had turnstile doors, a six-car garage, and an intricate emergency switchboard. After three years of on-again, off-again construction, the station was finally up and running, so the cops were selling off all their old crap. For the first hour we watched people walk away with wooden desks, torn vinyl office chairs, coffin-size filing cabinets, even the titles to three souped-down squad cars and a badge from Holedo’s first sheriff, Will Warner.
But my mother wasn’t interested in any of that crap. What she wanted more than anything was the old station itself. With its single-story design, ivy-covered brick face, and rooms lined with barred cells, she had convinced herself it would be the perfect home.
“Don’t be so pessimistic,” my mother said. She ran her hand over her kerchief, and it crinkled like a sandwich bag. “It’s our chance to own a place. Do you want to live in that apartment the rest of your life?”
This opposite thing was so easy with her. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
Since my father had taken a job driving a truck for Edie’s new shoe business three months ago, apartment life was better than ever. He was gone most of the week, trying to make sales to independent shoe stores up and down the East Coast. If the business took off, I had heard him explain to my mother more than once, Edie would hire more drivers and he would get to be the dispatcher. That meant he’d make a lot more dough than he used to bring home from the factory. All I knew was that with just me and my mother around during the week, I could watch television whenever I wanted, drink soda, and eat chips in the living room.
“You’ll change your tune once we spruce it up,” my mother said.
No matter how much we fixed the place, it could never be a real home. Last week Officer Roget had given us a tour. Between twisting the bristly tips of his mustache and listening to my mother giggle over all his cocky jokes, he explained that no one had ever spent more than a single night in a Holedo cell. It was really just a holding pen until criminals were sent to a real prison or set free. The news left me disappointed. If we were going to move to a jail, I wanted it to have a dark and dangerous history. I tried to imagine murderers on death row, planning their escapes before their brains got fried in the electric chair, but I found that impossible with the smell of Roget’s stray cats, the emptiness of the jail cells, and toilets that were as filthy as forgotten fishbowls. The place felt more like the Franklin Park Zoo outside of Boston. Still, my mother was convinced it was a great fixer-upper. My Uncle Donald had sent a fat check from one of his latest inventions, and buying the old station was the way she was going to spend it.
But we had competition.
After the cars had been auctioned off, the only people left standing under the tent were Vito Maletti and
Grover Payne. Vito owned Peaceful Pizza on Water Street by the bus station. Grover owned the Town Auto Body on Hanover.
“Peaceful Pizza Two,” my mother said.
“The Town Auto Body at a new location,” I said.
She sighed. “What happened? I thought we got rid of the competition.”
For weeks my mother and Marnie had gone store to store, tearing down auction signs from community bulletin boards, as well as calling local radio stations and disguising their voices to announce a change in date. “Excuse-a me,” Marnie would say, switching off her southern. “Ze oction ’as-a bin chenged.”
“You couldn’t have expected everyone to fall for your tricks,” I said.
“Why not?” my mother said, her beige raincoat practically swallowing her. “All’s fair in love, war, and house hunting.”
This was her idea of a joke. Ever since that night at Edie’s last summer, my mother’s jokes had begun to annoy me. It was as if Edie’s kiss had aged me ten years, and I saw my mother in a different way. I wanted her to stop wasting time with Marnie. I wanted her to stop chasing after my father. I wanted her to stop putting on the normal mother act every time he won her back.
Across the lot a skinny girl was single-handedly protesting the auction. She was about my age and my height, with long, flat brown hair that made me think of a “before” picture in a Wella Balsam ad. One of those pretty-faced models looking dismal until the shampoo blessed her with bounce, luster, and a glowing smile. She held up a sign that said HOLEDO MUST PRESERVE HISTORIC BUILDINGS, but no one seemed to be paying much attention to her.
“Who is that girl?” my mother asked.
“Don’t know,” I said, because I had never seen her in school before. “But I think she wants our new home to be a museum.”
My mother looked her way and said, “Well, I always admire a girl who fights for what she believes in.”
“We are opening bidding on the former Holedo Police Station,” Officer Roget announced, stealing a quick glance at my mother. His face was saggy and pouched, set off by a crooked nose and thin lips. The face of a skinny man set atop a muscled body. Something about the way he kept putting his fingers to his mustache, like it was a costume that didn’t fit quite right on his face, made him seem shifty to me. Or vain. I wasn’t sure which.
“He sure is handsome,” my mother whispered.
I looked at his gorilla chest stuffed into a blue uniform. His holster rode high on his waist, the pistol jutting out like some inflexible part of his body. “Maybe without his head,” I told my mother.
Roget fingered the black nest of his mustache, then touched his badge and prattled on. “This six-room office building has housed Holedo’s finest since 1923. There are hardwood floors, a galley kitchen, and three bathrooms. It’s well suited for a business. Of course, it could easily be renovated into something else.”
“I feel like I’m on The Price Is Right,” I said.
My mother didn’t respond. I knew she wished Marnie had come with her instead. But Saturdays were Marnie’s big day at the hospital, where she was in charge of television rentals for patients. Most of the week she made her way from room to room, gathering crinkled dollar bills from sick people with bedsores on their asses and nothing to do but watch Mary Tyler Moore and listen to Marnie’s personal line of bullshit. On Saturday mornings, though, Marnie was the Bingo Lady. For a full hour her face was broadcast over the hospital television system. “B one. G fifty-five. I know there is a winner out there somewhere!” The way she dolled herself up and carried on, you would think she was a guest on Carson.
“We will open the bidding at fifteen thousand dollars,” Roget announced. “Do I hear fifteen thousand?”
Grover waved his faded and fingerprinted cap in the air. Vito counterbid. The two of them went back and forth until Roget reached fifty thousand.
“Why aren’t you bidding?” I asked my mother.
The air around us was flashbulb blue and smelled of fireplace fires. Her face looked puffy, heavier than usual, in the morning light. Her cheeks were red. “I’m just letting them lay the groundwork. When things get serious, I’ll make my move.”
Vito bid at fifty-five thousand.
“Sounds pretty serious to me,” I said.
“Do I hear five thousand more?” Roget asked.
“I’m out,” Grover mumbled, folding in a high-stakes card game.
The three of them were in Monte Carlo. Marnie was in Hollywood. And my father was hauling his girlfriend’s clodhoppers all over New England—the bombshell girlfriend I had kissed but not seen since. All last summer I kept hoping to spot Edie at the Doghouse or the Cumberland Farms Quick Mart. I had ridden my ten-speed by her house a few times in the fall, desperate to catch a glimpse. When I didn’t see her again, I started to blame my father. Of course Edie preferred him over me. He was all about beer, big muscles, and his big mouth, and I was none of those things. Whenever I fetched him from a bar after that night at Edie’s, I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the door. No more intros with his buddies. No more hanging out while my mother waited in the car. That was how much I had changed.
“Do I hear five thousand more?” Roget said.
“How much did Uncle Donald give you?” I asked.
“Never you mind,” my mother said and raised her hand to match the bid.
Vito didn’t wait. He shot his hand in the air.
“Sixty-five thousand?”
My mother raised a finger.
“Seventy thousand?”
Vito waved.
“Seventy-five thousand?”
“Mom,” I said, unable to stop myself from stopping her. “We could buy a real house for this much. Think about it.”
“Not now, Dominick,” she said.
“Seventy-five thousand?” Roget asked.
“Mom,” I whispered. “Let him have it.”
Finally she seemed to hear me and hesitated. Her hand stayed by her side.
“Going once,” Roget said. “Going twice.”
My mother bit her upper lip but kept her hand still.
“It’s better this way,” I said, deciding to ease up on the opposite routine for a while.
“Sold. To Mr. Vito Maletti.”
My mother put her head down and turned toward the car. Her crazy plan had been let loose into the air like a balloon caught in the wind. She untied her plastic kerchief and slipped it inside the pocket of her raincoat. When we climbed into the Pinto, she pulled a gum wrapper out of the unused ashtray. Inside the silver paper was the piece of Juicy Fruit she had been chewing when we arrived. She stuck the piece back in her mouth and put the wrapper in the ashtray again. Whenever I bought gum, I blew through the pack in under an hour. But my mother worked on one piece forever, saving it in a wrapper between chews as if there were an international gum shortage.
We drove out of the parking lot of the new Peaceful Pizza, where Vito was shaking hands and that girl with the picket sign was packing up her protest. My mother stayed quiet all the way across town, and I rolled down the window and let in the earthy, late-morning air. The rain had stopped, and somewhere, someone had managed to start burning leaves. Finally my mother said, “All I want is a little round thing on the wall so I can control my own heat. I want a kitchen where I can keep the trash can beneath the sink.”
Ever since she had heard about the auction, my mother had been going on about the flower boxes she wanted to put in every window, the wicker planters she planned to buy, the braided throw rugs for the hardwood floors. But she never mentioned removing the bars from the cells or dealing with any of the other setbacks that came with buying a police station. “Uncle Donald would have to have invented a time machine for us to afford that place,” I said.
My mother twisted the knob on the radio, and the car filled with noise from a football game. The Eagles versus the Patriots. Or the Saints versus the Cardinals. I could never keep them straight anymore. “Well,” she said, “if those fellas hadn’t shown
up, we would have gotten the place for dirt cheap.”
We were on River Road, about to pass the new police station. My mother kept her eyes on the road, but I stared out at the green rectangle of lawn, the shining windows, the three-story layout. An officer stood on the tarred river of sidewalk—hand to his forehead like a visor or a salute—gazing up at the face of the building as if awestruck by the design. Now that place looked like it could have been a home. Seeing it made me feel sorry for my mother.
“You can save the money for something else,” I said.
My mother reached for the radio again and pushed the hard black buttons. Classical. News. More football. Weather. Nothing seemed to make her happy, so she turned it off. The road snaked its way through the center of Holedo. Redbrick buildings on either side. A gold flashing light winked at us as we skirted beneath. The skeletal frames of last year’s town Christmas decorations—two angels and a star completely stripped of their garland—blew back and forth in the wind. The air from outside smelled different here. No more burning leaves; now it was factory smoke. I rolled up my window, hushing the sound of spinning tires.
“I’m going to tell you something, but you have to promise not to tell your father,” she said.
Sharing secrets with my father was never a temptation. Besides, when my mother made up her mind to trust me, my word was a mere formality. “I promise.”
She glanced away from the road toward me. Her face looked puffy still, and I thought of moist air trapped beneath her skin. The tight fist of hair behind her head left her ear naked and exposed. Without jewelry, the pierced hole was a miniature mouth opening toward me in a yawn. “I have a little money put aside,” she said. “Not enough to buy a decent house yet. And God knows I’d never get a mortgage with your father’s job. But if something should happen to me, I want you to use it for yourself.”
I thought of her life in New Mexico, a waitressing job in San Francisco she had told me about, Truman. She once said that she left her old lives quietly, like she was ducking out of a party without telling the host or the other guests good-bye. I imagined myself as one of those hosts, eyeing her from the corner, watching her gather her coat and shuffle toward the door. “Are you going to leave?” I asked, as a worried feeling mushroomed inside me.