Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  “These aren’t his things. They’re Mommy’s.”

  She wrapped her arm around the door casing and disappeared, then emerged with something in her hand. She held up a can of asparagus.

  “Do you need this?” she said.

  I took a hesitant step forward. “No. Is this another pantry?”

  She disappeared and reemerged a moment later with a can of sauerkraut. “Is this the right thing?”

  “No.” Another step.

  She reappeared again, this time with tomato sauce. “Is this right?”

  I blinked, baffled. “Well, yes it is.” Sarah gave a yelp of joy. I took another step. “What else is in there?”

  “All the stuff.” She disappeared again, and this time I followed her into the darkness. A string hung from above, and I tugged it. Light.

  To one side hung blouses, shirts, dresses, and skirts, pants and sweaters folded over hangers, crisp and exact, shades of emerald and garnet and topaz and amethyst, sorted by color, all looking far nicer than anything I’d ever dug out of a drawer for myself.

  It was hard to imagine that the other side of the closet belonged to the same woman. Shelves held a baffling assortment of objects. Magazines. Teacups. Photo envelopes. A lightbulb. A china dog. A ball of string. Things behind things too deep for me to guess the depth of the shelves.

  And food. Cans, jars, bottles, and boxes, piled and packed. Vegetables, cereal, sauces, beans, juices, and soups in no discernable order. A bottle of clam juice crowded between a can of baby formula and a flowerpot. Two jars of pickles supporting a box of melba toast. But soon I started to see repetition: somewhere on every shelf was grape jam. Jars, and jars, and jars of Welch’s grape jam.

  Eventually, my eyes finally found the floor. In the corner, against the wall and a case of macaroni, was a blanket, a pillow, and Buffers. And jam. So much grape jam.

  *

  Paul brought Kevin home, bare-chested and shivering, a towel wrapped around his waist, rolled-up jeans and a shirt under his arm. I glanced up from the stove where I stood over a hissing pan, scraping shreds off the block of frozen ground beef as they thawed.

  The two of them stood just inside the door, looking at me. I prodded the meat, flipping the block over, setting off a fresh round of spitting. I looked back up to find them still there. What were they waiting for? I was not the mistress of this house here to give them direction and wouldn’t let my position at the stove tell them I was.

  Kevin’s chest was pale and sinewy, his shoulders drawn forward, hands clasped over the towel at his waist, lips clenched together. Paul looked off slightly to the side. I flipped the meat again. Forfeited the battle.

  “Kevin, why don’t you get in the shower right now and warm up. Dinner won’t be ready for a while.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The still life dissolved as Kevin shuffled toward the bedrooms, laces trailing on his untied shoes. Paul tugged at his cap.

  “Guess I’d better be going,” he said.

  “Okay, then.” In the worst way, I did not want to end up sitting around the table as a family, but anything else felt like I was shoving Paul out the door and supplanting him in his own home. I ran the wooden spoon around the edge of the pan. “Or if you want to wait a little longer, I can fix you a sloppy joe before you leave.”

  He nodded. “That’d be real nice. Thank you.”

  He left the room and went outside. I could hear the shower water running through the pipes, a door slam as I guessed Sarah followed her father outside, and then a while later another bang as she came into the laundry room beside the kitchen. She brought with her a smell of leaves and the puppy-like scent of childhood sweat. The meat had finally relaxed into the pan and was almost finished browning, and she bounced to my side to see.

  “When’s it ready?” she asked.

  “Soon. Would you set the table?”

  She jumped onto the counter and swung her head to one side as she opened the plate cupboard. She set the stack of plates on the counter and jumped back down, and it was only as she laid the last plate on the table that I realized she’d laid out four rather than three. I hesitated, unable to think of a tactful way to correct the situation quickly enough. She returned to the kitchen for silverware and glasses.

  “Sarah, I think your Daddy has to go. I don’t think he’s going to eat with us.”

  She nodded her head. “He’s gonna have a sloppy joe, too.”

  That could mean anything. I put my hand on my hip and looked back down at the pan. This was not a fatal situation. It was entirely possible that Sarah’s assumption was not Paul’s. And even if it were, sitting at the table with the family would not, in fact, kill me. Surely I could manage to perform that simple task with enough grace to not embarrass or offend any of them and keep my own discomfort to myself.

  A door opened, creaked, and closed again, and Paul came into the kitchen holding his hat in one hand, scratching his hair. Grace. I would comport myself with grace.

  “Are you going to eat here, or do you want to take yours with you?” I asked.

  “I put your plate here, Daddy,” Sarah said, patting the plate at the end of the table with her open hand. “Like always. Lena sits there.” She pointed to the other end. Perfect. So I’d been sitting in her mother’s spot all this time.

  His eyes flitted to the table, then settled somewhere along the edge of the counter. “That’s great, honey, but I really gotta get going.” He glanced at me. “I’ll just take it with me, thanks.” He turned and left again the way he’d come, with “I’ll just take my stuff out …” trailing behind him as he pulled his hat back over his brow.

  What had he been doing all this time, going in and out, if not taking his bag at some point? I scooped the meat onto a paper towel and poured the grease into a cup, then went mining in the refrigerator for something fresh to serve on the side. Nothing. Mercifully, I found peaches in the pantry and didn’t have to wrestle with whether to send Sarah for whatever pleased her in the closet.

  “Do we put the stuff in now?” she asked from my elbow as I dumped the hamburger back in the pan.

  A squeal in the plumbing let me know Kevin had shut off the shower.

  “Yes. Here you go.” I handed her the opened can of tomato sauce.

  “I can do it myself?”

  “Well sure.” I couldn’t imagine a problem. The sharp-edged lid was already in the trash and the burner was off.

  She looked up at me and gave a single slow blink. “Really?”

  Was there history here I was unaware of? Was I being unsafe, doing something her father wouldn’t have let her? It seemed like a harmless enough thing for a child to do. But if something bad happened, it would be my fault. My fingers hardened around the spoon.

  She seemed to sense my hesitation and stared at me, eyes round. I forced my hand to relax.

  “Really. Just pour it in.”

  She stood on her toes and arched her arm over the pan, keeping her skin as far as possible from its edge, and started to tip the can. I put my hand over her wrist to lower it.

  “Careful. It’ll splash if you hold it too high.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I doubted she heard me. Her concentration was absolute.

  “Good job. You want to do the packet?”

  She nodded, too awestruck for words, and although she did sprinkle a little outside the pan, in this she was largely successful as well.

  “Now stir.”

  My shoulders released as abruptly as if a belt had come unbuckled, surprising me with how tense I must’ve been. I watched her swirl the spoon in the pan for a few moments before I turned the heat back on.

  “You did a really good job,” I said. “I’ll put the sandwiches together. Now go tell Kevin dinner’s almost ready.”

  I toasted the English muffins in the oven while the filling heated through, filled them, and wrapped one in foil for Paul. As I stood over the table dishing peaches, the back door squealed, then banged shut.

&n
bsp; “Your sandwich is on the counter,” I said. When he didn’t answer, I looked up to find him standing over the wastebasket, staring into the trash.

  “Is something wrong?” I said.

  He shook his head, then looked at me and scratched the back of his head.

  “Where’d you find that tomato sauce?” he said.

  “Sarah found it,” I said, heat spreading across my face.

  “Mmm.” He pulled his upper lip between his teeth, nodded, then took the sandwich in his hand. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “Sure. You’ll be back Friday?”

  “Yup.” He cleared his throat. “Money’s there in the jar for groceries. You just buy whatever you need. I know there wasn’t much for you to work with tonight, so I really appreciate you taking care of things.”

  Sarah swung around the corner of the room with one hand on the wall.

  “I gotta go now, honey,” he said.

  “You got a sloppy joe?”

  He held up the foil disk as Kevin came into sight, hair slicked back, wearing a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, heading straight for the table.

  “I’ll see you on Friday, okay, buddy?”

  Kevin nodded, pulling his chair out. “Bye.”

  “Okay.” He touched the brim of his hat to me. “Thanks again.”

  And with no ceremony, no wails of protest from children who’d already had a mother drive away and never come back, he was gone.

  “Can I have milk?” Sarah asked.

  I stood in the center of the kitchen, more bewildered by this family than ever.

  16

  Can we start reading early tonight?”

  We’d left off last week in the middle of James and the Giant Peach, which I could tell the children enjoyed, but Kevin’s request surprised me. The sloppy joes were done and cleaned up and they were watching a Sunday movie about a bear cub while I flipped through a magazine. He sat at the far end of the sofa from me, and I would have thought he was completely absorbed. I closed the magazine over my finger.

  “What do you think, Sarah? Do you want to finish the movie?”

  She lay on her belly in front of the TV, Buffers wedged under her arm, and didn’t turn her face from the screen.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is that okay, Kevin? Can you wait a little longer?”

  He glanced at me and shrugged one shoulder. “I guess.”

  But something caught my eye. He looked different. One of his eyes looked—smaller somehow.

  “Kevin—look here a sec.”

  He turned to face me. Yes, one eye was certainly puffy. I moved over and bent closer.

  “Does your eye feel okay? Is something itchy or sore?”

  “Nah.” He looked away.

  “No, really. Let me take a better look.” Not that I knew what to look for or what I’d do if I saw something. Call Joan or Mindy, probably.

  “It’s nothing.”

  I pulled back a fraction. It’s nothing. This wasn’t an allergy or infection. Something had happened. I laid the magazine beside me.

  “What happened? Did you hit it on something?”

  The corner of his mouth wrinkled. “Kinda.”

  I lowered my voice, but Sarah seemed oblivious to everything but the television. “Did you get in a fight?”

  No response.

  “What was it about?”

  A faint shrug. “Nothing.”

  At last one of the many loose strands of the afternoon caught on to something solid. “Did you call your dad to come pick you up today? Is that why?”

  He looked down at his lap, where he scratched at something on the surface of his jeans. “Yeah.”

  “What was it about?” I repeated.

  “My mom,” he said. His voice was barely above a whisper.

  “Oh.”

  “A kid said she was crazy.”

  “Ah.”

  A roar and a yowl. I glanced at the screen. A bear—the cub’s mother, I guessed—fought a pair of coyotes.

  “Did he say it to you?”

  He shook his head. “He was telling other kids. They were laughing.”

  “Oh.” Children as a dog pack. I understood the behavior well. We moved so frequently as I grew up, I had to face it over and over. Someone would find out about my connection to the Arroyo fire, an event that didn’t fade from public memory, and the one who learned first would pull others into the name-calling. Before long, I’d be glad to hear we were moving again. Never far enough, though. My father, a teacher, wouldn’t look for a position outside the district where his employment was secure. So the cycle would repeat itself.

  But now, after these few weeks here, I’d started to see familiarity as a robe you pull over the odd or the shocking. As with any other clothing, everyone knows what’s under there, but folks ignore it and focus on other things. Because everyone has something to cover. If the crowd at the Powder Keg was any indication, most people understood that, and in time made a loose, careless peace with each other. Maybe I could’ve learned that sooner if we’d stayed in one place longer. Given the chance to stick trouble out, Kevin might fare better than I did.

  “You were at the pool?” I asked. “Just on your own?”

  He shook his head. “I was with some kids.”

  What had Kevin been like when his mother was alive? I doubted very much different. Serious and stern, dark-browed and sober, his jeans hard and his shirt tucked in tight; he would never be one of the gang. Anytime he thought he was, they’d surely turn on him. No, if they didn’t have this, they’d be teasing him about something else. The trick was to get him through this time.

  “Well.” I stood up. “We need to get some ice on that.”

  *

  The phone jangled me out of a sleep so heavy I’d forgotten where I was. I was in the Koffords’ living room. It was night. Vague, formless panic preceded rational thought.

  The rollaway creaked as I sat up. I rocked backward slightly, then swung my feet to the floor and staggered across the living room to the kitchen.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. It’s Paul. You up?”

  My response was instinctive, spoken before my mind could process the irony of the question. “Yeah, sure.” I blinked. With the phone cord stretching behind me, I took the additional steps to switch on the light inside the stove hood, then bent and squinted to read the clock below. The white plastic hands cringed against each other. Three twenty. “Where are you?”

  “Green River.”

  Consciousness stretched and stirred. Utah. The desert. Driving at night. “Oh. What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Kevin. I wanted to talk about Kevin.”

  That’s when I heard it. The slight stumbling, the hesitation over the hard consonants in “wanted to talk about.” He was drunk.

  “It’s three in the morning.”

  “I know—I know.” Pleading. “It’s just—I wanted to talk to you while I knew he wouldn’t hear anything.”

  Snappy retorts would only occur to me later. “Okay.” I leaned against the wall beside the phone, then slid to the floor and put my elbows on my knees. Closed my eyes.

  “He got in a fight today,” Paul said. “He’s not a fighter. He doesn’t fight.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It was about his mom.”

  Oh, God, please don’t let him start crying. “Yeah. He told me.”

  “He did? That’s good. That’s really good. I’m really glad.”

  Who would serve alcohol to a man who pulls up in a heavy rig along an interstate highway in the middle of the night? Or did he just carry a bottle with him?

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What’d he say?”

  “That some kid said she was crazy.” Weariness made me blunt.

  “Is that all?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s more. They said Kevin was crazy, too. They said that’s why she died—she couldn’t stand the sight of him. Him being as crazy as her.”

 
; “Oh.” The word faded into a sigh. “Oh, no.”

  “He wanted to know, in the car—we were driving home. He said, ‘Am I crazy?’ But he’s not. You understand? He’s not. He’s not. He’s a good kid. He’s kinda quiet, that’s all. He looks angry sometimes when he’s not, that’s all. That’s all. He’s not crazy.”

  “No—I know. You’re right.”

  “Carrie was—it was hard, all right? People talk, but they loved her. She never acted crazy around anybody. She never did anything wild. She never hurt anybody. She just wasn’t the same as everybody. That’s all. That’s all.” He’d begun to cry.

  I listened to him in the dark, the receiver pressed to the side of my face, my head bowed over my knees. I saw the closet full of objects and food. The pressed clothes. The jam. Things were so much more complicated than I’d first thought.

  “Everybody loved her,” he went on. “She just—did that to people. They couldn’t help it. But then she’d get ideas that didn’t make any sense, and it’s like she knew they didn’t make sense, a little bit, because she’d do things but then she’d hide them. And she’d forget things and I’d worry about the kids. Whether they were safe. And I worried, you know, how it was for them. I tried to keep everything—okay. Everything together, you know?”

  I didn’t. And I didn’t want to. He’d come out of this a few hours from now and remember bits of it and wonder how much he’d told me.

  “Oh, God, it was the secrets. I couldn’t handle all the secrets. Secrets she had with the kids, secrets she kept from me—”

  I couldn’t let him go on any longer. “I know, I know. It’s okay. We’re okay here. Is there anything you want me to do for Kevin? Anything you want him to do? Are they going to let him go back to the pool?”

  There was no answer. I could hear crying.

  “Anything at all? Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  Finally, a deep breath and he spoke again, very low. “Just—take care of him. Watch out for him. Don’t ever joke with him about being crazy. He’s gotta toughen up but he needs more time. Just more time.”

  “Okay, now tell me where you are right now.”

  “Green River.”

  “That’s right.” It was like talking to Sarah, coaching and managing. “But are you at a truck stop or a bar or something?”