by John Inman
Of course, having my own little Eden had not come cheap. My sister had driven a hard bargain when she sold me the property. She might have been heartbroken that her husband of three years had taken a powder, disappearing one day and never returning, without so much as a fuck-you note to explain it, but Sally was not so heartbroken that she couldn’t smell a financial windfall landing in her lap.
While unable to remain in the house because it reminded her of Paul, she still stuck to her asking price, even when she learned it was her very own brother who was interested in buying it. And I didn’t much mind that she did—because I really wanted the house!
And now, a year after selling the home, and three years after her husband disappeared, Sally was off on vacation with the man she was having an affair with, and here I was, babysitting my one and only nephew, Timmy, who at the ripe old age of four was in training to become a world class snorer and running me ragged while he did it.
In truth I had been a bit uneasy when Sally broached the subject of Timmy staying with me for a month. It would, after all, be the first time the kid had spent a night in the house since his father disappeared. While I feared it might bring back repressed memories of missing his father, Sally assured me Timmy was way too young when his father ran off to miss him, or even remember him at all.
And so far that seemed to be the case.
He had called me Daddy after I snatched him up in the backyard that afternoon, but that might have been a slip of the tongue. Maybe the kid’s memory banks had skidded over a cog or two. God knows mine do it often enough.
I rolled over in the bed to get Thumper’s pointy chin out of my leg and made a renewed effort to fall asleep. I counted sheep. Then I counted Big Macs. Finally, I tried to remember back to every trick I had ever slept with, and that was a big mistake. Suddenly, I was not only wide-awake, I was also turned on. And hungry.
Rather than poke my dog in the ribs with my blossoming hard-on, I rolled over again, facing the opposite direction. Thumper pressed her cold nose to my butt, and I jumped like a jackrabbit. Jesus.
I threw the covers off, climbed out of bed, and pulled on a robe. Leaving the dog where she lay—flat on her back with her legs pointing off in four different directions, smack in the middle of the mattress—I sauntered out into the hall, rubbing my eyes and grumbling to myself.
I stuck my ear to Timmy’s door but couldn’t hear anything, so I quietly pulled it open and peeked inside. Timmy was sprawled out sideways in the bed sound asleep, with one arm and one leg dangling over either side of the bed. His head was twisted all the way back in what looked like an excruciatingly uncomfortable position, sort of like a fossilized velociraptor. His pajama shirt had been dragged up to his chin, exposing his pale belly. One pant leg was knotted up around his hip leaving his little stick-thin leg exposed to the elements and poking out into the night air like skeletal remains.
He looked like he had fallen out of a plane.
Satisfied he was still alive and sound asleep, although I wasn’t sure how, I silently backed away and headed for the stairs.
In the kitchen, I flicked on the lights; then I just as quickly flicked them off. Too much light. Then I remembered the zombies and quickly flicked them on again. Too much dark. What a wuss I am.
I settled myself at the kitchen table and plucked an apple from the bowl of fruit sitting there. Chomping away at the apple, eyes half closed, I wondered what my sister was doing at that moment. An image of her and Dipshit performing the nasty on a hotel balcony overlooking Times Square suddenly popped into my head, and I gave myself a shake to dislodge it. Yuk.
I glanced at the clock. Two in the morning. I wondered if Timmy was an early riser. God, I hoped not. I laid my head down on the table, still clutching my apple core, and fell instantly asleep.
When I awoke, the kitchen was filled with morning light. I lifted my head and saw Timmy sitting at the table across from me, grinning. His hair appeared to have been run over by a Bush Hog. Yesterday his hair was blond and fluffy and cutely casual. Today it was totally uneven, with a couple of bald patches shining through here and there. He looked like a dog with mange.
I wiped the drool off my chin and sat up with a creak and a groan. I could actually hear my eyeballs rolling around inside my head like marbles in a bucket.
“What the hell happened to your hair?” I asked.
“I cut it.”
“You cut it?”
“Yeah. What’s for breakfast?”
My mind wasn’t ready for breakfast. All I could envision was my sister strangling me with an extension cord. “You cut it?”
Timmy laughed, presumably at the horrified expression on my face, then climbed down off the chair. He padded across the kitchen on his bare feet and yanked open the refrigerator with a grunt, sticking his head in between the first and second shelves. That was as high as his head went. From the back his hair looked worse than it did in the front, and in the front, it looked terrible.
Still in shock, I gazed down at the blackened apple core in my hand, then back to Timmy’s hair, or what was left of it. “What did you cut it with?” I asked. I thought I had hidden all the scissors when I kidproofed the house.
Timmy was digging through the bottom shelf now. “That little pop-up button thingy on the side of your ’lectric razor. It cuts real good.”
“The sideburn trimmer?”
“I guess. Where’s the ice cream?”
“Freezer.”
“What kind you got?”
“Pistachio strawberry.”
“Bleccchh. I want chocolate.”
“Well, you can’t have chocolate. You’ll have pistachio strawberry. And by God, you’ll eat every spoonful after the stunt you just pulled, young man.” There, I thought, that’ll show the kid who’s boss.
“Oh, all right,” Timmy groused. He climbed back up on the chair, plopped his elbows on the table, and waited for me to serve him.
While I filled a bowl with ice cream, it slowly dawned on me the kid had just conned me again. Hadn’t he?
I glanced over to where he sat. He was smiling like the Cheshire cat.
“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” I asked.
“I’m smarter than you,” he said, his poor massacred hair poking unevenly off the top of his head as if his brains had exploded.
I would have argued, but I was fairly certain the kid was right.
I handed him his ice cream and scooped out another bowl for myself.
I guessed I wouldn’t be starting that diet today after all.
IN AN effort to work off the fat I had undoubtedly acquired following Timmy’s diet of hot dogs, ice cream, and macaroni and cheese, I decided to put us both to work cleaning out the basement. It was a job I had been postponing forever. And since there were spiders in the basement (which was the major reason for the postponement) I thought it might be nice to have Timmy around to keep me in line. After all, I didn’t want to seem like a girlie fruitcup to my one and only nephew, squealing and swooning every time I spotted a bug. I was fairly certain I could maintain a modicum of dignity with the kid watching my every move. There was also the added benefit that if I ran across a really big spider, maybe I could get Timmy to kill it for me.
That’s not effeminate, is it?
It was a hot day, but because of the spider thing, I wore long pants, a long-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way up to my throat, one of those big summer straw hats pulled all the way down over my ears, with a flap hanging down in the back, and gloves. Leather gloves. Thick leather gloves. Nothing short of a hammerhead shark could bite through those. If I had owned a beekeeper suit, I would have worn that too, no matter how much Timmy was snickering at my appearance.
And speaking of Timmy, he tackled the enterprise barefoot with a pair of shorts on. That was it.
The fool. And with that haircut, he really did look like a fool. I’d have to do something about that before his mother came home. But not today. Today we had other fish to
fry. Metaphorically.
Timmy and I stood in the middle of that unholy mess I called my basement and gazed around, trying to figure what to do first. I really had no intention of throwing anything away. I just needed to get the place organized.
Before we could decide how to begin, we heard a whining coming from the top of the stairs that led down from the service porch behind the kitchen. It was Thumper.
I couldn’t believe it. Unless it entailed pooping or eating, Thumper hadn’t been off the couch on her own since the last presidential election. And now here she was, wanting to join the party.
It’s not like the dog asked for much, so I had little choice but to slog up the stairs in my spider-killing suit, sweating like a field hand, wondering all the while just what were the symptoms of a heat stroke, and carry her down to the basement floor. There she stood on quivering legs, looking around for a place to lie down. Timmy dragged an old blanket out of a box in the corner and dropped it by the wall. Thumper limped over to it and collapsed in a heap, raising a little cloud of dust. Then she gave Timmy’s hand a friendly thank-you lick.
Timmy seemed as amazed as I was. “Wow,” he said. “She licked me.”
“See?” I said. “And you thought she was dead.”
Timmy lay on the blanket beside her and pressed his ear to her belly. “I can hear her belly rumbling,” he said.
“Lovely.”
“Oops,” Timmy said with a giggle. “I pressed too hard, and she farted.”
“Even lovelier.”
Leaving my geriatric dog and my insane nephew lying in the corner getting to know each other, I pulled on my gloves and went to work—dragging boxes of books into a corner out of the way, rearranging some of the discarded furniture that would one day need to be donated to charity, but not today, and trying to organize the lawn equipment in one general area instead of scattered to hell and back so I never knew where anything was when I needed it.
Timmy had enough sense to stay out of my way. He didn’t want to work any more than I did.
The house was a beautiful old Craftsman, built in 1923. Sally’s previous husband, Paul, an attorney, had bought the house as a fixer-upper just prior to their marriage, and the two of them had done a lot of work on the house during the two years they were together. New windows, new roof, new furnace and AC. They had also done a lot of buttressing of the foundation and structural work in the basement, which I learned when I bought the house. New walls and floor to seal out the damp, new lighting fixtures overhead. A sturdy security door leading directly outside to the backyard, keeping the place safe. Unlike me, Paul had been handy with tools. He did a lot of the work himself.
I had liked Paul. Might even have had a bit of a crush on him. The man was handsome, kind, funny, and caring. Consequently, there wasn’t too much about him not to like. During the years of their marriage, I was thrilled Sally had found a guy who would put up with her the way Paul did. In fact, Paul was nuts about Sally. I could see it the first time I met the man. Paul didn’t seem to have any issues about his brother-in-law being gay either. He treated me the way he treated everyone—with an easy friendship and an unwavering loyalty that drew people in and made them reciprocate in kind.
When Timmy came along, Paul was nuts about him too. The best father ever.
Until he ran off like a louse.
I was still heartsick with the way things had turned out. It had taken me months to accept the fact that what Sally said had happened, actually had. One day her husband was there, and the next day he was gone. Just like that.
Sally thought Paul’s disappearance was brought about by another woman, and over the years, I had grown to accept that hypothesis as well. Finally, the police had accepted it too, explaining that people disappear every day and many are never heard from again. They seemed to think since Paul was a lawyer he would be even more adept at covering his tracks than the average Joe. He would know a few legalities that could keep him hidden indefinitely. He might even be practicing law in a different state under an assumed name. Just because he abandoned his family did not mean he had abandoned his livelihood.
Sally seemed grateful he had left everything for her and Timmy. After all, he could have taken the money with him. She also seemed to think that if he wanted to be gone, she should simply let him go. After the first few frantic weeks of his disappearance, she finally turned her back on Paul’s memory and rarely spoke of him again. I secretly suspected that during that time, her love for Paul had turned to, if not hatred, at least a stubborn indifference.
I supposed I couldn’t blame my sister for that.
After three years Sally had Paul’s name removed from the house and their bank accounts—I’m sure there were a lot of legal hassles involved, but I never asked and she never went into it—and while he wasn’t officially declared dead yet, it was pretty much accepted around town that the man was never coming back.
That’s when Sally put the house up for sale, and that’s when I rode in on my white horse, checkbook in hand, and bought it from her lock, stock, and barrel. Now Sally lived on the other side of town in a condo by the bay, and I was rattling around in the rambling Craftsman she and her husband had fixed up, and we were both moving on with our lives.
As for Paul, I supposed I would never know what really happened. Oddly, I wished him well. Paul might have chosen to leave Sally penniless, but instead, he left her with security and a roof over her and their son’s heads. The man could not be faulted for that.
Now with a new love in Sally’s life, a man she had worked with for years at the bank, where she held down the position of loan manager, my sister had come full circle. The fact that I didn’t like the twit she was seeing didn’t seem to bother her much, and I couldn’t really see why it should. It was her life, not mine. The best thing I could do would be step back and let her live it.
At least the kid turned out all right, with little or no residual trauma from the ordeal of being abandoned by his father in babyhood. It was sad Paul would never get to know Timmy. Or the boy him. Sad, indeed. It broke my heart a little just thinking about it.
I wiped the sweat from my eyes and looked over at Timmy now.
I gave an inward groan and chuckle. God, that haircut!
I suddenly remembered what Timmy had said at dinner the night before.
I peeled the bandanna off my face, jerked the hat off my head, and tore open the top of the shirt that was strangling me to death. The sun had risen high in the California sky, and it was pounding on the little ground-level windows like a burglar trying to bash his way in. It must have been ninety degrees outside. Ninety-five in the basement. I had flung the security door wide, hoping to let in a little air, but since there wasn’t a breath of wind outside, it wasn’t doing much to cool the place down.
Timmy laughed now that I had exposed my head for the first time in an hour. “Ooh, you’re all wet. You look greasy.”
“It’s called sweat, Timmy. People do it when they work.”
“Then I don’t think I ever want to do any.”
Golly, the kid really was a born politician. They never want to do any work either.
I stared at Timmy. He was up against the wall beside the furnace, sitting cross-legged on the blanket next to Thumper. He had his hands cupped together before his face, peeking carefully between his fingers.
“What are you holding?”
“A bug.”
“Does it have a stinger?”
“No.”
“Horns?”
“No.”
“A little umbrella and spats?”
Timmy giggled. “No.”
“Then let it go.”
Timmy threw it at me and laughed like a hyena when I squealed and jumped out of the way.
I tried to act nonchalant, especially when I saw the bug had not only missed me but had gathered its wings about itself and actually flown off in the opposite direction, but Timmy didn’t look fooled. In fact, he was still laughing, although he had buried
his face in Thumper’s belly while he did it. Thumper was sound asleep. It takes a lot to impress Thumper. Or even wake her up.
I cleared my throat.
“Remember at dinner last night? You said the man in the basement was nice. What man were you talking about?”
Timmy put his head to the floor, nose to nose with Thumper. Thumper opened her eyes and gave the kid a lick. Timmy licked her back.
“Don’t lick the dog,” I said.
“She did it first.”
“Yeah, but she cleans her butt with that tongue. Presumably, you don’t.”
Timmy popped up to a sitting position, wiping furiously at his mouth with a corner of the blanket. “Oh,” he said.
“And don’t wipe your mouth on that blanket. It’s filthy.”
“You’re worse than Mommy.”
“Thanks. About the man in the basement—”
“What about him?”
“Who is he?”
Timmy shrugged. “Some guy.”
“You saw him through the little window yesterday?”
“I didn’t see him. I just heard him. He said you were getting fat.”
I stiffened. “What?”
Timmy giggled at another one of my horrified expressions. I seemed to acquire a lot of them when Timmy was around. “Just kidding,” he said, all innocent charm, which didn’t fool me in the least. “Can I cut your hair, Uncle Jason?”
“That would be a big fat no,” I said. “I still don’t know what we’re going to do about yours.”
I gave the air a minute to clear from all this extraneous conversation about haircuts and me getting fat (damn, that hurt) and finally got back to the mysterious man in the basement.
“What did he look like?”
“I told you. I didn’t see him. He just talked to me.”