We go back to our homework, then, because despite everything, Brandy and I are those kind of students. I do my homework so I don’t have teachers crawling up my ass, mainly; Brandy is trying to get on the honor roll so she can qualify for reduced insurance rates. She’s in drivers’ ed now, so that’s all she thinks about. My mom pays my insurance—I know that. My dad used to but then he let it lapse and I got a ticket for going through a stop sign and my mom freaked out because it involved all these fines and fees and paperwork with the court. She doesn’t trust him for shit like that anymore.
After we finish our laundry, I drop Brandy off. I don’t go inside, because while I’ve seen Megan since our big sex talk, I still feel awkward about being around her. And then, even though Brandy says I’m being obsessive about it, I drive back to my dad’s house, just to see if anyone’s around. It’s a split-second decision, really. An impulse.
But this time, just as I roll past, Roy comes out and sees me. He’s standing still, about to light a cigarette. He doesn’t look thrilled, but I pull over and park anyway.
When I get out, he’s walking toward me, cigarette lit. He’s cut all his hair off; you can see his scalp, and his ears are pink from the cold. They’re pierced way up and down too, but there’s nothing in there, just holes. I never noticed that before, when his hair was long.
“What’s going on, William?” he asks. It’s half-friendly, half-suspicious.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just was in the neighborhood.”
“You’re in the neighborhood a lot.”
Shit.
“My girlfriend, I drop her off at the house where she babysits sometimes.”
“Don’t they live on the other side of the block?”
I don’t feel like defending myself. He’s a dick if he can’t accept that I’d be a little curious.
He sucks in his cigarette, then blows it out over his shoulder.
“Hey, you’re not alone. This whole street is up in your dad’s business lately. What he’s doing. What he’s not doing. It’s kind of become a big problem. For your dad at least.”
“Why?”
Roy shakes his head, like it’s too much to explain. “Listen, I want you to know that I’m helping out again, living here, and things are happening. On the inside, at least. It’s getting there. It’s just, the snow is making it hard to do anything beyond that.”
“I thought the county ruled the house unfit for people to live in?”
Roy shrugs. “Your dad’s not in agreement, obviously. He’s kind of stubborn.”
“No shit.”
“It’s not like he’s a jerk, but he certainly could be softer about dealing with neighbors. That might make them not want to call in the county with little complaints all the time.”
I don’t know what to say. I feel so angry, I’m afraid my glasses will steam up. I take them off and wipe them on my coat, even though I know it’s a wool blend and will probably scratch the coating on the lenses.
“Is he home?” I ask.
“Not right now,” he says. Takes another drag of the cigarette. “He bought another Laundromat over in St. Paul; he’s over there getting that place going.”
“What the hell?”
Roy scratches his head, feels around in his pocket, and pulls out a hat, puts it on his baldness. “Yeah, that happened before I got here.”
“When’d you get here?”
“January,” he says. “I withdrew from school.”
He looks a little ashamed about it, but also like he wants me to tell him it’s okay, as long as he’s helping my dad. I look at him, sucking at his cigarette, his fingers all dirty and callused. I wonder if he’s back on drugs. Like he’s not really helping, but staying here because that’s all he’s got left now.
“Sorry,” I say.
He blows out more smoke, which he tries to exhale away from me, but the wind sends it into my face anyway.
“I’ll go back probably,” he says. “Just not right now.” He’s not looking at me, but at a FedEx truck stopping at a house down the street.
“Can I come inside and see?” I ask.
Roy steps back. Steps on his cigarette and kicks snow over it. Shakes his head.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, man.”
“Why? My dad still hate me?”
“Your dad doesn’t hate you, Will,” he says. “I know he mouthed off and said a bunch of shit he regrets. He’s told me that. But I know what he’s doing right now. And what he’s doing is to make up for it. He’s dead set on having your graduation party here. That’s his goal, that’s his timeline . . .”
“Then what the fuck is he buying more businesses for?”
“Cash-flow issues, I guess,” he says. “I’m not making excuses; I wish to hell he hadn’t done that either. But the point is, he’s focused on making it up to you. And I’m trying to keep him focused too. He won’t let anyone in that easily. That friend of his, Garrett? He won’t speak to him anymore. I’m like the last tenuous link here.”
“Is he still drinking?”
“Not at the house,” Roy says. “That was my limit. I can’t be around that.”
“But he’s still drinking.”
“I think so,” Roy says. “He doesn’t like the idea of meetings, though I’ve tried to get him to come.”
“He’s not going to stand for that shit.”
“He thinks that, now,” Roy says. “There’ll come a day where it just gets too tiring, though. Where you’ll do anything to reverse the direction you’re headed.”
“So, what? You work on the house and try to get him to be sober?”
“Not in that way,” Roy says. “Just, I don’t know. I’m trying to listen to him. Be supportive. Remind him, through example, that recovery’s possible.”
“I hope you don’t say it like that,” I say. “‘Recovery’s possible.’”
Roy laughs. “Oh, no,” he says. “I said that once and he pointed to me smoking and asked what the fuck I thought that smoking was. He’s pretty guarded.”
“So . . . you’re not going to let me see the house.”
“I promised him,” Roy says. “He’s seen you too. Driving past. And he doesn’t want you to see the house until he’s ready for you to see it.”
I say okay and his phone beeps and he looks at it and smiles.
“Another girlfriend?” I ask. It’s the first time I’ve ever acknowledged that part of his life.
He kind of smirks.
“Sex and cigarettes,” he says, shoving the phone in his pocket. “My last vices.” He slaps my shoulder and lights another cigarette and then I get back into the car.
I’m wishing I had a shift, but I normally have weekdays off. The sky is the color of cement; there’s snow and dirt and slush everywhere. It’ll be spring in a couple months, at least according to the calendar. The last day of school is May 30 and graduation is two days after that. I’m passing all my classes, nothing great, but I’ve got C’s and some B’s. My mom has all these things for college for me to look at. It’s like she won’t acknowledge that I’ve done nothing to apply for school in the fall.
There are a lot of good things happening in my life now, but they’re all happening to other people. Angus is leaving for spring break to go tour around Chicago. Kinney and Taylor’s snowboard team is going to some championship. Jay just got a raise at work. Kristin’s goat is pregnant. Garrett just bought a new car. And my dad is building the house up, as a present. For me. I should feel better. I should be happy Roy’s there, with my dad. I should feel good that I can stay with my mom. That I have Brandy. That I have Angus. I should feel good about these things. I should.
But I just feel cold and hard inside. Like, I’m a million years older again. It makes me want to check the mirror for gray hair. Because hearing Roy talk about the house being finished, for me, like he believes it? It just makes me tired. It’s exhausting, hoping for the best.
TWENTY-TWO
THE SNOW FINALLY fucking sto
ps. But not until the end of April. Then, the days suddenly get hotter and sunnier and being in school is torture. One day they call off school because Franklin isn’t air-conditioned and the temperatures in the classrooms, even with the windows open, is over ninety-eight degrees. I don’t know why they even bother. Most of the seniors don’t give a shit anymore and with all the fans the teachers constantly have running, you can’t hear anything anyone says.
Now that the sun’s out, Jack Telios has taken to unbuttoning his shirts even more. DeKalb and him have some game going with Isabella and Loretta, the cousins. And now Jack’s the main roadie for Angus and DeKalb’s band, because they’re playing more shows—that same first coffee shop has them regularly on Saturdays now, along with a couple more places like it. Little gigs, but Angus is very proud of them. I usually have to work Saturdays so I don’t see them all. Plus Brandy likes the band and she wants to go with Shania, but I can’t deal with her and Angus in the same zip code so I always say I’m busy. Even if I’m just staying up late at my mom’s, waiting for Angus to call me when he gets home. Which he always does. He’s always in the mood to hook up with me after he plays a show.
Except for the weather, everything’s the same. Work, me picking up some extra shifts for Carl. Me, with Angus, stolen minutes in his garage practice room here and there; once in his basement on the couch after everyone was asleep. Me, with Brandy, at her house after school when her nana’s asleep and her aunt’s still at work. There is something about getting sex all the time that just makes you crazy. It’s like you’re sick. And the only cure for it is more sex. My dial is stuck at go go go yes yes yes all the time. It freaks me out to think that maybe I want it exactly like that.
I don’t want to like it, though. I never thought of myself as a cheater. Cheating at first seemed mainly like lying. Which is nothing great. But why do liars lie? Because they’re greedy. They want everything without admitting it.
But when you’re greedy, everyone can see how desperate you are. There’s no dignity in it. That’s why I can only stand it when no one can see. I can’t think about it too much or I’ll fucking go crazy myself.
I think I’m going to end up like my mom.
“Tess settled for the suburbs,” my dad would tell his friends, when he was drunk and thought I was asleep. Or “Tess can’t sit still. Always striving for something.” I think they both sound right. But it seems wrong. How can she be both those things, even?
My eighteenth birthday is May 9, but it’s on a Monday. Brandy does nice things for me all week: brings me lunch, gives me presents (a new watch, a pair of flip-flops, since I always wear my boots, even with my shorts, which she says is weird). Then, after school, she gives me a blow job in the bathroom at her house while her nana’s downstairs in front of her afternoon talk show.
Afterward, I tell her it’s not the kind of birthday stuff I’m used to. For her birthday, all I did was buy her a gift card for Target and a new bracelet Shania helped me pick out.
“I’m not used to it, either,” she says as I’m buttoning up and feeling a little light-headed. I can hear the TV downstairs; Nana keeps the volume jacked, even with the closed captions on, for some unknown reason. “But I think it’s how birthdays should be. We have a lot to celebrate, I think.”
She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and flips her hair out of her face.
I kiss her a bunch. I swear, I cannot even taste myself on her mouth. She must have some magic trick, something in the magazines she and Shania always pass back and forth. Because I always taste it in Angus’s mouth. Maybe there’s some difference in saliva for girls and guys? I feel guiltier than usual when she gives me head because that is a thing with Angus that I always give back to him. It’s impossible not to think of him while she’s doing it, actually. For my birthday, my mom bought an ice-cream cake from Dairy Queen and we’re going to have steak—that was my request—and she even invited Angus. But Angus is gone overnight for his class campout, so he’ll miss it. So I won’t see him at all on my birthday, which would have been a good gift in itself. Not that I expected a blow job. Though, lately, when we manage to hang out, that’s usually what happens, anyway. Birthday or not.
The next Thursday, I’m at the Laundromat with Brandy and I’m not doing homework but I’m looking over college-application stuff. Brandy keeps looking up at me from her yellowy copy of Jane Eyre.
“I hated that book,” I say.
She doesn’t say anything. Just gets up to go to the coffee shop. She doesn’t ask if I want anything, either, which is also weird. She comes back a minute later with a Snapple and sits back down with her book. I don’t want to make this into a big deal, like the other times we’ve fought, which seemed like fighting about air or wind or something invisible. So I take off my glasses and clean them on my shirt and act like nothing’s wrong.
Until my dad walks in.
I know it’s him, even without my glasses. Can tell, just by how he moves.
I put my glasses on. The three of us all stare at each other. It feels like everything’s completely transparent between us, and I’m embarrassed. I know he knows I’ve told Brandy everything. And I know this is why he’s mad.
My mom has been emailing him. Texting. Calling. All about the graduation party. We have invitations with my senior picture—I made her pick the picture where I’m wearing glasses, even though she and Brandy both liked the ones without them better—but the time and place are blank. She’s trying to work with him, she says. He’s stopped calling her back. Answering.
Now I’m here. In his place of business. Which is as dirty and unloved as ever. I wonder if he’s going to throw us out. Or just me.
“Hello,” he says. He says it to Brandy. She says hi back in the softest voice ever.
“Hi, Dad,” I say. My voice sounds like I scraped it up from my guts.
“Everything working okay?” he asks, nodding toward the bank of washers and dryers.
“Yeah, great,” Brandy says.
“Good, good,” he says, nodding, like we’re customers and nothing more. He gets out his keys and goes into his office. I can hear the lock click after he shuts the door.
I go back to looking at the college stuff. Brandy is staring at me now in a way that annoys me. I don’t want to talk about any of this.
“Should we leave?” Brandy whispers.
God. Like he can hear her, from inside his office, with all the fucking racket of the washing and drying!
“No,” I say. “Your stuff isn’t done.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No,” I say. “You paid and you get to finish what you paid for.”
“Maybe we should leave once everything’s done in the washers. Go somewhere else and dry them?”
I try to stay calm. I do. I stack all the college crap into a pile. Breathe in, out.
“Brandy,” I say, leaning toward her. “Just because he’s my dad doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to wash and dry your clothes. I mean, fuck. You have nothing to do with me and him. And there’s no fucking way I’m going to make you haul all your wet shit out—”
“We could line dry it,” she says. “My aunt has a thing in the backyard—”
“No,” I say. “That’s ridiculous. He’s ridiculous. You have every fucking right to be here. And I’m going to be here too. If he wants me to leave, he can call the fucking cops. Neither of us is doing anything wrong.”
“Okay.”
She blinks. Smiles. I can’t help it; there’s something about seeing her face soften like it does right now. It kills me. I lean over and kiss her, quick.
I think that’ll be it, but then she leans back and we kiss some more. I take off my glasses and I’m hard and we’re kissing in a goddamn Laundromat. What the hell, I think. How long do we have together, Brandy and me? As long as Angus and me have, probably. Which is to say, a couple more months. If I go anywhere. And my ticket to going somewhere is sitting in a pile between us while we kiss like idiots.
&
nbsp; Later, after we bring back all the washed and dried laundry (and my father never once leaves his office, the door stays almost self-consciously closed), I help her put it away while Megan makes dinner, which we all eat on the patio, even Brandy’s nana, whose eyes seem wrong. I guess she’s got some eye problems too, in addition to being deaf. God, if she goes blind, what the hell will she have left?
But Nana chews and smiles and occasionally yells some comment that’s way off track of the main dinner conversation. It’s bright and sunny out. Megan is being normal, like she always is, polite and nice to me, but I still feel dumb around her. Like all she sees when she sees me is that picture of me naked in her niece’s bed.
We sit out on the patio after Megan brings Nana inside to watch her evening shows. I ask Brandy about her eyes—is she going blind—and Brandy blinks, shrugs. She seems to think of her nana as a quirky pet more than an actual person.
The wind kicks up and she comes to sit closer to me and I can’t keep my hands off her. I am feeling her up, everywhere. Tits and ass and even trying to stick my hand down her shorts. She twists away.
“Not here,” she says. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Brandy’s house isn’t cruddy but there’s not a lot around it in terms of places to go. So we walk for a while, holding hands. I feel like I could run; I’m practically dragging her behind me. She doesn’t complain, just scrambles to keep up.
“There,” she says. Points. A little brown building that says Public Water Works #7 on the outside. It’s got a door and weeds growing out of the sidewalk, and I don’t know what she’s thinking but then we’re behind the building, between two bushes and there’s nothing behind us but the back of a tires place and there’s no going back to where we were. I barely kiss her. I just undo her shorts and kneel down and pull her pussy into my face and she says, “Jesus, Will,” but leans back against the brick wall and lets me lick her there. Everywhere.
I’ve done this before but never like this. Never with the sun still up, though it’s fading. Never outside. Never standing up. Never like this.
I expect her to stop me. To say no. To say, “Not here.” But she never does. She holds my head between her legs, her hands in my hair. She sighs. I never take my glasses off but I’m closing my eyes. I imagine her face, flashed with happy. I’m grinning myself. All over her. She’s wet so I know it’s okay.
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