by Chris Lynch
“And two of those scratch tickets,” one of the ladies says.
Junie reaches around right in front of me to peel two tickets off the roll, and from this angle I see another new something I don’t like. It’s a big red burn mark, circular, about the size of a quarter, in the middle of the back of her hand.
I grab her wrist. She reaches with the free hand and gives my hand such a sharp wallop that the clap fills the shop and I get stares of shock from both of the customers. Smoothly Junie swings back in their direction and closes the transaction.
When the shoppers have left, Junie turns back in my direction. I am sitting, stupid, in the chair, staring up at her, while she leans back, half-sitting on the counter.
It is a cool, hard stare-off, and I never, not once, came close to bettering her in one of these. Junie Blue could make the head on a coin blink first.
“So,” I say finally, “where did you—”
“Change the subject or get out, O. I’m not kidding.”
Getting out right now sounds like the most awful thing.
“You sell a lot of lottery tickets, huh?” I say, feeling like I am trying desperately to make conversation for the first time with this wonderful girl.
“They carry the shop.”
“Huh, interesting,” I say, uninterested. “Is it true that Juan won again? Rumor has it, you know.”
“Rumor can have this,” she says, making an obscene gesture that would likely make her father weep with pride.
We stare at each other a little more, until the door opens again, to a gaggle of unruly kids who must be the scourge of little shops like this.
“You should probably go now,” she says, with none of the harshness at all.
I nod, stand up. “Why are we not together, Junie?”
“Because that’s the way I want it.” Again, the hard words and the soft delivery have no business in the same room together.
“I think maybe you need me, though,” I say.
She snags the scissors out of my hand, and the hard words join up with the hard delivery in a perfectly synchronized, “Get. Out.”
I am walking quickly around the counter toward the door when she calls me back. I race toward her, only to find her palm outstretched and waiting.
“You owe me,” she says, “for the haircut. I’m a working-class gal, and I need to get paid.”
“Of course,” I say, “of course.” I fish some crinkly bills out of my pocket, from which she selects something fair. She was always fair with me, before the unfairness.
I head out again, until she calls me back with a barking, “Hey.”
All the kids stop to watch now, and they oooh a little as I trudge back to the reckoning.
“We sell stuff here.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Well, did that brand-new scissors climb down off the rack and unpackage itself?”
I am not even a little bit curious about what will result if I take up the obvious dare and point out that she opened the scissors, not I. I pay up. She hands over the scissors, and it feels more like a last laugh than a fair trade.
I am aware of the low-level murmuring of kids mocking me as I finally make the door. But it is nothing compared to Junie’s farewell.
“I need you?” she says, and laughs, growls at my back.
Five
“You paid for this haircut?” my mother says, laughing, walking around and around me as I sit in the chair.
“Twice,” I say, surrendering completely.
She continues circling, looking for a way in. “This is clearly the work of a woman scorned.”
“I didn’t scorn anybody,” I say. “She’s killing me, Mom. She really is.”
There is a voice coming through the window screen where my mother usually hangs out. “Hello? Hello?” It’s Malcolm.
“Speaking of killing,” I say, jumping up just as my mother takes her first remedial clip at my temple.
“That was very dangerous,” she says.
I run down the hallway to the front room, where I throw down to my knees with enough force to make both kneecaps crunch and shift out of place.
I am face-to-face with Malcolm on the other side of the screen. Our noses are practically pressed to each other.
“I am going to kick your ass,” I say.
“No, you’re not,” he says.
“And why not?”
“Because you and I are not men of violence, that’s why not.”
“I am now a man of violence,” I assure him, “and you are a man of getting his ass kicked.”
“The whole neighborhood can hear you,” Mom calls.
I drop my voice, which I was about to do at this point anyway.
“Did you do it with Junie, Malcolm?”
“No.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“The truth?”
“The truth.”
“I’ll tell you the truest truth I know. And that is, people lie. Everybody lies.”
“Not everybody.”
“Of course, everybody.”
“You?”
“Of course me. Everybody.”
“So. Are you lying? Did you do it?”
“Did you really sleep with Maxine?” he asks. “That is so awesome.”
Mom calls from the other room again. “I think I want to sketch you before I fix that hair, if you don’t mind.”
Malcolm points at my head and offers me some unnecessary advice. “Dude, mind.”
It is all getting the better of me. I used to think lying was a great lark, back when I brilliantly thought I was the only one doing it. Or, one of the two.
Lyin’ O’Brien.
Sweet Junie Blue Lies.
Life was sweet, and Blue, and just dubious enough.
“What are you here for, anyway, Malcolm?”
“Just wanted to see how you made out. You see June?”
“Yes, I saw June. What’s it to you?”
“Jeez, testy.”
“Did you do it, Mal?”
“No.”
“Are you lying to me?”
“Do you mean right now, right this second?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Then, no.”
“Grrr.”
“So what did you find out? From Junie?”
“What the hell are you going on about? What did I find out about what?”
Malcolm, for a change, goes silent. He points, with both index fingers, at a spot above and behind me. I turn to see my mother looming.
“Oliver can’t come out to play right now, Malcolm,” she says, tugging me to my feet by my ear.
“I’ll call you,” he says as I walk backward and he shrinks in the window frame. “We’ll talk.”
“Oh, what, about tennis?” I say, perhaps a little too sarcastically. There is more to him than that. “And your new tennis pal?”
“Or about Maxie Blue?” he says leeringly.
“Or not,” I say.
“Okay, about Junie Blue,” he says.
“Or about my kicking your ass blue,” I say, and my mother yanks my ear sharply around the corner.
• • •
I wake up to a feeling of lightness I did not have the previous couple of days. I wake up, in fact, to a lightness I have not felt since the Split. I dreamed about her. But that’s not unusual, so that’s not it. It’s more about the fact that the dream had a weave that it hasn’t had before. It was threaded through by the thoughts I had before bed, and it is sustained now by the thought still living and bobbing and weaving this morning.
She needs me.
I am still worried about her, still scared as hell about what is going on.
But she needs me, and that’s a start. I will not let her down.
It is with this lightness that I step into my clothes and head down the stairs with something like purpose, which has been howlingly absent from my first steps of recent days. I bop the last step, turn the corner into the kitchen.
<
br /> Where I am blown right back into the hallway with the force of the voice.
“What have you been telling people!” Maxine screams.
“Nothing,” I say, backing up as she walks forward. “I swear to you, nothing.”
I’m not sure whether it’s my genuine sincerity or my cowardly lion full-body tremble that does the trick, but she instantly dials it back.
“Okay,” she says, nodding. “I didn’t think it was you, but I had to ask. Sorry if I freaked you.” She takes me by the hand and leads me toward my own dining room. She looks back at me, then down at my hand. “Ooh, shivering and sweaty. Be still my heart, manly man.”
“Maxine, what are you doing here?”
“I’ll show ya.”
And show me she does.
“Leona?” I say to the lovely quiet lady at the table.
“Hello,” she says, waving a small wave at me and almost giggling. Her smile is at least three times the volume of anything I ever saw her produce in her own home.
My mother is the picture of intense concentration. If she looked halfway this focused when she drew me, I might not look like a salesman in the sketches for once.
“O,” Mom says sweetly, “I have to tell you what a wonderful morning we are having here. “These women . . . are such a joy. I can’t believe we are just getting to know one another like this now, after all this time. It’s a shame it couldn’t have happened before you and June had to split up. A real shame. I could draw these cheekbones all day.”
Leona giggles.
“Yeah, I’m really sorry to have let everybody down and all. . . . Um, does Ronny know about this sitting?”
“Nnnnnope,” Maxine says with more than a little delight. She offers me a green smoothie she apparently made in the kitchen without waking me. I take it. “The old ratpacker’s got a birthday comin’ up, and I’m giving him this as a present.”
“Oh,” I say. “Ah. Didn’t he, though, make it really, really clear that he expected to be the one who got the first—”
“Yyyyyup,” she says, then presses the blender high button and laughs kind of scarily over the gizmo’s whine. “I could kill in that kitchen, by the way. It is amazing.”
“On the subject of killing in the kitchen . . . any chance he follows your trail and winds up here this morning?”
“None at all. He’s playing tennis with his new ball boy, your idiot friend. I tell you what, my old man might be a dope, but he can spot one of these preppy chumps a mile away and just makes a sport out of seeing how much he can get them to buff his boots, kiss his ass, lick—”
“Got it, Max. Your father is a crusader against the inequities of the class-based socioeconomic system we live in, and prides himself on redressing the situation in his own modest ways.”
She gives me the devil’s own smile, with devil’s dimples. “I could not have put it one bit better.”
I walk around behind my mother to glimpse the work at hand. I am stunned.
I like my mother’s work. I love some of my mother’s work, especially when I am not the subject. But there have been a few distinct occasions when her stuff has transcended . . . everything. However, while Leona is a strikingly pretty woman, she has always seemed to be carrying an extra ten pounds of face on her somehow, and it was striving to drag her right to the floor. Yet here, in this work right here in front of me, I see what I think is the more live-than-live-action Leona, more vibrant than any version of the real her I have seen. How, I wonder, is Mom doing that on their first ever meeting?
I look up, eventually, from the sketch to look at the model.
And I see. Leona, the flesh version, is giving off the same incandescence, the same vitality and just raw loveliness. I get actual, bumpy goose bumps as I look between model and drawing and model and I see the one feed the other and the other feed back the one.
Maxine hears me make some stupid grunt of approval and crowds right up next to me. She gets even more dazzled than me, more quickly.
“How,” she says very deliberately, “is this done? It’s like frickin’ magic.”
Mom can barely contain herself as she shifts side to side in her seat, blushes wildly, then looks up over her shoulder to see right into Maxine’s upside-down face.
“I like to make the possible as possible as possible,” says the artist. “When I can.”
Maxine looks like she may even cry all over my mother. Then quietly says, “I cannot wait to see Ratass’s fat face on his birthday.”
So, a moment to warm all heart cockles.
It is ten thirty when it is deemed time for a work stoppage. Maxine, who completely owns this kitchen and dining room now, is serving coffee all around. Mom has instructed me to violate the dedicated Pepperidge Farm cupboard and plunk down a variety of those cookies they do like nobody’s business. And because they are Pepperidge Farm cookies, they could just as easily be cakes or brownies or muffins as cookies and so are appropriate for any time of day.
The coffee, however, comes over smelling—in addition to its fine, fine arabica tones—very suspicious indeed for ten thirty a.m.
I suspect Irish.
“Spanish, actually,” Max says, passing them all around.
Nobody is registering any complaints.
After a bit the two moms are huddled over some of my mother’s other sketches—far too many of me—and Max tugs me into the hallway and out to the backyard.
“So, I gotta ask,” she says.
“Ask,” I say.
“Does she got it?”
“Who got what?”
“Don’t play stupid, O.” She sips her coffee. “Does my sister have the damn lottery ticket?”
“What? I mean, what?” I sip my own coffee. It’s awfully good. It might need to be stronger, though.
“Come on. I won’t tell.”
“Maxie, I don’t know anything about this.”
“Jeez, dummy, absolutely everybody is talking about it. Nobody’s come forward to claim the winning ticket from last week. They know it was sold from a shop in our neighborhood. So you know One Who Knows considers it his ticket. If it was me, I’d give him the ticket and live off his underworld generosity for the rest of my lazy life. Sounds like a great deal to me. Most folks, though, even if they didn’t think it was such a sweet arrangement, would still give him the ticket, out of fear of consequences. You’d have to be one stubborn, leather-ass lunatic to withhold, I figure.”
As thoroughly chilling as I now find this discussion, I join Maxine in irresistible broad-bright grinning.
“Right,” she says, pointing at me and clinking mugs of Spanish coffee. “Did somebody just say, ‘Junie Blue’?”
I drink down my coffee, and that is that.
“This is serious, Maxie. Shit, this is serious.”
“Could be it’s not even her, since she’s said nothing to me, or to you. Maybe it’s just an honest oversight and she’s not even involved. Maybe some old crock just has the ticket lodged in the crack of his crusty underwear someplace.”
“Jesus, Max.”
“Sorry, Mr. Sensitive. People are talking, however.”
“She would have told you, though.”
“O, she hides her coffee from me.”
“Oliver,” Mom calls from the other room.
When I get there, she and Leona are making plans for another sitting, more coffee, maybe some golf. The ladies have to be off so they can beat the beast home and not spoil the surprise. I’d bet he’s not a fan of surprises. On the way to the door, Maxine and I exchange winks and knowing glances—and I don’t even know what they mean.
What I do know is, I have to try.
“Wonderful people,” Mom says as the door closes.
“Indisputably,” I say, headed straight up the stairs.
“Where are you off to?”
“My room.”
“Already? But you just came down. . . . Oh.”
“Mom! Cripes. No.”
I don’t have time to addres
s my tattered in-house reputation, as I must try to contact Junie. I dial her number, and it rings out. It does not even give me the opportunity to leave a message. I throw the phone onto the bed and start pacing.
I get a text message signal.
What? She snaps.
I return serve. Do you have something to tell me?
Yes. You’re dumped.
You’d think that would get easier. Nope.
Where are you? Can I see you?
Bet you can if you squint and use your imagination.
Is there something wrong with me for sort of enjoying this?
Come on, Junie. This is hard.
At it again, are ya?
Right.
I phone her once more. She picks right up, laughing.
“I did forget how much fun that could be,” she says.
“Good. So that’s settled. We are back to being a fun couple.”
“We’re not, actually.”
“Is it the basketball team?”
“Well, sure.”
“Punch line? Please?”
“Um, no. Punch line is, just, no. Don’t be a pain, O, huh? Please? I got things I need to do, for myself, that’s all.”
“I want to see you.”
“I want to see you, too.”
“Where are you?”
“Walking the dogs.”
“That’s not a place.”
“Walking the dogs on the moon.”
“Please?”
Pause.
“You gonna ask difficult questions and make a nuisance of yourself?”
I have to laugh. “Junie Blue, you know that our entire relationship was driven by exactly those things. Of course I am.”
Click.
Desperately, frantically—which means I press one button and shake the phone like I’m strangling it—I try to call her back. It rings out, unanswered.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” I say, strangling the phone and stomping all around my room. The phone’s death rattle sounds, fortunately, just like my text alert.
Ipswich Street. The two big Boxer pups, so you better behave. Woof.
I am feeling altogether apprehensive but not altogether hopeless as I barrel down the stairs and out toward Ipswich.
Does a rotten-rich lottery winner walk other people’s dogs?
• • •
“Does a rotten-rich lottery winner walk other people’s dogs, numbskull?” Junie says as the one boxer, Yin, jerks her along the sidewalk.