“About Bob Schnapper?”
Joel looks up, making eye contact, and Pete sees the boy’s chest rise and fall, quick and bated, like Pete got it all wrong—like there’s something much, much bigger stuck in there.
“Are we talking about Bob Schnapper?”
Joel looks away and he says, “I wish I’d punched him in the nose.”
So it is Bob Schnapper. But it is also Oliver Quick.
“You and I talked about that, Joel. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“But you’re the police.”
Pete looks over the neighbor’s ragged fence, their Foreclosure sign. And trash in the alley: a long-gone to-go cup, a forgotten La Raza newspaper rain-melted to mâché. Dead leaves over near-dead grass on their stamp-size lawn; the uneven steps to the run-down rental that they’re supposed to call home.
And all of it this way because Pete did his job.
“Dad?”
“Yeah,” he hears himself say, though everything goes out of focus as his mind racks toward that one punch.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” He throws the towel onto the pavement, says, “Listen, I need you to finish up here. I have to go to work.” He can see Quick’s face, the flash of his camera.
“Okay. Is Butchie going with you?” Joel gets out of the squad and follows him toward the house, a half step behind.
“Just do the windows and lock it up and I’ll be back out.” Quick saw them together. He knew the judge. He didn’t know the context.
“Yes, sir.”
He turns back for the squad, Joel right behind him.
“And I need you to feed the dog later.” What Quick saw was a headline.
“Butchie is staying?”
“Butch could use a wash, too.” What Pete saw was a threat.
“I thought you said I wasn’t allowed—”
“I have to go and I need you to take care of him, okay? Forget what I said before.” He slams the squad’s passenger doors. What the cameras saw ruined him.
“Okay. But, Dad—”
“Just take care of Butch. Okay? Please?” He goes around to the driver’s side, Joel on his heels.
“Is he in trouble?”
Pete stops. Turns. Sees his boy; finally hears him. Wonders if he heard. “Why would you ask me that?”
“Because you’re going to go to work without him.” He looks like he’s about to cry.
“It’s a side job. The Metro. I thought I said.”
“No.” Joel looks down at the pavement.
Pete gets into the car, starts the engine. Thinks about it. Wishes there were a way to keep his mistakes from catching up with the boy. Wonders how much he knows about Ja’Kobe White. If he’s worried. But can only say, when he rolls down the window, “Take care of the dog.”
6
The house is quiet now—Joel in his room reading and Butchie toweled off, splayed out, asleep in the corner—when McKenna comes crashing, heavy on attitude, up the stairs and into her room. Joel hears her shoes go thunk, plunk when she chucks them into the closet.
Butchie startles at the noise but doesn’t wake; his eyelids don’t get but half open before he settles right back into snoozeland.
Joel finishes the chapter he was reading and he feels terrible. He didn’t like the beginning of the book at all, when starving wolves killed the dogs and travelers one by one. But then it turned into White Fang’s story, about him growing up and wanting to explore; that part was really good. Now, though, the wolf-dog is in an Indian camp, and the people are mean and the other dogs are mean and the worst part is they force White Fang to be the meanest of all. Joel wishes White Fang had escaped into the forest when he had the chance.
“Jesus,” Mike says, aggravated.
Joel closes the book and decides to see what Jesus is up to in his sister’s room.
She says, “Get out, Joely,” before he reaches her door. Inside, she’s already switched her school uniform for stretch pants and either a very long shirt or a very short dress. She stands sideways in front of her makeup mirror, probably making up stuff that’s wrong with her. Everything that was ever in a drawer is out: on the floor, the bed, the bureau tops. The flat iron makes the room smell like burned hair.
“What’s wrong?” Joel asks.
“You’re standing there watching me.” She turns the other way in the mirror.
“Well, you’re supposed to be watching me, because Mom’s running late and Dad’s gone to work.”
“That’s fucking fabulous.”
“You don’t want to watch me? What about this?” Joel does the samba dance move that Molly taught him—a one a-two, two a-two—hips popping.
“That is fucking fabulous.”
“Thanks.”
“Now go away.”
“Come on, tell me what’s wrong.”
“Get me a Diet Coke first.”
“Okay.”
When he gets back, Mike’s at her computer and wearing a completely different outfit, this one flimsy layered shirts that run into a low-slung denim skirt. Joel doesn’t mean to stare, but the get-up gets caught up at her waistline, same place her ever-changing diet can’t seem to reach.
“What?” she asks, though the snarl in her voice means she already knows—and hates—the what. She takes the pop from him and says, “Don’t you have anything better to do than stand there?”
“Sure,” Joel says, “I can sit.” He clears a spot on her bed, tossing clothes she didn’t wear over the book bag she won’t use.
“Boy, I wish you had a life.” Mike leans back at her desk—chair facing the door so that her cyberlink to the outside world is not—and clicks her mouse with one hand, smoothing her straight blond bangs with the other. She used to be strawberry-blond and she used to have curls; Joel thought she looked so pretty after the long days she spent at the beach this year, all summered and sun-dried. But before school started, she used some kind of gunk to make her hair relax. Now, it’s the most relaxed thing about her.
“Hey, Spaceboy,” she says as she types. “If you’re going to sit there, make yourself interesting.”
“I’m not interesting. I’m grounded.”
“Seriously? What now? Did you freak out at the teacher again?”
“No. It was a kid.”
“What did he do?”
“He ruined my school project.”
“Did you kick his ass?”
“I peed in his gym locker.”
She quits typing, looks up from her screen. “No. You. Didn’t.”
“Yeah.”
“That is like the best fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Dad doesn’t think so.”
“Oh please. What does he know? He’s the one who landed us in this place.”
“I like this place.”
“It’s a dump.” Mike types fast and even, like a court stenographer.
“He said I could talk to the judge.”
She looks up again, the light reflected from the screen turning her eyes to steel. “Of course he did. He lu-huhves the judge.”
“She’s a nice lady.”
“She bothers me.”
“Still?”
“Always.” She lifts her pointer finger, what she calls her bullshit detector, and whistles as it spins.
Joel thinks it’s a pretty stiff opinion; even though they had to move here after his dad was finished protecting her, it’s not like that was the judge’s idea. And anyway, Mike only ever met her once—the night she came to dinner. It was at their old house. It was a big deal, even though no one said so—like when Grandma Murphy used to visit, and his mom would spend two days cleaning and another day in the kitchen and everybody acted like she always did that. And also cooked a roast.
When the judge arrived, though, she was nothing like Grandma. She was a small woman who stood tall; Joel glimpsed the skin on the tops of her feet between her straight-leg pants and her patent-leather heels. Her blouse was paper thin and cream col
ored and unbuttoned pretty far—bare skin there, too, and also a nice pearl necklace. It wasn’t so much about the way she dressed, though, as the way she moved—naturally, like how her hair fell in waves around her shoulders. Not like Mike’s hair, who forced the style after she flattened her curls, or like his mom’s, whose just kind of sat there.
Now that he thinks about it, that was kind of how things went at the dinner table, too.
Maybe it was because when they sat down, Mike was trying to act cool, so she gave Joel some grief about getting grounded. She told the judge he’d been caught playing Roadkill. Joel argued he’d been playing 911, and their dad, at the head of the table, said 911 was just a different name for the same game. He looked at the judge when he said it and there was a smile in both corners of his mouth. The judge smiled and said she’d never heard of either game. Joel’s mom wasn’t smiling at all, and she said that whatever the game was called, the idea came from Pete and “his pals in property crimes,” who had been telling lies over beers on the back porch the previous weekend.
The judge seemed interested in the game, so Joel told her about it. The way it went was, one guy would be the lookout, the other the victim. So if his pal Kink played lookout, for instance, he would signal Joel when a car was coming. Then Joel would lie down on the side of the street all contorted—like he’d been hit by a car or whatever and left there. Kink would start the clock, and then the car would slow down, or maybe even stop, and Joel would try to stay there as long as he could before the person got out or he got too nervous. Then he’d get up and run away. Whoever could stay the longest was the winner.
That day, it was fun until Kink called out a car and the driver saw Joel and the driver was 911—a cop.
As he told the judge about the bust, Joel’s mom sat at the table and shook her head at him, or else it was at the Easter-dinner-size meal she’d cooked that was going cold while he told the stupid story. Joel couldn’t help it, though: no matter how detailed the detail, the judge kept smiling at him. Like somebody was tickling her.
Then she asked, “Your friend’s name is Kink?”
Joel didn’t understand why that was relevant, but everybody else laughed. Then his mom passed the potatoes.
After dinner his mom offered the chocolate ganache tart she bought from the fancy bakery by the train station. Joel asked the judge if she knew that ganache was the French word for jowl, a fact he looked up when his mom couldn’t tell him the definition. The judge seemed impressed by that, and also by the tart, but she said, “Looks delicious, Sarah, but I don’t do desserts,” and opted instead for one more glass of wine. Then, while his mom served everybody else a piece, the judge asked if they’d mind if she slipped out for a minute. Nobody minded, so his dad directed her to the back porch. When she was out there, it didn’t seem right that she was by herself, so Joel asked if he could join her. His mom looked at his dad and his dad said the oh but not the kay and Mike looked at Joel and he didn’t know what the heck was going on so he just got up and went out.
The judge was smoking a cigarette, one high heel kicked off, her bare foot on the deck. Joel didn’t know what to say, but he felt like saying stuff, so he asked if she knew smoking was bad for her, and was she going to quit? She said yes and no. That even if the evidence was stacked against her, smoking wasn’t illegal, and if she wasn’t hurting anybody else, a once-in-a-while cigarette was her risk to take. Besides, she said, stress was going to get her before cancer.
Joel said his grandpa had cancer.
She said that cancer was the most unfair trial of them all.
Then Joel wanted to know how she’d have ruled in his case. Wasn’t being grounded for two weeks over a game a pretty stiff sentence?
She said she wouldn’t overrule his dad. “But,” she said, “there could be conflict of interest there. If you ever get in a jam again, come talk to me. I promise I’ll get you a fair trial.” Then she put out her cigarette on the bottom of her high heel and asked what other words he knew in French.
“Joel,” Mike says. She’s typing faster now, if that’s possible.
“Who are you talking to?”
“I’m talking to you, Spacey!”
“I mean on the computer.”
“Oh.” The steel in her eyes goes soft, to nickel. She looks up. “A boy.”
Joel wishes he had steel in his eyes or better yet, in his backbone. Is it Zack Fowler she’s talking about? It takes all his guts to ask, “What boy?”
She gets up. “Time to go.”
“Is it Zack Fowler?”
“It is none of your business. Come on.” She takes his legs out from underneath him, sets his feet on the floor.
“He called you last night, I know you weren’t talking about homework—”
“Jesus, Joel, give me a break. I feel like you’re mom and dad sitting here.”
The upstairs air shifts as the front door opens downstairs.
Mike says, “Speaking of. Sarah’s home.” She pulls Joel up off the bed pushes him out into the hallway. “Seriously, get out, I have to—” The click of the door’s lock finishes her sentence.
Joel stands outside the door and hears her rummaging around, probably changing clothes again. It’s probably better she didn’t tell him anything; the secrets he already has are hard enough to keep. Today, he nearly told his dad about finding her in the garage—there was a second there when he thought it would be okay—but then he realized he’d have to confess a whole bunch of other secrets just to explain how he knew the one. Like why he’d been outside in the first place. And how he’d been spying on his parents before that. And eavesdropping on McKenna because he was hiding in his room because he lied about his headache … before he knew it he’d have told about Felis Catus. No way Mike’s trip to the garage is worth Zack and his bat.
Joel goes back to his room and looks in on Butchie, dreaming, exhaling in quick bursts, eyelids twitching, paws going pfit, pfit, pfit—nerves working instead of muscles. Joel lets him be, hoping he’s after a dreamed-up squirrel.
Downstairs, Joel finds his mom in the kitchen, her attention split, and not very equally, between fixing dinner and talking on the phone. Apparently she hasn’t spoken to the person on the other end of the call in a while, because the macaroni noodles on the stove are already going to goo right along with her when she says, “It’s been a tough summer.”
Joel swallows his hello and thinks about bailing on dinner; summer wouldn’t be nearly as tough anymore if she’d just stop talking about it already.
“Jo Jo’s come down for dinner,” she says, her sixth mom-sense leaving him no escape. “No—my god, it’s been too long since I’ve heard your voice.” There’s a half-full hard-water-stained wineglass next to the cutting board, which is one good reason why she’s getting all sentimental.
Another good reason is what happened on June 7: her brother Ricky died. She went by herself to Long Beach, California, to say goodbye; nobody else could go because his dad declared the last-minute airfare too high. Joel didn’t really care—it was the beginning of softball season—until his mom told him Disneyland was right down the freeway from Ricky’s apartment. It was a cruel thing to do.
“It’s true,” his mom says to the phone.
It’s probably better that Joel didn’t go with her; there’d have been no time for Tomorrowland. Anyway, Joel only ever met Ricky a few times and that was when he just showed up and made his mom real upset. She got upset whenever he called, too, and then she’d call just about everybody else she knew and use words like crazy or tricky or nutstick before his name, same place Joel would use Uncle.
Then, on June 1, somebody who knew Ricky called, and his mom called everybody else to tell them apeshit Ricky went off his medication and disappeared. A week later, she called them again to say that Ricky was gone, and that things would never be the same.
That last part has been hard for Joel to understand because many things are very much the same. Case in point: since the day of Uncle Ricky
’s death, including tonight, she has served macaroni for dinner exactly twenty-three times.
“I can’t say I’ve noticed,” she says while she microwaves a plate of hot dogs. Joel seconds her statement; if she hasn’t flipped about the huge dent he and Butchie put in the side of her car when they were playing fetch last weekend, he’d be surprised if she noticed an extra finger.
She takes a gulp of wine before she says, “Like I said, we had a tough summer.”
Joel sits at the table and wonders how much soggier a noodle can get.
“Oh my god,” Mike says, making her entrance, “I am not eating that again.” She’s dressed in outfit number three: this one skinny jeans that probably give her hips blisters and a black top that matches the rings she painted around her eyes. She looked so pretty, before.
She marches across the kitchen, says, “Had a few, have we, Sarah?” looking for Joel’s reaction as she tips an invisible glass to her lips. Joel ignores her; he hates it when she acts like a know-it-all. Sarah. The name sounds worse than any bad word from her lips. He hates that she calls their parents by their first names. He wonders why they let her.
Mike roots through the junk drawer, says, “What a fucking mess.”
Mom strains the macaroni, says to the phone, “It’s hereditary.”
Joel studies the curled edges of his placemat.
Mike slams the junk drawer, says, “Fuck it. Sarah? A couple of people are hanging out at this kid’s house. I’m going. Call me if you care.”
Mom says, “Just a second,” either to the phone or to Mike, but by the time she turns around, Mike is already out the back door. She looks directly at Joel as she says to the phone, “I have learned that when you know someone is not okay, you cannot believe a thing they say.”
Joel puts one cheek to the table, looks at the world that way. The flowery wallpaper. The stupid wooden sign that says HOME with somebody’s painting of somebody else’s home on it. The calendar that’s still on June, like they’re stuck in this tough summer forever. McKenna is right: he wishes he had a life, too.
Eventually, his mom puts a busted-open hot dog and some sticky macaroni in front of him, and all of a sudden Butchie is there, under his feet. Joel eats the whole plate and goes for seconds even though he’s as tired of the menu as he is of listening to his mom’s memories of Uncle Ricky—especially since they seem to get better with every telling. Ricky wasn’t always “an amazing talent,” or “completely misunderstood.” He was a fuck-up. A box of mixed nuts.
The Good Boy Page 9