Do Not Deny Me

by Jean Thompson

  “‘I don’t know’ is not a good answer.”

  The girl said nothing, just picked at the piece of sandwich that was now so smeared and flattened as to be inedible.

  “What does he do to Michelle?”

  “Tickles her.”

  “And does Michelle like being tickled?”

  “I have to go home now,” Kyra announced. She put the sandwich back on the plate and hopped down from the bench.

  What to think? What to do? She stood at the gate a long time after Kyra had disappeared across the alley. If it was an invention, a falsehood, a misunderstanding, it would be a catastrophe to set the ponderous machinery of the state in motion, police, social workers, the child welfare agency. Nor might they intervene on such a scant account. They would look at her and think her a meddler, a troublemaker, wonder why she didn’t keep her nose on her own face.

  Yet how easy it was to ignore or disbelieve a child, simply because it was the habit of adults to ignore and disbelieve children.

  It was the weekend again. The man’s pickup truck stayed in their driveway, and Kyra did not visit. Beate’s husband returned to his attack on the front door and enveloped himself in sawdust and noise. Beate, frankly spying by now, kept watch from her window on the neighbor’s backyard. But the weather had turned rainy, the children did not come out to play, and there was nothing to see.

  Only this: there had been occasions when Kyra’s father and the children’s mother stood outside by themselves, talking. Beate could never hear them, or even see their faces clearly, but she knew the look of a couple who had serious things to say to each other, things best said away from the children. Now here they were again, out in the driveway in the mild drizzle. As always, the woman, Shelly, had her hair wrapped up in that peculiar unflattering way, as if she were hiding a length of pipe beneath her headscarf. They stayed there a long time. Should she even hope that it had to do with the little girl? What if Kyra had said something to someone else, what if the mother really had not known or noticed until now? It was possible, anything was possible, though God knows there were enough other reasons for any couple to have their difficulties.

  On Monday morning the truck was gone by the time Beate woke and looked out her window. None of the children came out into the backyard, although the rain had cleared and the day was fresh and cool. Kyra did not visit. The woman’s brown car left at some point, although when Beate looked again it had returned.

  Things happened quickly after that. The truck stayed absent that day and the next day and the next. A car Beate had not seen before pulled into the driveway. A man got out and began loading cardboard boxes, laundry baskets, clothes on hangers into his trunk. The children’s mother filled her own car also, with blankets, backpacks, children’s jackets, paper sacks. Clearly some major dislocation was in progress.

  As she watched, the two younger children were led and carried out to the brown car, the little girl clinging, the little boy dawdling, there was another driveway conference with the strange man, then both cars started up, backed out into the street, and were gone. The whole process had taken less than an hour.

  At night she kept watch, and in the daylight hours she went from window to window, as if she might see Kyra in some unexpected place, the next street over or the far end of the alley. What would her father do to her if he suspected her of telling tales? Such men were unpredictable, possibly violent. The child might be in real danger. How high would you have to climb to see the whole city laid out beneath you, find the one small moving piece that was dear to you? How horrible people were, what an ugly blotched patchwork life made. What a lie a pretty picture in thread was when your own life was just as sad, as torn, as

  misshapen as anyone else’s. . . . “What’s the matter with you?”

  her husband asked, and she said, Nothing. Nothing was the

  matter.Turning her back to him in bed. She felt him hesitate, wondering whether to say more, then he settled into sleep.

  On the third day, the pickup truck was back. Around midmorning the man emerged from the back door, hauling out pieces of furniture and wrestling them into the truck bed. Nightstands, mattresses, bed frames, chairs, a dismantled exercise machine of some sort. He squared the load and roped it in and drove off.

  She made up her mind to go speak to him, ask him where Kyra was. Demand information, some way to get in touch with her. Surely he would be back, the house would hardly be empty. Perhaps this evening, when her husband could go with her. She would make him, he didn’t have to be happy about it. There would be an advantage in having a man on hand.

  But when the truck returned in the middle of the afternoon, she couldn’t bring herself to wait. He might leave again for good, and then how she would reproach herself. What was she afraid of, anyway? So he was rude, unpleasant, perhaps worse, a creep, as her children used to say. Her children, anybody’s child. She had a mother’s heart. She would face him down.

  It would have been easiest just to cross the alley—she was certain their gate was left unlocked—but walking through the yard might aggravate him, and why begin that way? She went the long way around, down to the end of her own block, then past the alley to the unfamiliar street with its line of battered mailboxes on posts, its feral-looking cats skulking under fences, its sagging front porches. She’d never seen Kyra’s house from the front, and it took her a moment to recognize it. The driveway was unpaved. Grass had grown up in the center path between the tire tracks, then scorched and dried to yellow weeds. The house looked as if something heavy had once settled on it and knocked its every right angle askew. A ceramic wind chime was nailed to one of the porch supports. The front windows were covered over with blowsy curtains, or perhaps they were bed sheets serving as curtains.

  Beate walked a little ways up the drive. The truck was pulled up to the back door. The man came out, dragging one end of a sofa. He guided it up a ramp to the truck bed, then shoved it into place from behind. He turned and stared at Beate. His face was dark red from exertion and his hair was damp.

  She couldn’t tell if he remembered her or not. “Hello,” she said. “I saw that you were moving and I came to ask about Kyra.”

  “What about her?” Flat, belligerent. None of her business.

  She had not rehearsed what to say. “I haven’t seen her in awhile. I wanted to . . . I wondered if she was all right.”

  “She’s fine.”

  He wasn’t going to give her anything. Beate said, “Oh, is she with her mother?”

  He made a barking sound, a laugh. “Not likely.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “There’s a word that fits her mother. Her and them like her. But I won’t say it. It’s not for delicate ears.”

  It was his longest speech yet. It seemed to animate him to recall his grievances. Beate said, “I wanted to tell her good-bye.”

  “How about I tell her for you.”

  “No. That’s not good enough.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because I don’t trust you.”

  He seemed to find this funny. “Well it’s a good thing you don’t have to.” He stepped to the back door. “Kyra! Get on out here!”

  She came out slowly and loitered on the porch step. She wore a blue party dress made out of some stiff, glossy fabric, the cheapest kind of fancy garment. The skirt stood out unevenly, already draggled. Her old plaid sneakers had been replaced by new pink ones, the laces printed with red hearts.

  “Hello, Kyra,” Beate said, once she found her voice. Kyra gave no sign of recognition. She was absorbed in scratching some substance off the screen door.

  “Come here,” her father said, and she hopped down to stand next to him. He held out his hand and she took it. “Whose girl are you?”

  “Daddy’s.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where are you moving?” Beate asked. The sun beat down on the center of her head, a beam of pure heat.

  “Someplace where the neighborhood watch ain�
��t so busy.”

  “Kyra?” Beate bent down, trying to meet the girl’s eye. “You remember where I live. You can always come visit me.”

  Her father picked her up and set her on the sofa in the truck bed. The horrible dress twisted around her, too tight beneath the arms. He said, “I guess it’ll be awhile before that happens.”

  He was waiting for her to leave. She walked past them through the backyard and its broken, discarded toys, opened the gate and crossed the alley to her own house.

  She sat in the kitchen until she heard the truck’s doors slamming, its engine starting up. Then she climbed the stairs to her sewing room. She had two more blocks of her quilt to finish. After that there was the border to piece, with its roses and curving stems, the little brown bird that was there all along if only you knew to look for it.

  Liberty Tax

  We were broke, Bobby and me. Both separately and together, as a marital unit. It had happened without warning and without our consent. It had all taken place at a distance, in offices and institutions far from us. We had been notified by mail. We still had the house and the cars. We didn’t seriously believe we’d lose the house and the cars, but what if belief was just one more thing that would fail us? Along with equities, interest rates, collateralized debt obligations, auction rate securities, bundled loans, and all the rest of the financial gimcrackery that had laid us, and so many others, low.

  Bobby said, “We’re upside down in the house.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  Bobby took a hard swallow from his wineglass. We were still buying wine, although not of the same quality as before. “It means we owe more on the house than it’s worth.”

  “I don’t understand how that can be. The house is practically brand new.”

  “Every house in the neighborhood is worth less than it used to be. We bought at the top of the market and now the market’s in the crapper.” Bobby got up and fetched the wine bottle from the kitchen, set it down in the middle of the dining room table. I worried that the bottle might mar the wood finish, but maybe the table wasn’t worth what it used to be either, and what would it matter. I was still confused about how something as big and solid as a house, a really nice, desirable house like ours, could spring a leak and start dribbling money.

  “I love you, honey,” I said to Bobby, and he said, “I love you too,” and we kept saying it, often and at different times as we came to terms with our bewildering new condition. For love was meant to be both our anchor and our buoy in times of trouble.

  There was still reason to be hopeful. We had each other, for whatever economic good that would do us. We were still young, although not quite as young as we had been. We were both employed, although our jobs too had been nibbled down at the edges and were not the jobs they used to be. We had been married four years and five months, and up until now, our life together had unrolled as smoothly as a bolt of cloth. Bobby was so handsome. Every once in a while I’d catch women looking at him with this lost expression, just poleaxed by the sight of him. And me, I kept myself up. I had a nice figure, everyone said so. I smiled a lot. At store clerks, strangers on the street, small children of the appealing sort. It knocked them for a loop. We made a sharp couple, a good-looking young couple with the world at our feet, and if that sounds prideful, just stick around. The world was setting us up for a fall.

  We’d borrowed against the future because we thought we had one, and because the future was always supposed to be better. More brightly colored, new and improved. We felt entitled to it, although we could not have explained why. It was one more assumption that might not bear weight when tested. Maybe we were none of the things we thought we were: well-intentioned, generous, enterprising, fun. Maybe we were stupid.

  It wasn’t as if either of us had grown up with money, far from it. My dad was a union pipe fitter and he earned a good enough living when times were good and a lesser one when times were not. We didn’t want, but there weren’t any extras. My mom served up Tuna Surprise often enough that it was no surprise, and if you didn’t like what was on your plate, you were told fine, more for the rest of us. Bobby and I got married in the Laborer’s Hall and our reception was a potluck.

  Bobby had it a lot tougher because his father was a famous deadbeat and ne’er-do-well, a Big Idea man whose ideas were all about how to get money without working. There was a scheme for marking up imported shrimp and selling them to restaurants, there was another for hawking overpriced and soon-to-be-defunct vacation packages, and other semilegal or outright criminal manipulations of wagers, loans, and skims. If I hadn’t known the old man was dead, I’d suspect him of being a Wall Street genius these days. Anyway, Bobby grew up in the shadow of all this, the boom and the bust, the father’s lurking, creep-show associates, the phone ringing in the middle of the night, the patched-together family life of a hustler.

  So we were self-made, me and Bobby, because that was part of the future’s promise, that you could make yourself up, or over. We’d worked hard, we’d latched on to jobs that we rode like a fast wave, up to a pretty decent living and then some. Of course our mistake was in not seeing it as a wave, with a break point coming after the swell. We thought it was just life, the way life was once you finally climbed up high enough to have a good view of it. Can you blame us for going a little giddy, well, yes, of course you can, but could you understand it?

  The things we had spent money on! Furniture! Manicures! Orchids! An entire room full of video entertainments! Every service, commodity, and luxury item had been available to us, the resources of the planet spread out for us to browse. Now, of course, we cut way back. No more shopping-for-fun. We got rid of the cleaning service, we stopped looking at brochures for time shares. We packed our lunches, we ate dinner at home. We were stern with ourselves, and we took some actual pleasure in the process, like going on a rigorous diet. “At least I’m not a crook like my old man,” Bobby said. “We’ll get out of this pickle fair and square.” I said of course we would. But it was hard not to think of the crooks and semicrooks who were making out so well these days, cashing in on the rest of us.

  We canceled the health club membership and instead took long walks in the evening through our pretty, devalued neighborhood. We learned to read the signs of others’ similar distress. Sometimes they were literal signs: For Sale. Price Reduced. Motivated Seller. Sometimes it was more subtle. A lawn grown ragged, a basketball hoop knocked askew and left to rust, or a long-empty bird feeder with an optimistic squirrel still grubbing around beneath it. Other people were in trouble too, we knew this from the television news, though it was not a topic for polite conversation. We were all diminished in our own eyes. We hoped to keep up what was left of appearances.

  In November I came home from work to find Bobby in the breakfast nook, eating a bowl of cereal. “Hi there, how was your day?” I said, all cheery and casual, but it was as if I already knew. He never got home before I did.

  Bobby didn’t answer right away, just kept eating. The milk and the Sugar Frosted Flakes box were still on the table, and he was downright gobbling, working that spoon for all it was worth. He gave me the strangest look, like you’d get from a dog guarding its food, like I was going to grab the cereal bowl away from him, like he was ashamed of his own hunger.

  “Babe,” I said, “what is it, what’s wrong? Will you stop eating for a minute?”

  Finally he left off the spooning and the gobbling and wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. “What do you think’s wrong?”

  “Oh.” That was all I said.

  “Four months’ severance, outplacement service, and I can buy into health insurance for the next year. And it’s nothing personal.”

  “Four months is pretty good,” I said, already shifting gears, adjusting everything downward. “That’s a reasonable arrangement.”

  Bobby still had that hungry dog look in his eye. He said, “Let’s not try to be big about this just yet, huh? Let’s just wallow.”

&nbs
p; “Sure, wallow away.” I figured Bobby was entitled, that this was one of the unwritten rules of being fired, you got to behave as unreasonably and childishly as you wished, at least for a little while. But I would have appreciated it if he’d made some sort of an effort at being a grown-up. My job was now the only slender lifeline we had. And since it was a girl job, of course it paid less than his. We were going to be back to the land of Tuna Surprise if something didn’t break our way. I knew it was the wrong time to bring up baby year.

  We’d always said that once we’d been married five years, we’d have a baby. Five years was supposed to be enough time to lay down a good financial foundation, also to get all the self-indulgence out of our systems, take the kind of exotic vacations that only childless people can. Belize! Fiji!

  How firm a foundation? How many vacations were enough? Those had been important questions, but now we would have different questions, further calculations. And yet I was determined that a baby be something other than a budgeted purchase. You were supposed to want a baby in a different way than you wanted a Jacuzzi. Maybe we should just go for it, a reckless leap of faith. A throw of the cosmic dice. I didn’t discuss any of this with Bobby. Like Mary in the Bible, I kept these things and pondered them in my heart.

  We began noticing an increase in the kinds of ads and solicitations designed to separate us from our money in imaginative ways. This was a great time to invest in film production or purchase franchises in tortilla restaurants or mattress stores. Our vehicles were in need of extended warranties, we qualified for loans with special rates, we were invited to explore the untapped potential of overseas currency markets. We heard radio promotions telling us there were terrific opportunities to purchase foreclosed properties, a real buyers’ market. And maybe it was, but as our loan payments continued their climb, as Bobby’s résumé continued to languish unread at places that should have fought to hire him, we were less and less charmed by the notion that there were always ways to make even a bad business climate work for you.