Raucous laughter billowed from the kitchen and there was no doubting why when I got inside. The foursome gathered in the one air-conditioned room in the house and Becky galloped around the table impersonating either the Flintstones’ vehicle or a rodeo. In the most hick voice I’d ever heard, she explained how we’d slid down a dinosaur back and run here barefoot from Kentucky. They gobbled it up. By “they” I meant Rudy, Victor, and Jane?, if I’d heard her name correctly.
Jane saw the blood first. “Good God. Did my brothers leave you dying in the yard?”
“Fountain started after they left,” I said.
Jane popped Victor and then Rudy with a kitchen towel and tossed it my way. “Probably because of them.”
“Not at all,” I assured her.
I pressed the rag against my nostrils and declined a beer. There must be adult-adults around here somewhere—folks who might care about an invasion from Kentucky—but they weren’t in the kitchen, and none of the other teenaged occupants seemed particularly concerned about underage drinking. Victor had three bottles lining the rim of his placemat. Becky had two. Rudy was drinking a Gatorade and eating carrot chips. The air was kicking, and kicking hard. I put my sweatshirt back on and sat next to Rudy.
Facts slotted into place as I stole carrots from Rudy’s plate. This wasn’t the Guthrie house. This was Rudy’s dad’s girlfriend’s place. I didn’t catch her name, which made me feel guilty, as I was staying the night. Jane was Rudy’s half sister. Victor was their dad’s girlfriend’s son. Not even a true stepbrother, but they didn’t care. Except for being tan in the same perfect Orlando way, Rudy didn’t look like Jane, but Victor somehow looked like Rudy. Nurture over nature. They’d been together since Jane was fourteen and Rudy was twelve and living here for nearly as long. Jane’s boyfriend, Josef, lay sacked out on the couch because he had to be at work early. They called him Jane’s husband, but he wasn’t. Evidently, he was the only one among them who could coax Deuce to fall asleep in his own bed or eat a food group that didn’t involve sugar. Jane had been warned. If she broke with the husband, Victor and Rudy were keeping the husband in the divorce.
“You met the girls where?” Jane asked.
When Victor and Rudy said Parkers, they buried their heads in the crooks of their right elbows to avoid Jane’s wrath. “Parkers is not suitable.” Her disdain worsened when they copped to hitting the farm for fireworks. “These two wombats warn you there were alligators, like big frickin’ alligators, at the fireworks spot?”
“There was a sign,” I said, and Becky asked, “That was for real?”
Victor held his left hand up for us to see; his ring and pinkie fingers were partially missing. “One of them got me.”
“And it was a baby.”
“Four or five foot long.”
Rudy finished off his drink and tossed the bottle across the room into the trash bin.
“Two points,” cooed Becky, when the bottle rimmed the trash can and fell in. She must have a decent buzz going.
Rudy was still on the alligators. “Tell them what you were doing, Vic.”
“I may or may not have been taking a selfie. I didn’t think the little ones could run that fast.”
“Was the photo good?” I asked.
Victor offered me his knuckles. “Thata girl, you know it was.”
“That photo was a blurry mess,” Rudy said.
“But I looked very handsome. Am I right? Give me three and half.” Rudy smacked Victor’s hand hard. They laughed even harder.
They’d clearly recounted this story many times to others and still enjoyed it. They’d enjoy it twenty years from now. There was plenty of humor available, because two fingers were something Victor could live without. Two fingers—well, one and a half—was worth the glory. “You really don’t care?” Becky asked.
Rudy cocked his head toward Victor. “Better to lose two fingers than the rest of him.”
Jane explained. “Vic was supposed to be with Rudy in New York. Their fairy godteacher, Ms. Jay, paid for them to attend after Aunt Linda started her culture campaign.”
“But then I stopped being able to count to five on my right hand and had to bail.”
“We gave that alligator a big-ass medal,” Jane said, looping an arm around Victor’s neck and squeezing his face against hers. She turned to me. “Ru says we should give you one too. That he wouldn’t have gotten off the bus without your encouragement.”
All three of them eyed me, but it was Victor who said, “Do you need a medal, Golden Jennings?”
The only thing I gave Rudy was my beanie. “Lord, no, but I’ll take a beer.”
We had another round of drinks and conversations, and then Victor and Jane said they were too tired to exist and must depart to bed. There was some discussion of how zapped Becky and I must be after our day of driving. And it was true, my eyes were on fire and there was a low-grade hum happening behind my temples. The clock on the stove read 2:03 a.m. when Jane dragged a groggy Josef off the couch. She paused, supporting his weight on her shoulder, and said, “The sofa doesn’t pull out, but it’s better than your truck,” and that seemed true enough to accept the offer.
Becky tromped to the kitchen sink with her toothbrush and Rudy rolled behind me into the living room. It was the first time we’d been alone since the bathroom at Down Yonder.
“Your mom should have named you Penny. You keep turning up.”
I probably shouldn’t have asked, but I did. “Is your mom around?”
“Nah, but Charlotte will get home about the time we leave. She works nights at Waffle House down the strip. She won’t mind that you’re here if you were worrying about it.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“Upstairs.” He grinned; he seemed to be made of grins, like there was an insatiable spring of grins inside him. But then I caught on and smacked his arm for teasing me. “I’m down that hall. You can wake me if you need anything,” he said.
I’d been down the hall on an earlier trip to the bathroom. There were only four doors. If one of those doors was a closet, then I guessed all those rooms were filled to the brink with beds and kids. A dormitory family. A teeny commune. And I figured, we were not so different.
This guy, the one who rolled back and forth in his two-hundred-square-foot living room, and the one who had stood at Down Yonder’s bathroom door, were the same, despite the changed circumstances. He had to have known his world was enlarging with that unofficial acceptance to Emerson. That his days of evening drinking with Victor and Jane might be paused or over; that to charge ahead was to leave them behind. But he’d gone on to New York without Victor, so maybe that was something he knew how to do. I wanted to ask him about Emerson, if he was moving to Boston in the fall, but I didn’t.
“You doing okay, Golden?”
I was. My head was an aquarium stocked with swimming thoughts. I gave him a resolute nod. “You?”
When he raised his head, doggedness and determination twinned through his eyes. “Tomorrow morning, let’s visit Caroline before we hit the road. We should try convincing her to come along. It would mean a lot to Carter to have the three of us there. And maybe even to the crowds. I do think there’ll be crowds. And if the donation thing is an indicator, they’re going to be overwhelming. What about the boyfriend? Could you change his mind?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Becky was flashing her freshly polished teeth at me from the kitchen sink. I was thinking of people at their computer desks sliding credit cards from their wallets and typing sixteen digits of their hard-earned cash into a GoFundMe with my name on it. I was thinking of those same people boarding subways, Ubers, taxis, planes toward the Green-Conwell. How they’d file through Accelerant Orange on Sunday. And then Caroline’s name registered. “Caroline?” I asked.
Rudy gave me a look that said: The only Caroline we know. “She’s my cousin. Moved down to live with our aunt over Christmas. Lives about ten miles from here now.”
Oh.