Dom held the Dixie cup of cold water over his mom who lay on her bed snoring—her pale fleshy arms flung out to her sides like she’d washed ashore after a shipwreck.
“Go ahead,” his sister, Maddie, said with an extralong sigh. “She’s so not going to wake up on her own.”
They had pulled the thick bedroom curtains open. The morning sun ignited the dusty bedroom furniture so it glittered. Still, his mom refused to wake up.
Dom had that ache in his gut. Like he needed a gulp from one of the bottles he’d stolen from the bar in his grandparents’ house or he’d shit his pants.
“Just give me the cup already,” Maddie huffed.
He knew, behind her pissy attitude, she was just as scared by the crap news he’d delivered that morning.
Their grandparents were coming. The Colonel and Veronica could arrive any minute.
Maddie sounded just like those girls she’d gone with to the fair. She’d stolen a bottle of gin for them, from the same bar in their grandparents’ house next door. Dom had heard it sloshing around in her backpack last night and had known she’d get sick. She was a freaking lightweight, his sister. Not him. He’d been sneaking sips, then shots, and now thermoses full for a year now, since he started seventh grade at the East Avalon Junior/Senior High, an underweight kid with girlishly wide hips in a land of giant jocks searching for freaks to humiliate.
“Whatever,” he said. “I heard you puking your guts up this morning. So I let you sleep. Instead of banging on your door and telling you I told you you’d get sick from drinking.”
“Um, you just did, genius.”
“Did what?”
“Told me told you so.”
They laughed. He loved his sister’s laugh. Not that fake giggle when other people were around. The real thing. He wished they could leave Mom, leave the cottage. Before their grandparents arrived. But where could they go? He’d spent a few nights in the woods after his dad chased him out the front door, belt in hand. But Maddie wouldn’t want to sleep in the woods like Dom did some summer nights. Not now with the caterpillars hatching. Where did kids go when they couldn’t live one more day at home waiting for shit to blow up?
A string of spit hung from his mom’s parted lips. Her blond lashes were crusty with dried sleep goo. He tried not to see the dark shape of her nipples under the sheer nightgown. What would their grandmother Veronica say if she saw her only child in such a sorry-ass state? She was always reminding him and Maddie that their mother had been runner-up to Miss Avalon 1967. As if, he thought, their grandmother was reminding herself.
“Ready?” Maddie asked.
“I guess.”
He let his too-long bangs curtain his eyes. His mom made him get bowl cuts at The Hair Cuttery—even though, duh, it made the teasing at school worse. He wanted his hair short on the sides, long on top, sculpted into waves like Brandon on Beverly Hills, 90210. Despite the extra ragging it was sure to get him at school, from MJ Bundy and Victor Hackett and all the senior douchebags who waited at Dom’s locker and followed him to homeroom, calling him “faggot” and “homo,” hands flopping limp-wristed as they lisped, Do you take it up the butt, LaRosa?
“Look.” Maddie’s voice was sweeter. “You know I don’t want to do this. Right?”
“No shit, Sherlock,” he said.
“But the Colonel’s going to be here soon. Real soon. Maybe even today.”
“Veronica too.”
It was their grandmother he dreaded. Her relentless correction. No slouching. No slurping. Her use of we to scold him, as if she and he were pals: We ask to be excused from the table. We don’t lick ice cream off our spoon.
The night before, when his grandmother’s raspy smoker’s voice followed the answering machine beep, her proper tone filling the small cottage, he hadn’t picked up the phone.
“Surprise! It’s Mommy and Daddy. Expect us sometime tomorrow, Ginny dear. We’ve stopped in North Carolina for the night. At a dreadful Howard Johnson.”
She let out a phlegmy cough and he heard a voice in the background—his grandfather. The Colonel.
“Smells like mildew. And the dust! Howard was a good friend of Daddy’s, as you know. It’s a good thing he isn’t alive to see this place. Make sure you tidy up, dear. We know how Daddy can get.”
He chewed the waxy lip of an empty cup. It wasn’t the first time they’d dumped cold water on their mother to bring her back to life. They’d been doing it since Dom was a third-grader, when his dad started taking extra shifts at the factory and working weekends at Uncle Carmine’s garage, and Dr. Joseph, their family doctor, prescribed Mom pills for her “blues.” Back then, the little cups had fit just right in Dom’s hands and he’d cried when Maddie poured, turning Mom’s jewel-colored nightgowns dark as blood. Now, he wondered if Mom was faking. Like girls at school who went to the nurse’s office with cramps. An excuse to get out of running the mile in gym class.
He and Maddie were always waiting for Mom. To wake. Get better. Cheer up. Open the locked bedroom door after they’d pounded on it with fists. Return to them from that dream world she chose over them. Maybe, he imagined, it was carpeted with cotton balls, insulated with puffs of cloud. Like a never-ending hug.
He kicked the box spring. Mom’s slack belly jiggled.
“Crap,” he said. “Just do it.”
Maddie poured one cup, then another, down their mother’s freckled chest.
She jerked. An arm flailed like the fin of a beached fish.
“Why are you doing this to me?” she cried like a little kid, then turned pissy, spitting, “Stop it!”
“Mom,” Maddie said in the voice Dom half remembered hearing when his sister soothed him out of night terrors. “You got to get up.”
He tugged on his mother’s arm crisscrossed with wrinkles matching the rumpled bed sheets. “Mom, please.”
He dug into her body with his fists, kneading her damp flesh. You fat, selfish, lazy whale. He shoved, her body rocked side to side, and she sat up, the hem of her nightgown hitched so he smelled the fishy odor that clung to the bathroom when Maddie was on the rag.
“When your father gets home,” she wheezed, “you’re going to get it!”
“Dad isn’t home.” Tears tried to squeeze through the cracks in his voice. “He never is. And they’re coming, Mom.”
“Who?” His mother used a chipped fingernail to pick at the sand in her eye.
“The Colonel,” Maddie said.
“And Veronica,” Dom added.
His mom peeled off her wet nightgown with Maddie’s help. Dom avoided her sagging breasts and looked instead at the shiny white Cesarean scar striping her belly. She’d been reminding him of it for as long as he could remember. It almost killed me giving birth to you.
“We made a list,” Maddie said. “The stuff we need to do before they get here.”
He was grateful his sister was there. She’d make sure they were ready.
Two years had passed since their grandparents had fled Avalon Island for their annual winter escape to Florida, and then, to everyone’s surprise, not returned with the other snowbirds in the spring. Still, he remembered enough to expect their grandfather’s inspection. The Colonel’s white cotton gloves stretching tight over his thick knuckles. His golf cleats clicking across the wood floor as he neared the closet in Dom’s bedroom, where a tower of dirty clothes waited to spring out like a jack-in-the-box. He knew they’d follow the Colonel from room to room and nod at his insults. Make no excuses, no matter how much they wanted to play defense. Even Dom’s dad would be mute—his already swarthy complexion gone black hole with choked-back anger. His dad, the man Dom, Maddie, and their mother feared, who could, out of the blue, bug the hell out, pull his belt out of his pant loops so fast it whistled like Indiana Jones’s whip in Raiders of the Lost Ark, was scared of only one person—the Colonel.
It seemed like the Colonel had an unending supply of white military-issue inspection gloves. Plenty for a colonel who wasn’t even a colonel. Dom’s dad had explained it all with a smile. How Robert Pencott had been a lieutenant in the summer of ’42 (two months before he was scheduled to be deployed) when a back injury branded him 4F in the draft. He’d never fly into battle and, instead, ended up an engineer at Grudder Aviation’s Plant 2, overseeing the assembly of twenty Hellcat fighters per day. Fifty years later, he was Grudder’s head honcho. El Numero Uno. President Pencott.
He might not be a bona fide colonel, but Dom knew his grandfather was sure as shit scary as any admiral who’d led a fleet into enemy waters. Dom only had to mention the Colonel and the kids at school backed down, nodding like Dom deserved the kind of respect his grandfather got. When he felt small and powerless, he remembered he was the only grandson of the man who’d made Old Ironsides the champion of the navy, from World War II straight through Nam. The old man had helped land American boots on the fucking moon! When Dom huddled on the cold classroom floor during duck-and-cover drills, his fingers laced at the back of his neck, he knew it was his grandfather who’d make sure the nukes they were rehearsing for never dropped on American soil.
Still, they were doomed. Destined to fail the Colonel’s inspection. Even if they’d had weeks to clean, there was no way to rid the cottage of all the dust, grime, and grease; Mom’s used tissues and Bugles crumbs; Dad’s wiry black body hair; and Dom’s own mountain of unwashed clothes. But they had to give it a shot, he thought as he and Maddie each gripped one of Mom’s arms and pulled her to stand on shaking legs. He remembered the Colonel’s maxim: The Pencotts never quit.
They’d have to get Mom showered, and couldn’t forget deodorant. And perfume. He imagined his grandmother sitting at the kitchen table, immaculate in one of her many cream-colored pantsuits. Smoking cigarette after cigarette with coral-painted lips. As flawless as one of those black-and-white movie stars. Not a hair out of place.
His mother stood in the doorway, readying herself to leave her cool, dark cave of a bedroom.
“Dom,” she said, smiling as if seeing him for the first time, “how’s my baby boy?”