The morning Edie decided to call in her favor, I was standing under a tent at the Holedo policemen’s auction with my mother. It was a cool, drizzly November day, and the sound of raindrops on canvas made me think of knuckles cracking. Over and over.
“Do you think we’ll get what we want?” my mother asked. She was wearing a yellow plastic kerchief over her head. Beneath it, her hair was pulled back in a bun, leaving a funny-looking lump in the plastic.
“Probably not,” I said, practicing my new routine of telling her the exact opposite of what she wanted to hear.
The taxpayers’ association had funded a brand-new police station—or pigpen, as my father called it—on the other side of town. The new place had turnstile doors, a six-car garage, and an intricate emergency switchboard. After three years of on-again, off-again construction, the station was finally up and running, so the cops were selling off all their old crap. For the first hour we watched people walk away with wooden desks, torn vinyl office chairs, coffin-size filing cabinets, even the titles to three souped-down squad cars and a badge from Holedo’s first sheriff, Will Warner.
But my mother wasn’t interested in any of that crap. What she wanted more than anything was the old station itself. With its single-story design, ivy-covered brick face, and rooms lined with barred cells, she had convinced herself it would be the perfect home.
“Don’t be so pessimistic,” my mother said. She ran her hand over her kerchief, and it crinkled like a sandwich bag. “It’s our chance to own a place. Do you want to live in that apartment the rest of your life?”
This opposite thing was so easy with her. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
Since my father had taken a job driving a truck for Edie’s new shoe business three months ago, apartment life was better than ever. He was gone most of the week, trying to make sales to independent shoe stores up and down the East Coast. If the business took off, I had heard him explain to my mother more than once, Edie would hire more drivers and he would get to be the dispatcher. That meant he’d make a lot more dough than he used to bring home from the factory. All I knew was that with just me and my mother around during the week, I could watch television whenever I wanted, drink soda, and eat chips in the living room.
“You’ll change your tune once we spruce it up,” my mother said.
No matter how much we fixed the place, it could never be a real home. Last week Officer Roget had given us a tour. Between twisting the bristly tips of his mustache and listening to my mother giggle over all his cocky jokes, he explained that no one had ever spent more than a single night in a Holedo cell. It was really just a holding pen until criminals were sent to a real prison or set free. The news left me disappointed. If we were going to move to a jail, I wanted it to have a dark and dangerous history. I tried to imagine murderers on death row, planning their escapes before their brains got fried in the electric chair, but I found that impossible with the smell of Roget’s stray cats, the emptiness of the jail cells, and toilets that were as filthy as forgotten fishbowls. The place felt more like the Franklin Park Zoo outside of Boston. Still, my mother was convinced it was a great fixer-upper. My Uncle Donald had sent a fat check from one of his latest inventions, and buying the old station was the way she was going to spend it.
But we had competition.
After the cars had been auctioned off, the only people left standing under the tent were Vito Maletti and Grover Payne. Vito owned Peaceful Pizza on Water Street by the bus station. Grover owned the Town Auto Body on Hanover.
“Peaceful Pizza Two,” my mother said.
“The Town Auto Body at a new location,” I said.
She sighed. “What happened? I thought we got rid of the competition.”
For weeks my mother and Marnie had gone store to store, tearing down auction signs from community bulletin boards, as well as calling local radio stations and disguising their voices to announce a change in date. “Excuse-a me,” Marnie would say, switching off her southern. “Ze oction ’as-a bin chenged.”
“You couldn’t have expected everyone to fall for your tricks,” I said.
“Why not?” my mother said, her beige raincoat practically swallowing her. “All’s fair in love, war, and house hunting.”
This was her idea of a joke. Ever since that night at Edie’s last summer, my mother’s jokes had begun to annoy me. It was as if Edie’s kiss had aged me ten years, and I saw my mother in a different way. I wanted her to stop wasting time with Marnie. I wanted her to stop chasing after my father. I wanted her to stop putting on the normal mother act every time he won her back.
Across the lot a skinny girl was single-handedly protesting the auction. She was about my age and my height, with long, flat brown hair that made me think of a “before” picture in a Wella Balsam ad. One of those pretty-faced models looking dismal until the shampoo blessed her with bounce, luster, and a glowing smile. She held up a sign that said HOLEDO MUST PRESERVE HISTORIC BUILDINGS, but no one seemed to be paying much attention to her.
“Who is that girl?” my mother asked.
“Don’t know,” I said, because I had never seen her in school before. “But I think she wants our new home to be a museum.”
My mother looked her way and said, “Well, I always admire a girl who fights for what she believes in.”
“We are opening bidding on the former Holedo Police Station,” Officer Roget announced, stealing a quick glance at my mother. His face was saggy and pouched, set off by a crooked nose and thin lips. The face of a skinny man set atop a muscled body. Something about the way he kept putting his fingers to his mustache, like it was a costume that didn’t fit quite right on his face, made him seem shifty to me. Or vain. I wasn’t sure which.
“He sure is handsome,” my mother whispered.
I looked at his gorilla chest stuffed into a blue uniform. His holster rode high on his waist, the pistol jutting out like some inflexible part of his body. “Maybe without his head,” I told my mother.
Roget fingered the black nest of his mustache, then touched his badge and prattled on. “This six-room office building has housed Holedo’s finest since 1923. There are hardwood floors, a galley kitchen, and three bathrooms. It’s well suited for a business. Of course, it could easily be renovated into something else.”
“I feel like I’m on The Price Is Right,” I said.
My mother didn’t respond. I knew she wished Marnie had come with her instead. But Saturdays were Marnie’s big day at the hospital, where she was in charge of television rentals for patients. Most of the week she made her way from room to room, gathering crinkled dollar bills from sick people with bedsores on their asses and nothing to do but watch Mary Tyler Moore and listen to Marnie’s personal line of bullshit. On Saturday mornings, though, Marnie was the Bingo Lady. For a full hour her face was broadcast over the hospital television system. “B one. G fifty-five. I know there is a winner out there somewhere!” The way she dolled herself up and carried on, you would think she was a guest on Carson.
“We will open the bidding at fifteen thousand dollars,” Roget announced. “Do I hear fifteen thousand?”
Grover waved his faded and fingerprinted cap in the air. Vito counterbid. The two of them went back and forth until Roget reached fifty thousand.
“Why aren’t you bidding?” I asked my mother.
The air around us was flashbulb blue and smelled of fireplace fires. Her face looked puffy, heavier than usual, in the morning light. Her cheeks were red. “I’m just letting them lay the groundwork. When things get serious, I’ll make my move.”
Vito bid at fifty-five thousand.
“Sounds pretty serious to me,” I said.
“Do I hear five thousand more?” Roget asked.
“I’m out,” Grover mumbled, folding in a high-stakes card game.
The three of them were in Monte Carlo. Marnie was in Hollywood. And my father was hauling his girlfriend’s clodhoppers all over New England—the bombshell girlfriend I had kissed but not seen since. All last summer I kept hoping to spot Edie at the Doghouse or the Cumberland Farms Quick Mart. I had ridden my ten-speed by her house a few times in the fall, desperate to catch a glimpse. When I didn’t see her again, I started to blame my father. Of course Edie preferred him over me. He was all about beer, big muscles, and his big mouth, and I was none of those things. Whenever I fetched him from a bar after that night at Edie’s, I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the door. No more intros with his buddies. No more hanging out while my mother waited in the car. That was how much I had changed.
“Do I hear five thousand more?” Roget said.
“How much did Uncle Donald give you?” I asked.
“Never you mind,” my mother said and raised her hand to match the bid.
Vito didn’t wait. He shot his hand in the air.
“Sixty-five thousand?”
My mother raised a finger.
“Seventy thousand?”
Vito waved.
“Seventy-five thousand?”
“Mom,” I said, unable to stop myself from stopping her. “We could buy a real house for this much. Think about it.”
“Not now, Dominick,” she said.
“Seventy-five thousand?” Roget asked.
“Mom,” I whispered. “Let him have it.”
Finally she seemed to hear me and hesitated. Her hand stayed by her side.
“Going once,” Roget said. “Going twice.”
My mother bit her upper lip but kept her hand still.
“It’s better this way,” I said, deciding to ease up on the opposite routine for a while.
“Sold. To Mr. Vito Maletti.”
My mother put her head down and turned toward the car. Her crazy plan had been let loose into the air like a balloon caught in the wind. She untied her plastic kerchief and slipped it inside the pocket of her raincoat. When we climbed into the Pinto, she pulled a gum wrapper out of the unused ashtray. Inside the silver paper was the piece of Juicy Fruit she had been chewing when we arrived. She stuck the piece back in her mouth and put the wrapper in the ashtray again. Whenever I bought gum, I blew through the pack in under an hour. But my mother worked on one piece forever, saving it in a wrapper between chews as if there were an international gum shortage.
We drove out of the parking lot of the new Peaceful Pizza, where Vito was shaking hands and that girl with the picket sign was packing up her protest. My mother stayed quiet all the way across town, and I rolled down the window and let in the earthy, late-morning air. The rain had stopped, and somewhere, someone had managed to start burning leaves. Finally my mother said, “All I want is a little round thing on the wall so I can control my own heat. I want a kitchen where I can keep the trash can beneath the sink.”
Ever since she had heard about the auction, my mother had been going on about the flower boxes she wanted to put in every window, the wicker planters she planned to buy, the braided throw rugs for the hardwood floors. But she never mentioned removing the bars from the cells or dealing with any of the other setbacks that came with buying a police station. “Uncle Donald would have to have invented a time machine for us to afford that place,” I said.
My mother twisted the knob on the radio, and the car filled with noise from a football game. The Eagles versus the Patriots. Or the Saints versus the Cardinals. I could never keep them straight anymore. “Well,” she said, “if those fellas hadn’t shown up, we would have gotten the place for dirt cheap.”
We were on River Road, about to pass the new police station. My mother kept her eyes on the road, but I stared out at the green rectangle of lawn, the shining windows, the three-story layout. An officer stood on the tarred river of sidewalk—hand to his forehead like a visor or a salute—gazing up at the face of the building as if awestruck by the design. Now that place looked like it could have been a home. Seeing it made me feel sorry for my mother.
“You can save the money for something else,” I said.
My mother reached for the radio again and pushed the hard black buttons. Classical. News. More football. Weather. Nothing seemed to make her happy, so she turned it off. The road snaked its way through the center of Holedo. Redbrick buildings on either side. A gold flashing light winked at us as we skirted beneath. The skeletal frames of last year’s town Christmas decorations—two angels and a star completely stripped of their garland—blew back and forth in the wind. The air from outside smelled different here. No more burning leaves; now it was factory smoke. I rolled up my window, hushing the sound of spinning tires.
“I’m going to tell you something, but you have to promise not to tell your father,” she said.
Sharing secrets with my father was never a temptation. Besides, when my mother made up her mind to trust me, my word was a mere formality. “I promise.”
She glanced away from the road toward me. Her face looked puffy still, and I thought of moist air trapped beneath her skin. The tight fist of hair behind her head left her ear naked and exposed. Without jewelry, the pierced hole was a miniature mouth opening toward me in a yawn. “I have a little money put aside,” she said. “Not enough to buy a decent house yet. And God knows I’d never get a mortgage with your father’s job. But if something should happen to me, I want you to use it for yourself.”
I thought of her life in New Mexico, a waitressing job in San Francisco she had told me about, Truman. She once said that she left her old lives quietly, like she was ducking out of a party without telling the host or the other guests good-bye. I imagined myself as one of those hosts, eyeing her from the corner, watching her gather her coat and shuffle toward the door. “Are you going to leave?” I asked, as a worried feeling mushroomed inside me.
“I’m not going anywhere, Dominick. I just want you to know I have a little security blanket for you and me in case of an emergency.”
We were pulling onto our street, Dwight Avenue. Row after row of rented three-story houses with jigsaw-puzzle roofs and torn-screened porches. Our apartment was in the only five-story complex on the block, built on an old neighborhood baseball field. Outdoor stairways led to each floor. The brown aluminum siding was streaked and stained from the leaky gutters. For the first time I saw this place the way my mother must have. Mustard instead of sunny orange. The muddy brown of a pond when she wanted the blue of a sea.
I’ve lived all over the world, Edie said in my head. Holedo is just as good a place as any.
“Why did you come here?” I asked my mother as she scoped out a spot in the lot behind our building.
“What do you mean? I married your father, and we moved here together.”
My next question could have pushed her secret sharing session a bit far. Still, I asked, “But why did you marry him?”
We parked in front of an overloaded Dumpster, and my mother turned off the car. A sign said NO PARKING, but we could get away with it until Monday. There were empty milk cartons scattered at our wheels. Cream soda and RC cans. A flattened bag of chips. A pigeon clenched a thin disk of potato in its beak, complete with green slivers of chive. My mother sighed. Her exhalations were often heavy, weighted things, the sound an old woman might make if she looked back unhappily on her life with no more time to make things right. “It’s like those breakfasts in New Mexico,” she said.
Here we go again, I thought.
But then she said, “When I met your father, I thought he was the most handsome man I had ever seen. He loved to have a good time. Driving around on his motorcycle together. Staying out all night. Before him my life was such a tangled mess, and everything with him was one big party. I guess that’s exactly what I needed.”
I tried to wrap my mind around the image of my mother on a motorcycle, staying out till the sun came up. It made me wonder if she changed personalities when she changed lives. After all, she was always warning me to be careful on my ten-speed. I asked her what any of that had to do with those breakfasts.
“I only mean that your father was perfect for a certain time and place in my life. But taking it further didn’t exactly work the way I had hoped. We had you, which was the best thing that ever happened to me. But I thought your father would change when our lives did. Settle down. I thought we’d buy a real house—”
She stopped, and I knew she must have been thinking about the police station, on its way to being a pizza place instead of her dream home.
“Looking back,” she said, staring out the car window past the metal Dumpster, spilling over with its dirty insides, “looking back, I realize I should have paid attention to the signs.”
“Signs?” I said, not getting her.
“Signs. Life lays them right in front of you. One. Two. Three. All you have to do is look, Dominick. You’ll see as you get older. If you step back and take in the world around you, there’s always some sort of guidepost. Something telling you which way to go. He drank too much then. He lied then. But I ignored it all because I was so. . . so. . . hungry for him. It was like a voice from the future telling me how our life would be, but I didn’t want to hear. So I tuned it out, and here I am.”
Her voice had dropped to a whisper, and she fingered her car keys that still hung from the ignition. Her key chain was a miniature globe, and she shook the world from side to side.
I was going to ask her about the tangled mess before my father that I assumed was code language for Truman, when outside the car a pigeon flapped its wings in a scurry of noise and feathers. The motion startled my mother, and I could tell by the look on her face that the sharing spell was broken. She wasn’t going to tell me any more about following signs or Truman. “I’ll find a way to make things better,” she said, patting my knee and putting an end to our discussion. “You’ll see.”
Even with her hopeful words, I could tell she felt lost in her life as she put her gum back in the wrapper and stuck it in the ashtray again for later. We got out of the car and made our way up the stairs to our second-floor apartment. I thought of the sappy eight-tracks she sometimes played when she was down. The singers were nameless to me, but one of their rhymes drifted to mind now. “I looked at my life today. I wish I was happy living this way.” The words were hopelessly melodramatic, enough to make me want to snap her out of it. “Which jail cell would I have slept in?”
“Well,” she said, jumping right into the joke despite herself, “I would have taken the master cell. And you would have the one down the hall.”
“Don’t forget the guest cell,” I said as she fumbled with the keys.
“Of course, we’d have to fingerprint any overnight visitors to protect ourselves.”
By the time my mother got the door open, we were both laughing. The apartment smelled like the inside of a defrosted refrigerator. Cold metal and old food. “Maybe it was a little half-baked,” she said. “But you can’t blame me for trying.”
“What was half-baked?” my father asked. He was sitting at the kitchen table with the Holedo Herald and a beer, his aviator glasses halfway down his nose, like he was too cool to bother taking them off.
Since he had been on the road during the week, my mother and I had developed new personalities for when he was and wasn’t around. The two of us were downshifting, fast. “Oh, nothing,” my mother said. Lately it took her longer to switch from my side to his when he showed. But she always made it there. “I thought you were away until Sunday.”
Before he could answer, the phone rang. The noise mixed with the sound of the football game droning from the television. Rather than leaving the black-and-white on the shelf in the living room, my father had a habit of carrying the TV with him to the kitchen. Sunday mornings he liked to plug the thing in the bathroom and disappear in there with the newspapers. At the moment it was perched in the middle of the table, aluminum foil dangling from the bent-hanger antenna. His idea of good reception. On the second ring my father stood to answer the phone. “It’s for you, Terry.”
She took the receiver. After a pause she said, “Win some, lose some.”
Probably the Bingo Lady herself, just off the set of her prime-time show. This was my chance to cut out. Headphones and The Who were waiting in my room. Leon and I always played “The Acid Queen” and “Pinball Wizard” at top volume.
“How you doing, son?” my father said.
I turned back, snagged into a conversation. The smell of his trip was all around him—rest stops and diesel fuel, too long behind the wheel of a truck. A voice in my head told me he was the visitor we needed to fingerprint.
“Fine,” I said.
“School?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Job yet?”
“I’m fifteen,” I said. “Not old enough.”
Since our little chat was going nowhere fast, he gave me a light punch in the arm, hoping for a wrestling match like we used to have. I thought of all those times when I was a kid and he’d let me pin him to the floor. When I least expected it, he’d break free and tickle me until I laughed and screamed in surrender. It seemed like years since we’d done that routine. But I was in no mood for a fake fight when so many real ones were happening beneath the surface.
“That was Officer Roget,” my mother said when she hung up. She gave me a nervous look. Like her secret stash, her plan to buy the station had been hidden from my father as well. “He called to thank me for the volunteer work I did last month.”
“Volunteer work,” my father said. “What did you do for that crook?”
“You know,” my mother said, her voice lilting the way it did when she lied. “This and that.”
I could tell by the way she busied herself in the kitchen—wiping the circles of dried coffee from the stove top, untangling the crimson balls of fringe that dangled from the curtains—that she was still having trouble adjusting to his unexpected arrival.
“Well, then,” my father said. “Since everybody is doing a lot of nothing around here, you’ll both be glad to know the reason I’m home.”
My mother tugged on the sleeves of her cardigan and made her way across the kitchen. She was forever moving cereal boxes and soup cans from one shelf to another, trying to find the best fit. Now she pulled down tomato soup and sank the sharp tooth of the can opener into the lid, twisting it open. She dumped the rust-colored blob into a pot on the stove.
“How come you’re home?” I asked.
He looked at me and grinned. “I quit my job.”
“Quit?” my mother said.
“What’s the matter?” My father stretched his stomach out into a hard balloon and scratched, teasing her. “Can’t I stay home and freeload, too?”
“Very funny,” she said.
The thing was, it could have been funny. Not fall down, but a Partridge Family sort of laugh. My father didn’t understand, though, that his benders and trips away muffled things somehow. It was difficult for my mother and me to relax and act natural when neither of us knew when he’d vanish again.
“Let’s just say that Kramer woman is one fucked-up broad.”
At the mention of Edie, my mother turned toward the sink. She poured out the last of his beer and tossed it in the trash by the stove. I would have pulled the can out and stomped it flat the way I used to like to do, but I was dying for the Edie story.
“Please stop talking like that in front of Dominick,” my mother said.
“He’s heard it before. Right, son?”
I nodded yes to my father. But when my mother looked, I shook my head no.
She asked, “What about money?”
“I’ll find something. Maybe one of those cross-country driving jobs.”
I saw my mother’s face wilt, and I knew she must have been thinking about all those signs she had ignored so many years ago. But there was nothing I could do. Their conversation would loop round and round for hours. My mother would keep asking her tentative, worried questions but never get the real deal. In a week or so he’d be on to some better-than-ever dream job. There would be no news about Edie. I was ready to retreat to my room when I spotted an envelope among the empty fruit bowl, the newspaper, and the television set. My name written in block letters across the seal. “What’s this?” I asked.
“In the mailbox when I got home,” my father said. “It must have been hand-delivered, because there’s no stamp. Maybe you’ve got an admirer.”
I peeled it open, splitting my name in two.
Dominick,
I need to see you.
E.
“Well,” my father said. “Who’s it from?”
I tried to fold the paper but nervously crumpled it instead. “Gritta,” I said, shoving it into my pocket. “Gritta Alexander.”
“Well, Terry,” my father said, “it looks like our boy’s got a girl.”
I left my mother to deal with him and headed for my room. Door locked, I unfolded the paper—already creased from the short time in my pocket. “Dominick, I need to see you. E.” No doubt that the “E.” was Edie. I held her handwriting to my nose, hoping for that milk-and-skin smell, the jasmine of her house. Instead I breathed in the first day of school, homework. I puckered my lips against the E of her name. I stuck out my tongue and licked the tiny dot beside it. I couldn’t believe she had finally made contact with me—actually driven over to my apartment and put a letter in the mailbox—after all the months I had spent swelling with thoughts of her and of our kiss, wondering if there could ever be more between us. Maybe she had been waiting for my father to be gone from her life before coming to me. Maybe now that he’d quit, things could begin with us.
All that mattered now was that she wanted—needed—to see me.
In my drawer I kept a tightly rolled joint I had sneaked from Leon months back. Most of the time we stuck to booze, mixing our own lethal concoction from his mother’s black-lacquered liquor cabinet. A few weekends before, it was rum, vodka, whiskey, vermouth, a bit of Dr Pepper, and a splash of OJ. We called it the Holedo Hell-Raiser and promptly puked our guts out after chugging the whole thing from an old milk carton. Whenever we wanted to raise hell but thought our stomachs needed some R&R, Leon scored a dime bag of pot. I had been saving some for just this occasion, in hopes that if I ever got the chance to be alone with Edie, a few puffs of a joint would help open her up again. Before closing the drawer, I caught a glimpse of a stack of baseball cards I used to collect with my father. Something made me pick them up, flip through the stack. Once upon a time I was pretty good at remembering the players and their stats. Wilbur Wood: relief pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, 22 wins, 13 losses, 1.91 ERA. Brooks Robinson: third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles, 2 homers in the ’70 Series, .429 batting average, .810 slugging percentage. Billy Williams of the Chicago Cubs, lead player in the National League a few seasons back, 42 homers, 129 RBIs. When I used to whip out those names and numbers, I knew it made my father proud. But remembering all those stats was as pointless and dull to me as doing math homework. And somewhere along the way I stopped bothering to keep up. The players and their numbers became a blur in my head, just some faces on a bunch of cards that still smelled like bubblegum. I tossed them back into my drawer and was about to close it again when I spotted the return address I had copied from Uncle Donald’s last letter to my mother.
DONALD F. BIADOGIANO
97 BLEECKER STREET, APT. 3B
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014
Every time I saw it behind my gray sweat socks and blue-banded underwear, I thought of Truman. He was part of me, really. A half brother living almost two hundred miles away, and I had made up my mind to find out more. For the moment, though, I wanted to focus on Edie. I closed the drawer and went back to the kitchen.
“Shoes,” my father was saying. “I’ll give that lady shoes. She’s lucky she doesn’t get my size ten right in her teeth.”
He wrapped his arms around my mother’s waist as she stood at the stove, filling a bowl with soup. She was still trying to pry out the details of his job, not realizing I was closer to the answer. “Where’s my girl?” he asked her, kissing the back of her neck. “Where’s my girl who used to like to have fun?”
“Later,” I said and headed down the stairs to my ten-speed.
My mother opened the kitchen window and called to me like I was a little kid. “Do you want something to eat?”
I stared up at her soft face, a burst of white against the brown, BB-punctured aluminum siding. This was the choice my father must have faced all the time. My mother and her warm food, quiet voice, and careful movements. Or Edie and her big house, big tits, and big money.
“I’ll grab something later,” I said, climbing on my bike and pedaling away in the damp air.
As I rode toward Edie’s, I wondered if it would be as easy to kiss her this time as it was the first. The pot would help. I looked down at the black shoes she had given me. Day after day I slipped my warm feet into their soft leather. Now they were scuffed from so much wear. Part of me wanted to turn back and give the shoes a quick polish before showing up at Edie’s. But my heart was beating too hard to turn back. I pushed the shoes out of my mind and thought of licking the teeth my father wanted to kick. The image of my wet tongue against Edie’s hard white smile kept me pedaling up and down side streets until I reached the top of the hill near her house.
In daylight the Victorian looked even more decrepit than last time. Leaves from the red maple had dried, curled, and fallen to where they lay unraked on the dead hairs of grass. The once-white rocks of the driveway were speckled with black, like hundreds of cavitied teeth crunching beneath my bicycle tires. I stopped pedaling and caught my breath. When I took a step toward her porch, I felt choked with nervousness. I wondered if I should have rushed over here like this, if crossing enemy lines like my mother always did with my father was a mistake. After all, Edie had lied to me that night about my father not being in her bed. Every time I thought of that, I told myself I should be pissed at her.
But she needs to see me, I reminded myself. With those words in mind I walked to the door, kicking at the shavings of yellow paint that littered the porch. Against the dreariness of everything else, it looked as if pieces of sun had fallen and landed at Edie’s doorstep for her to sweep away. A lion’s-face knocker had turned red with rust and blank in the eyes. I gave the sorry-looking guy a clank or two, then waited.
“Edie,” I called when no one answered. “It’s me, Dominick Pindle.”
A bird squawked in the sky, but no noise came from the house. The place had the feeling of people coming and going. Wandering in and out, like I had last summer. A rest area off the highway. A cheap motel.
Finally I put my hand on the knob and turned. It wouldn’t move, so I walked around back to where my father’s truck had been parked that night. This time there was Edie’s Cadillac. Edie was turned away from me, loading a tiny red Chiclet of a suitcase into the trunk. After all these months apart, I couldn’t believe the sight of her. She wore a long-sleeved T-shirt that hung down to her knees. Under the blue material she could have been naked, since all I could see were her bare legs and flip-flopped feet.
“Hello, Edie,” I said, using a voice I had been practicing. It was the well-honed deep echo of a cave. The sound of a solemn male soldier.
“Dominick,” she said, turning around. She reached out and hugged me. I felt her arms slip under my arms, wrap around my back, and pull me to her. Her tits and stomach pressed against me. “You’re here sooner than I expected,” she said, and I could feel the heat of her breath against my neck.
My body went into overload—my chest burned, my mouth felt sticky, my dick went hard. I had hoped and hoped that Edie would want to be near me again but was never really sure how she would act when we met a second time. In that moment I knew our kiss had changed her, too. And this is what I told myself: Edie had come to her senses and realized my father was a fuck-up.
When she let go of me, I could see a purple puff of skin under her left eye, like the bruises Leon got after a fight. The flash of color seemed to belong on him. But on Edie the look was like smeared makeup, messy and all wrong. I heard my father say Size ten right in her teeth.
“What happened?”
“Do I have to tell you?” she said, closing the trunk. “I’m sure you can put two and two together.”
The bruise was split in the middle by a sharp line of blood. I thought of the painted lips of a doll, deep red dried into a smile. Edie smelled of hampers and used clothing. Her hair was wormy and unwashed.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“Yeah,” she said in her raspy, rock-band voice. “Fucking crazy.”
I laughed, unsure whether she meant it to be funny.
“I’m going away for a few days,” she said. “But I needed to see you first. Do you want to come inside for a while?”
I followed her up the short stack of stairs to the house. A seashell wind chime hung by the door, clanking out hollow noises in the breeze. The kitchen had fallen apart since my last visit. The stove, cluttered with dirty pots. The windows, fingerprinted and cloudy. The table looked as if it had been interrupted during a meal—two plates, half emptied of fish sticks and french fries.
Edie brushed her fingers through her mess of hair. Every one of her long nails was gone. All of them bitten down to nothing, like her pinkie nail that first night. “Do you mind if I take a minute to freshen up? Last time you found me in my nightgown. And this time I look like a rag doll. I should at least clean myself up.”
“I’m just glad to see you,” I said, grateful that she gave me an opening to compliment her. “Take your time.”
When she was safely down the hall, I looked for some sign of my father. The desk in the corner was piled with pink and yellow bills the color of baby clothes: $5,614.10 owed to D.T.E. Manufacturers in New Jersey; $2,952.72 owed to Galepsy Dye Incorporated in Alabama; $3,982.19 owed to Marathon Truck Rental right here in Holedo. FINAL NOTICE. FINAL NOTICE. FINAL NOTICE. Underneath all that, a blue doctor’s bill asked Edie for $350 even, the “Services Rendered” column neatly torn from the page. The bills of a rich lady, I thought. But why hadn’t she paid?
My stomach grumbled, and I made my way to the fridge. Empty except for club soda, salad dressing, jelly, and assorted crap. If my father had been spending a lot of time here, there would have been Schlitz or Bud. Maybe Edie dumped it all out the way my mother sometimes did. I wandered to the hallway to check out the shoes and to see about that old sneaker I had left behind. But there was just a matted carpet, the color of a brown egg, which led to the door. No high heels. No cleats. No slippers.
Edie’s footsteps shuffled about the other side of the house. A drawer opened and closed. I went back to the kitchen and picked up the phone to dial, carefully muffling the rotary as it wheeled its way back to zero.
“Hello.” It was Leon. I pictured him in his basement bedroom, doing flies on his bed to build his chest muscles, stopping to grab the phone.
I whispered, “You will never guess where I am.”
“In a fucking jail cell,” he said.
“No. I talked the old lady out of buying the station. So guess where I am.”
“Home, popping the pimples on your ass,” Leon said.
“Try Edie fucking Kramer’s, nipplehead.” Even if the bruise on her face had distracted me from wanting her at the moment, I could still act like I did.
“Pindle. You’re not starting this little fantasy again, are you?”
“It’s the truth.”
“I’d love to hear more, but I’m on my way to fuck Mrs. Lint.”
Lint was the blond algebra teacher who had flunked Leon last year. He was always saying he’d love to give her an F right back. I pictured Leon at home with his mother and her tall skinny glass of vodka tonic clinking with ice cubes as she smoked her mentholated Salems. I hated when Mrs. Diesel’s bitchy personality completely rubbed off on him. He barely believed me the first time I told him about kissing Edie. No way would he believe me again, unless I had proof. “Wait fifteen minutes and call here. When Edie answers, ask for me. Then you’ll see.”
I heard her padding down the hallway so I settled the plan with Leon and hung up. Edie must have made a pit stop, though, because the house was quiet again. When she didn’t show, I made my way over to the back of the kitchen. Through a narrow door I could see a sunroom I hadn’t noticed before. The mattress from the basement covered the center of the white wooden floor. On top lay a zigzagged blanket, some pointy high heels, and a scattering of pillows. I felt the heat of the room press against my skin when I stepped inside.
“The light’s nice in here,” Edie said from behind me. “I put the mattress in this room so I could nap in the afternoon.”
When I turned around, she looked more like the Edie that Leon and I always talked about. Brushed blond hair that curled at the ends. Barn-red lipstick. A cloud of sweet perfume. She still wore the loose shirt, only now there were black pants beneath.
“Have a seat,” Edie said.
I sat on the edge of the mattress, and she did the same. Between us there was a single unstrapped shoe, red as a cooked lobster. I wanted to ask what she needed but decided to go with the flow the way Leon always said to. This was my chance to be cool.
“Do you get high?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“I used to,” she said. “But I’ve decided to cut back on my vices. You know, clean up my act.”
Just my luck. Everything was all wrong—Edie’s bruises, her messy house, and her clean act. Still, I kept trying. “Too bad,” I said, tempting her. “I have some good stuff.”
“Well, by all means light up. Just because I’m turning into a nun doesn’t mean you have to.”
“Really?” I said. My voice sounded more stretched and thin than I would have liked. It felt stupid to light up and smoke in front of her, but I couldn’t back out. Besides, once she saw all the fun I was having, she was bound to change her mind. I took the joint and the Doghouse matchbook from my pocket. Edie pulled an ashtray from the shelf. A blue-scaled ceramic fish with a wide-open mouth. Edie and the fish watched as I lit the tip and toked. “Monster,” I said when I exhaled. I had heard someone call it that in a movie once. It sounded pretty cool, so I said it again. “Monster.”
“I bet,” Edie said. She kept switching her position on the mattress, folding her legs beneath her on one side, then another. I wanted her to get comfortable so she could concentrate on us.
Thinking of Leon, I looked at the clock in the kitchen. Almost one. The whole day seemed like a blur now—the ridiculous auction, my mother and her secret stash, my father quitting his job. “I wonder what Officer Roget wanted when he called,” I said out loud without meaning to.
“Who?” Edie said.
“Oh,” I said. My tongue had grown an inch, gained a pound. My head felt spongy. “Never mind.”
I took a couple more hits and shook my head, trying to focus on Edie’s lips. Good old Mr. Bruise below her eye kept getting my attention instead. It seemed strange my father had let loose on her like that. For all the talking he did, I had never seen him hit anybody. Not me. Not my mother. Still, Edie’s eye was proof enough. “I’m sorry about your face,” I said.
“Don’t be. You didn’t do it.”
In the reflection of the window I caught a glimpse of myself. My face was the wide-eyed, scrappy kid’s face in the Boys’ Club commercial. Only it was stretched like a caricature of myself around the end of the joint. T-shirts and sweaters never looked right on me, so I covered up with the same gray sweatshirt, the hood carried on my back like an empty, useless pouch. I decided I should anchor myself in a conversation before my mind drifted off into that reflection. “So what do you need me for?” I asked.
Edie tilted her head and looked at me. She was beautiful despite her beat-up face. “I wouldn’t have snuck that note in your mailbox if I had someone else to talk to,” she said.
“Yo comprendo,” I said and laughed at my Spanish. Edie didn’t seem to think it was funny, though, so I pulled my lips together. Something in my head was shrinking, fading away. I watched the thin line of smoke twist its way through the air between us until Edie spoke again. “Do you love your parents?” she said finally.
That was not the type of question I had expected her to ask. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”
“Both of them?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. Then I thought about it. “I guess I love one more.”
“Your mom?” she said.
No matter how stoned I was, I wouldn’t let Edie trash my mom. I could confuse the old lady with opposites. I could take off when she was making lunch. But that was me. “Yes,” I said, defensive.
“I don’t blame you,” she said. “Mothers are usually easier to deal with. And your father can be a real prick.”
Trashing him didn’t bug me so much. In fact, it made me feel like I had pulled something over on him. “Yeah,” I said. “A fucking prick.”
“Do you think he and your mom will stay married?” she asked.
I thought of the conversation in the car with my mother. “Yes,” I told her. “They have big plans. They want to buy a house. Drive around on his motorcycle. Make breakfasts together.”
“Breakfasts?” Edie said. “Motorcycle? I didn’t know he had one.”
“Yup,” I said, sounding smug because I knew more about him than she did, even though I’d just found out about the motorcycle an hour ago, and even though he didn’t own it anymore.
“Well, I guess there’s a lot about him I never knew,” Edie said. “That’s no surprise.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I told her, taking another hit of the joint. The smoke in my lungs left me with a confused confidence. I decided to say whatever came to mind. “I’m here now.”
“I’m glad for that,” Edie said, leaning toward me. “Dominick, can I show you something?”
This was it. We were going to kiss again. Maybe even fuck. “Show me,” I said. “Show me anything.”
Edie knelt in front of me and put her hands on the bottom of her shirt. I swallowed hard. The pot had left my head feeling cinder-blocked and messy. For months I had waited for this moment, but I still didn’t feel ready. She needed to look more like the women Leon and I checked out in Hustler and Penthouse. Splayed and nipple-pinched, gazing off into nowhere like the eyes of that fish ashtray. Instead Edie stared at me intently, her face marked by that bruise. Signs of my father’s love all over her. “Are you ready?” she asked.
No more pot, I thought. “I’m ready,” I said.
Slowly she lifted her shirt. Her skin was creamy and white beneath. Her stomach fatter than I had imagined. I thought of the hard belly my father had made in the kitchen a few hours ago. Now the gesture seemed funny after all, and I laughed. Edie ignored the sound and kept pulling the material up, stopping before her breasts. “Why are you stopping?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she said. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
“Your stomach,” I said, trying to sound appreciative. “It’s beautiful.”
“Dominick,” she said and pulled my hand toward her. Sparks ran between us. She pressed my palm and fingers against her belly. “I’m pregnant.”
The sponge in my brain squeezed itself out and left me suddenly sober. My hand yanked back on its own. That SHARON TATE MURDERED headline popped into my head for a split second, then vanished. “Pregnant?” I said.
“Pregnant,” she repeated.
All at once it came to me in one of those “boy meets girl” kind of stories. Only mine went like this: Woman has affair with man and gets knocked up. Man already has a wife, and a kid to boot. Man beats the shit out of her. Woman picks herself up and contacts man’s kid. Here the story fell apart. Woman wants kid to. . . to what exactly?
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, not caring how my voice came out. Shallow and quivering. Young and confused. Fucked up all the way.
“I told you. I don’t have anyone else.”
“So get a shrink,” I said.
Edie rolled the shirt back over her belly. Five months, I guessed. Maybe a hundred. I had no fucking clue when it came to this baby shit. “Why don’t you get rid of it?” I said.
“I’m keeping the baby,” she told me. “People in this town think I’m a whore anyway. So now they’ll have their proof. But I’ll have my child.”
I snuffed the joint out in the fish’s mouth. I thought the sucker looked happy. “So why do you need me?”
“Forget it,” Edie said. Her eyes were moist and mapped with tiny red veins. The smoke. Or maybe tears.
I let out a huff. “This just isn’t what I expected.”
“I understand,” Edie said, rubbing her stomach.
But I don’t think she truly did. She had no idea I wanted to kiss her again. Maybe even more. There was no use bringing that up now. My father had won after all. “So what can I do for you?”
“I need you to talk to your father for me,” she said.
“And tell him what?”
“Tell him I need his help,” she said. “Financial support.”
I laughed. “If you remember, he quit his job working for you. He doesn’t have a dime. And you’ve got this big house. Your business.”
“The business is dead,” she said. “He helped piss away every last penny.”
I thought of those bills the color of baby clothes. FINAL NOTICE. FINAL NOTICE. FINAL NOTICE. “You’ve got your house,” I said.
“I can’t pay the mortgage anymore, and my ex-husband refuses to lend me money. Listen, if you could just talk to him. Explain my situation. I need some help getting back on my feet. Believe me, I’d rather get a bank loan than beg from that bastard. But the bank would laugh me right out of the building.”
I thought of my mother’s money, hidden somewhere in case of an emergency. No doubt she would keep her fifties and hundreds at the bottom of one of her music boxes—a plastic ballerina twirling every time my mother made her deposit. I thought of the half brother I already had living on Bleecker Street. If I helped Edie, I would know this brother or sister. I wouldn’t have to wonder. My mind flip-flopped like that fish come to life on dry land: I could lend her some dough for a bit and she could pay me back down the road without my mother knowing.
No, I couldn’t.
Yes, I could.
I couldn’t. I could.
I couldn’t.
Just then Edie reached her hand up and touched the dried slit of her wound. She rubbed gently with her pinkie and naked ring finger. I pictured all five of my father’s fingers curled into a tight fist, swinging into her soft face. I hated him for doing that to her.
“I could—” I blurted as the “couldn’t” faded to black.
“Talk to your dad?” Edie said.
“No. I could lend you some money.”
“Dominick,” she said. “That’s very sweet. But I need real help. A lot of money.”
I wondered how much I could get away with. After all, my mother would never really use it. “Listen,” I said, figuring the math would come later. “We both know my father won’t give you anything. So let me loan you some cash for a while. You’ll be surprised at what I can come up with.”
The phone rang—sharp and unfamiliar. Leon. Suddenly our plan seemed as crazy as one of my mother’s. I didn’t want him to know about this part of my life anymore. Edie wasn’t a Penthouse girl or Hustler whore. She was choiceless and sad, like so many other real-life women seemed to be. I wanted to let the phone ring and ring. But Edie went to the kitchen where I could see her and answered. “Dominick Pindle?” she said like a question, eyeing me from the doorway. Her free hand pressed to her cheek.
A faraway voice in my head said, He’s not here. He is riding his bike in the parking lot behind the Doghouse. He is home eating canned tomato soup in front of the tube with his mother. I looked at Edie and shook my head no. I slid my index and middle fingers across my throat in the way that means “cut.” It looked like I was slashing the skin there, the breathing tube beneath. Again and again I slashed. Shook my head no.
“You must have the wrong number,” Edie said. “There’s no one here by that name.”
When she hung up, I looked at her—bruises, belly, and all. “If I get you the money,” I told her, my voice angled and serious, “it’s just between you and me.”