Before the county fair, the nearest I’d ever seen Don, my stepfather, get to a cow was when he ate a sirloin steak: he thought choice meat on his plate made him look sophisticated, though we lived in a pure crap part of Windfall, a hill of spoiling homes near Muleshoe Bridge that peered down on the old railroad shops.
Don was a civil engineer, a theorist. All my friends’ dads worked blue collar: bricklayers, roofers, mechanics, they wore shirts with their names embroidered on patches. Emmet Brown, who lived across the street from me, was my best friend. His dad drove a big rig. People called him Ace. He bricked things at the TV when the Steelers got a bum call: Iron City cans, pretzels, and once, the day he was supposed to take us to the county fair, some kind of plastic egg with a tail that he’d dug up from the couch cushions. It cracked against the screen and landed. It started buzzing and tracing an arc on the carpet.
Emmet jumped over to the egg and switched it off. He turned away from me, the back of his neck burning red, and went to the kitchen.
“Wait till she finds out I discovered her pussy-rattler,” Ace said to me. He stretched his arms out at me and said, “Bzzzz.” His veins bulged as if stuffed with purplish roots. I looked into his eyes, old blanket blue on strains of tomato pink. His odor, motor oil, smoke. “Y’ins take and drive up there yourselves. I’m in no condition for any of this.” He got up, handed me his car keys, and stumbled into the bathroom. He closed the door halfway; in a hallway mirror I could see him pissing in the sink.
Neither of us was old enough to drive, but tonight was the last night of the fair. Emmet knew a girl who was supposed to be there with her friend. We were hoping for some play. I went outside and gave him the keys. “Should we go?” I asked.
“I guess. I don’t know.” He told me about the girl who was waiting for us. He said she was the main event. “She’ll put out, too,” he said. I shook my head as if I understood, to show my appreciation for such a piece.
We spent a few minutes angling slate chips through a tire swing. The air was crisp and the tossed stones sizzled in it. The slate landed in more slate. We heard the phone ring inside his house. “If you drive,” I said, “I’ll go.”
“Okay,” Emmet said. He threw another slate piece. Somewhere in the pile was the egg: Emmet’d tossed it when he thought I wasn’t looking.
Ace called out to us: it had been my stepdad on the phone. Ace had told Don that we had the keys and were going to drive ourselves. Of course now I was supposed to go directly home.
I walked across the street. Emmet came with me.
Don was a prude. He believed in the social theories that make laws unbreakable. He once told me that he waited at a red light for ten minutes even though there was no traffic from any direction. Eventually a cop pulled up beside Don and told him to drive on through. I told Emmet about it. He didn’t say anything.
My mom was talking on the phone in the kitchen as Don explained to me why I couldn’t go to the fair with Emmet, who waited for me on the front porch, listening through the screen door.
Then Mom came out of the kitchen. “I have the perfect solution,” she said. “Don, why don’t you drive Darren and Emmet over to the fair? I’m subbing tonight, though. You have to be back by eleven.” My mom worked as a part-time nurse. She’d worked full time before marrying Don. She wanted us to be home by eleven so that she wouldn’t have to send my sister, Abigail, to my aunt’s place. Abigail hated it there and so did I. Everyone in the house smoked and there was never anything to eat unless somebody had cash to order a pizza.
“Okey-dokers,” Don said, “I’ll take the boys up.”
Okey-dokers. I hoped Emmet hadn’t heard Don use that word. I went back to the front porch. “I bet your real dad would’ve let us go,” Emmet said.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. My real dad lived in West Virginia. I’d seen him only a few times in the past ten years. He was a house painter. That’s all I knew as far as his biography went. But sometimes I told people that my real dad was a Formula One driver, or a stuntman, or a porno star. Anything but the “well-intentioned fuck-bubble” my mother said he was.
Don I knew a little better, though it’s more accurate to say that for a long time I felt like I only knew of him. He was born in Windfall and for some reason had gone to college way out in New Mexico. After serving in the military he came back to Windfall. My mother met him at a church-sponsored dance. Me and Abigail met him a few weeks after he proposed. I was thirteen then. At the wedding I gave her away. I have a picture of myself in a rental tuxedo. They honeymooned in the Poconos and then Don moved from his bachelor pad into our place and for a long time we didn’t talk. In fact that trip to the county fair would be the longest time we’d ever spent together. But going with him would suck. Me and Emmet had gone places with his dad before—fairs and car shows and the bowling alley, and Ace always let us run around and do what we wanted. At the same time, he wanted us to leave him alone. Though probably we were all three looking for the same thing when we went out: girls. Girls with big tits.
We rarely met any girls. But once in a while we could see Ace with his arms around some drunk woman, someone’s horny ex, even though he was married to Emmet’s mom, Violet. I think she and Ace had some kind of arrangement that Emmet pretended not to understand, and I never asked about. Later I guessed that the arrangement came about as a result of Ace’s being on the road three weeks out of every month.
We felt sick when we saw Ace with another woman. The women he met up with were tired-looking, with only the residue of a beauty that had become pockmarked and saddled from long hours of work and smoke and drink. They were the kind of women Don would call “seedy.” None of them was as pretty as Emmet’s mom, and maybe that was part of the deal as well, that he could only mess around with girls who weren’t as pretty as Violet; and there were plenty of girls like that.
It was a one-hour trip to New Germantown, and as we drove Don talked to us about the highway we were on—highway 91. It had been built just a few years before, and Don claimed to have had a big hand in designing it. “I told them that when they got to Bootjack they’d have to go up around that mountain, but they didn’t listen. They can’t afford to pay me for all my good ideas. But that one was a freebie. I told them to go around, but they started hacking into that rock face to save money and they ended up being over budget trying to cut into that hill. I told them I’d help. That’s what people need to do, is accept help.”
He started talking about international relations between the United States and France during World War II. Then he told us about a guy he knew named Bill Glass, who died because he wouldn’t let anybody help.
“What if I need help fixing a transmission because I don’t know how to do it?” I asked finally, trying to challenge him.
“Well, you get help. Can’t be afraid to ask.”
He hadn’t understood my point, which was that I couldn’t ask him about it, because he would have no idea. Or if he did have an idea, he could explain it to me only in abstract terms. And in this way he could keep his good hands clean.
I guess Emmet understood what I was getting at. Just the month before his dad had let us help him work on the Monte Carlo. “Are you trying to make me look like an idiot?” Don asked. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror. He smiled but the smile was not a friendly one.
I was trying to make Don look like an idiot. I thought it would cheer Emmet up. I wanted him to start talking and later talk about the egg. I thought I knew what it was. But I wasn’t sure. I wanted to know. I wanted to know everything, and he knew more than me.
At the fair Don paid for all three of us. Emmet got his hand stamped. “Thanks, Mr. Harlenburg.”
“We call Emmet’s dad Ace,” I said to Don.
“People used to call me Sergeant,” Don said. “In the army.”
I took off my flannel shirt and tied it around my waist. “Yes, sir,” I said. The night was about to go rotten. We’d only just arrived. It was about seven in the evening. It was deep August, the last night of the county fair. We stood just inside the entrance, Don with his hands in the pockets of his pressed slacks, looking like a golf pro. “What do you want to do?” I asked him.
Don laughed. “You guys go have fun,” he said. “I’ll just look around and do my thing. But we have to meet back here at ten. Remember your mother has a shift tonight.”
I was surprised. Emmet was surprised, too. I didn’t say anything and Don turned toward the pavilions by the football stadium and walked away. I wanted to call him back and ask if he could give me a few dollars, but hesitated and ended up borrowing from Emmet, who had eight bucks his dad gave him before we left. If Don hadn’t paid for Emmet, he would’ve had only three dollars left. Eight bucks was a lot of money for Ace to give him. And I let Don walk away with probably thirty or forty in his pocket. I needed help and didn’t ask for it.
Emmet and I were alone. We looked around for his girl. I kept wondering what Don was doing. Maybe he was looking for girls, too.
“Are you worried Don’s going to see us goofing off?” Emmet asked me.
“No,” I said. “I’m afraid we’ll see him goofing off.”
We went over by the Ferris wheel and saw two pretty girls with big boobs. “There they are,” Emmet said. We walked over and said hi. I met Emmet’s girl, Julie. Emmet kissed her.
“He’s cute,” Julie said. “This is Anita.”
Anita had on a short blue halter top that showed her stomach. She said hi. We kind of shook hands. Julie whispered into Emmet’s ear and he said, “He ain’t shy, he’s just a fag.”
I tried to smile. I could see a trail of cheerful little brown hairs going down into Anita’s pants from her belly button. She had light brown eyes, hair dyed blue-black.
“He don’t look queer to me,” she said. Her voice was raspy, like she’d swallowed a corncob.
We spent Emmet’s money to take them on the Ferris wheel. As Anita and I got into our car and the bar was pulled down, the wind blew her dark hair into my eyes. It smelled like peanuts and peaches. She held my hand as we started to go up. We looked down. Kids stared up at the balloons they had tied to their wrists. Game vendors taunted losers out of another dollar. A man dropped a bag containing a goldfish and water and kept walking.
When we reached the top I put my arm around Anita’s shoulders. I looked behind her head at my finger on her bra strap. The wind was stronger up high. We looked out over the greater distances of the fairgrounds, striped canvas tents and lines for the Tilt-a-whirl and Zombie Shack. There were some lonely people walking by themselves.
Emmet and Julie were in the car in front of us. They started making out. We watched them. Anita said, “Wow.” I wanted to kiss her but I didn’t want her to think I was trying to do it because they were doing it. Her hand was in mine; they were entwined on my lap, a few inches below my waist. I was hard. I was embarrassed. Her hand was beautiful and slender. She had a scar on her forearm that looked like it had come from a tiny scythe.
We got off the Ferris wheel and walked around a while. Emmet and I were trying not to spend money, but we didn’t have to. The girls were camping just outside the grounds and told us they had a tent and snacks and a bottle of peppermint schnapps.
“So?” Anita said, squeezing my hand.
Julie kissed Emmet. “Shall we?” she asked.
In those few seconds of silence, before either Emmet or I followed up on the proposition, Don walked out of the men’s room tucking his shirt into his pants. He looked at me, looked down, then walked past us and looked up once more and smiled at Anita and me. “Do you know him?” she asked once Don was out of sight. I told her that he was my stepdad, that he had driven me and Emmet up here.
“He’s pretty cool,” Emmet said. “He lets us run wild.”
Anita looked carefully at me. “You must be rich,” she said.
Julie was biting her nails. She spit a piece on the ground. “So you guys want to come and get fucked up?” she asked. “Or get fucked up and come?”
“Come on, Darren,” Anita said. “Your dad will never see you in the campgrounds.”
“Stepdad,” I said.
We walked across the fairgrounds to the camping area, and all four of us got into their tent. I took a few sips of schnapps and felt sick. I’d never had anything stronger than beer. Julie turned on a little radio and a flashlight, which was balanced on a cooler. She and Emmet started kissing again, and then they got up and went outside.
I was nervous. I took a few more gulps from the bottle. When I put the bottle down I bumped the cooler and the flashlight fell down. Anita put it back. She sat next to me. Her fingernails were ivory.
Her mouth was soft. She opened it wide and pushed her tongue in and out all over my lips, my chin. I put one hand under her top. I skimmed the other hand over the hair on her belly. Lower I touched the cold spark of the snap closure of her shorts.
She circled that wrist. “I wouldn’t mind fucking you,” she whispered. “But I can’t now because of my cycle.” Her cycle. I’d never heard a girl even mention her cycle. In my house those things were kept secret. The thought of her being unashamed of her cycle was arousing. And she said fuck. It sounded nice in her voice. It sounded severe and eternal.
“I don’t mind,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“We’ll see,” she said. She pushed my hand away again. Her eyebrows were sculpted into obtuse angles. She reached for my zipper. She told me to lift my hips. She pulled my pants down. “Did anyone ever give you a blow job?” she asked, her hands on my stomach.
“No.”
She smiled. “I hope you’ll remember this.”
I leaned back on my elbows and knocked against the cooler again. The flashlight fell and its light shone directly on Anita’s face. I looked at her. She looked at me. She didn’t stop. My mind was thinning. She used her hands.
Afterward she spit into a handful of tissues and went outside the tent to smoke. I pulled my pants back up and went outside with her. I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Hello.” I hugged her.
“You’re sweet,” she said. “I like guys like you.”
I felt good with her. She was nice. “Have you done that before?” I asked.
“Just a few times. Usually by request.”
A hammered bell clapped through the trees. A shout of victory rose from the fair. Anita offered me a cigarette. I put it in my pocket.
“I wonder what my stepdad is doing, walking around by himself.”
“Maybe planning to buy the place,” she said.
“We’re not rich. I mean he’s not. None of us are. He just likes to look like a tycoon.”
She lit her cigarette. “My parents are weird. My dad can’t sit at any table in the world with a shirt on. He’s got to take it off. My mom’s a school-bus driver. She gets up early, and starts her pick-ups, then comes back home because our house is on the bus route. I didn’t used to mind but now it’s just weird. I get on the bus and we pretend we don’t know each other. She’s a good person, though. Very punctual. She’s here, somewhere. My dad too. Me and Julie actually saw them sucking face on a bench in front of everybody. That’s embarrassing.”
She kissed my cheek and asked me what a tycoon was.
Julie and Emmet came along a path that ran from a forest, through the camping area, and back toward the lights and music of the fairgrounds. They were holding hands and smiling. “Time to go,” I said to Emmet. “It’s close to ten.”
We said good-bye to Anita and Julie. Me and Emmet both hugged the other’s girl and kissed her on the cheek. We promised we would write them letters.
“You’re looking at a man who has just lost his virginity,” Emmet said as we walked away. He stopped and hugged me. He kissed me on the cheek, he was so excited. “So what happened with you and Anita? Did you bang her?”
“Shit,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.” But I couldn’t resist telling him now. The night had turned out to be fun. I could think about Anita in the car, in the dusky light of the backseat, with Don, unaware, driving. “She gave me head,” I said.
“You’re kidding,” Emmet said. “I can’t wait to tell my dad about Julie. I promised him I would whenever it happened.”
When we got to the place where we were supposed to meet Don, we were fifteen minutes early, but he was already there, his arms folded across his chest, a pamphlet of some sort rolled up in one fist.
“Let’s go. We have to beat the crowd out of here.” I could see the popcorn in his teeth and nudged Emmet to check it out.
We got onto I-91, but then traffic was stopped near Locksboro, all three southbound lanes. Red brake lights climbed the hill in tiers and dropped below a ridge. We waited five minutes while Don raced through the radio stations hoping for a traffic report. Then he looked at his watch, pulled the car over to the shoulder, and got out. “Stay put, guys,” he said through the open window, and jogged ahead to see what the problem was.
Me and Emmet got out of the car and sat on the hood. “Like he’s going to be able to do anything,” I said. “He can’t even change a flat tire.”
“Maybe I won’t tell my dad what happened,” Emmet said. “I didn’t wear a rubber. Ace always told me to wear rubbers. He even gave me some but I left them at home.”
“Did you pull out?”
Emmet laughed. “I don’t want to have a kid. I wouldn’t come in her.”
“So what—in the grass?”
“She told me to. She’s like, ‘not on me, not in me.’ Did your girl swallow?”
“No,” I said. “She spit it out and then drank more of that schnapps. I think I drank too much of that crap. I feel sick.”
Emmet spat on his boot tip and rubbed it into the leather with the bottom of the other boot. “Think they don’t want to have anything to do with sperm that comes from guys like us?”
“We’re not that bad.”
“You ain’t, maybe.”
I looked behind us down the highway. The cars were backed up now for about a half mile. “My mom’s going to be pissed,” I said.
“My mom’s always pissed,” Emmet said.
I remembered the egg. “What was that thing your dad threw at the TV?”
Emmet shook his head. “I don’t know, some kind of vibrator.”
“Does your … do girls jerk off?” I meant his mother. I pictured her with the egg shimmering in her long fingers and her lips puckered into a cherry coo.
“I guess so.”
“What do they think about?”
“They think about money,” Emmet said. “They think about chickens.”
“Chickens?”
“The egg,” Emmet said. He put his hands on his crotch. “Bzzzz.”
Some fat guy was walking toward us along the shoulder. He was wearing a T-shirt that said, Instant asshole—just add alcohol. When he was close to us he stopped. “Either of you motherfuckers have a rifle?” he said.
“Motherfuckers?” Emmet asked.
“A rifle, kid,” the guy said. “Or a pistol. There’s a motherfucking bull running around on the highway up there. Some jackass was hauling it back to his hillbilly hidey-hole and it broke out of the thingy, the whatsamajig. It’s running around like crazy. It’s all crazy, everything. I’m crazy.”
“You’re drunk,” I said.
“I’m always drunk,” he said. “You want to see it?”
“See what?”
“The bull. It’s up there about two hundred yards, just under the ridge. It’s mad. It’s tripped out. You think I’m crazy, wait until you see that bull. He’s horny, too. Get it? Horny, horn, horn.” He spread his fingers out against the sides of his head and started digging his feet into the gravel at the shoulder. “Olé,” he said. “Get the picture, you retards? Where y’ins from?”
“Never heard of it. I’ve heard just about everything, but nobody’s ever said the word Windfall to me. You might as well be from Shitsville. Go check out the bull.”
We started walking up over the ridge. My legs were heavy. My sperm was in a tissue in the campgrounds. I imagined myself with bull’s horns, those horns making it harder now to lift my head. About a quarter mile up the road there was some guy swinging a lasso around his head. He was standing beside a parked car. On the other side of the car was the bull. It stood there looking stupid and psyched out like the guys on the wrestling team who took steroids. The man threw the lasso and came near to dropping it around the bull’s head.
“That’s your dad,” Emmet said. “Holy fuck.”
It was Don. He was trying to lasso the bull. “Stepdad.”
We started laughing. “If you need help,” I said, imitating Don’s cool, authoritative voice, “you got to ask for it.” We watched as he gathered the rope in again.
We were surprised; he did it well. He started swinging the lasso above his head. It went around and around. He missed and the bull started toward him. It began to lower its head. People were shouting. Don jumped into the trailer and the bull went to the guardrail and licked it.
Don reeled in the rope, set another loop in it, and let the lasso fly. It sailed in the air. Don jerked it a little, guiding it.
It landed around the bull’s neck without brushing the horns. He pulled the rope tight, then let out some slack from his end and tightened his grip. People who’d been stuck in traffic clapped and honked their horns and flashed their lights. He started tying his end of the rope to a steel ring inside the trailer. Just then the bull started running again, away from the trailer, and pulled the rope taut. But Don had tied the rope in time and the bull could only strain against it. He went up to the driver of the truck and told him something; the driver pulled ahead slowly, the trailer gate dragging along the ground. The bull followed, twenty feet behind, mesmerized by the sparks. People started clapping. It was an odd kind of slow parade. Don backed away and watched. He stood near us. We walked back to the car.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” Emmet asked.
“I worked as a ranch hand out West a few summers, putting together my college tuition. I never had to do anything like that, though. That was fun.”
We drove home listening to the radio. We were all thinking like you do on trips home from strange outings. The bull’s horns were not white. Anita had white teeth. Her eyeteeth were long.
Don looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Where’d you disappear to with those cute girls I saw you with?” he asked.
“They had a tent,” I said. “They showed us their tent.” His eyes flashed up once more and I knew that he knew. It wasn’t a bad feeling, that anybody knew. But Don’s knowing was different. I didn’t like for him to know too much about me. He looked suspicious.
“Smells like you two have been drinking,” he said. “I can smell it. I’m no idiot.”
We were going ninety miles an hour to get home in time for Mom to get to work. Don was breaking the law, driving over the speed limit by thirty-five miles an hour. “This is fun,” Emmet said. It was easy for him to say that because he wouldn’t get in any trouble. His dad didn’t care who he fucked, as long as he had a rubber, and didn’t care if he drank, as long as he didn’t drive.
“You going to tell my mom?” I finally asked Don as we got to the Windfall exit.
“Tell her what?”
“About the drinking.”
“We’ll see,” Don said.
“We just had a few sips,” Emmet said. “In fact I had a lot more than Darren.”
“Cop,” I said.
Don slowed from ninety to about seventy-five miles an hour and said, “Shit.” The cop’s red lights swirled on. Don continued decelerating and pulled off to the side of the road, waiting for the cop to catch up. He looked at his watch.
“I heard cops don’t give tickets to veterans,” Emmet said to Don. “Just show him your military I.D.”
The cop pulled over behind us and walked up to Don’s window.
“License,” the cop said. He turned his flashlight on Don, then on me, then on Emmet. “You been drinking?” the cop asked.
“No,” Don said. He almost laughed. “But there do seem to be a number of problems.” Don was shaking. The whole car was in a tremble. “I don’t have my license,” he explained to the cop. “I’ve got registration and insurance, but my license is at home. I could kick myself. I really could.”
Don got the papers from the glove box and handed them to the cop. He took them and then checked the inspection sticker on the windshield. He was standing outside the window with the light on the papers. His cruiser’s red lights still revolved, filling the car with a crimson glow. It made me want to throw up. The car still shook.
“You got to take a leak or something, sir?”
“It’s a little embarrassing,” Don said, “but worse than that. A kind of digestive emergency.”
The cop handed the forms back to Don. “What kind of emergency?”
“Diarrhea,” Don said. He was squirming around in the front seat, shaking his legs; that’s why the car was swaying.
“Diarrhea?” the cop asked. “That’s the first time I’ve heard that one. If it was me, I’d just pull off to the side of the road and shit in the woods.”
“No T.P.,” Don said. “Anyways, were almost home now. I can make it.”
Emmet and I weren’t sure if Don was lying or not. The word diarrhea made me again want to throw up. The cop shone the light on my face. I tried to look away from it but couldn’t. It was oddly comforting, the pain in my eyes outweighing the corrosiveness in my stomach and the wateriness of my mouth.
“Those your sons?” the cop asked Don.
“No,” he said.
“Well, whatever. I don’t want to witness a man shitting himself. But shitting yourself’s better than killing yourself, and these kids, just to avoid pooping your pants,” the cop said. “Consider this a Christmas gift.” Then he walked back to his car without having given Don a ticket.
Don took a few breaths and eased back onto the highway. He looked at his watch again and again said, “Fuck.”
“Do you really have the shits?” Emmet asked him.
“If I didn’t, I do now,” Don said.
I was thinking about the word no. No, those aren’t my sons. I suppose that had been the precise answer if one was allowed to say only yes or no. I thought about it for a few months.
We got home by ten-forty. I asked Emmet to come in for a while because I knew Don wouldn’t mention anything about the drinking with Emmet there. It was a family matter, a degree of privacy that didn’t exist at Emmet’s house. Once when I was there his mother threw a screwdriver at his father. It stuck blade first into the drywall above his shoulder, and he took off his ball cap and hung it on the grip.
Once in the house, Don went immediately to the bathroom. Me and Emmet sat on the sofa in the living room. Mom had her nurse’s uniform on, her hair pinned up. “You won’t believe what happened,” Emmet said to her. He liked her. People liked her, they wanted her to take interest in them.
She looked at me. “What happened up there?”
I pretended not to know what Emmet was talking about. At his house you can tell everybody you just got a blow job. You throw vibrators at TV referees. You drink and fight and piss in the sink or even a cat box: Emmet had done so. But not here. “Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing?” Emmet asked. “Oh my God. Mr. Harlenburg lassoed a bull right out on the freeway. He saved the day. Otherwise we’d still be stuck in traffic, waiting for some cop to show up and shoot it. It was cool.” He started waving his arm like he was swinging a lasso. I thought he was drunk. “Then he bullshitted a cop and got us out of a ticket.”
“Don?” Mom said. Then she looked at me and silently mouthed the same question, her eyebrows strict, amazed, above her tender eyes. Don?
Don came down from the bathroom. He told Mom the story without giving himself much credit. But I could tell he was excited: she was paying attention to him. “All in a days’ work,” he said. He handed her the brochure he’d gotten at the fair. “These people are going to open an arts and crafts store here soon,” he said. “I thought that was right up your alley. I told them we’d give them some business. Maybe get you a part-time job there if you want. Entirely up to you.”
“Speaking of jobs,” Mom said, “I’m going to be late.” She kissed him on the cheek. Then she came over to kiss me, but first took a sniff at my mouth.
I held my breath but pretended not to.
“Were you drinking?” she asked. I was about to say no.
“I gave them a little sip from a flask,” Don said. “Barely a thimbleful.”
Now Mom was even more confused. Don rarely drank. He didn’t carry a flask. He was, it seemed, without vice. But he’d started a lie and now he’d have to follow up on it. The two of them exchanged some look. She glanced at me. “We’ll talk about this later,” she said. It wasn’t clear whether she was talking to me or to Don. Then she left.
Emmet was looking at the arts and crafts brochure. There were pictures of fake flowers arranged in vases; pictures of wreaths, candles, mirrors. “Can I stay over here tonight?” he asked.
I looked at Don; it was okay with him. “Thanks,” I said. “I mean for taking us, too.”
“No problem,” he said. His voice was loud. He was starting to shake. “But I don’t want you fucking things up for your mom and me, you little jerk off. And what the fuck did you do with my driver’s license? Did you take it?”
“No,” I answered.
He smacked me on the shoulder and pulled his hand back again. Then he dropped it and went upstairs to his and Mom’s bedroom. He turned the TV on. I rubbed my shoulder.
Emmet ran across the street to get a sleeping bag and his toothbrush. I lay in bed. My mouth was still watering, making my throat smooth for the puke. I waited for Emmet. I thought of Anita, the kisses, the schnapps. Emmet hit the main event. Anita’s middle name was Clover. My head spun. The TV was loud. I guessed Emmet would stay home to referee a fight between his parents. I remembered the egg, Anita’s muffled full-mouth gags, the look in Don’s eyes when he smacked me. Now I knew him.
I ran to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet and on the toilet seat. My eyes watered into the vomit. I could hear Don pacing the hall, preparing to let me know it was my fucking mess, and I’d have to clean it up.