Money. I do have an income, sort of. Mrs. Garcia, three doors down, who refuses to leave her house due to her pathological fear of squirrels, pays me to run errands for her. Like picking up things from the grocery or her prescriptions from Banner Drug. She’s good for twenty or thirty dollars a week, depending on how many errands I run. Sometimes she forgets to pay me, but she always tells me how nice I look. She is one of the few people who truly appreciates the care I take with my appearance. In fact, that’s where most of my money goes. Clothes. Not that I pay full retail. I buy my clothes at thrift stores. There’s a good one over near the synagogue where there are always new suits in my size coming in—all those thirteen-year-old Jewish kids wear them once for their bar mitzvah then grow out of them. Most of the suits are pretty dark-colored and boring—I think a bar mitzvah must be something like a happy funeral—but they fit me fine because of my diminutive stature. But they are not free, and dry cleaning costs money too. And even if I quit buying new clothes and gave every dime I earned to Jon Brande, it would take me months to come up with five hundred dollars.
Mrs. Garcia’s Saturday morning grocery order was usually too heavy to carry, so I borrowed Mom’s three-wheel gardening cart and walked it over to Jerry’s Shop-n-Save. I rolled the cart right into the store. They let me do that because I am a regular.
There were about twenty items on the list, including English muffins, baking potatoes, liverwurst, graham crackers, ginger snaps, and a case of chocolate Ensure. You know what Ensure is? I drank one once. It’s like a thick, slimy version of chocolate milk. Old people chug them like Red Bulls.
I noticed that almost everything on her list was brown, so I added a bunch of bright yellow bananas, a head of lettuce, and two red apples to the cart. Mrs. Garcia likes me to be creative. I threw in a can of root beer and a Slim Jim for myself. Have you ever read the ingredients list on a Slim Jim? Love those “mechanically separated chicken parts.”
Mrs. Garcia must have just got her Social Security check; she paid me with a crisp twenty dollar bill. That increased my total cash supply to $27.92. No way would I come up with $100.00 by Wednesday. I was thinking about that as I rolled the cart back into the garage, and I was still thinking about it when I went into the house, but then I stopped thinking when I saw Shayne sitting at the kitchen counter with Marie.
Marie saw me come in and made a face.
I made a face back at her. Shayne looked at the two of us in that way he had: measuring, evaluating, computing.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Shayne was telling me about when he grew up,” Marie said.
“You grew up?” I said. Maybe I was being a little bit sarcastic, but I really meant it, in a way. I guess I had this feeling about Shayne even then, that he hadn’t ever been a little kid, that he had always been exactly the same.
Also—this is embarrassing—I think I was a little bit jealous. Like Marie was trying to steal him from me.
“You didn’t tell me he was originally from Australia,” Marie said.
Australia? I looked at Shayne and thought I detected a faintly self-conscious smile on his lips. “Let me guess. You were raised by kangaroos in the outback?”
“Aborigines,” Shayne said with a straight face.
“Of course.”
Marie wasn’t getting that it was a joke. She was all in lust. Seeing Shayne toss Trey Worthington over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes must have given her a hormonal overdose. Even if she wasn’t my sister, I think I’d have found it somewhat repellent.
“I thought you grew up in Arkansas,” I said. “Or Idaho.”
“There too,” he said without hesitating.
“And are your parents doctors, or spies, or aboriginies?”
“All three.”
Marie said to him, “You’re funny.” It came out like, You’re hot.
“I am a maze of contradictions,” Shayne said, still with that hint of a smile.
“Me too,” Marie said. “I contradict myself amazingly often.”
“I think you’re both insane,” I said.
“You shouldn’t say that,” Shayne said, suddenly serious. “Insanity is no joke.”
“What should I say then? You’re in la-la land? You’re nut jobs? Crunk monkeys?”
Shane gave me about two seconds of nothing, then asked, “What’s a crunk monkey?”
“I have no crunking idea.”
Shayne’s mouth softened, then formed a smile, and then he was laughing. Marie started laughing too. I, who was no crunk monkey, turned my back and went to my room.