Shayne had dinner with the four of us again that night. Marie was being talkative for a change, and at one point she mentioned a book she had read.
“Since when do you read books?” I said. I hadn’t seen her read a book since the seventh grade.
“Now Michael …” Mom started her usual dinner table intervention, but Marie was on a roll.
“Since forever,” she said. “What do you think I do in my room all the time? Work on my hair?”
“Actually, yeah.”
“I read all the Gossip Girls. I read Pride and Prejudice. I read that vampire book …”
“Dracula?” Dad asked.
“No. The one where the vampire is a good guy, and this other guy turns into a wolf.”
“Did you read the actual books, or the comic book versions?” I asked.
Marie gave me a scathing return look. “Mikey, you’re a moron.” She batted her eyes at Shayne. “Is moron okay? Or is it too close to insane?”
“Now Marie …” Mom began, then trailed off as she saw Shayne open his mouth.
“Moron’s okay, but Mikey’s not a moron,” Shayne said.
“Right—he just says moronic things,” Marie said.
“Nobody here is a moron,” Mom said. She offered Shayne the bread basket for the third time. I think she wanted to adopt him.
I said, “Better to say stupid stuff than to do it.”
“Saying is doing,” Marie said. “When you say some-thing you are doing something. You are saying.”
“You mean if I say, ‘I’m brilliant,’ it’s the same as being brilliant?”
“No. What you’re doing is saying.”
“Yeah, well I say you’re a crunk monkey.”
Dad had clamped his jaw shut and was looking off into the distance. I wondered what would have come out of his mouth if he hadn’t been working so hard to keep it in.
Shayne must have noticed it too. He said, “Mr. Martin, how does it feel to live in a house filled with philosophers?”
“Philosophers?” He gave Shayne an uncomprehending look.
Shayne said, “Yeah, like the nature of reality: If you say something, does that make it real? Like when Mikey says, ‘crunk monkey,’ does that mean crunk monkeys actually exist?”
Dad looked at Shayne with an odd, brow-crinkling expression—maybe trying to figure out if he was being teased.
Shayne said, “It’s exactly like philosophy, only without all the—you know—logic and stuff. And with crunk monkeys.”
Dad said, “What is a ‘crunk monkey?’”
“Apparently, I am a crunk monkey,” said Marie, giving me her squinchy face.
Dad laughed; it was like a balloon popping. All the tension went out of the room, tension I hadn’t even known was there.
Dad loosened up and asked Shayne who he favored in the next presidential election.
“Dad, he doesn’t care about politics,” I said. “He can’t even vote!”
“Just because you’re too young to vote doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know who you would vote for if you could vote,” Dad said. Like crunk monkey logic, that made sense only if you didn’t think about it too hard.
Shayne said, “Who will you be voting for, sir?”
Dad told him, then spent an eternity explaining why. Shayne listened attentively, nodding in all the right places. By the time he finished, Dad had convinced himself that everyone at the table agreed with everything he had said. Of course, nobody disagreed because nobody wanted to keep talking about it.
I don’t want to give the impression that my dad is as boring as a crunk monkey. But he can be tedious when it comes to certain subjects. Politics, for example. Or submersible pumps. Do not get him started on submersible pumps. He engineers pumps for his job, and engineers are the most boring people on the planet when they talk about their work. He can go on about pumps for hours.
Once we were done discussing politics, Marie tried to move the conversation on to recent movies. Bad idea. The last movie my parents went to was Schindler’s List, before I was born. But that didn’t stop Dad from talking about it all the way through dessert. Shayne’s attentive nodding became robotic, and Marie was rolling her eyes so hard I could almost hear them squeak. Finally, I interrupted him and said Shayne and I were hoping to shoot some baskets before it got dark.
Once Shayne and I got outside I said, “Sorry about my dad.”
“Why?” Shayne asked.
“He can go on a bit.”
“I like your dad,” he said. “He’s intense.”
“I like him too, but he’s my dad.” I grabbed the basketball and made a jump shot from the side. Swish.
“HORSE,” I said, and passed the ball to Shayne.
My dad, who is six feet two inches tall, put up the basketball net when I was in kindergarten. It took me until the second grade to make my first basket. From that moment on, I dreamed of becoming the next Shaquille O’Neal. I got pretty good for a guy my size—but I’m still waiting for that growth spurt.
Shayne duplicated my shot. I dribbled the ball halfway down the driveway and sank an underhanded lob.
“You’re lucky,” Shayne said.
“Pure skill,” I said.
“I mean, you’re lucky to have such a great dad.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say to that. Shayne’s dad was in Afghanistan or wherever, and here I was complaining about my father’s social skills.
He missed the shot.
“That’s an H for you,” I said. “And you’re right. My dad’s okay.”
“I like your sister, too.” Shayne laughed at the expression on my face. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask her out or anything.”
Immediately, I did a mental flip-flop—I didn’t like that Marie was hot for him, but at the same time, it bugged me that he wouldn’t want to go out with her.
“Why not?” I said.
“I just don’t want to get tangled up.”
“You got tangled up with Jon Brande,” I pointed out, going in for an easy lay-up.
Shayne said, “I went over to his house yesterday.”
I missed the shot. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“I talked to his dad. Well, sort of talked to him.” Shayne retrieved the ball and made a two-handed overhead shot from six feet behind the free throw line. “He told me to get lost.”
“I hope Jon doesn’t find out,” I said.
Shayne shrugged.
We were tied at H-O-R when my dad came outside and started fiddling with the birdbath fountain in the side yard. The fountain had stopped working a few days before. He looked up, caught Shayne’s eye, and waved him over.
“Oh no,” I said.
Naturally, the fountain was powered by a submersible pump. Five minutes later, Shayne and my dad were in the garage disassembling the pump, and I was shooting free throws all by myself.
Later that night I was in my room working on my Trig homework when I looked up to see Marie standing in my doorway, pajamas on, arms crossed, leaning against the jamb.
“What’s the deal with Shayne?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You know. Does he have a girlfriend?”
“Not as far as I know. I’ve only known him a few days.”
“Jon doesn’t like him much,” she said.
“Jon doesn’t like anybody.”
“He likes me. Sort of.”
I didn’t say anything to that. She looked around my room as if seeing it for the first time. “You’re very neat,” she said.
“I like to know where things are.”
She half-smiled. “You were always that way. Putting your own clothes away when you weren’t even in kindergarten. This four-year-old neat freak.”
I didn’t take offense at that. It was true.
She said, “He should watch out. Shayne, I mean. He shouldn’t make Jon mad.”
“It wasn’t his fault. Shayne just tried to talk to Jon about the five hundred I supposedly owe him, which I don’t. Anyways, I don’t have it.”
“Doesn’t Mrs. Garcia pay you every week?”
“Not that much.”
Marie thought for a moment, then sighed. “I guess I could try to talk to him again.”
“Again?”
“I tried to talk to him once. I didn’t want to see you get tased again. I thought maybe if you paid him a little bit every week, it would work out.”
“That was your idea?”
“It was the best I could do.”
“Oh. Well, thanks, I guess.”
“Maybe if I tell him you really don’t have the money, he’ll forget about it.”
“How come you’re being nice to me all of a sudden?”
“I shouldn’t be nice to my baby brother?”
“I’m not used to it, that’s for sure.”
“Shayne’s nice,” she said. “He listens when I talk.”
“So you’ve decided to be nice too?” Even as I said it, it hit me: That was exactly right. Marie had a fetish for the top dog in the pound, as her list of current and former boyfriends proved, but she also had this personality defect—okay, quirk—that made her act like whatever guy she was fixated on. With Jon, it was all about being totally self-centered and not caring about anybody else. But now, for the first time, my sister had found herself panting after a dog who was actually a nice guy.