In the two months since Rodney’s father had gone away it seemed that, along with his blue Impala, he had taken with him the last days of spring. The distraction of school was gone as well, and Rodney’s days had melted into an endless routine of pedaling his bicycle from one end of Hope to the other, yellow grass and concrete to yellow grass and concrete, over and over, back and forth. The high point of his day was when it was time for him to sweep out the warehouse. There, at least the dust moved around him, and he could see some sort of change occurring in his world from one minute to the next.
And yet.
It was clear to Rodney that his mother was discovering change of her own, and that the shift in her world seemed to be suiting her just fine. Hers had become a world of longer nights now, of makeup and shoes with heels, and frozen dinners left for her son in foil trays. There were the late-evening voices echoing outside in the street, the bell-like laughter between her and a girlfriend or two, finishing up gossip or whatnot, the noise of her shoes like drumbeats as she marched up the front steps. There were nights of dancing and pool, she told him (when she told him), and though he occasionally caught the glimpse of close silhouettes in the dull light of a parked car’s interior lamp, Rodney never said a thing about it to her. He wanted desperately to believe that men and women could be allowed to spend time with one another as children did, and nothing else. Laugh, and tell stories. Enjoy one another’s company but at the end of the day, return home to their families where they belonged. More than anything he had to believe this, but as time went on it was harder and harder to fool himself that any such thing could be possible.
“You’re old enough to stay home alone sometimes, right?” she asked, taking the broom from him and setting it behind her. She counted out a stack of ones from the till, putting five of them on the counter for him. There had been no reason to think she worried about him being home by himself, not in the last couple of years. He’d stayed home alone plenty of times.
“Why? So you can go out more often?”
She pulled back from him. “Listen, you. I work hard around here,” she said, waving a hand like she was casting a spell over the empty store. “I deserve a little time to myself now and then, you know?” She closed her eyes, her lips pushed together in a rosebud. “I don’t mean that as a judgment against you. You’ll always come first. You know that, don’t you?”
The words felt as vacant and dead as the space around them. He fought back the stone in his throat. “When dad comes back—”
“Oh, Rodney don’t,” she said. “Don’t keep trying to force yourself into a life based on your father’s timeline. I don’t have the foggiest idea what his plans are and neither do you. It’s okay to look for something else, when what you hoped for isn’t there anymore.” She leaned into him. “Does that make sense at all?”
It did, at least as it related to her, and what she wanted. So, he thought, that’s how it was going to be. They would just move on—as if Rodney’s father had been nothing more than a character in a scene, who’d simply walked off midsentence and disappeared from the story completely.
Rodney finished up his second can of ravioli and, as his mother had told him to do, cleaned up his mess, drying the dish and putting it back into the cupboard—the same dish that he used every night, now.
The late movie on television had grown complicated and he could not follow it anymore. Between the convoluted plot of stolen diamonds and too many double-crosses, and his drifting in and out of sleep, he finally turned it off and put himself to bed. Lying down so he could see the window, he watched for the wash of headlights against the drapes, and the inevitable sound of outside chatter.
The nonsense of the movie continued to play in his head, though, his mind stubbornly trying to untangle the bad from the worse, who had stolen from whom. And then his eyelids weighed heavy and thoughts of diamonds dissolved into flying, soaring over yellow fields and the stripe of a blue car racing over a black roadway.
And as quickly as he’d drifted he was jarred awake by the rumble of a muscle engine, and the slamming of doors. Quiet at first, and then the familiar tones of his mother, with a man’s voice layered in. Another pause and then his mother’s high giggling, and the clicking of heels up onto the front porch. The low light of the hallway spilled in through the wedge opening of his bedroom door, a habit he could not seem to break, keeping the door cracked. It was a guide to help orient himself when he opened his eyes in darkness, in those moments when he woke up and could not tell where he was. He had always liked this part, when he could look past his parents’ door to the kitchen alcove, at the flickering blue light against the wall coming from the television and know that his mother was there, still awake, curled up on the sofa watching Johnny Carson before she went off to bed all by herself.
It was the man’s voice again, louder, weaving in and out of his mother’s, just outside the front door. Rodney lay silent, blankets pulled to his chin now and he stared at the ceiling, at the putty texture, with eyes so easily tricked that they began to form clouds and constellations, shapes that turned and drifted until a simple blink of the eyelids reset the entire scene, back to the beginning.
The front door rattled and creaked and the conversation tumbled into the house with the knock of shoes on hardwood. His mother laughed again.
“Stop it.” Her voice. “You’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.”
It was quiet for a moment, and then there was a low hum, and a shuffle of some kind, a jacket maybe, sliding off and into a chair, or onto the floor.
“Slow down, cowboy.” His mother, almost a drawl.
“I will when it counts.” The man again, and then nothing. Nothing but the noise of breathing. A quick shadow fell across the floor and he heard his mother’s bedroom door click shut.
Rodney did not sleep yet, though there were no sounds happening that should keep him awake. He strained to listen for something—for anything—that might help him craft a believable story, a “safe” explanation for what could be happening in that room. A late movie playing out on the tiny black and white RCA she kept perched on the dresser. Two people, seated on opposite sides of the room, telling stories, the mother going on about her son who was in the very next room and a husband who might just walk in the front door at any moment.
In the stubborn silence Rodney seemed to drop off at last, though it was hard to tell if it was truly sleep, and whether the span of time had stretched itself over fifteen minutes or two hours. A flood of light spilled in from the hallway with the creak of the door.
“You awake over there?” A man’s voice.
The figure took up the open doorway, nearly a full silhouette, though Rodney could see that the man was draped in a bathrobe, and the robe was tied loose at his waist, the hair on his stomach sprayed thick like moss from the white waistband of briefs that showed just above the knot. In one hand he held a milk bottle and he tapped it against his leg, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. The light filled in around one side and Rodney recognized the robe as the one his father had always worn.
“What do you want?” Rodney said.
“I don’t want nothing,” the man said. “Just saying hey.”
“I got school tomorrow,” the boy answered.
“In summer?”
Rodney’s eyes adjusted some to the low light, and it was then that he was able to finally make out the man’s face. It was the cook from the Iron Rail, with the hair thick and shiny and black, all of it swept back over his head as if it had been combed or raked back with fingernails until it finally just gave up and fell down into its place. And those sideburns, dripping down from the whole mop, from the top of the ears to the hard jawline.
“Hey man, how old are you?” he said. His lips pushed from his mouth like he was holding something in there. “You old enough to drive a car?”
Rodney said, “I can’t drive. I’m only twelve.”
“Jesus. You look a lot older than that.” He tipped the milk bottle to his lips and swallowed a mouthful, the white washing around the glass as he brought it back down to his side. He wiped a sleeve over his mouth, the sleeve of Rodney’s father’s bathrobe. “I figured you’d already be trying to sneak girls in through the window.”
There was the sound of a door behind him, and Rodney’s mother’s voice, low and soft. Otis looked over his shoulder and scratched at his naked stomach, fingers raking at the black fur. A monkey.
“We shall talk another time,” he said. Then he stepped off and closed the door behind him and a breath of moonlight seeped in through the window, and for a moment Rodney thought there was someone else in there with him, a figure standing at the far side of the bedroom. His jacket, maybe, draped over the corner of his closet door. There came the low hum of voices again on the other side of the door and he turned his back to them, taking hold of his pillow and carefully wrapping it over his ears like a hood.