Rodney and Otis sat in the living room watching a bowling match on television that Otis had settled on. Out in the kitchen, Rodney’s mother worked by herself, knocking pots on the stovetop and turning the faucet on and off, muttering the whole time to nobody in particular. There was more noise than usual out there, and if Otis caught this, he gave no evidence of it. His eyes didn’t move from the screen, from the scatter of pins and the pumping fists of thick-mustached men.
“Rodney,” his mother suddenly called out.
Otis broke from the show for a brief moment, giving Rodney a look.
“Come help me wash this pan,” she said, tapping the side of a roaster. It had been lasagna, and she had overcooked it. Cleaning that pan would be an ordeal.
“Can’t it soak?”
“Come in here and keep me company.” Her voice was elevated, high and birdlike. Forced into something that was not her at all. “It sure gets lonely in this kitchen by myself, you know.”
Otis said, “Go on to Mama,” and jutted his chin out at him.
Rodney gave Otis a twist of his lip and shuffled over to the sink. He let the water run and dropped in some soap, moving his hand over the topography of the pan bottom. His mother remained next to him, sponging the countertop in slow, circular movements that hardly resembled any real cleaning.
“So?” she said.
“So what?”
“So, how is school?”
“Fine.” When did she ever care about school?
“Who’s your teacher again?”
“Miss Carr.”
She whispered, Miss Carr, and then she started swirling the sponge again. “Otis says there’s a teacher at the school who has a wooden leg,” she said. “I never heard that before. Have you?”
Rodney had never heard anything of the kind. A wooden leg. He ran through the faces of every teacher he knew, and tried to picture them walking in the halls, across the playground toward their students all lined up against the wall. There was no one he could think of who could have a leg made of wood.
“It sounds like a lie to me,” he said.
“It might not be true, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a lie,” she said. “It could be that Otis is just teasing.”
“Same thing,” Rodney said, “A lie is a lie.”
“Teasing is supposed to be fun, like a joke. Lying is”—she paused—“deceptive. Wrong.” She stopped with the sponge and turned to face him. “Let’s say that someone told you to keep the truth from me,” she said, “or to give me an answer that wasn’t true, even though I asked you point-blank.” She pointed the sponge at him. “That would be lying.”
Where was this coming from and, more important, where was it going?
“Sounds like a couple of old ladies gossiping.” Otis had come into the kitchen and pulled a chair from the table and slid into the seat, his legs stretched all the way to his filthy socks.
“She said you told her someone at my school had a wooden leg,” Rodney said.
“That’s what I heard,” he said. “Some woman named Brown or Green, or something like that.”
“There’s no one at my school with a color for a last name.”
Otis snorted. “Oh you’re the expert all of a sudden?” he said. “You’ve been in this place not even a year and you know all about who works at that school and who doesn’t.”
The lasagna pan was clean now, but Rodney kept on scrubbing.
His mother dropped the sponge in the sink and turned around to look at Otis. “I get the feeling sometimes there’s some secret between you all that I’m being kept out of,” she said, “What do you say to that, Rodney?”
Otis said, “What do you say to that, Rod? Mama wants to know what secrets you’re keeping from her.”
Rodney could feel eyes on him, like spider legs on his neck. They’d had a deal, right? Rodney had done what Otis had told him to do, and he hadn’t whispered a single word to anyone else about it. Every night he lay in bed with the payment for that loyalty hidden less than a foot beneath him. What was Otis trying to do here? Test him?
He picked up the pan from the sink and handed it to his mother. “It’s all done,” he said. He wiped his hands on his jeans and kept his eyes locked on hers. “I don’t have secrets.”
“You’d better not,” she said. “I went through this enough with your father; I don’t need to relive it now.”
She glanced quickly at Otis, who laughed and said, “I don’t know what you think could happen right under your nose that you wouldn’t know about.”
“Yeah, well, I notice you’ve got a lot of pocket money lately. And what about all that stuff in the garage? I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much crap in my life. Why anyone would be willing to pay good money for it, I’ll never understand.”
“I’m a resourceful man,” Otis said. “I’m a mover and a shaker. You should be happy.”
“I’ll be happy when I know what the hell is moving and shaking under my own roof,” she said. She took the pan and dropped it into the lower cupboard with a pointed racket, then stomped from the kitchen and to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
Rodney wiped down the counter and turned to leave, but Otis was right there, standing in his way. His arms hung loosely at his sides, fingers wiggling like he was typing on a typewriter. Rodney stepped to one side, and Otis mirrored him. A simple curl raised at one side of his mouth.
“What?” Rodney took a step back. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Good. You’d be smart to keep it that way.”
Rodney pushed off from the counter and moved to circle past Otis. He didn’t get one step beyond before Otis grabbed hold of his arm.
“That night …” He squeezed down, his fingers working themselves into the muscle. He leaned in close, his breath hot against Rodney’s ear. “You didn’t exactly come away empty-handed.”
“I didn’t ask for anything.” He pulled back against Otis’s grip, but those fingers held tight.
“You sure as hell didn’t refuse what you got, either.”
Rodney pulled back again. “You’re hurting my arm,” he said. “Otis—”
There was the sharp sound of the bedroom door clicking open, and Rodney’s mother’s voice calling down.
“Otis. Come and talk. Please.”
Otis reached over and gave Rodney a little shove in his shoulder. “I guess you can’t pick the rose without getting pricked by thorns,” he said with a wink. “Don’t stay up too late reading.”