(10)

For the record, Aunt June never mentioned my birthday had recently passed. I don’t think she knew the date until sometime later.

The little blue house became my home, but I never thought of it that way. Not really. It was just where I stayed. Aunt June had all the warmth of a refrigerated ice tray in winter. She treated me well enough, the way you might treat a dead relative’s pet that you didn’t really want to look after.

The house was a house where everything had a place and everything better damn well be in its place. I was expected to keep my bedroom as clean and neat as a military barrack. I went to school. Watched TV. Read books. In school, I didn’t adjust right away. I was thought weird and was as popular as a prostate exam.

It wasn’t that my aunt wasn’t kind in her own way. She wasn’t one to hold your hand or put her arms around you or kiss you on the cheek. She made me go to school and to church, which I always found depressing, especially since she didn’t go and had absolutely no interest in anything theological. I think she thought it would somehow make me part of the community.

I remember one boy from my school said church was a great place to pick up girls. He might have been right. I never found out. I quit going as soon as I could drive a car and was no longer dropped off like laundry and collected an hour or so later.

For a couple of years, I wrote Ronnie, and she wrote back. Sometimes I wrote Millie, and she wrote back. Eventually the letters dwindled, then stopped. I guess even good memories must make way for new ones. I was almost happy we quit writing. That way I could quit thinking about what I had lost.

My aunt and I, if we were in the house alone and were both suffering from boredom, would talk a little. It was usually what I think of as functional talk. Do you have this or that? How are things at school? Anything you want to add to the grocery list?

I tried to direct our conversations to other places, but it was almost like you couldn’t get there from here. I wanted to know more about my father and mother, the things that as a child I might not have noticed.

My aunt surprised me one day, saying, “You know, I dated your father first. But it was your mother that caught his eye. Sad day for her. Lucky day for me. It was like I dodged a cannon full of grapeshot when he lost interest in me. Your father wasn’t worth the collected cells that made him, that handsome bastard. There was always something dark and suspicious about him, like a snake in your underwear drawer. Your mother and I weren’t close, especially for twins, but I remember telling her she should take a powder, as they used to say. Head for the hills, leave that marriage like a cow plop in the pasture.”

“Do you think she’s dead?”

She looked at me as if she might reveal a dark secret, her face quite beautiful, but she didn’t say anything. She suddenly found things to do in the kitchen.

Aunt June was like that. In a moment when you thought you might have connected, you realized, like throwing a dart, the release felt good but often the toss missed the target by more than a few inches.

One thing that changed during my time with my aunt was my father’s ghost. He didn’t visit me anymore. Perhaps he found my life too boring to haunt.

There were a few calls from Sheriff Dudley over the years, and this surprised me. When he walked off Aunt June’s porch that day, I assumed I would never hear from him again. But he called. Not once a week or once a month, but at least once or twice a year. He called to check on me. I always told him I was doing fine, and then he spent the rest of his time on the phone talking to my aunt while I stood or sat somewhere nearby, hoping there would be news of my father’s car and body.

When his call was finished, I would look at my aunt, and she would say each time something like this: “They don’t know anything more than what they didn’t know before. Dragged the lake again. Found some tires and a dead horse, but they didn’t find him. Way I figure, that fat sheriff couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a well-marked instruction manual.”

As I moved into my junior year I began to feel more like a true teenager. My aunt bought me a used car, the one that kept me out of church, a ’64 tan Impala, and boy, did it run. I had to work part-time sacking groceries to pay for the insurance, tires, gas, and so on, but I liked that. It meant I spent less time with my aunt, moving through silence like a ship through fog. I kept my studies up enough to pass. I dated. I had sex in my car with two different girls quite a few times—never at the same time, I should say. Neither of those pretty sex partners turned out to be my one true love, or me theirs.

The second one, Jennifer Kitchen, a blond beauty with a figure loaned to her by Aphrodite, was quite an obsession for a time, but football players proved irresistible to her, so her favors were taken from me and given to them.

At home I sulked about for a few weeks. It wasn’t a loss of love, as I said, but it was a loss of something. Sex, most likely. I had never discussed it with my aunt, but she surprised me by recognizing my disease.

“Got your heart broke, huh?”

“What?”

“Some girl?”

“No.”

“Bullshit. You got the look. They come and they go, Danny, and mostly they go. It’s no big thing. You would have got her pregnant anyway, and then there would be a child, and what a burden. You’d be stuck with some girl who is going to change as much as you are. Hell, buy some condoms and use common sense. Enjoy yourself for a few years. Better yet, die a bachelor. It saves on groceries.”

I didn’t know what to say to her. It was embarrassing. But that’s how it was with my aunt. Absolute silence or something insightful or mean phoned in from left field. I once asked her why she had ceased to travel after so long in Europe, and her answer was as blunt as a tossed rock.

“I have you to take care of, don’t I?”