As Simple as Snow (7 page)

It was when he got back that Mrs. Hathorne stopped wanting anything to do with my mother. She stopped seeing a lot of her friends, as if they had been the cause of all the trouble. Or maybe she was embarrassed. Then the Hathornes moved north of town. It was only a few miles away, but it might as well have been the North Pole. Carl and I still hung out, but our parents never socialized anymore. You never saw Carl’s mom.

Everyone saw Mr. Hathorne, though. After he got out of rehab, he spent his days down at Gurney’s gas station. Gurney’s was a full-service gas station; you had to go to the other end of town, to Downey’s, for self-serve, and the gas was usually the same price. You would see him anytime you went by, sitting in a black plastic chair by the front counter, sipping on a big cup of coffee. Every once in a while he might get up and clean someone’s windows, but he never pumped gas. He wasn’t working. Derek Gurney or his twin brother, Erick, did the work. Carl’s dad sat and sipped.

Carl’s mother waited before she said anything to her husband about going back to work. She gave him time to adjust to his sobriety. But Carl thought differently. “Why doesn’t he just sit on the road with a sign around his neck that says, ‘I’m a drunken out-of-work bum’?”

Carl’s father sat at the gas station for a long time. It was the only place I saw him anymore. One day after school, in the middle of October, I guess, Anna and I were walking down along the river and Carl came out of the woods, holding his hand over his right eye. I was a little embarrassed to see him, since I’d been ignoring him since I started hanging out with Anna. It was nothing personal, it was just all Anna, all the time.

“Are you all right?” Anna asked him.

“I will be.” He took his hand away and revealed a swollen mess.

“That’s going to look good in the morning,” I said.

“What happened?” Anna said.

He looked at her with his left eye and then at me. He didn’t want to say. “Customer dissatisfaction.”

“Do you want to go after the guy?” I asked.

“No, I’ll take care of it later.” He looked at my hand. I would have gone after the guy, even with my splint. I was about to say so, when Anna spoke.

“Put a raw potato on it. It’s the best thing.”

“How do you know that?” I said.

“It’s an old witch’s trick,” she said. “I can also put a curse on the person who did it.”

“That you can do,” Carl said.

I invited them both over to my house. Carl didn’t want to go to his own. And he didn’t want to be seen around town with a swollen eye. That would be bad for business. So we walked to my house.

We went in through the garage and into the kitchen, which was a mistake. We should have gone in through the front door—that way we would have avoided my mother. I should have known better; I spent every afternoon avoiding her, and here I led Carl right in on her. When we walked into the kitchen, my mother and Carl’s dad were sitting at the table, drinking coffee.

“Anna and Carl are going to hang out for a while,” I said.

My mother was startled. She got up from the table but then sat down again. “Okay,” she said. Carl’s father didn’t say anything. Carl didn’t say anything. Then, without looking up, Mr. Hathorne said, “Tell him to get out of here before I blacken the other one.” He hadn’t even moved his head; he spoke directly to his coffee. My mother looked at Mr. Hathorne. We quickly went upstairs to my room.

“What do you think that’s all about?” Carl said.

We didn’t say anything about his eye. I don’t see how Mr. Hathorne could have beaten his son and then made it over to my house. I wasn’t going to bring it up unless Carl did.

“What do you suppose he’s doing here?” he said.

“Maybe he’s been helping my mom out,” I said. “She’s always getting somebody to do her work for her.”

“Maybe they finally kicked him out of the gas station,” Anna said.

“Maybe she’s trying to help him,” I said.

“Maybe they’re having an affair,” Carl said.

Carl’s dad was at the same table, drinking coffee, a few nights after that. It got so that Anna and I wanted to see if he was there, but we didn’t want to go at the same time. It made us uncomfortable. Carl always asked if we had seen him. “You’d think that if something was going on they wouldn’t just hang around drinking coffee after,” Anna said. “You’d think she’d get him the hell out of there before anyone saw him.”

“But maybe since we saw him that first time, they figured what the hell,” I said.

“It’s strange,” Carl said.

It got stranger.

One night I came back later than usual from Anna’s after school. I was late for dinner, which is usually a crime in my house, but that night no one said anything about it. I walked in the door and there were my parents, sitting at the ends of the table as usual, and there was Carl’s father, sitting at the table with them, at my spot. He was even eating off my plate. I didn’t know what to do, so I stood there in the kitchen with my coat on, looking at my place at the table.

“Where have you been?” my mother asked in almost a friendly tone.

“Over at Anna’s. I lost track of time. I’m sorry.”

“Well, get a plate and get some dinner while it’s still warm,” she told me.

Nothing more was said. I sat at the table across from Carl’s dad.

After dinner I went up to my room and called Carl. “What happened at your house?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Your mom didn’t say anything?”

“No.”

“Well, guess what happened over here.”

“I don’t know.”

“Your father ate over here. And my dad was here too.”

“You’re not serious.”

“The three of them were sitting there as normal as can be.”

“Your dad didn’t do anything?”

“None of them did anything. We all ate dinner and then I came up here and called you. I think your dad left a few minutes ago.” Carl said that he would call me if anything happened at his house, but he didn’t call.

Carl’s father sat at my place at the table for the next five or six nights, and then it was over, without a word or a warning. This episode had ended, and no one said anything about his being in our house.

my heart, previously

Anna Cayne wasn’t my first girlfriend; I had dated Melissa Laughner in the spring of the same year. There was nothing wrong with Melissa Laughner. She was smart and nice and pretty, tall and thin, with straight brown hair. She wore glasses, sometimes, and she was quiet. Near the end of March her younger brother, Adam, had told Carl that she liked me, so I called her up one night and asked her if she wanted to go see a movie or something. She did. On the Friday of that week, her father drove us to Hilliker, where the nearest theater was, dropped us off, then picked us up when the movie was over. She said barely a word the whole time.

“I don’t think she likes me,” I told Carl on Monday.

“That’s not what her brother says.”

“Even after Friday?”

“He says she had a good time.”

“Maybe he’s just jerking me around.”

“It’s true,” Carl said. “Everyone’s out to get you.”

I found Adam after school. “Carl says that your sister still likes me.”

“Why shouldn’t she?”

“I’m not so sure things went all that well,” I said.

“She’s just shy. You didn’t tell her that I talked to Carl, did you?”

“No.”

“I mean talked to him at all.”

“No,” I said.

“All right. Give Melissa another call. If you want to, I mean.”

I don’t know whether Adam talked to his sister or not, but she was a lot different the second time we went out. She even spoke. We started going out after that, hanging out after school and on the weekends. She would call me every night, and it was all right at first. Then I got bored, I guess. I don’t really know what happened; I just knew that I didn’t really like spending time with her anymore, no matter how much we kissed. I didn’t feel a connection with her; nothing drew me toward her. Something about her made me want to be away from her whenever we were together. I take that back—there wasn’t anything wrong with Melissa Laughner. There was something about
me
that made me want to be away from her. We would sit at my house and watch TV, and the time would barely move forward to when she would leave. I didn’t know what to say around her, and the fact that she was quiet made me uncomfortable or uninterested, or both. It was easier to be alone, I thought. At that time I wanted to be alone, I guess. And then I was. More than I wanted.

I hardly knew how to get into a relationship, and I had no idea how to get out of one. I wanted to break up with Melissa, but I didn’t know what to say or what to do. Everything dragged on for a few more months, and when the freshman spring dance was coming up, Carl and I devised a plan.

Melissa and I were supposed to go to the dance together, of course, but I called her at the last minute on the night of the dance and told her that I was sick and couldn’t make it. She said that she wasn’t going to go either then, but I persuaded her to go. She could hang out with her friends and have a good time without me. She had to go to the dance. That was critical. Because when Carl saw her sitting at a table by herself he went over to her and said, “I’m sorry you guys broke up,” then acted all surprised when she acted surprised. “I didn’t know he was sick,” Carl then lied. “He told me he was going to break up with you before the dance, so I figured . . .”

Melissa immediately went home and called me. “Carl said that you were going to break up with me before the dance tonight.”

“I’m sorry about that, Melissa. I was going to, but then I got sick and I didn’t want to do it over the phone.” To tell the truth, that’s exactly how I had wanted to do it. Carl had no problem breaking up for me. In fact, I think he enjoyed it. It was simply another transaction for him. I was a coward, I admit it. And I’d like to say that I felt bad, but the next day Carl and I were laughing about it.

“You should have seen her face,” he said. “It was like I’d hit her in the head with a shovel. How often do you get to do that?”

Melissa didn’t talk to me again for a long time. She went around and told people some shit about me, and a few more people in the world stopped talking to me. I didn’t have that many friends to begin with, and now Melissa was subtracting a few more. She left notes in my locker telling me how terrible I was and how much she hated me. I ignored them. I don’t know why I was all in a hurry to get away from her; it wasn’t like I was suddenly doing something more exciting after we broke up. I would wander around town by myself, try to avoid going home to my mother, and watch Carl conduct his business. I couldn’t go with him—that was bad for business, he said—so I would follow him around, spying from a safe distance. That’s what I did now that I wasn’t with Melissa—I spied on my best friend. It was always interesting to see who was buying what from Carl. It wasn’t just the burnouts and the jocks, there were people who everybody thought were squeaky clean, good students. There were preachers’ kids and teachers’ kids, even adults, who would meet Carl behind some building or at some out-of-the-way spot, and he would hand them a small bag of something and take their money. When I got bored watching Carl, I would pretend to run into him and then walk around with him for a while. He was good, though he never talked business. He
was
business.

Melissa and I had a few classes together and we would pass each other in the halls almost every day at school, but she had stopped talking to me. We ignored each other to the point that I had almost forgotten about her. But when Anna and I found those notes in our lockers after the football game, I was certain that it was Melissa who had left them.

halloween

It had snowed the night before. I looked out my bedroom window and saw a good five inches on the ground, covering everything. The plows hadn’t come by yet, and no one had driven on the street. A perfect blanket of white stretched as far as I could see. I wished that it would stay like that, but no sooner did I wish it than I heard the sound of a shovel scraping against concrete. My father was out in the driveway. He would need help. I pulled on my clothes and a pair of coveralls, laced up my boots, put on a cap and a pair of gloves, and went out to ruin the spotless snow.

“It’s a lot of snow,” I said. “Have you ever seen so much snow so early?”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” my father said. “There’s school.”

It was costume day. Everybody was supposed to wear one. Carl went as an executive. He wore a suit and tie and carried a briefcase. His visor was tucked away in his locker and his hair was combed and neat. During classes, he pretended to be on his cell phone the whole time.

Anna came dressed in a private school uniform: black shoes, white stockings, plaid skirt, white blouse, and a blue blazer with a crest on it. She didn’t wear anything black (except her shoes), not even eyeliner. Everyone was shocked. I thought she was beautiful, but by then I thought she was beautiful all the time. On the crest, in tiny gold script, were the words “Satan’s School for Girls.” Only a few people paid attention to the details.

At first I didn’t want to wear a costume, but in the end I went as a box of Velveeta. I should have gone as a pirate. I could have put on some junky clothes and a bandanna, and had a hook cover the splint on my finger. Instead, I got a big cardboard box and attached a pair of my father’s old suspenders, so it would rest on my shoulders. I painted the box bright yellow, and had my mother help me with the logo. She made a stencil so I could paint the letters red. “Why do you want to go as a box of cheese?” she said. “It seemed like something easy,” I told her. “And who else is going to wear anything like it?”

Billy Godley, a freshman, also came as a Velveeta box. And his costume looked a lot better than mine. I had made mine too big, and it got bent when I tried to fit it into the backseat of the car. It was snowing again when I got to school, and the heavy wet flakes spotted the paint and made some of the red run. The worst thing was that I couldn’t sit down in class. The cardboard went from my shoulders to my ankles, and I had to either keep standing or take off the costume, and what was the point of that? Billy Godley had hinges in his costume, at the knees and waist, so at least he could sit on a chair, even if he couldn’t fit into a desk.