Ask Again, Yes (11 page)

“Aren’t you?” Kate asked. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do. Where was she supposed to look? Peter inched closer, took her hand again, slid his hand to her wrist and circled it with his fingers, took the other wrist as well. He moved his hands up to her elbows, and Kate rested her forearms on top of his. Together, they looked braced to jump. Neither of them said anything, and then their silence stretched so long that they got past wanting to fill it. He was wearing the Mets T-shirt
he’d worn at least twice a week for going on two years. It was getting too small for him—the material pulling a little across his shoulders.

“I guess,” he said.

Kate noticed that there was something different about talking with him now, aside from the circumstances, aside from him holding on to her as if he wanted to confirm that she was really there.

“Are you sure your parents were asleep?” she asked. “I’d better be back before twelve thirty.”

“Kate,” he said, and shifted a little so that now he was examining her fingers, measuring them against his own like they had when they were kids. Then he bent and kissed her knuckles. He turned her hand over and kissed her palm. Kate thought: Everything in my life has been lived only to get to this, his warm mouth in my hand. There were two pencil-eraser-sized holes at the seam of his T-shirt. He leaned forward and kissed her lips.

They parted for air and Kate shivered, though she felt calmer now that it had happened. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and then noticed him looking at her with mock pain.

“Oh, sorry,” she laughed. A car passed on Monroe and they followed the direction of its headlights as the beams traveled through the trees. It turned onto Central.

“My dad’s leaving,” Peter said. “He’s going to live in Queens with my uncle.”

“You guys are moving?”

“Just my dad.”

“Are you serious? Peter. When did he tell you?”

“Yesterday after dinner. My mom—she went berserk after, you know, when she saw you and me outside. So she called him at work and he came home and then, I don’t know. She said a bunch of stuff and I guess that’s when he decided.”

“Did he ask you to go with him and you didn’t want to, or did he not ask you?”

Peter picked at a splinter that was rising up from a plank of wood. “I think I’m better with her than he is.”

“Well what did she say?”

He picked at another splinter.

“Hey, Peter? Are you sure you don’t want to try to talk your dad into bringing you with him? I know I’d miss you, but—”

“Thing is though, Kate, I don’t think she’d be okay if I went. You know?”

“But.” Kate thought about how to phrase it and didn’t do any better than when she was little. “What’s wrong with her? Maybe there’s been a misunderstanding and if we just—”

Peter shook his head. He told her what had happened at Food King over the winter. That explained why the Stanhopes had Evergood grocery bags in their garbage can now. Evergood didn’t even sell nuts and raisins in sealed packages; customers had to scoop them out of bins. That it had been almost five months and she hadn’t heard about it at school meant that it probably wasn’t as big a deal as Peter was making it out to be, but then she considered the opposite: that it was such a big deal that the adults had been that careful not to talk about it in front of the kids.

“Peter—”

“I just wanted you to know things might be different for a while.” He kissed her again, this time for longer. She could feel his hands clutching her, moving between her rib cage and her waist. She rested her hands lightly on his shoulders and then circled them tight around him. If his mother had gone berserk after the previous afternoon when Peter had merely checked that Kate was okay, what would she do if she looked in on him tonight and found him not in his room? Kate pulled away.

“You can tell me anything, you know. I would never tell anyone.”

“I know.” He sat back on his heels. “When we were little it was different, but now—I don’t know. I think of how I want to tell you everything and sometimes when things aren’t so great at home I think about something funny you said. And the way you are with your sisters and your
parents. I used to think what my life would be like if I were your brother instead of your neighbor but then a while back I realized I don’t want to be your brother because then we couldn’t get married one day.”

“Married!” Kate nearly shouted before she burst out laughing.

“I mean it.”

The porch light went on in the house next door and they jumped apart. “We better go,” Peter whispered. Kate scrambled back to the ladder while Peter took the slide. They sprinted to the sidewalk—Kate slapped the For Sale sign as she passed by—ran down Madison, and turned onto the far end of Jefferson, where Peter stopped, scooped her up in his arms, swung her around, and then set her back down. Stumbling, giddy, they resumed their run until their houses appeared. When they got close they crouched for a moment in the shadow of the Nagles’ boxwoods.

“I’m sorry about what happened yesterday,” Peter said. Kate studied his face in the uneven moonlight and glimpsed what he would look like when he was grown. She reached up and put her hand on his neck. He closed his eyes.

“It’s okay.” None of that mattered. They were tied now by what he’d said, by the kiss, by knowing each other their entire lives. Silently, they shot out from the boxwoods like a pair of foxes—Peter to his house, Kate to hers.

They would have gotten away with it, too, if Lena Gleeson hadn’t remembered that she’d left the garden hose to a trickle after dinner. She’d just planted that hydrangea, and now she might have drowned it. She’d been asleep but something in her dreams had reminded her, jolting her awake. She arrived in the kitchen to find the back door slightly ajar. She stared at it, looked quickly to the living room to see if Francis had come home, and then wondered if she’d really forgotten to lock up. She went outside into the chilly night and turned off the water. The ground under
her slippers was sopping. She returned to the kitchen and fingered the little twist lock on the doorknob. When she went back upstairs to check Kate’s room, it felt almost good to be right.

“Where were you?” she asked when Kate finally came creeping around the holly bush to the back door. Lena was sitting on the back step. Kate gasped, put a hand over her heart.

“Mom!”

“I asked you a question. Where were you?”

Her voice sounded so calm that Kate thought, at first, she might not be in too much trouble. Behind her, Peter’s shadow cut across the lawn to his own back door.

“Hold on a second,” Lena called out, striding across the soggy lawn in her bright white bedroom slippers. “Just hold on.” She passed right by Peter and pounded on the Stanhopes’ back door.

“What are you doing? Mom! Wait. Please,” Kate said, pulling on her mother’s sleeve like a toddler. “You don’t understand. Why do you have to tell them?” A lamp on the first floor of Peter’s house was switched on. Then the kitchen light. Kate looked to Peter to chime in, to help, but Peter just sighed.

“You know,” Lena said when Brian opened the door and the light boxed them in together. She drew her robe more tightly around her body. “You can tell your wife that her son is no angel either. This was his idea, them sneaking out.” From the depths of her robe pocket she removed the paper airplane. A car pulled into the Gleesons’ driveway. A door slammed. Everyone listened to Francis walk up the path, fumble at the door for his keys. He flicked on the living room light and walked straight through the house to the back door, which was standing wide open.

“What’s going on?” he asked as he approached, though Kate could tell he’d already figured it out.

“She’ll tell you,” Lena said as she gripped Kate by the most tender part of her elbow and pulled her back toward their house. Brian held the door open for Peter, who stepped past his father with his head bowed.

“Ow,” Kate said as she tried to maneuver out of her mother’s grip.

“Am I hurting you?” Lena asked as she gripped harder.

In all the years they’d lived next door to one another, the Gleesons had never heard the Stanhopes yelling. Hearing them argue now—a woman’s voice, yes, they could all hear it, and a man’s, and Peter’s—made all of them stop to listen. Kate felt the attention deflected from her just a little. Sara appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “There’s something going on next door.”

Then she saw Kate and said, “Oh boy.” She plopped down on the couch and looked around with naked interest in whatever might happen next.

“He’s leaving them,” Kate offered, desperate to keep their focus on the Stanhopes. “Mr. Stanhope. He’s moving in with his brother. Peter just wanted to tell me.”

“It has nothing to do with you, Kate,” Francis yelled, pounding his fist on the table so hard even Lena jumped. “Make a new friend, for God’s sake. Stay away from those people.” It was his fault, he knew. Even as he was yelling he knew it was on him. Anne Stanhope rang an alarm in him the first moment he met her, and yet he’d done nothing. Because he liked Brian. Because he thought, they’re little kids, what harm? But what does a little kid care except to have another kid to play with? There was a window there somewhere when they could have replaced Peter with any other child and Kate wouldn’t have even noticed. Nat and Sara were a pair, but he and Lena could have let Kate invite friends home from school. That’s what some of Kate’s classmates did, according to Lena. It seemed so American, inviting a kid from across town when there were so many walking distance from home, but they should have done it. They should have encouraged her to go over to the Maldonados’ more often. Susannah was maybe a little dumb and that older brother
always seemed up to something, but at least their parents were normal. But Lena always said it was sweet, how Kate and Peter sought each other out. She’d stand at the kitchen window and look at them out there in the yard, always talking, talking, talking. She said it was important to have a good friend, and anyway, they’d grow out of it. One would get tired of the other and move on.

“How do you know?” Francis asked after the incident at Food King, when there was no sign of them growing apart. Brian was markedly less friendly to Francis after the New Year’s drama, and a few times he seemed outright hostile. People get funny when they know they’re in the wrong.

“It’s called adolescence,” Lena had said. “It’s called life.”

Kate looked so scrawny in her thin pajamas, her narrow little body the same as it was when she was in kindergarten, only stretched out. She was his girl, Francis thought, though he was always careful to not play favorites. His heart would swell sometimes to see her tearing around from the back of the house in any type of weather while her sisters painted their nails inside. She was the only one who might tag along with him to the hardware store on a Saturday morning, even though she knew as well as he did that they’d spend half their time there standing around with the other cops who’d been tasked by their wives to fix something, install something. Together in their black dress socks pulled up to mid-calf and their plaid shorts—all of them with their off-duty weapons holstered under their short-sleeved button-down shirts—they scrutinized every manner of bit, nail, and screw without having the first idea what to do with any of it because they’d all moved up from the city where they’d just badgered their supers until things got fixed. Having grown up in Ireland didn’t make it any different for Francis; where he came from they didn’t have ambitions of cedar decks out back. “What did you have?” Kate asked him once. “A patio?” He’d laughed. Once, when she was barely out of diapers, she gathered her stuffed animals on the stairs and told him she’d called them for muster.

But now she was thirteen and he watched her wipe her nose roughly with her open palm. Lena was always after her to stop doing that.

“Listen to me, Kate. There’s enough trouble in the world without going out and looking for more.”

Lena itemized all the things she could not do. Wasn’t there a big graduation party coming up? Well, she could count that out. Also: no phone, no television. Kate smirked and folded her arms. She didn’t use the phone anyway. She barely watched TV.

“No going outside after school,” Francis added, and Kate’s heart dropped. She felt her smirk falter. “And no more bus. Mom or I will drive you.”

Natalie appeared, rubbing her eyes. “What the heck?” she said, and then looked past her mother, past her father, and squinted at the front door. “Is that Peter? What’s he doing?” Kate jumped up and spun around. There was Peter, standing under the extinguished porch light as if deciding whether or not to knock. When he saw all of them looking at him, he raised his hands like a half-hearted surrender.

It was Francis who opened the door. “What now?” he asked, looking past Peter into the dark.

Lena said, “I think we’ve had enough for one night.”

Peter nodded, taking the comments in. His Adam’s apple tumbled up and down the chute of his skinny neck as he swallowed, grew more nervous, swallowed again. He glanced over at his house, and then, taking a breath as if he were about to dive into a body of water, he stepped inside. “Will you guys call the police please?” he asked, looking only at Kate. But instead of waiting for an answer, he simply walked past the entire Gleeson family, through the family room, through the dining room, to the kitchen, where their phone was on the wall in the very same spot as it was in his own house. They all stayed exactly where they were for a moment, listening to the hollow plastic sound of the handset being removed from the cradle.

Lena began to speak, but Francis held up his hand. “What’s happening?” he demanded, following the boy into the kitchen.

Peter looked directly at him as he spoke into the phone. “Yes. Hello. Can you send someone to seventeen eleven Jefferson Street? Yes. Please hurry. My mother has my father’s gun.”

Lena clapped her hand over her mouth as Sara and Natalie flew to the window. Kate looked only at Peter. Francis shook his head. It wasn’t possible. The boy had misunderstood. This was why bystanders made terrible witnesses. Peter’s mother had taken his father’s gun in the past, so the boy only thought she’d done it again. They thought—he and Brian—that they could keep that one detail from the kids just as they’d kept it from the rest of Gillam, but these kids knew everything. They watched and listened and knew too much.