Beetle Boy (18 page)

Then we start to laugh. Nervous laughter, because we don't recognize the number on Clara's caller ID.

“Oh my God, Charlie. Should I answer it?”

But she waits too long, and it goes into voice mail and we listen to the message and it is the Grandville Surgical Clinic, calling to tell Clara that in regards to a Mrs. Martha Manning in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the clinic is not able to give out phone numbers to nonpatients.

Clara looks guilty as charged. “I just thought … I just thought we should … I just wanted to …”

“Jesus, Clara. Why didn't you just ask me for her number?”

“Oh, you have it? Could you go get it?”

I glare at her.

“Don't look at me like that, Charlie, I wasn't going to call her without telling you!”

“No, no, go ahead and call her,” I say. “I'll get the number for you. Seriously, call her right now.”

“Charlie … don't be like this. I just thought we should thank her.”

“Oh sure, thank her! Ask her if she wants to go with you to Liam's concert. She loves violin music.” And this is true. She played violin concertos in the mornings—Mozart and Schumann and Liszt, part of her morning routine, which became my morning routine for that blissful year. And all that time, all those mornings, my brother was ten miles away, living with our mother, playing the violin every day, and waiting to get his revenge.

Clara is asking me something. “Cheese and mushrooms? Charlie? Where are you, Charlie? Oh, be that way. I'm ordering cheese and mushrooms. And get me that number—now!”

She orders the pizza. While she is on the phone, I retrieve Mrs. M.'s phone number—written on an index card in one of the boxes. She gave it to me before she left Michigan. Clara is on hold. I flash the number in front of her face. She snaps the card out of my hand. Frowning. Then takes a pen from her cup of pens and writes in large letters above the number: “MARTHA MANNING'S PHONE #.” The pen she is using just happens to be Mrs. M.'s diamond pen. Apparently, it still works.

Mrs. M. was wrong to think I wouldn't like living with her. I liked it from day one. I liked her cozy house. I liked my room in the basement. I liked her simple cooking and her sandwiches. I liked watching TV with her in the evenings (she was obsessed with crime shows). I slept like a log on my little bed and appreciated not having to hear people having sex in the next room. My bathroom was a tad dingy, but I was used to a much worse one, and in the basement, I had complete privacy, nobody ever pounding on the door for me to hurry up and no female products overflowing from a shared cabinet.

During the first month, Mrs. M. bought a few other things for my room without asking—a little computer desk, a small bookshelf, an old stuffed chair, an alarm clock, and a clip-on lamp that could attach to the top of the stuffed chair for night reading. Whenever she would buy something for me, she would tell me that she bought it with her latest huge royalty check because she was such a successful author. It was a game with us.

The chores I had contracted to do were normal and finishable, especially compared to the unfixable mess I had come from. Taking out her trash took five minutes. Raking her leaves was a piece of cake—she had a nice new rake and a wheelbarrow. Apparently, her husband had been kind of a garage neat-nik, and she had the most well-stocked tool and yard shed that I could have ever imagined. Everything I did in that little house made sense and felt easy. My homework was easier. Sleeping was easier. I learned to cook a few simple things. I recycled. I learned how to use a food processor. Me!

Mrs. M.'s garage became a secret world of delights. Everything in it worked—nothing was broken. A shiny-new power mower, an assortment of clean buckets, and tools hanging from a shelf in symmetrical rows. I learned how to use many of them. I fixed things—a broken cupboard door, a leaky faucet, a section of loose floorboard on one end of her front porch. I got handier and faster and always put my tools back in the places where I had found them.

Mrs. M. always acted amazed that I would do any of these things without being asked. She would say, “It's not even in the contract, Charlie.”

“We don't have to be slaves to the contract, Mrs. M.”

My senior year of school was strange but manageable. I was getting along better with my peers. A few of my teachers were openly nice to me. I got a few As, mostly in my English classes. Ironically, the librarian liked me. A couple of girls seemed interested in me and invited me to their parties. I went, although I mostly stayed hidden in dark corners. I wasn't a beetle anymore, but now I had another secret—that my father had stolen the last babysitter from me and kept her for himself. I had seen too much. I knew too much about sex, although until that year, I never had any. I was afraid that the truth of this showed on my face, especially when I was trying to be charming.

Slowly that year, I reinvented myself—a serious guy with a streak of dry humor who lived alone with his odd, lovable grandmother and kept his sordid past firmly in the past. I got better at just being a teenager in high school. I learned to make small talk and be ironic. I accepted the possibility that I was reasonably good-looking. I had a few random sexual experiences that weren't disastrous, just predictably meaningless. Nobody questioned my family situation; lots of kids at my high school lived with relatives.

Once, at a party—one of those parents-away-for-the-weekend-somebody-got-a-keg events—I noticed a girl trying to catch my eye as I wandered around the house, nursing a red cup of something vile. After half an hour, I finally let her corner me in the kitchen. A few minutes of the usual high school small talk, and then she swerved into unsafe territory.

“If you live with your gram, where is the rest of your family?” Her eyes widened in alarm as she waited for my answer. No one had ever asked me so directly. I realized it was a moment of either truth or nontruth. I opted for exotic appeal: “They are no longer with me.”

Her jaw dropped. “You mean …”

I looked deep into her eyes with all the sadness I could muster. Then slowly looked away, without answering. It worked.

She said, “Oh my God, Charlie.”

I shrugged sorrowfully.

She put down her own red cup and picked up my hand and entwined our fingers meaningfully. She would comfort me, at least for a little while.

After that I started routinely telling my classmates and my teachers that Mrs. M. was my only living relative, and the more I said it, the more true it seemed. Soon only Mrs. M. knew that I had a brother—she still asked about Liam from time to time, and I told her that I was keeping in touch with him and that I would bring him over soon but then always had a plausible reason for why it wasn't a good time. I could no more have gone back to that apartment for Liam than I could have gone back to check in with Ruby. I did my best to forget them.

Then, in the spring of that same year, amazingly, I got a job. I had studied up on the tools needed to fix bicycles and learned the names of all the hottest cycle brands and I was friendly and relaxed during the job interview and it worked! The bike shop was next to the Rite Aid, and I started working twenty hours a week, after school and Saturdays. I started right away giving Mrs. M. a token amount of money from my paycheck, and she took it and said that she was proud of me for getting a job “without having any helpful connections.”

I was still working at the bike shop during the fall after I had moved into the motel, and I started to go to the Rite Aid rather frequently, even when I didn't need anything, because a certain pharmacist's assistant always smiled and said hello to me. I was completely smitten with her in her white lab coat with her tortoiseshell glasses and her thick auburn hair, always worn in a big twist halfway up the back of her head. Fantastic hair. I used to wish there was something wrong with me so I could order a prescription from her. Antibiotics! Fungus cream! Sodium pentothal!

Finally, one afternoon I got up the nerve to ask her where the Band-Aids were, and then I followed her, watching her walk from a few steps behind her in a state of shock and awe. She stopped at the bandages section of the aisle and turned around and smiled for a longer beat than usual, like it was so enjoyable to help me. She wore a name tag on the lapel of her lab coat that said
Clara.

She noticed that I was staring at it. “Where's
your
name tag?” she asked.

“We don't wear them at the bike shop,” I said. “But my name is actually Charlie.”

“You work at Bodacious Bikes? No wonder I see you all the time.”

“It's very dangerous work. I'm always needing Band-Aids.”

She laughed. It completely astounded me. It gave me the courage of a tiger. “Would you ever want to have lunch with me?” I asked her, and I said her name for the first time:
Clara.

I am grocery shopping at the neighborhood store for the first time in the two months I have lived with Clara, pushing a cart and checking off a list of groceries. I have decided that it's time for me to start cooking dinner for Clara, now that I can get around on my own. I'd learned to cook a few things, living with Mrs. M., although I am rusty and Mrs. M. had a much better kitchen. But I am determined to start doing my share.

Halfway through the list, I hear someone call my name, and this surprises me. Nobody knows me by name in Clara's neighborhood.

“Charlie Porter!” someone calls. “Is that you, Charlie? It's me, Sam Church!”

Someone is coming toward me—someone too old to be Sam Church, but it is Sam Church, my once illustrator. One of the few people in this town who might recognize me in a grocery store. I happen to know that my dad never paid him for his final contribution to my career. As he comes closer, he glances down at my walking boot and asks, “What the hell did you do to your foot, Charlie?”

“Achilles tendon,” I say. Otherwise, I would run from him. He has outstretched his hand to shake mine, no escape. I shake it.

“Sorry to hear that,” he says. He adds meaningfully, “Remember me?”

“You're Sam,” I say. “My dad's friend.”

Sam is not aging well. He has let his hair grow way too long—like crazy, never-wash-it-or-comb-it long, and he is wearing a battered khaki hat tied under his double chin and his face is that kind of red-purple that people's faces get when they drink all the time. No surprise. He was one of my dad's few drinking buddies, after all. Maybe the only one.

“So what d'ya hear these days from the old man?” he asks.

“I think he lives in Jamaica,” I reply.

“I
know
he lives in Jamaica,” says Sam. And so at last I know that my dad does indeed live in Jamaica. Instantly, I wish I didn't know; I preferred not being sure.

“Yeah, we stayed in touch for a little while,” Sam continues. “He was always gonna send me that money. You know. For doin' the illustrations.”

“I don't know anything about that,” I say.

“Somebody told me that old Dan got your little brother to do the same gig as you. That youngest-published-author gig. So there must still be books around, right? Money comin' in, right?”

“I don't think so,” I say. “I moved out a long time ago, and I didn't stay in touch with them. I don't even know my dad's address.”

“You probably know he married that little girl once he got down to Jamaica, right? What was her name?”

“I don't know,” I say.

“Your dad owes me like over two thousand dollars, Charlie. For the work I did on those last two books. Do you think you could find out how I can get ahold of him?”

“I don't know where he is,” I say. “I'm sorry he didn't pay you. He was really, really bad with money.”

Sam Church's expression darkens. He says, “I was supposed to get half. I sure as hell didn't get half.”

“I didn't get anything,” I say, equally bitter. “Except a really fucked-up childhood.”

Sam takes a step away from me, shocked. I take this moment to depart, needing to be finished with him, and he calls after me, finding his voice. “Well, if you ever do talk to your dad, tell him to call me. I'm still at the same copy shop. He can call me there.”