Belly (3 page)

His daughter nodded.

“Every mistake you made’s in walking distance.”

Finally they turned onto Spring Street, down one block and into the driveway. It seemed like the car ride took longer than
the bus, and Belly just wanted to sit in the truck and take a nap, to wake and have his life be settled the way it was before.
They all sat in the truck for a minute, Belly and Nora and the three kids, all quiet.

“The house looks good,” said Belly. He was lying. An Erector set of scaffolding held up the front porch, and blobs of white
paint dotted the soggy cedar siding. The houses all around looked pristine, straight out of a magazine, but their house seemed
to belong on a long-gone block.

“It’s getting there,” Nora said, getting out and unstrapping the baby from his car seat. “Gene’s been working on it for us.”

“Gene, huh? He’s still around? What about your husband?”

Nora pulled the baby up her hip and the boys ran ahead inside and she said, “Don’t start.”

They walked up the creaking side porch steps. “No one’s fixed these yet, I see.”

“It’s next on Gene’s list,” she said, throwing her purse on the kitchen table and setting her Café Newton coffee cup down
on the counter. “You can work on the dining room table if you need something to fix.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It wobbles.”

Belly put his lemon meringue pie in the fridge and sat down at the table, fiddling with the leather straps of Nora’s purse.
He threaded one inside the other till they knotted up and held. “Any messages on that answering machine for me?”

“You just got here.”

“People know I’m back.”

Nora set the baby down in his walker. Belly heard the TV go on in the room behind him and the boys flopping on the couch,
fighting over the remote. “What people?” asked Nora.

“People.”

The baby waddled by him, banging plastic keys on the white rim of his walker.

“What people?” Nora said again, and he said nothing. “Belly, you just leave them alone, and they’ll leave you alone. They
let you rot down there, so just stay away from them. Especially that Loretta woman.”

He unknotted the straps of her purse, tried to keep his hands busy so he wouldn’t slam them down on the table. “You don’t
know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Sure, I don’t. Let’s just pretend I don’t know what I’m talking about. That sounds fine.”

Belly pressed on the kitchen table to raise himself up. His hips were killing him. “Where do you want me?” He picked up the
duffel bag.

“Jesus, I forgot. You’re in the attic. There’s a girl staying in your room.”

“That was very kind of you,” he said, but she didn’t smile.

“Ann’s friend is here for the week.” Nora looked at him carefully when she said the name of his second daughter. “She’s staying
with us.”

“She is?” He let the bag slide off his shoulders to the floor.

“Not Ann. Her friend.”

“Oh.”

“Bonnie.”

“Okay, then.”

“I gave her the guest room because she’s our guest, and you’re, you know …”

They looked at each other.

“What?” he said.

“Belly, can I just ask you one thing, one favor?”

“What?”

Nora opened the dishwasher and set in a couple of dirty plates. Then she picked up a greasy saucer and held on to it for a
moment and she said, “I want you to be at Stevie’s confirmation on Sunday.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Lower your voice.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked in a loud whisper.

“I’m just telling you now so you know. It’s going to be a big affair.” She set the saucer in the dishwasher, rinsed her hands,
and called to the boys, “Kids, get your suits.” Then she turned back to Belly. “We’re going around the corner to swim. To
Mrs. Radcliffe’s. We do it every afternoon. Join us if you want.”

Belly stood there with his duffel bag slumped around his feet and said, “I hate water,” and Nora said, “I know,” and she collected
the baby and the boys like she was gathering dirty laundry in her arms. She said, “Make yourself at home,” and they were gone
and the house was hollow and echoey and hot.

He looked at the phone, but the phone did not ring. He picked it up, he cradled the receiver in his hand. He put it back.
He lit a cigarette with his Maybelline lighter and he looked at her phone number scrawled in junior high school bubble letters
on the card, and when he reached for the phone again, he could not remember Loretta’s number. Fifteen years of calling that
number, and all of a sudden it was gone. He took it as a sign. He should clean up some before he saw her. He should wait for
her to contact him.

Belly sat down at the kitchen table in his son-in-law Phil’s house, the house that used to belong to Phil’s father and Belly’s
ex-best buddy, Phillip Sr. He was Belly’s first friend to die, though they hadn’t been friendly for a long time when he passed;
the man did not approve of Belly’s extracurricular activities. When Phillip Sr. used to live here, every house on the street
had a menacing look, threatening to collapse. They’d sit on the sagging front porch and drink beer and joke about their kids
hooking up and getting married, how the kids would steal their houses from them and banish them to nursing homes. By the time
that prophecy half came true, Phillip Sr. wasn’t speaking to him anymore, and the bank had taken Belly’s own house around
the corner. Just after their kids got married, Phillip had a heart attack one day while repaving the driveway. There was still
that one darker strip of tar, as far as he’d gotten before he keeled over and died, right there by his car.

In the corner of the kitchen a computer in a shocking shade of green sat atop a plastic desk. The kids’ drawings covered both
doors of the fridge, and a printed-out picture from a sonogram was taped on top. Affixed to the left door was a long list
of home repairs, almost half of them checked off, and then the ones left blank: the dining-room table, the front porch floor,
the side porch steps, the two kitchen cabinets above the dishwasher, the leaky faucet, the stone walkway leading to the kitchen
door. A silver medal from field day at the Lake Avenue School was looped around the refrigerator door. He remembered his mother
telling him the only reason to have children was to have grandchildren, but already he couldn’t recall their ages. His mother
had scolded him for not giving her a grandson. “Four daughters, four daughters. Belly, you’re doomed to a life of women,”
she’d said when Eliza, his fourth and final daughter, was born.

Belly inspected the cupboards. Fluff. Jif. Doritos. Not a real thing to eat in the house. But he opened the fridge door to
find a six-pack of Piels, his old watery favorite. What a good daughter, he thought, as he checked his watch to make sure
it was after noon. It was. It was 12:05, and he popped open the can, and that crisp sound called every cell in his body to
attention and once it was in his mouth, the hops and barley and the suds and the cold, he thought, I have never been so happy.
I have never been this happy in my life. He held the liquid on his tongue for a moment till the carbonation dissolved, and
then he swallowed.

O
ne beer sat stranded in the plastic loop when the side door burst open and Jimi ran inside, his wet suit dripping on the linoleum.

Jimi came right up to him, then he stopped and looked carefully at Belly’s eyes.

“Hiya, kid,” Belly said. He felt the whites of his eyes burning red; he felt the pure redemptive power of drunkenness.

Jimi whispered, “Grampa,” and then climbed onto Belly’s lap. He was wet, the boy was wet, and he made dark circles on Belly’s
jeans, his wet hair stuck to Belly’s stubble, and the feel of cold and wet burned on his skin but the boy put his arms around
Belly and this was his first embrace in four years. He pressed the child to him.

“Ow,” said Jimi. He climbed off Belly’s lap and scampered into the TV room.

“The kid has my eyes,” he said to Nora, who leaned against the counter with the baby on her hip. Stevie Ray stood next to
her, holding on to the baby’s foot and glaring at his grandfather. Nora hoisted the baby up higher and then Stevie Ray’s hand
hung limp at his side.

“What’s with you?” Belly asked him.

“Were you really in jail?” he asked.

“How old are you, again?”

“Thirteen,” he said.

“Shit,” said Belly. “That’s almost old enough to drive.”

“Were you?” Stevie Ray asked again.

“You bet,” he said. “Four years of it.”

“All right, enough.” Nora gave Stevie Ray a light shove. “Upstairs, change, downstairs, dinner.”

“I don’t want to change,” he said.

“Stevie, goddammit, go up and change, I said.”

The boy’s eyes widened, and he started to walk away slowly, shaking his head and whispering absolutions to himself.

“I’m sorry,” Nora called after him. “Sorry I took the Lord’s name in vain. Jesus,” she said. “You can’t say anything around
him these days.”

Nora plopped the baby in his high chair, cooing softly, wiping strands of dark hair away from the baby’s blue eyes. “My little
angel,” she said to him. “My perfect little angel.” There was something strange yet familiar about this image, something that
made him feel just the tiniest bit sick, trapped in a scene from the past.

Belly realized he had not yet left the kitchen. Nora told him the time when he asked and then he knew he’d had two beers for
every hour. That was nothing, normally that was nothing, but after four years with no alcohol—well, with some alcohol when
they smuggled it in but almost none, some but not much—after all that time, those few beers in half as many hours had his
brain cells sprained. He looked at the baby and the baby looked back at him.

“Nora, this was your high chair. Where’d you come up with this? I remember this.”

“Mom had it.”

“Oh. Your mother.” How could he have gone so long, so many days stretched into weeks and then months, without thinking of
his wife, Myrna? Guilt crawled up the back of his spine. “How is she, anyway?”

“We’re not talking about her.”

“Okay.”

Nora sat down at the table with her now cold cup of fancy coffee. “Belly,” she said. “You are welcome to stay here. Stay here
for as long as you want. Stay here till you get a job, at least. But my kids are not driving until they’re old enough to drive,
and they’re not drinking until, well, until high school, when everybody else drinks.” She slid her fingers over his. “Is that
okay?”

He withdrew his hand. “What did I say? Did I say anything?”

“You have to follow the rules.”

“Nora, honey, I have been obeying the rules for four years.” He heard his own voice break. “I am your father and not one of
your children, so don’t you go and —”

“Belly, are you drunk already?”

He said, “No.” He said, “Give me a cigarette.”

“You have to smoke outside.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You can smoke on either of the porches but not in the house,” she said.

“You’re going to make an old man with two bad hips get up and go outside every time I have to have a cigarette?”

“It’s not that much to ask, to get your ass up and walk ten feet to the porch to smoke.”

He stood in the doorway, one foot inside and one foot out, fished a cigarette from the pack in his pocket, and lit it with
his new lighter.

“Out,” Nora said. “I mean it. Let’s not get off to a bad start.” He didn’t budge. She raised her voice. “Move your ass outside,
Belly.”

He swayed in the doorway.

“Oh my god, you’re totally drunk.”

He lifted his hands in an overplayed shrug and smiled, and he exhaled smoke into the still heat of the kitchen.

“I won’t be able to, I can’t do this.” She stopped, took a breath, started again. “I don’t have room for trouble,” she said.

All the beer circled inside him, it rose up his spine and into his brain and it made the words come out. “Trouble? Trouble?
You were the most trying of the bunch, nothing but trouble your whole life, and who looked out for you? Your mother? You think
because she saved your high chair she cares about you? She was the one who called you a mistake.”

He was aware of the children standing in the doorway. Nora laid her head down on the table, and the baby pounded his fists
on the high chair and gurgled with his spit.

All the day’s nervousness had burned down to a fine dust inside him, and he felt calm and sedated and, even at this early
hour, ready to find his bed.

Nora stood up and wiped her hands on her jeans. She opened and closed the cabinets gently, taking out cans and a package of
pasta, ignoring him as the boys slumped back into the TV room, and the digital music of video games filled the air.

“Nora,” he said, and she said, “No.”

He stepped outside to the porch, put his cigarette out between the sagging and splintered wooden planks and carefully placed
the lighter in the pocket of his jeans, the lighter Maybelline had fixed up just for him, and he knew he would see her soon
and that she would save him from this house.

He waited on the porch. He waited for Nora to coax him back in, to ask him what he wanted to eat on his first night as a free
man, but she kept her head bent over the boiling water and the half-open cans and the spine of a glossy magazine. He stepped
off the porch, cowboy boots hitting macadam, and that was the moment when he finally and for the first time felt free.

T
he stillness of late-afternoon heat made his town look hazy in a movie sort of way. A slight breeze blew through the tall
pines across from School Four, where all of his daughters had gone to elementary school before it became a center for vocational
training. He walked down the hill and started up, traversing the great fault on which the city was built. Congress Park on
his left, Hawthorne Spring on his right, the wide slide of Spring Street between them.

Long ago, the day after Nora was married, he’d walked down Spring Street, alone, early in the morning, 6:00, 6:30. He’d stayed
up all night partying; those were the days when people still laid the coke out in little volcanoes on streaky mirrors in back
rooms. The wedding was at St. Peter’s and the reception at War Bar. It was one of those times when Loretta wasn’t speaking
to him, so he’d taken another girl, a girl whose name was long forgotten, but he could remember the spider-web scars from
a breast reduction reaching across her chest. At some point in the night, he’d screwed her in the bathroom; she’d been pounding
Greyhounds, and right after he finished, she leaned over and vomited grapefruit and vodka into the sink. He sent her home
in a cab, closed the place up himself, headed east, carrying the girl’s long coat in his arms as the sun rose. Nora had married
in December, amid all the gray gloom.