Carter Clay (37 page)

“Well, then”—with his finger, Carter follows the outline of one of the tablecloth's little chicks—“I guess it's lucky I'm just here to visit my sister.”

Cheryl Lynn hesitates, then grins and raps her brother's shiny head with her knuckles. “You're right.”

While Carter sits on the boys' bed to pull off his boots, Cheryl Lynn sits in the director's chair that serves as the family clothes hamper. She inclines her head toward the door, through which it is possible to see Jersey and Katherine and the boys watching television. “Can I shut the door a minute?” she whispers.

Carter stares wearily at the boot he works from one foot with the toe of the other boot. “They'll know you're talking about them if you shut the door, Cheryl Lynn.”

“Well.” She takes a deep breath. She is nervous. “Are you going to tell me about—what you're up to?”

Carter eases onto the mattress and lies down. “Things with Jersey and Katherine”—he twists his neck back and forth on the
pillow in a way that makes Cheryl Lynn nervous; didn't their mother used to do that same thing when she was upset?—“they was in a bad accident. Katherine hurt her head, but she's getting better, and Jersey—I got some ideas from this place I used to work on how to help her walk again. Plus prayer, of course. Faith. The pastor from the church we went to in Florida—he told how the disciples did miracles, too. Through the power of Jesus, of course. And you remember that guy, Carter McKay, that Mom used to watch? Hell—well, if you believed it, he was curing people right and left. Through faith, Cheryl Lynn. Pure and simple.”

Cheryl Lynn gives her head a shake made up of equal parts of admiration and embarrassed skepticism. She is only too happy to use the slamming of the porch door as an excuse to jump from her chair and stick her head out into the front room where James is now handing the girl a canvas knapsack.

“What's going on, James?” Cheryl Lynn asks the boy.

“I just got her something from the van.”

Cheryl Lynn nods, then returns to the bedroom. Carter has rolled onto his side, facing away from her, and she steps close to him, pokes him in the back.

“You know, there's plenty I'd like to ask you, Carter—like, where you been?”

He shakes his head without turning her way. “Long story.”

She separates the dirty clothes from the director's chair into lights and dark, and waits for Carter to begin, but he never does, and, eventually, she asks, “You going to visit Dad?”

“I hope to, sure.”

“The bastard. Still, that's good. He's getting old and all. But, hey, you need to sleep, don't you?”

“Cheryl Lynn”—Carter rolls over to face her—“listen, don't let them go off on their own anywhere.” He hesitates. “Seriously. Because Jersey might try to run off, or something.”

“She's
going to run off?” Cheryl Lynn can hardly help but laugh at the idea. “Why?”

“Well”—he closes his eyes—“she don't like me very much, Cheryl Lynn.”

The idea of any person not liking her brother makes Cheryl Lynn angry, but when Carter lifts his hand—very slow—and gestures for her to draw near, she feels a chill. She does not want to hear what Carter has to say, and so she does a funny little dancing movement toward the door, and in a voice as light as she can make it, almost teasing, she calls, “Okay, Okay! I'll watch her! You sleep!”

The girl looks up from the book in her lap when Cheryl Lynn steps out into the front room. Cheryl Lynn tries to smile as she goes to her—this girl who doesn't like Carter. “Now what kind of coloring book is that, Jersey?”

A friendly question, but it leads to a scene in which Alfred tries to yank the coloring book away from Jersey, and then receives a swat on the bottom from Cheryl Lynn that starts him off on a tantrum. Cheryl Lynn—swearing—tears through the various cardboard boxes and ruined laundry baskets that sit here and there in the front room, and yells, “Why you guys can't never put a damn thing back, I don't know! Here! Here's a coloring book, Alf, now shut up!” With her free hand, Cheryl Lynn hoists the weeping boy from the floor and onto a shoulder, from which he glares spitefully down upon Jersey.

Cheryl Lynn herself gives a testy glance in Jersey's direction. “I'm sure,” she says, as she plunks Alfred down beside the wheelchair, “your cousin won't mind sharing her pencils.”

Cousin. Jersey stares in amazement as the damp-lashed Alfred rattles through her pencils with his delicate, grubby fingers. She does not know whether to be delighted or horrified. She has never had a cousin. Cousins have always been something other people had and that you did not necessarily want—like red hair or a British accent.

Alfred sniffles and takes up a vermilion pencil. After a quick peek at Jersey, he strums the pencil lightly across the spokes of the near wheel of her chair. “My book's ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,'” he says.

Jersey nods. She feels a slight vibration from the boy's strumming. “That's—who's your favorite turtle?” she asks.

“Knock that off, Alf!” says Cheryl Lynn, and when the boy obeys, she turns to Katherine to ask, “So—you met Carter at church, huh? Carter didn't used to be much for church.”

Jersey glances at her mother, then back to her coloring book. Her pencils make an insectlike noise as the heavy paper gnaws bits of color from the leads. When Katherine continues to sit silent, Jersey says, “Our family was in an accident. My grandma didn't think she could take care of my mom. After my mom got out of the hospital. My dad”—she blinks at the sliding glass door, waiting to catch her breath, and, automatically, Cheryl Lynn turns and looks in the same direction.

“—well, my dad was killed. In the accident.”

“Oh!” Cheryl Lynn turns back to the girl. “I'm sorry!”

“I only mention it,” Jersey says, “because—my mom and Carter knew each other from when my mom was at Fair Oaks, too.” She hesitates, then adds a soft, “Where Carter worked? In Bradenton?”

Cheryl Lynn is grateful for the girl's tactful way of dispensing information.

“There Sam!”

Jersey and Cheryl Lynn turn to Katherine. Throughout the brouhaha over the coloring book, Katherine sat quiet, but now she is animated, pointing at the television, where, sure enough, there
is
her brother-in-law, Sam Alitz. In tails and a belly and a big white mustache and some gizmo that covers his hair so that he appears as bald as Carter Clay—or perhaps Sam's head, too, has been shaved. An advertisement: Sam playing the millionaire icon of a famous board game.

“Who's Sam?” asks Cheryl Lynn.

“My uncle,” says Jersey. “Sam Alitz.”

“Peekaboo!” cries Sam-the-millionaire, and several beautiful young women squeal and chase after him.

“Yuck,” says Katherine, and makes a face of disapproval that piques Jersey's interest. What was that all about?

‘Your uncle?” Cheryl Lynn rests a palm on top of James's head. “Did you hear that, kids? That guy's your cousin's uncle!”

Dark and scowling, James ducks out from under his mother's hand, then asks, “So is he our uncle too?”

“Sort of!” Cheryl Lynn says gaily. “Wouldn't that be right?” She turns to Katherine, then remembers Katherine is not up to such questions, and turns back to Jersey. “Has he been in other ads?”

Jersey is both embarrassed and pleased by this attention, and, for a moment, she draws a blank. “Well, he's an actor. He was on
American Theater Playhouse.
And if you ever saw the soap opera
Texas Oilmen
—he was a guy who had an affair for a while with the wife of the main character on
Texas Oilmen.
”

“Pete?” Cheryl Lynn drops down next to James on the couch. “I loved Pete!” Cheryl Lynn continues to stare at the television, although the board-game ad is finished and a sports star is now promoting breakfast cereal. “I got to call Maggie and tell her I can't come in! We got to do something special, you know?” She glances at Katherine, then back at Jersey. “I could take you two to the alley. I work at the bowling alley. Do you guys bowl?” She glances at Jersey's chair. “Oh, but—we'd have to leave Carter if we did that. You like videos? We could get a video.”

“Teenage Mutant Ninjas!”
Alfred cries.
“Teenage Mutant Ninjas!”

“I could make chili,” Cheryl Lynn says. “You like chili, Katherine?”

Katherine nods.

“Jesus!” Cheryl Lynn sticks her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, and rocks onto her heels. “You remember Pete, James! He always wore a white hat and his hair was sort of silvery but he didn't look old or nothing.”

James shrugs. “Maybe.”

“I could go to the store,” says Jersey. “If you need anything. I could take my mom. She's supposed to take walks.”

“Wha' about Car-er?” Katherine asks.

Cheryl Lynn gives Jersey one of the various winks she has perfected at the Bowladrome's bar: the you-know-and-I-know-that-you've-had-enough-to-drink wink. “James'll go,” she says. “Put on a shirt, James. And get us a six of Bud. I'll call ahead.”

Jersey stares out at the mossy rooftops and trees—the green light of Washington—and finds it hard to breathe. She is being submerged in the world of Carter Clay.

Submerge
is a word that first entered Jersey's vocabulary when she was a tiny girl and her parents bought a metal box trap for the riot of mice they found in a cabin they rented near a dig in Montana. After the trap filled, Joe and Jersey drove several miles in order to release the creatures far from the cabin, only to discover that the trap had no release. In seeking an alternative to those neck-snappers that so upset his wife and child, Joe had missed the instructions pressed into the box trap's metal base: “When trap is full, submerge in water.”

It made a good story. Members of the family told it now and then; and, sometimes, when someone missed an essential point, one Alitz/Milhause would whisper to another, “When trap is full. . . .”

After Cheryl Lynn finishes calling the grocery store, she steps out on the porch and latches a high hook on the screen door. When she returns to the kitchen, she tells Jersey, “Carter told me to keep you from going outside alone.”

If Jersey were less smart, she might respond to this; instead, she reaches into her sidepack, pulls out her journal, and says, “Would you like to call my uncle? I have his number.”

“Call
Pete
?” Cheryl Lynn slaps her hands to her cheeks. “But we probably better wait till Carter gets up—hadn't we?”

Without looking up from the journal through which she pages, Jersey says, “I'll call collect. If you're worried about costs.”

“Collect!” Cheryl Lynn just has to laugh at the idea of making a collect call to the actor who played Pete.

Before leaving for England for two weeks, Sam Alitz changed the message on his machine to something in a mobster mood: “This is Sam, see. Your message or your life, see?” But all that Jersey hears is the operator informing her that there is currently no one at that number to accept a call.