Further Joy (19 page)

“Who was buying beer for the trade school kids?” Sofia asked.

“Al Terry. This was near a couple weeks ago. Had to charge him, even though I don't think he did anything wrong. I don't make up the rules, I just enforce them. If they have beer, to my thinking, they might not wind up on something worse. Maybe that's misguided.”

Uncle Tunsil cut the water off and Sofia hopped up and grabbed a clean hand towel. She started drying the dishes, leaving her uncle free to gather his wallet and badge and gun and phone. He combed his hair in front of a small mirror on the wall.

“There's a sheriff in Oklahoma has this woman he uses. I follow her on the computer. She's part Indian. Her specialty is
where
. She don't know what it's going to be or who put it there, but she'll say to check the alley behind so-and-so, and sure enough, they'll find a clue. It's not an uncommon move anymore. Anyway, having another look at each of them boys in a stressful situation couldn't hurt.”

Uncle Tunsil had himself together. He shook his head at Sofia, like people did when they thought they'd been sold a bill of goods. “So up at the station say one-fifteen?”

“See you then,” Sofia said.

He slipped his sunglasses on. Sofia followed him to the door like she always did, then waited as he got in the cruiser and bumped from the driveway up onto the straight two-lane road and out of sight. The road was blanketed in shade, but the front steps of the house were already in full morning sun. Sofia stepped out into the humidity.

She was thinking about her mother now, how wary she'd seemed of Sofia when she was young. The drastic looks her mother used to give her. She remembered the doctors, the tests, being handled like something breakable. Her mother had forbid anyone to talk about Sofia having a gift of any sort. Explanation or no, a gift was out of the question. Simple motherly concern was there, Sofia knew—worry over the terrible time Sofia would suffer in grade school, perhaps beyond grade school—but also her mother had been panic-stricken at the thought of scandal. Up north, for many bygone generations, Sofia's family had been part of the lowest class, poor and of ill repute, immigrants who couldn't adjust and then simple hustling riffraff. Sofia's great-grandmother had moved south, about as south as one could move, and started fresh. She'd toiled her family to the fringe of blue-collar, taking any honest work she could find. Her daughter, Sofia's grandmother, the next in the line, had been a dependable hand and eventually a permanent
office employee at a booming citrus concern. Sofia's mother had attended a trade school, and Sofia a real college. Uncle Tunsil wasn't sensitive to this striving history like Sofia's mother had been, but it was women who'd struggled the family upward, not men. Most of the men had taken their leave, thrown their lots elsewhere.

Sofia's mother must've harbored fears that had nothing to do with her recent ancestors, or even with Sofia's well-being. No one blamed a child when these sorts of rumors made the rounds—it was the mother's doing, the softheaded mother who wanted to think her child was extraordinary, reading into things. Sofia understood all this. She didn't blame her mother for a thing. But Sofia was done with college now and she needed to figure out who she was. The rest of her life was sitting in front of her, a shapeless pale hill to clamber up, and she didn't feel prepared to begin the trek. She'd denied a part of herself for so long, had kept herself convinced of what was real and unreal, but she'd been aware all the while of a nagging doubt. It was all doubt for her now, if she was honest, because she also doubted that there had ever been a wondrous talent in her at all. She doubted that anything had ever been afoot other than coincidence and potent imagination.

She looked up through the leafless half of the nut tree, at the green-tinted sky. A few tattered clouds were strewn about, and an osprey, black at this distance, soaring so high it appeared stuck in one spot. Sofia strolled out into the yard barefoot, to the trunk of the towering tree, tiny twigs snapping under the pads of her feet, the soil still possessed of a slight coolness. She rested her weight against the gnarled bark and looked back toward the house—the steep tin roof, the bed of azaleas blooming under the front windows, the stained-glass water birds her uncle had let her hang from the eaves of the little porch. The sight of the place made her feel cozy and moored.

Sofia had her own reasons to put herself in a room with these men, but she also wanted to help her uncle. She wanted to be of use, wanted for once to be able to repay some of her uncle's kindness. Sofia had lived with him through half of high school and all of college. Now she'd been done with school for over a year and he still hadn't made a single mention of her paying
rent or even chipping in for bills. He didn't hassle her about having direction in life. He'd given her no rules, nothing but trust.

On the way to her preschool there'd been a state prison, a clutch of windblown barracks crouched behind lookout towers and razor wire, and each time her mother drove past it, Sofia would go woozy and bewildered in the back seat. Finally she'd lost consciousness one day, and her mother had pulled the car over and shaken her awake. That's when the tests started, the doctors. All that ceased as soon as her mother realized that every specialist at every clinic was going to keep saying the same thing, that there was nothing physically wrong with her daughter.

Sofia had driven back over to the prison just a few weeks ago, two towns to the east. It had looked smaller of course, still with its burnt, beaten grounds. She'd cruised past it on the soft-curving frontage road, trying not to steel herself, trying not to peer through the fences, and she'd felt nothing more than the hollow heartache anyone feels at the thought of so many men locked up with their guilt.

Sofia remembered the night terrors, but children had night terrors. She remembered the trances, remembered a man in a striped dress shirt and open white coat asking her what her middle name was, her address. And then Sofia's pen pal. The girl from Kentucky. Sofia had been seven years old, and her mother had found her in the corner of her bedroom, handwritten letters heaped on her lap, sobbing the front of her dress damp for no apparent reason. Another letter was due from the girl by the end of the week. When it didn't show, Sofia's mother called the girl's mother. Sofia's pen pal had drowned. Shannon Janicek was her name. She had slipped off an icy dock and hit her head on the hull of a boat. She had been at the park with the family of a new friend of hers, a family her mother had never met, and so her mother could not help but hold herself responsible. The regret Sofia had endured, she surmised later, was Shannon's mother's. No one had ever found out about that one, about Sofia crying with the letters. It had stayed between Sofia and her mother.

There were other episodes Sofia could remember, and, she was sure, a bunch more her mother had let her forget. On a drive across the state, stopped
at a gas station, a woman had run screaming from Sofia. They'd both been browsing the candy aisle of the little store, Sofia's mother outside pumping gas. The woman spoke to Sofia and Sofia, as if under a spell, glazed over and began reciting the woman's past, every failing and indiscretion. The woman had cursed at Sofia and fled the store, and Sofia's mother had hustled her to the restroom at the back of the building and splashed water on her face until she answered to her name again. Neither of them had said a word for the rest of the drive. That's the part Sofia remembered so clearly, the wordless drive. She didn't remember, all these years later, what she'd said to the woman in the store, but she remembered the roar of the wind in the open windows of her mother's car, remembered the burdened look on her mother's face. After that she'd knotted up something inside herself, and eventually the woozy feelings went away.

Sofia worked four mornings a week, giving tours at the Thomas Edison House over on the coast. During her last tour, shortly before lunchtime, she noticed her on-and-off boyfriend loitering at the back of the crowd. His name was James. He wore work boots and had parted brown hair. Sofia tried not to look at him, not wanting to lose concentration and forget her spiel describing Edison's establishment of a newspaper aboard a working passenger train. Sofia broke up with James often. The most recent reason she'd found to part ways was that she didn't want to tie him down, didn't want to saddle him with a serious relationship at this stage of his life. The truth was an old, ordinary story, particularly in her family: she was afraid to lose him, and the best way to avoid that was to keep pushing him away. He was handsome enough and his mind was impressive, but it was the company of his kindred heart she couldn't stand the thought of losing for good. When she was around James, her soul was calm. That was the best way she could describe it.

Sofia led her group into the final exhibit, a gallery crowded with photos of Edison clasping shoulders with various famous people. James was still bringing up the rear. An old man in a thin sweater was speaking to him, and he was leaning in and nodding. Sofia revealed that Edison had invented
paraffin paper and then gave out handfuls of wrapped candies to the kids. Four or five people walked up and tipped her, and she flattened out the bills and folded them and slipped them into her back pocket. She exited out a side door toward the parking lot, where she guessed James would be waiting.

And here he was. He came over to Sofia, crunching the broken white shells of the parking lot underfoot. He was carrying a book, which was probably about pirates or explorers. He was a public health major, but all he read about was romantic maritime adventure. Sofia had met him at college. He was a year younger, still a senior, finishing up his degree with a couple night classes.

“How come you came up here?” Sofia asked. “You could just stop by the house and knock on the door.”

“You might not answer if I knocked on the door. That's happened, you know.”

“Fair enough.”

“And anyway, I've never been to this place. It's right here and I've never been. Well, it's not
right
here. It's pretty far out of the way, really.”

“Yeah, it's a serious commute for a part-time job.”

“You're really good at tour-guiding. You seem like yourself but more authoritative, like you probably know CPR and would enjoy debating. Spirited debating.”

“People debate me about Edison all the time,” Sofia said. “They're usually right. I usually give in.”

She was walking toward her car and James was walking along with her, shortening his stride so it matched hers.

“I don't like coming to your house because your uncle feels sorry for me.”

“That's better than him thinking you're a creep.”

“I'm not so sure. It gets old, having people think you're nothing to worry about.”

They rounded a thicket of bamboo and started down a long row of glinting chrome. All the disturbed dust of the morning was hanging static in the air. James knew about Sofia's past. She hadn't told him the details but he knew the gist. He seemed to regard it all as an exotic happenstance
of her formative years, like if she'd lived in Africa as a diplomat's daughter or something. Like Uncle Tunsil, he didn't speak of it unless she brought it up, and she rarely did. Sofia didn't feel like telling him about the interviews she was planning; she didn't want to know what he'd think about that. He'd find out soon enough, the way news spread.

James believed in things—in ghosts, in God, in spontaneous human combustion. He'd once said he didn't understand the point of
not
believing in things. He made a lot of declarations and they didn't all jibe.

“So this concern you have about the sowing of my wild oats,” he said. “It's valid as a concept, but it doesn't really apply to me. I don't think I'd be breaking a big story, saying I'm not your average dude. If I have any wild oats, I'd just as soon sow them with you.
In
you? I don't think I have a mastery of that metaphor.”

“Of course you'd say that,” Sofia said. “But I'm only the second girlfriend you've ever had. There could be plenty of girls out there you'd like better than me and you'd have no way of knowing it.”

James scoffed. “First off, I'm not going to dignify that with a response. Second, isn't it my choice whether I want to date any other girls? Isn't that sort of up to me?”

“We have no brakes. We wind up spending every minute together. It can't be healthy.”

“You need breaks from me?”

“No brakes.
B
-
r
-
a
-
k
-
e
.”

James gently brushed a moth away from his pant leg, then watched it zip up toward the treetops. “I guess I don't see the problem. I guess that sounds like an ideal situation, spending every minute together.”

Sofia tried not to feel flattered, tried not to feel like she was fishing for loyalty. They reached her car, an old Datsun the color of sweet-potato flesh, and she fished around in her purse for her keys. Her purse was tiny and she still could never find anything in it. She could see the cover of James's book now. It said
THE BRITISH ROYAL NAVY
. He started walking around to the passenger side of the Datsun.

“What are you doing?” Sofia said.

“What? Getting in the car.”