Labor Day (18 page)

Can you believe about the escaped convict? she said. My dad was talking about it with our next-door neighbor who’s a state trooper. I guess the police have this theory that he might still be in the area because they’ve had all these roadblocks up on account of the holiday weekend, and they figure they would have spotted him if he tried to get out of town. Of course he could have hidden in someone’s trunk or something like that, but they think he might be holed up someplace till he recuperates from his injuries. They’re pretty sure he must have broken his leg, at least, when he jumped out the window.

Even if he’s around, I said, he might not be so bad. He’s probably just trying to mind his own business.

Even now, as bad as I felt about him stealing my mom, it was uncomfortable hearing someone talk about Frank like he was a terrible person. In a funny way, even though I’d started wishing he’d just disappear, I couldn’t really blame him for wanting to get together with my mother. All the things he was doing with her were what I wished I could do with some girl myself.

I don’t know why people are so worked up, I said. He probably isn’t dangerous.

I guess you don’t read the paper, she said. They had an interview in it, with the sister of the woman he killed. Not only that, but he killed his own baby.

Sometimes there’s more of a story than they put in the newspaper, I said. I would have liked to explain to her about Mandy laughing at Frank, and how she’d tricked him to marry her and think Francis Junior was his son when really he wasn’t, even though he ended up loving him just as much anyway. Only I couldn’t say these things, so I just sat there, flipping through the pages on the jukebox remote, looking for some song that might set the mood.

Some cashier over at Pricemart saw him. She called up the hotline, after she saw his picture. He was with some woman and a kid. Hostages most likely. She was hoping to get the reward, but just seeing him wasn’t enough. It’s the first interesting thing that happened in this town since my mother exiled me here.

I know where he is, I told her. My house.

After I paid the bill—mine and hers—we walked outside the diner, and over to the video store. There was this movie she said I should see called
Bonnie and Clyde,
about a criminal who kidnaps a beautiful woman and gets her to start robbing banks with him. Unlike Patty Hearst, Bonnie wasn’t rich, but she was restless and bored, same as my mother must have been at the point Frank came along, she said, and like my mother she hadn’t had any sex in a long time probably. And Clyde had all this charisma, same as the man in the Patty Hearst situation.

Warren Beatty, she said. Now he’s pretty old, but back when they made the movie he was the handsomest man ever. My mother said that even in real life he had that charisma type of effect on people. He was always getting women in Hollywood to sleep with him even if they knew he was sleeping with other people too. They couldn’t help it.

In the movie, Bonnie and Clyde fell in love. They drove all around the place, holding up banks and stores and living out of their car. The odd thing was, Clyde couldn’t even have sex with Bonnie. He had some kind of phobia about that, but even without actually doing it, she still lost her perspective, just from the sex appeal. In the end they got killed. This person they thought was their friend, who was part of their gang, betrayed them to keep from going to prison.

There’s this scene at the end of the movie where the federal agents track them down and ambush them, Eleanor said. The
part where Bonnie gets killed, there’s so much blood my mother couldn’t even watch it on the video, but I did. It wasn’t even like a single shot that got her. They had these machine guns, and her body started jumping all around the seat of the car going into spasms, while the bullets keep hitting her in new places, and you could see the blood seeping through her dress.

Bonnie was played by Faye Dunaway, she said. She’s very striking. In the movie, she wore amazing clothes. Not so much the dress she had on when they shot her, but some of her other outfits.

I don’t think it would be a very good idea, me renting this movie, I told Eleanor. If my mother and Frank saw me watching it, they might get the wrong idea.

I didn’t actually want to see it myself, anyway. Thinking about the scene she described, where Bonnie gets shot, I knew I’d be more like Eleanor’s mother. Especially since it might bring to mind the current situation.

Can you imagine if your mom got killed in an ambush? Eleanor said. And you were right there watching it. They probably wouldn’t shoot at you since you’re a kid, but you’d see the whole thing. It could be extremely traumatic.

We were still standing outside the video store when she said this. A woman walked past, pushing a stroller. A man dropped a movie in the slot. The heat seemed to be radiating from the sidewalk.
Hot enough to fry an egg,
I’d heard somebody say one time
. Like the tits on a Las Vegas showgirl. Your brain on drugs.
We had only been out of the air-conditioning a few minutes and already my shirt was sticking to my skin.

Eleanor had put her sunglasses on—very large, round sunglasses that covered half her face, and for a minute she just looked at me, though the sunglasses were so dark I couldn’t see her eyes. Then she reached out one long thin arm and touched
my face. Her wrist was as thin as a broom handle. With a ball-point pen, probably, she had drawn a dotted line, and the words written on her skin,
Cut here
.

I have this really weird feeling, Eleanor said. There’s this thing I keep wanting to do only you’d think I was strange, but I don’t even care.

I don’t think you’re strange, I said. I tried not to ever lie, but this was an exception.

She took off her glasses and folded them into her shoulder bag. She looked around briefly. She licked her lips. Then she leaned over and kissed me.

I bet you never did that before, she said. Now you’ll always remember, I was the first girl you ever kissed.

I
T WAS ALMOST FIVE O’CLOCK WHEN
I got home. My mother and Frank were sitting on the back porch drinking lemonade. Her shoes were off and she was holding a bottle of nail polish. Her legs were stretched out across his lap and he was painting her toenails red.

Your father called, my mother told me. He’ll be over in half an hour. I was starting to get worried you might not make it back in time.

I told her I’d be ready and went upstairs to take a shower. Frank’s razor was there now. Also the shaving cream. A few black hairs circling the place where the water drained out. This was what it felt like, having a man in the house.

I wondered if they’d taken a shower together while I was gone. People did that in movies. I pictured him coming up behind her, putting his arm around her neck, kissing her in that place he left the mark. His tongue in her mouth the way Eleanor had put her tongue in mine.

Water running down her face. Running off her breasts. She put her hand on him. That place I was touching now, on my own body.

I thought about Eleanor, and Rachel, and Ms. Evenrud, my social studies teacher from last year, who left the top two buttons on her shirt unbuttoned. I thought about Kate Jackson on
Charlie’s Angels
and a time I was at the town pool when a girl who was someone’s babysitter had come out of the water with the two-year-old and didn’t notice the top of her bathing suit had gotten pulled down, so part of her nipple showed.

The noises Frank and my mother made in the night. Imagining that it was my bed banging against the wall, not hers. Eleanor in it, only a less skinny version of her. This one had breasts that rounded out, not a lot, but slightly. As I touched them, that song my mother always played was coming through the wall.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river.

There was a way of listening to music where, in one way or another, practically every single thing they sang was about sex. There was a way of looking at the world where practically every single thing that happened had some kind of double meaning.

I could hear Frank outside, washing the paintbrushes. When my father came by, he’d lie low. Not that my father ever stayed long. I tried to be out the door before he even made it to the front step, to keep the two of them—my father and my mother—from saying anything to each other. Or not saying anything, which was what usually happened, which was the worst.

Normally, I would have just wrapped a towel around my waist and walked through the hall to my room that way. But with Frank here, I felt shy about my thin, unmuscled chest, my narrow shoulders. He could pick me up and crush me if he wanted.

I could crush him too. A different way.

When are you going to call them? Eleanor asked me. The police.

Later I guess. I have to think about it.

I wished I didn’t, but I couldn’t get the picture out of my head, of my mother sitting at the kitchen table, him setting the coffee next to her. No big deal. He had just buttered the biscuit for her, though carefully. Doing that thing he showed us, pulling it apart instead of slicing, so there was more surface area for the butter to sink in. When she took a bite, a small dot of jam had stuck to her cheek. He had dipped his napkin in his water glass and dabbed the spot. Her eyes, when he touched her, had this look. Like a person who’s been wandering in the desert a long time, and finally, there’s water.

Breakfast, he said. Who needs anything more than this?

Remember this moment, she said.

CHAPTER 17

M
Y FATHER AND
M
ARJORIE HAD BOUGHT
a minivan, where the back door slid open instead of swinging out the way it did on our old station wagon. This type of vehicle had only recently come on the market, which meant my father and Marjorie had been on a waiting list for a couple of months before one became available. When it did, the model that showed up at the Dodge dealership had been a kind of maroon color that Marjorie didn’t like. She wanted white, because an article she’d read someplace had reported that white cars were the least likely to get into accidents.

Richard and Chloe are my precious cargo, she said. There had been a pause before she added what came next. And Henry of course.

In the end they took the maroon one. Your father has a perfect driving record, Marjorie pointed out, as if any of us was
worried about getting killed on the highway. In my case, my worries had more to do with not going out in cars. Staying home all the time was the worry. Not that going to Friendly’s with my father and Marjorie was my idea of a great outing.

They always pulled up in front of my mother’s house at five thirty on the dot. I was waiting on the front step for them. This time, in particular, I didn’t want to risk my father coming all the way up the walk to the door and seeing inside.

Richard was sitting in the back next to Chloe in her car seat, listening to a CD with headphones on. He didn’t look up when I got in, but Chloe did. She had started to say a few words by this time. She had a piece of banana in her hand, that she was partly eating and mostly smearing over her face.

Give your brother a kiss, kidlets, Marjorie said.

That’s OK, I told her. It’s the thought that counts.

What do you think about this heat, son? my father said. Good thing we went for the aircon option on the Caravan. A weekend like this, all I want to do is stay in the car.

Smart thinking, I said.

How’s your mother doing, Henry? Marjorie said. The voice she used when she asked about my mother sounded like she was asking about a person who had cancer.

Great, I told her.

If there was one person in the universe I didn’t feel like filling in on the topic of my mother, Marjorie was it.

Now that school’s starting, it would be a great time for your mom to find a job, Marjorie said. With all the college kids going back to school and so forth. Waitressing a few nights a week or something along those lines. Just to get her out of the house a bit. Bring in a little cash.

She has a job already, I said.

I know. The vitamins. I was thinking, maybe something a little more dependable.

So, son, my father said. Seventh grade. How about that?

There wasn’t much to say, so I didn’t.

Richard’s been thinking of going out for lacrosse this season, haven’t you, Rich? my father said.

In the seat next to me, Richard was nodding his head to some song none of the rest of us could hear. If he knew my father had asked him a question, he gave no sign.

How about you, old pal? my father continued. Lacrosse could be good. Then there’s soccer. Probably not football, until you put a little more meat on those bones, huh?

Probably not football anytime in the next century, I said. Probably not lacrosse either.

I was thinking about signing up for the modern dance group, I told him.

Just to see his reaction.

I’m not sure that would be such a good move, my father said. I know how your mother feels about dancing, but people might get the wrong idea about you.

Wrong idea?

What your father’s trying to say is, they might think you were gay, Marjorie said.

Or they might just think I wanted to hang around a lot of girls in leotards, I told her. Richard looked up when I said that, which made me think he’d probably been hearing everything. He just preferred to stay out of it, which was understandable.

We had reached Friendly’s now. Richard jumped out his side of the van.

Can you get your sister for me? Marjorie said.

I had figured out some time ago that this was part of her strategy for fostering a relationship between me and Chloe.

Maybe you should take her, I said. I think she’s got something in her diaper.

I always ordered the same thing: a hamburger and fries. Richard got a cheeseburger. My father got a steak. Marjorie, who watched her weight, got the Healthy Living Special of a salad and fish.

So, are you munchkins looking forward to being back in school? she said.