Little Blue Lies (11 page)

“It's none of my business, Dad. I hope she did win and that she's going to be the happy heartbreaker for the rest of her life, but she didn't win, and she's working every possible shift at that stupid shop and she's walking dogs to the moon and back, and I hope that
that
makes her the happiest heart-breaker in the solar system, but frankly I have
no
insight into this situation, nor into any other situation that involves Junie Blue, other than that
every
situation involves Junie Blue and every situation involving Junie Blue is making
me
blue.”

I take another gulp of the beer and peer over the rim of the glass at my chastened-looking father sipping his water through a straw.

“You're upset,” he says wisely.

We stare across at each other for several seconds, both drink glasses remaining like shields in front of our faces.

And I laugh. “Yeah, Dad. I guess I am.”

“Love is like getting fat, O. If you take a long time building it up, it takes a long time burning it off.”

I shake my head at the depth of his wisdom. “It's like
fat
?”

He laughs. “Yeah, that might not be my best work there.”

“You ever been fat, Dad?”

“Oh, God, no.”

“So, then, how—”

“Unless you're still going with the metaphor. Simile? Whatever. If fat means love here, then, oh, God, yes. I am fat inside out for your mother. Make no mistake, Son. I am a blob for your mother.”

“Wow. What can I say? That's just sweet as hell. And no, I don't think I want any dessert, thanks.”

“Ah,” he says, calling for the check. In seconds he is paying and signing, and as I finish the scraps and dregs, he fills the conversational void. “So, you don't believe she's got the ticket?” he says casually.

“Thanks for lunch,” I say, and beat it out of there before he has even calculated the tip. He's shockingly slow with numbers.

I have just about convinced
myself that I can move on. By “move on” I mean I can have thoughts that don't entirely revolve around Junie. I can consider my father's offer of a job for life—no—and the prospect of college—not yet—and what that leaves me for near-term options—beats the squat out of me—without my mind being paralytic with concerns and worries and speculations about the existence of lovely June.

And then my phone does that thing that it does. Message.

I'm coming over.

It's from her.

And just like that, as if all the psychological masonry that I had just carefully tapped and pointed into place has been rocked with a 6.5 tremor, I come spectacularly to rubble again.

I jump out of bed, grab some clean underwear—that's right, this time I was doing
exactly
the type of mind-clearing exercise they think I'm always doing—and I get dressed as if I am going to Wimbledon or boating or my own baptism, but
in my bright beautiful whites I am confident that this is the sunny reboot of my summer right here.

The doorbell rings, and I hear my mother padding to the door—but sorry, Mom, I cannot be denied—and I take three stairs at a go and practically break my ankle at the bottom, but I wobble and careen to the door first and fling it open on the wrong, wrong, wrong shade of goddamn blackened Blue.

“What are you doing here, Ronny?” I say.

“Is that what passes for hospitality in this house?” he says.

“Yes,” I snarl.

“No,” Mom says, extending her hand to shake the beast's big meaty paw.

“You have lovely hands,” he says, and he
kisses
one of them. A noise comes straight through my stomach wall, like when you need to retch but you fight it down. I won't fight next time. “Lovely artist's hands.”

“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Blue,” she overpolites.

“Mr. Blue is a weenie Bobby Vinton song from the 1970s. I'm Ronny. Especially to a lovely lady such as yourself.”

She's courteous, but she's not a dope. “Yes, thank you. So, what brings you here?”

“An appointment,” he says.

“What are you talking about?” I say. “And what are you doing with Junie's phone again?”

“You're an inquisitive little chap today. As it happens, Miss June—hey, sounds like she's naked in a magazine, don't it? Anyway, she happened to leave her phone behind again.”

“Where is she?”

“Another holiday, I guess.”

“So,” Mom interjects.

“So,” he answers, “I pick up this business card, right. Your business card,” he says, pulling my mother's card out of his breast pocket. “And it says right there on the back that there's a sitting scheduled here this morning. And I remember, I was supposed to be having a sitting, so apparently it's been scheduled for me. So, apparently, I better get myself over here. Can't be upsetting the artiste, you know what I mean?”

“Where is Leona?” Mom says in a cool way that bears no resemblance to any version of her warm self I have ever heard.

“Home,” he says, all happy-smiley. “Where she's supposed to be. Why do you ask?”

There is a crackling hot silence.

“Shall we get to it, then?” he says, that infuriatingly happy mug. He's chewing all the scenery around, like an actor hamming it up for the cameras.

Mom sits in her usual artist seat with a grim determination I usually only associate with the day she does her taxes. The portrait's subject, on the other hand, looks like he's settling into one of the better rides at Disneyland.

“This is really a lovely place you have here,” Ronny says, taking everything in, the way I imagine a burglar would.

“Please face front,” Mom says sternly.

“Where's June?” I say, standing over him. This must look like an interrogation from an old war movie.

“I told you,” he says.

“No, you didn't.”

“You know, you don't have to be here, O,” Mom says.

“I don't mind,” I say.

“What do you think about that lottery business, nobody coming forth to claim it?” Ronny says. Hard to tell who he's talking to.

“Interesting,” Mom says.

“Interesting, yes,” he says.

Knowing this particular choreography, I jump ahead. “Why don't you ask her yourself?”

“Think I didn't try that already?”

“So, what did she say?”

He pauses. “I can't repeat it in front of your mother.”

“Ha,” Mom says, a welcome spasm of joy in the middle of her determined sketching.

“Good for Junie,” I say.

“Shouldn't you be out playin' tennis?” he snaps. “Or cro-quet? That's the kind of thing your people play, isn't it? Cro-quet?”

“No.”

“Then why are you dressed like that?”

I look down at my bright and clean and sporty getup, which feels so embarrassingly inappropriate now and was probably embarrassingly inappropriate before—Junie would have mocked me more than anyone—and I am thrown back to my childish high hopes of earlier. I feel stupid, and bereft.

“You look lovely,” Mom says, making things infinitely worse.

I leave and go to my room, where I change into some jeans that are too heavy for the heat and a black button-down shirt that is the wrong color but the right material—linen—so I can look my version of tough while still surviving in breathable fabrics.

When I return to the scene of the art crime, Mom is already wrapping up the session. It lasted maybe one third of the time that Leona's did, and who wouldn't want to spend precious life minutes with the one rather than the other.

Ronny hops to his feet, anxious to see, certain of the drawing's greatness already.

Mom quickly throws a smock over it.

“Oh, you can't see this version of the work, Ronny. It's far too preliminary.”

“You need me to come back for another—”

“Not at all,” she blurts, practically lunging to stuff the
words back into his mouth. “I have all I need to work with. Now it's time for me to live with it for a spell.”

I get a chill thinking about my poor, decent-hearted mother living with
it
for even a while.

“Oh,” he says. “Okay, then. You're the artist. So lemme just . . .” He reaches into the baggy pocket of his baggy shiny black pants and pulls out a folded hunk of currency, a thicket of bills that looks like a fat green cross section of a calzone.

“Oh, oh,” she says, holding both hands outstretched defensively, blocking her very sight of the dough as if the guy were waving his manliness around, which, of course, he is. “We'll, ah . . . we'll wait and see how it comes out before we talk about anything like that. We'll let you know when it's ready. Right, O?”

“We'll be in touch,” I say, flat.

I see him to the door as Mom remains rooted to her place, and her art.

“Thanks for having me,” he hisses. “Fun to be inside your world. See how your type lives. Just like I imagined. What does your old man do again?”

“I want to see her,” I say, this coming from I don't know where.

“You,
want
 . . . ? Listen to me, sonny. You keep talking to me like that, and you'll be happy enough to see
tomorrow
, you understand?”

I understand, of course. We have reached that unfortunate place where Ronny Blue and I understand each other quite clearly.

Not a place I've ever wanted to be.

I slam the door.

•  •  •

The horseflies are savaging me. Monstrous little things. They mostly leave you alone, until you go into the water and come back out. Salt water is like some combination of Worcestershire sauce and meat tenderizer to them, and it's chow time once you settle onto the sand again.

So I don't settle. I bodysurf, bodysurf some more. Come out, get punctured a few more times, go back and bodysurf some more. It is my kind of beach day, hot but overcast, sparsely populated, nice surf for the body.

It is the finest and purest of all water sports. I feel like I harness the force of the whole damn ocean when I flatten and fly the top of a wave all the way into the sand. If you glide rather than jump into it, if you catch the exact break point, if you just make yourself available, place yourself on top of the wave, then the wave accepts you, and there is no better feeling I have ever found, no closer you'll ever get to being properly owned by the sea. And what higher state could there be than that?

Board surfing is okay. But there's a board. A level of remove.
Your belly can't scrape along the sandy bottom with a board.

“Are you following me or something?” I say as I lie right there where the latest white horse has deposited me.

“What, the beach belongs to you now?” Malcolm says, walking in up to his ankles. “I know your dad's a master of the universe these days, but—”

“My father is hardly a master of the universe. Where do you get this stuff?”

“Ear to the ground, my man. I've got my ear to the ground, and so nothing eludes me. You should try it.”

I turn my head and drop my ear flat to the sand. The remains of a wave come in and go up my nose.

“Goof,” he says, wading out into the water. I get up and join him.

He catches a wave right away, surfs it competently but jumps too hard into it and rides too low to go all the way in. I am childishly pleased at his mediocrity, and it is possible this is written on my face as he returns.

“Who cares,” he says. “It's not like it's tennis or anything.”

“You going to play at college?” I ask.

“I hope to. If you come along, I bet we could make it in doubles.”

“Hnn,” I say, September considerations chasing me right back into now. “Junie is gone on another
holiday
,” I say, and I can hear the sombre in my own voice.

“Yeah,” he says, sizing up another wave. “Don't worry about it, though. She'll be fine.”

He takes off, a little higher and lighter this time, and I follow his path all the way in. Then I follow him. I'm not surfing, though. I'm stomping.

“What do you mean by that?” I demand. “What do you know about it?”

He is wallowing in the shallows, about ten inches of water. He shushes around, eel-like, flips over onto his back to see me seeing him.

“Nothing. Junie is one tough chicklet, that's all. She can handle anything.”

“What's she handling, Mal?”

He grows quickly, visibly uneasy. Flips back over and starts lobster-walking away from me into the deeper water.

“Nothing. How would I know. Jesus, paranoid.”

I don't know where this next thing comes from. It sure doesn't come from my history or my nature or anywhere I recognize in myself.

I launch myself and dive right onto Malcolm's back. When I am there, I get a grip on his neck, and I force his head all the way under the water. I feel his face thump into the sand, and I've got him in such an awkward position that it's almost too easy to do this. I grind his face into the ocean floor as he flails back at me over his shoulders.

“Tell me what is happening,” I growl at him, insanely, since he cannot possibly meet my request. “Tell me, Ronny Blue ball boy, what is happening to Junie, or I'll kill you, I swear.”

I have him under for six, eight, ten seconds, my knees now digging hard into his back, when I sense he is weakening. And I sense . . . myself.

I throw myself sideways off him and kneel there in the water as Malcolm surges up desperately and does an hour's worth of deep breathing in ten seconds to regain the amount of his life I choked away.

“Are you
demented
?” he gasps, first kneeling, then on all fours. “You . . . have got something majorly wrong with you, O.”

I almost say I'm sorry. I come close. But not that close.