One Good Hustle (26 page)

And now I’m here. The sliding glass door is open and the television is on. The sheers are drawn but I can see Marlene sitting on the couch, bent over the coffee table. She’s playing cards. Solitaire, it looks like. Since when does Marlene play solitaire?

I can hear a rerun of
Alice
but I can’t see it. Marlene lays her cards down uncertainly, as if she isn’t quite sure of the order of things any more.

The canned laughter roars and one of the actors yells a twangy, “When donkeys fly!”

Marlene looks up and blinks at the TV and then sets the deck down and picks up a thin paperback and a pencil. Crossword puzzles? She stares at the page and then carefully prints something. Her hands look frail from here, not like the pale, elegant hands I’ve always known, but pink and bony and raw. If a chicken had hands, they would look the way Marlene’s do.

I open my mouth to make some sort of noise to announce myself, but then I stop.

Say something. You can’t just stand here spying on her like a goddamn peeping tom
.

But I don’t. I just listen to the people on television rail at one another in familiar voices:
Stow it, Flo! Kiss my grits!
Big laughs.

I stand still and listen to the catch-phrases I’ve heard a thousand times and all the phony laughter and when the theme music starts up to let me know it’s over, I nod a couple of times as if to show that I’ve been listening, as though somebody flesh-and-blood has been talking to me all this time.

I turn and slip quietly down the cement path and into the alley where I won’t be seen.

TWENTY-EIGHT

“
THERE SHE IS
,” Ruby says when I come into the kitchen. “How goes the battle, Sammie?”

Jill is sitting at the table. She looks dreamy-eyed and blushy as if she’s just won the Miss Universe Pageant.

I stare at her. She grins. I suppose that she and the Roaming Nose made up today. I wonder if she caught a glimpse of me leaving the Pantry.

“How’d your visit with your mom go?” Ruby asks. She rinses her hands in the sink and wipes them with the tea towel on the counter.

“Fine.” I look at the box of French onion soup mix behind her. Ruby’s been mixing an envelope of the stuff with hamburger meat in a ceramic bowl. I love that stupid bowl. It’s white with these goofy yellow ducks along the sides. Makes me smile every time I see it. Hamburger meat and French onion soup mix is one
of Ruby’s favourite recipes. Soon she’s going to crack an egg into that duck bowl and mash it all around, then fry us up some burgers for dinner. Or maybe Lou will barbecue.

“Well? How was she?” Jill asks in high, gushy voice. “Did you just hang out or did you go out somewhere together?”

It sounds as if she’s got something she wants to say but she’s trying to make a show of giving a damn about someone else in the room.

“What’s going on?” I ask, mostly because I don’t feel like lying. I’d finally called Marlene from a pay phone and said that something had come up. I’m really sorry, I told her. Will you be around tomorrow?

“I’ve got a meeting at six with my sponsor,” Marlene said. “But I’m around in the afternoon.”

Sponsor? Took me a second to figure out she was using AA-speak. The foreign country of Our Apartment now has a complete foreigner living inside of it.

I look at Jill. “What’s with you?”

Jill looks at Ruby and Ruby looks at me.

“Jill has some news,” Ruby says on her way to the fridge.

I bet. Jill appears as if she might blast off at any moment. “Roman asked me to marry him!” Her voice is slurry and squeaky as if she’s drunk with glee.

I glance at her left hand: nothing but bangles on her wrist and a silver thumb ring. “He actually proposed? With an engagement ring?”

Ruby walks back to the counter with an egg, cracks it on the side of the bowl and plops it into the raw meat.

Jill looks exasperated a second before she says, “The
point
is, he said that breaking up made him realize how much he loves me and he wants to be with me. He wants to spend his life with me. I asked him straight up, you mean marriage? And he said, yeah. One day.”

Ruby’s hands are in the bowl now, squashing the meat and egg together.

“So, you’re not actually
engaged
,” I say. “You’re sixteen.”

She looks as if she can’t believe what a twat I am and gives me a smile as smug as hell. “There’s sixteen and there’s
sixteen
, baby. I’m not in the same universe as, say,
you
. Or most girls my age. Can you seriously imagine me dating a sixteen-year-old
boy?
”

Isn’t anyone going to say,
Come on kid, seriously?

Ruby is still kneading the meat. Her face has a funny little smirk on it. The same one she wore when she cornered me in Jill’s bedroom five or six weeks ago. Inscrutable chicken: the game that Ruby excels at.

Jill taps a cigarette loose from the pack on the table and lights up. Exhaling, she says, “Can’t you just be happy for me, Sammie?”

“A good friend doesn’t just say what you want to hear, Jill.” Ruby lays a damp tea towel over the bowl of meat and puts it in the fridge. “A good friend tells you her honest opinion.”

My eyes flick from Ruby to Jill. I’m such a creep. You’re supposed to be excited for a person when she says she’s getting married. I should at least act a little happy that she’s happy. “Maybe you could just date him again for a while and see how it goes?”

Jill rolls her eyes. “
Obviously
, we’re going to be dating. But we have a commitment now.”

Ruby sits down at the table. “Did you see your messages by the phone, Sammie?”

I walk back into the hall, glad to escape, and peer at the little pad on the wall with the dangling pencil:

Sammie—Drew called. 12:30 p.m
.

Sammie—Your dad called. 3:30. He’ll try again tonight
.

Drew called and Sam called. Doesn’t make sense to see those two names together on the same piece of paper.

Like a wolf and a lamb. It repeats in my head like a nursery rhyme.
Drew and Sam, like a wolf and a lamb
.

“You going to join us for dinner tonight?” Ruby calls. “Lou’s gone to pick up buns and lettuce.”

I read the second bit on the pad again slowly, word by word as if I’m translating.
Sammie: Your dad called. 3:30. He’ll try again tonight
.

It’s the wolf you need if you’re going to get along in this world. Suddenly I’m tearing up as if there’s a cold wind hitting my face.

“Sammie?” Ruby says. “You there?”

Sam is where I’m supposed to be.

“Yes,” I say finally. “Thank you.”

My eyes move from the words on the pad to the phone and part of me wonders why the hell it doesn’t ring. The writing on the wall says it will ring. It should ring right now. I check my watch. What’s “tonight” supposed to mean? Is that after dinnertime? Dinner’s at six-ish. Seven? Eight? Any old time
before midnight? I want to get a chair and sit here in the hall and watch until the phone does what it’s supposed to.

Dinner drags on for years. I only catch snatches of conversation. I don’t make any.

I do hear Lou say, “I thought you said Roman was a loser and
loogan
.”

Jill says she’s going to get nail extensions.

Ruby’s million-year-old friend Adele isn’t doing well. Something about a hospice.

What’s a hospice? I wonder. It sounds worse than a hospital. I should be in a hospice. Maybe they’d remove the cotton batting from my head.

Sharp noise cuts through the fog: A chair leg scraping the floor, a car horn, an ambulance siren—every squeal makes me jump, turn in my chair and look toward the phone.

“Don’t worry, he’ll call,” Ruby says.

Oh God, could you quit jinxing me, Ruby? Could you just shut your big trap before you make Sam disappear all together?

After dinner Jill gets up from the table and goes downstairs to her bedroom to call her “fiancé.” I wash the dishes while Ruby dries. My belly feels like a circus act—as if a family of tightrope walkers is in there, teetering from one side to the other, back
and forth. Lou is sitting at the table, staring out the window into the backyard while he pokes his teeth with a toothpick.

I can’t hear Jill when she’s downstairs. Can’t tell for sure if she’s still on the phone but I damn well know she is. She’d be back upstairs gloating if she weren’t.

Every couple of minutes I look over my shoulder to the hall door that leads down to the basement and Jill’s room. Get off the goddamn blower!

After half an hour, Lou picks up the hall extension and says, “Jill, wrap it up. I’m expecting a call.” He drops the receiver back in the cradle, stands beside the phone still toothpicking his teeth and then he picks up again and says, “Jill, put the phone down. Now.” He listens, says thank you, and hangs up.

He steps back into the kitchen, big and beleaguered.

“Who are you waiting to hear from?” Ruby asks with her little Buddha lilt.

“I’ll never know if she keeps talking to that jackass,” Lou says, then opens the door off the kitchen that leads to his and Ruby’s bedroom, and clomps upstairs.

I love Lou. Lou is the best thing about Jill. He is the best thing about Ruby. What would it be like if Lou was my dad? Who would I be if Lou and I were married?

The four of us are in the living room, Ruby and Lou sitting close on one couch and me fidgeting alone on the other. Jill stands by the window and watches the road. The place stinks
of her wafting perfume. Jill has had a bath and put on fresh makeup, and blow-dried her hair to never-before-seen heights. Roman said he would be by at seven-thirty or eight to pick her up. It’s now nine o’clock.

An old Scorsese movie called
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
is about to come on television. I’ve seen it before with Marlene. She loves Ellen Burstyn. She loves that movie. I like it too. I guess we sort of relate to it, even though Marlene and I have way more secrets than the mother and son in that show. I wonder what it will be like to watch it without her.

“Why don’t you call and see what’s taking him,” Ruby suggests to the back of Jill’s head.

Will everybody just stay off the goddamn horn!

“I’m not calling him,” Jill says. “I’m going out.” She turns around and looks at me, her arms folded tight across her chest. The gold cross dangling from her neck is caught between squashed-together boobs. “Want to go to a movie, Sammie?”

I look from her to the commercial on the television: a woman in a flowery dress runs, slow motion, through a field. The gravelly announcer’s voice says,
Come to find the beautiful fragrance of Jontue: Sensual but not too far from innocence
, as a man on horseback searches for her, his cape flapping in the wind.

“We
are
watching a movie,” I say and gesture at the TV as if the show has already started.

Jill glances to the screen as the prince on horseback finally finds the girl in the flowery dress. Romantic music plays as they ride away on his horse together.