Sex & Violence (29 page)

“I guess we’re on KP duty, A,” Soren said. He kept calling my dad that: “A”. I suppose that’s the best nickname one can get from a name like Adrian.

“What’s KP duty?” I asked.

“Kitchen patrol,” Soren said. “Military slang.”

“Isn’t this the part when we fall asleep in front of the TV?”

my dad asked. “And the women clean up?”

I tensed at the word “women.” Had my mother been there, would she be pestering us to help her? Was I the woman in this whole holiday now?

“I don’t see any women, so I say leave it,” Soren said. And so we did.

Soren went to take a shower and was gone so long I wondered if there’d be any hot water left. My dad lay on the couch, and I turned on the TV. There was a choice of football and bad chick movies and more football. My father was fiddling with his phone, smiling at the screen, like he had gotten a good message. He seemed completely content, which was fucking weird.

Maybe he was just drunk.

“How come you didn’t tell me Soren was coming?” I asked.

My dad looked up quick. “Well …”

“Because you were avoiding him?”

“I just …” he stopped. “It took a while for him to convince me it was okay.”

My dad went back to his phone, and I turned back to the TV, holding my bottle of beer tightly. At first I wanted to smash it on his head. But then I just looked at him, all bald and defenseless, his feet in socks in a curl beside me, and I felt like it was dumb for me to be mad.

***

Later that afternoon, after more football and a round of pecan pie that we all forced in with ice cream and more beer, my dad got up and said he was taking a walk. With his phone.

When the door closed, I looked at Soren and said, “He’s going out to meet whores. Or get his drugs.”

“What?”

“I’m just kidding,” I said. “He does that a lot. Disappears with his phone. He might be a government agent. Breaking codes with computers. Who the fuck knows.”

“I bet it’s that woman. The professor.”

“Brenda?”

“Yeah. She’s been calling him.”

“Really?”

Soren laughed a little. “God, Adrian never changes! Secretive motherfucker. Yeah, that’s what he told me. We’ve been talking for the last few weeks. How else you think we’re able to be in the same room without the fur flying?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I hoped it was just friendship, he and Brenda. Because the idea of Baker becoming my sister after I’d felt her boobs was pretty gross.

Soren clunked his beer on the coffee table, put his feet up.

He was barefoot, too, like me.

“You know the whole deal with your mother, then? Or not?”

“No. Well, sort of. But not from him. From … well, you know that island? Story Island?”

He looked a little alarmed. And a little impressed, as I told him how I went out there with a girl, exploring the Archardt House. How I found his name and my mother’s name on the tree. And his book. I ran upstairs and got it for him. I watched him look through the blue book, and it was the first time I thought his easy composure might crack. I stared at the muted football game on the television and wondered if the thunder and lightning had finally come.

“Melina didn’t want to stay in Pearl Lake,” he said. “She hated it here. It didn’t quiet her mind like it did me. Just made her restless. She was a curious girl. Not weird-curious. But just always reading, always looking past me, like she wanted something else. Not that she didn’t love me. I knew she did. But I wasn’t enough. Somehow, Adrian was.”

I laughed. Thought of my dad. His boring clothes, his belly paunch, his bald head. “I don’t get it.”

“I never wanted college,” Soren said. “I wanted a simple life. I moved out to the cabin after high school and just expected that Melina’d come with me. We’d been together since we met working at the Kiwanis Camp, when she was fifteen and I was seventeen. I just figured she’d go to college and then come back and play house with me. I’d catch our fish, and she’d cook them. That kind of bullshit. If you want any success with girls, Evan, don’t take that approach, is my advice.”

“But what did she see in
my dad
?”

Soren laughed. “Well, they were the same age, and they both went to school at the U in Minneapolis. And I suppose since it’s a big place and they didn’t know anyone else, that’s maybe how it worked. I mean, my brother isn’t an idiot. Just sort of slow when it comes to people. He doesn’t see what’s in front of him half the time. How things cycle back. Just like nature or the seasons. Doesn’t think he should be stuck in a box like that. I mean, that lady he’s talking to? That gay sheep farmer dumped her last month, and I’d bet money she’s talking to Adrian wanting more than just a shoulder to cry on. But my brother’s still acting like Melina’d be mad at him about it.”

“Keir’s really gay?”

Soren looked confused. “Who’s Keir?”

“The gay guy.”

Soren blinked, like it was a given.

“But Brenda wants to be with my dad?”

“That or she’s just into phone sex,” he said. I made a face, and he laughed.

“Anyway, he’ll never admit it to you. He’s ashamed of the whole thing with Melina. Thinks it’s his fault she died. Like he deserved it, because he stole her. But she wasn’t something to steal. She wasn’t an object. She was a woman with her own mind. I didn’t get that for a while. Took me a war to figure that out. Figure out I wasn’t god’s gift to womankind.”

“You were in a war?”

“First Gulf War,” he said. “Which lasted like two minutes, so don’t get excited. That war wasn’t shit compared to the next one. But one day, I was sitting in my rack, waiting for orders to move out and thinking about it. Melina was pregnant with you, and she’d written me a letter—she always kept in touch, even though I refused to attend their wedding—and I realized I was being an idiot. I was as bad as a girl. Romantic, thinking she’d come back to me. Stewing on Story Island the year she went to college and started being with your dad. Acting like Peter Pan out there in that crumbling old mansion. Like she’d see me fixing it up, and that would change her mind. And here, though I didn’t like war and it was hotter than hell and we had a job to do, I knew it was no life to just sit around on the porch and watch the seasons change. There had to be more than one beautiful place on Earth, and I currently wasn’t seeing it in Iraq. I had to quit wasting all this time.”

“So, why did you guys not talk for so long after that?”

“Evan, I’m not a saint,” he said. “It still ripped me up to think of her with anyone else. She was a beautiful woman, for one, and I was young, thinking I’d owned something because I didn’t want anyone else to touch it. I said terrible shit. Told your dad he’d fuck you up without Melina to love you. Wrote him this big long letter about how his life’d turn to shit.”

“Well, it kind of did,” I said. “He’s been dragging us across the country for the last few years. We’re like nomads who live in condos instead of caravans. And just because I can make turkey doesn’t mean I’m not fucked up.”

Soren laughed. “You know, I have a son myself. Did your dad tell you?”

I just looked at him.

“Right,” Soren laughed. “I shouldn’t have to ask. Yeah, you have a cousin. He’s five. Lives in California with his mother.

We split up not long after he was born, but I still live out there, most of the time, anyway. Work’s been hard to get lately, and his mother doesn’t like me much. I rile him up with gifts and wrestling and whatever, and she gets all pissy.”

“What’s his name?”

“McElhatton,” he said. “My grandfather’s name. But we just call him Mac.”

“That’s my middle name.”

“It’s a good name,” he said. “Your great-grandpa Mac was a good guy. Taught me so much shit. I don’t know why any of that never trickled down to my asshole father.” He turned toward the TV and jumped. “Jesus! Did you see that? Another interception. Unmute it, will you?”

I handed him the remote and laid back. Thinking again of this world where Keir was truly gay—Baker owed me twenty dollars for that, since we bet on it once, not that I’d ever claim it—and where my mother dissed a guy as awesome as my uncle for my dorky dad and where I had a cousin named Mac who lived in California.

“That’s fucking insane,” Soren said to the TV.

“Does Mac like football?” I asked.

“No telling what he might like. He’s a wild little kid, though.”

“I hate football,” I admitted.

Soren groaned. “That’s your dad’s work,” he said. “I bet you hate fishing too?”

“Kind of,” I said. “We only went once this summer.”

“Jesus!” he yelled up to the ceiling. “I’ve got a lot of work to do on you, kid.”

“Focus on Mac,” I said. “I’m a hopeless case.”

He drank more beer and looked at the TV. “No, Evan,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that just yet.”

***

Monday morning, before l left for school, Soren ran out in the driveway to say good-bye to me. He was only in a shirt, and it was freezing cold, but he didn’t seem to care.

“It was good to meet you, finally,” I said. “My dad told me about a lot of stuff you guys did, growing up.”

“That’s my necklace you’re wearing, you know,” he said.

“Really?”

“Melina gave it to me for a present when I was eighteen,”

he said. “But I sent it back when you were born. Thought you should have it. Since I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to meet you.”

I touched the circle necklace. Felt a little shy about it.

Didn’t know who to thank for it, just then.

“Well, I better go. I gotta get back and find work. Say what you want about your dad,” he said. “At least he’s always earned a good living.”

“Yeah, great,” I said.

“Hey, he’s not perfect,” Soren said. “And he’s never gonna want to talk to you about Melina and everything. But I know he loves the hell out of you. He told me about how you got hurt at that school. He was losing it, Evan. Really losing it. I was the one who said bring you here. That was how we started talking again—he didn’t know who else to talk to. So this summer was all my idea, and he thought it would work. Thought if you got enough sunshine and whatever else, that would make up for it.

He’s kind of slow, like I said. But he means well.”

I nodded. He hugged me, and I didn’t feel weird about it. It was a very manly hug.

“You’ve got my number,” he said. “Keep in touch.”

***

The rest of the year went on. The court date in North Carolina was pushed back from June to September, and my dad considered switching lawyers until I told him that I didn’t care, the further away from it I got, the better. My dad and I had Chinese takeout for Christmas because neither of us could face the idea of dishes on the scale we had them on Thanksgiving, but then both regretted it when Jordan’s mom invited us over the day after for their leftovers and dessert and it was all so good, we realized we’d been idiots to eat moo shu pork instead of making an effort.

Jordan and I rang in the New Year with the longest make out in human history, on her giant plush queen-sized bed at her house while her mother worked an overnight shift at the hospital. Jordan was still very cautious about this kind of thing, always stopping at certain points and shutting everything down, as if Dr. Richter was in her head, telling her to keep herself safe. Which was probably a good thing, given how after long make-out situations like that, I’d feel like a total fucking animal. No better than Jake, really. It was hard, ha-ha, trying to keep all that from Jordan, so she would never know Dirtbag Evan existed.

But we did a lot of other things besides make out. Jordan and I got into doing jigsaw puzzles in her breakfast nook.

I learned how to make ratatouille. My muscles got somewhat decent from Physical Conditioning. One day in English class there was an awful pop, and I realized that my hearing—some of it, anyway—was back in my left ear. I walked around that day feeling like everything was too loud.

During spring break, Jordan went to tour her college, some all-girls place in Vermont. I spent the week being the laziest fucker alive. Lying on the couch and vowing to go for runs but never doing it.

***

After spring break, Jordan seemed crabbier and I didn’t know what to do, besides imagine elaborate punch-out scenes between me and Jake that were likely to never happen. But mostly she was just so damn nice. I thought about her all the time. Not just sex stuff. But little things about her. How she automatically did her homework, no putting it off like I did. How she always ate a turkey sandwich and drank a bottle of grapefruit juice every day at lunch. How oblivious she was about sports and how she thought I was weird for running track. All that sweating for no reason, is what she said.

She always asked me what I was thinking too, which was thoughtful, I guess, but she’d get mad if I said I didn’t know. I’d tell her bullshit, then.

“All right, I’m thinking about poetry.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m thinking about the epidemic of emerald ash borers.”

“Come on!”

“Okay, I’m thinking about getting an Irish wolfhound.”

“You are?”

“No.”

“Evan, you bug the fuck out of me, you know that?”

Dr. Penny even started noticing that all I talked about was Jordan. I must have been boring her because one day she just flat out asked if I was “sexually active” with Jordan.

“No!” I said. “She can’t. Won’t. It’s kind of this big fucked-up thing.”

“What big fucked-up thing?”

I laughed. Dr. Penny swearing killed me, though she only did it to repeat something I said.

I almost didn’t tell her the whole Almost-Rape story, but then I just did. I was better about telling her the truth now. And that story was easier to talk about than my weird father or my dead mother, in any case.

“Have you talked about sex?”

“Not really.”

“Do you see yourself having sex with her?”

I laughed, a little embarrassed. “For real? Or just in my head?”

“For real.”

“I don’t know. I can’t ruin it. I have to be good to her.”

“This girl is not Collette, Evan,” Dr. Penny said after a long silence.