The Lonely Polygamist (19 page)

“We’re having a little fun, cleaning the kitchen,” Trish explained, even though she knew there was no use. Beverly gave her a long, sad look while Trish’s hips, despite everything, still twitched in disco-time.

It took Em only a minute to change back into her own clothes and to pack her bag, and it hurt Trish somehow that the girl didn’t share a secret look with her, that she wouldn’t glance her way. Even now, three months later, Em treated Trish with the polite deference she reserved for any other adult.

Out on the deck in the cool winter sun, Trish watched Rusty survey her yard and the fields beyond. He picked up his glass and pretended to take a sip from it even though there was no sip left.

He asked if he could use the bathroom. He didn’t really need to use the bathroom but he wanted to go back inside the house, snoop around a little and take a look at things, maybe slip something into his pocket he could later claim to have found, which would give him an excuse to come back to return it before his next lesson.

“We’ve got a little problem on that end,” she said. “Toilet’s backed up. I was watching the second twins over the weekend and I think one of them dropped something in there.”

“You plunger it? I can plunger it for you.”

“I plungered it all right.” She smiled. “Plungered the living heck out of it. Your dad was supposed to come over to fix it on Monday, but he didn’t have time and now he’s gone again—”

“He’s
always
gone.” Rusty popped his lips and gave his head a little shake.

“Well, not to worry, the place next door’s vacant and I’ve got the key, so we’ve been using the bathroom over there.”

“It’s all right,” Rusty said. “I can hold it.”

“It’s no problem at all.” Trish stood. “The key’s right in the kitchen.”

Rusty shrugged and squinted for a moment into the low sun. “I’m fine. I’ve been practicing my self-control. I can hold my breath for like five minutes, and sometimes I don’t eat breakfast.”

He gave her a quick look to gauge her reaction, walked to the edge of the deck and toed the tufted head of a dead thistle.

“If you want,” he said, “I could, you know, do some work for you. For free.”

“What kinds of things do you know how to do?”

“I can mow your lawn.” He shrugged, and his voice seemed to tighten. “I could, you know, trim your bushes.”

She thanked him, told him she was sure she could use his help in the future, when summer came and the lawn and bushes actually required attention. “You probably ought to get going, Aunt Beverly will be on the lookout for you.”

“She doesn’t care where I am, not really.”

“I think she does. She seems to get rather upset when you’re not where you’re supposed to be.”

“Everybody over there, they act like I don’t even exist, it’s like a big game. When I try to talk they say,
Did you hear something? I didn’t hear anything, did you? It must be the wind
. Like that.”

“That’s terrible,” Trish said. “They shouldn’t do that.”

Rusty shrugged, stuck out his lower lip and said that he didn’t care. Trish couldn’t tell if it was eleven-year-old bluster or if he really meant it.

“Maybe I should tell Aunt Beverly what’s going on.”

“She knows. They all do it, even the little ones. And Aunt Beverly does it except when I break the rules, and then all the sudden I’m not invisible anymore. So being invisible isn’t all that bad.”

Trish wanted to tell him that, despite its immediate rewards, invisibility was not anything to aspire to; it got old very quickly.

She asked him if he wanted a ride home and he told her he’d ride his bike. He picked up a macaroon from the plate and walked to the barbed-wire fence. The turkeys, who where pecking their way along the irrigation ditch by the road, hustled over in one big mob, stood in front of Rusty, gave him their undivided attention.

“Will they eat a cookie?” he asked.

She told him they would eat pretty much anything, including newsprint and styrofoam peanuts.

With a sidearm motion he winged the macaroon over their heads and they made a mad dash for it, gobbling and thrashing their bony, clipped wings, climbing over each other to peck at the cookie with violent stabs of their heads.

Rusty put his hands on the fence wire and watched. He cleared his throat as if he had something important to say. He said, “What a bunch of stupid turkeys.”

RUSTY TO THE RESCUE

She washed her tea mug in an otherwise empty sink, looked out the window at a flock of sparrows wheeling and diving over the Gunthers’ hay barn in the dawn-pink sky and thought,
I am getting along fine.
She was discovering the only way to make it through each day was to hunker down and wait it out, like in a hurricane or high drought, something to be survived. It had been, what, ten days since she had been alone with Golden, since he’d stepped foot in this house? She could handle it, she knew she could. She knew how to wait. She knew how to be alone.

In those ten days there had been only three or four nights when she’d slept badly and only one when she’d curled herself against the headboard and given in to a fit of whimpering. Mostly bearable nights visited occasionally by the same dream: Trish sleeping exposed on the edge of a rocky precipice, knowing somewhere in her sleeping mind that if she rolled over or shifted her weight even a little, she’d go over the edge into the bottomless dark.

And then last night a real curveball: a prolonged sexual dream that woke her suddenly with its sweaty fervency, leaving her limp and trembling—and curious about who could have broken into her dreams and brought her to such a pitch.

She set the mug in the drainer and went to check on Faye, who slept with such an eerie stillness, her pale skin nearly the color of the sheets, her features so sweetly serene, that no matter how much Trish tried to tell herself,
She’s fine, stop your worrying,
she could not restrain herself from putting her hand against the girl’s neck to feel for the delicate vibration of blood under the skin.

She waited another hour for Faye to wake up, spent too much time preparing a three-course breakfast the girl hardly touched. She started the laundry, fed the breakfast leftovers to the grateful turkeys, and read scripture with Faye, only because Faye would become agitated if they didn’t.

After lunch she vacuumed the hallway, folded the laundry, and sat down at the table to wait—she didn’t know what she was waiting for. She had no idea. She thought—and it was not a thought that bothered her as it probably should have—that she might be losing her mind.

Around two o’clock she heard a faint clanking sound out front. She ignored it, but it continued, softly, a chorus of metal clanking, like someone rustling through a cupboard of pots and pans. She opened the door to find Rusty climbing the steps on the porch, wearing an overburdened tool belt and a rusted plumber’s snake coiled crossways around his torso like a Mexican bandolier.

“Hey, there,” she said, and he said, “Hey, there,” back, huffing a little with the exertion of riding his bike across the valley loaded down as he was. He took a big breath and gave her a terse, professional-style nod. She couldn’t have been happier to see anyone.

He said, “I’ve come to fix the, you know, the john.”

She let him in and he moved purposefully across the room, holding the head of the long framing hammer that hung from his belt so it wouldn’t bang his knee while he walked.

In the bathroom he put his hands on his hips and regarded the toilet.

“This the one?” he said.

He took out his tape measure, experimentally pressed its lock button several times, put it back into its little holster.

“Okay then,” he said, “this might take a while.”

The only reason he had any idea what to do about a clogged toilet was because he’d seen his father trying to unclog the one in the bathroom on the second floor of Old House, the bathroom that Aunt Nola called the Black Hole of Calcutta. He wasn’t sure why it was called the Black Hole of Calcutta, all he knew was that it was damp and dark and smelled like mildew, and that the toilet had a mind of its own. His father had tried to fix it many times, but there was something about the gigantic ceramic water tank that you emptied by pulling a chain, and the old pipes in the house that made it belch and mumble and groan, sometimes in a way that sounded like talking.

At least Aunt Trish’s toilet, Rusty was pretty sure, didn’t have anything to say, which would make it a whole lot easier to deal with. He uncoiled the plumber’s snake and fed the end of it into the hole. He’d seen his father do this at least twice, but he couldn’t remember how far the snake was supposed to go down the hole. He fed it in slowly, delicately, as if he were feeding something that might try to bite him.

Faye stood next to her mother and said, “What’s he doing here?”

“He came to fix the toilet.”

“That’s Dad’s job.”

“If only Dad were here to do it.”

Rusty looked at Faye and she stared him down until he had to glance away. He laughed and made a huge snork, which he tried to cover up by pretending to cough, which made him cough for real.

Aunt Trish asked him where he got the tools and he told her from the service truck his father kept in the old chicken pens. “That truck is full of tools, you should see it. There’s like some kind of huge jack-hammer in there.”

“Well,” Aunt Trish said, “I’m glad you didn’t have to bring
that
with you.”

He laughed again, which produced another snork, but this time he didn’t care.

He’d fed the snake in about two feet and it didn’t seem like it would go any farther. The water, now exactly level with the lip of the bowl, trembled ominously. He said, “I think we’ve got something here.”

“That’s a nice shirt,” Aunt Trish said, and Rusty couldn’t think of anything to say, so he said, “Indeed.” He stole a glance at Faye, who had managed to disappear without a sound.

Because he didn’t have a nice shirt of his own, before coming over here he had swiped one of Parley’s, a long-sleeved button-up with a big collar and prints of motocross riders doing wheelies all over it. Where Parley had ever gotten such an incredible shirt Rusty had no idea. It was made of some kind of silky material that rubbed against his belly and produced instant static electricity that crackled all around him every time he moved.

He rotated the handle on the crank twice, giving off a slight crackle. He paused dramatically, as if listening for something only an FBI agent could detect. He gave it two more violent cranks and…nothing. What a gyp! He looked at his tool belt, which was starting to pull his pants down to dangerous levels, wondering if there was something in it that could help him. Maybe he could stick his hand down the hole? Pull out whatever was in there with some pliers? Would that be an act of bravery or something a stupid dickhole would do? He looked at Aunt Trish, whose arms were folded in a way that made it hard to get a good idea what her boobs might be doing. She was smiling at him in a nice way and he had to look down because he knew he was staring. He put a little more pressure on the snake and cranked the handle like crazy, again and again, giving it everything he had until he was sweating from his butt crack and generating enough electricity to power a Christmas tree.

“All right, then!” Aunt Trish called, which made him stop. “Looks like we’re going to plan B.”

“Plan B?”

“A plumber. Our only choice.”

Rusty looked at her dumbly, as if the word
plumber
were foreign to him, which was entirely possible. Though she’d meant it as a joke, she wondered if there was even such thing as a plumber in this valley. Generally, the people here did not rely on professionals; they
were
the professionals. They fixed their own cars, machined their own parts, raised their own food, birthed their own babies. If they didn’t know how to do something, there was always a neighbor, someone down the road, who did. She imagined the scandal it would cause if she paid some bumbling fatso to do a job her husband could do in two minutes, if only he came around once in a while, if only he acted like he cared. She imagined the outrage, the gossip, the attention: Beverly’s indignation, Nola’s amazed delight, Golden’s bewilderment, his slow recognition that she would not be taken for granted, that she had needs, that she mattered. Such a pathetic little fantasy, but she couldn’t deny the small spasm of pleasure it gave her.

“Ee-yep,” Rusty said, assuming the casual stance of a professional: hip out, thumb hooked into tool belt. “I think I might know somebody who can help. I think I can probably take care of it.”

“Really, honey, it’s all right. Your dad will be home in a few days…”

“I’ll take
care
of it,” he said and shrugged immediately, as if to excuse himself for being rude. He didn’t like her to call him honey; it was a word she used for four-year-old Sariah or one of the Three Stooges.

He pulled the snake out of the toilet, wrapped it around his torso, checked his tools. Aunt Trish put her hand on his shoulder. “Thanks so much for your help, Rusty, you’re a true gentleman. If you’d like to hang around for a few minutes I’ll make us some instant pudding. I think I’ve got some graham crackers.”

As far as Rusty was concerned, instant pudding and graham crackers with Aunt Trish was as good as it could possibly get, better than cherry popsicles on a yacht with Wonder Woman, plus she had touched his shoulder and called him a true gentleman. But some kind of romantic instinct, maybe one he had picked up from his favorite book,
To Love a Scoundrel
, told him that it would be best not to wear out his welcome. The Scoundrel never hung around for instant pudding and graham crackers. He always gave the sexy duchess a quick kiss on the mouth and then jumped out the window, holding on to his wig and landing safely on a haystack going by in a cart.

“I have things I have to do,” he said as mysteriously as possible. It was true: he had plans, people to talk to. “Maybe a rain check on the pudding?”

“A rain check,” Aunt Trish said. “You can cash it in anytime.”