This is Just Exactly Like You (45 page)

“What do?”

“The undersea creatures.”

“Are you kidding me?”

He straightens up. “No,” he says. “Why?”

“I just thought somebody should ask you that.”

She’s orange in the streetlight. They both are, and so’s the ground, the sidewalk, the sky above them partly clouded over and throwing back Frank’s light, the light of the rest of the city. “Why don’t we put one up?” he says.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“A small one,” he says. “A small one.”

“Are they heavy?”

“Sort of,” he says.

She shifts all her weight to her right foot, then her left. She looks at him. He can see her trying different answers out in her head. “One,” she says. “I’ll help you do one.”

The undersea creatures on their sides in the front yard look like some kind of marine biology project gone badly wrong. He tries the catfish, just to say he did, but it’s too heavy for the two of them, so he settles on one of the jellyfish, the maroon one. It’s got a bow tie and a pocket watch. No pocket. They pick it up, and he gets them spun around to where he’s walking backwards, so it’ll be easier for her. He tells her about how he left the clam for Zel. She wants to know who Zel is, and he tries to explain while they carry the jellyfish around the back and look for the right pad, the one with the right configuration of bolts. Once they find it, they get it on there pretty easily. Butner and Ernesto did a nice job. It’s a good fit, and it’s three feet tall. At least. It seems bigger here than at the Undersea Adventures Mini-Golf, but he likes that, likes the way the scale changes, likes how it feels like it doesn’t quite entirely belong here. That’s the appeal, after all. The surprise of it. They stand back and he says, “What do you think?”

She looks at him, at the house, at the racetrack. “Jesus, Jack,” she says.

“What?”

“I still don’t know what you want me to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” he says.

“It’s a lot,” she says. “That’s all.”

He knows there’s more, knows that’s not all, but when he takes her hand, she lets him, and he pulls them a couple of steps farther back, so they can look across the street. The house is all lit up over there. Either the lights timed on, or Canavan and Rena went in there to fight, to apologize, to shake hands and part ways, to stab each other with steak knives, to try to figure out what might happen to them now. He can’t see anybody. All he can see is the light through the windows, the cardboarded-over hole where he put the beer can through. He needs to get on that. Get a pane of glass cut. Beth lets go of him, walks back to the jellyfish, puts her hand on its head, like it might be another child they have. She leans over, puts her forehead on it. He’s fairly sure she’s crying. He can hear her breathing. He can hear himself breathing. He walks down to her, stands behind her, is reaching for her, is about to put his hand—where? on her back? her shoulder?—and then there’s Hen in the doorway, the back door, Yul Brynner next to him, the two of them silhouetted against the lamps in the living room. Hen’s taken his clothes back off, is completely naked. He’s taken his bandage off, too. He’s not marching, not singing, not speaking Spanish. He is not reciting constitutional amendments or the entirety of the Yellow Pages. He’s not doing anything to make them think he’s any better or any worse. He stands there and looks out at them, at his racetrack, at his jellyfish. He reaches for the door. More than anything else, Jack thinks, he looks like he’s been born once more, new, into this world.

I am deeply grateful to Lisa Kopel-Hubal for finding this book, and forever in debt to Peter Steinberg for taking such good and thoughtful care of it, and of me, from there on out. Thanks always to Paul Slovak at Viking for taking a chance on a story full of mulch, but more importantly, for pushing to make all parts of it, even those pages without pine bark, so much more like what they were supposed to be. Thanks to Paul Buckley, Sharon Gonzalez, and Kate Lloyd at Viking for their excellent assistance along the way. Early readers of this book—Sarah Cox, Jane Kitchen—thank you for your encouragement and advice. Thank you Terry Kennedy for details large and small; thank you Jon Baker for knowing it wasn’t ready, and for saying so.

Thank you Jim Clark and Julie Funderburk and the faculty of the UNC–Greensboro MFA program—Fred Chappell, Stuart Dischell, Lee Zacharias—for providing a home it turns out I’d never really leave, and thanks especially to Michael Parker for pulling me so often from flowerbeds both real and perceived. Thanks to Elon University for its support, to Kevin Boyle and Cassie Kircher in particular, and to my students for reminding me, with some frequency, what matters and why. Many thanks, of course, to Jason Wright at American Mulch Supply in Whitsett, North Carolina, for humoring my request for a brief internship. Thanks to Jeff Towne for the forgiven rent.

My parents raised my brothers and me in a house full of books—among so many other things, they taught us to read. Thank you Judy and Tom, Neil and Josh. Thank you Piver. Thank you Jane and Walter, Sally and Jack, and Nancy.

Tita: Without you, no home to come home to. No story, either. Thank you, thank you.