Watch Over Me (3 page)

He flipped the lid off the tote again and took out a clean pair of shorts to wear.

He needed all the days he could get.

There wasn’t a single taxicab company in Beck County. Not one in Castle, either. Matthew pedaled to the main roadway, stashed his bicycle in the tall grasses near the on-ramp, and waited. A car rattled by, then another, ignoring his outstretched thumb. Already his head and mouth felt fuzzy. He couldn’t stay in the sun much longer.

Finally a pickup steered onto the shoulder. The driver rolled down his window.

“Where you going, son?”

Matthew opened his pad. He’d already written
Hollings.

“You got a tongue in that mouth of yours?”

He flipped his pad over, showing the driver the words already printed on the back cover.
I’M DEAF. I READ LIPS.

“Deaf, eh?”

Matthew nodded.

“Foolish thing, hitchhiking. ’Specially when you can’t hear nothing.” The man took off his Twins cap, wiped his hairline with his cuff. “Get in.”

In the truck, Matthew dropped his backpack on the floor and unzipped it, took out a bottle of water. He drank all of it, and half of another. Too much. He was allowed only four cups of liquid a day.

Goosebumps sprouted on his arms, his sweaty skin reacting to the air-conditioning like a vinegar and baking soda experiment. He flipped the vent toward the driver, who glanced at him and said something; Matthew couldn’t read his sideways mouth but nodded anyway. The man slid the air control to low.

Matthew looked out the passenger window. He counted hay bales, four hundred and ninety-seven during the twenty-minute ride, his eyes flickering over the fields, grouping, estimating, the numbers adding themselves. In Hollings, he walked a couple of miles to the bus station and bought a ticket to Pierre.

Aunt Heather might have driven him to visit his mother on Saturday, if he’d asked, or she might have made her boyfriend do it. But he didn’t want anyone to know. He’d been planning to go alone for nearly a year, and wasn’t quite sure why he chose today to do so. He only knew that he had fallen asleep last night ready, finally, to take his trip. His aunt thought he was sitting in the high school computer lab, completing on-line classwork.

The bus crossed the bridge into Pierre, a gray city on a gray day, the street lined with gas stations and hotels and fast-food restaurants. Matthew got off at the station, walked to his mother’s apartment building—three floors high, with the bottom floor half underground, the bluish siding a patchwork of dark and light stripes, newly replaced boards between the old. He prayed as he approached the main door. An elderly man with a cane stood just behind the glass, trying to push outside while dragging his wheeled shopping basket. Matthew rushed over, held the door open for him.

“Thank you much, young man,” he said.

Matthew smiled and slipped through, trudged up the hot stairway and banged on his mother’s apartment. The peephole darkened; Melissa Savoie opened the door, smirk on her face.

“This isn’t
my
kid. He doesn’t ever come see me,” she said. “He’s too good for me, that boy.”

Matthew’s hands shook as he fumbled to find a blank sheet in his notepad.
Can I come in?

“By all means. This don’t happen every day, you know. Is Heather with you?”

I came alone.

“You drive now?”

Bus.

He wiped his feet on the plastic runner, took off his sneakers and his backpack. The apartment had new carpeting since his last visit. Dark blue, almost purple, and plush. He sunk into it as he crossed the room to the small kitchen table.

“You want a drink?”

He shook his head.

“I have root beer. Well, diet. It used to be your favorite. You used to sneak it, and pour it over your cereal when you were little. That kind you liked.”

Cocoa Krispies.

“Yeah, that. So, you want some?”

He had used root beer on his cereal because it was often the only beverage his mother had in the house. And she’d been too strung out to get up and make him breakfast.

He shook his head again.

“Suit yourself,” she said, sitting across from him.

I’m sick
, he wrote, turning the words to his mother.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

It’s worse than before.

Her mouth pulled in, the lines around her lips giving her a toothy appearance, as if she wore her jawbone on the outside. “Heather told me.”

I need a kidney.

“You think I’m gonna give you mine?”

He wouldn’t ask if she would, fearing the answer. He knew she had loved him once; he remembered that, remembered her lifting him onto the handlebars of her rusty three-speed bicycle and pedaling seven miles to the T-ball field so he could play. They had no car then. They barely had food. But she tried, fighting for sobriety during those few summer months. She pedaled him to the school field after her double shifts at the catheter factory, sat smoking under the basketball net, watching the ball roll through his legs. Then Griese showed up, and any trying his mother used to do disappeared up her nose in a cloud of white powder.

I can’t use yours.

She dropped her eyes to her lap, tugged at the collar of her gray T-shirt. “So, what are you doing here?” She whispered this; Matthew could tell by the way her face remained still while her mouth moved.

Where’s my father?

“That dirtbag’s not gonna help you.”

I just want to ask.

“I haven’t talked to him in years.”

Does he have family? Someone who might be in touch?

“Forget about him.”

You won’t tell me?

“I don’t know.”

Fine,
he wrote, standing and stuffing his notebook in his back pocket.

Melissa grabbed his arm and said, “Buffalo. New York. He was there, last I heard.”

Matthew pressed his lips together and nodded.

Melissa let go of him. “You should have called. I don’t got time for this today. I’m working now. Got to get there in forty-five minutes.”

He nodded again, strapped on his knapsack and left, walking back to the bus station, to the ticket window. The bus to Hollings wouldn’t leave for another three hours. He waited in the air-conditioning, buying two packages of Chips Ahoy from the vending machine and shaking the crumbly, stale cookies into his mouth straight from the bags. He read, worked a Sudoku puzzle in the newspaper someone left behind. After an hour, he wandered out to one of the cabbies lining the station curb and asked how much it would cost for a ride back to Temple. When the driver said two hundred dollars, he went back to the hard plastic seat to wait some more. He’d take the bus, even though it meant he’d be stuck on the side of the road when he got off in Hollings, praying for someone to stop and bring him home.

Chapter FOUR

Sitting at the kitchen table, his third cup of coffee empty, Benjamin stared at the Bible. He didn’t remember the last time he opened it, had to blow the dust off it when he found it under his bed, having stuffed it under there when he couldn’t stand it looking at him from the nightstand, accusing him of neglect. But he had dug it out today, opened to a random page somewhere in the middle, hoping for—he couldn’t say what. He hadn’t read more than a sentence, the blurry words drifting off the page, disappearing each time he rubbed his eyes to clear his vision.

He heard Abbi come out of the bedroom, the swollen door opening with a sticky pop. Everything swelled in the heat. Problems. Fears. Sins. All puffed with humidity and ready to rain out with the slightest change in air pressure.

As she passed, his arm moved on its own, reached out and cupped her loosely around her waist. She let him, and he tried to think back to the last time their touches weren’t accidental bumps against one another while scurrying around the small bathroom in the morning, or brushed hips when passing too close in the kitchen. For months, they had each slept on their own side of the bed, backs to each other, their bodies two parentheses curving away from one another, refusing to close. When he came to bed. He hadn’t last night. Or the night before.

“I didn’t know you were home,” she said.

“Came in late.”

“You’re sweating. Turn the air on.”

“It’s too loud. I can’t hear myself think.”

She spun away from him, opened the dishwasher. “You emptied it.”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s the juicer?”

He pointed up, at the middle cabinet. “Where it always is.”

She stood on tiptoe and stretched to reach it on the top shelf. Her arm uncurled above her head like a butterfly’s proboscis.

She’s beautiful,
he thought, had thought hundreds of times. But not in a long time.

“What are you doing today?” he asked.

“Working. You?”

“Working. Probably late again.”

She took two oranges and a lemon from the refrigerator, balanced them on the flat of her bare arm. “Want some?”

Benjamin shook his head, watched her slice through the fruit right on the counter, without a cutting board. Citrus filled the air as she pressed each half against the glass juicer, twisting and grinding the guts out. She rinsed her hands, wiped them on the back of her— his—boxer shorts, and drank right out of the collection cup.

He couldn’t find words for her anymore. They used to talk— bicker—about anything, everything. Politics, religion, the price of corn on the cob at the roadside farm stand. But now it was fights with jagged words, or polite trivialities, or nothing. Mostly nothing, a wounded silence snapping at their heels.

Abbi rinsed the juicer, without soap or sponge, rubbing the pulp away with her fingers. She only used detergent on oils and baked-on crud. “It’s the water that does the cleaning. The soap only helps it along, and a little elbow grease will do the same,” she’d tell him if he complained. It drove him crazy. To him, plates weren’t clean unless the sink mounded with bubbles. He got that from his mother. Commercial cleaners, difficult to get in India, at least where she had lived, were almost an addiction for her, and after coming to the States, his mother had filled her kitchen pantry with pastes and gels and sprays. Chemical fumes meant loving care; they comforted Benjamin almost as much as the simmering black-eyed peas and
garam masala
in his mother’s
chavli amti
.

“The McGees invited us to dinner after church this Sunday,” Abbi said, her back to him, wiping down the counter. “Again.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That I’d ask you.”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“It’s Friday, Ben. I need to give them an answer.”

“You’re not going to Pierre?”

“I don’t have to.”

“What do you want to do?”

She sighed, scratched at a spot on the Formica with her thumbnail. “We should probably go sometime. Janet has been asking for the past three months.”

“How about next week.”

“Can I tell them that?”

Benjamin closed his Bible. The room had grown hot with questions, and he reached over and flicked on the air-conditioner. “I don’t know.”

“What else is new,” she mumbled, throwing the rag in the sink. Then she left the room. He heard the bathroom door slam and the shower started.

“Stupid,” he said, standing and shoving the chair into the table. He wanted their old life back. He crammed a bag of deli ham, the rest of the loaf of bread, and a squeeze bottle of mustard into his insulated lunch bag, tossed a freezer pack on it, and zipped. Repositioning the wad of lamb’s wool—thick and yellow and slightly greasy, the kind dancers use in their pointe shoes—in the front of his right boot, he tied his boots on. The wool kept his foot from sliding forward and crushing his remaining toes.

He shoved his keys in his pocket, but the shower went off, a dull thud echoing through the house as Abbi pushed in the single faucet. He leaned against the living room doorway, eyes closed, stretching his lower jaw in and out so his bottom teeth slid over his top ones, then popped back behind them with a painful scrape. Finally, he set his lunch on the end table and walked quietly down the hall, knocked on the bathroom door. Abbi opened the door, wrapped in a towel with a corner tucked between her breasts. And they stood there, both staring over the other’s shoulder, until Benjamin said, “We can go, if you want.”

She shrugged. “It’s fine.”

“Well, whatever. Just let me know.”

“Yeah.”

A drop of shower water made its way down Abbi’s face from her hairline, catching a moment in her eyebrow before lazily rolling toward the tip of her nose.
Toward its demise.
He wiped it away with his thumb. That was twice he’d touched her today. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said, without thinking if that, indeed, would be the case.

She looked at him then. “Really?”

He was trapped. “Yes.”

Abbi lifted the cuff of his shirt a little, turning his arm so she could read his watch. “You have time,” she said, and she plucked at the tucked corner of the towel. It mounded at her feet. He glanced at her, shiny and fleshy and soft. Her body was the same as on their wedding day. He thought it was. He hadn’t seen it in too long. His fault, not hers.

He turned his eyes away.

“Puritan,” she said.

He blew one quick burst of air through his nose, a chuckle of sorts. “Liberal.” And they smiled—tired, uncertain smiles that didn’t reach their eyes—because they had begun this way, with insults and name-calling, and the flutters that came with a new love.

She sighed and sank back against the vanity, arms clamped across her chest, shoulders pulled in toward each other and legs crossed as if trying to disappear into herself. Benjamin wanted to touch her again, wondered if she’d disappear—
poof !
—if he did. Or crumble. Or leave.

Benjamin knew she was waiting for him to come to her. But he didn’t, and she sighed again, gathering the towel from the floor and tying it around her waist. He watched her cross into the bedroom, his eyes tracing the lines of black ink growing from between the dimples on her tailbone, rising and curling over her spine, out toward her shoulder blades, her tattooed interpretation of Gustav Klimt’s
Tree of Life
.