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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Suggestions

When Mick got back to the house, the living room was lighted. He crept to the window and peered in. Nora was sitting beside his father, knitting with thin black needles while some commercials flashed on the TV. It looked normal, as normal as anything he'd seen in any window during his walk that night, but he knew it wasn't.

Mick opened the back porch door, hung Foolish's leash, and tried to slide through the kitchen, but his father said, “Well, here comes the Mick.”

“Hey,” Mick said, and waited to be quizzed on his whereabouts, but his father surprised him. “You eaten?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, eat a little more. There's chicken tetrazzini in the oven.” He stood up, turned off the TV, and looked at Mick. “You're wasting away, kiddo.”

It was true Mick had lost a few pounds. “Sure, okay,” he said and followed his father to the kitchen, where Mick found himself devouring the plate of tetrazzini set before him. He was surprised how hungry he was, and how good it all tasted.

His father brought a fresh cup of coffee to the table and said, “Okay, Mick, what happened today at Mary Jemison High?”

A standard question, and Mick gave his standard, nothing-much shrug, but tonight his father pressed him. “Hey, c'mon. Give us a little campus news.”

Nora came into the kitchen and started dunking dishes in the sink.

Mick slowed his chewing. “Yeah, okay. My history teacher, Mr. Cruso, kind of freaked out seventh period.” Mick was watching Nora. He thought he caught her hands stilling for just an instant at the sink.

“Freaked out over what?” his father said.

“His car. Somebody put sand in the gas tank.”

Mick's father grimaced in disgust. “What does he drive?”

“An old Porsche. A '59, I think he said.”

“Nice car,” his father said, “and sand in the gas tank's big money.”

Mick nodded. “They're charging him over two thousand dollars to fix it.”

His father let out a low whistle. “You know, I'll bet Essa would let me do it for cost. That'd save him a third, easy.” He turned to Nora. “You know this guy, Nora? Could you talk to him?”

When she turned, her face seemed slightly misshapen. “He teaches at the high school. We don't generally run in the same circles.”

“Yeah, but still. You must know somebody who knows him.” He winked at Mick. “Tell him we'll give him the educator discount.”

Nora kept washing dishes.

“Well, anyhow, it's a real shame,” his father said. “They know who did it?”

Mick shook his head. “He thinks it's somebody from school, a male, but it could be a girl, I think. I guess Cruso makes a habit of hitting on girls.”

Nora shut off the water and turned slowly. “What do you mean, hitting on girls?”

Mick finished his bite of rice, then wiped his lips with a napkin. “I guess he gets them alone and makes, you know, suggestions, or whatever. He told Myra she should call him the minute she turned eighteen.” Mick paused. “He told her she was strangely vivifying.”

Nora's face went suddenly pale. She turned back to her dishes.

“Jeez,” his father said. “Talk about sleazy. A teacher going after students. They ought to can the guy.” He turned to Nora. “Couldn't they can him for that?”

In a low voice, without turning, she said, “These things are hard to prove.”

His father grinned. “Yeah, okay, but I just retracted the educator discount.”

Nora carefully folded her dish towel and turned to Mick's father. Her face had a wooden look. “It's late. I'm going up.”

“Sure,” his father said, and then, “You okay, Nora?”

“I'm fine,” Nora said. She talked evenly, and as she left the room her step was slow and careful, like, Mick thought, a drunk person trying to act sober. Or, he thought later, lying in bed replaying it in his mind, like someone mad trying to act calm.

Mick took his empty bowl to the sink and went upstairs. Nora was in her bedroom with the door closed, and Mick quickly tried a few new passwords to get into her e-mail—Cruso and Defoe and even vivifying, plus five or six others—but nothing worked. He checked his own e-mail and found out why Myra had told him to check it. She'd left him a message.
Hey, Mick as in mittens,
how would you feel about letting me cook for your sixteenth birthday? Filet mignons, plus a little birthday surprise. Saturday night
sixish?

Mick wrote back
yes,
sixteen times.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Resolutions

On Memorial Day, Lisa went with her parents to visit her grand-parents in Homer, which her father liked jokingly to call his ancestral burg. She ate baked beans and her father's red cabbage cole slaw. She spread out an old quilt on her grandmother's back lawn, put her hair in a bun that she secured with a pencil, and, feeling freckly and white in her one-piece bathing suit, wrote a list.

Will be cheerier around house.

Will be better friend to Janice.

Will ask Mick to bake cookies Sat. night.

She put down her pencil and stopped.

Will totally and completely stop thinking about Joe Keesler.

Lisa set down the list and looked up at the clear blue sky. She closed her eyes. She thought about how it felt to hold Mick's hand, about how she didn't have to feel guilty about it, even though he wasn't Mormon. It wasn't like she was going to marry him or anything, she thought, and then immediately her mind drifted in just that direction, trying to imagine what a grown-up Mick Nichols would be like. She knew one thing. It would be easy to talk to him—it had always been easy to talk to him.

Lisa opened her eyes, and wondered if there was any more of her grandmother's chocolate meringue pie inside the fridge.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

In Which Janice and Maurice
Exchange Gifts

Maurice at this moment was shaving his chest. Janice was lying on the bed, stroking Harriet (who Maurice had brought home to live with him), and watching Maurice's work with real amusement. “Okay, children, we'll title this fable ‘How the Maurician Got His Smoothness,' ” she said. Then, a few seconds later, “That's just gotta hurt.”

Maurice had his chin tucked down, trying to see what he was doing. When he'd finished his left pec, he looked up. “I hear Marky Mark went the electrolysis route.” Maurice grinned. “But then Marky Mark has more discretionary income than I do.”

Maurice lathered his right pec and got back to work. About halfway through, he said, “Got a present for you in my front pants pocket.”

This drew a snorting laugh from Janice. “I'll bet you do.”

Maurice worked his razor carefully around his nipple. “Check it out,” he said. “Front left.”

The cat slid from Janice's lap as she stood. Janice came over and eyed the pocket. The bulge was squarish. She patted it. A small box maybe. She reached in and slid it out.

It
was
a small box, wrapped in gold foil. She held it up. “Should I open it?”

“Only if you want to see what I bought you.”

Under the wrapper, inside the small, lidded box, nested into a soft bed of cotton, was a gold-rimmed red stone attached to a gold necklace. Janice let out an actual gasp, it was so beautiful. “Oh, my God,” she said. “It's . . .” She didn't know what to say, and then she did. “It's devastating.” She looked then from the necklace to Maurice. “You're devastating.”

Maurice, toweling bits of lather from his chest, grinned and said, “I could've told you that.”

Janice was looking again at the necklace. The stone was a garnet. The tag on the necklace said 18 KARAT. She turned, beaming, to Maurice. “So how'd you afford this thing? Rob a bank or something?”

Maurice seemed pleased. “
How
isn't anything you should worry your pretty head about. Let's just say some of Maurice's investments are paying off.”

Janice was hardly listening. She'd clasped the necklace and went to the medicine cabinet mirror to admire it. She loved it. She absolutely loved it.

“There's some yellow cream in a bottle in the cabinet,” Maurice said. “Could you grab it?”

She swung open the cabinet and took out some Hecho in Mexico Genuine Turtle Oil. It was yellow and—she gave it a sniff—a little weird smelling. “What's this stuff for?”

“Soothes the razor burn.”

Janice was going to hand it to him but suddenly had another idea. She began to do it for him, rubbing the cream in, her flat hand moving in slow circles, as if polishing his smooth chest smoother. The cream smelled faintly metallic, like a washed soup can or something, but she got used to it.

Maurice closed his eyes. “That feels good,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Detour

On Friday, June 1, under a sky patterned with rows of hazy clouds, the field hockey team—minus Janice Bledsoe—ran past Herman Melville Junior High, the Sno-Boat Parfait stand, white fences, red tulips, and the gray-tongued cemetery where, to Lisa Doyle's surprise, Mick Nichols was poised and waiting on his bicycle.

He grinned and lifted a hand.

“Hi!” Lisa called, turning around to run backward. The other ponytailed girls kept jogging.

Mick started pedaling and cruised up beside her.

“I'm not a great backward runner,” Lisa puffed, “so I'll just about-face here, okay?”

“Okay,” Mick said, standing on his pedals and keeping just to her right.

“So what're you doing in the cemetery?” Lisa asked, trying not to sound out of breath.

“Watching to make sure the field hockey team doesn't get detoured by ice cream outlets.”

“Oh, we save that for the end,” Lisa said. “That's how we get through the four miles.” She jogged and listened to the whirring of his wheels. She felt light and almost giddy, happier than she'd felt since the day she got Elder Keesler's letter.

“Speaking of sweets,” she said, jogging around a trash can, “do you want to come over on Saturday night?”

“This Saturday night?”

“Uh-huh.”

Mick paused.

“I was just thinking we'd make pfeffernusses, maybe,” Lisa said, slowing down a little so that the whole field hockey team wouldn't hear Mick shaft her. “They're a kind of cookie.”

“I really, really want to do that,” Mick said. “It's just that I already said I'd do something else.”

Lisa absorbed this. “With Myra, right?” She felt like sprinting right out of Jemison. She should have known that boys were never just friends with ex–beauty queens.

“Maybe I could change it,” Mick said. “Why don't I call her?”

“Nah,” Lisa said, beginning to quicken her pace. “It's okay. See you tomorrow on the chain gang, though.”

Ten or eleven ponytails and one bob glistened in the sun ahead of her. Speeding up, Lisa ran past Heather Guzman, Dai Malone, Beth Niederhauser, and Jo Craythorne. Then, weaving and accelerating, she passed the rest. She didn't look back until she led them across the street, and by then Mick and his bicycle were gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Pine Needles

Lisa was polite to Mick at work on Saturday. Polite is what she meant to be, and polite is what she was. Besides their regular duties, the northeast crew was pruning roses, and after Maurice gave a quick demonstration, he issued a pair of clippers to each jeep. When the crew fanned out, Lisa waited to see which way Mick went, then went the opposite direction. It was quiet except for the steady
snip snip snip
of the clippers, and Lisa finally said to Lizette, who was working beside her, “So what's the Spanish word for creep?”

Lizette turned sharply. “You thinking of Maurice?”

Lisa was surprised at the vehemence behind Lizette's expression, and tried to dispel it with a laugh. “Nope. Another candidate.”

Lizette's face seemed to shut down—it was as if she'd just lost interest.
“Infeliz,”
she said. “Or
dañado.
”

Lisa repeated it—“Dahn-yado?”—and Lizette nodded and said, “Yeah, more or less.” When she finished the rose she'd been clipping, Lizette shifted to another row while Lisa finished up the row they'd been on.

The way to prune floribundas, Maurice had said, is to look for the first five-leafed branch below the spent rose, and then cut diagonally just above that branch. It was easy, once you got the hang of it, and pretty soon Lisa's thoughts persistently drifted toward Joe Keesler and Kara Agnostic, and then toward Mick Nichols and Myra Vidal, back and forth, Joe and Kara, Mick and Myra, until pretty soon she began to feel the tightening clamp of a headache. By the time Maurice came to pick up the crew, it was after four o'clock and Lisa never wanted to see another boy or floribunda in her life.

After cleanup, it was nearly 4:30, and it seemed to Lisa that Mick was anxious to leave—twice she'd caught him checking Traylor's watch—but Maurice wasn't quite done with them.

“Good news,” he said and scanned the group with an easy grin. “I've recommended everybody on this crew for upgrade from jeep status. So beginning next pay period you'll all be considered normals and”—here he widened his grin—“will get the pay bump that goes with it.” He stopped then and, to Lisa's surprise, he seemed actually tongue-tied. He looked down for a second to regain his composure. When he raised his eyes he said, “I want each one of you to know I was proud to recommend you for upgrade. Each one of you has gotten better with every passing day, and I'm betting each one of you will get even better yet.”

Lisa suddenly thought, Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he's not so bad after all.

“Okay,” Maurice said, back to his old self-sure voice, “everybody's out of here except Traylor and Uribe, who I need to see for just a second.”

As they broke up, Lisa felt Mick giving her a look, but she turned without looking back and vanished into the women's locker room, where she took her time changing. She wanted Mick long gone before she came out. What was she going to say to him? Have fun tonight? My regards to the beauty queen?

She didn't think so.

When Lisa finally came out of the locker room, everyone was gone, which was what she'd thought she wanted, but what her real self wanted, she realized with a sudden pang, was for Mick to have waited for her on his bike like he'd done the other day when she was running with the field hockey team. But he hadn't. Well, she thought, that's what you get for being Miss Fridge. He'd tried to make eye contact with her, and when that failed he'd changed and ridden away without a word. Who could blame him?

Lisa sat down on a bench to wait for her mother. From here she could see Maurice's brown-shingled cottage just beyond the gully and footbridge, which made her think of Maurice, which made her think of Janice, who had quit working at Village Greens the week before, citing a “conflict of interest.” That plus Janice's total lack of interest in mandatory field hockey training runs meant that Lisa had seen Janice maybe once in two weeks outside of school. It was like Maurice had taken over Janice's life. Lisa rubbed her right temple—her head really was aching now— and wondered if Janice was in the Maurician bungalow right now, Conflicting with her Interest.

But when the bungalow door opened, the person who stepped out was not Janice. It was Lizette Uribe, and she was crying.

“Lizette?” Lisa said when Lizette had crossed the footbridge.

Lizette glanced toward Lisa, gave a quick wave, and started walking in the opposite direction.

Lisa ran and caught up with her. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing,” Lizette said.

Lisa kept walking. “Please, if it's Maurice, you have to tell me. I think Janice is in love with him.”

“Well, she can have him.”

“Has he been dating you, too?”

Lizette shook her head and wiped fresh tears off her face. “Dating me?” she said bitterly. “I wouldn't call it that.”

“Then what? What's he doing?”

Lizette took a few more steps and then, suddenly, did something odd. She stopped short and pressed an open hand over each eye, and just stood there, very still, with the rest of her face contorted, like some kind of weird statue of someone pressing tears back inside.

“Oh, Lizette,” Lisa said. “Don't do that.” She reached for Lizette's wrist. “Here—let's go to that little picnic area. You know, where the pine trees are.”

Lizette allowed herself to be led across the street and up a smooth dirt path to a stone table that said IN MEMORY OF JOAN POKOJSKI. They sat down on either side of the table, and Lisa waited while Lizette wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“Okay,” Lizette said. “I'm fine now. See you next week, okay?” She stood up.

“Come on, Lizette,” Lisa said. She paused. “If you don't want to tell me, okay, I understand, but you should tell somebody.”

Lizette didn't say anything, but she didn't leave. She picked up a pine needle and started poking it into Joan Pokojski's plaque. Slowly, she started talking. “He makes me
do things,
” she said. “So I can keep this job and get catering work.”

“What do you mean, do things?” Lisa asked, looking up to see if an approaching car was her mother's.

Lizette cleaned out an engraved letter and brushed the dirt off the table. “Well, right now he wanted me to clean his kitchen wearing just my underwear, and the worst part is, I started to do it, but then I just couldn't.” She turned now to Lisa. “You know what he said as I was leaving? That I could say adios to the catering work.”

Lisa felt sick. She asked if there was other stuff, and Lizette just lowered her eyes and nodded.

“We have to tell someone,” Lisa said. Another car passed, slowly, like a big barge, but a tiny old woman was at the wheel, trying to keep the barge afloat.

“No,” Lizette said emphatically. “What I have to do is quit and get another job.” She began again to work dirt from the plaque with the pine needle.

Lisa looked at her and thought about it, but she couldn't stand it. “No,” she said. “No, no, no. We can't let him do this to people.”

“We?” Lizette looked up. “We?” she repeated and set her face with a bitter look that made Lisa wonder for a moment if she was doing the right thing. Then she pressed on.

“I mean that I'll help you if you want. He shouldn't be able to do this to you. He shouldn't get away with it.”

“Well, he will. They always do.”

“Not if you tell somebody important. Like the owners. Or maybe you should take him to court. Sue him for harassment. Then he'd be embarrassed in front of everybody.”

“No,
I
would be embarrassed in front of everybody. I'm not going to tell a bunch of strangers what I just told you. Besides, they'll say, ‘If it was so bad, why didn't you tell us sooner, or why didn't you just quit?' ”

Lisa was quiet. It was true, those probably were the kinds of things people would ask.

“Just so you know,” Lizette said, “my family needed the money, is why I didn't quit. My dad's been in Mexico for seven months because his mother's real sick, so the only income we have is from my mom's cleaning houses and what I make.”

“And I suppose Maurice knew that?”

Lizette smiled bitterly and stared off. “Maurice knows everything.”

And he's the one who gets to decide who's a normal and who's not, Lisa thought. Well, she didn't feel normal, and it was plain Lizette didn't, either.

This time, the car that cruised past the pines was her mother's gray-green Camry. “There's my mom,” Lisa said. “Please, please let us take you home. I have an idea, okay?”

Lizette stood up, and Lisa dashed through the bushes to wave down her mother's car. “Okay?” she asked, turning back.

Lizette nodded, crunched the pine needle with her hand, and followed Lisa to the car.