Page 37 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

Carol finds me twenty minutes later.

She arrives beside me at the window with a club soda and stands there without saying anything, comfortable, in no hurry at all. Across the floor, June is crouched to Teddy’s height, retying a shoe he could tie himself, letting him narrate. Margot stands beside them, close, unforced, in her velvet dress.

“That’s Nora’s braid,” Carol says.

Everything in me goes very still. “Margot asked her to learn it. There was a photograph.”

“I know the photograph. I was holding the camera.” She watches her granddaughter a while. The trio plays something with bells in it. “Nora practiced that braid on my head for a month. Complained about my hair the entire time. I have never told anyone how much I liked it.” Her glass turns, one slow rotation, and I catch myself in the habit and put my own glass down. “The girl did it well. The back’s crooked.”

“Margot won’t let her fix the back.”

“No,” Carol says. “She wouldn’t.” And then she turns and looks at me — all the way at me. It’s the look she’s been not giving me all year, the one that measured casseroles and calendars and is now measuring my face. Whatever is there, I’m too slow to put it away. I know it the second her mouth changes.

“Be careful, Augustus,” she says, with no color in it at all, and pats my sleeve once, and goes to say goodnight to her grandchildren.

* * *

The drive home is quiet. Kids asleep by the second bridge — Teddy folded sideways, Margot upright with her braid untouched against the seat back, protecting it even unconscious. June watches the city go by from the passenger seat with her hands still in her lap. Neither of us mentions Mitch, and neither of us mentions Carol, and the silence about both of them fills the whole car.

We carry the kids up. We’re good at it now, a two-person system, doors and blankets and the night-light, Margot’s door to the width of a book. June comes out of Teddy’s room easing the latch silent. In the hallway dark we stand for a second, listening to the house settle. This is the spot where, every night for a month, I have made myself say goodnight and walk away.

“Gus,” she starts, whisper-level, “tonight, with the tie — I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry. If anybody—”

“Somebody did,” I say. “Two somebodies.”

Her face goes still while she starts working the problem. “Okay. Then we should—”

“June.” I take her hand. Not a brush of it, not the dark-of-the-theater version. I hold her hand in my own hallway like it’s mine to hold. We go to the stairs, and at the bottom I do the thing I’ve been not doing for a month.

I step on the fourth stair — the loud one, the one I’ve spent a month carefully stepping over — and let it creak through the entire house.

The sound is enormous in the quiet, and nothing happens. No doors. No feet. Just the furnace, and her staring at me halfway between horror and laughing.

“You’re insane,” she whispers.

“I’m done tiptoeing in my own house. That’s different.” At her door I stop and turn her to face me, both her hands now. I say the rest of it plainly, because everyone else read the truth off my face tonight. She should get to hear it in words. “I performed for forty people tonight. Shook every hand, remembered every name. And the entire time, the one real thing in that room was standing by the coat check fixing my son’s collar. I’m not sorry about the tie. I’m sorry I stepped back after. That’s the last time I do that.”

“Gus—”

“Tell me to say goodnight,” I say, quiet, against her ear, “and I’ll say goodnight.”

What she says is my name, in the voice that isn’t for anyone else. Then we’re through her door, and I turn the lock. The click sounds final. Good.

I’m not in a rush tonight. That surprises us both, I think — after a night like that, there should be fumbling. Instead I back her against the door, take her face in my hands, and kiss her slow enough to make a point of it. I find the zipper at the back of the green dress and lower it one tooth at a time while I talk into her neck. Quietly, because with the kids home, quiet is the only way we get to have this, and tonight I’ve stopped resenting that.

“All night,” I tell her, as the dress comes off her shoulders, “you laughed at something the treasurer’s wife said, and I wanted to cross the whole room to you. I stared at a centerpiece instead.” The dress pools. She’s in very little, and the lamplight loves her, and I keep my hands moving slow, collarbone, waist, hip. “You took Teddy’s punch cup so he could tie his shoe, and I lost the entire thread of what the man in front of me was saying.”

“You hid it well.” Her hands are working my shirt buttons, steadier than mine deserve. “I checked. Every few minutes. You were very impressive over there.”

“I know you checked.” I catch her chin and make her look at me. “That’s the only thing that got me through the trio’s second set.”

I lay her down on the narrow bed and take my time, mouth over every inch I uncover. I keep talking while I go. All night I couldn’t say one true thing about her in that room. Now I get to say all of them. What I noticed. What I wanted. Where. She pulls my shirt off and drags her palms down my chest. “Less inventory, more—” She loses the end of the sentence, because my mouth arrives where she wanted it.

I work her slowly with lips and tongue and two fingers, her thigh over my shoulder, her fist pressed against her own mouth. When she gets close I stop, climb her body, and start again at her throat. She calls me something truly unprintable in a whisper.

“Patience,” I say, into her sternum.

“I will end you.”