Page 24
Her name gets out.
Once. Low and wrecked, out loud in an empty house.
Vanessa.
Then nothing. My chest working. The fridge cycling on downstairs.
That was the best one in years. Not close. Years.
A fist and a dark room and a woman who has never set foot in this house, and it ruined me. That’s the part I’ll be carrying around tomorrow.
She’s in here now. That’s what I did tonight. Ten days of holding still, and I let her in for twenty minutes of my own company, and there’s no getting her out of a house this quiet.
I clean myself up with the shirt off the floor. The sheets I’ll have to look at in the morning.
I’m hard again inside the hour, lying there staring at the ceiling, and I make myself a promise about it that I don’t believe while I’m making it.
Sunday night I tell myself it’s plumbing again. Takes even less time.
My mother turns up unannounced, the way she always does.
I’m under the Hendersons’ inboard with a work light in my teeth when the Buick comes through the gate, and I know it’s her before I’m clear of the hull, because Diesel launches off the office porch barking his excited bark. The one he used to only use for two people on this earth.
Now he’s widened that scope to three.
By the time I’m on my feet, she’s out of the car in her floral blouse and good slacks, crouched down letting my dog put his paws on her chest.
“There’s my handsome boy.” To the dog. Not me. “Look at you. Somebody’s brushing you. Coat’s gleaming.”
“Nobody’s brushing him.”
“Of course somebody is. Just look at him.” She stands, takes me by the jaw, turns my face side to side. The full inspection. I’m covered in grease to the elbows and sporting three days of stubble. “You, on the other hand, look terrible.”
“Good to see you too.”
“When’s the last time you ate a vegetable?”
“There’s ketchup in the-”
She smacks my arm, “Don’t.”
She’s already moving past me, sharp eyes taking in everything, reading the whole yard in one pass.
Then she focuses all her attention on the office, not missing the fact that the window’s shut clean in its frame for the first time since Dad ran the place, my cinder block holding the door open, and a woman inside it I have not mentioned to my mother one single time.
She turns her gaze on me.
“The window’s latched.”
“I fixed it.”
“You’ve been meaning to fix that window for three years. What happened?”
“Got around to it.”
“Mm.”
She heads for the office before I can coax her in a different direction. I go after her and get to the screen door in time to watch it happen instead of stopping it.
