As Cool As I Am, page 14
I stared at Kenny. It was like he’d studied tapes. That he’d boned up for this.
I felt like I was closed off in some bubble. Dad, the man with the vanishing parents, wouldn’t quite look at me. Kenny didn’t dare speak to me. What could we talk about with everybody listening, straining for clues?
Every now and then I caught Kenny’s mom scoping me out, and I realized my shoulders ached from being hunched forward, keeping any trace of my boobs from pressing against my sweater. It was like she could see through my clothes anyway, see my mom leaking out of me, the body pulling Kenny away from her. I thought of the way she’d wrapped Kenny up in the shower, holding him tight.
He’s already gone, I wanted to tell her. Whether I have anything to do with it or not. But she knew it. It was obvious in her darting, shifting eyes—the years she saw alone on her couch, his bedroom left empty, in case he someday came back. I could have told her that wasn’t going to happen. But I smiled instead, leaned forward to offer her another stab at the chestnut-and-bacon char.
She shook her head, lips pressed tight as a clamp.
Mom disappeared to get things ready in the kitchen. Dad kept throwing out names of people Mrs. Crauder—whose name, I learned, was Elizabeth, or Libby—might know, but he and Mom were almost ten years younger, and Dad had never worked in town. They didn’t come up with any hits.
Mom called Dad out to carve, and the three of us sat like statues without them. Mrs. Crauder a sphinx. A deadly piece of stone.
“Your parents are so young,” she said to me, leaving plenty of blanks to fill in. She reached for a chestnut. “What a surprise you must have been,” she added, whispery, like something she might deny saying altogether.
I looked at Kenny. “You don’t play football because you’re afraid you’ll hurt somebody?”
He smiled, flexing a biceps that was mostly bone. “I’m wiry, but I’ll pop you.”
“Like you did the other night?” his mom asked.
Dad shouted, “Chow’s on!” and I heard Mom moan, “Chuck!”
We used the dining room, something we did like maybe once a year. There was wine out, a glass already poured at each plate, which I wasn’t the only one to notice.
Mrs. Crauder didn’t wait to sit down. While Mom carried in bowls of food, Mrs. Crauder drained her glass and set it down, very empty. She reached over and picked up Kenny’s. “I think you’ll remember our conversation about Kenny’s troubles with alcohol,” she said, taking a gulp.
Mom and Dad stopped, Dad holding a platter of carved meat in his hand. He nodded. “Well, here’s the start of things. There’s plenty more, though.”
“Bird’s big enough to feed a whole orphanage,” I said.
Dad didn’t even blink.
Mom took one last peruse of the table and made us all sit. She sat last, like entertaining this way was something she did every day.
Mrs. Crauder poured herself another glass of wine.
“What did you do for Thanksgiving in the orphanage?” I asked Dad.
“Turkey,” he said with a wink. There was no way to know if he’d made up every word.
He started passing things around. Clockwise. The way things go down the drain at the other end of the world.
Which, after dinner, is where I wished I was when Mrs. Crauder, surveying the picked-over plates, the half-empty bowls of food, helped herself to the last of the second bottle and said, “So, the two of you are all right with what our kids are doing?”
Dad had shoved back his chair, raised his hands to pat his stomach while drawing in a breath for his huge after-feast sigh. He interrupted his ritual long enough to lift an eyebrow at Mrs. Crauder.
“The sex, I mean.”
Dad stopped. A purple smudge of cranberry sauce stained the edge of his lip like a bruise. Mom froze, too, her eyes sharpened icicles pointed at Mrs. Crauder’s throat.
“What did you say?” Dad said.
Mrs. Crauder launched back the rest of her wine. “Our kids fucking. No problem for you?”
“Mom,” Kenny said, smaller than ever.
“Lucy?” Dad started, the shake in his voice making it obvious he had no idea what he was going to ask.
“Did you just say ‘fucking’ in my house?” Mom asked. “At my table? Did you just say that while asking about my daughter?”
Even if you couldn’t have seen Mom—the grizzly-bear sow hackles of her raised, her charge only an instant off—the lethal-sharp edge of her voice alone would have told you to invent something, anything, to make it absolutely clear that was not what you’d said.
“Mom,” Kenny said, just a shadow of him left. “Don’t. Please.”
“Watched your daughter traipse out of my place at six the other morning. Watched her carry Kenny straight to his bed the other night. No doubt about where it was. Watched her strip off his clothes for a shower.” She turned to me. “What was it you said, sweetheart? ‘Nothing I haven’t seen already’?”
“You said that,” I murmured. “Not me.”
“That is enough!” Mom roared.
“Well, that’s what I think, too,” Mrs. Crauder said. “More than enough.” She looked clam cool, but her face was flushed, and sweat stood in tiny beads on her lip, her hairline. “I don’t want my son catching any diseases from your daughter.”
She said “your daughter” like I was the disease myself.
Mom sprang out of her chair like she might go right over the table and sink her teeth into Mrs. Crauder’s scrawny bird neck, claw her eyes free from their dark sockets. Dad was up, too, maybe to stop Mom, maybe to mop up the pieces.
“Get out!” Mom shouted. “You pathetic woman! Get out of my house!” She said it like she was banishing Mrs. Crauder from Eden— our house, which she’d only ever made fun of.
Kenny’s mom stood. “Hiding your head in the sand won’t stop anything,” she said. We were all out of our chairs. “I won’t have your daughter-”
Mom’s finger lashed toward the door. “Out!”
I rushed for the stairs. I heard a chair fall over and hoped Dad hadn’t kicked into action. Mom shouted, almost cackling, “You won’t have my daughter? You? My daughter-”
I slammed my bedroom door behind me, cutting her off, but instead of banging shut, it banged on Kenny.
I whirled around to find him hanging on to his elbow.
“I’m sorry, Lucy. I didn’t tell her anything. I begged her not to come here. I even went to Van’s and bought a turkey to cook ourselves. I told her I was sick. I knew she-”
I pulled him the rest of the way into my room and held him as tight as I could, squeezed him hard enough to make my ears ring, but I could still hear them downstairs. Shouting. Dad now, too. I thought of the man at the fair, the blood etched between his teeth.
Twisting the lock of my door, I pulled Kenny onto my bed, the two of us sitting side by side, touching like on the top of the jungle gym. I shut my eyes, feeling the tears squeeze out. The run of one down my face. I flattened it dry. Downstairs, they were still shouting. I knew they hadn’t noticed us gone.
“Your dad’s whole orphanage thing,” Kenny said. “Kind of sounds like a pretty good deal, doesn’t it?”
I couldn’t stop this tiny laugh. “You know, when you first moved here, I wanted us to adopt you. I had this whole big dream that we could be this great happy family.”
“Me?”
It was almost too easy to please him. I didn’t tell him it was only my plan to get Dad to stay. Kenny gave me a squeeze. A kiss down low on the neck. He called me sis.
But I’d started chewing my lip. “Maybe,” I said, “maybe Dad’s the one we should have adopted. Maybe that would make him feel like he has a real home here.”
“Lucy, I’m not sure, but I kind of don’t think you can adopt your father.”
“You can pick your nose but not your parents.”
“Yeah. Like that. I guess.” He put his arm around me and said, “Happy Thanksgiving, Lucy.”
“You know how my parents said that to each other? In the shower. Going at it like rabbits.”
“Now, that’d be a happy Thanksgiving.”
Things went quiet downstairs, and Kenny said, “I am so sorry, Lucy.”
We listened to them come up the stairs, tap at my door. Dad said, “Luce?”
“Go away,” I tried to say, but my voice cracked. I touched Kenny’s face with the very tips of my fingers. “Go away.”
Kenny sat beside me, his eyes wide, rolling to see his doom coming through the door. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said, his lips against my ear. I gave him a no shit! look.
“Lucy,” Dad said.
“I’m okay, Dad. Okay?”
“She’s crazy, Lucy,” Dad said, and I saw Kenny close his eyes. “Crazy, and drunk, and rattlesnake-mean.”
“Dad,” I said, trying to stop him.
“Don’t listen to a word she said. We didn’t. She’s crazier than a keg of nails.”
“Wow, Dad. Hard to beat nails for crazy.”
“That a boy,” he said. He waited, probably hoping I’d let him in now that we’d had our joke. His constant hope. “Luce?” he said.
“I’ll come down in a while, Dad. Okay?”
He stayed. “That woman,” he said at last. “As if her son was some kind of prize.”
“Kenny’s all right,” I said.
“I know. He can’t help who his mother is.”
“Nobody can,” I said, meaning him, a woman who’d drop off a baby for nuns to raise.
“You can pick your friends but not your nose,” Dad said.
Kenny’s brows scrunched together, and I almost laughed. He smiled, and I looked away. All we needed was to start laughing.
“You sure you’re okay, Luce?”
Mom told him, “It’d take more than that bitch to scratch our Luce.”
“That’s right, Mom,” I said. “Diamond Girl.”
Kenny raised his eyebrows, and I pointed my thumb at my heart.
They said they loved me then, and Kenny and I listened to them going down the stairs, which was a relief. It had been as likely, I figured, that they’d go down the hall to their room.
They hardly ever said they loved me. I mean, it seemed pretty obvious most of the time, but it wasn’t something anybody in our family often said. I wondered why they didn’t even say it to each other, with all they went after it.
One look at Kenny, and it was obvious it wasn’t something he ever heard. Of all the stuff my parents had said about his mom, about him, even, that “We love you, Luce” seemed to be the one that really drove a spike through him.
Kenny didn’t make a move to touch me or anything. He whispered, “I’m the one that really loves you.”
I reached over and pulled him tight against me. “I don’t even know what love is.”
“You’re looking at it,” he said, but he turned toward the window and a moment later asked, “How am I going to get out of here?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A few hours later, leaving Kenny alone in my room, I made my appearance downstairs. They were on me right away, but I held them off, saying, “I know. She’s crazier than a bedbug in a keg of nails.”
“Luce-”
I held up my hand. “Dad, I don’t want to talk about it. It makes me feel sick. Dirty, somehow. Like I really did something or something.”
“But Luce-”
“Let her go, Chuck,” Mom said.
I wondered how much she knew and how much she simply didn’t want the subject of sex while he was away raised in connection with anyone, even me. No telling, where that might lead.
“I just came down to say good night.” I stepped forward and gave Dad a hug, something we usually saved for his departures and arrivals. He hugged back, only an instant late.
Mom, when I moved to the door, stepped back so I could go through. No hugs there. “ ‘Night, Luce,” she said. “You sleep tight.”
At the doorway, I turned. “Dad? Was all that true? About being from the orphanage?”
He shrugged it off. “It was like having a hundred brothers and sisters.”
“And no parents,” I said. “Do you know who they were? Your parents?”
“They were kids, Luce. It was different in those days.”
I didn’t know what to say. Kids? Like what, Mom and him had been senior citizens?
Dad smiled. “And here you are griping about me being gone once in a while.”
“Once in a while? Once in a while?”
Dad laughed like it was a joke, and Mom said, “Good night, Luce,” again.
Upstairs, I found Kenny standing at the open window, ready to leap out, maybe, to a broken leg at best, rather than face my mom or dad.
“Close that,” I hissed, locking the door behind me. “It’s freezing in here.”
“What am I supposed to do now?” he asked.
“We’ll wait for them to go to sleep, then you sneak out. Like we already said.”
“To where?”
I knew what he meant, but I didn’t have an answer. “You could stay here,” I mumbled. “But not now. Not like this.” I gave him a little kiss, walking him over to my bed, letting him see he’d at least make it through the night. “They’ll be up soon. We just have to be quiet.”
I knew what would happen then. What we’d hear. I thought of Kenny an hour ago, promising that he was the only one who really loved me. “Remember,” I asked, chewing at my lip, “that morning I came to your room?”
He smiled. “That’s not something I’ll probably forget.”
I fiddled with the hem of my sweater, then lifted it up over my head. I worked quick, letting my jeans fall to the floor. “I told them I was going to bed,” I said. Kenny, I could tell, wanted to look away, thought he should, but couldn’t. I unhooked my bra, but then couldn’t just stand there naked before him. Dodging under my covers, I said,
“I want to do it right this time, Kenny. Like it’s supposed to be. Like it means something. Not like some stupid accident.”
“Here? Now?”
I flicked off the light. “Come here,” I said.
Kenny sat down on top of the covers. He petted my hair, gave me a few kisses.
Downstairs we heard the phone ring, and a few minutes later, Mom and Dad came up. We listened to their steps. Instead of going to their room, they stopped at my door.
“Luce?” Dad said. “Lucy? Are you awake?”
“What, Dad?” I answered, trying my best to sound asleep.
“Kenny’s mom is on the phone,” Mom said. “She’s not making a lot of sense, but Kenny’s not home, and she’s frantic.”
“Too bad,” I said, but Kenny sat up straight, like he might bolt right out the door for her.
“She doesn’t know where he is. We lost track of him when she was leaving.”
“Do you know where he might go?” Dad asked. “Any idea where he might be?”
I sat up and rubbed Kenny’s back, his shoulders. “I don’t know. The park? The jungle gym?”
They were quiet. I heard steps go down the hall to their room.
“Dad?”
“She’s still on the line, Luce,” Mom answered. “He went to tell her.”
“Oh.”
“Any other ideas?” she asked.
I shook my head in the dark. “No.”
“She thinks he’s over here with you. She said she’d come haul him home if we didn’t.”
“Don’t let her, Mom. Don’t let her come back.”
Mom snorted some kind of laugh. “I wouldn’t worry about that. She didn’t sound as if she could make the walk.” She didn’t say anything else, but I didn’t hear her steps going away. Then, out of the quiet, she said, “I just hope Kenny’s all right.”
“Me, too,” I answered.
She waited longer this time, until I wondered whether I hadn’t heard her walk away.
“Chuck just hung up,” she announced. “That’s done with.” I heard the knob twist. “You’re not thinking about letting me in there, are you, Lucy?” She had her mouth right against the crack of the door. So Dad couldn’t hear.
“I’m in bed, Mom. I don’t have any clothes on.”
She knew I didn’t sleep naked. She knew we never locked doors.
“Naked?” she said. “Lucky boy.”
She said it so quiet, I wasn’t sure I’d heard what I heard. But I was. I knew.
We heard her steps fall away down the hall.
The two of us had, the whole time, been frozen tight. I didn’t realize it until Mom left, the stiffness of every muscle in my body. I lay down flat, blew out this long breath.
Kenny finally lay down beside me. “She knows,” he said.
I knew what was coming. I said, “Just wait a minute.”
It was maybe twenty minutes before Mom and Dad started their bedtime ritual. I felt Kenny slowly turn to me in surprise. I hugged him, and said, “Would you get under the covers now?” I pulled his sweatshirt over his head. “Believe me, they won’t hear a thing.”
“This is suicide,” he said, but he did as he was told. I got his pants off.
It wasn’t long before I reached behind me, fumbling open my drawer, scrambling my fingers through the tangle of my underwear. I found one of the condoms, pulling the foil open with my teeth.
“Are you trying to get us killed? Me?”
“What did you tell me before?”
“What? That I love you? I do, Luce, more than-”
I put my mouth over his.
Kenny struggled in the dark with the condom and then, only seconds later, he was in me. I whispered, “Tell me again,” and Kenny did, saying it over and over, as best he could between kisses. I listened for the rhythm of my parents, straining to match it. Kenny pulled away from me, up onto his elbows, my mouth no longer able to silence him. But we were moving against each other then, and I don’t think he was saying anything.
We were too near the side of the bed; Kenny, I think, still that ready to run. One of his legs slipped off the mattress. He had to stand up on the floor. He held on to my rear, lifting me half off the bed. Something he couldn’t stop. I started to hear our own rhythm, and I nodded to it. I opened my eyes, but Kenny’s were shut tight, his face caught in what we were doing.
