Barefoot (18 page)

“No problem,” Josh said. “I’m all over it.” He nearly went on to describe life with his father: dinner at eight-thirty, the beer, the iceberg salad. Josh knew all about routine, he knew all about sameness.

And so, the summer started: Monday through Friday, Josh’s alarm went off at seven-thirty. It took him thirteen minutes to brush his teeth, shave, comb his hair, apply sunscreen, get dressed, and towel the dew off the seats of his Jeep—and anywhere from eleven to fourteen minutes to get from his house in Miacomet out to ’Sconset, depending on traffic by the high school. He pulled up to the cottage on Shell Street right before eight and invariably found Brenda and Blaine on the front step throwing pebbles into a paper cup. Brenda was always in a short nightgown—she had two, he’d learned, one pink and a white one with flowers. Josh was convinced she stayed in her nightgown to torment him. When Josh arrived, she stood up and said,
My work here is done,
and disappeared into the house, into her room, where she changed into a bikini. Josh was on board with establishing a routine, but he couldn’t help appreciating variation—such as which nightgown Brenda was wearing, which bikini Brenda chose to put on, and the substance and duration of their conversations about her work. Because what Josh had learned early on, the first or second day on the job, was that Brenda was writing a screenplay. There had been one kid in Chas Gorda’s writing workshop who aspired to write a screenplay, a sophomore named Drake Edgar. Drake Edgar had the distinction of being the most earnest student in the class; he handed in scene after dreadful scene and wrote down everyone’s criticism, verbatim. Chas Gorda himself—though his first and best-known novel had been made into a film which could now most generously be described as “cult”—suggested early on to Drake Edgar that the writing workshop was a place for pursuing serious fiction rather than scripts for horror films or thrillers. The other students, including Josh, dismissed Drake Edgar, considered him eccentric, borderline maniacal—though every conversation about Drake Edgar ended with the disclaimer that he would “probably laugh himself all the way to the bank.”

Why not take screenwriters seriously? Josh thought. Everyone loved the movies. And movies had to be written.

“A screenplay?” Josh said to Brenda. “That’s fascinating. I’m a writer, too. Well, I’m studying writing at Middlebury with Chas Gorda. You know of him?”

“No,” Brenda said.

“He’s great,” Josh said. “He wrote this novel called
Talk
when he was only twenty-six.”

Brenda smiled knowingly. “Oh, he’s one of
those.
You know, prodigies who peak early and then never write another thing worth reading. God, I could teach an entire class on those people alone.”

Josh felt uncomfortable hearing Chas Gorda insulted, and he considered defending his professor, but he didn’t want to argue with Brenda. Instead, he said, “What are you working on?”

“Me?” Brenda said. “Oh, I’m trying to adapt this thing . . .” Here she stroked the gold-leaf lettering of her old book,
The Innocent Impostor
. “But I don’t know. It’s not going that well. It’s like this book doesn’t fit the screenplay formula, you know? There is no car chase.”

Josh laughed—too loudly, probably, and with the unsettling eagerness of Drake Edgar. Still, what were the chances? He was a writer, sort of, and so was Brenda. Sort of.

“I can help you if you want,” Josh said. “I can offer my opinion.” (
That’s our currency here,
Chas Gorda was always reminding the class.
Opinions.
) “I can give it a read.”

“It’s nice of you to offer,” Brenda said. “But who knows if I’ll ever finish. Are you writing a screenplay, too?”

“No, no, no,” he said. “I’m more interested in writing short stories, you know, and novels.” The way Brenda stared at him made him feel ridiculous, as though he’d just told her he was dressing up as Norman Mailer for Halloween. “But I could read your screenplay if you want feedback.”

“Maybe,” Brenda said. She tucked
The Innocent Impostor
back into its nest of bubble wrap and closed and locked the briefcase. “Maybe when I’m further along.”

“Okay,” Josh said. She was humoring him. He was a child to her, and yet he couldn’t stop himself, each and every morning, as they helped Blaine pick the pebbles up off the flagstone walk, from asking how the screenplay was going. Some days she said,
Oh, fine,
and other days she shook her head and said nothing at all.

Another variation of Josh’s day-to-day was what Vicki made for breakfast. Every morning it was something elaborate and delicious: blueberry pancakes, applewood-smoked bacon, cheddar omelets, peach muffins, eggs Benedict, crispy hash browns, cinnamon French toast, melon and berry salad. Josh and Vicki were the only ones who touched the breakfasts. Melanie was too queasy, she said, especially first thing in the morning. All she could handle was ginger tea and dry toast. Brenda didn’t eat in the mornings, though she was a prodigious drinker of coffee and filled a thermos of it, doctored with a cup of half-and-half and six tablespoons of sugar, to take to the beach. The kids didn’t eat the breakfasts because they were respectively too small and too picky. Vicki fed Porter pureed carrots or squash while Blaine ate Cheerios at the kitchen table. So the morning feasts were left to Josh and Vicki.

At first, Josh protested. “You don’t have to go to all this trouble for me,” he said. “I can grab something at home. Cereal, you know, or a bagel.”

“You’re doing me a favor,” Vicki said. “I need to keep my strength up, and I would never make any of this for just myself.” For Vicki, every forkful was an effort. She had no appetite, she felt specifically un-hungry. She gazed at the tiny portions on her plate and sighed. She picked a blueberry out of a pancake, she considered half a piece of bacon or a single cube of fried potato. “Here goes,” she said. “Down the hatch.”

Josh couldn’t say how long it had been since someone had made a meal just for him; it was, he realized, one more part of having a mother that he missed. Vicki and Melanie watched him eat with appreciation, or maybe envy. They loaded his plate with seconds. Melanie nibbled her dry toast in the seat across from Josh; Vicki ate as much as she could, then she did the dishes, lifted Porter from his baby seat, washed his face and hands, changed his diaper, slathered him with lotion, and put him in his bathing suit. Blaine liked to dress himself—always in the same green bathing suit and then, as the days passed, in a shirt the same color as the shirt Josh was wearing. Yellow shirt for Josh, yellow shirt for Blaine. Green, red, white. Blaine cried the day Josh wore his Red Sox jersey.

“I’ll have to buy him one,” Vicki said.

“Sorry,” Josh said.

“It must be tough being his hero,” Vicki said.

Josh ruffled Blaine’s blond hair, uncertain of what to say. There was no point denying it. Blaine hadn’t given Josh a single bit of trouble since the first night of babysitting; he was resolutely well behaved, as though he were afraid that if he did something wrong, Josh would leave and never come back. Most days, Josh took the kids to the town beach right there in ’Sconset and sat in the shadow of the lifeguard stand (at Vicki’s insistence). Josh and Blaine would dig in the sand, building castles, looking for crabs, collecting shells and rocks in a bucket. Porter spent time in his pack ’n’ play under the umbrella chewing on the handle of a plastic shovel or chugging down a bottle or taking his morning nap. Blaine clearly liked it best when Porter was asleep; he wanted Josh all to himself. Other kids sidled up to Josh and Blaine with varying degrees of confidence, peering in the bucket, sizing up the sand castle. Could they play? Blaine shrugged and looked to Josh, who always said,
Sure.
And then, in the interest of fostering good socialization skills, he said,
This is Blaine. What’s your name?
Josh had learned to be careful, though, not to show anyone more attention than Blaine—otherwise Blaine would skulk off and sit under the umbrella, surreptitiously slipping rocks and shells of chokable sizes into his brother’s playpen. Being with Blaine, Josh decided, was like being with a jealous and possessive girlfriend.

Babysitting was harder work than he thought it would be. It wasn’t the hundreds of times Josh had to throw the Wiffle ball; it wasn’t the half hour side by side eating the sandwiches that Vicki had packed talking about
Scooby-Doo;
it wasn’t the fifty-seven items on Vicki’s nonlist list, none of which could be forgotten (such as: never leave the house without a pacifier, make sure the milk stays cold, Blaine must finish his raisins before he has a pudding,
sunscreen, sunscreen, sunscreen!,
medicine for Porter’s poison ivy to be applied every ninety minutes, shake the towels out, rinse off the Boogie board, stop by the market on the way home and pick up some Fig Newtons and some Bounce sheets, here’s the money . . .). Rather, what drained Josh’s energy was the emotional load of caring for two little people. From eight until one, five days a week, Blaine and Porter depended on Josh Flynn to keep them safe. Without him, they would dehydrate, drown, die. When viewed in this way, the job was
really important
. Despite the sort of flukiness of his taking this job, the oddness of it, and the suspicious nature of its beginning (his lust, plain and simple, for Brenda), Josh felt himself becoming attached to the kids. Hero worship? He loved it. At some point during the second or third week, Blaine took Josh’s hand and said,
You’re my best friend.
And Josh felt his heart grow three sizes, just like the Grinch in Dr. Seuss. A little kid affecting him this way? No one at the airport would have believed it.

Tom Flynn occasionally asked over dinner,
How’s the new job going?

Josh answered,
Good. Fine.
And left it at that. There was no use explaining to his father that he was making progress—he could now tell the difference between Porter’s cries (hungry, tired, pick-me-up-please) and he was teaching Blaine to keep his eye on the ball. He would never admit that he had memorized entire pages from
Horton Hatches the Egg
and
Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man,
which Blaine liked to read upon their return to the cottage in the minutes before Josh left for the day. He couldn’t articulate the tenderness he felt for these kids who were in danger of losing their mother. If Vicki died, they would be just like him—and although Josh would say he was well adjusted by anyone’s standards, this made him sad. Every time Josh saw Vicki, he thought,
Don’t die. Please.

So with his father, he tried to stay noncommittal.
The job is good. I like it. The kids are a hoot.

At this, Tom Flynn would nod, smile. He never asked what the kids’ names were or anything else about them, and Josh, for the first time in his life, didn’t feel compelled to explain. His job, the routine, his relationship with the kids and the Three—these were things that belonged to him.

Josh was so immersed in his new life that seeing Didi in the parking lot of Nobadeer Beach came as a very rude surprise. Josh had taken to swimming nearly every day at six o’clock, after most of the crowds had packed up and gone home, after the heat had dissipated but the sun was still mellow and warm. It was a fine hour of his day, and Josh usually toweled off and sat on the beach a few extra minutes watching the waves or tossing a piece of driftwood to someone else’s dog, feeling fortunate, and smart, for taking control of his summer. So on the day that he climbed the narrow, rickety stairs from the beach and spied Didi sitting on the bumper of his Jeep, he filled with an old, familiar dread. There was no use pretending this was a happy coincidence; she was waiting for him. Staking him out. Josh thought back to the previous summer and the summer before that—Didi had surprised him every once in a while in this same way, and back then he had counted himself lucky. But now he felt creeped out. If her eyes hadn’t been trained on him, he would have tried to sneak away.

As it was, he barely concealed his disgust. “Hey,” he said. He whipped his damp towel into the open back of his Jeep.

She made a noise. At first he hoped for a snicker, but no such luck. She was crying. “You don’t love me anymore,” she said. “You fucking hate me.”

“Didi—”

She sniffed and swiped at her nose with the heel of her palm. She was wearing her old cutoff jean shorts from high school, the ones with white strings dangling down her thighs, and a pink T-shirt that said
Baby Girl
in black cursive letters. She was barefoot; her toes, painted electric blue, dug into the dirty sand of the parking lot. Josh did a quick scan; he didn’t see Didi’s Jetta.

“How did you get here?” he said.

“Someone dropped me.”

“Someone?”

“Rob.”

Rob, her brother, who cruised around in a huge Ford F-350 with a shiny tool chest on the back and a bumper sticker that said
I give rides for gas, grass, and ass.
Rob was a carpenter with Dimmity Brothers, where Josh’s mother used to work. The island was way too small. So Rob had dropped Didi off, and barefoot, no less; now Josh was trapped. He would be forced to give her a ride somewhere. She knew he was too nice a guy to strand her.

“Where’s
your
car?” he said.

“They took it.”

“Who took it?”

“The repo man.” New tears fell; her mascara streaked. “It’s gone forever.”

Josh took a breath. “What about the money I lent you?”

“It wasn’t enough. I’m in trouble, Josh. Big trouble. I can’t make my rent, either. I’m going to get evicted and my parents have made it perfectly clear that they do not want me back at home.”

Right. After twenty years of overindulgence, Didi’s parents had moved on to tough love. Too little, too late, but Josh couldn’t blame them for not wanting their grown daughter back in their house. She would drain their liquor cabinet and run up their phone bill.

“You have a job,” Josh said. “I don’t get it.”

“I get paid shit,” Didi said. “It’s not like I’m a nurse.”