Casebook (31 page)

I stuffed it back into the ruffled envelope, glad to be told what to do.

“I’ve got bread rising,” Ben said. “You guys know how to knead?”

“His mom does,” Hector said.

He handed us aprons that looked like bibs. “Really? I thought mathematician. Head in the sky.”

He took the puffy dough out of an oiled bowl. It was like a stomach. Kneading was fun at first, then work. You had to keep going. My hands hurt.

“People at UCLA probably still think Eli lives in Washington,” I said.

“Sure,” Ben said. “They’re in the ‘Irene’ column.”

“Why did he have to find us?”

“Con artists are canny judges. They find good people,” Ben said. “
He’s
not going to be taken. Be a lot worse if she’d married him.”

“But her happiness,” I said, “it was all fake.”

“Was she happy, really?” Hector asked. “Maybe it was just hope for happiness.”

“Hope for happiness
is
happiness,” I said.

Ben shook his head. “Love. It’s the one thing you should never lie about.”

“That woman we saw,” I said. “How did she finally get over the guy?”

“I don’t know that she did.”

“Well, then how did you talk her into firing you?”

“I didn’t. It was our guy in Arizona. I told you he’s in Twelve Step. As part of that, you have to make amends to everyone you’ve wronged. He sent back money he’d taken from her, with the interest compounded.”

Ben showed us how he’d put bricks inside his oven to form an open box. The kind of thing Sare was always complaining our dads didn’t do. But I couldn’t exactly imagine our moms with Ben Orion
either. It had something to do with Sacramento State College and the way he talked, what I recognized but wouldn’t have then called class.

He walked us out to our bikes. The moon hung low, close to the rooftops, a huge ball.

“Sure you guys don’t want to wait till the bread comes out?”

But we had to get home. “Hey,” I said. “What happened to the stalker you sent back to Idaho?”

“That’s all quiet. He’s living with his mom again. We’ve got somebody in Boise checking up on him. Make sure the old lady doesn’t die. Still the same job, but he joined a group at the local library that meets once a month to talk about
American Idol
. All the studies show just being a member of a group, any group, makes people happier.”

“What Eli did should be a crime,” Hector said.

“It was, once upon a time. You could sue a man for harming a woman’s marital prospects. But your mom’ll have plenty suitors.”

“How do
you
know?” I tried to say that in a nice way.

“I saw her once. Going into your house. She was carrying a bag of groceries.” So he thought she was beautiful, too. Maybe Ben Orion had a crush on the Mims from afar. Maybe
that
was why he’d helped us for free. “You think she’s okay for money and everything?” he asked.

I really didn’t know. She’d been counting on Eli’s seven thousand a month. I didn’t tell Ben or Hector that. I was ashamed we needed money.

60 • Flushing Drugs

I glued the envelope, but it still looked tampered with. I tried to iron it smooth on the ironing board in the basement. I browned a corner, then just slid it back into our mail, between two bills. The
next day, when Hector and I loped in, Marge stood in our kitchen mixing batter, her arm like a ham. “Bundt,” she said. My mom bent over chopping walnuts. I checked and found the letter still unopened. I’d buried it too well. The bills weren’t opened either.

The Boops sat on the Eli-sofa, decorating tags:
From the Adler family
. Cakes cooled on mesh racks. Hector asked how many they were making.

“Hundred, hundred ten,” Marge said. “It’s everybody at your school and all the departmental secretaries.”

“Nothing like this ever happens in our house,” Hector said. “I don’t even think our oven works.”

The oven too now! I knew the washing machine was busted. He didn’t tell me these things. And he knew everything about me! Why didn’t Philip just call a repair guy? I felt bad about his oven. Once, a long time ago, his mom had made jam with us in their kitchen.

When Philip arrived to pick up Hector, Marge poured him a glass of wine. “Not too shabby,” he said, the glass in one hand, a small cake in the other. For him, this was ebullience. I felt like asking him about his broken machines. My sisters tied their tags onto red-cellophane-wrapped cakes for the teachers, janitors, parking patrol guys, secretaries, and the school nurse. The assembly line reminded me of all the other years, but the Mims stood like a zombie, doing her job with blank eyes. I worried about money.

Hector herded his dad to the door. “I’ve still got Latin and my book’s at home.”

School was all of a sudden hard. While we’d been busy, we found ourselves dropped into the time when everything
counted
. I had a paper due, but I kept thinking of presents my mom had given Eli. She’d bought him a digital camera once to take pictures of his son. She’d given him cuff links and what should have been my watch. I assumed the parties he attended, where he wore cuff links and the four suits, took place far away. At least we’d found out
before Christmas; she wouldn’t buy him anything this year. Did he wear that watch with the Victim? Did
she
ever ask where it came from?

“Leave a list of your teachers,” my mom said, “and who should get cakes.”

I wrote down every teacher. I figured I’d need the help.

By the weekend, the letter was gone from the mail basket.

She still took us where we needed to go. She signed our permission slips. She gave off a feeling of trudging through an obstacle course with no appetite or hope of pleasure. Even Pedro, the security guard at our school (who earned hardly any money, she’d once told us, which was why we had to look at him and say his name when we said good morning and why she’d stayed up baking him a miniature Bundt cake, to go along with the twenty-dollar bill),
he
asked me, “Everything okay your family? Your mom look like she be sad.” I worried about all those twenty-dollar bills, too.

In hac spe vivo. Now what
didn’t seem a question anymore. We would go on like this for months, I thought. Years, maybe. My dad put Post-its on his glass doors.
Tell Malc to send cases of pinot to Susan, Jeff, Adam, and Bailey
. People he worked with and his bosses. My mom baked cakes for janitors and secretaries.

No wonder he made more money.

Our mother slept. In our family, we all looked like my dad, but though he woke up at four in the morning and cycled through frets until it was light, the three of us came out true great sleepers. Nine hours was nothing to us. I could do fourteen. The Mims had always loved to sleep. My dad had joked that they’d have a fight, he’d stomp out to let off steam, and when he came back, she’d be sleeping.
Soundly
, he’d added for the laugh. Since October, though, I’d woken at odd times in the night to her crying. I never told that I heard; a measure of her despair was the fear that she was failing us.

I hadn’t known that happiness was a requirement for parenthood. I didn’t know how I’d ever manage. But now, the noise had stopped: she went to bed early, and we had to wake her in the morning.

“I bought pajamas at lunch,” she told me one day, coming in with a bag. She seemed to live for sleep. I’d seen her computer open to a consumer page, comparing mattresses. Maybe I’d have to go to college nearby, I thought, if things didn’t improve.

Twice, Sare drove us home from school. Those days, my mom pushed up from bed and made supper in her pajamas. She slept, burned food, cut herself with the knife slicing an Asian pear. She’d become less capable, overnight.

“Remember the Christmas lights?” Hector said.

“Fucking Christmas lights.”

“You got ladders from the gardener. Every year, you kept thinking Eli would do it.”

“He probably put up lights on that house we saw with his kid.”

“We could go look. We could appropriate the bug. I can drive, remember?”

I let him spin out the adventure in my small room in Santa Monica. Pasadena was thirty-some miles away. When his mom was out, we’d have to drive off without her or his aunt seeing, in Kat’s old powder-blue VW.

“But what if we got caught?” I said. “Like by police!”

“They’re only allowed to stop you if you’re breaking the law. My dad said that.”

We google-mapped the address, planned a route without freeways, but I didn’t think we’d ever use it.

My mom showed us pictures of puppies from a breeder. The one she said had poodle hair, apparently good for allergies, was butt ugly. Hector thought so, too. Sare, when she came by, said it looked learning disabled. You had to love Sare.

“I don’t want that dog,” I said.

My sisters chorused me. Only Philip thought he wasn’t so bad. He and the Mims talked on the porch. Hector and I climbed up to the roof to hear.

“You can’t yell somebody into loving you,” she said. So she must have told Philip. I liked knowing that they talked.

Philip knocked on his old briefcase. “Eighty student interpretations of
Hamlet
.”

“I worry that you’re not liking this enough,” the Mims said.

“I worry about that, too,” he said, and then called Hector.

We hugged the eave spout, then dropped to the ground, our hands smelling of grass and the cold smear of mud.

One Wednesday, I came home to the box of cookies we’d ordered waiting on the porch. I hid the red tins under the Mims’s bed so the Boops wouldn’t consume them before the holidays. I peed in her bathroom then and, for no reason, opened her medicine chest. I found a bottle of pills still in the pharmacy bag. Xanax. I googled it and learned it was a tranquilizer, then opened the small plastic bottle and lifted out the cotton. The pills were tiny, innocent-looking.

I called Hector. “They’re sleeping pills. But she already sleeps all the time.”

“Are you worried she’ll hurt herself?”

I remembered the night of keening outside our old house. I guess I thought it was possible. “I don’t know. She’s on day seventy-four. But she doesn’t seem much better. She might even be a little worse.”

“We could go to CVS and find vitamins that look like the pills. Then we can switch them.” It occurred to me again that Hector was the smartest person I knew. Philip forbade him to leave on a weeknight, though, so I had to wait for his sister to fall asleep so he could shinny out their window. Two hours later, Hector knocked at my back wall. He’d come on his bike. We rode to the all-night Rite Aid. I’d brought a Baggie of the pills. They were white and oval, with
XANAX
printed on them in tiny letters. I worried about the writing. It was hard to tell in the pill aisle what the vitamins
looked like. We couldn’t open the jars without getting caught. “But wait,” Hector said. “Will she even remember what they look like? Probably not. Let’s just get vitamin C. She’ll never think somebody’s swapped them out on her.”

I emptied the Xanax pills into the toilet and flushed them down, filled the jar with vitamins, and stuffed the cotton back in.
^*

“Miles!” my mother called later that night. “Were you in my bathroom?”

My heart went stone. “Yeah.”

I waited, suspended in the stretched air.

“Please remember to put the toilet seat down.”

Another thing my vexing report said, besides the grades, was that I was behind on community service hours.

“Same,” Hector told me. That had to be wrong. So we went to see Mrs. Fisk. Even though we’d done tons for FLAGBTU, since it was a club, she said, it didn’t count. Same with Specials tennis. Specials didn’t count
because
I’d done it for so long. Mrs. Fisk said if I wanted to do something new, like run a bake sale or a raffle to benefit the Specials,
those
hours could count, because they’d represent a
dif
ferent activity. I asked the Specials director, and he said, “Well, city supplies rackets and the van. They buy balls.” He shrugged. “They don’t really need money.”

“So community service isn’t actually to serve the community,” Hector said. “It’s for us to develop ‘new skills.’ The way scholarships here aren’t for the recipients. They’re for us to ‘experience diversity.’ ”

Philip made him do Clean Up the Beach. Charlie said you just put trash in a bag, and you could claim eight hours’ service. Philip
dropped us off at the bottom of the California Incline, which was kept intact by murdering chipmunks.

“Was your grandfather a psychopath?” Hector asked me as we trudged over the sand. “Women are supposed to fall in love with men like their fathers.”

“I don’t think so. I mean, she saw him like four times her whole life.”

We had to sign up at a table, set in sand. They gave us each four huge garbage sacks and balled-up litterbags for dog poop.

“I thought animals weren’t allowed on the beach.”

“They’re not,” the woman said, “but you know. People.”

“My mom got a four-hundred-dollar fine,” Charlie said, walking with us; his head was already pointed toward the clump of standing girls, who held their sandals. I looked at their legs, wondering if I was like any of their fathers. Maude Stern’s legs were shaped like scalene triangles.

I tied my laces together and hung my shoes around my neck; Hector stuck his flip-flops in his shirt pocket. We headed south toward the pier, bending down every few minutes for garbage. It was amazing the shit people dropped. You kind of expected pop tabs and candy wrappers, but we found condoms, barrettes, a green sparkly high-heeled shoe, cigarette butts, two combs, one stray earring, and pennies. People left food, too: sanded watermelon rinds, gritty French fries, a whole carrot.

“My aunt is back in the hospital,” Hector said, wiping the carrot on his shirt.

“Oh. That sucks,” I answered, the surf roaring at our backs. What could you say?

“Don’t tell anybody.”

I wouldn’t. “You want to know something bad?” I wanted to give him a secret of my own, to prove it. “My mom thinks she’s not a good person.” There was no one else I could tell this to, not even the Boops. Hector loved my mom a way you couldn’t love your own mother. “Remember Eli told her if she was crippled that
would be better than what was wrong with her because a bad leg wouldn’t get in the way of a relationship?”