Crooked Little Heart (21 page)

“But we don’t know that,” said Rae. “We’re just sad because we’ll miss him. But I notice one thing that is good. He’s gotten good at knowing what really counts, and asking for it—a ride out to the living room in his wheelchair, a glass of cool water with a thin slice of lemon.”

“It was different for my dad,” said Rosie. Elizabeth, in the back seat, stiffened. She leaned through the space between the two front seats and reached her left arm across Rosie’s chest. Rosie dug her chin down into her mother’s arm, rubbed it hard, like a deer rubbing its nubs against a tree. After a minute, she continued. “He just got smashed into and died. That’s what scares me, everything going dark on you all of a sudden. One moment, like 11:08, my dad was cruising along, thinking about me and Mommy and listening to the radio and thinking about what he was going to do the next morning, and then at 11:09, he was dead. Boom. At 11:08 I had a daddy, and then at 11:09, I never did again.”

“Well, you do have a daddy,” said Rae. “But not Andrew.”

“I have James,” said Rosie. “I have a James. Not a dad.”

Elizabeth, in the back seat, closed her eyes, trying to breathe back in all the parts that were suddenly spiking out of her.

T
HEY
sat in Charles’s room beside his bed. Rae rubbed his feet. He wanted to know about Rosie’s tennis and James’s book.

“I heard him on the radio again,” he said, in his soft reedy voice. “He was talking about something important. I can’t remember what now. But he was very clear, very caring. You can’t hope for much more than that.”

Elizabeth watched Rae rub Charles’s feet. His nurse had manicured them perfectly, cutting away calluses and doctoring corns. The nails were trimmed and buffed. They looked like God’s feet, smooth and pale as alabaster, but at the end of spindly wasted legs; because they were so lovely, Charles didn’t wear socks anymore. It was one incongruous frivolity in a man who had seemed to care so little about his physical package. Elizabeth saw his newly realized feet as something he had grown briefly, a new way of being in the world, almost like little feathers that he couldn’t fly with yet because they were too new, but that he could preen.

R
OSIE
fell asleep in the back seat on the way home.

Elizabeth started to think of Charles’s feet again, as they drove along. She found it hard to breathe. “I keep thinking of the physical part of Charles that isn’t going to be here anymore,” she said. “Like his feet.” Neither of them said anything until Elizabeth pulled up in front of her house. She shut off the engine and hung her head.

“Can we just sit out here for a while?” Elizabeth asked.

Rae nodded, her eyes downcast, grave.

“Lank is inside with James. It’s their basketball night. Look. They’re peering out at us.” The men stood at the window in the living room, waving. The women waved.

Elizabeth turned back to Rae. “I’m thinking,” she said, “about the shoes that aren’t worn anymore, and the feet that don’t walk anymore, and yet how delectable they are. Feet in repose. Not transportation,
not support. They’re like beautiful perfect clay feet. And oh, Rae. He loves your massages.”

They looked out through the car windows for a minute and then back at the men who still stood at the window, still waving.

“We don’t make any sense to them,” Elizabeth said. “Here we are, a couple of white women sitting in a stuffy car, talking about a dying man’s feet.”

For a minute, Rosie’s snores from the back seat were the only sounds in the car. Then Rae smiled at Elizabeth.

A
FTER
a while the men came out of the house, James in his basketball clothes and high-tops, with a basketball tucked fiercely under his arm as if it were someone’s severed head. Lank wore khakis and Birkenstocks.

Rae rolled down her window. “Lank. They’ll never let you play like that.”

“I left all my stuff at Linda’s. I forgot it was basketball night. I promised I’d go for a walk with her. I’m supposed to meet her in town.” He sighed. “Maybe she’ll take cyanide instead.”

“I thought you liked her,” said Elizabeth. He had been dating Linda for three weeks.

“Maybe she’ll hook up her garden hose to the exhaust.”

“Lank!” said Elizabeth, but she was laughing. James bent down and peered in at his wife.

“Hi,” he said plaintively.

“Oh, James.”

“How was Charles?”

“He’s okay, isn’t he, Rae?” Rae nodded. “You need to see him soon if you want to say good-bye.”

“Okay.”

James peered in at Rosie sleeping soundly in the back, looked inquiringly at Elizabeth, and pantomimed tossing back drinks. Elizabeth nodded, and they smiled at each other. Lank studied Rae.

“Is Jesus in there with you now?” he asked.

“He’s always with me, Lank.”

“Why don’t you guys come inside,” said Elizabeth, “and I’ll make you a quick cup of coffee?”

“No,” said Lank. “We’re going. Don’t even try to slow us up. We’re going now.” He started to walk away, and then turned back to peer in at Rae again.

“Is Jesus like your little shadow, Rae?”

“He’s like my own little sun.” Lank stared at Rae for a moment, and then he smiled, like a good sport, as if she had won and he understood this.

“You’re great, Rae,” he said.

“Hey, thanks.”

“But we’ve given up on girls, me and James. Right, James? Girls confuse us.” James nodded one nod of great finality, and they turned and walked away.

R
OSIE
was playing Colleen Morgen in the round of sixteen, in a tournament in Stockton, on the last court in a row of eight. She was seeded eighth in the tournament, Colleen not seeded at all, and it was five games each in the second set. Rosie had won the first set, but Colleen was playing hard now, with confidence, and Rosie was afraid. Her stomach ached with anxious thoughts of losing. Colleen needed one point to win the game.

Rosie looked around.

No one was watching the boys in the match on the next court, and they were consumed by their own play, and at first she thought no one was watching her and Colleen until she noticed Luther alone under a tree, reading a newspaper. She watched him for a moment. He did not look up. So when Colleen served a weak pouffy serve that landed on the intersection of alley and service line but just barely, Rosie, almost without meaning to, called it out.

She caught the ball on her racket, stopped it, and nonchalantly began walking to the backhand side of her court, to receive serve.

“What?” said Colleen, gawking.

“It was out,” Rosie explained, continuing toward the other side of the court. She cocked her head, smiled gently. “Really,” she said.

“It caught the line,” said Colleen.

“Sorry,” said Rosie.

Colleen continued staring and then laughed with derision, shaking her head, looking off over her shoulder as if for an unseen referee. After a moment, she served to Rosie’s backhand, and Rosie hit a crisp winner down the line, winning the game.

Rosie was all but whistling as she went to pour herself some ice water from her thermos. Colleen came up to where she stood drinking
but did not seem to see her and poured herself water in stony silence. An airplane passed overhead, but it did not entirely drown out the grunts of the boys on the next court, in the midst of a long baseline rally. Rosie walked to the service line. She turned slightly, all of a sudden sure that someone—maybe someone from the sportsmanship committee, maybe Colleen’s parents or coach—was watching and had been watching all along. But there was no one. No one except for Luther. He was looking right at her, his brown eyes crinkled ever so slightly around the edges. She felt an incredible jolt of shame and amazement and fear. And felt also that without wanting to, she was sliding into him. She felt the way you do when you stick a plug into an electrical outlet, and turn on the machine—the blender or the vacuum—and are startled by the noise. She did not know what to do with her eyes, and so she glared at him, vibrant with distress.

In her mind, she saw herself running up the stairs toward him and pulling a knife from the waistband of her tennis skirt, stabbing him through the heart with it, killing him with her knife, and then she saw herself dying too. In this horrible moment she wanted obliteration. But turning back to the net, she realized that all she needed was to win four of the next six points—and she did, easily.

Colleen would not shake her hand at the net when the match was over. She appeared to be in a trance. Rosie smiled nicely and went to put her racket in its case.

People could be such bad sports. Colleen bolted away, and Rosie felt sorry for her, but mostly she was excited to be in the quarterfinals.

She lost in the quarters, as she was expected to do, to the number two seed, who went on to upset the number one seed. She did not mind losing at all as long as she was expected to. And still no one but Luther and a few of her opponents knew Rosie’s horrible secret.

It was not until early the following week, while practicing with Simone at the public courts in town—there was a round-robin tournament for the adults tying up the courts at their club—that panic set in. People were sitting in the chairs next to the court, watching her and Simone with loud and obvious admiration, and that was almost the best of all feelings, and so she was shaken when her mind began to race with bad images. There she was, running Simone all over the court, vaguely amused by the skill of her performance, when she suddenly and for no reason went from ruthlessly pelting the ball from one
baseline corner to the other to watching a slide show in her head of future disgrace. Click: she saw Colleen notify the sportsmanship committee of the junior tennis association, saw herself called before them, charged with cheating. Click: she was playing in a tournament, center court, when out of the audience steps a tall dour man in a suit, like someone from the FBI, who whips his wallet open to show her a badge. Click: she opens the front door and Peter Billings is standing there, brokenhearted, looking at her with pain and contempt. Click: she’s standing in front of a closed door with
SPORTSMANSHIP COMMITTEE
stenciled across the pane of smoky glass, and she knocks and hears a friendly familiar voice she cannot place, a voice that says, “Come in”; flooded with relief, she pushes open the door, and there is Elvin Thackery sitting behind the desk, looking at her with disappointment, holding the little pocketknife he showed her that time when he put his dick on her arm, and he’s so unhappy with her now for having cheated that all she can do is hold her breath and try to look cute and harmless so he will take pity on her.

“I have to go home now,” she said to Simone, who was always glad to cut a practice short. The spectators clapped as they walked off the court, and Simone bowed at the waist, like the star at curtain call, while Rosie dipped her head down close to her chest as if someone had just spritzed her with cold water.

R
OSIE
began watching the mail, watching her parents for any sign that they had been contacted, but whenever she studied her mother’s face as she read or ate or thought, her mother would just look up and smile gently, in her sad and slightly spaced-out way, and then go back to her business. There was no indication anywhere that anyone knew, and she swore she was done with cheating for good, was starting over, starting now. But secretly, in some outlaw part of her psyche, she felt like she had discovered the secret of the universe.

God, she thought. You spend all this time trying to do right but always feeling wrong, and you wonder why you never get ahead and why it takes so much energy, like tightrope walking. And then here she was getting away with cheating, and for some reason in that she found a huge relief. She’d stopped being so good, and she no longer worried so much about falling off the tightrope.

She felt an electric thrill nowadays when she walked past Luther. It was sort of like when she woke up from a dream of kissing boys, or in real life, when Simone told her about kissing boys, about boys kissing her breasts, or how Jason Drake had put his thing into her underpants but not into her. Not really, not all the way. She met Luther’s eyes. His gaze was direct and even warm. She turned her back on him and walked away.

S
HE
told herself it didn’t matter if you called a few balls wrong. And the grown-ups were so stupid not to catch her. It made her feel smarter, like she thought Simone must have felt smarter at first, having gone so far with Jason all those weeks ago. Her period was late this month; she had been so desperate for it to start since that day at the river. Natalie had told Rosie something odd the other day, when Simone had the stomach flu and had to default her match. Natalie said to Rosie, “Tell her to give me a call if she needs me,” and Rosie had passed it along when she called Simone that night. She asked Simone what that really meant—and how they would know what to do next—but Simone had been so cross with her that they ended up hanging up on each other. The next day, during a close match, she had tried so hard to be good and not cheat, because Simone was so stupid and cheap to let Jason go so far with her, and Rosie wanted to start over, to be a good person who could look down her nose at Simone. But at the same time, she was desperate to win, and wanting to win so badly made her feel like a kite pinned against a wall by a hard wind. And she cheated again, as if she were unable not to, as if she no longer had any choice in the matter.