Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (12 page)

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Joe Davis said. He really did look sorry, too. “You don’t have to confess, though. You could just tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I liked the idea of the box,” I said.

“I could hide behind my desk.” Joe Davis leaped up. He went behind his desk, ducked behind a particularly large stack of books. “How’s that?” His voice was a little muffled.

I laughed. “You’re going to knock those over.”

I saw a hand rise up, slap down on top of the books to hold them down. “Okay, shoot,” he said.

I laughed again. His head poked up over the books. “I’m waiting,” he sang in a pretend-annoyed fashion. “Actually, is it all right if I come back and sit down? My knees hurt with that crouching.”

“I suppose so,” I said. Joe Davis sat down again. He folded his hands over his chest as if he’d just eaten a good meal and was now waiting for the movie to start. It looked like he would wait there a long time, so I told him about Travis. I told him what had happened the night before. I told him that there were big pieces of me that thought I was in love with Travis Becker. Those pieces of me didn’t want to give up Travis. I avoided the eyes of the sad-faced Jesus. He looked very disappointed in me. I wished he had a Sea World T-shirt on too.

“Wow,” Joe Davis said when I finished. “That’s a lot to deal with, all right. I can see you are feeling pretty bad about it.”

His sympathy made a lump rise in my throat and my eyes grow hot with tears. “Aren’t you supposed to make me do something, like say a bunch of prayers?”

“I’m sorry, Ruby,” he said.

“Don’t tell me. Catholics again?”

“Yep. Anyways, I’m thinking the thing you should do is talk to your mom about this.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

I knew he was in love with my mother. I didn’t want to betray her by giving him negative information. Explaining why I couldn’t talk to her right now would be like telling him that she laughed at the religious channels and couldn’t make a fried egg to save her life and always left it to someone else to put a new roll of toilet paper on. Something he should have to find out at least after a few dates.

I thought for a while. I remembered something I once heard about minister-patient confidentiality, or something like that.

“This stays between us, right?” I asked.

“Absolutely.”

“She’s broken right now,” I said. “Everything is in pieces. Even the kitchen is in pieces. Our dog chewed a big hole in the wall.”

Joe Davis winced in empathy. He crossed one leg over the other. He wore sandals, too. Maybe good men could be found in sandal-like shoes.

“I can’t give her anything else in pieces,” I said.

“Things come apart before they can be put back together again.”

“What do you think I should do?”

Joe Davis leaned forward, elbow on one knee, and scratched his neck. “You know what I’ve learned in this job? The people who ask for advice are the ones who already know what they should do.”

“I should go to Sea World,” I said. He looked at me like I was crazy, so I pointed to his T-shirt. I was suddenly in the mood for a little humor after dropping that package at Joe Davis’s feet.

Joe lifted one fist in the air. “Shamu power,” he said.

“I’d have a whale of a good time,” I said.

Joe Davis groaned, threw his head back as if in pain. “I love Sea World,” he said. “But the one thing that bothers me is that they sell fish and chips there.”

“Eek,” I said.

Then Joe Davis got serious again. He looked at me. “Ruby? Here’s the thing. About this guy. Sometimes we are so convinced someone is throwing us a life preserver that we don’t notice that what they are actually doing is drowning us.”

I remembered that day at Marcy Lake, Travis’s hand clutching my wrist, my tight lungs, his crooked smile under that green, murky water. Joe Davis was more accurate than he even realized.

I tossed him some brave words. I owed him something, I guess, for being kind to me. “It’s a good thing I’m a strong swimmer,” I said. I didn’t believe it; I doubt he did either. You know when your own mind means business, and when it is only saying what it thinks it should.

When I left the church office I noticed the sign.
DOG IS MAN’S BEST FRIEND.
It looked like Joe Davis was having a little fun with the unknown sign changer.

On the way home, I stopped to watch the paragliders. I wanted to see their bravery and their rightness. And that day was a whale-themed day, because to my surprise, for the first time ever, I saw him. The
I Love Potholes
guy with the whale van. He wore shorts and sandals, a T-shirt emblazoned with a heart with wings, the logo of the paragliding club. He wasn’t much older than I was, and had rough, tumbled, curly hair, the start of a beard. He was taking his backpack from the van and caught me looking his way.

“You going up?” he asked.

“Just watching,” I said. I figured I owed him an explanation for my staring. “I’ve always liked your van.”

“Yeah?” He smiled. “Then you’ve got to see this.” He set his pack down, leaned inside the driver’s seat. “Keep watching,” he called.

I watched the whale. A spurt of water came from its spout. More like a dribble really. A drool, dripping down the side. The whale-van guy emerged again. “Isn’t that lame?” he said, his eyes happy.

“Oh, jeez. Pathetic,” I said. “That is so bad.”

“I know it. You ever been up?” He nodded his chin toward the mountain.

“No,” I said.

“Oh, you’ve got to. See that spot up there? The landing?” I nodded. “From up above it looks like the mountain has a bald spot.”

“Hair Club for Men,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.

He picked up his pack and waved, and after a while I headed off. My mom was home early that day; when I got home she was already in the kitchen making dinner. She was walking around in her bare feet and cutoffs, with an open book in one hand that she was reading as she stirred a pot of spaghetti sauce. Chip Jr. had already come home from Oscar’s house. He was creating what looked like the Empire State Building on the kitchen table with sticks of spaghetti. Poe didn’t even say hello. His focus was on Mom and anything she might drop as she cooked; his eyes were glued to her hands as if he were under a hypnotic spell.

I barely got a hello from Mom either. “Good book, huh?” I asked. It was the same one I had seen in her room a few days before—
Life Times Two,
by Charles Whitney, thick enough to have her engrossed and to cause her fingers to splay like duck feet with the effort of holding it open.

“Mmm hmm.” She stopped stirring the sauce, moved to the counter where she’d begun making the salad. Poe trotted after her, his eyes still never leaving her hands and their amazing possibilities. My mother took some torn lettuce leaves from the salad spinner and dropped them into the salad bowl, still reading. Her aim gradually wavered until she was missing the bowl completely and a little pyramid of lettuce greens was rising on the kitchen counter. This was better than TV.

“Mom,” Chip Jr. said.

She looked up. “What? Oh, shit.” She grabbed the leaves and shoved them in the bowl with irritation, as if they had willfully misbehaved. One fell on the floor, to Poe’s great delight; he jumped up and trotted over to sniff it. Then he sat back down and looked up again in wait. The lettuce leaf looked limp and rejected. It should have. That dog would eat underwear, for God’s sake.

“Let me help you,” I said to Mom. I could see the spaghetti sauce rising slowly to the edge of the pan, bubbling all lavalike. I caught its handle just in time. It was one of my mother’s biggest problems, the way she immersed herself in something to the exclusion of everything else. She could move from world to world, and it
was tough trying to find the secret door to wherever she was.

“Time to put this down,” she said, stating the obvious. It was too bad in a way. I was looking forward to actually eating and seeing how she was going to manage reading while spaghetti slapped all over her chin. “You,” she said to me, as if she only now noticed I was there. “I need to talk to you.” She put the cover flap inside the book and set it down, away from the possible splatterings from the stove. My stomach flipped. Oh, God. Nerves tightened my throat.

“Oh, jeez, Poe,” Chip Jr. said. He waved his hand back and forth, fanning the air. Poe continued to stare up at Mom as if nothing had happened.

“Dog, you were not named for the poet and short story writer and forefather of the modern mystery,” my mother said down to him. “You were actually named for Sir Potent Fart, king of the exiled canines.”

It was the first joke I’d heard her make since my father’s last visit. Jokes, a regular dinner, reading—my mother was returning to us again.

She strained the spaghetti, steam rising in a sudden gust, and slid some onto our plates. She ladled the sauce on, dropped the heel of bread pretend-accidentally to Poe, who brought his prize to the living room, where he could spread the crumbs all over the carpet. I waited. I was making brave efforts to remind the sick feeling that there were lots of things she could want to talk to me about. Maybe I’d forgotten to do something she asked.
Water the garden? Get gas in the car? Not break into someone’s house in the middle of the night while Travis Becker took their jewelry?

Mom ate for a while, looking down at her plate. As the silence grew, I was sure she would not be struggling with words if I had left the gas tank empty or didn’t water the garden. Outside, someone was mowing their lawn. Chip Jr. was doing an apparent pasta science experiment. On the first mouthful, he rolled up the spaghetti as high as he could around the fork and up the handle. On his second bite, he took a single strand between his lips and inhaled, until the end of it finally whipped past his lips like the back car of the Tornado Train Roller Coaster at the Gold Nugget Amusement Park.

“Ruby,” my mother said finally. “About the other night.”

“Uh oh,” Chip Jr. said.

“What night?” I said. I was giving her every opportunity to let this be about something else. Even I could tell that my voice was too cheery.

The lawn mower sound stopped right then. The room was suddenly too quiet. I studied my tangle of spaghetti. Poe was back. He sat by my chair and panted,
Heh heh heh.
I didn’t know what he thought was so funny.

“The night you went to the movies with Sydney.”

“Oh, right,” I said.

“She called over here after you left, saying they ordered a pizza. They asked if you wanted to come over.”

I didn’t say anything. I just kept looking at that
spaghetti, hoping it might do something to save the day. It was one of those times where you just don’t understand yourself and how you got into such a mess. I was having a lot of those moments lately. The real me had gone off on vacation somewhere and I was being house-sat by someone who had wild parties and smoked in bed.

“Is this about a boy?” my mother said. I guess she thought that most troubles had love at the heart of them. She was probably right.

“Yes,” I said.

“I knew it,” Chip Jr. said.

“Oh, Ruby,” my mother sighed. “You know when you start to lie about something that you are in territory where someone is going to get hurt. If you need that lie, you’ve stepped over the line onto dangerous ground.”

“I know,” I said. I did know, too.

“Who is he?”

“That rich guy that lives in the castle,” Chip Jr. said.

“One of the Becker boys?” my mother said.

“How do you know?” I glared at Chip Jr.

“Oscar’s brother saw you throw him in Marcy Lake.”

“Spy,” I said. Did everyone have to know your business?

“Yeah, right,” Chip Jr. said. “This is actually a hidden camera.” He held up his bread roll.

“Shut up,” I said.

“And this is a miniature microphone.” He held up a cherry tomato from the salad. He spoke into it. “Yep, she’s here,” he said.

I shoved back my chair. I shoved a little too hard; it fell over with a crack and Poe did a little sideways scurry from the fright. I don’t know why I was so angry. I went to my room. I slammed the door. I could hear the framed pictures on the other side of the wall—overly large school photos of Chip Jr. and me, caught at our height of ugliness, with teeth that looked too big for our faces and glazed expressions of goofiness—slide off-kilter. I sat with my back to the door. My mother knocked a second later, as I knew she would. All of this was familiar from those Disney movies where a Teenager Makes a Scene. I guess that’s where I learned what to do.

Mom rattled the doorknob. Then she gave up. I could hear her slide her back down the door, and I knew she was there, sitting on the other side of it. She was quiet for a long time, and then her muffled voice came through the door, right at my own ear level.