Josie and Jack (4 page)

Then I put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, what I always wore during the summer. Jack took one look at me and marched me back into my bedroom, where he made me change into a different pair of shorts and a different T-shirt.

“What’s the point?” I said.

“The point,” he said, “is that the first time, you looked like you were wearing your brother’s old clothes. Now you don’t.”

“I like my brother’s clothes.”

“I like you in my clothes, but take my word for it. No, don’t braid your hair,” he said. “Leave it down.”

“It’s too hot,” I complained, but I did as he said.

This time, Jack made me go into the drugstore alone.

If I was lucky, I thought, it would be the boy’s day off and I could just buy toothpaste and leave. But there he was, sitting at the counter with his hair in his eyes, looking bored. He was wearing a green cardigan sweater against the chill of the air conditioning, the kind that Raeburn sometimes wore in the fall.

As soon as he saw me he jumped to his feet.

“Toothpaste?” I said, managing to smile.

“Aisle six,” he said. “One aisle down from the aspirin.”

He remembered us, then. The smile eased into my face a bit.

I walked to the aisle, chose a tube of toothpaste, and walked back. I could feel him again, watching me too closely. The scrutiny hadn’t grown any easier to deal with. The muscles in my legs still didn’t seem to remember which way to move.

As he rang up the toothpaste, the boy said, shyly, “Your name is Jo?”

“Josie,” I said. “Well, Josephine, but—” I shut my mouth fast, in case I was babbling. I kept my eyes wide and my hands away from my hair, and tried to pretend that nothing I said really mattered to him. It was like talking to Raeburn.

“Oh,” he said. “I heard your brother call you Jo the last time you two were in here. I’m Kevin.”

We stood for a minute. The drugstore was so quiet that I could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights above me. I was waiting for him to talk; maybe he was waiting for me.

“Your brother drives a blue Ford,” he said. “I see you two together a lot.”

“We are together a lot.”

“But you don’t go to school.”

I shrugged.

“That must rock,” he said.

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to school.”

“Believe me, it rocks,” he said. “School’s a drag.”

“That bad?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. Now it was his turn to shrug. “Or—I don’t know. It’s getting better, because I’ve got two free periods this fall, plus the jazz band. Other than that,” he shook his head, “it pretty much sucks.”

I tried to look sympathetic, but I had no idea what he was talking about. “How much time do you have left?”

“Two years.”

Behind him, through the store’s front window, I could see Jack’s golden head inside the truck, waiting for me. Waiting for me as I flirted with a high school boy, I thought, a little bewildered. Was I doing a good job? How was I supposed to know? It would be easier if there were a meter that you could look at, like the temperature gauge in the truck.

Then Kevin said, “So what about you?”

“What about me?” I asked and smiled as if I’d said something witty.

Kevin smiled back and said, “What do you like to do?” His throat moved as he swallowed hard. “Do you like to go to the movies?”

“Sometimes,” I said, although I’d only been a few times. The smile on my face was beginning to feel strained. “Not really.”

“Me neither,” he said, too quickly for me to believe him, and we stood in silence for another minute before he asked, “Do you ice-skate? Because the rink is open year-round now.”

I was a good skater. Jack and I went every winter, as soon as the pond froze. The ice was always thin but we went anyway. The town rink, though—I’d seen the crowds outside the town rink on Friday nights. “I’m not very good,” I told him.

“Neither am I,” Kevin said.

I was confused. “So why did you ask?”

He shrugged and looked depressed. “People do it,” he said. “What about music?”

I finally figured out what he was trying to do, and thought: coffee, ice cream, a bottle of rum in the alley—anything, but ask me something I
know.
Then I heard the bell over the door jingle and Jack was there to save me.

“What’s taking so long, Jo?” he asked, but his voice was friendly. He looked at Kevin. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Kevin answered, and they introduced themselves. I stuck my hands in my pockets, fast, before anyone noticed that I’d been wringing them. Jack’s grin was just enough, not too much. Someone who didn’t know him would never have seen how intent and calculating his eyes were.

“We were talking about music,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?” Jack said easily. “What kind?”

Kevin coughed and looked embarrassed. “We hadn’t gotten that far yet. But I’m into jazz, mostly, right now. The old stuff.”

“Like Coltrane?” Jack said.

“I don’t know much about Coltrane.” Kevin looked as relieved as I felt to have something to talk about. “But what I know, I like.”

Jack grinned. “I just picked up
Blue Train
down at Eide’s. Great stuff.”

“Eide’s is awesome,” Kevin said. “They’ve got everything down there.”

The rest cascaded into place; my brother was a master. Before Kevin could figure out right from left, he had accepted an invitation to come up to the Hill on the following Monday night to listen to Jack’s new Coltrane album. All I had to do was stand there, smiling at Kevin and nodding enthusiastically when it seemed appropriate. I didn’t know who Coltrane was, or what Eide’s was, or what was going on, but Kevin’s eyes kept drifting toward me and that despairing look was gone. By the time we’d said our farewells, he had begun to look hopeful, even excited.

I was surprised to find that Jack actually had the album they had talked about. He dug it out from under his bed when we got home. There was a black-and-white photograph of a dark-skinned man with a saxophone on the cover. The plastic sleeve had a price tag stuck to it that said “Eide’s.”

“What’s Eide’s?” I asked Jack.

“Big record store in Pittsburgh. It’s where all the cool kids go to buy their vinyl.”

I stared at him. “How do you know these things?”

Jack shrugged. He was looking at the back of the album cover. “That ratty green sweater he was wearing, it had ‘dumb white jazz fan’ written all over it.” He glanced up at me. “White boy jazz fans tend to be heartbreakingly sensitive. Maybe he’ll write you a love poem or two.”

I pointed to the album. “But how do you know about Eide’s? When were you in Pittsburgh buying records?”

“Not records,” he corrected.
“Vinyl.
When was I in Pittsburgh buying
vinyl.”

“When?” I repeated. “When was it?”

“Drove down there one day when I was supposed to be getting the truck tuned up.”

“You randomly drove down there,” I said, “and happened to find the cool kid record store. Randomly.”

“I had that job there for a while. You remember. I told you about that.”

“That was in Pittsburgh?” I said, disconcerted.

He nodded.

I didn’t know what to say. “Well, what if the truck breaks down?”

He threw the album down on his bed and took a cigarette from the pack on his dresser. “The truck is in better shape than Raeburn thinks.”

He lit the cigarette and pitched the match out the window into the still water and rotting leaves in the gutter. I studied my bare toes. There was dirt in the crevices around my toenails.

Finally Jack said, “I can’t take you everywhere,” and I said, “I know.”

The next Monday, Kevin McNerny showed up at our doorstep at eight o’clock, as arranged. Standing on our porch, his face so hopeful, he looked alien and out of place. For an instant I panicked. I almost told him to turn around and go home. I almost told him to leave us alone. Letting him take even a single step into our house was unthinkable. This was our house; this was where we
lived.

Then he told me that my dress looked nice.

“Thanks, it was my mother’s,” I said and let him in.

The parlor was ours. Raeburn taught lessons there during the winter, when the light was a little better than in his study. Other than that he never used it. As I led Kevin in from the front hall, I could practically smell the curiosity coming off him in waves. And sure enough, even after the two of us were sitting on the dusty couch, he was still poking around the room with his eyes, inspecting and collecting everything that he saw. For a moment I let myself look through his eyes as if I didn’t see the room every day of my life: the fraying, cloth-covered books in the bookcase, the dingy floral wallpaper, the shelves full of odd things that we’d brought from elsewhere in the house. But then I thought, let him look. We’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.

When he finally looked back at me, he blushed and looked embarrassed. “I’ve never been in one of these old houses before,” he said. “My mom went on that historic homes thing last spring when my aunt was visiting, but I didn’t go. Do they all look like this?”

“This is the only one I’ve ever been in,” I said.

“Are you on the tour?”

“We’re not really an open-to-the-public kind of family.”

“No, I guess you’re not.” He smiled. He had a nice smile, with straight white teeth. Some of my hostility melted away. “Well, I bet that none of those houses have as much cool stuff in them as yours does, anyway. Where did it all come from?” He stood up and walked over to the bookcase and took down a tarantula the size of my head, sealed in glass and framed in wood.

“My grandfather, mostly. That spider is older than both of us put together.”

“Wow.” Kevin sounded awed. “Was he a collector?”

“Sort of. He was a trader—he sold curios and things—and we ended up with some of the leftovers. I don’t really know anything else about him.”

“He was a smuggler,” Jack said from the doorway, three bottles of beer dangling by their necks from one hand. “Used to ferry whiskey down from Canada during Prohibition. After that, I think he switched to art and artifacts.” He crossed the room and handed a beer to Kevin, who seemed delighted to get it.

“That’s awesome,” Kevin said.

“Is it true?” I asked Jack.

“Nearly as I can figure. You like our house, Kevin?”

“It’s great. Looks like it should be haunted. Is it?”

“Only by us,” I said, and we all laughed.

We were good that night. My job, Jack had told me before Kevin arrived, was to make the boy fall in love with me. By the time Kevin left, I think he was a little in love with both of us.

“It’s great that you guys get along so well,” he said, a little drunkenly, as I walked him out to his father’s car. “But I guess you sort of have to, don’t you?”

“He’s my brother.”

“Yeah, but you should see me and my little sister.” He shook his head. “That kid drives me nuts. If we had to spend more than fifteen minutes a day together, neither of us would survive.”

“I think it’s different with us,” I said, and he said, “I think it is, too.”

When he was gone, Jack and I sat together in the parlor and finished the beer. He was sitting in the old horsehair armchair, next to the fire; I was stretched out on the sofa.

“Say whatever you want about little Kevin McMonkey,” he said. “At least it’s something different, right?”

“He’s nice.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “So are puppies.”

Kevin came up again the next night and half-scolded us for letting him drive home drunk. Jack said, “All right, then. I promise not to get you drunk,” and disappeared upstairs.

I said, “I’m glad you came over.”

Kevin blushed.

In a few minutes, Jack was back with the cigar box where we kept our pot.

“Jesus,” Kevin said. “You two have any other tricks up your sleeve?”

“This cashes me out,” Jack said, grinning, as he started to crumble the dried leaf between his fingers, “but I think Josie might have one or two surprises left in her.”

“Ignore my brother,” I said. “He’s a garden-variety madman.”

“My sister, of course, is a rare and precious blossom,” Jack said, looking me in the eye as he deftly rolled a joint thicker than a pencil. When he was done, he passed it to Kevin. “Guests first. I think this is half oregano, but it’ll have to do until we can find something better.”

“No complaints here,” Kevin said, and didn’t cough on his first drag, which surprised me. After a few minutes he said, “This is good. Where did you get this?”

“I know a guy,” Jack said.

A million years later, the night rubbed smooth and silky by the pot, I was sitting on the rug in front of the fireplace in the parlor. It wasn’t anywhere near cold enough but we’d built a fire anyway, and we were lucky we hadn’t set ourselves ablaze doing it, stoned as we were. My legs were stretched out in front of me where the firelight could bathe them in a warm, flattering glow. I had good legs, I thought, admiring the way the shadows flickered in the hollows at the sides of my knees.

My gaze drifted up and landed on Jack. He was staring at my legs, too. He caught my gaze, smiled, looked away.

Kevin sat near me in a battered green leather armchair. It was the chair Raeburn always chose, and there was a painting of a naked woman with blue skin hung on the wall directly opposite it. Kevin gazed thoughtfully at the painting for a few heartbeats as he sucked on our second joint and exhaled.

“What the hell is that?” he said, nodding at the painting.

“It’s Art.” That was how I thought of it, with a capital letter. “Raeburn’s father bought it in Spain.”

“Spain?” Kevin blinked and passed the joint to me.

“Spain, Portugal, Brazil. I forget which. Ugly,
isn’t
it?”

Jack spoke up: “I think the guy who painted that was doing a lot harder stuff than this,” he said, and we laughed for a long time and the subject drifted away.

Suddenly Jack was gone and Kevin was sitting next to me on the hearthrug and if I hadn’t been so stoned it might have been awkward. Then he kissed me. The fire had burned down to embers, and as Kevin touched my breasts through the thin cotton of my dress—delicately, as if he was afraid they might bruise—he told me that he was crazy about me and I kissed him and it seemed so good, so innocent. We lay together in front of the fire for a while, and at some point Jack came back; he and Kevin talked but their voices were too low for me to hear clearly and I don’t remember when Kevin left. When I opened my eyes again, it was Jack who was sitting next to me, smoking a cigarette and staring into the fire.