Late Rain (18 page)

Ben’s name remained on the lease, but another life was taking shape at 809 Farrow Lane with Anne, Paige, and Jack Carson.

Earlier in the evening, he’d felt as if he’d begun to fully inhabit that life.

Ben had found himself in the kitchen with Anne, and the radio was on some oldies station and the Everly Brothers were saying all they had to do was dream, while Ben stood at the sink peeling shrimp, the thin translucent shells gathering like some variety of seaborne cicadas.

Ben dropped the shrimp into a white bowl with a blue rim, the shells into a yellow plastic wastebasket. His fingertips smelled like the floor of the Atlantic.

Anne had been at the stove, sautéing a skilletful of diced onions, mushrooms, and red bell peppers, and she had glanced over her shoulder and smiled, and right then, all the habitual stress and exhaustion, all the worries about household finances and her father’s health and Paige’s problems with her classmates fell away, and Ben had seen what Anne must have looked like at nineteen or twenty.

At that moment, Anne’s smile held the promise that March made to April and May collected on, an old promise that unexpectedly opened onto an earthbound grace that arose simply from the business of living.

Paige remained a major sticking point though.

Anne was still adamant about maintaining the façade that Ben was not staying over. He went along with it for Anne’s sake, showing up after Paige and Jack were asleep and leaving before they awoke in the morning, but whenever Ben tried to convince Anne that Paige was not fooled and knew exactly what was going on, Anne stonewalled him. Anne needed the fiction, so he didn’t push things.

To and for himself, Ben counseled patience. Paige undercut all other strategies. He would wait her out. He’d practice the mechanics of fatherhood until one day he looked up and discovered Paige smiling at him. Ben was banking on that.

Just as he was banking on leaving behind in the apartment all the attendant three AM despair and disorder and a kind of lonely deep and powerful enough to bend bones.

With Anne, he was not superfluous.

He was needed, and being needed was both an aphrodisiac and sacrament, Ben and Anne finding each other in the dark each night, an urgency of hands and mouths and breath and flesh, and on the other side of the bedroom door, three lives and now a fourth that were joined in an equally fundamental way.

Flesh and family.

He’d found a place in both.

CROY WENDALL WAS PLANTING VERBENAS. He pretended his hands were machines.

Jamie carried over the flats of flowers from the trucks. He was supposed to help Croy plant them too, but Jamie liked to pretend he was doing work and only really did any if Mr. Sharpe or one of the supervisors came over to see how things were going.

They were working for Mr. Sharpe planting flowers at a new subdivision because Mr. Balen didn’t have any crimes for them to do right then.

Jamie had already spent all the money Mr. Balen gave him though, so Croy and he got up early and waited on the corner across from the Food Lion for the green truck to stop and pick them up to plant flowers for Mr. Sharpe. Jamie was not in a good mood because of the beer he drank last night, and he almost got in a fight over his seat with a man named Hector when they were riding on the truck.

Croy looked up from his planting and saw a yellow cat at the house across the street in the grass next to a crimson maple. Croy didn’t like cats too much. They gave him a nervous feeling. He thought it had something to do with the size of their tongues.

He added the cat to the number he was thinking in his head and then subtracted one because that was how many syllables the word had, and then he multiplied it by three because cat started with the third letter in the alphabet, and when he got that number, Croy divided it by the number of houses he’d been planting verbenas at so far, which was four.

That made the number he was thinking about in his head
eight.

Eight
also matched
ate
. It was like they were shadows of each other, and Croy was the light that fell on either one and made the shadow when he said the word.

Croy got the nervous feeling again at lunchtime when Jamie and another man named Tommy started talking about what they’d do if they had the reward money for telling who killed Stanley Tedros, and Croy had made himself quiet inside and like he wasn’t even there to hear Jamie and Tommy talking, but after a while, Tommy started talking about his car and something called a torque, so Croy unwrapped a sandwich and ate it.

After lunch, Jamie went to look for a place to hide and take a nap, and Croy went back to planting verbenas. The sun was like a mean dog that wouldn’t leave him alone.

Croy counted the number of verbenas left in the flats, and there were thirty-nine of them, and Croy thought the number but did not say it because thirty-nine was the same as the times he’d stabbed Stanley Tedros, but then the number started moving around in his head and mixed with the words Croy had heard Jamie say at lunch about the reward money, and that was when Croy started pretending his hands were machines.

BEN DECOVIC HAD ARRANGED to switch and sub on the third shift so he could help Anne Carson get ready for Paige’s birthday party. Ten kids had shown up, though there were easily enough food and treat bags and game prizes for more than twice that many. The living room and kitchen were filled with streamers and banners and clusters of helium balloons, most of whose faces held cartoon characters Ben didn’t recognize. In the middle of a large sheet cake
Paige
was written in a rainbow of M&M’s and circled with twelve thin candles, the rest of the cake thick with whorls of white icing and bordered by alternating red and blue roses.

Anne slipped into the kitchen and gave him a quick kiss and whispered thanks. Ben nodded and smiled. Two nights ago, after they’d made love, Ben woke and found Anne sitting in her nightgown at the kitchen table. She’d been crying. In front of her were the monthly bills she’d sorted and resorted in an attempt to leave enough to cover Paige’s party. Ben had insisted on helping, and Anne had not tried to talk him out of it. She’d simply taken his hand, and they’d gone back to bed.

In the living room, Anne organized a game of Charades. Ben set out more chips and popcorn and refilled a line of paper cups with soda. Outside the kitchen window was the brightly colored piñata Ben had hung from the lower limb of the magnolia tree earlier. In the afternoon light, it resembled a psychedelic hornet’s nest.

He sensed movement on the landing, and opening the door, Ben found one of the kids from the party standing by herself at the railing. Her fists were clenched and her arms tight at her side, and she was doing a poor job of fighting back tears. Ben stepped over and asked her name.

“Lucy,” she said.

Ben squatted next to her and asked what was wrong.

The girl glanced at him, then away. “Are you Miss Anne’s boyfriend, the policeman?”

“Yes.”

“Will you arrest somebody?”

“I can if they’ve done something wrong,” Ben said.

The girl turned and directly faced him. “Well, you need to arrest Paige Carson then,” she said.

Ben started to smile, stopped himself, and asked why.

“Because she told me my gift was retarded. Because she’s very mean and not just today.”

“What did you get her?”

“A board game: Life. I picked it out myself.”

“That’s a good one,” Ben said. In fact, he’d considered something along the lines of that for Paige himself, but finally he’d been undone by the logistics of wandering the aisles of Toys Plus, a mammoth franchise that lived up to its name, trying to find something he thought Paige would like, and settled in the end for sticking two twenty dollar bills in a card with
It’s Your Day!
emblazoned across its face.

“Why don’t we go back inside?” Ben asked. “I think they’re playing Charades.”

“Nobody likes Paige at school,” Lucy said. “That’s why so many kids didn’t come to the party. I didn’t want to either, but my mother made me even though she doesn’t like Paige very much herself.”

Ben glanced through the window into the living room and tried to come up with something diplomatic, but his words sounded like dialogue from a bad after-school television special. “Growing up is never easy. It’s hard to know how to act sometimes.”

“Paige needs to grow down, not up,” Lucy said. “She thinks she’s the boss of the world.”

Ben eventually cajoled her back into the living room, and once there, she threw herself into the game. Ben stayed and watched and thought about how good a cold beer was going to taste later on. Anne and he had given up trying to hide the fact from Paige that Ben was spending the night, and for her part, Paige had not exactly welcomed him to the fold. Ben felt the weight of Paige’s eyes on him, the unflinching dark brown watchfulness, and at best there was a stiff acceptance of his presence and a lot of terse monosyllabic responses to his attempts at conversation.

In the living room, a little boy with a spiked haircut pretended to be a grizzly bear. Another kid, a ferris wheel. One kid mimicked a mailman. Another a tree in a strong wind. When Paige’s turn came, she was a spider spinning a web.

When the game broke up, Paige walked down the hall to her bedroom. Ben, curious, followed and stopped in the doorway. Paige had pulled back the curtain and was looking out toward the driveway and street. He asked if something was wrong.

“I’m expecting someone,” Paige said. “It appears he’s late.”

“He?” Ben said. He tried to imagine what brand of boy would develop a crush on Paige.

“Mr. Deane,” she said. “He said he was going to come by.”

It took a moment for Ben to place the name. Gerald Deane. The guidance counselor who’d begun working with Paige at school. According to Anne, Paige was evidently taken with him, but from what Ben gathered, that had yet to translate into any improvement in Paige’s behavior and attitude.

Paige let the curtain fall back into place and turned to Ben and said, “May I ask you a question?”

Ben nodded.

“Are you using a condom when you have sexual intercourse with my mother?” She dropped her hands to her blue-jeaned hips. “I hope so,” she added.

Ben didn’t know what to say.

Someone began knocking on the front door.

“Maybe that’s him,” Paige said, brushing by Ben to answer it.

It turned out to be Buddy Tedros. He wished Paige a happy birthday and handed her a present with wrapping paper covered in row upon row of leaping dolphins. Paige added it to the pile on the living room couch and then headed for the kitchen where Anne had just announced she was cutting the birthday girl’s cake.

Buddy Tedros shook Ben’s hand and introduced himself. He looked around the living room and asked, “Where’s Jack?”

Ben told Buddy that Anne thought the party might agitate him and so Jack and Mrs. Wood were at Ben’s apartment for the afternoon.

Buddy and he crossed the room and stood just inside the doorway to the kitchen and watched Anne move among the kids, handing out napkins and teasing them about eating like wolves.

“I’m glad you two hooked up with each other,” Buddy said. “Anne’s good people. I’ve known Jack and her since high school. She deserved someone better than Ray.”

“You knew him?”

Buddy nodded. “From high school. After graduation, Ray drove trucks for Stanco Beverages for a while, but got let go or quit. I forget which. That was pretty much the story with Ray.”

Anne waved hello to Buddy and brought them over a piece of cake. She thanked Buddy for remembering Paige’s birthday, then smiled and squeezed Ben’s arm and went back to the party.

“Nothing like a roomful of kids, huh?” Buddy asked. “All that energy.”

“There’s that,” Ben said.

“Wouldn’t mind a couple of them around the house myself,” Buddy said.

Ben overheard Paige tell another girl that the Harry Potter books sucked.

“I meant that, about hoping things work out for you and Anne,” Buddy said, “and that you’re as lucky as Corrine and me. I knew she was the one the first time I met her.”

Ben asked where that was.

“Corrine was waitressing at one of Sonny Gramm’s supper clubs in Myrtle Beach, and I was there for a bachelor party. Wasn’t long after that, I was walking down the aisle.”

“Funny how things turn out sometimes,” Ben said.

Buddy forked a piece of cake, then asked if any of the reward tips looked promising.

“We’re following them up,” Ben said, “but I won’t lie: All those tips, they take up a lot of extra hours, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. Most of them are worthless or end up going nowhere.”

“Stanley’s pocketwatch hasn’t shown up yet?”

Ben shook his head no.

“Oh man,” Buddy said. He went silent for a moment.

“Maybe Corrine is right,” he said finally. “She thinks I need to move on. The reward and the tape recorder with Jack, she didn’t like the idea of either.” He looked at Ben. “I couldn’t do
nothing,
though. Stanley was the only family I had.”

From the living room came a loud welter of voices and then Paige’s overriding them. “It’s my birthday,” she said. “You have to do what I say.”

“You know, Jack might still remember something,” Buddy said. “It’s not impossible. I know it wouldn’t hold up in court, but maybe a lead. Anne says she can tell he’s trying.” Buddy paused and went back to his cake.

“Have you talked to Raychard Balen lately?” Ben was tired of Buddy’s routine. He was overplaying the family friend number. Ben had decided to give him a push. See what happened.

Buddy frowned. “Why would I do that?”

“Balen doesn’t represent you?”

Buddy shook his head. “Will Patterson’s been our family lawyer for years. I’ve never had any dealings with Raychard Balen, except to nod and say hello at a social function now and then.”

“What about your wife?”

“I’m not sure she’s ever met him,” Buddy said. “Why do you ask?”

Ben was starting to wonder if Buddy Tedros was exactly what he appeared to be. His puzzlement seemed genuine.