Little Sister (9 page)

After closing the bedroom door behind her, Beth walked down the hall and into the kitchen. Francie and Andrew were seated at the table, finishing up their meal. Two serving plates on the table held the hamburgers and potatoes, although the juice from the hamburgers was congealing around the meat. The salad which Beth had made was sitting, wilted and untouched, on the counter. Beth’s place at the table was empty except for the silverware she herself had placed there.

This dinner was my idea, Beth thought. My idea to ask him here, to be nice, for Francie’s sake. Suddenly, like the one witch not invited to Sleeping Beauty’s christening, Beth wanted to get even.

“Noah thinks he’s going to send his songs to Kenny Rogers and then Kenny is going to fly him to Nashville,” Andrew was saying with a sneer.

“Do you want some pie?” Francie asked. “I made it.” She suddenly noticed that Beth was in the room. “Hi,” she said. Then she turned back to Andrew.

Andrew looked quickly from Francie to Beth, who was still standing in the doorway, her arms rigid at her sides. Then he shrugged. “Sure. I guess so.”

“Good,” said Francie happily, pushing her chair back and going to the refrigerator.

“How ya doin’?” Andrew asked Beth, watching her stony expression with wary eyes.

“Hello, Andrew,” Beth said in a tart voice.

She strode across the kitchen and reached in front of Francie, who was cutting the pie on the countertop. Without saying, “Excuse me,” Beth jerked a plate from the cabinet above Francie’s head and slammed the cabinet door shut. She walked over to the salad bowl and heaped some on her plate. A slice of cucumber flew up and landed on the edge of Francie’s pie. Beth ignored it and walked over to the table. Francie made a noise of protest that stuck in her throat. She looked at Beth, who had dropped her plate on the table and stabbed a hamburger with her fork.

Francie carried the two dishes of pie to the table and put one in front of Andrew and one in front of herself.

“These are burned,” said Beth, dumping the hamburger on her own plate.

Two red spots appeared on Francie’s cheeks, but she said nothing.

Andrew began to gobble down his dessert. “Good pie,” he said through a mouthful of food.

“Thanks,” said Francie. “It’s a pie I always used to make for my—”

“What grade are you in school, Andrew?” Beth interrupted as she tore her potato apart with her fork and knife.

Andrew swallowed the pie as if it were a wad of wet papier-mache and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He looked quickly over at Francie, who was staring down at her plate, her mouth turned down in a bitter line.

“I’m a—uh, sophomore,” said Andrew.

Beth nodded as if she were a state trooper examining an expired registration. “A sophomore,” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said. He frowned at Francie, but the girl’s eyes were riveted to the bottle of milk on the table. Her face was white except for the spots of red in her cheeks.

“You go to school and work, too, is that it?”

“What do you mean?” said Andrew, nervously folding the comer of his paper napkin into triangle upon triangle. His eyes narrowed as he looked at her.

“At the Seven-Eleven. You do work there, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I work there.”

“Part-time,” Francie cried in a shrill voice. She slammed her hand down on the table. “Mind your own business.”

Beth put down her fork and stared coldly at her sister. “I was just making conversation. This may surprise you, but civilized people often make conversation at dinner.”

Francie’s eyes glinted behind her glasses, and she gripped her fork so tightly that her knuckles were white.

Andrew stood up from the table. “That was really good, babe. But I’ve got to get going.”

“No, don’t go,” Francie wailed.

“Thanks for having me,” he said to Beth with just the hint of a sneer on his face.

Beth nodded stiffly, unable to meet his eyes. Francie stood up and slammed her chair against the table. Without another word to Beth she followed Andrew out of the kitchen.

“Good night, Andrew,” Beth said. There was no reply from either of them. Beth sat alone in the kitchen, staring at the salt shaker and forcing down her dinner. After a minute she heard the front door close and then the sound of her sister’s footsteps heading up the stairs.

“Francie,” she called out.

There was a moment of silence, and then a sullen voice said, “What?”

“Get in here and clean up this mess. I’m not going to clean up after you and your little friend.”

Francie stomped into the kitchen and began to throw the plates into the sink.

“What a bitch,” she muttered.

“Pardon me,” said Beth, “I didn’t hear you.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Francie snapped.

“I didn’t hear you when you called me for dinner either,” said Beth.

“I don’t have to call you for dinner.”

“No, obviously.”

“Thanks for ruining everything,” said Francie. She turned and jerked the faucets on full blast. “Bitch.”

“I’ll do my dishes later,” said Beth, getting up from the table.

She went into the living room and sat down in a chair by the window. She picked up a book and pretended to read it, but her heart was pounding, and the words were a blur on the page.

Very mature, she told herself. You really handled that situation beautifully. Why didn’t you just dump their plates in their laps, just so there would be no mistaking how you felt? What’s a good temper tantrum without a little food throwing? And all this because they ate a hamburger without waiting for you.

Beth put the book face down on her lap and turned her head to look out the window at the night sky. The stars seemed to swim before her eyes.

Suddenly she heard the water stop running in the kitchen. After a few minutes she heard Francie coming down the hall. She felt an urge to call out to her, to try to make up. It had been wrong to spoil the evening, to run Andrew off, now for the second time. But as she saw Francie pass the doorway she could not force the words out. Francie started up the stairs to her room.

“Good night, Francie,” Beth said, but her voice was harsh. She had not meant it to sound that way.

Francie kept going and did not reply.

ANDREW FELT THE CHILL OF THE NIGHT
cutting through his coat as he walked, head down, his body angled forward. It was as if icy hands were closing around his narrow chest, squeezing him, making it hard to breathe. The walk itself did not tire him. He was used to walking. He walked everywhere. But he was hurrying to get back, and the food from that miserable dinner roiled in his stomach, threatening to rise up and choke him.

Car headlights appeared behind him, in the distance, and Andrew whirled around, sticking out his thumb. The car whizzed past him. “Fucking bastard pricks,” Andrew muttered after the car, and jammed his hands back in his pockets. He smacked his arms against his sides as he increased his pace.

He forced himself to go faster and faster, sometimes breaking into a run, until he could actually feel himself sweating despite the cold temperature. The night was still and quiet but not safe. He tried to clear his mind of everything but his progress. But every now and then the trees would rustle, and it seemed to him that the night was whispering to him some low words of warning that he could not decipher. He had to get back.

As he finally reached the house he looked up and saw a dark silhouette hovering in the front window beside the sheer curtains. The silhouette disappeared as he got closer. Checking around on all sides like a spy, Andrew started toward the back of the house, but he did not go in the back door. Instead, he lifted the sloping metal doors to the cellar and scurried down the cinder-block steps. The cellar was dark and smelled moldy. He made his way by habit to the light cord and pulled it on. A dim bulb was illuminated, throwing a weak greenish light on the cold cellar.

Quickly and mechanically Andrew began to remove his clothes. He folded and piled them neatly on a white enamel-topped table that stood against one wall. He stood there, naked and shivering, under a shower head that protruded from a length of pipes along one wall over a drain in the cellar floor. Gritting his teeth, he turned on the faucets and waited for the blast of lukewarm water to hit his goosefleshed skin. Almost as soon as the blast came and he had begun to lather himself with the soap that rested on a little plate attached to one of the pipes, he thought he heard noises coming from the floors above. It was as if someone were shouting his name in a high, frightened voice. Andrew shut off the water and demanded in an angry voice, “What?”

There was no reply. Andrew clenched the faucet handles and turned them on again. He rinsed himself quickly and stepped from beneath the shower. There was silence in the house.

Andrew rubbed himself dry with the scratchy towel which hung on another nearby pipe. Then he dressed in the clothes which had been placed on the enamel table. After slipping on his shoes again, he pulled off the light chain, groped his way to the cellar stairs, and then climbed to the door at the top. When he arrived there, he knocked twice and then began to drum his fingers on the stair rail in annoyance.

A soft voice came through the door. “Andrew, is that you?”

“Open up,” he snapped. “Of course it’s me.” / saw you in the window, he thought. You waited until you saw me.

“Just a minute.” He heard the bolt being drawn back, and then the door opened. She poked her head around the corner, a limp ribbon holding back her frowsy, dirty blond hair. “Peekaboo,” she said.

Andrew tried to push the door open, but Leonora Vincent raised her arm to look at her watch, thus blocking his exit. Andrew stared at the arm for a moment, thinking of snapping it back, like a turnstile.

“Seven o’clock,” she said. “My goodness.”

“Get out of the way, Mother,” he said.

Leonora lowered her arm, and her son squeezed past her, making sure not to brush against her.

“I had to stay late at the store tonight,” said Andrew, starting down the hall. “Mr. Temple had some meeting to go to.” He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. After taking out a bottle of ice water, he poured some into a glass and began to drink it.

Leonora followed him and stood in the doorway. She was wearing a huge, shapeless sweater, a tight pair of stretch pants, and scuff slippers. “I think our Mr. Temple is being too demanding of your time,” she said.

“I didn’t care about staying,” he said, gulping down the water and starting toward the door where she stood.

“Wait. Not so fast,” she said, pushing a hand into his chest. He backed away from her touch. “I have your supper all ready for you.” She shuffled over to the oven, reached in, and produced a plate with a grayish mixture of fish and macaroni on it that made Andrew feel as if he were going to be sick.

“I had a sandwich at the store,” he said.

Her face fell into a pout. “I saved this for you,” she said. “You need to eat.”

“I’m not hungry,” he said in a tight little voice, turning his back on her.

“I didn’t think we were so wealthy that we could just throw food away,” she said, shaking her head as she opened the refrigerator and stuffed the plate inside.

Andrew bolted from the room and started down the hall, but she was behind him in an instant. “I’m going to have to speak to Mr. Temple,” she said. “I think he is taking advantage of you because you are such a good worker. The very next time I see him I am going to say—”

“Don’t say anything,” Andrew snarled as he went into the living room and snapped on the television set. He flopped down on a chair and focused his eyes on the screen.

“No, I’m going to have to,” she said, settling herself among the cushions of the worn old sofa, “because I don’t know where you are sometimes and I can’t even reach you—”

“Stay out of it,” said Andrew in a low voice. “It’s my job.”

“I even called there tonight, two or three times,” said Leonora, “and I guess he wouldn’t even let you come to the phone because Mrs. Temple answered, and she kept pretending that you weren’t even there.”

Andrew, who had been ready to snap back at her, suddenly realized what she was saying. She knew that he hadn’t been at the store. A sick knot formed in his stomach, and he stared at the TV screen as if he had not even heard her. There was a cop show on. Guys were jumping behind cars, toting huge guns. His body had stiffened up in the chair, but he kept his eyes riveted to the screen, pretending he was inside the TV, pretending that she was somewhere else, far away.

“Is that what happened, Andrew?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said automatically.

Leonora leaned back a little in the cushions, but he could feel her eyes boring into him as he stared at the television. Her silence seemed to be drowning out the voices on the set. He wanted to get up, and go upstairs, and hide in his room, but he was afraid to. He was not sure his legs would hold him up.

“This is your last chance,” said the man on the screen, holding the gun into the other man’s belly. “Tell me where the money is.”

“I must know where you are at all times,” said Leonora.

Andrew gazed at the screen. “Yes,” he said.

“Good,” she said.

The man with the gun in his belly swore that he didn’t know, so the other guy shot him. Andrew’s heart leaped as the guy grunted and toppled over.

“We won’t be staying up until all hours watching TV, I can tell you that,” she said. “I have to be at Dr. Ridberg’s bright and early tomorrow. We have a busy week.”

Leonora was a dental hygienist who worked in the office of a dentist in Harrison. She took the bus to and fro each working day because she did not enjoy driving. She was never late, and she never missed an appointment. She felt that good dental hygiene should be a required subject in school. It was a subject about which she had strong opinions.

“I had a man on Friday,” she went on. “I don’t think I told you about him.”

Andrew clenched his jaw and tried to hear the words of the cop, who was searching for the guy with the gun.

“This man had a buildup of calculus in the pockets of his lower anteriors, and it was a miracle he hadn’t lost his teeth altogether. I was scraping out the pockets,” she said, demonstrating by lifting up a finger and crooking the top joint in the air, waggling it back and forth. “I came upon a filling that was ready to disintegrate in the back. This man kept insisting that he didn’t need a new filling, but I gave it a good poke, and this man let out a yell—”