Mean Season (14 page)

Vince didn't move a hair while Momma was hollering. It was like he was frozen. But as soon as Momma turned to tend to my face, he took off running, across the big field where the Civil War battle had raged, and on into the trees. The battlefield was surrounded by woods and bounded on one side by the Shenandoah River. Beyond the boundaries of the park stood a forest and beyond that, the start of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

No one could find Vince. The teacher was looking and the park ranger, and I remember sitting in our car and listening to some of the kids from Vince's class calling his name. In a panic, Momma telephoned my father, who drove over to the park straightaway. She was in tears by the time he arrived.

“He'll be back,” Dad told Momma. Dad said that Vince was like a dog that needed time alone to lick his wounds. “You wait here,” he told Momma. “Leanne and I will find him.”

My father held my hand and we walked a path through the woods that sloped toward the Shenandoah River. At a fork, he turned to me and asked which way I thought Vince would have gone. I remember being scared to answer such an important question. I thought hard, then pointed at the river. I knew I wanted to see the river.

When we hit the water's edge, we followed the river downstream and in a ways came upon a man then about my grandfather's age. He sat on a folding stool, with a tackle box and a fishing pole. When he saw us, he nodded and motioned down the bank, maybe twenty feet farther on. Vince was sitting there quietly, fishing.

When Dad called out his name, Vince gave a start, like he was waking up. He reeled in his fishing line, stood up, and walked over.

“I'm sorry for hurting your face,” Vince told me. “I didn't mean to.”

Dad put his hand on Vince's shoulder. “Your momma's worried over you,” he said. “We'd best get along back.”

Vince nodded and gave his fishing pole back to the old man.

“I been watching him,” the man told my father.

I thought about that man on and off as I was growing up. I used to wonder what he'd thought, seeing Vince emerge onto the bank in tears, like some runaway prince. I wished I could ask him. Whenever I asked Vince to tell the story, he claimed he couldn't remember much, other than his hook, baited with American cheese, sinking into the green river water.

There, in the roadway dark of Somewhere, Virginia, I thought about the old man. Nearly twenty years had passed so I figured that he probably had, too. And now my dad was dead and Vince was gone again. This time, we hadn't found him. He hadn't been found or hadn't let himself be found. Or maybe the worst, he couldn't be.

Somewhere in Virginia, I looked out at the road, both ends disappearing into the dark on either side of the strip mall. Somewhere else in the state, my brother Tommy was going about his life. Somewhere, back behind me, Beau Ray and the others were watching James Bond. I wondered who was having a better time, those who left or those who remained. My parents had lived out their whole lives in West Virginia, and that wasn't so unusual. A lot of folks lived all their years within a few miles of where they grew up. I figured it was people like Joshua who skewed the results—because looking at Pinecob, it seemed like most everyone had always been there and would always be there. I just had to figure out whether I'd be one of them. And if I wasn't, then when and to where?

I didn't even know where I was, just then, and that didn't seem a fortuitous way to start the decision-making process.
So I found a map in the glove compartment and located the town where I'd pulled over. It was a lot farther into Virginia than I'd expected. Maybe it was just that my mind had been elsewhere, but part of me wanted to take it as a sign. I'd traveled that far, singing along with the radio and watching fields pass. I might go even farther if I had a plan.

I wondered whether the same realization had hit Vince. A strip mall, a map. Maybe he'd pulled over to figure out where he was and seen how far
he'd
gone. I thought about California, where people so often went to reinvent themselves. Who said I couldn't do the same thing? What would happen if I just didn't go back? But then I thought about Beau Ray and the movie I was missing in our living room, and I knew I couldn't, not like that at least.

After a while, I turned the car around and headed back toward Pinecob. It took longer than I thought it would. There was construction along the route the map said was the shortest. And also I stopped to get Beau Ray some ice cream. By the time I got back, the house was dark. Everyone had gone.

Day 36: the Fourth of July

O
ur backyard in Pinecob looked like this: you'd come out of the house through a sliding door in the back of the dining room, onto a deck Tommy had built years before. Nothing big, but it held a couple of chairs and one of those plastic all-weather tables. Then two steps down, you'd be in the backyard, with grass that Beau Ray kept mowed. Our backyard was much bigger than our front. It ran the length of the house and was maybe twenty-five, thirty feet across. At the far side stood a cluster of pine and oak trees that had felt to me like a deep, dark forest when I was little. Once I was older, it seemed more like a glen, protected and shady but tame, so that I stopped expecting to run across Bambi or Thumper in there.

A narrow ditch paralleled the far side of the trees, and after that rolled the big expanse of Brown's Field. Brown's Field was always called that, though officially its name was “the West Ridge field” and it was county land, facts I learned
through my job at the clerk's office. At the far edge of the field sat the Pinecob Elks Lodge and VFW building.

All the time I'd lived there, people rarely hung out in Brown's Field. Teenagers would mess around in there on and off after dark (at least, I did, when I was one), and on Memorial Day and Veterans' Day, the men from the VFW would host a big spaghetti dinner and bingo raffle, and pull tables out to the field's edge. The only other time it regularly saw traffic was on the Fourth of July. The way the field sloped made it a good place to watch the fireworks that were annually set off over at the elementary school.

Beau Ray loved fireworks, and we'd spent many July fourths over at Brown's, a blanket spread out on the gangly grass. That's what I'd planned to do that year, too, though I'd figured on using lounge chairs instead of the usual blankets, since that Fourth of July was set to be soggy. It had rained the whole day before, and the sun had only broken through around three on the afternoon of the Fourth. Momma had gone to Elkins to visit Susan and the kids, so I was expected to stick close to home.

“Leanne, I expect you to keep the house from burning down” was how Momma said goodbye. You might think that we kept a fire stoked twenty-four hours by the frequency of that admonition. But far as I knew, our family hadn't ever suffered a fire, and there was no great Pinecob burn to warrant her worry either. Paulie's family once lost an outbuilding to fire, but that was because his father had been burning trash in a barrel, gone inside for a cold one and got distracted by a playoff football game on the television (another reason Momma had for disliking television). Paulie's father hadn't even known the building was on fire until a neighbor came knocking. Paulie's mother was in charge of all trash burning after that—but they lived on a farm outside of town, so I kind of figured things ran different over there. We took our trash to the dump.

On the morning of the Fourth, Momma packed up early for the trip to Elkins, saying she'd be back the next afternoon. She didn't mention it to me, but I knew she was picking up Judge Weintraub on her way out of town. I'd overheard her say so when she was on the phone with Susan. It bugged me that she hadn't said anything to me. She didn't even give me the chance to be gracious and adult about it.

I haven't taken a poll or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised to find other youngest kids who've had a hard time proving themselves grown-up to their family. To my mind, I should have had an easier time of it, considering all the mothering I was expected to do with Beau Ray. But there were certain things that Momma only talked to Susan about, because Susan was older and had had kids young, like Momma had, and because she had a husband. I figured such things seemed to Momma like proof of being fully human.

Anyhow, around five, Momma was long gone to Elkins and I was about to put a load of laundry in the washer when the doorbell rang. Beau Ray answered it and in walked Lionel and Scooter. They were carrying a cooler and paper bags full of steaks and hot dogs and buns.

“Hey, Leanne,” Lionel said. “Happy Fourth.”

“What're you doing here?” I asked him.

“We're barbecuing, right? Five o'clock,” he said.

“I love bar-cue!” Beau Ray said. He looked thrilled.

“We are?” I asked. That was one more thing I hadn't heard about, but I told Lionel to make himself comfortable—he already knew where everything was kept. I said I'd be right back.

Joshua was down in the basement. As I was walking down the stairs, I heard the doorbell ring again.

“Joshua,” I said to him.

He was looking at something on the computer. Without turning from the screen, he held up one hand in a gesture that said hush up and wait.

“Joshua,” I said again.

“Just a sec,” he said, and I waited while he finished whatever he was reading. “Okay. Yeah? What is it?”

“You tell me,” I said. “Did you invite people over?”

“Huh?” He turned around to face me. He looked particularly sour.

“Did you invite people—Lionel, Scooter, I don't know who all—over? To barbecue today?”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Yeah, last week.” He started to turn back to the computer, but I wouldn't let him.

“Were you going to tell me?” I asked him.

He glanced over at me and rolled his eyes. “I didn't think it was a big deal,” he said. He sighed. “Are you making it a big deal?”

“Are you going to go upstairs?”

“Of course,” he said. But he tried to turn back to the computer again. “I'll be up in a little while,” he said.

I swear, I thought I hadn't heard him right. “You're kidding, right?” I asked him. I mean, say you go out to eat and you order the steak and the person you're with orders the chicken. Both of the meals arrive, and you taste your steak and don't like it. Do you make the other person eat your steak simply because you ordered wrong? I felt like Joshua had just grabbed my day and started in on it. I'd had in mind a mellow Fourth of July, with lounge chairs in Brown's Field, watching fireflies and fireworks blink all together. I stood there, trying to figure out what had just happened and whether I suddenly had to be all social. Swear to God, Joshua could make me feel like the least mellow person alive.

“What's the big deal?” Joshua asked me.

“For one, you didn't ask. And for two, they're
your
guests. And they're here.”

He stood up so quickly that his chair bumped the back of his legs and fell over. He didn't move to pick it up. I could tell he was pissed but so was I.

“Fine,” he said as he brushed past me and headed up the stairs.

“Wait, so now
I'm
the bitch?” I yelled after him, but he didn't answer. I took that for a yes.

I stood there in the basement, looking at the upended chair, on its back like a dead thing. I listened to the sound of feet and conversation above me and wondered what was the point. I'd felt the same way the first night Joshua had been there, when I'd wondered how I would ever survive the summer. Now we were more than a third of the way through, and I was still trying to figure it out. In the most recent couple of weeks, there'd been a few times when I'd felt like we'd struck a truce. And then something like what had just happened would happen, and I would wonder how a stranger could make me feel so out of place in my own home. I felt like I was flying below the radar, going unnoticed in my own life. I was almost embarrassed that I'd ever imagined Joshua and me becoming friends.

I leaned up against the Ping-Pong table and stared at the wall calendar that hadn't yet been changed from June. The computer was still on.

“Hey, sunshine. You waiting for me to kick your ass in Ping-Pong?”

I turned around and saw Max smiling. “No,” I said.

He frowned. “Uh-oh. Serious mood,” he said. He went over to Joshua's chair, looked at it a moment, then righted it and tucked it back beneath the desk. “What's up?” he asked.

“Nothing. I'm fine. So how was the movie last Sunday?”

“Oh, right,” Max said. “You never came back.”

I felt my face redden when he said that. I guess I'd been hoping that he'd wondered about it all week. But it seemed like he'd forgotten I hadn't been there until I reminded him. I felt about as appealing as a spotty mushroom.

“Where'd you go anyhow?” Max asked.

“Just errands. Was the movie good?”

He nodded. “For James Bond, it was okay. Laura and Lisa were thrilled to meet Josh,” he said. “I have a feeling they might find a reason to visit me again real soon.”

He twirled a Ping-Pong paddle, then found a dusty ball on the floor and hit it over to me. I caught it in one hand. Such a relief when a guy you like tosses a ball or a Frisbee or something of that sort and you manage to catch it without some huge lunge or bobble. Especially when the rest of your moves aren't that graceful.

“You're not mad at me, are you?” Max asked.

I didn't know what he was talking about. “You?” I asked him. “No. Why?”

“First you cut out for the movie, and then I only heard about this barbecue from Lionel.”

“You knew about it before I did,” I told him. I tossed the Ping-Pong ball back and he lobbed it into the ceiling. “Maybe Joshua wanted to surprise me.”

“Gotcha.” He put the paddle down. “Let's go up. Paulie brought beer and a kiddie pool, and Scooter has a whole mess of bottle rockets,” he said. “It'll be fun. We'll make it fun.”

 

Apparently, Joshua had told Lionel to invite whomever. Apparently, he'd said that he wanted to meet a lot of new people. By five-thirty, there were maybe thirty folks in the backyard, grilling food, dunking their feet in Paulie's pool and drinking beer and whatever else they'd carried in. An hour later, there was near to twice that many, and a steady stream of randoms were finding their way through the trees from Brown's Field. In a bigger town, that might have become a problem, but this was Pinecob.

Of course, it turned out that I knew or least recognized most of them—acquaintances from high school I saw around town, friends of Lionel's I hadn't seen since we'd stopped dating, friends of friends of friends. And it had turned into one of those perfect early evenings of summer, almost but not
quite too hot, so moods stayed up and people kept cool by spraying each other with a hose that someone had dragged out to fill the kiddie pool. Plus Lionel, bless his heart, had put a sign in the driveway, telling people to walk around to the backyard. And he'd locked the front door, which kept most people out of the house.

“Don't think I don't remember your momma,” he said. “Anything happens and you can blame me. She likes me.”

Scooter took charge of the grill, and I was impressed to see that there was a whole setup of coleslaw and potato salad and ketchup and mustard and relish and paper plates and plastic forks.

“You really didn't know about this?” Max asked. “Maybe Joshua
did
organize it to surprise you. I heard he's footing the bill for it.”

I wasn't convinced. “Maybe,” I said.

“Looks like he's having fun anyhow,” Max said.

Joshua was standing with three women, who cocked their heads and played with their hair as he held forth about something. A fourth approached and handed him a drink. He took a gulp and said something that made the girls giggle. No doubt, he could have recited state capitals and they'd have been cooing.

“He's not supposed to be drinking. Alcohol, I mean,” I said to Max.

“Maybe it's soda.”

“Whatever. His party, his life,” I said.

 

Who came up to me not ten minutes later but Loreen Dunbar. Loreen: Buccaneer waitress, Potomac Springs Senior High graduate, and before then, skank who went down on Howard Malkin while he and I were dating. Sure, it was years back, but since we hadn't been close beforehand and hadn't spoken much after, that betrayal remained the most obvious thing Loreen and I had in common.

Loreen came bopping up to me with Paulie on her tail. It looked to me like he was trying to score, but her posture said that he wouldn't, not that night, not unless something changed her mind. I found myself marginally more impressed with her because of that.

“Paulie, give me a minute with Leanne, will you?” Loreen said, and he shrunk off. “Leanne. Great party,” she said.

“Thanks.” I asked if the Buccaneer was closed for the Fourth and Loreen nodded.

“I don't think I've been over here since third grade,” she said. “Remember your party?”

I nodded. She'd never have been to our house if Momma hadn't invited everyone in my class over for my eighth birthday.

“It hasn't changed much,” Loreen said. “That deck wasn't there.”

“Tommy built it,” I told her, just to say something.

Loreen shifted around a bit, like her skirt was biting at her waistline. She looked at her watch, then back to me. “You still hate me?” she asked, all of a sudden.

I felt myself freeze and get hot at the same time. She didn't look mad, just curious. I took a quick internal inventory.

“No,” I said, slowly, like I was listening to myself as the answer came out, trying to figure out if it was correct. “That wouldn't make much sense.”

“Oh,” Loreen said.

“But I don't like what you did, even if it was a while back.”

“No,” she said. “It's not something I brag to anyone about. I'm sorry it happened.”

I nodded. Part of me started to feel bad for having referred to her as a skank all those years. I told myself that maybe I wouldn't have done that if she'd said all this sooner.

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “I don't even know where Howard is. So it seems silly to keep on fighting over him.”

“Last I heard, he was living in Martinsburg,” Loreen said.