Sons of Liberty (2 page)

Their mother was awake. She’d set up the kitchen table: mugs filled with tea and a plate arranged with festive points of toasts, their crusts cut, slathered in butter and cinnamon sugar.

“We can set the alarms fifteen minutes later for tomorrow,” she said nervously, holding her fingers over her mouth to stop her yawn. “Give you boys a little extra sleep.”

“They’re fine, Katherine.” Their father curved his hand lightly over her bony shoulder blade. “They’re young. Anyway, I don’t need any of this.” His fingers flicked in the direction of the table. “I’m due down at the boat yard in an hour and a half. I’m turning in.”

“Night,” Rock answered, sliding clumsily into his seat. Exhaustion wobbled him. Cliff sank into the seat opposite. Their mother fluttered and jerked between the kitchen counter and the table, rearranging silverware, pouring out milk, and fetching extra napkins before roosting lightly in her chair, one leg tucked beneath her as if she were poised to fly away at any moment.

Rock munched his toast triangles methodically, the sweet and crunch and butter all dissolving beautifully in his mouth.

“I’m gonna flunk my Spanish quiz,” Cliff, his head bowed, muttered to his toast. “On less than five hours of decent sleep.”

“Didn’t you study?” His mother’s voice was gently reproachful.

“Course I studied. What I’m talking about’s being able to keep my eyes open long enough to actually read—”

“Shhh. Your father’ll hear.”

“I don’t care if he hears.”

“What kind of tea is this?” Rock asked. “It’s too strong.”

“Earl Grey. It’s the only decaffeinated we had.”

“Tastes nasty. Like smoke.”

“Mom, you gotta talk to him. You promised you were going to, last time,” Cliff said querulously.

“And I did, I did talk to him, but he thought tonight was important, and you know your father has his ways, how he was saying about discipline.”

“Don’t
you
start now, Mom. I mean, come on. School gives me discipline, the soccer team is discipline, lifeguarding is discipline, but geez; two hours hammering on our roof in the middle of the night trying to fix a leak—that’s not anything but Dad being nuts, and you just let him. You just let him get away with it.” Cliff’s last word ended in a reluctant yawn that stretched his face and for a moment, in Rock’s eyes, made him look scarily deformed.

“This tea tastes like aspirin and throw-up,” Rock said. He dug his spoon into the sugar bowl and began shoveling sticky spoonfuls into his teacup. But no matter how much he added, the bitter taste stayed. Two, three, four; soon a sandy floor of sugar had formed on the bottom of his cup. But his mother wasn’t watching him; her eyes were fixed to Cliff.

“While you are under his roof—,” she began. Cliff crumpled his napkin and threw it into his buttery plate.

“Yeah, okay. Just go ahead and use that excuse. I can’t say anything to that old argument. Except maybe to warn you that I might not be under this roof for much longer.”

Strong words, Rock thought. Too bad the voice they came out of was all crackly with feeling. Rock looked at his mother, whose body seemed to deflate under her nightgown. She touched her fingertips to her closed eyes, and Rock was certain tears would squeeze out of the corners any second.

“I can’t take your treating me this way, Cliffy.”

“I’m not trying to be mean, Mom.” Cliff pushed away his plate. “I just wish you’d stand up to him every once in a while. Look, don’t cry, you’re not gonna cry …” Cliff shoved himself to his feet, gathering his cup and plate.

“What are you doing?” Suddenly his mother turned on Rock with agitated energy, yanking the teaspoon from his hand. “If you hate the tea, then I’ll get you some juice or cocoa or something, but don’t just sit there dumping eighty-six pounds of sugar into that little cup. Good grief, Rock, what a waste.”

“Sorry.” Rock bounced up and away from her. “I’m going to bed.” He used his foot to push his chair back under the table.

“Wait a minute, Rock honey, come back, I didn’t mean …” Her voice shook, but Rock scooted out of range of his mother’s outstretched hand, covering the area of the front room in three easy strides and taking the stairs two at a time. Tears made Rock nervous; he himself rarely cried, and when he did, it felt too private and embarrassing for anyone to see, like when people leafed through their family photo album and caught a glimpse of those baby pictures of Rock smiling and goofily naked in the bathtub.

Cliff didn’t follow. He stayed downstairs for a long time, helping their mother clean the kitchen. Their muffled voices drifting up from below replaced the steady noise of the leak, lulling Rock to sleep and at the same time filling him with a restless unease that didn’t leave him even as he dreamed.

L
IZA STOMPED HER PRESENCE ONTO THE FRONT STOOP, ONE PINK-WOOL-MITTENED
hand jammed on her hip, the other bare and blue and pinkie-crooked as she inhaled from an imaginary cigarette. Slowly she exhaled a long white tail of frost, then threw back her head and fake-laughed like she was at a cocktail party. Loony Liza, Rock smiled, always preparing for some swank life after she got out of Sheffield.

“You’re busted, Covergirl.” Rock opened the glass storm door, letting Liza slide into the living room on a current of freezing air. “Pretending to smoke air frost. That’s like what second-graders do.”

“So? I’m practicing for if I win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. For the parties after. Who cares if you saw, peon.” Liza waved to Cliff and Brontie and their mother, who ranged around the kitchen table. “Morning, Mrs. Kindle. Morning, everyone. It’s wicked cold in here.” She moved closer to the front room’s tiny fireplace, crouching and stretching out her hands.

“I can do them myself,” Brontie stated, pointing at Liza. “Only I’m allowed to do them.” She twisted the orange rag hair of her favorite doll, Wynona, tight in her fingers.

“Huh?” Liza looked at Cliff, the family interpreter of Brontie’s leapfrogging brain.

“Sneakers. You tried to tie Wynona’s sneaks the other day, remember? Bront’s still mad, since only she can touch Wynona. You’re kind of a protective mom, aren’tcha, Bront?” Cliff reached over and snipped Brontie’s chin between his fingers. She smiled, a full top-and-bottom-tooth smile that she reserved for Cliff alone. Only Cliff knew how to attach meanings to the associations that orbited like millions of bright and scattered stars inside Brontie’s four-year-old brain.

“Oh, okay. Sure, Bront. I should have known. Nothing comes between you and Wynona.” Liza’s smile was met with Brontie’s more characteristic stare and silence. “You guys ready?”

“Boys, lunches.” Their mother pointed to the counter. “And there’s soup in your thermoses, so you’ll need to buy milks at school. You have money?” Her question stood on the breathless edge of panic. In their mother’s world, little problems always raced to the edge of crises.

“Yeah, yeah.” Even though Rock rarely had spare change, Cliff always socked away cash and usually lent it out.

“You want me to pick up orange juice on the way home?” Cliff asked, zipping up his jacket. “Since we’re almost out, I noticed.”

“That would be terrific.” Their mother’s smile opened her face. “Thanks, Cliffy sweetie. I have a list, actually. And here’s my bank card.”

The list was long, too long. Rock watched, annoyed, as Cliff poked it and the bank card into his jacket pocket.

“Mom, why don’tcha—” Cliff’s glare halted Rock’s question for only a second; then more loudly he repeated, “Mom, why don’tcha go down to the milk store yourself? You’re home all day.”

“Stuff it, Rock. I’ll take care of it.” Cliff cuffed Rock hard in the back of the head.

“No fighting, please. No fighting.” Rock felt the weight of his mother’s troubled eyes on him. “I can. I can get those things, Cliffy, if you want—”

“I got it, Ma. Don’t worry, okay?”

“Come on.” Liza stomped out of the house, banging the door behind her.

Outside, the early morning was soft and dingy as a newspaper photograph. The sky and trees were gray, the lawns and roofs caped in white, and the snow-banked road of Linwood Drive was glossed icy black. Skipping ahead, a flame of lavender ski parka and pink jeans, Liza looked like an early visit from the Easter Bunny. When she got to the end of the drive, she dropped her book bag and flipped a perfect one-handed cartwheel.

“Pretty good,” Cliff acknowledged.

“Not bad,” Rock agreed, yet the thought of Liza’s raw hand hitting the freezing sharp teeth of the gravel drive made him shiver in appreciation. Liza Vincent sure was tough stuff. Tougher than most guys.

Suddenly Liza focused on Rock like she’d just read his mind.

“Now you go,” she said.

“I don’t do stupid gym-
nas
-tics,” Rock said. “Gimme a break.”

Liza’s greeny-brown eyes, the color of October as she herself had once described them, squinted in the corners as she grinned at him, and she lifted her hands to the back of her head, popping out a pink plastic barrette. She dipped her shaggy dark hair forward and swung her book bag over her shoulder, then back-sidled into Rock, nudging him hard and catching him off balance.

“Cut it out.” He pushed her away and yawned absently.

“You’d been wearing your glasses, you’d’ve seen me coming.”

“Shut up, I don’t wear glasses. Just to read is when I wear them. Sometimes.”

“You guys seem tired,” Liza stated flatly. “Get much sleep last night?” Her eyes betrayed her curiosity. Liza had a tricky way of tucking deeper meanings inside innocent questions.

“Us?” Cliff answered for both of them. “Not me. Slept like a log.” Rock could hear Cliff’s unease with Liza’s question. Interrupted nights were a secret that the Kindles guarded safe from daytime.

“I’m sure not tired,” Rock asserted, but a piece of him wanted to throw some doubt Liza’s way, make her wonder if they were hiding something from her. Rock was always having to swear to Cliff he’d never tell Liza about Interrupted nights, although Rock was never sure why, exactly. In Rock’s mind the Interrupted nights were kind of cool, like a special training program that Dad planned. They took guts, and Liza always appreciated things that took guts.

“Well, my ma would say you could pack sweaters in the bags under your eyes,” Liza noted, but her gaze had strayed ahead to the snowball fight at the bus stop.

It was a full-fury combat, with snowballs sling-shotting through the air, hinged on laughing shrieks and shouts from the teams standing on opposite sides of the road. At the sight of Liza and Cliff and Rock, both sides started yelling, “Cliff, Liza, Rock. Come over to our team! Our team, our team!”

Rock and Liza broke off from Cliff. It was only fair. Cliff was biggest, and threw a perfect overhand pitch. He immediately dropped his book bag and began to lob diplomatically at any moving enemy target. All indifferent determination, that was Cliff.

Rock didn’t play that way. He chose Mitchell Briggs, a soft-faced kid he’d hated since forever. A kid whose dad, according to Rock’s father, was always palming the Kindles off with the scrawniest cuts at B. B.’s Fishmart, then overcharging for them. Like one time last summer, when Rock had brought home lobsters as a surprise for his parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary.

“Call this a lobster?” His father had picked up the live lobster and shoved it under Rock’s nose. “Brian Briggs must think he can sniff out a fool from miles away. A sucker born every minute, but it’s a painful day when that fool turns out to be your own son. Don’t even tell me how much you paid for ’em. I don’t want to think about how Brian Briggs’s sitting there in the back of his store, counting his money and laughing himself into a fit.”

He’d tossed the lobster in the fireplace. It smacked hard against the bricks before plopping to the hearth. Its rubber-banded claws dragged through the ashes, uselessly treading air currents. Brontie had promptly pitched a fit, yelling that the lobster needed a Band-Aid. Then their mother had started in, trying to get everyone to apologize, trying to make Brontie shut up, nervously working to smooth everything over. But their father had left, the station wagon loosing a spray of gravel from the driveway, as he’d retreated to Maguire’s Pub for dinner. What a mess, that night. Brontie crying in her room. Their mother, bundled up in a bedspread in the front room, staring blankly at the television screen. All because of that cheapskate Mr. Briggs.

Now Mitchell Briggs would get it. Rock always got a weird kick out of getting back at Briggsie.

Rock started easy on him, pitching soft-packed powder puffs that fell in a spray over Mitchell’s red ski jacket. He could see Mitchell nervously enjoying the battle at first, the blur of his chubby face breaking open into a jack-o’-lantern grin as he ducked and tossed back. His pudgy throwing arm was worse than Brontie’s. Rock crouched and prepared an iceball, squeezing it dense as coal between his cupped palms. Then he slid his glasses out of his jacket pocket and quickly stuck them on, to get a better aim.

“Masterflex!” he shouted ominously, just to throw a little extra scare into Briggsie. He wound up and pitched in his best imitation of Roger Clemens, watching it whistle across the road. It stung a perfect bull’s-eye against Briggsie’s ear.

“Aye-yoww!” Briggsie clapped his hands over the mark. His gaze flicked over Rock warily. “Come on, Rock. Come on, man. That hurt.”

Liza laughed and gave Rock a mittened thumbs-up. “Nice one,” she said.

“I’m out.” Briggsie backed away from the battle range, moving close to where some of the younger kids were playing a frantic hopping game. Wimp, Rock thought. Wicked wimpy, just like his dad.

“Hey, check it out.” Liza’s voice was secretive at his side. She raised an eyebrow, one of her coolest tricks, and then her bare fingers uncurled to reveal a glittering chunk of black gravel. Deliberately, like a magician, she poked the piece of gravel into the snowball that was cradled in her other, mittened hand. “For Briggsie.” She grinned, rolling it into Rock’s palm. “The Det-o-nay-tor. Pack it tight, too. Turn it to ice. And keep your glasses on.”

“Yeah, cool.” Rock flinched as a snowball grazed his shoulder. But the Detonator, now balanced carefully as a muffin in his open hand, gave him a stab of misgiving. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Briggsie squatting close to the safety zone of the little kids and still rubbing his ear. Probably wishing he could just go home and whine to his mother.