Tilt (6 page)

It wasn't Stan's father. Couldn't be. For one thing, Stan's father was taller than this mopey man. He was tall and angular and athletic. Stan's father used to skate right past all defenders — two, three quick strides — and cut around the net with his long reach and tuck the puck inside the post before anyone even knew what had happened.

Stan's father could whip a baseball the length of the driveway and curve it so wickedly you had to watch the spin on the seams to have any chance of knowing what the ball might do. And if you missed it you'd have to run all the way through the backyard and under the hedge and into the Farquardsons' garden to get it.

Stan's father could pick up a kid and twirl him like a helicopter blade so fast you were almost flying.

This man — this imposter — had to straighten himself up just to avoid looking Stan in the eye. He had soft shoulders and a paunch and weak eyes, saggy in the corners. Not the dark, glinting ping-pong champion beamers that Stan remembered.

He looked like a man who'd abandoned his kids years ago.

“Ron,” Stan's mother said.

“Isabelle,” Ron said.

They stood on the little walkway in front of the house. Lily was still draped all over him. He pressed her thick hair to his neck as if hanging on to a cliff-face vine.

All right, his father would do that. But this man — Ron — was crumbling in the corners. He looked like all the other middle-aged men Stan's mother had dated in the past few years.

“What are you doing here?” Stan's mother asked.

Ron buried his pudgy hand in Lily's hair and mumbled something about bus fare.

“What's bus fare got to do with anything?”

“There was a special on. I saw a flyer for it and so I thought I'd come.”

Ron still hadn't looked Stan square in the eye. Stan might as well have been a fence post. It was up to his father to say something.

Up to Ron, who wasn't up to much.

“That wasn't our agreement,” Stan's mother said. “You can't come here and disrupt everything just because there's a special on.”

“I'm special,” Lily blurted. “I'm going to go to a special school!”

“Please get down, Lily,” her mother said.

“Why can't we just have a visit?” Ron pleaded.

“They tested me and I'm extraordinary,” Lily said, not getting down. Ron gripped her tighter.

This man made Gary look good.

“I just hopped on a bus. That's all —”

“You just owe us four years, three months' worth of child support!” Stan's mother turned her icy gaze on Lily.
“Lily.”

Lily hugged the man — Ron — all the harder. Stan imagined taking out the side of his knee with a sweeping kick. He'd collapse like a broken tent pole.

“Look, I'm not here to make any trouble,” Ron said. He put Lily down. She clung still, a koala bear grappled to a tree limb. Ron squatted and blew a quick puff to clear the hair from her eyes.

That was something his father used to do.

“Did you bring your checkbook?” Stan's mother said. “Or I'd be happy to take cash.” Then, because she couldn't help herself, she said again,
“Lily.”

Lily didn't move.

If Stan had his broom handle he could sidekick the innocent grin off Ron's face.

“Look. This wasn't meant to be a big thing. I just saw the ad —”

“What are you doing for work these days, Ron?” Stan's mother asked.

Ron laughed bitterly. “That's what it always comes down to with you. What's the bottom line? What's the measure of a man's worth?”

Stan's mother's chest shivered with quick little phony breaths. Either she was going to faint from lack of air or claw his eyes out.

“I'm a carpenter,” Ron said finally. He opened his hands — his pudgy, white, non-callused hands.

“From law to real estate to carpentry,” she snapped.

Then a miserable gaze between the two. Stan fell into the trap of it for a time. It was hard to look away. But finally he stepped in and took Lily's wrist — not harshly, not softly — and pulled her into the house.

“He's not going to stay,” she whined in the vestibule. Stan wanted to wait close enough so he could spring to his mother's aid if need be.

“He doesn't deserve to,” Stan said.

He couldn't make out what they were saying out there.

They weren't screaming. That was something.

Carpentry? Stan remembered his father trying to replace a spoke on Stan's bicycle years and years ago. He remembered the wrenches, the sweat, the swear words rising to the basement rafters. And the new spoke broken, poking through the replacement inner tube. The blood on Stan's father's knuckles.

Carpentry.

Stan's mother came through the door. Stan glimpsed the front walk. Ron was gone. He'd left on foot for somewhere.

“The end of a bloody marvelous day,” she said and closed the door by leaning all of her weight against it.

—

Stan made dinner. Pancakes, his one dish. The recipe was in a beat-up old family cookbook with stained and smelly pages. They were low on fresh milk so he used powdered, which they were also low on. Stan's mother usually did the weekly grocery shopping Saturday morning, so often Friday dinner was sparse.

Flour was in short supply, too, so he used more baking powder than usual and slipped in extra sugar to keep Lily happy.

Not too much of the batter splashed on the stovetop. And there was bacon — last week's, still hanging tough.

If she'd just give him the money he'd do the shopping and they wouldn't run out like this.

Stan's mother wandered the house glued to Gary through her telephone.

“Well, what am I supposed to do? . . . I didn't! I didn't invite him! . . . I suppose somehow he's been in contact with Lily. Despite our agreement! Why the hell would I be surprised by anything he does at this point?”

Ron's phone was still in Stan's backpack. But if he told her . . . 

Now was not the time.

There was no oil so the pancakes didn't stick together particularly well. They burned to the nonstick pan instead. The smoke alarm was going to go off any minute.

Water-paste pancakes, charred and crumbling. At least there was syrup. Lily might eat them yet.

“He told me that Kelly-Ann and Feldon have gone to stay with her uncle . . . She's in pre-law. He's got money to pay for that. Maybe they're still using her family money. And he's a fucking carpenter.”

She was in her work outfit still, her blouse and pressed pants, but with the sorry yellow knitted slippers she tended to wear around the house. Little pom-poms bounced when she thudded across the floor.

“I don't know if she kicked him out or not!”

The smoke alarm sounded then. Not the family-room alarm, which was closest, but the upstairs-landing alarm. Stan called out to Lily to whack it with the broom.

“You're going to have to do it yourself,” Stan's mother said.

He only had batter left for another few pancakes.
“Lily!”

“It's a madhouse here,” his mother said into the phone.

Stan charged up the stairs and swatted the alarm off the ceiling. It howled on the floor until he pried it open with his fingers and released the battery into silence.

—

Later, when the blackened remains of dinner had been cleared away, the three of them, the rump of a family, watched a dating show on television in which former celebrities tried to give romantic advice to contestants whose prize was to end up with each other in full public view. Even Lily stayed quiet, hypnotized by the quick cuts, the glitzy narration, the thunderous commercials. Here was a troubled young woman lying on her bed in semi-darkness — without pants, for some reason, the whites of her legs glimmering — moaning about how easily she'd shed her clothes, and was she too inviting, and would he ever call the number she had made sure he had?

“The weirded-out thing is,” she said, “like, do I even like this guy? Is it, like, too late to be asking?”

She was wearing bangley earrings and her lips seemed puffed out. Nothing about her was attractive except . . . 

 . . . except Stan felt himself possessed of a ridgepole for no good reason whatsoever.

Sitting on the sofa with his mother and his sister as this young woman in her underwear moved her legs.

Where was the blanket? On the back of the sofa.

The young woman said, “Sometimes I just really want to jump a guy and I have no idea why.”

Stan twisted to retrieve the blanket, trying hard not to press — anything — against anybody.

“What's wrong?” his mother said. Waking up from some thought.

The young woman wiggled her butt and said, “There's nothing wrong with, like, healthy sexuality. But I really should be able to remember his last name.”

Stan settled the blanket on his lap. The young woman disappeared, replaced by a ripped guy pumping weights in the gym who said, “She let me in, why wouldn't I?”

“Lily, I don't think you should be watching this,” his mother said. She picked up the remote and pressed a button. Nothing happened.

“Why not? Why can't I?” Lily howled.

“Stanley? Stanley, can you fix this?”

Stan took the remote. The veins in his head throbbed as he skipped through from show to show.

Lily hit him with the pillow.

“But I want to see it!” The blanket shifted and Stan pulled it back.

He stayed exactly where he was, waiting for the bubble of the evening to settle somewhere and die.

—

In the middle of the night, long after he'd gone to bed but failed to sleep, Stan sat on the front porch in the chilly air, his feet near freezing, bare on the wood. He fingered his father's phone.

It glowed in chill darkness. He hit the buttons.

“Hello?” came a voice at last. “Lily? Is that you?”

“Hi, Ron.” Stan shocked himself addressing his father that way, and yet — why not?

“Oh,” Ron said.

Breathing on the other end. The street lamps, everything, so still.

“It was good to see you today, son,” Ron said. “I'm sorry to surprise you like that. I just saw the . . .  ad, for the bus fares —”

“Does it get any better?” Stan blurted. Was that his question?

More breathing at the other end of the line. Stan thought he could hear noises in the background. At the bus station? Was it open this time of night?

What time was it?

“Does what
get any better?” Ron asked.

“Getting an erection for some girl on TV,” Stan said. “Thinking about it all the time. Sitting at the table at breakfast over cereal and being hard as a poker in your pajamas over nothing. Nothing!”

Not a word. If anybody knew about this, it would be his father.

“What are you talking about, Stan?”

Off. Off with the phone.

—

Stan smelled smoke on his way up the stairs and back to bed. He remembered that he hadn't replaced the battery in the smoke alarm from the burnt pancake episode, but this wasn't house-fire smoke. It was coming from a cigarette.

From the back porch, in fact. The smell grew sharper as Stan crept back through the kitchen. In the years since his mother had quit he'd grown more sensitive, so that now the smoke from a single cigarette seemed to fill the whole house.

His mother was smoking again. She was on the back porch in the dark, her head resting against the screened window, the orange bead of the cigarette perched in mid-air. Her hair was loose and long and looked as though she'd been bunching it in her hands.

He watched her from the open doorway. She was letting the cold into the house, letting in the smoke. He'd grown up with it but Lily hadn't. Somehow it seemed to him that Lily ought to be protected from the dangers.

He stood by the open door. It would be the easiest thing in the world to turn around, slip back up the stairs. He could make sure Lily's door was shut against the cancer.

Janine's mother had cancer. He'd be meeting her tomorrow night. Tonight, actually, since today had morphed into Saturday.

Stan stared at the orange bead, at his mother in shadows gazing into the backyard where the winter's chill was already in the air even though that season was technically still a few months away. He could feel it on his face, in his feet.

Surely she knew he was there? She used to know every thought in his head, every hand snaking into the cookie jar. Every nightmare.

She was wrapped in her old brown robe, and her feet were tucked up beneath her.

Stan heard himself say, “I sank a shot against Karl Brolin today in the wind on a bent rim way too far to even try it.”

She didn't startle or drop the lengthening ash on the cigarette. Stan wished she'd put it out. But she just turned her head and smiled a little bit.

It was the middle of the night. They might have been in a dream. But everything felt normal somehow.

“Who's Karl Brolin?”

Stan went out and sat on the wicker loveseat opposite her and pulled a blanket around himself. It smelled of the damp, of outdoors. He told her about the whole improbable basketball game and she listened, in her way. Tossing a ball into a hoop was as unlikely an event for her as knitting this blanket would have been for him. (Was it even knitted? Crocheted? What was the difference?)

And then somehow he was telling her about Janine Igwash. He told her about the belt loop, about the invitation to the dance. About Janine's mother.

“Breast cancer?” his mother said.

The cigarette was out now, squashed into a little plate she must have brought out. There were no ashtrays left in the house. She must have a pack, but Stan couldn't see it anywhere. Only one stub and its ashes littered the plate.

Silence strung between them like the smoke. Stan rubbed his cold toes and waited.