Zipped (13 page)

On this side of the street, an old woman was moving haltingly in Janice's direction. When Maurice emerged from the storefront, the woman followed him toward the car. As Maurice approached, Janice reached over to flip the lock, but the old woman arrived just as he was opening the door. Her cheeks and nose were red and veiny, and her face seemed loosely gathered around her tiny mouth. “Two dollars soup money's all I need, friend,” she said to Maurice. “Just two bucks.” When she smiled there was nothing but gums.

Maurice got in and slammed the door. The cat stiffened for a second, then relaxed again. The old woman steadied herself on the car and tried to peer through the tinting. Maurice made a heavy sigh of annoyance, then pulled a five-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to the woman, who looked like she might weep with surprise and gratitude. Maurice slowly eased the car away from the curb.

“That was nice,” Janice said.

“Not really,” Maurice said, his voice stony. “I just wanted her grimy hands off my car.” But after he glanced down at the cat in her lap, his voice softened slightly. “Looks like Harriet's found another lap to call her own.”

They drove to Thornden Park, close by but depressingly urban after Green Lakes. Maurice found them a table where they sat eating their cheeseburgers and fries. Harriet was in her harness, tethered by a slim leather leash, but after some ritual exploration with tail held vertical, she'd curled in Janice's lap. The food was cold now, and the sun was ebbing fast. Maurice had finished his cheeseburger and was eating his fries slowly, dipping each bite in mustard, then ketchup, when he said, “So Doyle's your girl chum, right?”

Janice nodded. “We're friends, yeah.”

Maurice ate two more fries. “She a real redhead?”

The question alarmed Janice. “What do you mean, real?”

Maurice grinned. “You know what I mean. You've seen her in the shower room, haven't you?”

Janice knew what Maurice meant and she had of course seen Lisa in the shower room, but the very fact that she could tell Maurice wanted to hear that Lisa was a true redhead kept her from saying it. A new feeling had taken hold of Janice. She began some tight scratches of the cat's ears and said, “The thing is, I promised Lisa I would never tell.”

Maurice smiled a loose, easy smile. “Promised to never tell what?”

A lie composed itself in Janice's mind. She knew she shouldn't say it, but she wanted to say it, and she did. “That she's a Lady Clairol redhead.”

Maurice's eyes seemed to dilate for a moment as if in surprise, and then he was slowly shaking his head. “Well, that's a real fooler,” he said.

Janice pretended to stick up for her friend. “I don't see why it should make any difference one way or the other. She's still really cute.”

Maurice poked a fry into his mouth. “The thing is, it does make a difference,” he said in a serious voice. “Sham redheads are a dime a dozen.”

“Well, it's not like she's on the market anyway,” Janice said, and smoothed her hand over the cat's back. “She's got two guys on the line—the Mormon and another one—and she's having a hard time deciding which.”

Maurice crumpled his empty fry bag. “They can have her,” he said. There was something hard in his voice now, as if something had been irreversibly decided.

For a moment—but only a moment—Janice wondered why she didn't feel worse about what she'd just done.

Maurice had gone to the trunk of the Honda and brought out a soft rag and begun to wipe clean his car, which, to Janice, already seemed perfectly clean. As he worked, he carefully folded and refolded the rag to keep a clean side out. Then he began applying wax.

“Want me to help?” Janice said.

He didn't even look up. “Naw. I have my own way of doing it.”

As he worked, he was humming. It was an infectious tune, and Janice found herself wanting to hear it better, but she didn't move or say anything. A few minutes later, Maurice stopped and pulled off his T-shirt, which he brought over to the table and folded neatly. His upper body was so white and smooth and tightly muscular in the twilight it reminded Janice of the marble Olympians in the art museum sculpture garden. While she was thinking this, Maurice caught her looking at him, and she began to blush. But he did something surprising. He leaned forward and gave her a gentle nip on the ear. Everything about this—his touch, his closeness, his smell—affected her. He was still humming. When he leaned away, she had to fight the impulse to pull him back.

“What's that song?” she asked.

“Something my mom used to sing all the time.”

Rosy apple, yellow pear,
Bunch of roses in your hair.
Gold and silver by your side,
I know who will be your bride.

He stopped singing and smiled. “Weird, huh?”

What was weird was how well Maurice could sing. It was like he was some bare-chested medieval troubadour. It was quite possibly the sexiest thing a man had done in her presence, and she wanted him to sing it again, but closer.

“Know what you can do for me?” he asked.

Janice wondered what, if anything, she would say no to. “What?”

Maurice fixed her with a set smile. “You can tell me why you called Jocko's Unsurpassed Security on my cell phone while you were sitting in my car.”

Janice felt the color draining from her face. “What do you mean?”

His smile seemed actually to relax slightly, as if a small pleasure had just been presented to him. “Jocko himself answered the phone. I was sitting next to him at the time. On hang-ups he routinely checks the caller ID.” Maurice's smile widened. “After he checked, Jocko turned to me and said, ‘Your phone just called me.' ” Maurice paused. “Since my phone was in the car and the only person in the car was you, it wasn't that hard to figure out.”

Janice lowered her eyes. “I just wondered who'd called you,” she said in a small voice. “I thought it might be a girl. I know I had no right to be jealous, but I think I was.”

Maurice took this in. “How'd you know what number to call?”

“Watched you speed dial. It's just like my mom's phone.”

“Smart girl,” he said.

She looked up. She wasn't sure whether he was about to be mad or about to be friendly. She had the feeling he wasn't sure himself. Finally he went to the back of the Honda and lifted the hatch cover to reveal a small cooler filled with ice. He pulled out two bottles of cold beer, opened them at the table, and clicked them lightly together. “Here's to the smart girl,” he said.

He handed Janice the bottle of beer.

She took it. It tasted bitter, but she drank it.

He drank his off quickly, in six or seven gulps, and leaned forward to give Janice another little nip on her ear. This one was slightly less gentle than the first one, but it affected her the same as before, only more so. She felt dreamy. The cat purred in her lap. Maurice was smiling at her, a relaxed I-own-you smile, and she felt as if with his merest touch all of her clothes might loosen and slide free.

But he stepped back, and then, in the fading daylight of a Sunday afternoon in an out-of-the-way corner of Thornden Park, she watched him go back to the careful waxing of his car.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

How Does Your Garden Grow?

The house was dark when Mick got home. It was nearly eight o'clock, but he was the first to arrive. In the pantry the answering machine was blinking and the message readout said 2. Mick hit play.

“Greetings from Reeceville and let me tell you, Mr. Mickster, thanks to the uncle Arnold, the woe in Connecticut has turned golden and then some. Details at eleven. You will definitely want to stay tuned.”

Mick was interested, but also mildly disappointed. He'd hoped the message might be from Lisa, and the second message wasn't from her, either. It was from his father: “Nora? You there? If you're there, pick up.” A pause. “Okay, I'm still at Clyde D.'s but I'll be home no later than eight-thirty.” Another pause. “I thought you'd be home now.” Pause. “Okay. See you later.”

In school Mick had learned that the temperature at which a flammable gas bursts into flame is called the flash point, and, later, he would realize that listening to this message had brought him to something similar. His eyes squeezed shut.
“God!”
he said aloud through clenched teeth. It was too much. That was all. It was just too much. He felt overmatched, overwhelmed, over-everything. He took the disk from his pocket and threw it hard against the kitchen wall. It clicked and fell. He looked at it lying on the linoleum and thought, Good. Let somebody else find it. Let somebody else carry it around.

Foolish came warily forward, sniffed the disk on the floor, and walked away.

So did Mick.

Upstairs, he found an e-mail waiting for him from Myra.
Hi,
Mick as in mittens. I left so fast last night I didn't get to tell you how
much I enjoyed your company. You probably didn't know it, but you
were a comfort to me, a little weird I know, but there it is. We should
do it again some time, yes?

Being a comfort didn't seem great exactly, but it didn't seem so bad, either. He composed three or four different responses to Myra, but didn't like any of them. Finally he just wrote
Yes.
Definitely yes.

Then Mick went to his room, lay down on his bed, leafed through a car magazine for a few minutes, and fell asleep.

He awakened a while later to a gentle tapping sound—his father's knuckles on the doorjamb. “You already eat?”

The room was dim and Mick was trying to get his bearings. He looked at the clock. Eight-forty. “No, I didn't,” he said in a thick voice. “Guess I wasn't hungry.” The truth was, he'd just forgotten to eat.

“You drop this?” His father was holding a computer disk.
The
computer disk.

Mick, who'd been groggy, was suddenly totally focused, but he had no idea what to say next.

“It was on the kitchen floor,” his father said.

Mick didn't know what to say, but he had to say something. He said, “Is it green?”

His father looked. “Yep.”

A second or two passed and Mick heard himself say, “It's mine, then.”

His father nodded. “What's on it?”

Another pause. “A paper for history,” Mick said. “It's on the muckrakers.”

His father was nodding. “Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair,” he said.

Mick, surprised, said, “Yeah. Those guys.”

His father, grinning, came fully into the room. “I wasn't one of the whiz kids,” he said, “but those teachers pounded a few things into me.” He laid the disk down on Mick's bedside table. “Better put that someplace safe,” he said.

Mick stared at it lying there.

His father turned to go. “Nora's not here yet, so how about if us guys grub up something to eat?”

Mick nodded. “Sure, Dad.”

After his father left the room, Mick sat up and swung to the edge of the bed. He opened his mouth, breathed in, breathed out. Then he picked up the green disk and zipped it back into the interior pocket of his jacket.

By the time Mick got downstairs, his father already had bread in the toaster, peas in the microwave, and chipped beef in a Ziploc bag and was mixing up a white sauce at the stove. Creamed chipped beef and peas over toast was his standard bachelor meal, which was fine by Mick. It wasn't bad.

As his father stirred the sauce over a low flame, he was whistling something Mick didn't recognize, neither too fast nor too slow, but he abruptly stopped whistling to ask Mick if Nora had said where she was going.

“The mall. And then to some spinning lesson in Mattydale, she said.”

His father nodded and glanced at the clock. Mick knew what his father was going to say next even before he said it: “I hope she's okay.”

He resumed his whistling.

“What's that song?” Mick said.

His father stopped and cocked his head as if listening for the song he'd just been whistling. “Not sure,” he said. But as he was mixing the chipped beef with the white sauce it suddenly came to him. “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You,' ” he said. He moved his voice to a lower register and mock-crooned, “Moonlight becomes you, it goes with your hair. You certainly know the right things to wear.”

Mick said, “Kind of sorry I asked.”

They ate their dinner in front of the TV. Time seemed to thicken and slow down. When they were done eating, Mick lay on the sofa and his father stretched out in his recliner, but his father couldn't sit still. He kept checking the clock, and he fidgeted through the movie they'd settled on. Once or twice he got up and peered out the front window.

Finally, at 9:45, Mick heard the downshifting whine of Nora's 320i and then the dull grinding of the garage door. His father jumped up and went to greet her. Mick couldn't hear what his father was saying, but he heard Nora say, “Oh, you're so sweet, but I would've called if anything had been wrong.”

They came together into the front room. “Hiya, Mick,” Nora said with a breeziness Mick threw right into the bogus pile. “What're we watching?”

The movie had gone to commercials and his father hit the mute button.
“One False Move,”
he said. “Kind of a guy movie.” Then, “You hungry? There's more chipped beef.”

Nora declined. “I'm not quite that desperate,” she said, and Mick's father laughed and said, “Hey, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.”

This geniality annoyed Mick, and he said, “So how was the spinning lesson?”

Without the slightest hitch Nora smiled and said, “Frightening! The yarn kept breaking and the woman kept saying I'd get the hang of it.”

Mick's father laughed and said, “Well, she's right. You will.”

Nora kissed him on the cheek and looked around at the dishes with their hardening white sauce. “Guess I'd better clean up after your little bachelor party.” She began gathering plates and glasses.

His father helped.

Mick just sat.

The next day after school, alone in the house, Mick looked in Nora's knitting basket. Balls of yarn, ropes of wool, eighteen inches of what Mick supposed was the front of a cabled sweater, a half-eaten box of Junior Mints, and a business card with a small drawing of a spinning wheel in the corner. The address said Mattydale. Mick called the number and a woman answered, “Dyed in the Wool. Can I help you?”

“Is this the Alberta Scott who gives spinning lessons?” he asked, feeling both foolish and determined.

“Yes,” Alberta Scott said cheerfully. “What can I do you for?”

“This is Mick Nichols,” he said quickly, so it sounded like migniggles, and then he purposefully slowed himself down. “My stepmother left her wallet somewhere, and I'm helping her retrace her steps. Did she leave it at your house last night?”

“Last night?” Alberta Scott repeated.

“At her spinning lesson.”

“I think you must be mistaken. I didn't give any lessons last night. Who did you say your stepmother was?”

“What was that?” Mick said, calling over his shoulder into the empty house. “Never mind,” he said into the mouthpiece. “She found it. It was in her other purse all the time.”

He thanked the woman, hung up, and rubbed a rough-looking blob of wool between his fingers. It had a strange smell to it— thick and rancid—that quickly transferred to his fingers. He remembered Nora's phrase for freshly sheared wool. “In the grease.” Mick wiped the sheep oil on his pants, and then he just sat there, staring into the picture of Nora in her swimming suit, staring at her wide smile and bright eyes, wondering just what the face behind the face behind the face might look like, if he ever got to see it.