“Need you ask?” Leonard said.
“Marvin?” Brett said. “How about you?”
“Milk and cookies sounds fine.”
“Great,” she said. “Hap, get your ass in there and get the cookies. Some for me too. Chop-chop.”
I started toward the kitchen. As I passed her, she grabbed my arm. “Just kidding,” she said. “I’ll get them. I was just evaluating your training. You get an A. Later I’ll give you a treat, and it won’t be a dog biscuit.”
She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.
As I started back into the living room area Leonard said, “Good dog. Next you’ll be off the newspapers and using the yard.”
“That’s my goal.”
I sat down on the couch, the far end from Leonard, who had kicked off his shoes and was stretching his legs out.
“I can’t see what Brett sees in you, Hap,” Leonard said.
“It’s the parts you don’t see,” I said.
“Nor do I want to.”
“I’m thinking, maybe,” I said, “you didn’t really come over here to interrupt my sex life and have milk and cookies.”
“I’m having Dr Pepper,” Leonard said. “Dr Pepper that you got special just for me.”
“Go to hell, Leonard.”
“You’re right, Hap,” Marvin said. “We didn’t come over to have milk and cookies. It’s a little more complicated than that.”
3
We finished up our milk and cookies, Leonard his Dr Pepper and cookies, then Brett went upstairs to bed. The treat she offered me would have to be held in abeyance. I considered the delay Leonard’s fault, and gave him a black mark on my mental chalkboard. No star for you, asshole. Next time I’d get RC instead of Dr Pepper, see how that pulled his chain, maybe get some of those nasty coconut cookies he hated. I hated them too, but the punishment was worth consideration.
We went out in the yard to talk so Brett wouldn’t be bothered by our big mouths. She had bought some metal lawn chairs and put them out there, and I kept expecting to come out some morning and find they’d been chair- napped, as our part of the neighborhood was getting bad. Used to, you could leave your wallet on the porch swing and no one would bother it. These days, you left a cheese grater out, someone would steal the holes.
It was a nice night and there weren’t too many lights on our street, and the sky was clear so you could look up through the limbs of the elm tree at the edge of the yard and see stars. It was too cool for crickets and there wasn’t any traffic on the road out front. The air smelled fresh and a little sweet, like a baby’s breath, and in that moment I was glad we lived there in that house with that yard and that big elm, in what the old books about the South used to call genteel poverty.
After seating ourselves in the lawn chairs, I crossed my legs and dangled a bunny shoe.
Leonard said, “Man, you could have at least put on pants. That robe is a little too peekaboo.”
“My motto,” I said, “is if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”
“What you’re flauntin’ is enough to make a man turn a gun on himself,” Leonard said.
Marvin said, “I got a job proposition to discuss.”
“You’re gonna love this, Hap,” Leonard said.
I looked at Marvin. “Am I?”
“I don’t think you’re going to throw a parade, but here it is,” Marvin said. “My daughter’s daughter, her boyfriend, he’s been beating on her.”
This fit in with the theme Brett and I had been discussing. Maybe I should just send her over there with a shovel. If there was a dwarf, I could send her with a pistol.
I said, “Boyfriend? Your granddaughter? What is she, like twelve?”
“Eighteen.”
“Get out,” I said.
“They grow fast,” he said.
“And she’s a cutie,” Leonard said. “You should see her. A dirty old hetero man like you, you’d love her.”
“You’ve seen her?”
“Photograph,” Leonard said.
I turned to Marvin. “So what exactly is the deal?”
“Well, he whipped up on her and I went over and caught him pulling into his place and he got out and I beat him a little bit with my cane. It wore me out and it didn’t do my cane any good and I scuffed up a good pair of shoes. I had to get a new cane and have the shoes shined. That ain’t a quarter no more. White boys are doing it now, by the way. They like at least five dollars.”
“Inflation,” Leonard said.
