Hearts In Atlantis

“There,” he said. “Ninety cents. Go buy yourself a martini.”

“I really just guessed, you know,” Bobby said as he swept the coins into his hand and then shoved them into his pocket, where they hung like a weight. The argument that morning with his mother now seemed exquisitely stupid. He was going home with more money than he had come with, and it meant nothing. Nothing. “I’m a good guesser.”

Mr. McQuown relaxed. He wouldn’t have hurt them in any case— he might be a low man but he wasn’t the kind who hurt people; he’d never subject those clever long-fingered hands to the indignity of forming a fist—but Bobby didn’t want to leave him unhappy. He wanted what Mr. McQuown himself would have called an “out.”

“Yeah,” McQuown said. “A good guesser is what you are. Like to try a third guess, Bobby? Riches await.”

“We really have to be going,” Mrs. Gerber said hastily.

“And if I tried again I’d lose,” Bobby said. “Thank you, Mr. McQuown. It was a good game.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get lost, kid.” Mr. McQuown was like all the other midway barkers now, looking farther down the line. Looking for fresh blood.

Going home, Carol and her girlfriends kept looking at him with awe; Sully-John, with a kind of puzzled respect. It made Bobby feel uncomfortable. At one point Rionda turned around and regarded him closely. “You didn’t just guess,” she said.

Bobby looked at her cautiously, withholding comment.

“You had a winkle.”

“What’s a winkle?”

“My dad wasn’t much of a betting man, but every now and then he’d get a hunch about a number. He called it a winkle. Then he’d bet. Once he won fifty dollars. Bought us groceries for a whole month. That’s what happened to you, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Bobby said. “Maybe I had a winkle.”

When he got home, his mom was sitting on the porch glider with her legs folded under her. She had changed into her Saturday pants and was looking moodily out at the street. She waved briefly to Carol’s mom as she drove away; watched as Anita turned into her own driveway and Bobby trudged up the walk. He knew what his mom was thinking: Mrs. Gerber’s husband was in the Navy, but at least she had a husband. Also, Anita Gerber had an Estate Wagon. Liz had shank’s mare, the bus if she had to go a little farther, or a taxi if she needed to go into Bridgeport.

But Bobby didn’t think she was angry at him anymore, and that was good.

“Did you have a nice time at Savin, Bobby?”

“Super time,” he said, and thought: What is it, Mom? You don’t care what kind of time I had at the beach. What’s really on your mind? But he couldn’t tell.

“Good. Listen, kiddo . . . I’m sorry we got into an argument this morning. I hate working on Saturdays.” This last came out almost in a spit.

“It’s okay, Mom.”

She touched his cheek and shook her head. “That fair skin of yours! You’ll never tan, Bobby-O. Not you. Come on in and I’ll put some Baby Oil on that sunburn.”

He followed her inside, took off his shirt, and stood in front of her as she sat on the couch and smeared the fragrant Baby Oil on his back and arms and neck—even on his cheeks. It felt good, and he thought again how much he loved her, how much he loved to be touched by her. He wondered what she would think if she knew he had kissed Carol on the Ferris wheel. Would she smile? Bobby didn’t think she would smile. And if she knew about McQuown and the cards—

“I haven’t seen your pal from upstairs,” she said, recapping the Baby Oil bottle. “I know he’s up there because I can hear the Yankees game on his radio, but wouldn’t you think he’d go out on the porch where it’s cool?”

“I guess he doesn’t feel like it,” Bobby said. “Mom, are you okay?”

She looked at him, startled. “Fine, Bobby.” She smiled and Bobby smiled back. It took an effort, because he didn’t think his mom was fine at all. In fact he was pretty sure she wasn’t.

He just had a winkle.

That night Bobby lay on his back with his heels spread to the corners of the bed, eyes open and looking up at the ceiling. His window was open, too, the curtains drifting back and forth in a breath of a breeze, and from some other open window came the sound of The Platters: “Here, in the afterglow of day, We keep our rendezvous, beneath the blue.” Farther away was the drone of an airplane, the honk of a horn.

Rionda’s dad had called it a winkle, and once he’d hit the daily number for fifty dollars. Bobby had agreed with her—a winkle, sure, I had a winkle—but he couldn’t have picked a lottery number to save his soul. The thing was . . .

The thing was Mr. McQuown knew where the queen ended up every time, and so I knew.

Once Bobby realized that, other things fell into place. Obvious stuff, really, but he’d been having fun, and . . . well . . . you didn’t question what you knew, did you? You might question a winkle—a feeling that came to you right out of the blue—but you didn’t ques-tion knowing.

Except how did he know his mother was taping money into the underwear pages of the Sears catalogue on the top shelf of her closet? How did he even know the catalogue was up there? She’d never told him about it. She’d never told him about the blue pitcher where she put her quarters, either, but of course he had known about that for years, he wasn’t blind even though he had an idea she sometimes thought he was. But the catalogue? The quarters rolled and changed into bills, the bills then taped into the catalogue? There was no way he could know about a thing like that, but as he lay here in his bed, listening while “Earth Angel” replaced “Twi-light Time,” he knew that the catalogue was there. He knew because she knew, and it had crossed the front part of her mind. And on the Ferris wheel he had known Carol wanted him to kiss her again because it had been her first real kiss from a boy and she hadn’t been paying enough attention; it had been over before she was completely aware it was happening. But knowing that wasn’t knowing the future.