“Oh, you’re spoiling them, D.”
“Well, I only got them one, so they’ll have to share. So that’s good, right?” She laughed and started making coffee. “You mind?”
“Of course not, I should have put some on.” Patty went to the cabinet to find Diane’s mug—she favored a heavy cup the size of her head that had been their father’s. Patty heard the predictable spitty sound, and turned around, pounded the blasted coffee maker once; it always stalled after its third drool of coffee.
The girls came back in, heaving bags up on the kitchen table, and, with some prompting from Diane, started to unpack them.
“Where’s Ben?” Diane asked.
“Mmmm,” Patty said, scooping three teaspoons of sugar into Diane’s mug. She motioned to the kids, who’d already slowed their cupboarding of cans and were peering up at various angles of pretend nonchalance.
“He’s in trouble,” Michelle exploded, gleefully. “Again.”
“Tell her about his, you know what,” Debby nudged her sister.
Diane turned to Patty with a grimace, clearly expecting a tale of genital mishap or mutilation.
“Girls, Aunt D got you a sticker book …”
“Go play with it in your room so I can talk to your mother.” Diane always spoke more roughly to the girls than Patty did, it was Diane playing the pretend-gruff persona of Ed Day, who’d rumble and grumble at them with such exaggerated fatigue they knew even as kids that he was mostly teasing. Patty added a beseeching look toward Michelle.
“Oh boy, a sticker book!” Michelle announced with only slightly overdone enthusiasm. Michelle was always happy to be complicit in any grown-up scheme. And once Michelle was pretending she wanted something, Libby was all gritted teeth and grabby hands. Libby was a Christmas baby, which meant she never got the right amount of presents. Patty would hold one extra gift aside—and Happy Birthday to Libby!—but they all knew the truth, Libby got ripped off. Libby rarely felt less than ripped off.
She knew these things about her girls, but she was always forgetting. What was wrong with her, that these bits of her children’s personalities were always surprising her?
“Wanna go to the garage?” Diane asked, patting the cigarettes in her bosom pocket.
“Oh,” was all Patty answered. Diane had quit and returned to smoking at least twice a year every year since she was thirty. Now she was thirty-seven (and she looked much worse than Patty did, the skin on her face diamonded like a snake), and Patty had long learned the best support was just to shut up and make her sit in the garage. Just like their mom had with their dad. Of course, he was dead of lung cancer not long after his fiftieth.
Patty followed her sister, making herself breathe, getting ready to tell Diane the farm was gone, waiting to see if she’d scream about Runner’s reckless spending and her allowing Runner’s reckless spending or if she’d just go quiet, just do that single nod.
“So what’s up with Ben’s you-know-what?” Diane said, settling into her creaky lawn chair, two of the criss- crossed straps broken and hanging toward the floor. She lit a cigarette, immediately waving the smoke away from Patty.
“Oh, it’s not that, it’s not anything weird. I mean weird, but … he dyed his hair black. What does that mean?”
She waited for Diane to cackle at her, but Diane sat silent.
“How’s Ben doing, Patty? In general, how does he seem?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Moody.”
“He’s always been moody. Even when he was a baby he was like a cat. All snuggly one second and then the next, he’d be looking at you like he had no idea who you were.”
It was true, Ben at age two was an astonishing thing. He’d demand love outright, grab at a breast or an arm, but as soon as he had enough affection, and that came quickly, he’d go completely limp, play dead until you let him go. She’d taken him to the doctor, and Ben had sat rigid and tight-lipped, a stoic turtle-necked boy with a disturbing ability to withhold. Even the doctor seemed spooked, proffering a cheap lollipop and telling her to come back in six months if he was the same. He was always the same.
“Well, moody’s not a crime,” Patty said. “Runner was moody.”
“Runner is an asshole, not the same. Ben’s always had that remove to him.”
“Well, he is fifteen,” Patty started, and trailed off. Her eyes caught a jar of old nails on the shelf, a jar she doubted had been moved since their dad’s time. It was labeled
The garage had an oily concrete floor that was even colder than the air. In one corner, an old gallon jug of water had turned to ice, busted its plastic seams. Their breath hung thick with Diane’s cigarette smoke. Still, she was oddly contented here, among all these old tools she could picture in their dad’s hands: rakes with bent tines, axes of every length, shelves packed with jars filled with screws and nails and washers. Even an old metal ice chest, its base speckled with rust, where their dad used to keep his beer cold while he listened to ball games on the radio.
It unnerved her that Diane was saying so little, since Diane liked to offer opinions, even when she didn’t really have any. It unnerved her more that Diane was staying so motionless, hadn’t found a project, something to straighten or rearrange, because Diane was a doer, she never just sat and talked.
“Patty. I got to tell you something I heard. And my first instinct was to not say anything, because of course it’s not true. But you’re a mom, you should know, and … hell, I don’t know, you should just know.”
“OK.”
“Has Ben ever played with the girls in a way that someone might get confused about?”
