Pop has a way of laying down an ultimatum without laying down an ultimatum. I get it; if I keep hooking up with my family, I could be on my way out. That’s the only card he has left to play.
“If you wanna keep favored child status,” Marvin says, “you have to take the good with the bad.”
Marvin had waited five minutes after Pop left before coming in to commiserate.
“What’s the good?”
“Serious? iPhone, car, allowance, dictator dad too busy to follow up on his ‘dictates’ most times . . .”
“How did he know about me going to Sheila’s place?”
“Who knows? He’s caught me sometimes when I thought there was no way. I suspect he may have spies.”
“What?”
“Who knows? He talks to you more than me.” He considers that a second. “Thank God.”
“He talks at me.”
“You know the other thing he’s worried about with you, don’t you?”
“Which other thing?”
“That you’re kick-ass,” he says. “You know, violent.”
“I’m not violent.”
Marvin smiles. “A little aggressive, maybe, but yeah, no bodies lie dormant in your wake.”
“Marvin, ‘bodies lying dormant in my wake’ would be dead. Can’t you just say dead? And where did you get that he thinks I’m violent?”
“Same place I get all my information . . . through the heat grate in my bedroom. Fancy house like this one shouldn’t have built-in walkie-talkie, but it does. If you lay your ear right next to it, you can hear Mom and Dad talking in bed.” His face reddens. “Unfortunately, that’s not all you hear.”
“You listen to your parents . . .”
“Collateral damage,” he says. “I only listen when I think my hide is on the line. For a small fee, I’ll work in your behalf.”
“How’d you get so smart?”
“Ginkgo biloba,” he says. “Hey, everyone thinks guys my age are stumbling into puberty trying to figure out what to do with our di . . . private parts. I know exactly what to do with my private parts; I just don’t know who to do it with.” He smiles wider. “Except for, you know, myself.”
“Way too much information.”
He laughs. “Remember the kitten?”
“The one you had for a week? Yeah, what does that have to do with anything?”
“Remember how Dad said he got it for me so I’d learn responsibility?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s not why he got it.” He deepens his voice, imitating Pop. “Marvin, it’s time you learned to get serious. It is incumbent on you to take care of this little fella. Your room will be his home. His very existence depends on you. Welcome to my world.”
“But he was here a week. He ran away, right?”
“Yeah,” Marvin says. “In a basket on the back of my bike to Jenny Peterson’s house.”
“Why? He was darling.”
“Do you know what a kitten does when he sees something moving under the covers?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “He pounces!”
OMG! “Pop gave you that kitten to . . .”
“. . . keep me from, how should I put this . . . practicing.
I say, “That’s just cruel.”
“I’d wake up in the morning . . .”
“I don’t need to hear this.”
“. . . rise to lock the door . . .”
“Did I say I don’t need to hear this?”
“. . . one move, and whack!” Marvin smiles with the satisfaction of having told a story he thinks is funny while grossing me out.
That’s Pop’s grotesque idea of a sense of humor.
“Anyway that’s not all I think about,” Marvin says. “I think a lot about how to outfox my dad, but mostly that leads to dreams of bulking up in the gym to get his hopes up, then turn out for high school drama. Unfortunately, us drama dudes are memorizing soliloquies when we could be doing push-ups.”
“They aren’t mutually exclusive, you know . . . drama and push-ups.”
Marvin makes a muscle, only the muscle doesn’t make. “Yeah, I know, I know.”
“Listen,” I say. “If you hear through the heat grate that my eviction is imminent, you’ll let me know, right?”
“’Course I will. But you gotta know, you’ve got the very best firewall.”
“Really. What’s that?”
“Mom.”
ChapterEight
Two days after the non-ultimatum ultimatum from Pop, Leah offers me a ride home from book club, so I throw my bike into the back of her pickup and hop in shotgun.
As we’re pulling up to the house, she says, “Hey, listen, I was over at you guys’ practice the other day watching my little sister.”
“You won’t be able to watch her there for long,” I say. “She gets faster by the day.”
“Yeah,” Leah says, “if we were closer in age, she’d be giving me a run, but, that’s not my point. Uh, I don’t know how to say this. . . .”
“You saw me swim.”
Her long, graceful fingers tap the steering wheel. “That’s a generous depiction.”
I laugh. “A better one is ‘not drowning.’”
“Uh-huh. ‘Not drowning’ is easier on land. Annie, you might look good in a Speedo, but trust me, you’re a sunbather. Your shine is on the court.”
“I like to try stuff.”
She glances sideways at me. “I could give you a list of things to try that would give you a longer life-span, but if you’re going to do this, why don’t you let me work with you . . . you know, on your stroke.”
“You’d do that? Isn’t that, like, the very definition of quixotic?”
“Call it community service. Run in and get your suit and we’ll shoot over to the pool. I’ve got about an hour and a half before I meet Tim.”
“That would be so cool, but right now I gotta get in the house and see if Frankie has cut Marvin into small pieces and hidden them like Easter eggs. Could we do it later? Like maybe tomorrow?”
We make a date and Leah waits for me to haul my bike out of the pickup bed, then speeds off.
Standing in the hall entryway, I hear voices, tiptoe to the partially open door of the converted playroom Momma has set up for Frankie, and squat against the wall.
Marvin has squeezed into the tiny rocking chair with his back to me while Frankie lies on his stomach holding a conversation between a plastic bear and a small teddy bear—toys
