He was right, but I admit nothing to nobody.
Momma looked over at Frankie, who was being watched over during the game by Tim, who only thinks Frankie’s pretty cool because he never spends long stretches of time with him. “No Nancy, but you did run into Sheila, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Frankie with us tonight?”
“That okay?”
She looked sideways at Pop, whose eyes were rolled so far back in his head he was staring at his brain. “Yeah, honey, that’s okay.”
“Sorry.”
“I always wanted a big family.”
Pop believes the more often we take Frankie, the more we tie ourselves to Sheila, and to Nancy by default. Hard to argue.
The Howards don’t look like a Momma and Pop. They’re, like, in their early forties and in killer shape. I don’t call them Mom and Dad because that’s what Marvin calls them, and it’s only fair he gets first shot. He’s their real kid, the un-jock. I picked “Momma” because there was this really cool black kid in fourth grade who called our teacher that—until he got suspended for calling our teacher that—and “Pop” covered the bases for his status and left “Dad” open in the unlikely event that mine comes out of his pharmaceutical coma.
Bringing a beastie like Frankie home—even for one night—should be against the law, especially into a home that includes a soft soul like Marvin. Marvin’s already a little displaced by me because along with being a brainiac, he’s artsy. Momma loves Marvin and his talents unconditionally, and maybe so does Pop, but you can tell he’d have rather had a boy he could play catch with, and maybe teach to shoot small forest animals. It’s kind of a cliché that I’m the son he never had. Marvin gets even less attention when Frankie appears ’cause Frankie’s a mean motor-scooter and a poop-grouter who has to be watched. Frankie will go off at the smallest slight or frustration, and as for the poop-grouting—my term—when he gets seriously off-center, he fills any small empty space with poop—his. He pushes it into the cracks in the walls in his bedroom, where regular grout is missing in the bathroom or shower, into cracks in tables or chairs or linoleum. You don’t actually see him do it, you just find it. You smell it and you find it. There’s no other way to say this: if Frankie’s your foster kid, your house smells like shit. At first there’s just a hint. “Do you smell something?” “Does the house smell funny to you?” Pretty soon there’s nothing funny about the way your house smells. The trick is to keep him below that particular level of stress.
ChapterThree
I’m sitting on the curb pulling on my sweats after our title game. Hannah and Mariah have split, Leah and Tim are off with Frankie, buying him yet another sno-cone, Pop has deconstructed my play in maddening detail, and he and Momma are on their way to the car. Across the street Nancy stands beside Walter. I’d fire a hard one-handed pass straight at her smirky face, but I don’t want to embarrass Walter any more than he should be embarrassed already. Look, if you’re blessed with my mother’s particular body design, do not wear tight shorts and body-hugging tank tops. And don’t have an unlit cigarette hanging out of your mouth while clutching a King Kong–sized Big Gulp. Nancy’s not morbidly obese, but she can be morbid.
We came back up through the losers bracket like always—beat that first team like a cheap bass drum on the way—and Nancy didn’t see one game.
She’s pointing her cinnamon bun at me, yapping ninety miles an hour into Walter’s ear, so I know she’s pushing him to come sell her excuses. Walter’s resisting because it’s gotta be a little humiliating to deliver the bilious dreck she wants him to convey, even though he knows I’ll finally give him a pass because he’s the most decent guy she’s ever been with and we both know what a pain it is to talk her out of anything. Bilious dreck—how’s that for advanced vocab? Marvin would be proud. Maybe I can find a place for it in my senior thesis.
Anyway, finally, he shrugs and saunters over.
I say, “Save it, Walter.”
He nods. “Well, talk to me a minute, so it looks like I tried. You’re going home to relative calm. I’m going . . .” He nods back toward Nancy.
I gaze into his earnest eyes. “You poor man. Why do you do it?”
“Your mom’s not so bad,” he says, “once you get used to her.”
“I’ve known Nancy seventeen years. I don’t recommend getting used to her.”
“You act tougher than you are,” he says. “Don’t think I don’t know how the two of you sneak around. If you held her in the kind of disregard you claim, you wouldn’t get so riled when she doesn’t show.”
As much as we do battle half the time, there’s great relief knowing Nancy’s finally with a guy she would never attack physically, and vice versa, and who would never steal her ill-gotten gains or live off her welfare.
Still, not that high a bar.
He says, “You’ve got to cut me some slack sometimes, like right now where I’m making it appear like I’m giving you her bullshit excuse. You could make it appear like you’re buying it. Okay?”
I hear a combination of pleading and warning.
“So if you’re gonna go over and have a conversation with her, just leave out the part where you’re pissed. That’ll make my day a whole lot easier.”
Walter’s as tough as he looks, maybe twenty or twenty-five years older than Nancy. Even though he stays over some nights, they don’t live together because he doesn’t want to mess up her “government wages” as she sarcastically calls what she gets for housing and disability and whatever else she can come up with to rob America’s hardworking taxpayers. He works on motorcycles, washes dishes at a local sports bar, and sometimes works a third job, depending on scheduling. He keeps a one-room apartment five or
