Upstairs, bedsprings shift and the floorboards object to ‘god’s old man’s weight as he gets out of bed. Stepmom speaks, a sleepy question, and is answered tersely but with audible affection before the man goes down the hall to the upstairs bathroom. Stepmom’s bare feet follow him and pass the door to the bathroom and into the baby’s room. The Brat greets her mother with a slurry of meaningless syllables and rakes her plastic keyring noisily against the bars of her crib. Stepmom laughs softly and coos to her.
She slides out from under the quilts. The floorboards between the braided rugs are cold, even through the socks she wears, and the downstairs bathroom is even colder. She turns on the space heater.
Picking up the cake of Dove, she sniffs at it. It’s still a little damp from last night. Her toothbrush leans against the lip of a jelly glass on the shelf above the basin. She tips it out and rinses the glass and uses some mouthwash. Looks into the mirror. Turns her face to look at the left side. The black and blue is mottled with yellow and maroon. The wound bisects the muddied colors like a shiny string. Though puffy and torn at the lobe, her ear is almost normal again, and her left eye is fully open, though heavily shadowed with bruise-coarsened skin so it looks desperately weary. Raising her hand, she covers the left side as much as she can. Her jaw works and she drops the hand and pivots away.
The pipes clank and the water clatters in the tin shower stall of the downstairs bathroom just as Sam reaches the bottom step. He raps urgently on the bathroom door but over the noisy shower, Deanie must not be able to hear him. Upstairs, his father is shaving. Not alone. Pearl is just out of the shower and is drying herself and the baby. The pisser is, Sam thinks resentfully, it’s Saturday, a day Deanie could shower later. He grabs his jacket, unlocks the back door, steps through the shed and onto the porch and leans over the rail to piss into the bare branches of the lilac. Numbed, he can’t get it started right away and he rocks from foot to foot, muttering curses.
Encountering his father as he comes back into the kitchen, he is still adjusting his fly. Reuben raises an eyebrow but refrains from observing that it’s decidedly frigid for pissing out of doors. Sam shrugs and hangs up his jacket. He washes his hands at the sink and reaches for his razor on the windowsill over it.
He is rinsing it off when Deanie drifts into the kitchen, head already scarfed, high-tops gripped in one hand. She drops into a chair and hauls on her sneakers. He fills two mugs of coffee and sits down next to her.
“Can I go to work with you? I won’t get in the way. Maybe I could pump gas for you?”
He looks at his father, who shrugs.
“I’m not going straight to work,” Sam tells her reluctantly. “I’m going to the meetinghouse.”
“For what?”
“Pickup game,” Sam mutters.
Deanie brightens. “Yeah? Can I go?”
“You can’t play,” he points out.
“That’s okay. I’ll watch. Who’s playing?”
“Some of the guys.”
She grins. “Great.”
She’s at his elbow as he unlocks the side door at the meetinghouse. It feels a little like sneaking into the Mill together but he’s embarrassed too, because she’s about to see that the place where he practices on the weekends is a palace next to the improvisation of the Mill. She steps into the pale gold silence of the high-ceilinged hall and her eyes widen.
“My dad built this court years ago. Promoted the money from a summer resident. This guy likes to hack himself when he’s around. Can’t shoot straight but he’s wicked fast. Sometime I’ll show you his house on the lake. My dad’s his caretaker. Anyway, anytime the hall isn’t being used for something else, it’s available. Just wear sneakers and bring a ball. Most Sundays, there’s a regular pickup game. Dad usually makes that one. Pearl’s started playing recently. She’s somebody who can shoot straight.”
“No shit?” Deanie spins the ball on her fingertips, twitches her hips at him, and then dribbles it down the court and hooks it in.
“Hey!” he objects. “You’re benched, twink.”
Passing the ball behind her, she flips him a digit and sticks her tongue out.
“Twink yourself, Godzilla!”
He lopes after her and tries to take it away from her. Giggling, she teases him with the ball but won’t let him get a hand on it. He’s tentative, intensely aware of her unprotected face, but she moves fearlessly. Suddenly he stops dead, raises his palms and backs to the sidelines.
“Oh come on!” she pleads.
Crossing his arms, he shakes his head no.
Her mouth turns down and she spins away and drives the ball down court with a furious rhythm. She shoots around for a while and then she trots back and stands in front of him. The ball pops up off the floor and she rolls it over the edge of her palm and holds it like a globe.
“Chickenshit,” she taunts.
Sam extends his palm and she tips the ball into it. She slumps disconsolately next to the boombox. What is he supposed to do? She can’t play.
The others come horsing in, pausing at the sight of Deanie, and shooting Sam looks that he ignores, and then shrugging her presence off.
Woven through the chatter and clatter of the diner, the speculation among his teammates continues about whether the draft will be revived and how each of them will answer it. Few of them have any deep interest in politics or could find Kuwait or Iraq on an unmarked map but that doesn’t change the obvious: they are all prime cannon fodder. Sam sits there with his ears open, working his way once again through the arguments and thinking of Frankie. Deanie listens closely, once muttering “Bullshit” at some bit of macho posturing.
At the
