He flops onto his bed and opens the notebook he uses for an account book. He works a few moments, figuring his debts and anticipating his wages. The hole is huge. One relief is it hasn’t gotten deeper; the trip to the sports medicine clinic turned out to be a freebie. Whether it was Spellman doing them a good turn or not, he didn’t know, but they were told it was the first opportunity the clinic had to use one of the masks and they would do it gratis as part of a study. Throwing down the pencil, he buries his face in his pillow, wondering if maybe it wouldn’t be better to shitcan the baseball season and squeeze the hours for cash. His last high school baseball season—shit.
Hours later he wakes again and he doesn’t know why, except he is on the alert for something. It is the absence of the sound for which he listens from the other side of sleep that makes him anxious. Rolling out of bed, he sneaks downstairs to check on Deanie.
The bathroom light is on; the door, open. She stands before the mirror in her longjohns. With her left hand, she tries covering the scar and then lets the hand fall as if it just weighed too much to continue to support.
“It’s always gonna be there, isn’t it?” she says. “Like a tattoo. Where everybody can see it.”
He doesn’t answer. She doesn’t look at him. As swiftly as her knees slacken and her fingers close over the edge of the basin and she begins to rise from the balls of her bare feet, he moves, catching her by the hips and hauling her down out of her trajectory into the mirror. Though she struggles briefly, she’s lost both momentum and surprise and there’s no hope of overpowering him.
On the bathroom floor, he holds her tight. Shudders go through her in waves that make her body churn and twist. Still she stays dry-eyed. He rubs his fingertips over her mouth and she gasps and sucks at them, hard, and that’s when she finally cries, silent tears sheeting to the edges of her face and down his neck as she clings to it, and into the hair on his chest.
The bedding still holds a little of her warmth when he tucks her into it. He wants to reassure her that the swelling is diminishing, the bruising growing gaudy as it heals—it won’t always be as bad as it is. He wants to lie and tell her the scar will be unnoticeable, or easily covered with makeup. But a lie won’t make it so, it will only make him a liar.
Exhausted, she falls asleep in his arms. Carefully, he shifts her off him and slides out from between the sheets. He lifts the top quilt and lies back down beside her with most of the bedding between them.
Bouncing unsteadily on her toes, arms reaching ecstatically, Indy seems to be practicing her free throws but she is only excited by the noise and chaos of the Sunday-morning pickup game. Deanie holds her firmly by the waist in the pen of her crossed legs while the baby does her toddler squat thrusts. But Deanie stays somber, clutching Indy with something like resignation. In her eyes, Sam sees the bad night, the nightmare reality in the mirror.
In the afternoon, they babysit while Reuben and Pearl go to the farmhouse to work. Now that Indy is walking—staggering from pillar to post, occasionally working herself into a run with no brakes—there are baby gates in all the doors and at the top and bottom of the two stairwells. Indy wants to climb, so Sam folds the bottom gate of the back stairs and sits on a step within reach of her. He allows her to struggle up a few risers before returning her to the first step to begin again.
“You’re getting a lot done on that essay for Romney,” Deanie chides. “That’s sadistic, letting her get a little ways and dragging her back down.”
“She likes it.”
Slipping, Indy bangs her mouth into the edge of a riser and wails. He picks her up and finds she has bitten her upper lip and it’s swelling. Shushing her, he wraps a chunk of ice in a washrag and holds it to her lip. Almost immediately, she forgets the pain and starts to suck on the damp cloth. Lowering her into her playpen, he goes back to the table to go to work. Muckling onto the netting of the playpen, the baby clambers back to her feet.
“Da!” she yells at him.
When he looks up and grins, she bursts out in a tirade of gibberish that makes him laugh. Frustrated, she bangs her face into the netting and makes it hurt again. She bursts out screaming.
Deanie claps her hands over her ears. “Jesus!”
Scooping up her books, she boots it upstairs. His component system thumps on.
Sam shushes the baby. The baby’s wet herself right through in the course of her tantrum. He offers her the rag with the ice in it and takes her upstairs to change her.
Deanie lies on her back on his bed, holding his basketball on her stomach with one hand, one arm over her eyes, Green on Red’s “Rock‘n’Roll Disease” playing. Her breasts quiver with the movement as she lifts the arm over her eyes to peek at him.
Though Sarah brought over a box of jeans and shirts and stuff—including a pair of high-tops—that she claimed to have culled from her overstuffed closet on orders from her mother so it would practically be a favor if Deanie took them off her hands, almost the only thing Deanie has put to use are the sneakers, which do fit her—better than her old ones, anyway. She helps herself to his socks and T-shirts as they come out of the dryer and it makes him
