'He probably thinks you're still two. That's how I think of Seth. When the boys are down by the river, I imagine he's down there with them. I have to remind myself he's too big for frogs now.'
Klaus thought of me as two. My hair like white feathers, my diaper full of sand. He never imagined that I was grown. I could walk right past him, he might even look at me the way Ray did, and never know it was his own daughter. I shivered, pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my hands.
'Have you ever thought to call him, find him?' I asked.
Ray shook his head. 'I'm sure he hates my guts. I know his mother fed him all kinds of crap about me.'
'I bet he misses you, though,' I said. 'I miss Klaus and I never even met him. He was an artist too. A painter. I imagine he'd be proud of me.'
'He would be,' Ray said. 'Maybe someday you'll meet him.'
'I think about that sometimes. That when I'm an artist, he'll read about me in the paper, and see how I turned out. When I see a middle-aged blond man sometimes, I want to call out, Klaus! And see if he turns his head.' I made the glider creak as I pushed myself slowly.
My mother once told me she chose him because he looked like her, so it was as if she were having her own child. But there was a different story in the red Tibetan notebook with the orange binding dated Venice Beach, 1972.
July 12. Ran into K. at Small World this afternoon. Saw him before he saw me. Thrill at the sight of him, the slight slouch of broad shoulders, paint in his hair. That threadbare shirt, so ancient it is more an idea than a shirt, I wanted him to discover me the same way, so I turned away, browsed an Illuminati chapbook. Knowing how I looked against the light through the window, my hair on fire, my dress barely there. Waiting to stop his heart.
I looked at Ray, gazing out into the rain — and I knew how she felt. I loved his smoke, his smell, his sad hazel eyes. I couldn't have him as a father, but at least we could talk like this out on the porch. He relit his pipe, toked, coughed.
'You might be disappointed,' he said. 'He might be a jerk. Most guys are jerks.'
I rocked myself, knowing it wasn't true. 'You're not.'
'Ask my ex.'
'What you doing out there?' Starr opened the screen door, slammed it behind her. She was wearing a sweater she knitted herself, fuzzy and yellow as a chick. 'Is this a party anybody can come to?'
'I'm going to blast that fucking TV set,' Ray said evenly.
She pulled at the brown tassels of spider plants over her head, plucking the dried leaves and throwing them off the porch, her breasts pushing out of the V neck. 'Look at you, smoking in front of the kids. You always were a bad influence.' But she smiled when she said it, soft and flirting. 'Do me a favor, Ray baby? I'm out of cigs, could you run down to the store and get me a carton?' She flashed him her flat wide smile.
'I need some beer anyway,' he said. 'You want to come, Astrid?'
As if her smile couldn't stretch anymore, it sprang back to the center, then she stretched it again. 'You can go yourself, can't you, big boy? Astrid needs to help me for a minute.' Pluck, pluck, tearing the baby spiders off with the dead leaves.
Ray got his jacket and ducked out under the waterfall of water coming off the corrugated steel porch roof, the jacket pulled up to cover his head.
'You and me need to talk, missy,' Starr said to me as Ray closed the cab door to the truck and started the motor.
Reluctantly, I followed her back into the house, into her bedroom. Starr never talked to the kids. Her room was dark and held the smell of unwashed grown-ups, dense and loamy, a woman and a man. The bed was unmade. A kid's room never smelled like that, no matter how many were sleeping there. I wanted to open a window.
She sat down on the unmade bed and reached for the pack of Benson and Hedges iocs, saw it was empty, threw it away. 'You're having a good time here, aren't you,' she said, peering into the drawer of the bedside table, rummaging inside. 'Making yourself at home? Getting comfortable?'
I traced the flower pattern on her sheets, it was a poppy. My fingers followed the aureole, and then the feelers in the middle. Poppy, the shape of my mother's undoing.
'A little too darn comfortable, I'd say.' She shut the drawer, the little ring of the pull clicking. She tugged the blanket up, so I couldn't trace the flower anymore. 'I may not be some genius, but I'm getting your game. Believe me, it takes one to know one.
'One what?' I couldn't help but be curious about what I was that Starr recognized in herself.
'Going after my man.' She straightened out a cigarette butt from the plaid beanbag ashtray on the nightstand and lit it.
I had to laugh. 'I wasn't.' That was what she saw? Bang bang bang, Lord almighty? 'I didn't.'
'Always hanging around, handling his 'tools' 'What's this for, Uncle Ray?' Playing with his guns? I've seen the two of you. Everybody asleep except the two of you, cuddling up, just as sweet as you please.' She exhaled the stale butt-smoke into the close, humid air.
'He's old,' I said. 'We're not doing anything.'
'He's not that old,' Starr said. 'He's a man, missy. He sees what he sees and he does what he can. I've got to talk fast before he gets back, but I got to tell you, I decided I'm calling Children's Services, so whatever you were thinking, it's all over now, Baby Blue. You're history.'
I stared at her, her furry lashes. She couldn't be that mean, could she? I hadn't done anything. Sure, I loved him, but I couldn't help that. I loved her too, and Davey, all of them. It was unfair. She couldn't be serious.
I started to protest, but she held up her hand, the butt smoldering between her ringers. 'Don't try to argue me out of it. I got a nice thing going here now. Ray's the best man I ever had, treats me nice. Maybe you haven't
