“You’re feeling nostalgic,” Ellen said. “You think he’d take you back?”
I was too tired to fire something back at her. I took a sip of my coffee and read further into the story. When reports began to circulate Friday morning about the mayor’s behavior, he at first denied everything. It wasn’t clear whether he was lying, or simply didn’t remember. But by the afternoon, when presented with all the evidence against him, including the vomit-splattered front hall carpet runner that Gillian Metcalfe had taken down to city hall and left on the front steps, the mayor decided to revise his statement.
“I deeply regret,” he said in a written release, not eager to face any media representatives in person, “my behavior last night at the Swanson House.” It was named in honor of Helen Swanson, a late city councillor who had championed feminist causes. “I had had a particularly stressful session of council and may have had more refreshments afterwards than was prudent. I remain a strong supporter of Swanson House and offer my sincerest apologies. Next time I would hope to bring cookies rather than toss them.”
“Pure Randy,” I said. “Close with a joke. At least he didn’t stick with trying to pretend it didn’t happen. Must have been too many witnesses.”
Ellen had three plates out, put three bacon strips and two fried eggs and a couple slices of toast on two of them, and brought them over to the kitchen table. I sat down and shoved some bacon into my mouth. It was salty and greasy and wonderfully delicious. “Mmmm,” I said.
“This is why you keep me, isn’t it?” she said. “For the breakfasts.”
“Dinners are good, too,” I said.
She reached over the paper, pulled out the lifestyles section. I took a sip of coffee, forkful of egg, bite of bacon, bite of toast. I had a good system going.
“You going to have to do a full day?” Ellen asked.
“I think we can be done a little after noon. The rain delayed everybody a day, but by the end of yesterday we were starting to catch up.” We usually did seven to eight properties between eight in the morning and five in the afternoon and squeezed in the odd landscaping job when one came along. Ellen made more than I did with her job at the college, but we wouldn’t have gotten by without my business. “Why?” I asked. “You got something in mind?”
Ellen shrugged. “I saw you the other day, looking at your paintings.” There were a number of canvases, in various stages of completion, leaned up against the wall in the shed, gathering dust. When I didn’t say anything, she added, “I wondered if you were thinking of getting back into it.”
I shook my head. “Ancient history,” I said. “I was just deciding whether to throw them into the truck and take them to the dump.”
Ellen frowned. “Stop it,” she said.
I used the last of my toast to mop up some egg yolk, popped it into my mouth, and dabbed at the corners of my mouth with a napkin. “Thanks, hon,” I said, kissing the top of her head as I got up. “What are you going to do today?”
“Read,” she said tiredly. “It’s not like I have to read every writer who comes to the festival, but I at least need to know a bit about their work. You run into them at the cocktail parties, you have to be able to bluff your way through. Writers, honestly, a lot of them are really nice, but God they’re needy. They need constant validation.”
“No sign of my associate yet?” I asked as I took my plate to the sink.
“I think you’ll have to wake him,” Ellen said. “I thought the smell of bacon would do it. Tell him I saved him some and can do a couple eggs fast.”
I went upstairs and stopped outside the door to my son’s room. I rapped lightly on the closed door, then opened it about a foot, enough to see that he was under the covers, turned away from the door.
“Hey, Derek, wakey wakey, man,” I said.
“I’m awake,” Derek said.
TWO
Derek kept facing the wall. “I don’t think I can go today,” he said. “I think I’m sick.”
I opened the door wide and stepped into his room. It looked as it always did, as though a bomb had gone off. Heaps of clothes on the floor, half a dozen different pairs of sneakers, none matched up, scattered hither and yon, countless empty software and game boxes, a desk along one wall with not one but three computer monitors, two keypads, half a dozen different computer towers underneath, wires-connected and disconnected-all over the place. He was going to set the house on fire one day.
“What’s wrong?” I said. Derek was legendary for feigning illness to get out of school, but he was less likely to pull that kind of stunt working for his father.
“I just feel off,” he said.
Ellen passed by the door, heard a snippet of conversation, came in. “What’s up?”
“Says he’s sick,” I said.
She moved past me, sat on the edge of Derek’s bed, and tried to get her hand on his forehead, but he turned away so she couldn’t get near him.
“Come on,” she said. “Let me see if you’ve got a fever.”
“I don’t have a fever,” he said, his face still hidden. “Can’t I just feel out of it one day? And besides, it’s fucking Saturday.”
“And you got last Monday and half of Tuesday off because of rain,” I reminded him. “Win some, lose some. We should be done by noon. We’ve just got the Simpsons, the Westlake place, and what’s-her-name, the one with the cat that looks like a furry pig, who gave you the computer.”
Here’s the thing about Derek. He’s a good kid, and I love him more than I can say, but sometimes he can be a royal pain in the ass. Finding creative ways to get out of his obligations is one of his talents. He hates school, and he hasn’t always made the best choices. A few that immediately come to mind: a couple of years back, he and his pal Adam were setting off firecrackers in the dry grass behind the house. It hadn’t rained in a month and one spark could have started a fire that would have burned our place down. I nearly wrung his neck. There was the time he went joyriding with a fifteen-year-old buddy who took out his father’s MG-without permission and without a driver’s license-and wrapped it around a tree. Thank God no one was hurt, except for the MG, of course. And there was the time he and another friend decided to explore the rooftop of the high school, scaling gutters like they were goddamn ninjas or something. Maybe, if all they’d done was hang out there, no one would have noticed, but they’d chosen to do sprints across the roof, then leapt off the edge and over an eight-foot gap to another wing of the school. It was a wonder they hadn’t killed themselves.
“We never even came close,” Derek told me later, as if this constituted a defense.
They were doing so much thumping up there that the night janitor called the police. They got off with a warning, largely because they hadn’t actually vandalized anything. I was furious when the cops brought him home.
“Another fucking stunt like this,” I said, “and you can find some other place to live.”
I regretted it later. I didn’t mean it, that his next fuckup would be his last under our roof. Teenagers, honestly, sometimes they did some stupid shit, but you stood by them no matter what. It was all part of what you’d signed on for.
If Derek really was sick, I didn’t want to drag him out to push a lawn mower through the heat and humidity. But it occurred to me that it might not be an actual illness he was suffering from.
“You hungover?” I asked. It was hardly an outrageous question. Only a month ago I’d found a six-pack of Coors hidden under some old storm windows that were leaned up against the back of the shed.
“No,” he said. Then, abruptly, he threw off the covers, rolled over, and swung out of bed in one swift movement, bumping into his mother. “Fine,” he said. I think Ellen and I were both surprised to see that he was still in jeans and T-shirt. He reached for his work boots, ignoring the sneakers right next to them. “I’ll work. So I’m sick. No big deal.”
Ellen looked at me expectantly, like she was wanted me to pick up on this, ask him what was the matter. But I just shrugged and said, “Good.”
