Читать книгу From the Edge of the World - David L. Carter - Страница 7

Summer 2005

It was the smell that woke Victor up. It was a smell as familiar as it was unpleasant; it was the creeping funk of unwashed clothes and hair, mingled with intermittent gusts of stale tobacco breath, and beneath it all, the creeping, overpowering odor of an alcoholic’s sweat. Anyone who has ever shared close quarters with people who do not take care of themselves will know the smell, or one similar to it, and Victor was not only someone who had shared close quarters with the unwashed, he himself had at one time gone weeks without bathing simply because it seemed pointless to do so.

Victor pressed his nose and mouth against his duffel bag, but that was no help. The choice was between breathing or not. Slowly, carefully, he drew a breath through his barely open mouth, queasy with the sense that he was admitting something unwholesome into his lungs. The bus was full. He was stuck with this smelly bum beside him. Forgetting his predicament, he sighed, and as a result gagged.

He knew from experience that a person’s own filthiness is never as annoying to them as it is to those around them, so he coughed to disguise the gag. He lifted his head from the duffel bag and rubbed his face. Through the corner of his eye he glanced at the man that had sat down next to him. A typical drifter, in filthy denim clothes and a dingy white ball cap, out of the back of which a long, uncombed grey and white ponytail hung. This drifter looked to be about middle age, although such types tended to look middle aged as soon as they turn thirty. He had about two weeks’ worth of moth-eaten beard on his face and neck and bright blue eyes set in red streaked whites. His face, though pale within the creases was on the whole toasted from exposure to the elements, and he had the ancient, seam lipped expression of a man with no, or very few, teeth. He was bobbing his head and patting his fingers against the Hefty bag he held in his lap in time to some tinny arena rock that seeped from the headphones in his ears that were attached to a device in the breast pocket of his denim jacket. While Victor watched, the drifter reached into the bag on his lap, felt around in it, and then pulled out a pair of cheap aviator sunglasses, with which he shaded his bloodshot eyes. Good. The old bum would listen to his music and leave him alone. Victor relaxed again with his temple against the warm, grimy window.

He did not sleep, but he dozed. The warmth of the window, the rumbling, humming, and jostling of the bus as it made its way due east on the interstate all served to lull him, despite his seatmate’s aggressive smell, into that smooth, sunlit, pleasant semi-consciousness that was not quite the oblivion of sleep and not the hassle of being awake. This was the rest he sought and sometimes found when he slept in his classes at school; this aimless mental drifting, in which dreams merged with memory and longing to give him, at least in stolen, fleeting moments, some respite from his constant sense of dissatisfaction with life. These semi-sleeps were worth even the embarrassing pools of slobber he tended to leave on his desk or the cradle of his own arms when the bell rang for him to move on to the next period. Here on the bus, as in school, he did not dream, for in dreams one retains one’s identity. He dissolved; he was the bright burning orange sunlight against his closed eyes, he was the slow rise and fall of his own breath, he was the woman in the seat just behind him, complaining to her seatmate about her daughter’s boyfriend, he was the fox in a red white and blue striped sweater on the billboard he noticed as the bus pulled onto the highway from the bus station. He was conscious, but only slightly, and that slightness made all the difference. Nothing mattered when he was in this netherworld.

Nothing mattered until the drifter suddenly burst into song. In accompaniment to the tinny strains of his headphones, he began to hum, then sing, in a croak without any sense of volume or key, some rusty metal ballad.

With every note the drifter’s ragged voice grew more high pitched, cracked and lusty. Victor rolled his closed eyes, then sat up and looked around. The terrible singing was drawing attention from throughout the bus, the two black women across the aisle were staring at him and winked at Victor, and from behind and in front and all around them people were rising in their seats to get a look at whoever was making such a fool of themselves. Victor wanted to crawl into his duffel bag.

The drifter’s singing became louder, until from behind them an empty wadded up Doritos bag arched over the headrest of the seat to land on the garbage bag in the drifter’s lap. The drifter sat bolt upright and crowed “Fuck you!” and then tossed the chip bag over his head in the general direction from which it came. Muttering, he reached into the breast pocket of his denim jacket and the music stopped. Leaving the headphones in his ears, he turned to Victor. “People ain’t got any goddamn manners any more, do they boss?” he said. The alcohol on his breath was as sickly sweet as a rotting magnolia. Victor guessed it was not even eleven o’clock in the morning, and this man was already as drunk as if it were past midnight. If he ignored the man, maybe he would fall asleep and leave Victor in peace. But as drunks will, he took Victor’s silence for shyness, and assumed a kinship. “Ahh, fuck ‘em, right?” he looked at Victor with such a searching, sleazy expression that Victor had a sudden repellent image of the man kissing him. He looked past the man at the two black women across the aisle, who now watched him with expressions of amused sympathy. He hated them. The old drunk followed his glance and leered at the women. They clutched one another’s smooth, brown, gold braceleted forearms and cackled with laughter. Encouraged, the drifter leaned across the aisle to engage them in conversation, but they rolled their eyes at one another and drew in their lips and withdrew into a sotto voce discussion between themselves. The drifter leaned back in his seat and looked at Victor through his cheap sunglasses. “Mornin’ boss,” he said. “Didn’t mean to wake you up there.”

Victor shrugged.

The drifter cracked his knuckles. “Ain’t it a pretty day? Too pretty to sleep! Just look at the country. This here is God’s country,” he indicated the landscaping passing beyond the window Victor had been sleeping against with one grimy finger. “Lookit it. God’s country. I’m a traveling man, boss. Been all over the USA, but I like callin North Carolina home, like the sign says. Where ya headed, boss?”

The drifter waited so patiently for Victor’s answer that Victor had no choice but to reply. “Morehead City,” he said, in a tone one might use to indicate that one was going to a prison.

“Down East!” the drifter crowed. “Down East! Lucky you, boss, lucky you! Whatcha got goin on down east, brother? You got an old lady down there?”

Victor nodded, forgetting himself. In a way it was true, he had an old lady in Morehead City with whom he was going to stay, his grandmother, who he had last seen when he was too young to remember. He knew that his grandmother was not the kind of old lady the bum meant, but that didn’t really matter. Victor was only seventeen, and had never so much as kissed a girl, and he found himself shamefully flattered that this old drunk would assume for a moment that Victor would have a woman.

“Watch out for those island girls,” said the drifter with mock authority.

“Where ya coming from boss?”

Victor was being sent to work in his grandmother’s restaurant in Morehead City because his mother refused to have him mope around their apartment in the capital city of the state all summer. But until he was six years old he and his mother and father had lived on Long Island near his mother’s Italian family, so he mumbled ‘New York’ in a casual way.

“New York City!” the drifter crowed again. “A New Yorker, huh! A New York Yankee. You’re a long way from home, boss. Ain’t on the run, are ya? They always get their man, believe you me,” the drifter nudged Victor with a sharp denim elbow.

It had been weeks? Months? Years? Since Victor had smiled, but to his astonishment a reluctant grin lifted one side of his mouth, even though he had no idea what the man meant. The drifter, missing nothing, began to wheeze with appreciation for his own wit. Victor shook his head, slightly, looking at his feet, like a shy child.

“Just making tracks, huh,” said the drifter. “So am I, kid. So am I,” he held his grubby, thick-fingered hand out to Victor. “I’m Lewis. Everybody calls me Shorty, though. Betcha can’t guess why,” he winked.

Victor shook his hand. Without any forethought, he said “I’m Steve,” in a voice so clear and strong he couldn’t believe it was his. Unsettled by his unplanned lie, he blushed.

But the drifter did not notice. “Nicetameetcha, Steve,” he said, and released Victor’s hand. Victor turned to the window and willed the warmth and color in his face to fade. Steve. Of all the people to claim to be. Steve. Steve had been a methhead in the treatment center that Victor’s mother had sent him to the year before when he refused to leave the apartment for school or for anything. Steve had been at times floridly psychotic, and sometimes violent, but popular with the female patients for his long blonde hair and effortless charm. Victor had shard a room with Steve and had hated him, hated his manic methhead ways, his contempt for the girls that adored him, the unabashed conceit with which he preened in front of the mirror screwed to the door of their room. Steve had made no secret of his disgust for Victor’s lack of hygiene, and to some extent it was an effort to at once impress and thwart Steve that motivated Victor to bathe and groom himself and in general at least appear to be less subhuman, at least for as long as he was in the treatment center. His therapists and his mother were overjoyed, but no one else really noticed. He was discharged with the feeling that he had somehow been bested. So now why was he pretending to be someone he despised and feared?

Shorty was rummaging in the plastic bag in his lap. He pulled out a little round container, opened it, and pulled out a wad of tobacco that he prodded into his cheek. He held the container out to Victor, who shook his head.

“Ya don’t chew?” said Shorty.

“No.”

“Smoke?”

Victor nodded. Though he could go days or even weeks without a cigarette and not even notice, he considered himself a smoker. His mother, who was an intensive care nurse until her diabetes and weight gain became so disabling that she had to take a desk job, smoked two packs a day. Victor’s father had smoked too, until Victor was eight years old. Victor recalled the day that his father quit smoking as the day he realized that his parents could only barely tolerate one another’s company.

“A smart kid like you?” said Shorty. “Aww, that’s too bad. You know you’ll stunt your growth,” he emitted a series of phlegmy cackles and Victor thought he’d better smile. Victor was six feet tall and with his lack of muscle and long thin neck seemed much taller.

“I been smoking since I was 8 year old,” said Shorty. “My daddy give me my first carton for my tenth birthday. Lucky Strikes. Back then we didn’t think nothing of it. I grew up in Johnston County, tobacco all over the damn place, I picked it, cured it, drove it to market, smoked it, chewed it, spat it, did everything but fuck it from the time I was in diapers. Too late to do anything about it now, I got bigger problems on my back as I’m sure ya noticed. But, that’s the way it goes. You don’t drink do ya, Steve?”

It took a moment before Victor remembered he was Steve. Did he drink? He would if he knew how to get hold of any alcohol. His father drank. He could remember his parent’s arguing once over the fact that Victor’s father was in the habit of offering Victor the head of the beers he would treat himself to after mowing the lawn or completing some other task about the house on the weekend. “A little,” he said. Victor was quite sure he would drink all the time if he had friends he could drink with.

“I’m a alcoholic,” said Shorty. Victor wished he would lower his voice. “It’s a disease. It’s a allergy. There is no cure, only abstinence,” he settled himself back in his seat with an air of having performed some duty. His voice became singsong. “But I ain’t never touched nothing too ghetto,” he said. “Stay away from those ghetto drugs, Steve,” he said. “A little weed… that’s nothing. God put it in the ground for a reason. Takes the edge of things. But all that crack, that meth, that her-on…” he looked over his cheap sunglasses at Victor like a schoolmarm. “That’s for the scum of the earth, ya hear me? I hate to see a nice young white boy get mixed up in all that. Before you know it he’s running around with a rag on his head and his britches hanging down off his ass like … you know what. God I hate to see that. You know what I mean, Steve?”

Victor gave a wary glance past the drifter to the two black women across the aisle, mortified that they might be overhearing the drifter and assume that he was like ‘Shorty,’ but if they heard ‘Shorty’s’ rant it didn’t seem to bother them. Still, Victor sat back in his seat as far as he could. He wished that the drifter would put his earphones back on and start singing. As it was he was liable to say anything.

Shorty indicated Victor’s duffel bag. “That’s a coast guard sea bag, ain’t it!” he said.

Victor nodded, relieved. “It was my dad’s,” he said.

“Aww,” murmured Shorty. “He still with the guard?”

“He’s dead,” said Victor, without a twinge. His father ran an auto insurance company in Conway, South Carolina, and had just fathered a daughter with his new wife, who was seventeen years his junior and who dotted the I in Victor with a heart in the birthday card she had sent Victor signing both her name and his father’s.

“Aww,” the drifter murmured his sympathy. He looked at Victor as if to invite further details, but Victor didn’t know what to say. He didn’t really wish his father dead. He just didn’t want to talk about him. The drifter patted Victor’s forearm.

“That’s too bad. It’s a shame to lose your old man. My old man died six years ago, age sixty-six, I remember it like it was yesterday. He had the big C, had it for years, but it finally took him out. He was a fighter though, my god in heaven you better believe. A holy fucking terror even when he was on his damn deathbed, you just ask one of them nurses aids that had to wash him. He was as big a bastard as you’d ever want to meet sometimes, treated my mama like a dog, but he was my daddy and I loved and respected him as such. You can’t hold nothing against anybody when they’re gone, can ya Steve. Seems like when they’re gone, they just seem better and better. You want em back even if it means everything you couldn’t stand is gonna come right on back with em. I’d give my left nut just to have my daddy clip his toenails on the coffee table one more time. Know what I mean, Steve?”

Victor hazarded a glance at Shorty, who was drumming his fingers lightly on his garbage bag. Behind the cheap sunglasses the drifter’s expression was strangely thoughtful. “But now you take someone you’re really crazy about… say your ex-wife… and you can get tired of ‘em and for as long as they’re livin’ you’ll move heaven and earth just to keep away from ‘em cause they get on your ever lovin’ nerves so G-D bad, excuse my language. It’s a funny thing in this world, it really is. I could go weeks, months, years, without giving my daddy a second thought, ‘fore he got real bad off. I couldn’t stand the sight of him, tell you the truth… but it’s something about when people are getting ready to leave this world… I swear something comes over em, something changes. It’s like they’re little babies again, I reckon, they just get easier to love. And just when you start to want em around again, they’re gone…” the drifter’s voice narrowed and ceased, like the stream from a faucet being turned off. He sat silent for a moment, and his fingers stilled from their soft drumming. He drew in his lips and then blew them out again with a sputtering, equine exhalation. “Oh, me,” he said. Then, like a sky suddenly swept free of clouds, his countenance brightened. He nudged Victor with his bony elbow, “Listen at me. Sound like a preacher.”

Victor shook his head. The drifter’s thin shoulders underneath the denim jacket shook and his phlegmy laugh sizzled out of him like hot grease. “I just like to run my mouth. I talk to everybody. I’d talk to the devil,” he said jauntily.

And yet for the next half hour or so they rode on together in an easy silence. The bus jostled over the rough old highway. Their bags - Victors canvas, Shorty’s garbage - bounced in their laps. Victor gazed out the window, grateful for the lull in this treacherous conversation. For no reason the he could discern, he had denied his name and his father. So now he was Steve. He searched his mind for some motive for this disguise. There was none. He could call himself Steve, he could say that he had no father, but the facts remained, his name was Victor, and he not only had a father, but in addition to that a four-year-old step-brother as well as an infant half-sister whom he had never seen and was not likely to ever see. And he was traveling, not to his ‘old lady’, but to a literal old lady whom, as far as he knew, was as likely to be as impossible to please as his mother. The likelihood of this was in fact high, given the fact that the old lady and his mother seemed to like one another even though their family ties to one another had ended with Victor’s parents’ divorce. Victor’s mother talked to this North Carolina grandmother every few weeks on the phone, but she never spoke to her own mother up in Long Island. Victor didn’t even know if his mother’s parents were even still alive. Victor remembered his mother’s family from his preschool years in New York, but only vaguely. What he remembered most vividly was their volume, they shouted, they laughed, they were extravagant in their expressions, their outrageous claims, like monkeys fighting over a clutch of bananas. And they were chubby, his mother’s parents, chubby and swarthy and soft bodied, like loaves of dark bread. He remembered that their house, like those of all his countless aunts and uncles and cousins, was always full of fights and food and children running in and out. Why wasn’t his mother sending him to them?

The bus slowed. The sunlight and the yards they passed and the storefronts and the people ambling down the sidewalks were all plunged into oblivion as the bus pulled in underneath the awning of a station. The interior of the bus was suddenly cool and dim. People began rustling in their seats. Shorty turned to Victor and once again held out his damp, hot hand. This time Victor shook it without a wince. “Goldsboro, Steve,” the drifter said. “Welcome to Goldsboro, North Carolina. Home of Pope Air Force Base and my ex-wife Donna. I gotta get on the bus to Norfolk, if it ever shows up. I got a buddy up in Norfolk’s got some work for me. If the bus ever gets here,” he grinned. Despite the smell of his breath the grin was winsome, like that of a scrappy little boy, with all of its missing teeth. Take care, Steve. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, hee, hee, hee. Listen, Steve…” he leaned forward. “…Can ya do me a little favor?”

There was a hiss from the front of the bus as the doors opened. Several people stood, stretched, reached up into the compartments above their seats for their belongings, and got off the bus. The drifter, with his plastic bag in his lap, lingered. He gazed with shameless supplication through his cheap sunglasses at Victor.

“I ain’t had a bite to eat since yesterdy,” he said. “Think you could let me hold a couple bucks till… till we meet again?” he clasped Victor’s shoulder and palpated it. “I’d be much obliged, boss. It’d help me out a lot…” His hand rested on Victor’s shoulder, a gentle, warm, but unmistakable pressure.

For the first time since… since when? Since he was a child, Victor felt tears spring to his eyes. Was this what all the friendliness had led up to? He could not look at the drifter, whose hand still gripped his shoulder. When he had left the treatment center, he’d become so aloof from the months of irritability and not bathing and then the total remove from outside society that he’d wandered the halls of his school like a ghost, recognizing but not being recognized by his peers with whom he had at times been friendly, if not close. The only people who ever spoke to him then, aside from teachers and the guidance counselor, had been those clean cut, smiling types of either sex who would introduce themselves to him as he sat by himself in the cafeteria, or as he moped around the edge of the woods during his free period, or as he drifted off into one of his paradisiacal dozes during a study hall, and who invariably ended by inviting him to come along with them to their church, or their bible study. He felt now as he felt then, like a pawn. The drifter’s hand slipped off his shoulder. The old man stood, then, looking sheepish. He shrugged.

“Don’t worry about it,” Shorty said amiably. “I’ll figure something out. I always do. You take care, Steve.”

Victor had quite forgotten that he was Steve. Somehow, being someone else took the sting out of being touched on. “Hold on,” he said, and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a five-dollar bill and pressed it into the drifter’s hand.

The drifter’s grin was like that of a child who had just reached under his pillow and found a bill left by the tooth fairy. Clutching his plastic bag to his torso with one arm, he grabbed Victor in the other and pulled him to, pressing his bristly cheek against Victors smooth one and ended, incredibly, with a wet kiss to Victor’s temple. “God bless, you, kid. It’ll come back to you. Trust and believe on it, Steve,”

Victor felt inexplicably, uncomfortably warm. He sat back down in his heat. “See ya,” he mumbled, and he looked out the window as the drifter shuffled down the aisle and off the bus. After a few minutes the bus was moving again, due east toward the edge of the continent, and Victor closed his eyes against the bright sun, but he could not get back to the peaceful doze out of which the drifter had roused him with his terrible but then bearable odor.

Outside the cool dark cocoon of the bus the sun was bright and the air was moist and hot, and there was a faint briny tinct to the air which reminded him that he was in a new atmosphere. While the bus hissed and groaned behind him, he set his duffel bag on the concrete and stretched up his arms and brought his hands together and cracked his knuckles, squinting up at the cloudless blue sky. It seemed that no one was there to meet him, and he stood aimlessly in the parking lot until the driver of his bus disembarked and passed him on his way into the depot. Victor picked up his duffel bag and followed, and once his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the interior, he saw two women, the older one small and rather dry looking with closely cut and curled gray hair, dressed in lavender sweatpants and an untucked blouse. With her was a much younger woman, a girl really, short and thickset, her hair was a fountain of dark yet sun-streaked unkempt curls; she was dressed in a man’s white V-neck t-shirt and a long loose skirt with embroidery at the seam. As soon as the women saw him they rose from their seats near the glass door and approached him, the older woman holding out her arms, and the younger girl smiling slightly and taking him in through the huge lenses of red plastic framed glasses which, along with her round, cheeky face and explosion of curls made her look like a bewigged owl.

“Victor?” the old woman said. Her voice was nasal. He looked down at her, struck by how tiny she was, the top of her crest of pale thin waves of hair came up only to his shoulders. She reached up to clasp her arms around his neck and he had to bend his knees to accept her embrace. “Well, my Lord honey…” she said as she quickly let go to peer up at him through her sun tinted bifocals. “I never would have recognized you. Last time I saw you you didn’t come up to here on me, and now look at you. Tall as a stork. It sure is good to see you,” she reached forward and took his right hand and squeezed it. “My Lord,” she said again, softer, as if she were talking to some invisible companion of her own age.

The old lady dropped his hand and reached behind herself to push forward the younger girl who allowed this, lifting one eyebrow. “You’ve never even seen your cousin Shelby,” the old lady shook her head in wonderment. “First cousins, and you’ve never even laid eyes on each other. Now that is a shame. That’s the world we live in today, though. Shelby, help Victor with that sea bag.”

The girl grinned at Victor and reached for the strap of his duffel bag, but he bent to grab it before she could. “That’s okay,” he said. “It’s not heavy. It’s just clothes and stuff. I’ve got it,” he hoisted the strap over his shoulder and felt as if he’d averted some obscure danger. Shelby shrugged, still smiling inscrutably, and stepped out of his way.

The old woman circled him like a moth around a light bulb. “Well, it looks mighty heavy to me. You sure you don’t want any help? Well, I guess you know what you’re doing. You don’t have any more bags on that bus do you? Shelby, ain’t you going to say hello to your cousin?”

“Hello to your cousin,” said Shelby. Her voice was surprisingly low and smooth, like a woman on the radio, with no trace of the nasal accent of their grandmother. Victor nodded at her. Behind the glasses her eyes were large and strikingly pretty, a dark, greenish hazel that seemed to hold within it some of the gold of a sunrise. The color of her skin was quite dark, the shade of copper, but with a rosy undertone. Her jaw was soft but square under a wide mouth, and there was a slight gap between her two top front teeth. She caught him staring and her smile contracted a bit, and she turned away. She was not exactly fat, but her boxy shape, unmitigated by her loose clothing, seemed more masculine that his own, and she moved like a tugboat as she led them out of the depot to the front parking lot where the car was waiting.

It was an old LTD, dark blue and dingy with road dust. His father, Victor remembered, was an aficionado of sports cars, and would hate to own such a commonplace vehicle.

“You let Victor sit in front, now, Shelby,” the Grandmother said as she let herself into the driver’s seat.

“I was going to, Gum,” snapped Shelby.

Gum? Victor looked at the old woman beside him, who looked as diminutive as a doll with her hands on the steering wheel. Was he supposed to call this person Gum? He was sure he could not. He’d always wondered why the cards he’d received over the years at Christmastime and on his birthday, were signed with that silly, baby name, rather that Grandma or Nana, and now he saw it was because of Shelby. He looked up into the rearview mirror. Every slight move Shelby made was accompanied by the faint clatter and jingle of thin silver bracelets on her arms. Even though she was his cousin, he’d hoped against hope that she’d be pretty. She wasn’t, but there was something about her that made him want to stare, as if he couldn’t take enough of her in to remember her by. She wore no make-up, at least not then, and her features were not so much plain as they were strange; very full lips, a tiny blunt nose, wide eyes, the light, indeterminate color of which were so striking against her rose-copper complexion, the boxy, curveless body.

“How is it that Victor’s so tall, Gum?” Shelby said from the back seat.

The grandmother kept her eyes on the road as if it might drop off into oblivion at any moment. “From ya’lls granddaddy, I reckon.”

“Daddy’s tall,” Shelby says. “But I think Victor’s taller. But Uncle Eddie’s short. Is your mother tall, Victor?”

Victor has never thought about it. “No,” he says after a moment. “She’s shorter than my father. But I think her brothers are all tall. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t remember. They all live in New York.”

There is a long silence. Shelby leaned back against the back seat. “Genetics fascinate me. I read that some of the most crucial traits skip a generation. So there’s a sense in which we all get more from our grandparent’s than from our birth parents. God forbid!” she says and poked the back of the driver’s seat headrest with her index finger.

“Quit that,” the old lady said mildly.

The house was smaller than he expected, one level, a modest structure of brick and cream-colored aluminum siding, with an open carport tacked onto its left side. It looked, with a few minor differences, exactly like all the other houses on the street. Several thick spreading trees rose out of the square flat front lawn, and a walkway branched off of the driveway to lead to three steps and a place to stand before the front door. Victor realized he had all along unquestioningly expected a house standing on stilts that lifted it over the edge of the ocean, and he felt a vague disappointment. The only hint that there was water anywhere nearby was in the sharp tang of the air, and for all he knew the ocean was miles away, and might as well not be there at all for all the good it would do him.

When he stepped inside the house, he shivered, as the air conditioner was turned up high, and all the curtains in the front room were drawn. When his eyes adjusted he could see, by the inconstant light of a mute television set, a tiny living room inhabited by a sofa and easy chair, both upholstered in a blue and green tartan pattern, a low, round wooden coffee table, and walls peppered with framed photographs, decorative shelving, and one large print over the sofa of a woman in eighteenth century dress playing a harpsichord. A hallway led from the right side of this room to the rest of the house, except for the kitchen, which could be entered through a wide space in the wall just before the hallway. Into this space a shadow, then a more substantial figure appeared, it was a man, dressed in what looked like pajama bottoms underneath a plaid bathrobe, holding what looked like a half-sized soda can.

“Hey, Daddy,” said Shelby.

“Hey.” the man said in a faint, somewhat raspy voice. He looked at Victor and lifted his free hand in greeting, and his robe gaped open to reveal the shadow of ribs and one nipple surrounded by sparse, light hair. The man’s face was pale and his high forehead was wrinkled. He had very short light colored hair and a receding hairline, a square jaw and a stringy neck. Even in the dim light Victor could see that his eyes were the same bright light blue as the Grandmother’s, and like hers, lightly shadowed underneath.

“You must be Victor,” the man said. He stepped forward and held out a hand. Victor shook it, and was struck by how limp and damp and warm the man’s hand felt. “I’m your Uncle Buzz. I reckon you figured that out already.”

Victor nodded.

Uncle Buzz looked at the can in his hand as if he’d forgotten all about it. “This here’s my lunch,” he said. “I didn’t know ya’ll would be back so soon. I would’ve got dressed,” he took a sip from the small can, and grimaced. “It ain’t too bad. It’s all I can keep down, lately.”

The grandmother laid her purse on the arm of the sofa. “Did Dr. Patel call, William?”

It took Victor a moment to realize she was speaking to Uncle Buzz, who shook his head.

“I’ll call him after lunch,” the man in the bathrobe said as the old lady harrumphed. “Let’s get Victor settled,” she said, “and then we’ll have something to eat. Victor, honey, I don’t know how much your mama told you, but your uncle’s going for some physical therapy over in Beaufort when a space opens up for him this weekend, so for a couple of nights, I’m afraid you’ll have to bunk out here in the living room, if that’s all right. The couch pulls out, so you ought to be pretty comfortable. I know it ain’t too private, but…” she holds out her hands in a helpless gesture. “I wish we had more room, but we don’t.”

“That’s all right,” said Victor.

“I suppose for right now you can just lay your stuff out over by the window...” she indicated an open space of floor underneath the blinded east window, “And then when William gets settled you can move everything into his room.”

Victor nodded and put one foot on top of the other. He could sense everyone looking at him.

Shelby walked over to her father and butted her head gently against his frail shoulder. “I can’t wait to come see you, Daddy,” she said. Uncle Buzz nodded and lifted his free arm, as if with enormous effort, to drape heavily across his daughter’s shoulders. She turned to Victor. “He gets his own private room, and they have hot tubs and a massage therapist. It’s not a rest home. It’s more like a damn health spa.”

“Nice,” said Victor, uncertainly.

“Well, I don’t know why we’re all standing around,” the grandmother said after a brief silence. “William, let Shelby show Victor your room before you go back in there. Shelby, go on and show Victor the rest of the house, and I’ll get some lunch ready. I’m just going to have a tomato sandwich, it’s too hot for anything else. Victor, what do you want? I’ve got peanut butter, I can grill some cheese…”

For some reason, Victor wanted one of the supplemental milkshakes that Uncle Buzz was drinking, the same sort of thing they made all the anorexic and bulimic girls in the treatment center drink. His stomach was so tense that he could think of nothing less appealing than a peanut butter sandwich. “Peanut butter’s O.K,” he said. He picked up his duffel bag and followed Shelby down the hall. The first door, on the right, was the bathroom, small and dark and clean smelling. The next door, to the left, was the door to Uncle Buzz’s room, the room that Victor would soon inhabit. He peeked in for a moment and saw an unmade twin bed, a window overlooking the front yard, and, opposite the bed, a tall dresser. The doorway down the hall a bit and to the left was shut tight. “That’s the master bedroom,” said Shelby. “The old lady doesn’t like anybody going in there, so we won’t go in. There’s not much to see, anyway. It’s the biggest room in the house, though. There are a couple of pictures of you when you were little on the wall. They look like school pictures. I guess your mom must have sent them.”

At the end of the hallway there was another door shut tight. There was a laminated magazine picture of James Dean tacked to it and a knotted string with tiny copper bells attached hanging from the doorknob. “You want to see my room?”

“Sure.”

She opened the door and immediately the intermingled scents of candle wax, incense, and menthol cigarette smoke wafted out. She stepped inside and Victor followed, and the musky air made him sneeze three times in a row. The walls and ceiling were painted a smoky shade of lavender, the bed in its antique metal frame was heaped with stuffed animals and pillows of all shapes, colors, and sizes, and thick hot pink velvet curtains were drawn across the two sets of windows. Pictures framed or simply torn from magazines were pinned or hung haphazardly on every wall, and there was a vanity with an enormous round mirror and a tiny television atop a French provincial dresser. A wooden framed rocking chair upholstered in an incongruous brown sat underneath one window, its arms and back draped with clothing. Shelby put her hands on her hips and looked questioningly at Victor.

Victor had never been in a room so feminine or so thoroughly fragranced, and yet he was overcome by an eerie feeling of familiarity. It was as if not so much the room itself, but some invisible presence within it, was welcoming him back to a place he couldn’t quite remember. He smiled at Shelby. “It’s cool,” he said.

She snorted. “Gum hates it. She says it looks like a whorehouse in here. As if she has any idea what a whorehouse looks like.”

Suddenly Shelby’s expression became stern. “I’m glad you like it. But please don’t ever come in here without my permission. If you do, I’ll be pissed, and I have my ways of knowing if my space has been invaded. I don’t want to be a bitch, but I want to make it clear that I can’t live in a house with someone who doesn’t respect my boundaries. Everyone has to have their own space, and this is mine, for now. I know we don’t really know each other, but we are cousins, and I’m glad you’re here, believe it or not, because I’ve always wondered what you’re like, but I don’t want you- or anyone- in my room without my permission. Okay?”

“Okay,” as Shelby spoke he felt an initial rush of fury, as if he’d been offered something that was suddenly, tauntingly snatched away, but almost as instantly he wanted to assure her that he could be trusted. “I need my own space, too.”

Shelby smiled. “You’ll like Daddy’s room. It’s good,” she said obscurely. “Do you smoke?”

Victor hoped she meant tobacco. “Yes.”

“Menthol?”

“If that’s what you have.”

She held out a pack. “Take the whole thing. Gum gets them wholesale for the bar at the restaurant. I never have to buy my own,” she walked over to her vanity table and picked up an ashtray. They settled themselves on the carpet, Shelby leaning against the side of her bed, and Victor leaning against the closet door. For the first time Victor asked a question. “So, are you my only cousin?”

Shelby rolled her eyes. “There’s no telling, with this family.” l

Uncle Buzz did not join them for lunch, having enjoyed his nutritional supplement earlier he retired to his room, presumably to sleep away the sunny afternoon. It struck Victor as odd, and rather comforting, that the women in the house behaved so casually about his own sudden arrival as well as the uncle’s illness and immanent departure. From what Victor’s mother had told him over the past few days about this side of his family, it appeared that Uncle Buzz was or at least always had been, until he got sick, a very heavy drinker, and his drinking was to blame for his disease. Victor’s mother had mentioned all this in the context of explaining that his uncle and cousin lived with his grandmother, and not the other way around. “Buzz has never been able to take care of himself,” she’d said. “He went into the military right out of high school, just like your father, but he got kicked out as soon as he met poor Shelby’s mother.” ‘Poor Shelby’s mother’ was the only way Victor’s mother ever referred to Shelby’s mother, and she would only say that she was ‘unfit,’ but not why. She must be a monster, Victor figured, given that his mother seemed to consider Shelby’s alcoholic and apparently unemployed father to be more fit than this absent, enigmatic female figure.

He looked across the round kitchen table at his cousin Shelby and tried to conjure up the image of the monster that gave birth to her. Shelby didn’t on the surface resemble her father, but if one really looked one could see that they shared the same square, pointed chin and they both had slim, delicate looking fingers. It was hard for Victor to imagine Shelby having any other mother besides their grandmother, who, having eaten half of her own tomato sandwich was now standing by the sink smoking a cigarette and peering at the label on one of Uncle Buzz’s cans of nutritional supplement.

Shelby seemed to detect Victor’s scrutiny of her, and looked up. He blushed and looked down at his plate, which, with its half-eaten sandwich lying in nervous pieces upon it, seemed horribly unappreciated. Shelby’s plate was clean. She pushed back her seat, stood, and the bracelets on her arms jingled as she smoothed back her wild mass of hair and twisted it into a loose, but steadfast knot at the nape of her neck. “I’m going to my room to write in my journal,” she said pointedly, and took her plate to the sink. “I’ll be out when it’s time to go to work,” she spoke to their grandmother, but it was clear to Victor that he was the one being told to keep his distance for a while.

Victor left the house with the vague notion of figuring out if it would be possible to find, and walk to, the beach, but as soon as he stepped out of the cool darkness of his grandmother’s house onto the white hot concrete stoop that served as the front porch, it was obvious to him that to walk far would be to risk not only getting lost, but getting sick. The sky above was clear and pale, and the sunlight bore down on the crown of his head like a heavy hand. He didn’t want to go back inside, though, so he looked to the right and to the left, and, finding that there were children playing in a yard a few houses to the right, he headed to the left. Through the soles of his sneakers he could feel the heat of the road’s surface, and he hadn’t walked a block before all of his clothes were damp with sweat. There was a relentlessness to the heat here that he couldn’t recall ever experiencing before, for one thing, it seemed that all the trees here were thick and short and scrubby, and there were only a few of them scattered among the yards along the street, whereas back in the city, particularly in the suburbs near his apartment, there were tall cool pines everywhere.

He came to a side street and looked up at the street sign, noticing for the first time that the street his grandmother’s house was on was called Blackbeard Lane. This brought to mind a distant and long forgotten memory that made him pause in his aimless tracks, of a morning long ago; it must have been a weekend morning, because his father was never around on weekdays, back when they lived in New York. He could not have been more than four or so, and he was complaining to his father, as they drove somewhere on some errand, that he did not like their last name, Flowers, because, evidently, some other child had taunted him on account of it. Other children, he had realized, had last names that were words in their own right, names with complicated sounds that meant nothing other than to indicate the family that shared it. But his last name, he was now abashedly aware, meant something besides his family, it meant flowers, and to his mind this had an embarrassingly girlish connotation. He had suggested, riding in the car alongside his father, that they change their name to something better.

“Better!” his father had bellowed, in exaggerated indignation. “You want a name that’s better? Well, I’ll tell you boy, there is no finer name than that of Flowers! There have been Flowers’ in this country since before it was a country! I’ll have you know that the very first Flowers, your great, great, a million times over great grandpappy, sailed with Blackbeard the Pirate!”

Victor wiped his brow, remembering. That had been his father’s way, and still was, for all he knew, of dealing with troubles, he made light of them masterfully, with his easy manner, and compelled you to take lightly whatever it was that distressed you. Only his mother, Victor thought, could withstand his father’s insistent levity, and she did so, he knew, with a consistency that was just as impressive to behold. Victor stood now on the corner of Blackbeard Lane and some other street, and wondered if and how his parents ever got along with one another.

He turned right, down the street that branched off of Blackbeard Lane, a long dead end called Shackleford Drive. One yard down on the left a shirtless old man wearing loose yellow shorts and a dingy fisherman’s cap on his head with a bandage over one eye was watering his front lawn with a hose. The man lifted his hand to Victor, and Victor lifted his in return, caught off-guard. He looked down to the dead end of the street and knew he would have to pass the old man again in order to get back home. He foresaw the ordeal with disproportionate dread. The simple gesture of friendliness seemed too strenuous to repeat; yet it could not be escaped. He might even be obliged to speak, if the old man spoke to him. Victor was suddenly seized with a longing so sudden and fierce that it nearly doubled him over and caused his heart to race, for the regimented anonymity of his high school, for the torpid misery of his life with his mother, for the clinical scrutiny of the treatment center, for all those suddenly inaccessible areas of his life where it was not expected or required of him to be civil. When he got to the dead end of Shackleford Drive and doubled back, the old man in the yellow shorts and the fisherman’s cap had gone inside, or had taken his hose to the backyard. Along with the sensation of relief, the thought of suicide came to Victor and coursed through his consciousness like a balm. The relief it brought him was in exact proportion to the sense of abandonment he felt. For the first time he realized he would not shrink from death, if his life continued on its pointless course inward. It was with this secret strength that he returned to the house where he was a stranger, yet family.

Close to the corner of the house, where the fence began, there was a gate. Victor lifted the latch and let himself into the backyard. A medium sized dog dashed out from the darkness under the back porch and gave voice to such aggressive barks that Victor felt his heart in his throat. Before he could get the gate back open the dog stopped short in front of him and began to sniff his feet, legs, and behind. Once he realized he was not going to be bitten, Victor offered his hand again to be sniffed, and at the same time squatted to come face to face with the dog. The smell of the animal was strong and rank, and that along with the matted state of the fur around her belly and tail suggested that if the dog had ever been bathed, it hadn’t been recently. And yet while the smell was unpleasant, it was not overpoweringly so. The dog’s breath was hot and meaty. “Phew,” whispered Victor, “You’re a smelly old mutt, aren’t you? But you’re nice,” the dog blinked and panted, as indifferent to Victor’s remarks as a queen to the mutterings of a peasant. But his attention seemed to please her, or at least interest her. She circled him, snuffling, paying particular attention to his hindquarters until finally Victor had to laugh and push her away. Though there was no one but the two of them around, it was embarrassing, to have one’s ass investigated by a dog in broad daylight. Still squatting, Victor reached to pat the dog’s head, which was warm and hard, then he ran his palm along the length of her body. Her coat was so invitingly warm with the stored heat of the sun that despite the heat of the day, Victor let his hand, then his whole forearm, rest against her. A lump, then a tickling sensation, arose in his throat. He let his arm drop. He had not had such prolonged physical contact with a living being in years.

He stood, but the dog, it seemed, was not prepared to relinquish intimacy. As soon as he rose she lay down on her side and presented her mottled pink and black, obscenely furless and nippled underside to Victor, and he regarded it for a moment with an intense, if fleeting distaste. The dog’s four paws motioned in the air like beckoning fingers and she whined encouragingly. Clearly, she expected him to rub her belly. This old dog cared for nothing but that he should make contact with that area of herself that she could not reach. Kneeling, Victor tentatively put his hand to her belly, which was surprisingly cool. He rubbed in circles until the flesh was as warm as that of his own hand, and the dog wriggled in ecstasy. Victor couldn’t help laughing. After a minute he stood, groaning, and the dog, after a few more moments, clambered to her feet and trotted away in the direction of the doghouse, her mission accomplished. Victor let himself out through the gate and stood for a while in the driveway, feeling better than he had in many years, though the feeling lasted only a moment.

Once he got inside the house, he found that his grandmother and Shelby were waiting for him in the kitchen. “Honey, it’s ten till,” his grandmother said, with an edge to her voice, “We’ve got to get going.”

Victor didn’t even know what hour it was ten till, but he realized he’d forgotten completely that he was there mainly to work at the seafood restaurant his grandmother owned. She was standing in the kitchen, having changed her clothes, and a large canvas purse hung by its strap from her shoulder. Victor looked down at himself in his T-shirt and jeans. “Do I need to change clothes?”

“Naw,” his grandmother said. “Wash your hands, though. You’ve been out in back playing with Lily, haven’t you? She’s a sweet old girl, ain’t she?” her smile was thin and quick, but real.

Lily, then, was the dog’s name. Victor washed his hands in the kitchen sink.

“Shelby!” the grandmother stepped out into the hallway and screeched down its length, “Let’s go!”

In a minute they were all congregated in the living room, where Uncle Buzz lay covered up to his chest on the sofa with his gaunt head against the armrest. He was watching a raucous talk show on the TV.

“William, call me when they nurse comes, I want to talk to her,” said the grandmother to Uncle Buzz, who looked at her as if she’d appeared out of nowhere. He nodded.

“Let’s go,” the grandmother marched out the front door and down the steps to the driveway. Shelby rolled her eyes and nudged Victor. “She freaks out if we’re not there by three sharp. But it doesn’t really matter. Right, Daddy?”

Now Uncle Buzz looked at Shelby as if she’d appeared out of nowhere. “Do what?” he said.

“Bye, Daddy,” Shelby said.

Uncle Buzz nodded at the television.

Outside, the LeSabre honked. Shelby giggled and nudged Victor again. “She was worried that you’d gotten lost when you went out. She acted like you were gone for hours. Just make sure from now on you’re ready by quarter of three, and she won’t get in a tizzy. Do you have a watch?”

“No,” Victor had not had a watch since he was a little boy.

“Tell her you need one. She’ll get you one. She won’t mind.”

The Le Sabre honked again, a long, sustained, impatient honk.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” said Shelby. “See ya, Daddy.”

Uncle Buzz lifted his hand. “Bye,” he said. His voice was very soft, and Victor wondered if this is as a result of his sickness. That along with his pronounced drawl made his goodbye sound remarkably like the bleat of a lamb. As Shelby opened the front door, introducing a gash of sunlight into the dim room, Uncle Buzz spoke again. “He can borry mine.”

Shelby turned, “What?”

“My wristwatch,” Uncle Buzz raised his head a bit from the back of the sofa where it rested. In the shard of sunlight across his face he squinted. “He can borry my Timex with the gold stretchband. It’s old, but it runs as good as ever. It just don’t stay on my wrist no more. My arms is got so thin…”

Shelby looked at Victor. Her face was calm, set, unreadable. Victor blushed.

The horn honked again. Shelby pushed open the screen door and belted out; in a voice so loud it made the hairs on the back of Victor’s neck stand up, “Just a minute! I’m talking to Daddy! Calm down!”

She tried without success to slam the pneumatic screen door, “That’s nice of you, Daddy. But I doubt your watch’ll fit Victor. Look how skinny he is. Gum’ll get him one that fits.”

She looked hard at Victor, “Let’s go before she honks at me again and I have to kill her. See you, Daddy.”

Uncle Buzz had turned back to the talk show on the television. Shelby marched out and down the steps, and Victor stood frozen in her absence. After an interminable moment he lifted his hand to Uncle Buzz. “Thanks,” he said, hardly loud enough for anyone but himself to hear. Uncle Buzz nodded, however, and Victor then hurried to the car.

The restaurant had been in the family ever since Gum’s late husband, Victor’s grandfather, bought it upon his retirement from the Coast Guard in the late nineteen-seventies, and Victor’s own father had worked there throughout his childhood until he, and shortly afterwards Uncle Buzz, entered the Coast Guard themselves. All this was explained to Victor as his grandmother showed him around the empty restaurant, pointing out the various things that would be relevant to his position as the sole busboy and dishwasher. He would have help with the bussing on Fridays and Saturdays, when, his grandmother whispered; a Mexican boy would be in to help him. “But don’t count on him too much,” his grandmother said conspiratorially, “they work hard when they come, but they don’t always come when they’re supposed to. They’re on their own time…”

Not long after his tour, the other employees began to wander in, first three blonde waitresses who all looked like the same person at different ages, a couple of bikers who did the cooking, and one small, muscular young Latino who, Gum whispered to Victor, was the one who worked hard, but only when he wanted to.

For a while there was nothing for him to do but sit at the bar and drink a coke out of a Styrofoam cup as everybody else scurried about the restaurant, getting things ready for the evening. Besides managing the place, Gum served as bartender, and she mentioned to Victor, as she set up the bar while he drank his coke and watched her, that if it weren’t for the regulars who came in every night, on season and off, to drink, she wouldn’t be able to stay in business. Shelby parked herself on a stool behind the cash register by the front door and read from a paperback book, every now and then putting it aside to chat with the waitresses, who peered curiously over at Victor.

After his grandmother finished setting up her bar, she called the waitresses over from their various stations. “Jean, Dottie, Kelli, come on over here and meet Victor, my other grandbaby. Victor’s Eddie’s boy; he lives in Raleigh with his mama. He’s going to be working here while William’s in treatment. Victor, this is Dottie, she’s been with us about ten years now, and this is Dottie’s daughter Jean, and this is Jean’s daughter Kelli. Dottie is my first cousin. So she’s family, too, all three of them are. Isn’t that something?”

“Not really,” called Shelby from the cash register, “just about all the white people down here are related. So be careful who you sleep with.”

Gum ignored Shelby. The waitresses all smiled and offered their hands to Victor one at a time. “We’re pleased to meet you,” said the oldest one, Dottie, who was short and looked like a plumper, softer, more relaxed version of Gum. “Your grandma has always said she wished you would come visit.”

All three of the waitresses were dressed identically in short black skirts and blue and white checked blouses with sailboats embroidered over the right breast. The two younger ones, Jean and Kelli, smiled at Victor with the gentle condescension of older women over young boys, then went about their business. When they had gone, his grandmother turned on the television that perched on a shelf above the beer cooler and refilled Victor’s Styrofoam cup with coke. They watched the muted television for a while, and then suddenly his grandmother turned to Victor and looked him directly in the eyes for what seemed like the first time.

“You’ve been here before!” she said. “Lord, I just remembered. We came here after your granddaddy’s funeral, me, you, your daddy, and William, and you sat here at the bar and drank a coke just like your doing now, and you were such a little thing you couldn’t even see the TV, so I had to put you in my lap. Do you remember that?”

Victor did not. To imagine himself or for that matter anyone else in his grandmother’s lap was difficult.

“Well,” his grandmother shook her head and smiled in that peculiar way he noticed she had, of smiling a smile that drew in her lips and pulled the corners of her mouth downward like a frown, but which was somehow unmistakably still a smile. “Well,” she said again, and Victor noticed that her accent was such that when she prefaced a statement with the word ‘Well,’ which she often did, it came out sounding like “whale.”

“Whale, we enjoyed having you.”

Victor had never really worked before, and he was astonished by the sheer physical and mental relief with which he took to the tasks of gathering the dishes, washing, and storing them. He had no contact with the other workers in the kitchen aside from brief and soon forgotten introductions and every now and then a curt nod, and once the dinner hours were underway, he moved from task to task at a steady pace that was almost comfortable. At one point, while he was making the rounds of the dining area to pick up the bus pans that were full, he caught a glance of his cousin Shelby perched on her stool behind the cash register/display case peering, with her glasses off, into a paperback book which she held with one hand just a few inches from her face. Not for the first time, Victor wished that he could read the way Shelby was reading, with an obvious lack of effort. To read for any amount of time, unless he was reading something sexy, usually put him to sleep. He moved on to collect the overflowing bus pan behind the bar, and with a surge of pride he could not help but feel, he overheard his grandmother say to one of the aged, overweight patrons of the bar, that he was turning out to be a good, steady worker.

It was only when the pace slowed that Victor felt a craving for a cigarette. Having left his own pack in his sea bag, he rinsed his hands and went up to the cash register to ask one off of Shelby. She looked up as he approached and smiled her broad gap-toothed, lofty grin. “Having fun?” she says.

Victor nodded. “It’s all right. Can I bum a cigarette? I left mine.”

Shelby smirked. “You can always just take a pack from behind the bar,” she paused. “But not while there’s customers. It doesn’t matter. Here you go,” she rummaged around in the big black vinyl tote she used as a purse and held a nearly empty pack out toward him.

“Thank you,” he said, putting it behind his ear. “What are you reading?”

She picked up the book from where she laid it down on the display case beside the cash register and held the cover out for him to see. It was yellow, with the stylized silhouette of the face of a genderless figure with full features. The single word Cane was printed in stark brown letters across the top of the book.

“Oh,” he said, “I’ve never heard of it. What’s it about?”

“It’s not about anything. It’s poetry,” she said.

Victor grimaced.

Shelby laughed. Her laugh was silent, a soft rocking of her body from deep inside. “What’s the matter?” she said. “You don’t like poetry?”

Victor shrugged. Not being a reader, he hadn’t read much poetry outside of bathroom graffiti.

Shelby rocked again. “You’re a boy,” she said. “Boys don’t develop any sensibility until they’re in their twenties. If even then. I’m not even going to bother reading this to you. What kind of music do you like?”

Shelby looked at him, then lowered her brow like a gorilla, thrust out her chin, and pretended to shove her hands into pockets. It was only when she spoke, though, in an unnaturally low and gruff voice, that he realized she was mimicking him.

“Uh, I don’t know…” she said. “I like, gangster rap, I guess, and metal…” she laughed and pushed her glasses back up into her viper’s tangle of curls.

Victor blushed. Her pose, when she was mimicking him, was a pretty accurate reflection of how he was now standing, and yet it was not just him, it was an absolute caricature of the archetypical sullen disaffected teenage boy. She could have been portraying any of the younger white guys in any kitchen, in any restaurant anywhere. With an unpleasant sensation, like that of a cold shower, it occurred to Victor that he was not unique.

Shelby poked him in the chest with the corner of her book. “Move. They’re trying to pay,” Victor turned and sure enough, an ancient couple wearing matching sun visors totteringly approached the register. “Let’s go to the beach tomorrow,” Shelby said to him as she reached for their bill, “then we can talk.”

Victor nodded and went back to work with a feeling of lightness that he could not put his finger on. It was only a little later, while bent over the sink scrubbing a burnt spot off the lip of a frying pan, that it came to him that, for the first time in his memory, he was looking forward to the next day.

The day’s, or rather, evening’s work, ended with the three of them, Victor, Shelby, and their grandmother, seated in a booth across from the bar, in the absolute silence that the grandmother demanded while she counted the day’s proceeds. When this was finished, all the coins rolled and all the bills banded and zipped into a bank bag, the grandmother leaned back and lit up a cigarette.

“It was a good night, for a Monday,” said Shelby.

“Not too bad,” says the grandmother. “We could always do better,” she hung her cigarette in one corner of her mouth and spoke out of the other one to Victor. “What did you think, honey? You seemed to keep up pretty good.”

Victor nodded.

“It’s a lot busier on the weekends,” his grandmother said. “We’ll have Oliver, the little Mexican boy help you with the dishes then, take him off the line. I don’t know, though, you might be able to handle it yourself.”

Victor could feel Shelby stiffen beside him “Gum, Oliver is not a little Mexican boy. He’s Salvadorian, for one thing, and he’s almost twenty-five years old. Why do you have to be so ignorant?”

The grandmother tapped the ash of her cigarette into a tray. “Little Oliver? He can’t be no twenty-five. He’s as twenty five as I am,” she says. “Did he tell you he was twenty-five? Lord, help me.”

“He showed me his green card.”

The grandmother snorted. “My Lord honey, you know as well as I do you can’t go by that! They make them things themselves so they can get jobs here and not have to go back where they came from. For all I know, his name ain’t even Oliver.”

“If that’s what you think, then you have no business letting him work here. You’re taking advantage of him.”

“I’m paying him, ain’t I? And just as much as I’d pay a real American. Don’t talk to me about taking advantage, when I was his age, I was getting less than a nickel for every oyster I’d bring into the Beaufort market from Core sound. Everything I do here with my Mexicans is on the up and up, not under the table like a lot of places around here…”

“Blah, blah, blah,” says Shelby. Her indignation seemed spent. The next question she asked was without judgment. “Are you paying Victor under the table?”

“’Course I am,” the grandmother winked at Victor. “He’s family. He ain’t going to turn me in. Are you, son?”

Victor smiled and shook his head.

Shelby rested her chin in her hands. “You don’t pay me under the table,” she said. “I’m family.”

“You’d turn me in,” the grandmother said, and lit another cigarette.

The three Flowers returned to a dark and silent house. Uncle Buzz had gone to bed, leaving vacant the living room sofa, which the grandmother immediately stripped of its cushions and tugged into the shape of a bed. This was to be Victor’s accommodation at night until the end of the week, when the bed Uncle Buzz was waiting for at the nursing facility would be available.

Although Victor dreaded the prospect of sleeping out in the open like this, he went immediately to sleep, and woke up early in the morning to the sound of a deep and persistent bark. A pale, pearly sunlight seeped in through the closed curtains of the living room and the doorway of the kitchen. Victor rose, padded down the hallway as quietly as he could to take a piss, and then let himself out the front door to sit on the concrete stoop and smoke the first cigarette of the day.

Though it was only just past dawn, the temperature outside was already swiftly rising, and Victor returned with relief to the cool darkness of the living room. He was torn between relishing this time to himself and wondering how soon it would end. He was afraid that turning on the television would disturb the women, so there was nothing to do but pad around the living room and look at things; the living room walls were covered with pictures and tiny shelves that held knick-knacks and samplers and such. There were framed photographs set atop a large white doily that draped over the top of the entertainment center shelves, and Victor crossed the room to look at these. The largest picture, a 5x7 school photograph of a chubby little girl was clearly Shelby at the age of about six or seven, recognizable from the tiny mole on her chin and the striking, yellow-green coloring of her eyes, but in all other respects the picture looked nothing like the person she was today; the little girls hair was parted severely and braided into two stiff pigtails that hung down to her chin, her glasses were missing, and her gap toothed smile was anxious, not at all like the present Shelby’s open grin. Beside this there was a larger color picture, this one a studio photograph, of a slightly younger version of his grandmother, her hair thicker and thoroughly dyed an unnatural chestnut color. She was posed beside a broad-shouldered, unsmiling man with iron gray, slicked back hair and formidable grooves in his face from the corner of his nose to the line of his jaw. Both his grandmother and the man, whom he assumed must be his dead grandfather, were dressed as if for church, his grandmother in a plain, light blue shapeless dress and the grandfather in a dark suit and tie. The only other photograph among this set was a snapshot, really, black-and white and framed in a cheap silver snapshot frame, of two towheaded boys, wearing only shorts or perhaps bathing suits, standing side by side against the background of a busy pier and holding a swordfish lengthwise against their chests. The taller boy grinned and the smaller boy squinted into the camera, and looked as if he was trying to say something. Victor was astonished at how little the taller boy, his father, had changed in the thirty or so years since the picture was taken. Only his hair was different, in the photograph the boy’s thick bangs swooped apart in a wide cowlick, whereas now Victor’s father had only a fringe of close cropped blondish hair that reached from ear to ear around the back of his head, and just a sparse remnant of hair on top. The smaller boy, though not as recognizable, was obviously uncle Buzz; the pictured boy’s expression of consternation had maintained itself, somehow, in the grown man’s countenance.

There were several other snapshots, mostly in color, of infants and smaller children that Victor didn’t recognize; these were mostly displayed, in their gift-shop plastic frames, on a plastic, faux driftwood shelf that hung on the wall to the left of the television. He was about to turn away from these when he realized that one of them was surely the picture of the baby his father’s new wife had given birth to just weeks before Victor left the hospital, a baby girl, with an odd name that Victor had forgotten, but which he remembered disliking as soon as he heard it, an unusual name, but fashionable these days, a name that sounded more like a man’s last name than a little girls name, he didn’t want to remember it, but it came to him anyway; Madison. Victor wondered if he would ever meet her. He had never met his father’s new wife, whom he imagined to be, as the wedding pictures that were sent to him in the hospital indicated, a blonde, far younger than his father.

He stepped away from these shelves and looked at the wall above the couch. There was a painting there, or at least a print, of a familiar image, two small children, a boy and a girl, crossing a bridge, oblivious to the presence of a diaphanous, smiling angel hovering above them. Next to this there was an oval framed picture, which upon close inspection proved to be a very old photograph, of a little girl in a checked dress and what looked like saddle shoes, standing between a very wizened old woman in a shapeless flower-print dress and a glowering old man with a handlebar mustache and a watch chain looped across the vest of his black suit. Victor found he could not take his eyes off the image of the old man, he, more so than the little girl or the old woman, seemed to suggest another time, a way of life lost to the world. The old man looked out of the picture as if defending the very spirit of the past that his image represented, while the old woman and the little girl looked out with merry smiles. His image radiated disapproval as manifestly as the old woman’s image radiated kindness and the little girl’s reflected innocence. Victor wasn’t sure how long he stood staring at that picture when the sound of footsteps behind him startled him. He turned to see his grandmother, in a ragged nightgown and strips of toilet paper clipped to her hairline, baring her bridgework at him.

“Morning, honey,” she said. “Did you sleep good?”

Victor nodded.

“You’re up mighty early. You hungry? I’ll have some breakfast in a little bit. Do you like grits?”

He nodded. His mother, being from the north, never made grits, but they often had them for breakfast in the hospital, where he developed a taste for them. “Thank you,” he remembered to say.

“It’ll be a little while,” his grandmother scratched a place on her nightgown just below her small, low slung breasts. “Just rest yourself some more, you worked hard last night. What have you been doing, looking around?”

“Yeah.”

His grandmother smiled and pointed at the oval picture. “You know who that little girl is?”

Victor shook his head. “You?” he said.

Her smile drew itself in and turned upside down in the peculiar way it had. “Yes sir. Believe it or not, I was young once. That’s me with my grandma and granddaddy. They had a big house on Harker’s Island, and I used to stay there every summer. Granddaddy fished and was a part time Methodist preacher, and had nine children with my grandma and four with the one after her. He fathered a child at the age of seventy-one, can you beat that? That was my aunt Millicent, born when I was already thirteen. I’ll have to take you to meet Millicent, she lives down east.”

Victor looked at the old man in the picture with renewed curiosity. Ancient as time, yet he had not yet, when this image was captured, planted his last seed. “What was his name?” Victor asked.

“Carlos,” his grandmother said, musingly, “Carlos Blattery. I always wondered, and never did ask him, or anybody, how come it was he had a Spanish name. The Blattery’s as far as I know, come here from England. Maybe his mama just liked the sound of it. But that was his name, anyway. Not Charles, but Carlos. As mean as a snake, too, I never saw him smile for anything. But he provided for his family, that’s for sure.” With this she walked into the kitchen, but after a moment she came back. “You see how chipped the varnish is on that old frame? I’d take it down and put something else up there, but Shelby loves it so, I figure it don’t hurt to leave it up there….”

“It’s nice,” said Victor. “It’s probably worth some money.”

His grandmother snorts. “Well… I don’t know about that,” a whistle that rapidly grew into an insistent shriek issued from the kitchen, where his grandmother had put on a teapot to boil. She went back in there to attend to it, and from the other room called out, “It’s something to look at, anyway. Every picture tells a story, I reckon.”

When breakfast was ready Victor’s grandmother left the kitchen and rapped on Shelby’s bedroom door and screeched for her to wake up, but she left her son alone. “He can’t eat breakfast, and he can have his milkshakes anytime he wants them,” she explained.

Shelby shuffled into the kitchen puffy eyed and yawning. She wore an enormous t-shirt that reached to her shins with a picture of a cartoon Tasmanian devil on the front of it. “Morning,” she said to Victor, sounding as if she was speaking through a mouthful of glue. “Dang! I forgot you were here until just now!”

Victor was not used to eating breakfast, and left half the bowl of grits, though he finished the eggs and toast. Morning seemed to be a fairly relaxed time of day in the house, for a few minutes after the three of them were all finished eating, they lingered at the table, each with a refilled cup of coffee and a cigarette. Nobody said anything, but the silence was not awkward, and Victor unselfconsciously watched the play of cigarette smoke in the very bright morning sunlight that streamed in through the windows across from his seat at the table.

“I thought I’d show Victor around today, take him to the beach,” said Shelby after awhile. “You put him to work before he even had a chance to get any culture.”

“Just be back by quarter of three,” said their grandmother.

“We’ll need some money to take,” says Shelby.

“What for? The beach don’t cost anything!”

“We’ll need lunch, won’t we?”

“Then you better fix some. I’m not made of money.”

“I can’t drive yet,” Shelby explained as she zipped the lid of the polyester cooler that held their food. “So we’ll have to walk. You don’t drive yet, either, do you?”

“No,” Victor said, and he wondered just how much his cousin knew about his life. He assumed she must know, that his grandmother must have mentioned to her, over the years, that he had problems. And yet, he had to admit, she did not act as if she knew. Neither one of them did. It was as if, like Uncle Buzz’s obviously uncontrollable alcoholism, the grandmother’s guileless bigotry, and Shelby’s mysterious, evil mother, Victor’s hospitalization was just one of those things that happens in families.

“I took the road test in the spring, but I failed it,” Shelby said. “I was supposed to practice some more with daddy, and take the test again on my birthday, but then daddy got worse. So it’s on hold. My best friend has her own car, so I get around that way. You’ll meet her pretty soon. She’s a summer person, but we keep in touch when she’s at home. She’s from Raleigh, too. Her name’s Dora.”

Shelby handed Victor the little cooler, and shouldered her own enormous black tote bag, and they set out. Once outside the door, the heat of the sun smote them, but Shelby marched on as if in rebuke. Victor wondered if he would ever get used to the relentless, aggressive quality of this coastal sun; only a couple minutes out of the air-conditioning and the top of his head felt like it was being slowly eroded away by a laser beam. He had to work to keep up with Shelby’s pace, which, despite her boxy stature and shape, was long and swift; she moved like a ship in a favorable wind, her long light skirt sometimes brushing the hot asphalt.

“It’s about a forty-five minute walk,” she said over her shoulder to him. “When we get to the highway, we go down that about half a mile, then we get to the bridge. Then we have to cross the bridge, and that takes about ten minutes. Then we’ll be on the island, and it’s about a twenty-minute walk from the bridge to where I like to go. If you need to stop, just let me know.”

“I’m all right,” Victor said, though he was already dizzy with the heat.

They did not talk much as they made the long, hot trek to the oceanfront. Victor found himself absorbed with the sights and sounds and smells along the way; the landscape was another world to him, for all that he had evidently been to the beach as a small child. There was a strip of sidewalk across the length of the bridge over the sound, and he stopped, for a moment, in the middle, and leaned over the railing to look down into the sound as the strong warm wind whipped his hair to one side. Shelby sensed that he wasn’t right behind her and doubled back.

“Don’t even think about diving,” she said, “you’d break your neck. It looks deep, but it isn’t really. And it’s full of disgusting eels and jellyfish.”

They walked on. When they came to the island, Shelby veered to the left, and they walked along the main drag, which was flanked on both sides with cheap motels, cheap but overpriced seafood and fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and dock houses. Shelby turned into one sandy parking lot and onto a wooden walkway that led over a set of dunes. They passed a shed that held changing rooms, and then Victor saw the ocean for the first time that he could remember. Inexplicably, the sight made his heart race. He shaded his eyes with one hand and looked out as far as he could to where the ocean and the sky merged into one hazy line. The crash and hiss of the surf was as rhythmic as a pulse. The sense Victor had that what confronted him had a life of its own was so powerful that he was compelled to speak. “Wow,” he said, and as this expression seemed inadequate, he said it again. “Wow.”

Shelby, in the meantime, trudged several yards ahead, and laid down a green bed sheet that she carried along in her black bag. Victor stood stock still at the foot of the dunes until the intensity of his encounter with the ocean passed through him. Once he situated himself next to Shelby on the bed sheet, his astonishment faded, but he could not dismiss his sense that the two of them, along with the dozens of other visitors to this particular stretch of beach, were there at the mysterious, innocent pleasure of the place itself.

“I like it here,” Shelby said. “People don’t come here because it’s so close to the piers. They think the pier draws sharks. It does, but the sharks it draws are too small to hurt anybody. Besides, I don’t go in the water anyway. Do you?”

“I’ve never been to a beach before,” he said.

“Oh that’s right,” said Shelby. “Well, can you swim?”

He nodded.

“I can’t,” said Shelby.

This seemed incredible. “For real?”

Shelby reached into her big bag and pulled out a bottle of lotion, the contents of which she proceeded to languorously apply to her arms and face. “Me and daddy haven’t always lived with Gum, you know,” she said, “I lived with my mother until I was about four,” Shelby gazed grimly at the horizon. “We never stayed in any one place for very long, so I never had a chance to learn a lot of things. I don’t even really remember going to school very much until my mother left me with Gum. And by that time Granddaddy was dead and Gum had to start running the restaurant full-time, and she never had time to teach me to swim. So, even though I’ve always been around the water, I’ve never learned. Ironic, isn’t it?”

Victor wasn’t sure, exactly, what the word ironic meant. Shelby finished slathering her skin, drew up her knees, clasped her forearms around them and continued. “My mother didn’t really leave me with Gum. She lost custody of me, then she kidnapped me, and then she brought me back here to live when it got too hot for her. Daddy divorced her, or she divorced Daddy, when I was about three. I can’t even remember them ever being together. After that she started doing a lot of drugs, and I guess Daddy started to do a lot more drinking than he had before. He was still in the Coast Guard then, stationed in Charleston. My mother and me lived just about everywhere in the state, even Raleigh for a little while. She took me wherever whatever loser she was with took her. Eventually someone reported her for leaving me alone too much while she was out doing god knows what, so she left me with Gum. My mother’s very beautiful,” Shelby paused and looked out to sea. “She’s Lumbee.”

“Huh?”

“Lum-bee,” Shelby rolled her eyes and enunciates. “Lumbee Indian. Haven’t you ever heard of the Lumbee tribe?”

Victor shrugged. If he had, he couldn’t remember. But that explained, then, his cousin’s rose-copper coloring. Her mother was an Indian. Victor wondered what his grandmother thought of that.

Shelby sighed and spoke with the weary tone of one obliged to explain the obvious to an idiot. “We’re the largest Indian tribe of east of the Mississippi. But no one knows anything about us, because we don’t have federal recognition. Some people say we’re the descendants of the Lost Colony, mixed with the Native Americans. That may be true, but there’s also African blood in us. No one is really just one race, I don’t care what anyone says. You can be racist against yourself, you know. You can deny who you are. But the fact is, we’re a coat of many colors,” Shelby looked at Victor as if she expected him to contradict her. Then her look changed, as if he had suddenly come into focus for her.

“Hey, you know, I’ve never even met your mother,” she said. “I know that Gum likes her. I know they talk every now and then. What’s your mother’s name?”

Victor picked a handful of sand up from beside their bed sheet and let it sift through his fingers. “Veronica,” he answered. “But she hates it. She won’t let anybody call her that. She calls herself Ronnie.”

“Veronica,” Shelby said it musingly. “What a beautiful name. So European. I wonder why she doesn’t like it….”

Victor shrugged. “She really hates it,” he said. “What’s your mother’s name?”

“Tanya,” Shelby said this as if the sound left a bad taste in her mouth. “Your mother’s Italian?”

“I guess so. Her family name was Bassano. I think there’s some French, too.”

“Mediterranean,” Shelby nodded approvingly. “Southern Europe is a mixture of all kinds of people, too. Like I said, no one’s really any one thing. Certain people just want to think they are. Gum’s like that,” Shelby unclasped her knees and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Have you noticed that? That she’s kind of racist?”

Victor nodded.

Shelby’s lips, usually so full, compressed into a line that looked very much like their grandmother’s habitual expression of grim forbearance. “It bugs her that I’m not white. It always has. She was brought up that way that people shouldn’t mix, and she’s never really gotten over it. I guess there was never any reason for her to try, until I came along. And she’s tried, in her way. But I know it still bothers her. Some things you just can’t change about yourself, even if you know you should,” Shelby reached behind herself, untwisted the knot of hair at the nape of her neck, and let the sea breeze whip her thick, dark, rusty curls about her face. “It only bothers her, though, when she thinks about it. And she doesn’t think about it, at least not nowadays, unless someone else does. That’s how I can deal with her. Because deep down, it doesn’t make any difference to her any more. It’s just habit, that she says the things she does. She’s a product of her environment. Just like the rest of us.”

Victor looked down at his legs, long, thin, and pale, with fine dark hairs just beginning to coarsen near his ankles. With his dark eyes and hair, he favored his mother in looks, he had none of his father’s sandy coloring and stocky build. His mother had mentioned to him once, long ago, that of all the people in the family, he most resembled her brother Anthony, who was evidently some years older than her, and who died in Vietnam, when she was just a little girl. Anthony was, in fact, Victor’s middle name, and a name he liked much better than Victor, but when years ago he asked his parents if he could go by that name, his mother, though she said nothing, stiffened like a corpse and continued, as if he had said nothing, to call him by his first name, Victor.

While he remembered these things the wind that came in from off the water picked up, and the two cousins sat silent for awhile, listening to the sound of the breeze against their ears and the raucous cries of the seagulls and the crash of the waves and the squeals and shouts of the children running to and fro on the sand and splashing about on the water. The sense Victor had when they arrived, that the beach was as much of a participant in itself as the birds and the people inhabiting it returned to him with renewed strength. He had a sudden urge to walk out into the water, and he was about to stand when Shelby spoke again. “So, if your Mom is Italian, are you Catholic?”

Victor had a sudden image in his mind’s eye of the tiny gold crucifix his mother habitually wore around her fat white neck. “I’m not anything,” he said.

Shelby knocked him lightly on the shoulder with the back of her hand. It was the first time she touched him. “You know what I mean,” she said. “If you were some kind of religion, that’s what you would be, right? You get your religion from your mother. So, would you be Catholic?”

“I guess,” said Victor. Though he could not specifically remember ever having been inside of a Church, he knew, in some vague way, that he had been, and that the Churches he had been inside were Catholic churches. He knew that his mother, for all that she had not attended a church service since long before her divorce, still considered herself a Catholic, and received newsletters and other mailings from at least three of the Roman Catholic Churches in the city. He also knew that he was baptized in a Catholic Church in New York, and that before they moved to North Carolina he was in classes being prepared for his first communion. He had, then, a very vague memory of those preparations, of being herded every week or so with other children into a brightly painted classroom, then herded back out again to present some piece of artwork to the adults congregated in a dark and fragrant sanctuary. All of this ended with his families move South, this and other, more meaningful but sketchy scenes of being one among a dozen or so children at large gatherings of what might have been his mother’s extended family, of sleeping in the backseat of the car at night while his parents sat side by side in the front, driving home from somewhere, cocooned in a rare companionable silence. It was as if everything connected with his mother beyond her life with him and his father ended when they left New York, but she never, even after his father left, said anything about returning to it, or anything at all about her family up there, her friends, or her church. Victor asked her once, years ago, when his father was still living with them, why they had moved from New York, and she had said simply that there were better opportunities for his father in the south, and that she liked the warm weather.

But there was more to the move than this, and even as a child he’d sensed it. After the move, Victor saw less of his father, and watched more television than he’d ever been allowed to watch in New York. His mother had slowly and steadily put on weight until her once prominent cheekbones and chin became lost in the swollen roundness of an overweight face. Her dark hair, before always kept set, became stringy and streaked with gray, and her work as a nurse seemed to be constantly interrupted by some illness or injury. And his father would disappear for longer periods of time, during which his mother would only say he was on a business trip, until finally he was gone for good, leaving Victor with the present of a ten speed bicycle and the promise that they would spend every summer together at his new house in South Carolina, and that no matter what he was only a phone call away. “Your mom and me,” his father had said, deadly serious for once, as he sat on the edge of Victor’s bed the day he left, “can’t agree any more about too many things. Sometimes, son…” Victor remembered that his father, at that point made a very characteristic gesture, something he often did when he was tired, of rubbing his entire face with the flat of his right hand, as if he were washing it, or wiping it clean of something that had been dashed into it, “…things just don’t work out, and their ain’t anything anyone can do but say to hell with it. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, son, but I don’t know what else to tell you. All I want you to know, son, is that I love you, and I’ll always be your pop. You got that?”

At that Victor had nodded, feeling nothing but bewilderment. His father’s obvious distress seemed out of all proportion to what was happening. So he was leaving. It wasn’t such a big deal. He was never around anyway.

Sitting on the beach beside his cousin, Victor involuntarily shuddered at the memory. Shelby reached into the enormous straw bag she’d brought along and handed him a small plastic bottle. “The suns getting to you, paleface,” she said. “You better put this on.”

Victor took the bottle from her and looked at the label. It was sunscreen, with a high SPF, and he squeezed a bit onto his hand and applied it to his face and forehead. He was too shy to take off his shirt, though it was only a tank top, in front of Shelby. She watched him bemusedly, and then reached in her bag for something else. “What were you thinking about?” she said.

Victor looks out to sea. “New York,” he said.

“Do you miss it?”

“Not really. I don’t remember it very well. We moved down here when I was about six.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know.”

Shelby pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the bag, offered him one, then took one for herself. “Gum likes your mother,” she said again.

“I know,” Victor mumbled this around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth as he attempted, for the dozenth time, to light it with Shelby’s clear green plastic Bic lighter. It was impossible to sustain a flame in the strong sea breeze. Shelby cupped her small hands expertly over his, and finally it got lit. “My mom likes her, too,” said Victor. “I don’t think my mom talks to anyone in her own family. But she talks to…” he hated to say that silly name, but he said it. “…Gum. Not all the time, but more than she talks to anyone back in New York.”

Shelby turned to him, her eyes wide behind the enormous sunglasses she’d brought with her in her bag. “Why doesn’t she talk to her family? I thought Italian families were close-knit and warm and loving!”

“Not hers, I guess,” said Victor, smiling a little, though, for Shelby’s stereotype stirred a memory of one or several large gatherings of his mother’s extended family, in which food was served in the backyard of a row of houses, and dozens of other children were present, and his father and mother were absorbed into separate clusters of women and men. The memory was a pleasant one, and he remembered being presented to a very old woman, wizened and bound to a wheelchair and smelling of baby powder and urine, a figure so ancient that she seemed to be beyond speech or even thought, but who had seemed pleased with him and had babbled something in what he imagined now must have been Italian and stroked his head with fingers as rigid and fragile as a bird’s claws. All the children there, he remembered, had been older than him, but they had included him in their games anyway. He remembered his mother seemed to be more relaxed than usual at such gatherings, letting the rowdier older children roughhouse in their way with him as if she could trust, somehow, that he would not get hurt. He tried to remember the other children’s names or faces, but he couldn’t, and when he tried to remember who, among the grown ups at the gathering, were his grandparents and aunts and uncles, there was no distinction among them. Only one woman’s face stood out in his memory, a face younger than his mother’s but strikingly similar, though more heavily made up, with long dark hair that reached nearly to her waist. “Her sister!” he said suddenly, “Debbie. She doesn’t like her sister Debbie. That’s why she doesn’t talk to her family. She doesn’t like her, or she had a big fight with her before we moved… Jesus…” Victor shook his head as if to clear it. “I don’t know how I know that, but I do.”

Now that he had called to mind the name and the face of this woman, who was once a part of his life, he remembered her with increasing clarity. She was a salesgirl at a department store in the city, he remembered, she always had Dentyne chewing gum in her mouth, and she was not married. He remembered that even as a little boy he had thought that his aunt Debbie was extraordinarily pretty, and affectionate, as well. His father, he remembered suddenly, with a distinct clutching sensation in his belly, had liked Debbie, too.

A feeling came over Victor like a dark cloud, and he stood up without looking at Shelby. “I’m going in the water,” he said, and marched towards and into the waves that suddenly seemed to crash and hiss like a thousand red hot demons falling from heaven into the boiling cauldrons of hell.

Victor was unprepared for the chill of the water that met him; he stood for a long time at the very edge of the Atlantic Ocean while the shallowest of waves lapped about his ankles. The cries of seagulls just overhead seemed to accentuate the unearthliness of the moment as he hesitated, shivering, his arms wrapped around himself like a straightjacket. There were children in the distance, playing with abandon in water that looked as if it must be a hundred feet deep, but of course it could not be that much deeper than where he stood, even though it was so much further out. Victor eventually trudged forward, marveling at how quickly the cold sting of the salt water gave way to a pleasant coolness. Still, he hesitated to immerse himself totally. The murky greenish salt water had nothing in common with the clear, chlorinated pools he was used to; he could see nothing beneath the surface of the water except vague shadows. As he moved forward, however, the waves met him with greater force, until at last one swept him off his feet and laid him down; he fell back into the shallow water and emerged spluttering, completely wet from top to toe, with the curious sensation of having been, despite himself, utterly liberated. He turned and looked back toward Shelby, and for a moment he felt frantic, for he could not see her, with his salt stung eyes, amongst the dozens of reclining bodies on the beach. But then he spotted her, bent over a book that held her skirt to the ground between her upraised knees, it looked as if she was scribbling something in it. He turned back to the ocean and half hopped, half dove forward, and once again immersed himself in the cool, murky, and strangely invigorating waters. For what felt like hours he flung himself against and under and into the incoming waves, each of which seemed to carry its own individuality and its own particular reason for preventing him from moving too far out. When he had enough and finally made his way out of the water, trudging diagonally across the increasingly loose and burning sands to where Shelby sat hunched over on the green bed sheet, still scribbling, Victor had never felt so physically spent, and yet so very much alive. Shelby closed the clothbound notebook she had been scribbling or drawing something in, and squinted and smiled up at Victor as his shadow draped over her. “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Yeah.”

Shelby reached into her straw bag and pulled out, in foil wrapped increments, their lunch. Victor wolfed down his own roast beef sandwich and was left to observe with what delicacy his cousin consumed hers, like a thoughtful bird over a hunk of bread, half of her sandwich, in fact, she threw to the gulls, who descended upon it with cries of joy. After the two humans had eaten and Shelby had gathered their trash into one compact ball of foil, Shelby suggested that they start the long walk back home to make sure they were ready for work on time. The walk back was indeed long; it seemed much longer than the walk from home, and by the time they arrived Victor felt as if his entire body was covered with an uncomfortable slime of sweat and salt. He lingered in the shower, fearing that the excessive use of water would be irritating to his grandmother, but he relished the strange sting of the water on his skin, which from exposure to the sun felt tight and raw and new, and not yet painful.

That evening at the restaurant was much as it had been the night before, except for the fact that this night, Victor had help gathering the bus pans in the form of Oliver, the Salvadoran prep cook, whose bright black eyes and snaggled teeth and short, strong body exuded an air of boundless energy and willingness to please. As none of the biker types that worked in the kitchen said much to Victor, he was grateful for Oliver’s company and conversation, limited though it was by the barrier of language and by Oliver’s predominant interests; he seemed to have conceived a passion for the blonde waitress named Kelli. “She is…” he said, nudging Victor, then rolled his brown eyes in a manner that somehow seemed incredibly lascivious.

Victor grinned and blushed, at the same time wondering at himself as he did so, for hadn’t every other guy in the treatment center acted like this, hadn’t most of the conversation between the residents there been about the physical attributes of the few females they saw every day? Why, outside of that place, did talk of sex seem so treacherous to him?

Oliver did not wait for any response, but slapped Victor on the back, giggling. “I make you… Nervous? I’m sorry. You saved? You go to church?”

“No,” said Victor. “No church.”

“No?” Oliver, for a brief moment, looked puzzled, but his agreeable smile did not falter. “I don’t go to church here. But I am saved. I think, though, it’s okay to say I like her…” and he placed his hands against his heart. “I don’t bother her. She don’t even know I like her. She don’t like me. She has a boyfriend, anyway.”

Victor shook his head and rinsed down a rack of dishes. He had no idea how old Oliver was, but in spite of his uninhibitedness he seemed not a little wise.

“Maybe you right,” Oliver said after a moment, even though Victor had said nothing. “Maybe it’s not good, to look too much, maybe it’s a sin. Pero, I get lonesome, it’s hard not to look. Maybe I need to go to church, get saved again, yeah?”

“I don’t think that would help,” said Victor.

“No?” Oliver, still smiling, looked at Victor as if he really believed that Victor could advise him.

“I don’t know,” shrugged Victor, “maybe.”

The next day was Saturday, the day that Uncle Buzz was scheduled to move to the rehabilitation facility in Beaufort, just over a bridge and a few miles away. After nearly a week of sleeping in the living room, Victor had gotten used to it, and the prospect of another move, into Uncle Buzz’s room, seemed at once welcome and jarring. Victor wasn’t sure what exactly was wrong with Uncle Buzz, but whatever it was, Victor had never seen him wear anything except pajama bottoms and that same wine colored bathrobe. Uncle Buzz did very little besides sleep and watch television, and as his only form of nutrition was his supplemental milkshakes, he gave the impression that he never ate, but only drank; there always seemed to be a can in his hand. He did not seem to be suffering much, but he did not seem to be enjoying much either, he was like a shy ghost drifting through the house.

It was just before noon when a medical transport van arrived to take Uncle Buzz to his rehab. Why that van, which looked exactly like an ambulance was required, Victor didn’t know, but evidently he was the only one surprised by its arrival in the driveway, as his grandmother, who was in the kitchen on the telephone with one of her many sisters and sisters-in-law came out into the living room, opened the front door, and said “Here they come...” as if they were not already there. “Honey,” She called over her shoulder to Victor, “run tell Shelby. They’re here to take her daddy over to the rehab.”

Victor looked out at the huge vehicle, conspicuous even without its siren as it grumbled in the driveway. The driver and several other uniformed men climbed out and made their way to the front door as the grandmother opened it wide and waved them forward. “We’re just about ready for ya’ll,” she called, as cheerily as if they were houseguests, “Come on in.”

Victor slipped away and down the hall to Shelby’s door, and tapped James Dean’s jacket. He could hear eerie strains of music from inside, so he tapped again, a bit louder, and Shelby opened the door almost immediately. There was a yellow scarf tied around her head and the room was dark behind her.

“The ambulance is here,” Victor said. “Gum wants you.”

Shelby pursed her lips and nodded. “All right,” she says. “Is Daddy all ready?”

“I don’t know,” he looked over his shoulder at the bare closed door to Uncle Buzz’s room.

“Tell Gum I’ll be there in a minute,” Shelby said, and closed the door abruptly in Victor’s face. Victor hesitated before Uncle Buzz’s door, and then quickly moved away back down the hall, where he stood in the entryway to the living room and watched his grandmother herd the four transport attendants into the kitchen.

“I don’t know why I can’t just carry him over in the car…” the grandmother was saying. “But I know ya’ll have your rules. As long as the insurance is going to pay their part of it, I ain’t going to complain. Let me go make sure William’s got everything he needs. Do ya’ll want anything to drink?”

“No ma’am,” said two of the transport attendants. One of them nodded at Victor, who nodded back.

“’Zat him?” one of the attendant’s said.

“This is my grandson, Victor,” said the grandmother, aghast. “William is my son. Does this boy look like he has cirrhosis, neuralgia, stomach ulcers and sugar? Victor, did you tell Shelby to get out here?”

Victor nodded.

“Well, what in the world is she doing?” the grandmother did not wait for an answer but made her way past Victor and down the hall, muttering.