Читать книгу Midnight Bowling - Quinn Dalton - Страница 12

SO FOR SIX days in 1961, my older brother Walt was dead. And truth be told, everything comes down to that. I’m telling this, so I get to call it.

Now this was before I met Joe Wycheski—hell, he was still popping zits between rolls back then. One day we heard Walt had gotten blown up by a rocket-propelled grenade near a Michelin rubber plantation somewhere in Vietnam, next thing he’s coming home alive. It was like as if we had a regular Lazarus in the family.

Our father worked at Engineered Fittings out on Milan Road, just like Joe Wycheski did later on, dropping nut blanks on the screw machines, moving up from the facers and the hand tappers. Our mother kept the house and kept Walt and me straight as she was able. We were seven years apart, one lost in the middle. The idea was Walt would take our father’s spot—that’s what people did, pass their job down. And I’d have to bid or figure out something else.

Not too many choices either. The quarry, fishing boats, factories. None of it was for me. I’d grown up at the lanes in the cellar down below the State Theatre on Columbus and Water, first crouched behind my father when he rolled in matches, then as a pin boy, then going head-to-head myself with some of the best of the day. Bowling was the only thing I ever cared about.

When I wasn’t setting pins, I’d bowl a string with the other pin boys. Down there it got thick with smoke and men working bets. It was a big place for back then, thirteen lanes. The odd number was unusual because lanes were always in pairs for match play—you’d have four or six lanes, a big place would be eight lanes. People said that was bad luck, but only if they were losing.

This is in the late thirties, what I’m talking about, when I was just a little shit sneaking Drums I rolled myself with one hand because you had to know how to do that if you wanted any respect. And yeah, none of us wanted to be out of there last. We were all scared of the ghost of that choked kid.

Back then it was all local matches. People didn’t travel. They went for the town action. I’m talking mostly clubs—German Social, Polish, American Legion, VFW clubs, etc. And all kinds of leagues, singles, doubles, mixed doubles, or teams. My father was in the industrial leagues, because of his job. They weren’t pro, but they’d get cash prizes put up by local merchants. Quarries had their own leagues, for an example.

My father was a town hero back then. His team, the Sandusky Icebreakers, farmed for a professional team and traveled the Midwest for tourneys. The Register posted all their scores and standings—high single, high triple—from each night, and the team high singles and triples. He bowled in a few nationals, and one year he ranked tenth in the country. Not that he made any money for it, but that’s something to say, isn’t it? That’s something to say.

Most of the money was made in backroom betting. The manager’d put together a team or have a head-to-head and people would bet. My father got his cut. He let me carry his equipment, keep his ball polished, and I was proud to help him. I’d watch him and I’d think, That’s my dad. I learned my arithmetic chalking the scores next to his name. I made sure no one stiffed him and also tracked what he needed to win. He said not to worry about the scores, don’t get thrown off by anybody else’s game. Consistency was the key. He had it until the drinking caught up with him. There came a time anyway when I wasn’t so sure he was right. Winning was key. That was where the money was.

We pin boys got paid by the string—the manager would pay six cents a string, and the bowlers would tip. My father knew all the good tippers, and so he’d send them to me. On double league nights—like, say, the St. Mary’s teams would come in and bowl at six and another league started at eight or eight-thirty, scheduled back-to-back—you’d set up six hundred frames in a night, could hardly stand up after that.

Sometimes we’d bunch the pins for the customers we liked to see win. It was harmless. There weren’t all the standards back then, everything all precise. My dad could read where the ball broke into the pocket after three frames, tops.

Everybody talked about going on tour back then, but it wasn’t any great life. Living out of motels, driving all night, and sure, someone was sponsoring you, but if you didn’t do well you didn’t make any money. Meanwhile you’re paying your entrance fees and expenses. Some guys slept in their cars right there in the bowling center parking lot, ate beans and tuna out of a can, just squeaking by. When you’re cranking strikes all day long on your hometown lanes, everybody loves you, they’re all rooting for you. Then you get out on the road and you can’t read the lanes, and you’re not sleeping well and probably drinking too much. Nobody knows you, and they don’t care whether you win or lose like back home. Actually, they’re hoping you’ll lose because they’re rooting for their hometown hero. Guys get so nervous they throw the ball away. I remember it happened to my father once. It happened to Barry Asher. And I saw it happen to Joe Wycheski, like everyone else around here. But that came a lot later, and I made my peace with it.

And the point. The point is how I got back here. All this leads to it. My old man had gotten to like betting too much, not just on alley matches but anything. Track, cards, baseball. He’d get nervous when he lost bets and start drinking. The drinking ruined his game and then he’d drink more, depressed for losing.

After a while, he had people after him for money. Two big slabs came to our door one night. He was on the road, and I wasn’t with him that time because I had the pin-setting job at the State. Walt hadn’t enlisted yet so this would have been about ’43. I was eleven. The knock woke me up, but not Walt, who could sleep through anything. I followed my mother into the living room and watched her open the door. They didn’t wear those undertaker suits like in the movies; they looked like they were ready to go hunting, trousers tucked into mud boots and caps pulled down over their sausage faces.

My mother stared at them for about two seconds; they didn’t even have a chance to say anything. She’d grown up on a farm outside Castalia, but she wasn’t a fool. She said, “Wait a minute, I think I got some grocery money.” They just shuffled their feet and shook their heads; she’d embarrassed them. She pulled her purse off the table by the door, and we all watched her digging through it. One of the bricks said, “We’ll come back, Mrs. Florida.” But she had some bills in hand now.

“No, take it; it’s fine.”

The other brick said, “Mr. Florida is man enough to pay us outright, we have faith in that. We don’t need to take no food from your children.” And then he smiled at me like as if we were all friends now. Or like as if he was going eat me. I wanted to slit his pudgy throat. I wished he’d just taken the money instead of pretending he was doing us a favor.

They stepped back from the door, tipping their caps and such, and then they were gone. My mother shut the door, and when she turned around, she had this flat look in her eyes like as if she didn’t even recognize me. I’d never seen that look before. She told me to go to bed, but I just stood there. She said, “Go on!” I shuffled down the hall and sat on my cot, and I thought I’d be sick, I was so mad. I decided then that I wouldn’t have any weaknesses. I wouldn’t be blowing my cash or drinking it. But I was just a kid. It seemed simple to live straight.

When I came in Walt was sleeping facedown on his pillow, arms hanging on either side of his bed like fat ropes. He’d just graduated and was working at Engineered Fittings under our father, and he smelled like hot metal and grease all the time. He didn’t have anything to say to me anymore. So I made another decision right then. I was getting out of there. I didn’t want any factory job. I didn’t want to dole out an allowance to any woman, and I sure as hell didn’t want kids who sat in their dark bedrooms and hated me.

A few months after that, Walt enlisted and got sent straight to Normandy. He lived through that somehow and then did officer training and went to Korea. Sometime after that he got married, and then he was one of the advisors sent over to Vietnam in 1961, four years before they got official with the combat troops. I was thirty by then so he would’ve been thirty-seven. We hadn’t talked in years. I wouldn’t have known he was over there if our mother hadn’t let it drop and said it was a secret.

Then, just before Christmas that year, he died for six days.

By that time, I’d been out on my own more than ten years. I’d left when I was eighteen, figured I’d bowl my way around the country. I hadn’t been home except for a holiday here and there, and if it hadn’t been for Walt’s wife getting the visit from the base officer and the chaplain, hats in hand, I might never have come back.

Because at that point, I was doing pretty good. On the road, life was tournaments and match play and betting. I didn’t drink much, and I stayed smooth. I took on big-hooking crankers like Carmen Salvino, who was younger than me, and stylists like Earl Anthony, and everything in between. Saw Junie McMahon, who had to have the smoothest delivery in bowling—Salvino said you could balance a glass of water on the man’s head. Might as well have been scotch because the guy drank himself to death. Back then, the game was simpler but tougher. You won on skill, not your gear.

How my mother tracked me down with the news about Walt, I don’t know. I was in Minneapolis for a pro-am, sleeping on someone’s couch. But a mother has a way of finding you. I took the train home the next day.

The story was, Walt’s wife had planned to stay with my parents over Christmas anyway because she didn’t have any family. But then the news came, and so she came earlier than planned.

Louise was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother when I walked in. I went to kiss my mother, and I thought she’d be crying. But her eyes were dull. She looked like as if she hadn’t slept for weeks.

Louise had on a blue dress, and her hair hung down her back like a girl’s. She wore a thin gold chain with a locket that sat in the dip between her collarbones. She didn’t even look sixteen. She had freckled skin, the kind that sunburns easy. Her eyes were almost the same deep blue as her dress. She stood, and she was about as tall as me, and she faced me chin up like as if she was waiting for some kind of inspection.

We shook hands and she said pleased to meet you. Close up, I could see she wasn’t a child. Lines around her eyes and mouth—smile lines. That was a good sign.

“Pleasure’s mine,” I said. What I always said when I met a woman. But I knew that was wrong. There wasn’t any pleasure in that room.

She sat back down, and I worked my way around the table to get a glass of water. Mostly to have something to do. I didn’t want to look at my poor mother’s face. It was so tight in there Louise had to wedge her chair in to let me by. Her hair smelled like some kind of flower, I wanted to know what.

My mother told me my father was in back, which meant I was supposed to go see him. I made some small talk with Louise first, asked her how her trip went, because I didn’t want to be dismissed like a boy in front of her. I was thirty years old, for chrissakes, and my mother was telling me where to go the minute I walked in the door.

Louise said that Walt and me had a nice room growing up. You-all. You-all had a nice room. Some southern accent.

“She’s staying in your old room,” my mother said, in case I couldn’t follow the conversation on my own. Then she stood up and turned her back to us and held onto the edge of the counter. I remember hoping she wouldn’t start crying, not because I was sorry for her, but because I didn’t want to have to comfort her. That’s the truth. So I just nodded to Louise and walked out the back door.

The old man had put down some limestone scrap in a path alongside my mother’s flowerbeds. It crunched under my feet like bones. It hadn’t been good between me and him for a long time. I’d idolized him as a kid, but the night those two jokers came to our door while he was out of town, that was when I stopped thinking his ass was gold. Pretty soon he figured that out and he stopped caring what I thought.

Walt was just like him, a worker and a drinker. He didn’t bowl, but he played all the other sports—football, basketball, baseball—so he didn’t compete with the old man. After high school, he’d left every morning with my father for work, both of them in their blue shirts, while I was still sitting there eating my toast before school. Walt would sneer at me as he walked out the back door to the car. He thought I was a waste of time. He and Dad went drinking after hours, buddies all around. When he enlisted, my father went around hangdog for months. Sure, he was worried for his son. But he also missed his buddy at work and at the bar.

Sometimes I thought my father only wanted one son. Walt and me shoved together. One son who played tough on the field and worked and drank, like Walt. One son who loved bowling, but who never wanted to be any other place in the world than this town, and never got better than his father.

In the shed, he was hunched on a low metal stool, toolbox between his knees, wiping down drill bits with a rag. He still had on his coveralls. He picked up another bit, worked it over, dropped it back in the bin. His face was spongy. His hair was thinner, and his hands shook, rubbing that rag.

He dropped the last bit in the case, clanged it shut. Took his time speaking to me. “You even give a shit?” he finally said. He looked up at me then, hands on his knees.

I turned and ducked my head under the door frame, looked back at the way I came. I could see my mother and Louise through the kitchen window. My mother was working at something at the sink now, and Louise was looking out, not at me, but at something, like as if she might try to bust through that glass. I couldn’t blame her.

I heard the scrape of the stool behind me. My father stood up slowly, wiping the rag on his hands. Wringing it. He took a stiff-kneed step. “I’m sick,” he said.

Times like that, I think women do better. A daughter might have gone over there, patted him while he cried. No shame in that. All I did was stand there. “Let’s go in,” I said finally.

He turned and put the palms of his hands on his work table. Like my mother hanging onto the kitchen counter. He shook his head slowly, his neck sunk down between the swag in his shoulders. He lifted one hand and waved me off. And I was happy to go.

After the news that night, Louise got up and said she was too tired to hold her head up anymore (mah head, she said), and she went straight into that room with Walt’s old model planes still hanging from the ceiling and my comic books slumped on the shelves, and she didn’t come out again until morning.

When she did get up, I was dead asleep on the couch. I opened my eyes, not sure where I was, just as she rounded the corner from the hallway into the kitchen. She was wearing that blue dress again, hair pulled back. It was like as if she was floating past my feet where they were propped on the couch arm. I sat up and rubbed my face. I had to piss but I didn’t want to wake up my parents. I hadn’t had to sneak to talk to a woman in a long time.

I found her opening cabinets quietly, one after the other.

“Help you find something?”

Her shoulders jerked up; I’d spooked her. She turned around and looked at me for a second, the way women do, sizing you up for whether you’ll be trouble for them or not. Maybe she could read it in me, the want rolled up like too much cash in my pocket.

“Looking for a coffee cup,” she said. Not smiling, but not nervous. Careful.

I got around the table, reached past her, and pulled down two.

“Thanks.” She turned on the faucet and filled up the teapot that had been sitting on the stove.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

She looked up at me, and I could see the fine hairs around her forehead and cheeks were damp; she’d washed her face and her cheeks were pink from it. And those eyes, bluer still because of her scrubbed skin. She said, “Boiling water for instant.”

“I don’t know if there is any.” I pulled the percolator and a can of coffee from the cabinet next to the sink, where my mother had always kept it. Amazing how things come back to you. I couldn’t remember what city I’d been in a week ago, but I knew where the damn coffeepot was in my parents’ house. I scooped the coffee into the metal cup, poured the water, and plugged it in.

She watched the coffee burble in the glass nub on top. “We drink instant on the base.”

“Where’s that?” I asked, and she glanced at me, like as if she didn’t quite believe that I didn’t know where she and my brother had lived, but that was the case.

“Fort Carson,” she said. “Near Colorado Springs. And how about you?”

“Pretty much all around.” I ignored the look she gave me, damn near rolling her eyes, like as if she was tired of hearing answers that didn’t tell you anything at all. I had to piss so bad I wanted to cross my legs. “So what’s it like out there?”

“Cold. It’s right at the base of the Rockies. The air is real fine and the snow is great for skiing, and it’s clear all the time,” she said. “Not like here.” She looked out the window—another gray day with the clouds hanging on the branches. No snow at least.

I heard that accent again. “Where are you from?”

“Arkansas. Pine Bluff. My daddy worked at the arsenal there.” She’d folded her arms like she expected me to question her on it.

Arkansas was one of those places with no shape for me. She could see it on my face.

“It’s near Little Rock. You sure don’t know your geography for a guy who’s been all around.” She raised an eyebrow at me, gave a hint of a smile. So she was in there somewhere, sense of humor and all.

“I don’t get south much.”

“They have bowling down there, you know.” She smiled again and bit her lip and looked down at her feet. She was wearing navy blue pumps and hose. I felt sorry for her, all dressed up in her schoolgirl clothes, waiting for her husband’s casket to arrive so she could have a funeral for him in a town she didn’t know, staying with near-strangers, even if it was his family.

The coffee was almost finished. I excused myself and snuck down the hall. I still remembered where every board creaked in that hallway. I shut the bathroom door quiet as a burglar and let loose, trying to aim just above the waterline. In the next room my father snored like an engine revving and dying over and over. I don’t know how my mother stood it. I put the lid down to muffle the flush and turned on a trickle of water to wash my hands and face.

I glanced into my old room on my way back down the hall. My mother had gotten rid of the cots and put in a double bed, probably for Walt and Louise’s visits. It took up most of the room and was already made up. I wonder if Walt had specifications on how she did that, too—quarter bounce and all that. On the floor next to the bed stood a brown hard-sided suitcase. A gray wool coat draped over it, a navy beret on top of that. Ready to be picked up and carried out the door at any moment.

In the kitchen Louise stood with her back to me, looking out at the backyard. She cut a narrow line in the room, and I came in quiet so I could look at her longer before she turned around. I’d been with women a lot more beautiful than her. Big-busted, full mouths, thick red hair—I had a thing for redheads, that’s true. I’d been with women who knew how to do anything you wanted, and they weren’t whores; they just wanted to have a good time. That’s all I thought I wanted. I figured people just married when they decided it was time. And I didn’t want that, no way and never.

Standing in the doorway, I wasn’t sure I wanted to give up finding myself in a raggy motel with a woman named Babette who had a mole on one breast like an extra nipple. I’d met her at the Arcade Lanes in St. Louis. Babette, with her big tits and the third nipple and her wide hips bearing down on me before I even got my pants off—goddamn. I tried to remember what Louise and I had even been talking about before. She turned around, and I remembered—the base in Arkansas, where her father worked.

“So what’d he do?” I asked her, reaching for the coffeepot.

“What?”

“Your father.”

She looked at me like as if she was trying to figure out what I was asking—strange, because it was a straightforward question.

“He worked in the biological munitions plant there. Only one in the country,” she said, and then she was the proud daughter, arms folded over her girl breasts.

“That must’ve been something,” I said. I poured the coffee. “How do you like it?”

“Just black.”

“No sugar, even? Never met a woman who didn’t take at least a little.” I smiled at her and handed her the cup, and she just looked back at me, all serious.

“Walt got me to learn to do it,” she said, blowing over the rim. “He said we had to be able to do without.”

Everything about him came back to me then. The way he used to look at me like I was a stray he wanted to kick when he walked out in the morning with Dad. The way he used to grunt at our mother when he wanted something. She’d never complained, or at least not in front of us. She just did what was expected. Women pour themselves out for you, but I didn’t know that yet, standing in the kitchen that morning with Louise. What I did know was that I wasn’t sorry my brother was dead, because he’d made his wife do without sugar. Just because he could, and she’d obey him, because that was what she’d promised to do. It was a small thing. Maybe it even made her feel better, thinking of that instead of the idea of him gone and her alone. Where was she going to go? She must have been scared, standing there in her pumps with it barely even light out yet, like she had some kind of plan. More likely she didn’t have slippers and didn’t want to go out of her room barefoot to hunt up coffee and drink it bitter like Walt wanted her to.

It was a small thing. But that’s what life narrows down to. One time I decided to catch a train rather than ride with two guys to the next tourney, because even though I was almost out of cash, I was too tired to leave at four in the morning. And it turned out they died an hour out of Buffalo. Hit a patch of ice and then a truck. Most things we do don’t seem to count for much, but sometimes they do. My mind snagged on that sugar.

“There’s plenty,” I said, scooping a spoonful.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I like it this way now.”

I dumped it in my cup, even though I could take it or leave it, and right then the phone started ringing and it didn’t stop for the rest of the day.

By midmorning, the house was filled with women, and in spite of the cold, they spilled out into the yard, the street, even. This wasn’t visiting hours or anything official. This is what people did in our town back then. After the first shifts let out, the men showed up and sat out back and drank and smoked. By then, the women were hip to hip in the kitchen. The windows were steamed from food cooking on and in the stove, the table crowded with casseroles and sliced meats and pastries. There were children all over the place. I’d walk through the living room and one would slam face-first into my thigh, bounce on his bottom and get up tearing off somewhere else. The older folks, people from mass whose faces I recognized but whose names I’d forgotten, sat in the living room on the couch and on the kitchen chairs someone had thought to drag out there, to make more room. There were people on the swing and in lawn chairs on the stoop, standing in clumps on the lawn—mothers letting their kids run wild. I recognized a few of them, too, from high school. Girls I’d tried to get somewhere with had three kids now, and their husbands looked my father’s age.

My brother’s body was supposed to get there in two days. I guess all those people were good for my mother, to give her something to do. From the backyard I saw her through the kitchen window, moving back and forth from the oven to the table, wearing a dark gray dress and a green apron, gray being as close as she could maybe let herself get to black at that point. Walt’s was the first war casualty in our town since Korea, and we weren’t even supposed to be at war. It had everyone whipped up, though. You didn’t have a town more ready to get into that jungle right then than Sandusky.

As the day went by, I stayed most of the time with the men out in the back, watching my father drink himself bloodshot. I took a couple of sips from the flasks that were going around, just to be social.

“We ought to fix them up but good over there,” said Horace Schlemmer, one of the guys my dad worked with. He was drunk, his talk thick.

My father nodded and stared at the ground. He drew the tip of his boot across the dead grass, back and forth, back and forth, all the men watching him, his grief on display.

“What do you say, Leo?” said Rich Neidermeyer, another Engineered Fittings guy, retired by then.

I looked at him. “About what?”

“Those Viet Cong, they call themselves. Gooks.” He was red-faced, bottle choked in his fist.

“They’re all gooks, aren’t they?” I meant nobody here would know the difference between Viet Cong and a rice farmer, and apparently that was a problem over there. If officers on the ground couldn’t figure it out, we sure as hell weren’t going to.

But Neidermeyer read me wrong. “Yeah, you’re right,” and he grinned mean. “We oughta kill them all.”

I’d dated his daughter in high school. Kept her legs tighter than a lockbox.

Then Horace asked about my game, and I said it was as good as it could be, which was the truth. I was doing the circuit, winning here and there. But I could feel my old man watching me. He’d said before that I’d be back when I’d starved long enough. I knew what I’d see if I looked at him. Too bad I didn’t get it yet, that’s what he was thinking. I ought to put in for a spot on the facers at the plant, get in at the bottom and work up like any other man with sense. Start a family. Give in and give up like he did.

“Must be nice out there, a different town every day,” Horace said.

“Has its merits.” But I knew as soon as I’d said it that I’d had enough. I wasn’t ready to quit just yet, but I wasn’t getting any better, neither. There was a new crop of guys coming in, eighteen- and twenty-year-olds, as hot and driven as I’d been. They’d only ever rolled on oil, never had to get over shellac they used to use on the lanes. Almost everyone my age had either gone full pro or left to get some real wages.

People started clearing out at about ten. Around here, that was practically an all-night vigil. A few of my dad’s cronies stuck around in the backyard. When they moved to the shed, I hung back. Someone pulled the string on the bulb, and it glowed like a hot piece of metal. I headed for the house. I figured they were going to pass some whiskey and my father’s tools around and mutter back and forth, like a bunch of nuns working their rosaries.

Inside, my mother, Louise, and the wives of the men out in the shed were cleaning up. One wife was at the sink, washing dishes, one was loading the refrigerator, and one was picking up everywhere else. My mother and Louise were drying dishes. It was hot as hell in there, and they all looked exhausted. I stood against the wall to keep out of the way.

My mother asked me what I needed.

“Here, take a beer, make some room in here,” Mrs. Loden said, pulling one out of the fridge. She church-keyed it before I had a chance to answer and passed it to me across the kitchen table. She was short and curly-haired like her husband. I thought that was pretty funny, how married couples got to looking so much alike. I wondered what Louise would look like years from now. I watched her reaching up to put away some heavy bowls, the lift in her ribs, the way her dress hung on her hips. Sweat dark under her arms. She and Walt certainly didn’t look anything alike, with his bulk and the red hair he’d gotten from our mother. I was short and dark like my father. And Walt’s the one who got her, I thought. I shouldered the wall. I didn’t need any more beer but I drank it. I figured I’d turn out like my father after all, an old drunk.

“Sit down, honey,” my mother said. I looked at her and she pointed to a chair. Mrs. Schlemmer had put the chairs back at the table right under my nose and I hadn’t noticed. Louise smiled at me, but the smile was one she might give to clerks and delivery boys. I nodded to her and sat down at the table, jamming myself in close. I could see myself in that same spot as a kid eating cereal, metal edge at my chest. I could see Walt letting me help build a plane with him. He might have been twelve or thirteen then, and still willing to tolerate me. I could see my father heaving buckets of cement we hand-mixed for the foundation of the shed out back, how good it felt to come in and be fed and watered, as my mother had put it, farm girl that she was.

I said, to no one in particular, “I’m not the one ought to be sitting.”

“Well, you’re no use in here,” Mrs. Schlemmer said. She didn’t mean anything by it except to say I wouldn’t be allowed to help, which was fine by me.

“That’s about all of it, then,” Mrs. Neidermeyer said, shaking water off her hands at the sink. She picked up a towel to finish the silverware.

“You all go,” my mother said. “You’ve done enough.”

Louise looked at the ceiling. I thought she was rolling her eyes. I thought there might be some snap in her yet. She reached for the wall behind her, like she meant to lean against it, but then her knees buckled and she sat down hard on the floor. My mother went to her but Mrs. Schlemmer and Mrs. Neidermeyer were faster. Mrs. Schlemmer wedged herself between Louise and the counter, each of them taking her under the arm.

“You sit down before it happens to you, too,” Mrs. Loden said to my mother. “Both of you,” she said to me. I was on my feet again and hadn’t realized it.

I kept standing and my mother did, too, but with her back to me so she could face Louise. She said her name with a question in her voice.

Louise turned her head from side to side a couple of times as the women hoisted her to a chair. Her face was white, greenish at the tops of her cheeks.

“Now, put your head between your knees and I’ll put on some water,” Mrs. Schlemmer said. She slammed the teapot on the burner. “It’ll settle you.”

Louise leaned forward. She was at the other end of the table from me. Mrs. Neidermeyer stayed behind her, spotting her so she wouldn’t fall to one side or another. All I could see was the narrow hump of her back. Mrs. Loden pulled tea cups from the cabinet but didn’t offer me one. I got a couple of looks from the women. It was clear they wanted me out. Even my mother wanted rid of me. “Your father all right?”

“He’s fine.” I took another sip of my beer. I’d been trying all night to get away from him. “Can I help with anything?” I asked.

This was ignored. Mother asked, “Louise, do you feel sick?”

“No,” the answer came, muffled, from her knees. “Just tired, really.”

I caught the women trading looks. Then I got it. They thought she was pregnant, and they wanted me gone so they could ask her about it. I watched the ridge of her spine rise and fall.

“Would you like some help into bed?” Mrs. Neidermeyer asked Louise loudly.

I stood up. I could see her nodding into her lap. I looked down at her back and damp hair, and she seemed too small to be a mother, folded over like that.

“I hope you feel better,” I said.

She lifted her head. Her face had started to get back its color. “Thank you,” she said, and the women hauled her out of the room.

After that, the women left one by one, bustling out the back door to collect their drunk husbands. My parents went to bed and the house finally went silent, but I couldn’t sleep, even after all the beer. It was all I could do to keep from sneaking the few steps from where I was camped on the couch down the hall to peek in the door of my old room, like as if maybe I could tell what was in her just by watching her sleep. I could feel the idea of taking care of her settling in my bones and joints. It made sense to me, down to the root of myself, and I knew I would try to do it.