Читать книгу Touch and Go - Thad Nodine - Страница 6

As Ray and I hopped up our driveway, panting, the strike of his shoes and my boots echoed from the stucco siding. I heard the lilt of Isa’s voice inside, which made me plant both feet on the ground. With Ray tugging my arm, however, I didn’t have long to linger. If I didn’t tell anyone, I reasoned, how could Isa know I’d been let go? Ray pushed open the door.

“I don’t want to travel with that thing,” Isa sang out, her voice restless and uneasy. “It’s morbid. It gets in my head.”

As I stepped onto the threshold behind Ray, nudging him into our stale air conditioning, he resisted. I wanted the escape of my room, but now Ray wouldn’t budge. Our front door opened to a seam between kitchen linoleum to the right and family-room carpet to the left, as if the doorway had been built before the rooms were laid out. To the right of the entry, a spot where the linoleum buckled meant two steps to the kitchen table, plus three more to my room, depending on the odd chair in the way.

Before us on the linoleum lay a startling sight, I know now. But at the time, I assumed it was Isa’s tone that made Ray hold back; he hated confrontation. His mother had died almost a year ago, and his dad was in Soledad, a maximum-security prison—that was how he’d come to us.

“It’s a business investment,” Patrick said irritably. “Every time I have a breakthrough, every time I show initiative, every time I come up with an original idea to put food on this table, you have to bring me down. Have a little faith, for God’s sake.”

Patrick was thirty-eight and was always trying pyramid schemes and so-called business investments to get rich quick. For the past six months, most of 2005, he’d been trying to sell prefabricated homes, but they hadn’t taken off as quickly as he’d expected. Before the modular units, it had been Japanese kitchen knives, which he’d bought below wholesale, from an importer facing bankruptcy, and tried to sell to housewives. He still had sixty in slim wooden boxes in the hallway. Before cutlery, it had been obscure bones, most of which he’d bought in Mexico and smuggled across the border for resale as juju, or fetishes, to fortune-tellers and kooks, as far as I could tell. He’d participated in an archaeological dig in Mexico years ago and claimed to have smuggled Aztec jawbones into California for a professor. He said he carried stingray barbs, python vertebrae, and coon bones, but I never trusted what was in the cardboard boxes stacked in the corner of his room. Once, when he was away, I opened a box, expecting to find human-like tibias or femurs, but the bones I felt were thin and brittle, gritty, like whittled chunks of chalk.

This was soon after we’d moved in together, Isa, Patrick, and I. When they were applying to be foster parents, he hid the boxes from the people at Children and Family Services and said he was an under-employed cook, which was true; he’s the best cook I’ve ever known. He’d studied to be a chef somewhere back East or in the South—he was always vague about where. Before Isa and I met him, he worked in some top kitchens in L.A., but he could never keep that kind of job, where he had to get along with lots of people in a crowded space and submit to a chain of command. He started doing speed and blow to stay on top of things. And when he was high, he couldn’t stop his mouth. He would make snide remarks that undermined the head chef or humiliated his coworkers. That’s what he told us at Channel House.

As I look back now, I sometimes wonder: if Patrick had been able to run his own kitchen—if he hadn’t stumbled into the consequences of his own youth—then maybe he’d be a more generous man.

But I doubt it.

“Of course I have faith in you,” Isa said to him, her voice thicker than before. “But I’m not talking about business. I’m talking about Daddy.”

“Sweetie, this is what he wants,” Patrick said, almost pleading. “Something handmade. Wooden. You told me so yourself.”

Their voices came from the kitchen, from near the table. I heard no footsteps; no one seemed to be moving or acknowledging Ray and me in the doorway.

“I ain’t going to Florida,” Devon declared from the opposite direction, from the family room, somewhere beyond the couch. “With or without that thing.”

What thing? I wondered. What had Patrick taken up now? I took a step past Ray along the seam between the living room and kitchen.

“Let’s see what Kevin thinks,” Isa said, as if I’d just appeared.

“Kevin,” Patrick said sarcastically. “Now there’s business savvy.”

“Why can’t I stay home with Kevin?” Devon complained, trying to sound tough but coming off as whiny. “I’m off probation. I passed every class last year. I hooked myself a job. You guys treat me like a sucker.” At sixteen years old, he was taller than any of us, six foot two, and bony at the elbows but filling out his biceps. “Black as Mississippi mud,” Patrick had told me several times, though how would I know that color?

As I took off my hat, a hand touched my arm, startling me. Then I smelled Isa’s perfume. Woody. Like sweet wine.

Sometimes I hear people’s steps, sometimes not, depending on the room, the footwear, and my focus. Ray was easy to decipher, with his quick, fidgeting steps. Devon usually dragged his feet, shuffling in long strides, as if the bother exceeded the effort—unless he was wearing flip flops, and then he slapped the floor, which gave the same long strides a sense of urgency. Patrick’s pace I couldn’t predict: brisk and controlled one moment, silent and cunning the next. When Isa was wearing her wedge sandals or boots, she walked with soft thuds I liked to hear. But when she was barefoot, she could slip up on me, like Patrick could, but with different effect.

Ray leaned toward Isa as she hugged him with a flourish. I’d always loved that about her, the way she could dote and incite with a touch. But I pulled away, not trusting my reactions. She tugged me toward her and gave me a quick hug, brushing her side into me, setting off tingles. I couldn’t help it; my head drifted as I thought of my lost job. Would I ever be able to sustain myself? Would I always be dependent?

“What’s the matter?” she said. “What happened to you?”

I collected myself, stiffening. “Nothing. What? Nothing. What are you guys talking about?”

Ray swept by me, disappearing. Was he still holding Charlie? I closed the front door.

“You never listen to me!” Devon complained. “I ain’t going!”

“You raise your voice once more . . .” Patrick said, letting his threat hang there.

Patrick was always threatening without filling in the blanks, so he couldn’t be held accountable. He called himself a Christian Libertarian; I don’t know if he invented the term or got it from somewhere, but it gave him a belief system (after the recovery home, anyway) that was open and rigid at the same time. As a Libertarian, he believed in maximum freedom—under God, which was the Christian side of the equation. Take it or leave it; it’s up to you whether you want to be saved, but don’t try to butt in on Patrick’s freedoms. For him, free choice was the right of all Americans to make their own stupid mistakes and be damned to Hell if they didn’t correct their ways. That was the genius of the American Christ.

Yet he expected us to do as he said. He loved to talk about smuggling of all kinds, ripping off the government, treating neighbors with respect so long as they stayed on their side of the fence, obeying the laws that mattered, patrolling the borders of this great country, and leaving a better world than you inherited. He wasn’t muscular so much as solid. He had a shotgun locked in his closet. I’d felt the threat of his grip on my arm plenty of times. I still think of him as sinew and gristle.

Isa, on the other hand, was a dream I couldn’t make real and couldn’t quite get over. In the doorway, she took my hat from my hand. I meant to touch the small of her back but found her hip instead so that half my hand felt her soft skin, the other half touched her belt and hip huggers. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself: I dipped two fingers just beneath the waistline of her jeans, aware of Patrick in the kitchen. Could he see? Was he looking at his wife? It had been over a year since I’d touched her like that, and I’d never done it in front of him. I chided myself even as I relished the touch of her warm skin. Hadn’t she just brushed her body into mine? Why couldn’t I be affectionate and flip-pant too, particularly now, after losing my job?

“You can’t make me go,” Devon muttered in a low voice that was plenty defiant. “I’m staying with Kevin.”

Back then I knew Devon better than Ray, even though Ray had lived with us a month longer. I liked playing guessing games with Ray and listening to the pitter-patter of his steps; I helped put him to bed almost every night. But he was reluctant to say much, so I gave him space. People told me he had a winning smile.

Devon, on the other hand, was a verbal jouster who liked to go at it, which played to my available senses. When he first came to us, he kept to himself—who wouldn’t with strangers? He grunted when spoken to, but that was the same as most teenaged boys I’d been around. As soon as he began opening up, his attitude got under Patrick’s skin, but it didn’t bother me, though I’ll admit I never saw his grimaces or gestures. He started calling me Cowboy Bob, but that didn’t get a rise out of me. “Watch out for my shit-kickers,” I told him, smiling and raising my boot. “They have a mind of their own.”

After a couple of months, I could tell I unsettled his preconceptions. I wasn’t a threat, for one thing, or an authority figure. Yet I wasn’t a kid either. I had a marginal status of my own. And I was a reporter—he respected that. He started saying I had mad skills getting around. “That shit’s harder than being black,” he admitted.

“What color are you again?” I said.

He didn’t respond right away. Then he said, “People see you. You got that white cracker thing going even if you can’t see it. It’s like a virus, the way it spreads. Gets in everything.” He could be perceptive and articulate that way. All year, in his school essays, I tried to help him draw that out, when he would let me.

Devon had been with other families before he lived with us. His mom had been sent to minimum security at Chino for identity theft, and she had two more years to serve. He hated but had never known his father—a white guy who’d screwed his mom and left them both. About a year and a half ago, when he was a skinny fifteen-year-old, he’d tried to take on a football linesman at school who had called his mom a whore. The white kid beat the shit out of Devon, giving him a black eye and a bruised rib. But it was Devon who got busted. A blunt—a cigar hollowed out and filled with weed—fell out of his shirt pocket during the fight. Those few grams on school grounds, his testy demeanor, and a host of priors sent him to Juvenile Camp for six months.

When he came to us, he was transferred to Monterey High, a continuation school. In the second semester—the recent spring—an English teacher found that if he let Devon read about rebels and strife, he’d stop challenging everything under the sun and focus on the readings, which sparked other kids’ interest. Devon devoured The Autobiography of Malcolm X, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and On the Road. I listen to books all the time. When I was a kid, cassette tapes from the library saved me—mysteries at first and then anything I could find, as long as it had a story that took me places. Sometimes Devon and I would sit and talk—“choppin’ it up,” he called it. We’d start with whatever he was reading and end up arguing about politics or race or religion. He began to figure out how to come around the other side of an argument instead of attacking full tilt all the time. But when he got backed into a corner, he liked the shock of a personal affront. “You are one well-read exaddict,” he told me once, “if you count shit like books on tape.”

Those quips pissed off a lot of people, but they made me smile. They endeared him to me, and I often found myself wanting to protect him—tough as he pretended to be—from Patrick’s quick tongue and oddball needs.

Still standing in the doorway with my hand on Isa’s hip, I heard from the kitchen the crisp sound of a page turning. Patrick sometimes read at the kitchen table, arcane books about outlandish thefts from archaeological sites or the battle to secure the border. But if he was reading now, I knew it was for effect: Was it to piss off Devon? Or to feign indifference to my touching his wife? Or to hide his anger at Isa?

I swept my hand up to Isa’s back just before she pulled away and I was left standing alone, without Charlie or my hat.

“It’ll be good to get out of L.A.,” Patrick said from the kitchen table. He probably had his back turned, his head in the book. “You’ll learn something about yourself.”

“Right,” Devon scoffed. “From adults like you.”

“Don’t push me, boy,” Patrick said evenly.

“Don’t call me ‘boy’!” Devon said slowly, mimicking Patrick’s tone.

They had never come to blows, but they’d blustered plenty lately.

“Stop it, you two,” Isa said.

Patrick turned another page. “You’re still a boy,” he said dismissively, “whether you like it or not.”

“Kevin,” Isa said, “come look.”

“Like I can see.”

“You know what I mean,” she said lightly, trying to distract everyone, I knew. That was one of her blessings: her generous spirit, the way she tried to bring us all together.

I walked across the linoleum toward my room.

“Stop!” Patrick called.

The stiff toe of my boot struck, not hard but squarely, against something heavy. Thank goodness for my dumb-ass boots, I thought. My foot didn’t hurt at all.

Devon laughed.

“What the hell!” Patrick said. His chair scraped on the floor. “I bet you chipped it.”

I leaned down, reaching. It was a massive box of some kind. Almost up to my waist. Wooden. With carved patterns on the side.

“Look at that smudge from your boot,” Patrick said.

“What is it?” I said.

“A coffin,” Devon said sarcastically. “He wants to take this dog to Florida.”

“Look at the carvings!” Patrick said. “One of a kind. Hand-carved maple. Her dad said he wants something different. Not those ready-made boxes that cost a mint and have shiny handles.” He spoke rapidly, the excitement real.

“Kevin,” she said, “don’t you think it’s morbid to take it to Daddy?”

I crouched and felt along one side: varnish or lacquer made the surface slick and smooth. My fingers traced a raised cross with intricate embedded patterns of lines and angles. Its juncture was encircled by a halo. Along the edges of the cross, the wood was chiseled away like little waves.

“Wow,” I said.

“How much did it cost?” Isa asked. “You promised not to use the credit card anymore.”

“That’s the beauty,” Patrick said. “His estate will pay for it. We’re going to make money on this baby. We can’t lose.”

Beyond the cross, I touched a horizontal figure carved in relief, wings outstretched, feet protruding from a flowing frock, a long trumpet from its mouth. “An angel,” I said. I brought my fingers over her slowly, across the feathers of her wings and the folds of her frock. Her hair blew back as if in a breeze. Her eyes laughed, her cheeks full from puffing the trumpet. I liked that; she felt alive.

“I’m going to sell them to funeral parlors,” he said. “People are going to love these babies. And I’ve got the sole franchise.”

My fingers came across Ray’s small hands; he was feeling the casket too. I thought about his mother, gone less than a year: Had he seen her in a coffin? As I gripped his hand softly, he pulled away like in the game we sometimes played—grabbing hands at the kitchen table. Or was he upset? I couldn’t tell.

“What’s inside?” Ray said.

Patrick ignored him. “What do you think, Kevin?” He wanted my approval.

Past the angel, there was a second cross. Symmetrical. An angel in the center, with an ornate cross on either side of her. “Where’d you get it?” I asked.

“An old carpenter in the San Gabriel Mountains. You should’ve seen all the coffins he had lying around. Like a museum. And sculptures and weird old things. He even had bones.”

“Stop it!” Isa said. “You’re not selling bones again.”

“It won’t open,” Ray said.

“There’s two latches,” Patrick said.

I heard two crisp snaps as the telephone rang.

“Wow!” Ray said.

“Looks like Christmas,” Devon said, laughing.

“That is so cheesy,” Isa said. “It’s tasteless.”

“That’s why I love it,” Patrick said. “It’ll sell.”

As the lid had opened, a string of pin lights that were nestled in the seams of the fabric had flashed on inside the coffin. But I didn’t know that then. I thought they were talking about the material.

The phone rang again.

I felt the cushioned fabric inside. Satin. Soft as clouds. My fingers brushed against Ray’s hands, which flitted about, but I didn’t feel the pin lights.

“Fine,” Isa said. “Sell them around here. We’re not driving this to Florida.” Her voice shifted to her phone politeness: “Hello?”

“The carvings feel great,” I said to Patrick, “but you can’t take this to her dad. It’s rotten luck. He’s not dead yet.”

“What the hell do you know?” he said.

“Quiet!” Isa boomed. “It’s Daddy!” Her voice turned to sugar: “Don’t say that, Daddy. You’ll be fine.”

We could all hear the tinny voice of the old man raving: “The steroids they’ve got me on. Plugged up. Jesus!”

“We’ll be there soon,” Isa said. Her voice was thin now, precarious.

“It’ll be too late!” he said. “You’re always too late, Isa.”

What a bastard, I thought.

“We got you a casket like you wanted,” she offered. “It’s beautiful.”

“I won’t have those metal boxes!” he said. “I need something that rots, goddamn it. I’m going to buy it myself.”

“It’s handmade, Daddy,” Isa said. “Wooden. Daddy!” After a moment, I realized she was sniffling. “Why does he always hang up?” she said.

Patrick didn’t move; I could hear him breathing next to me. I wanted to walk over and hold her, but how could I, with him there? Instead I felt with my foot for the bulge in the kitchen linoleum. Then I beelined to my room and shut the door on them all.

Over the next week and a half, I kept up the facade of working for the newspaper, which was easier than I had expected in a house of distractions. Most of the time, Ray stayed at the Boys and Girls Club a few blocks away, where he could play basketball and air hockey with kids his age. Patrick was either on the phone or making the rounds to funeral parlors in Betsy, his old Taurus wagon, with the foot end of the casket sticking out the back. For several days, he tried to sell his one-of-a-kind coffins; then he tried to place them on consignment. He found the funeral industry to be a tight bunch.

Devon slept mornings; most afternoons, he worked at Target, his summer job. At night, he started pleading with me to run off with him. “Come on,” he said in the bathroom as I was brushing my teeth one night. “You’re sick of living here too.” For months he’d been borrowing my laptop and fooling around on the Internet, meeting people online through Friendster and Myspace. He wanted to run with me to San Francisco, San Diego, or Las Vegas—or wherever his online friends claimed to live. Ray’s quick footsteps found their way along the edge of the room.

I didn’t tell Devon it was a dumb idea. Or that I’d get arrested for kidnapping. I rinsed my mouth and put my toothbrush on my shelf. “Go to Florida,” I said. “You’ll come back here, and before you know it, you’ll have your high school diploma. You’ll find out soon enough how hard it is to be on your own.”

“I ain’t going to Florida,” he said.

“Quit using ‘ain’t.’ You might like Florida.”

“I’m down with Florida; it ain’t that,” he said. “It’s getting cooped up with this family.” He shuffled into the hallway and stopped. “One day you’ll wake up, and I’ll be gone. You too, Beavis Butthead.”

“I’m not Beavis Butthead,” Ray said from the hallway.

During those weeks, Isa would go off to bed with Patrick, but in the middle of the night, she’d slip from the back room around to the kitchen. I wasn’t sleeping well either, so when I heard a chair scrape on the linoleum, I’d get up, make tea, and sit with her, both of us hunched over the table. As everyone else slept, she would grip my hand, telling me how much she needed a listener; why couldn’t Patrick listen like I could? When she clutched my palm against her belly, my fingers tingled from her warmth. I breathed the salty sweetness of her skin.

Sometimes her hands trembled, and we sat in silence. Other times she raved in whispers about owing her life to Daddy—he’d saved her so often when she’d been lost. She told me stories about growing up in Florida—being spied on by her younger brother, doing art projects with her mom, and being groped at the real estate office by Daddy’s partner. Then she’d ramble and fret about wanting to bring Daddy peace. Her anxieties seemed minor compared with her depression the winter before, when she hadn’t gotten out of bed for two weeks. She lay unresponsive that time, sullen, as I tried to get her to sit up and drink tea or eat a cracker. I wanted to help her this time too; I knew Patrick didn’t have the patience.

I met Isa almost two years ago, when I came to Channel House, and I got to know Patrick about a month later, when he was admitted. I had just turned twenty-six, was about ten years younger than they were, and was the youngest person there. I first heard the lilt of Isa’s voice in group counseling, but I first spoke with her in a hallway, where she stopped me with a soft hand on my arm. I knew who it was before she spoke; back then she wore a cheap fragrance several traces too sweet.

I turned my face to hide my scar.

“You don’t have to be shy with me,” she said, bringing my chin forward with her hand. “You’re quite striking.” I drew her hand away from my chin because I wanted to touch her fingers, which were thin and long, with fingernails bitten too short. Her palm was soft.

“Do you know me?” she said.

“Isa,” I said.

She brushed full into me, enlivening my chest with her breasts before stepping back. “You’re cute when you blush. Do you know what I look like?”

I savored the lilt in her voice and her friendly laugh, but I figured she was playing to an audience, so I waited for the chuckles of others. There were none. No sounds of people at all. But still I couldn’t let myself relax. “Is that important,” I said, “how you look?”

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s more important how we feel.” She lifted my hand to her face and dragged my fingers through her hair. She let me feel her long neck and the way her throat trembled as she laughed. She traced my hand along her shoulders, arms, and thighs. Her skirt clung to my fingers as if the material were on my hand instead of her hips. My fingertips tingled, and my breathing quickened. She had on a halter top that was open in back and held her breasts like pendulums; I knew because she traced my fingers along her stomach and up under the fullness so pliable and resistant through the thin cotton—all of which made me grin like a goof.

“You’re cute,” she said again, as if surprised. “You don’t get to see anything; you might as well touch.” The way she laughed made me feel included.

I was touching the roundness of her hips when footsteps approached. “None of that at the House,” a counselor said. “There’s plenty of time after you’re clean. After you respect each other. After your graduation.”

“I respect him already,” Isa said. “Do you respect me?”

“I do respect you,” I said.

“You know what I’m talking about,” the counselor said.

Everybody at Channel House loved Isa; all the men did anyway. She liked to command attention by blustering into rooms. She and Patrick were drawn to each other as soon as they met; even I could tell. Patrick was a lot more fun back then, always making jokes. He was also more open about himself, but that’s the nature of a therapeutic community. When we were making moral inventories of ourselves—the fourth step—he admitted that he was weakest when he pretended to be strong. He chronicled the boozed-up fights he’d gotten into over nothing, the jobs he’d lost because of coke, the insults he’d thrown at people he loved. That was why he got tweaked all the time, he said, because it allowed him to forget his own mistakes and believe that everybody else was fucked up, not him. Isa loved that kind of honesty. She flirted and put him off, and he treated her like she was the world. He handled me like a kid brother, bringing me in on his secrets; he didn’t compete with me like he did with everybody else.

Isa and I graduated about six weeks before Patrick did. We got a place together, the two of us, a rental I called a deficiency because it was so small. Ever since I’d graduated from college, Mom and Dad had been badgering me to get a caregiver, someone to at least read my mail and help me pay my bills. I had a settlement from my accident—my blinding when I was a child—that my parents had managed when I was growing up. They got control of it again after my freefall in San Francisco, where I lived for just over two years—long enough to lose my job and my apartment. During the last six months, I lived on Casey’s couch and in the back of TBone’s van. They watched my back, and we all used my money. After Casey died, Dad had to fly out, bail me out of jail, and drive me down to Channel House in Burbank. When I graduated from the recovery home and still refused to move back to Greeley, Colorado, they got this advice from everyone: don’t give a crackhead any money. They insisted on paying my bills directly.

So I set up Isa to be my caregiver, and we invented a clean history for her. She had to interview with my parents by phone, but they took to her like everybody else did. They started sending her my monthly checks for room and board, plus a hundred dollars for helping me—as if I needed her help. The payments roughly equaled the interest from my account; I had to find my own income to purchase anything else. Mom flew from Colorado once to check on things, which I resented because it was obvious that she didn’t trust me. Or Dad didn’t. We had to hide Isa’s stuff and pretend she lived elsewhere. It made me feel like a kid.

Isa got a job waiting tables right away, but I couldn’t find work. I’d majored in journalism in college, and I’d written pieces of my life story at Channel House—as part of my moral inventory. I’d always liked writing, so I started doing street interviews along Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards, drawing from my experiences in San Francisco. I wrote several profiles of street characters, and the editor of the community paper printed one. When I came home and put that money on the table—it wasn’t much, but it was something—it was like we were together, Isa and I. I would change in the bathroom and sleep on the couch, but she could get dressed anywhere. She’d say, “It’s too hot for clothes,” or “All my panties are in the wash, so I’m getting some air.” We went to N.A. meetings every day, and that was when she started trying out churches and born-again revivals. She needed something, she said. Something to believe in. I’d hear her pull on a dress and take it back off, and I’d catch a drift of her hair just shampooed as she walked to the mirror. I love the swish of clothing against skin.

“How’s this look?” she’d say.

“It makes you look thin,” I’d say, or “I like the green one.”

“There isn’t a green one,” she’d say. “Look at you cultivating your trousers. You better go in the bathroom and elongate.”

On days when I was glum, she’d sing, “What can you see, Kevin? What can you see?” and I’d tell her things to lighten our mood: “I see a rose blossom opening its folds. I see a fog bank shrouding the moonlight. I see a butterfly unable to land.” They were visions, mostly, things I’d listened to in books and couldn’t quite picture.

Sometimes she’d let me massage her, unless I got fresh with my hands, which she’d slap away. “You’re my temptation,” she’d say. “But you know I’m waiting for Patrick. We need to get you a girl.” I had girl-friends in college, I told her, and a few one-nighters when I lived in San Francisco. But she knew I hadn’t been with anyone since.

During those nights at the kitchen table—with Isa obsessing about her dad and me feeling weak after losing my job—my affection for her began to simmer again. I’d succeeded in pulling away from her about the same time Ray and Devon had come to live with us, but now I felt myself sliding back. I told myself I didn’t love her even as I hungered for her verve and lack of restraint. I knew she was married and it was hopeless, but I was a fool. When Isa quivered and leaned against me, I tried not to feel the wisp of her hair on my neck or the prick of her fingernails on my skin. I tried not to sip the scent of bath soap mixed with perspiration on her arms. I did press my fingers against the silver cross on her breastbone, letting my hand touch the swell of her breasts. I massaged the tense spots along her shoulders and neck. I rubbed her forehead and temples. All to calm her, I told myself, not to caress her skin. She needed me.

As she worried and fussed, I excused her childish tone and her dips into born-again language. “With God’s grace,” she whispered, “I’m going to bring Daddy the mercy of Jesus to heal his judgmental nature. When people are tired of being broken and sick, Kevin, they’re ready for the spirit of God.” I knew lots of people who’d come out of recovery clinging to faith—even Patrick had his version. If God could dampen her bipolar swings, I thought, so be it.

It never occurred to me, in the midst of my compassion, that I was the one wracked with self-deception. I was always on the verge of letting her know about my job, but the moment never seemed right. I told myself I could live with Isa without loving her, even while pretending I could love her without showing it.

From those frustrating nights, I felt hungover during the days, and I grew more anxious about being left in the empty house as the day neared for them to drive to Florida. I could cook and care for myself; it wasn’t that. I was worried about keeping myself from relapse, particularly since I didn’t have a job. Each day my freelance work took me to avenues where people were using all the time. The more I spoke with street performers and the homeless, gaining their confidence for the interviews I would need for my articles, the more difficult it became to refuse their offers of nips and tokes. I felt my resolve slipping, so I attended daily N.A. meetings again.

I drafted two articles within ten days of being laid off: one about a sax player who’d lost everything in a fire and another about a seventeen-year-old girl from Indiana who’d run away to Hollywood and couldn’t go back home. I didn’t like either story; they offered only darkness. But I called the editor during that second week and left a message every day for three days, telling him I had the stories he wanted. He never returned my calls. On the fourth day, the afternoon of my twenty-eighth birthday, I called Cameron, the city reporter, who told me the editor wasn’t taking any freelance.

I heard myself thanking him. When I hung up, I threw my cell phone across my room into the wall.

The front doorbell rang. After a moment, it rang again.

“Get the damn door!” Patrick yelled from the kitchen.

“You get it!” Devon called from somewhere else.

Tossing on my bed, I convinced myself I was glad everybody was leaving for Florida the next day. Think of the quiet; I’d have two weeks to decompress from their stupid dramas. I should have moved out months ago, I told myself. What the hell had I been thinking, letting myself get sucked in by Isa’s needs again?

When the noises and smells from the kitchen could no longer be ignored, I resented in advance the cheap birthday card that Isa and the others would give me. The cake. The stupid song. If they remembered my birthday at all.

After a while, the kitchen quieted abruptly; feet shuffled outside my room. Then they banged at my door, laughing. I turned away on the bed, facing the wall, gripping my hands into fists. They came in uninvited, singing “Happy Birthday” out of tune, all except Isa, whose melodic voice I resented all the more. Devon poked my ribs, trying to make me laugh. I gritted my teeth. Ray scampered onto the bed.

“Get up!” Isa said.

I put on my dark glasses and faced them.

Ray hung around my neck, hugging me, bringing out a quick smile despite myself. They laid boxes all over my bed, startling me. I let myself breathe.

“Look at your clothes,” Isa said. “You never buy anything.”

Ray helped me open each box. They made me stand up and try on four shirts, including a seersucker that caught the hairs of my chest.

“Where’d you get the money?” I protested, but they ignored me.

“No more Cowboy Bob,” Devon said. He tugged me down on the bed, and I let them pull off my socks, though I pretended to struggle when they tugged at my jeans. They had me stand in my boxers so I could try on two pairs of baggy shorts that reached below my knees.

“Volcom,” Ray said.

“Sounds like a planet,” I said, though I knew it was surfwear. I couldn’t help smiling.

“Pull them down low,” Devon said, “like this. Show the top of your boxers.”

As if I didn’t know the style.

“I got you some new boxers with little surfer men,” Isa said with a friendly laugh. “But you have to try those on yourself.”

“These shorts are way too big,” I complained.

“They’re perfect,” Isa said.

They showed me how I could fit Charlie, folded, into the wide pockets of the shorts, though he protruded out the top. They had me sit on the bed so they could put sandals on my feet.

“Huaraches,” Ray said.

“They’re Mexican,” Patrick said.

“Warachas,” I said.

“Huaraches,” Ray corrected.

Devon put a cheap straw fedora on my head that was a touch big. I pulled the front brim down to hide my scar, and he lifted it back up, at an angle.

“There,” he said. “That looks better.”

I pulled it back down.

I grew up wearing Western gear in Colorado. I gave it up for army boots and black shirts when I started smoking weed in high school. About two years ago, when Dad bailed me out of jail in San Francisco, he didn’t lecture me about how bad I smelled or how skinny I was. He didn’t ask how I’d sunk so low so fast. We didn’t talk about what drugs I’d used or how long I’d been on the streets. He didn’t know how to talk about that stuff. He called ahead and got me into Channel House in Burbank. When he drove me down from San Francisco, we stopped along the way and he bought new clothes for me: cowboy boots and hat, as if I were still in middle school.

In my cramped room, I turned around in my new clothes and walked a few paces, feeling exposed without my Western boots, my toes unprotected from chair legs. And I missed my Bandit with its stiff Cattleman crown; I hated bumping my head. But my new clothes were cooler and more comfortable. I held up my arms and stamped my feet. I liked the feel.

“He looks like a tourist,” Isa said, laughing.

“We should have gotten you Ray-Bans,” Devon said. “You still look like a geek in those big glasses.”

I smiled. “I don’t know what to say,” I said. “Thank you.”

“And this just came,” Isa said. “It’s from your parents.” Ray helped me open the box. We reached in and pulled away the Styrofoam.

“What the hell is that?” Patrick said.

It was a Braille note-taker. Small, compact, perfect. Shaped like a large book but much lighter. Not quite as long as a regular keyboard. For almost a year, I’d been trying to convince my parents to buy me one from my own account; they cost over four thousand bucks. There were eight keys on top, plus a spacebar and some function keys. Along the front, beneath my wrists as I rested my fingers on the keyboard, was a one-line display where refreshable Braille dots would pop up in a row so that I could read what my fingers had just keyed in. No monitor needed. For the first time in my life, I could take notes without turning on a laptop. I could write from and edit my notes. I could read quietly. I could feel every comma and punctuation mark.

“I spoke with your mom a few weeks ago,” Isa said. “I told her this was the one you wanted.”

The irony suddenly overwhelmed me. To receive this—after losing my job as a reporter, after being rejected as a freelancer—was too much. I had to turn away—not to hide my scar but to wipe my face.

“Tell him,” Ray said, excited. I pulled Ray to me and hugged him.

“We want you to come to Florida,” Isa said.

Not a chance, I thought. No way.

“We know about your job,” she said. “There’s no reason for you to stay.”

I was pissed suddenly—that they’d pried into my life. What right did they have? And I was insulted that they’d kept their snooping from me.

“I saw you hanging out on Sunset with those bums,” Patrick said.

“I wasn’t hanging out,” I said. “That’s my beat!”

“I called the paper,” Isa said. “They said you didn’t work there anymore.”

“Come on,” Ray said.

“I’ll go if you go,” Devon said.

Isa sat on the bed and hugged me, but I wasn’t pulled in. Where would I sit in the car—in the backseat with the kids? What if I sat next to Isa all day, feeling her thigh against mine, her hand on my leg, with all of them in the car? I imagined Patrick always controlling where we stopped, what we ate, and when we went to the bathroom. “I need some downtime,” I said. “This’ll be a good trip for the four of you.”

“I ain’t going, then,” Devon said. “You already know what I’m going to do. Just don’t be surprised.”

“Let’s eat,” Patrick said, ignoring him.

“You’re coming!” Isa said. “We’re not leaving without you.”

They paraded me to the kitchen, where Patrick served my favorite meal, chicken and yellow rice, which made me imagine Mom back in Colorado; she always gave me an early taste on a hot wooden spoon.

“I’m starving,” Devon said. He was always eating; he’d grown three inches in his nine months with us.

We dipped our heads as Isa thanked Jesus for the food we were about to eat and for keeping Daddy well in Florida until she got there in time to save him, please Lord, as he’d saved her so many times, amen.

All through dinner, Ray asked questions about the trip. Patrick described cactus standing like sentries in Arizona. Thunderstorms rolling across New Mexico mesas. The friendly people in Louisiana. The unhurried sweep of the Mississippi.

“What about Texas?” I said. As a kid, I’d had a wooden puzzle of all the states. I could name the capital of each one.

“And Alabama,” Isa said. I’d forgotten that Alabama touched the Gulf.

“We’re going to blast through Texas at night,” Patrick said. “You won’t even see it.”

“Wait until you float in the Gulf in Pensacola,” Isa said. “There’s so much salt it holds you up like a cork. And it’s so warm, when you float in that water, it’s like the womb again. Everything feels right.”

Her eagerness surprised me; she hated the beach in California, claimed the water was too cold.

“Of course it feels like a womb,” Patrick said. “It’s where you were born.”

“She was born in the Gulf?” Devon quipped.

“We’re all born in a gulf,” Patrick said.

He brought out homemade chocolate mousse for dessert, with three candles that I had to blow out before they sank.

The chocolate astonished my mouth.

“Why’s it called ‘moooooooose’?” Ray said, laughing.

“Look at this!” Devon said, smacking his lips. “It’s as black as me.”

“You’re a mess,” Isa laughed.

“It’s the French word for foam,” Patrick said.

Was he making that up? He was always so sure of himself, I never knew when to trust him.

“You should both of you go to college,” Isa said. “Like Patrick.”

Had he gone to college? I thought he’d gone to chef school.

“Right,” Devon said, “so we can be unemployed cooks and sell coffins.”

I expected Patrick to snap back, but he kept his cool.

It was I who lost perspective. In a moment of chocolate weakness, I thought about my new note-taker and pretended that was why I needed to join them. I imagined Patrick selling a handmade casket to Isa’s dying father, the old man ranting as Isa floated in the womb of the Gulf, Devon goading the others into something rash, and Ray pitter-pattering along the edge of the fray. If I couldn’t come up with some edgy articles about this family journey, I decided, then what writer was I?