‘Sure.’
‘I will, too,’ John said.
We walked back to the trailer, leaving George and Kyra to play toss. Kyra was asking George if he had ever caught any crinimals. In the kitchen, Mattie was standing beside the open fridge and
stacking steaks on a platter. ‘Thank God you guys came in. I was on the point of giving up and gobbling one of these just the way it is. They’re the most beautiful things I ever saw.’
‘You’re the most beautiful thing I ever saw,’ John said. He was being totally sincere, but the smile she gave him was distracted and a little bemused. I made a mental note to myself: never compliment a woman on her beauty when she has a couple of raw steaks in her hands. It just doesn’t turn the windmill somehow.
‘How are you at barbecuing meat?’ she asked me. ‘Tell the truth, because these are way too good to mess up.’
‘I can hold my own.’
‘Okay, you’re hired. John, you’re assisting. Rommie, help me do salads.’
‘My pleasure.’
George and Ki had come around to the front of the trailer and were now sitting in lawn-chairs like a couple of old cronies at their London club. George was telling Ki how he had shot it out with Rolfe Nedeau and the Real Bad Gang on Lisbon Street in 1993.
‘George, what’s happening to your nose?’ John asked. ‘It’s getting so long.’
‘Do you mind?’ George asked. ‘I’m having a conversation here.’
‘Mr. Kennedy has caught lots of crooked crinimals,’ Kyra said. ‘He caught the Real Bad Gang and put them in Supermax.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Mr. Kennedy also won an Academy Award for acting in a movie called Cool Hand Luke.’
‘That’s absolutely correct,’ George said. He raised his right hand and crossed the two fingers. ‘Me and Paul Newman. Just like that.’
‘We have his pusgetti sauce,’ Ki said gravely, and that got John laughing again. It didn’t hit me the same way, but laughter is catching; just watching John was enough to break me up after a few seconds. We were howling like a couple of fools as we slapped the steaks on the grill. It’s a wonder we didn’t burn our hands off.
‘Why are they laughing?’ Ki asked George.
‘Because they’re foolish men with little tiny brains,’ George said. ‘Now listen, Ki — I got them all except for the Human Headcase. He jumped into his car and I jumped into mine. The details of that chase are nothing for a little girl to hear — ‘
George regaled her with them anyway while John and I stood grinning at each other across Mattie’s barbecue. ‘This is great, isn’t it?’ John said, and I nodded.
Mattie came out with corn wrapped in aluminum foil, followed by Rommie, who had a large salad bowl clasped in his arms and negotiated the steps carefully, trying to peer over the top of the bowl as he made his way down them.
We sat at the picnic table, George and Rommie on one side, John and I flanking Mattie on the other. Ki sat at the head, perched on a stack of old magazines in a lawn-chair. Mattie tied a dishtowel around her neck, an indignity Ki submitted to only because (a) she was wearing new clothes, and (b) a dishtowel wasn’t a baby-bib, at least technically speaking.
We ate hugely — salad, steak (and John was right, it really was the best I’d ever had), roasted corn on the cob, ‘strewberry snortcake’ for dessert. By the time we’d gotten around to the snortcake, the thunderheads were noticeably closer and there was a hot, jerky breeze blowing around the yard.
‘Mattie, if I never eat a meal as good as this one again, I won’t be surprised,’ Rommie said.
‘Thanks ever so much for having me.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. There were tears standing in her eyes. She took my hand on one side and John’s on the other. She squeezed both. ‘Thank you all. If you knew what things were like for Ki
and me before this last week . . . ‘ She shook her head, gave John and me a final squeeze, and let go.
‘But that’s over.’
‘Look at the baby,’ George said, amused.
Ki had slumped back in her lawn-chair and was looking at us with glazing eyes. Most of her hair had come out of the scrunchy and lay in clumps against her cheeks. There was a dab of whipped cream on her nose and a single yellow kernel of corn sitting in the middle of her chin.
‘I threw the Frisbee six fousan times,’ Kyra said. She spoke in a distant, declamatory tone. ‘I tired.’
Mattie started to get up. I put my hand on her arm. ‘Let me?’
She nodded, smiling. ‘If you want.’
I picked Kyra up and carried her around to the steps. Thunder rumbled again, a long, low roll that sounded like the snarl of a huge dog. I looked up at the encroaching clouds, and as I did, movement caught my eye. It was an old blue car heading west on Wasp Hill Road toward the lake.
The only reason I noticed it was that it was wearing one of those stupid bumper-stickers from the Village Cafe: HORN BROKEN — WATCH FOR FINGER.
I carried Ki up the steps and through the door, turning her so I wouldn’t bump her head. ‘Take care of me,’ she said in her sleep. There was a sadness in her voice that chilled me. It was as if she knew she was asking the impossible. ‘Take care of me, I’m little, Mama says I’m a little guy.’
‘I’ll take care of you,’ I said, and kissed that silky place between her eyes again. ‘Don’t worry, Ki, go to sleep.’
I carried her to her room and put her on her bed. By then she was totally conked out. I wiped the cream off her nose and picked the corn-kernel off her chin. I glanced at my watch and saw it was ten ’til two. They would be gathering at Grace Baptist by now. Bill Dean was wearing a gray tie.
Buddy Jellison had a hat on. He was standing behind the church with some other men who were smoking before going inside.
I turned. Mattie was in the doorway. ‘Mike,’ she said. ‘Come here, please.’
I went to her. There was no cloth between her waist and my hands this time. Her skin was warm, and as silky as her daughter’s. She looked up at me, her lips parted. Her hips pressed forward, and when she felt what was hard down there, she pressed harder against it.
‘Mike,’ she said again.
I closed my eyes. I felt like someone who has just come to the doorway of a brightly lit room full of people laughing and talking. And dancing. Because sometimes that is all we want to do.
I want to come in, I thought. That’s what I want to do, all I want to do. Let me do what I want.
Let me —
I realized I was saying it aloud, whispering it rapidly into her ear as I held her with my hands going up and down her back, my fingertips ridging her spine, touching her shoulderblades, then coming around in front to cup her small breasts.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What we both want. Yes. That’s fine.’
Slowly, she reached up with her thumbs and wiped the wet places from under my eyes. I drew back from her. ‘The key — ‘
She smiled a little. ‘You know where it is.’
‘I’ll come tonight.’
‘Good.’
‘I’ve been . . . ‘ I had to clear my throat. I looked at Kyra, who was deeply asleep. ‘I’ve been lonely. I don’t think I knew it, but I have been.’
‘Me too. And I knew it for both of us. Kiss, please.’
I kissed her. I think our tongues touched, but I’m not sure. What I remember most clearly is the liveness of her. She was like a dreidel lightly spinning in my arms.
‘Hey!’ John called from outside, and we sprang apart. ‘You guys want to give us a little help? It’s gonna rain!’
‘Thanks for finally making up your mind,’ she said to me in a low voice. She turned and hurried back up the doublewide’s narrow corridor. The next time she spoke to me, I don’t think she knew who she was talking to, or where she was. The next time she spoke to me, she was dying.
‘Don’t wake the baby,’ I heard her tell John, and his response: ‘Oh, sorry, sorry.’
I stood where I was a moment longer, getting my breath, then slipped into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. I remember seeing a blue plastic whale in the bathtub as I turned to take a towel off the rack. I remember thinking that it probably blew bubbles out of its spout-hole, and I even remember having a momentary glimmer of an idea — a children’s story about a spouting whale. Would you call him Willie? Nah, too obvious. Wilhelm, now — that had a fine round ring to it, simultaneously grand and amusing. Wilhelm the Spouting Whale.