Ted had been holding a Chesterfield between his fingers when he went blank; the ash grew long and eventually dropped off onto the table. When the coal grew unnervingly close to Ted’s bunchy knuckles, Bobby pulled it gently free and was putting it out in the overflowing ashtray when Ted finally came back.
‘Smoking?’ he asked with a frown. ‘Hell, Bobby, you’re too young to smoke.’
‘I was just putting it out for you. I thought . . . ‘ Bobby shrugged, suddenly shy.
Ted looked at the first two fingers of his right hand, where there was a permanent yellow nicotine stain. He laughed — a short bark with absolutely no humor in it. ‘Thought I was going to burn myself, did you?’
Bobby nodded. ‘What do you think about when you go off like that? Where do you go?’
‘That’s hard to explain,’ Ted replied, and then asked Bobby to read him his horoscope.
Thinking about Ted’s trances was distracting. Not talking about the things Ted was paying him to look for was even more distracting. As a result, Bobby — ordinarily a pretty good hitter — struck out four times in an afternoon game for the Wolves at Sterling House. He also lost four straight Battleship games to Sully at S-J’s house on Friday, when it rained.
‘What the heck’s wrong with you?’ Sully asked. ‘That’s the third time you called out squares you already called out before. Also, I have to practically holler in your ear before you answer me. What’s up?’
‘Nothing.’ That was what he said. Everything. That was what he felt.
Carol also asked Bobby a couple of times that week if he was okay; Mrs Gerber asked if he was ‘off his feed’; Yvonne Loving wanted to know if he had mono, and then giggled until she seemed in danger of exploding.
The only person who didn’t notice Bobby’s odd behavior was his mom. Liz Garfield was increasingly preoccupied with her trip to Providence, talking on the phone in the evenings with Mr Biderman or one of the other two who were going (Bill Cushman was one of them; Bobby couldn’t exactly remember the name of the other guy), laying clothes out on her bed until the spread was almost covered, then shaking her head over them angrily and returning them to the closet, making an appointment to get her hair done and then calling the lady back and asking if she could add a manicure. Bobby wasn’t even sure what a manicure was. He had to ask Ted.
She seemed excited by her preparations, but there was also a kind of grimness to her. She was like a soldier about to storm an enemy beach, or a paratrooper who would soon be jumping out of a plane and landing behind enemy lines. One of her evening telephone conversations seemed to be a whispered argument — Bobby had an idea it was with Mr Biderman, but he wasn’t sure. On Saturday, Bobby came into her bedroom and saw her looking at two new dresses — dressy dresses, one with thin little shoulder straps and one with no straps at all, just a top like a bathing suit. The boxes they had come in lay tumbled on the floor with tissue paper foaming out of them. His mom was standing over the dresses, looking down at them with an expression Bobby had never seen before: big eyes, drawn-together brows, taut white cheeks which flared with spots of rouge. One hand was at her mouth, and
he could hear bonelike clittering sounds as she bit at her nails. A Kool smoldered in an ashtray on the bureau, apparently forgotten. Her big eyes shuttled back and forth between the two dresses.
‘Mom?’ Bobby asked, and she jumped literally jumped into the air. Then she whirled on him, her mouth drawn down in a grimace.
‘Jesus Christ!’ she almost snarled. ‘Don you knock?’ I’m sorry,’ he said, and began to back out of the room. His mother had never said anything about knocking before. ‘Mom, are you all right?’
‘Fine!’ She spied the cigarette, grabbed it, smoked furiously. She exhaled with such force that Bobby almost expected to see smoke come from her ears as well as her nose and mouth.