• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 704 0

Jenny couldn’t catch it, but she heard the gravelly, careless sound of her voice. And she saw how Mrs. Scarlatti’s black hair was swept completely to the right, like one of those extreme Vogue magazine model’s, and how she leaned her head to the right as well so that she seemed to be burdened, cruelly misused, bearing up under an exhausting weight that had something to do with men and experience. Imagine Ezra knowing such a person! Imagine him at ease with her, close enough to worry about her. Jenny backed away. She understood, all at once, that her brothers had grown up and gone. Her mental pictures of them were outdated—Ezra playing the bamboo whistle he used to have in grade school, Cody triumphantly rattling his dice over their old Monopoly board. She thought of a faded flannel shirt that Ezra had worn so often, it was like a second skin. She thought of how he would rock back and forth with his hands in his rear pockets when he was lost for something to say, or dig a hole in the ground with his sneaker. And how when Jenny was shattered by one of their mother’s rages, he would slip downstairs to the kitchen and fix her a mug of hot milk laced with honey, sprinkled over with cinnamon. He was always so quick to catch his family’s moods, and to offer food and drink and unspoken support.

She traveled down the alley and, instead of heading home, took Bushnell Street and then Putnam. It was getting colder; she had to button her coat. Three blocks down Putnam stood a building so weathered and dismal, you’d think it was an abandoned warehouse till you saw the sign: TOM ’N’ EDDIE’S BODY SHOP. She had often come here to fetch Ezra home, but she’d only called his name at the drive-in doorway; she had never been inside. Now she stepped into the gloom and looked around her. Tom and Eddie (she assumed) were talking to a man in a business suit; one of them held a clipboard. In the background, Josiah Payson swung a gigantic rubber mallet against the fender of a pickup. Jenny was hit by a piece of memory, a mystifying fragment: Josiah in the school yard, long ago, violently flailing a pipe or a metal bar of some sort, cutting a desperate, whizzing circle in the air and shouting something unintelligible while Ezra stood guard between him and a mob of children. “Everything will be fine; just go away,” Ezra was telling the others. But what had happened next? How had it ended? How had it started? She felt confused. Meanwhile Josiah swung his mallet. He was grotesquely tall, as gaunt as the armature for some statue never completed. His cropped black hair bristled all over his head, his skull of a face glistened, and he clenched a set of teeth so ragged and white and crowded, so jumbled together and overlapping, that it seemed he had chewed them up and was preparing to spit them out.

“Josiah,” she called timidly.

He stopped to look at her. Or was he looking someplace else? His eyes were dead black—lidless and almost Oriental. It was impossible to tell where they were directed. He heaved the hammer onto a stack of burlap bags and lunged toward her, his face alight with happiness. “Ezra’s sister!” he said. “Ezra!”

She smiled and hugged her elbows.

Directly in front of her, he came to a halt and smoothed his stubble of hair. His arms seemed longer than they should have been. “Is Ezra okay?” he asked her.

“He’s fine.”

“Not wounded or—”

“No.”

Ezra was right: Josiah spoke as distinctly as anyone, in a grown man’s rumbling voice. But he had trouble finding something to do with his hands, and ended up scraping them together as if trying to rid his palms of dirt or grease, or even of a layer of skin. She was aware of Tom and Eddie glancing over at her curiously, losing track of their conversation. “Come outside,” she told Josiah. “I’ll let you see his letter.”

Outside it was twilight, almost too dark to read, but Josiah took the letter anyway and scanned the lines. There was a crease between his eyebrows as deep as if someone had pressed an ax blade there. She noticed that his coveralls, pathetically well washed, were so short for him that