Freedom [120]
“Carol,” he said amiably. “Hello.”
“Hello, Joey. You probably know why I’m calling.”
“No, actually, I don’t.”
“Well, you’ve just about broken our little friend’s heart, is why.”
Stomach lurching, he retreated to the privacy of the stacks. “I was going to call her tonight,” he told Carol.
“Tonight. Really. You were going to call her tonight.”
“Yes.”
“Why do I not believe you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, she’s gone to bed, so it’s good you didn’t call. She went to bed without eating. She went to bed at seven.”
“Good thing I didn’t call, then.”
“This isn’t funny, Joey. She’s very depressed. You’ve given her a depression and you need to stop messing around. Do you understand? My daughter isn’t some dog that you can tie to a parking meter and then forget about.”
“Maybe you should get her an antidepressant.”
“She’s not your pet that you can leave in the back seat with the windows rolled up,” Carol said, warming to her metaphor. “We’re part of your life, Joey. I think we deserve a little more than the nothing you’ve been giving us. This has been a very frightening fall for all concerned, and you have been absent.”
“You know, I do have classes to attend, and so forth.”
“Too busy for a five-minute phone call. After three and a half weeks of silence.”
“I really was going to call her tonight.”
“Never mind Connie even,” Carol said. “Leave Connie out of it for a minute. You and I lived together like a family for almost two years. I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I’m starting to get an idea of what you put your mom through. Seriously. I never understood how cold you are until this fall.”
Joey directed a smile of pure oppression at the ceiling. There had always been something not quite right about his interactions with Carol. She was what the prep-school boys on his hall and the fraternity brothers who were rushing him were wont to call a MILF (an acronym that, in Joey’s opinion, sounded faintly cretinous for its omission of the T for “to”). Although he was generally a very sound sleeper, there had occasionally been nights, during the period of his residency at the Monaghans, when he’d awakened in Connie’s bed with strange anxious premonitions of himself: as the unwitting and horrified trespasser of his sister’s bed, for example, or as the accidental shooter of a nail into Blake’s forehead with Blake’s nail gun, or, strangest of all, as the towering crane at a major Great Lakes dockyard, his horizontal member swinging heavy containers off the deck of a mother ship and gently depositing them on a smaller, flatter barge. These visions tended to follow moments of inappropriate connection with Carol—the glimpse of her bare butt through the nearly closed door of her and Blake’s bedroom; the complicit wink she gave Joey pursuant to a dinner-table belch from Blake; the lengthy and explicit rationale she presented to him (illustrated with vivid stories from her own careless youth) for putting Connie on the Pill. Since Connie was constitutionally incapable of being displeased with Joey, it had fallen to her mother to register her discontents. Carol was Connie’s garrulous organ, her straight-talking advocate, and Joey had sometimes had the sense, on weekend nights when Blake was out with buddies, of being the sandwiched party in a virtual threesome, Carol’s mouth running and running with all the things that Connie wouldn’t say, Connie then silently doing with Joey all the things that Carol couldn’t do, and Joey jolting awake in the wee hours with a sense of entrapment in something not quite right. Mom I’d Like Fuck.
“So what