Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [7]
Tommy nudges the old push mower with the double-helix blade into the yard. He pulls his T-shirt off and throws it on a garden chair. Naked to his gym shorts, a bandana round his head, he looks like his own posters. He pulls his long hair into a ponytail. Already he’s sweating, and he hasn’t even started to mow.
I want to call down to him, to let him know Allison is trying to sleep so that he doesn’t make too much noise, but Thad has hidden the window cranks again. If I rap on the glass Allison might leap from her nap, thinking someone’s shooting up the house, in that way that one noise becomes another in a dream. I wave my arms over my head to get his attention, but he doesn’t look up.
By the time I get downstairs, Tommy has disappeared from the garden. He’s put on a fresh T-shirt and jeans, and I find him in the weapons room. I have to say he looks more like his old self now, pushing his wavy hair out of his eyes, his bare feet planted on the Oriental rug. He has an open book in hand. The Tao of Killing, one of those slim catchall volumes that says absolutely nothing about the sport or the life, but sells millions of copies. He shrugs, like I’ve busted him reading a tabloid at the supermarket, and tosses it on a pile of mail.
—What’s going on? I ask.
—Just reading some . . . chain mail.
—That’s so bad.
—Chain letters?
Sometimes he gets this way with me, as if we’ve just met and he has to find something clever to say and it comes out awkward. He leans into the sword rack now and offers me a chair. Hoping to let him off the hook, I ask if I can get him something to drink.
—Actually, I was just going to make a smoothie. You want one? How about strawberry mango? he asks.
Then he touches my jaw, cradles it for a moment. I can feel the familiar calluses made by the strap of his shield.
—You all right? I ask.
—Perfect.
While he breezes off to the kitchen, I sink into the easy chair and shut my eyes.
Frank, my first father, I can’t remember. He died when I was one. But I don’t think any of the others ever made a point of asking me to join them for refreshments the way Tommy does. Though Rolfe, my third father—Rolfe was a mess—once asked me to join him for a highball in the living room. I was eight at the time. I remember hiding out in my bedroom closet till Allison came home. At his funeral some of his family, who had come to pay their respects to Allison, remarked that they didn’t mind so much that he had been taken out.
Tommy is the one who’s always shown interest. He wants to know if my black eye means someone picked a fight with me at school (I’ve been ganged up on a few times, sometimes by preps, sometimes by jocks); how many pounds of fries I cook at my hyper-food job in one night (the answer is plenty); if my friend Mark’s intentions are good; that kind of stuff. Tommy’s been around for five years now, though he and Allison didn’t get married right away. I never thought their relationship would last.
I hear the whir of a small blade churning up frozen fruit and yogurt in the kitchen, the blender set into the steel sink, the slap of his feet on the parquet floor.
He hands me a straw and we sip quietly.
—This is really good. Did you add a boost? I ask.
—Yes. Dope.
—Wuh?
—Made by Tour de France Ltd.
—You’re cracking me up today, I say, rolling my eyes.
—How’s A History of the Gladiator Sports Association going? he asks.
—I’m still on the American section. I really want to interview Joe Byers, but so far he won’t return my e-mails.
Many consider Byers to be the founder of Glad sport, but he’s a funny guy, never grants interviews.
—You know, you’d make a pretty good history professor. No, I’m serious, or a biographer.
—Wouldn’t Allison love that, I say.
—Not at first.
—I think my head-on-a-platter would express it.
—She wants you to be a Glad wife because that’s what she knows.