Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [90]
We orbit, Sheppard wrote, we repeat.
This pattern was there from the beginning.
The boy’s real name was Sam, but soon after he was born his father called him Chip. It meant “off the old block,” of course—like Sam, he could sleep through a tornado—but Marilyn saw it differently. In the mornings, after she woke him, he was so irritable she thought of him as Chip-on-my-shoulder. After spending a whole day together, after obeying as many of his little commands as seemed reasonable and arguing with every one that didn’t, each respective disagreement sending him spiraling into a tantrum, she called him Chip-away-at-my-sanity in her mind.
“Chip?” she called from the foot of the stairs. “Are you awake?”
“No,” Hoversten said, “he’s not.” He appeared at the landing, or rather his silhouette. He had a mallet of some kind in his hand, and his appearance startled her. “I just checked on him,” Hoversten said. He made his way and moved down the stairs in white shoes, white pants with a white belt, a red cardigan vest over his shirt. The mallet was a putter and he was carrying a bag of golf clubs. “What the hell’s that contraption on his face?” He stopped on the small landing above her.
Marilyn crossed her arms. “It’s a chin brace,” she said.
“What’s wrong with his chin?”
“Nothing,” Marilyn said. “It just juts out. Sam thinks that if we don’t fix it, he’ll have problems with his bite.”
Hoversten shrugged. “Well, tell Sam that in my professional opinion the kid’s going to have more problems with his self-image if he has to wear that thing every night. It makes him look like Frankenstein.”
“I’ll be sure to pass along the prognosis.”
Hoversten snorted. His eyes were ringed black with sleeplessness. The night before, Sam had confessed to Marilyn that there was talk of Hoversten’s medical license being revoked and some concern about “mental issues.” One of the nurses at Sam’s hospital had told her that during a breast exam he’d had the patient remove her gown, pinched both her nipples as if he were about to pull down a blind, and said, “Nothing wrong with these.”
He smiled at her emptily.
“Sorry I can’t stay and chat, but I’m playing golf with Dr. Stevenson.”
“I thought you were working with Sam at the hospital today.”
Hoversten’s eyes drifted toward the ceiling. “I think I need a little R & R right now. Tell Sam I’ll be staying with Stevenson for the rest of the weekend.” He leaned his clubs against the railing and labored back upstairs, using the putter as a cane.
“Would you mind stripping the bed before you go?” Marilyn called after him. She dreaded touching his sheets. Upstairs, she heard a couple drawers slam closed, then the bedroom door shut quietly. Hoversten took each step back down slowly, heavily, until they were at eye level. Holding an overnight bag, he shouldered his clubs and looked at her.
“I’ll let the help do it,” he said, then turned to leave.
“You son of a bitch,” she said.
“Careful with the cursing, Marilyn. When you’re dead you might end up in hell.”
“You’re a failure, you know that?”
Hoversten stopped at the door. “Oh, really?”
“A goddamn failure.”
He set his clubs down.
“Look at you,” she said. “Fired from the hospital. Deserted by your wife. Fat as a pig. And you show up at our door asking for help. Help and shelter. And we give it to you. We feed you and give you comfort, Sam even offers to get you a job, and that’s how you talk to me?”
“Keep it coming.”
“You arrange dates for my husband. Those nurses when we were in California. Then you have the gall to make a pass at me. You’re such a failure you try to share it.”
Hoversten stood there calmly, his weight resting on the putter. He shook his head slowly, his tongue pressed to his cheek. “Are you done?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said, and pointed the end of the club at her. “Because you’re the failure. A failure of a wife. You want to know why Sam’s been with all those women? Because of you,