Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [56]
Lewis’s heart sank. Did she think, now that Red was out of town for a few days, she could come over any old time? He didn’t want this casual dropping-by business to start. He’d say he was too busy to talk. Nip the impulse in the bud. As he waited for her knock, the phone rang. He talked to a woman about her husband’s medical insurance for ten minutes. When he got off the phone, Libby still hadn’t come to the door.
He found her in Red Ray’s living room. “Oh, hi!” She was curled up on the sofa watching the local news and drinking a glass of ice water. She had on a black tank top and snow white shorts. Her skin was the color of roasted peanuts.
“Hi,” he said.
“Done with work for the day?” she asked.
“Nope. I’m swamped with stuff.”
She held up the jar of eggs, then nestled them back between her legs. “Egg sitting,” she said.
“Why not take them over to your house?”
“Red and I agreed that the two jars should be in the same place, the only variable being human touch.”
Lewis stood between her and the television. She smiled up at him, a question.
“I got a lot of work to do,” he said.
“So you said.” She leaned to one side, to look past him at the television.
Back at the office, he kept wondering if he should go over again and act a little nicer. In the meantime, the Falcon disappeared.
Libby showed up the next day, too, going into Red’s without so much as a “Hi, how are you?” Red and Libby’s little science project was beginning to irritate the hell out of him. What was so damn fascinating about a couple of rotting eggs?
He found her in exactly the same circumstance: sofa, ice water, TV on, eggs nestled in lap. Lewis knelt and slid a hand inside her tank top, over her lace-harnessed breast. She held the eggs up and over to the side. “Put those damn things down,” he said, taking the jar from her grasp, “and let me demonstrate the benefits of human touch.”
YVETTE released Joe to Red with the familiar litany of instructions: Do things with him. He’s at that age when he really needs his father.
Joe had grown four inches in the last six months. A trauma, Yvette told Red, and physically quite painful. The boy’s skin was so pale and his limbs so skinny that he looked long, cartilaginous, new, as if he’d just uncurled from incubation. His eyes were blue, his hair ash and likely to turn white in his twenties, as his mother’s had.
The two of them drove down the coast. Joe talked about baseball until it became obvious that Red didn’t know who was on any of the teams. The boy then read a Rolling Stone and the Sunday sports section. Spend time with him, Yvette had said. Do some projects together. These instructions sounded more and more like Zen koans.
Once at Round Rock, Joe was independent, intent on amusing himself. He’d brought fat science-fiction and spy novels. Every morning, while Red showered and made breakfast, Joe took a forty-minute run, returning flushed, bright red, every capillary in his sheer skin pumped full of blood. In the evenings, when Red went to his meetings, Joe ran again. Once, Red stepped out on the Blue House’s front porch and spotted Joe moving noiselessly down on the roadway, his skin gray in the dusk, his arms and legs pumping, spidery.
Think of some interactive activities: Yvette spoke with such a plea in her voice, Red wondered if Joe had any friends at all in San Francisco. Here in Rito, at least, he had Little Bill Fitzgerald. They hiked together, rode bikes, swam in the river, and, he hoped, amused themselves without resorting to anything illegal. When Red was Joe’s age, Frank was his best friend and their favorite activities were breaking-and-entering and drinking, naturally, whatever they got their hands on.
Yvette’s imperatives heightened Red’s already firm sense of parental inadequacy. “His mother says I’m supposed to think up interactive activities,” he told Lewis.
“Take him fishing,” Lewis said.
“I haven’t fished for years. I wouldn’t remember which end of the line to put in the