Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [86]
“If you didn’t include me,” Red said, “I’d know you were lying.”
Money was a list of falsified invoices, petty thefts, uncompleted drug deals, and Sex a litany of impulsive encounters. He’d slept with his fourteen-year-old stepsister, cheated on his wife, slept with the wife of his boss at the parts store, with the wife of his philosophy professor in grad school. Pulling his feet onto his chair, Lewis hugged his knees and admitted to having sex with men, twice, in high school.
“Am I supposed to be shocked?” Red said. “Sorry, but that’s been in every inventory I’ve ever heard, including my own. Sex with men—and usually a particularly charming chicken, too.”
“Chickens? Really?” Lewis threw his head back and exhaled loudly. “So you don’t think I’m really a homosexual?”
“Do I care? You’re sure not my type.”
Lewis laughed long and loudly. Too loudly.
So far, so good, thought Red. Normally, he might’ve asked why Libby and Billie weren’t mentioned—an inventory should be current—but for this omission Red was inordinately grateful.
Secrets was mostly recap. Lewis had cheated on a final in college. And once, when drunk, he’d slugged his mother in the mouth. He told lies. Stole this and that. And for several months when he was very young—“I still don’t understand this one,” Lewis said—he’d used the backyard as his toilet and didn’t bury it. When confronted, he blamed it on his brother, Woody. “I don’t know why my parents believed me,” he said. “But they sent Woody to a psychologist. Every week, for years, he went to see Dr. Weiss. Makes me sick to think about it.” And Lewis did look pallid, scared, and tenderly young, as if in this room he’d become the very boy who dropped his trousers behind the eugenia bushes.
Never, Red knew, was it the ten thousand dollars embezzled from a business partner, or the drunken slapping of a new bride, but always this kind of ancient, shame-soaked, thumb-sucking, bed-wetting memory around which the personality had knotted, kinked, grown stunted. “It was probably the biggest favor you ever did for your brother,” he said. “At least he got outside help.”
“God. I never thought of that.”
When Lewis was finished, Red poured him a fresh cup of coffee and squeezed his shoulder. “Good work,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“Pretty fucking weird. I thought I’d die before telling this stuff to anyone. And here I am.” Lewis patted his own face. “It’s almost embarrassing to see it spelled out so clearly. Always wanting the woman I couldn’t have, never the one I was with. Just like my dad.” Lewis sipped his coffee. “You know what I’ve been thinking?”
“Mmm.” Red gazed out the window at dry, bleached grasses and dark-leaved groves. The sunlight was fragile.
“I was thinking I’d stay on here indefinitely. Work for you. Commute to school a couple days a week. And maybe patch things up with Libby.”
Red nodded carefully, trying not to panic.
“All the time I was with her, I thought I liked Billie. My head was screwed on backwards.” Lewis smoothed the pages he’d written. “You were right. I had to do this work. See myself more clearly. Get a grip.”
Red gazed at his own thumbnails as if into tiny pink hand mirrors.
“I heard she’s seeing somebody, but how long could that have been going on?” Lewis shrugged. “She can’t be too far up the tubes, can she?”
Red combed his dim Catholic boyhood for guidance: who was the saint of the worst-case scenario? “Lewis,” he said, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
THE HOUSE sat on jacks while masons built a reinforced cinderblock foundation. Libby climbed onto her new porch, which sat some fifty yards above the trailer’s former pad. She could see clear over the olive trees and a sea of darker citrus to the distant blue hills. In the foreground she saw the plume of dust from Red’s truck winding up her driveway.
She rushed down to meet him. “Look!