Slide - Kyle Beachy [58]
She waited until I'd reached the final step before shutting the door. Like most furnished basements I had known, this one was decorated to take advantage of the little natural light that came through the shoebox windows up high on two of the basement's walls. The walls were off-white, the carpet cream, and the couch in the corner a kind of wheat, or oat color. In the deepest part of the room, in the very elbow of the couch sat Zoe, her legs crossed beneath her, back straight and hair parted in the middle, falling to either side of her face. It was too cool for a tank top, but hers was light green. I tried and failed to not notice her nipples. Lying on the coffee table were a two spiral notebooks and pencils, a Starbucks cup and her cell phone.
Angel on the couch, young man waiting at the bottom of the steps. Mother upstairs mixing one part lemonade with two parts iced tea.
I projected officialdom as best I could, confirming that my role was concrete and without room for movement or discussion. Zoe seemed impressed by this. I had brought with me guidelines for the best way to approach an analogy, and also how to complete a sentence without knowing any of the words. I would save when to guess versus when to not guess for a future lesson. Once she began the practice test, my eyes strayed to the pencil, the hand that held it, the arm, shoulder, the neck. When she looked up from the workbook and caught me watching, I glanced quickly clockward.
“Nine minutes.”
After the test we finished with fifteen minutes of vocabulary drills. And here the angel shifted to a position of repose on the couch, which I tried to offset by crossing my legs professorially at the knee.
“Elegiac.”
“Spressing sorrow,” she said, one arm behind her head.
I nodded and flipped to the next card.
“Mendacious.”
“Habbing a false character. Liar, liar, your pants on fire.”
“Non compos mentis.”
“Not his fault. Him too dumb or him too crazy.”
“Demooterate.”
“Demooterate?”
Given the alternatives, such childish play was harmless, distraction from the repressed grumblings of desire.
“Wait a second. You make that up, teacher man? You makum upum brand-new word?”
“The English language is an undulating beast, a universe of flux where meaning and use shifts with context and terms are created according to necessity.”
“Demooterate,” she said. “Importantizing that which isn't naturally important.”
“Absolutely”
I was performing a service for a client. An educated man sharing his education with a coincidentally beautiful little but not so little girl. Sanctioned and funded by the family unit upstairs.
four
i drove, I read the billboards out loud, I tried to picture Audrey with a bald head. Certain heads flourish and achieve a new cranial power when stripped of adornment. I carried bottles of Premium water. Other bald heads are bumpy and ridged and misshapen, an embarrassment. From time to time, mistaken tallies from the morning warehouse hour would come to haunt me in the afternoon when I ended up with the wrong bottles for the day's final deliveries. On these occasions I would swap out extra caps from the box I kept between the front seats, dark blue for red, Purified magically turned into Premium. Customer none the wiser. Eddie and Marshall laughed knowingly when I asked whether there was any difference in the waters. I wondered what rule book said I couldn't do this for the rest of my life.
I was in the van when my phone rang. The call was from SLH!, and I was dripping sweat, and there are times when a son's instinct is to avoid even the prospect of his father's voice. When the same number called again a minute later, I began to worry. For the most part, I'd gone through life under the presumption that Freddy's