Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [82]
She thought it was sweet, how respectful he was. He reminded her of Teddy. He ended up sleeping on the floor, and they joked about it, the pregnant bride-to-be saving herself for marriage.
Then, when they’d arrived at Jude’s house, Johnny told Eliza that Harriet wanted them to sleep in separate beds. Eliza would sleep in Prudence’s room, and Johnny would bunk with Jude. “Sorry,” Johnny had whispered the morning after their first night there, handing her a dish to dry. “I didn’t know it would be this way.” It was just temporary, he said, until they found a place of their own. The arrangement was acceptable enough. Prudence mostly stayed out of Eliza’s way, offered her the first shower, cleared her a corner of the closet.
A few mornings in, while Prudence was in the shower, Johnny woke Eliza and asked her to take a walk with him. It was early, not even seven, but every boy who’d ever asked her to take a walk only meant one thing. She put on lipstick, sprayed a shot of Prudence’s perfume down the collar of her sweater. The morning was chilly, the glittering lake appearing now and then between blocks. The root-split sidewalks were stamped with children’s handprints, the telephone poles with staples from long-gone flyers. A row of close-set bungalows lined each side of the street, in white and putty and gray, with cement porches and torn screens, AC units hanging out of the windows. The one Johnny stopped in front of was on the side that backed up to the woods. It was slate blue, set up on cinder blocks, a child’s red wagon capsized in the long grass. A FOR SALE sign stood beside it. For a moment, Eliza thought he was going to knock on the door, or pull out a key. Maybe it was an old friend’s place that would be empty for a few hours. “Landlord must have put it up for sale,” Johnny said.
He’d been here to gather Teddy’s things after the funeral. He just wanted her to see it, too. They sat on the bus stop bench across the street and a few doors down, watching the tall pines behind the house bend and sway.
“It’s his birthday,” Johnny said.
“Friday the thirteenth?”
“He’d be sixteen.”
They sat in silence for a moment longer. It didn’t feel like a moment they were sharing. The breeze spun the rusty wheels of the wagon in the yard. Maybe it was a neighbor’s. She found herself wondering if it belonged to a boy or a girl. What was left of her buoyant mood was carried away in the wind, the hope of kissing her husband on a bench in the morning sun. She could only picture Teddy coming in and out of the door across the street. She supposed that’s what Johnny had intended.
The last time Johnny saw his mother, he was the age Teddy would be now. She was drunk, and he was packing his things. “He’s a snake,” she warned him. “A snake charmer. Don’t let him charm you.”
She was speaking about his father, a man named Marshall Cheshire. For most of his life, Johnny had known nothing about him. As far as he and Teddy knew, their fathers were dead, both killed in car accidents before they were born, and when they would ask their mother about them, she refused to elaborate, her silence the face of both a cold, hardened grief—two lovers killed! two tragic accidents!—and a disappointment in her sons’ frailty: big boys did not cry over their dead fathers. So when kids asked Johnny about his dad, he said he didn’t have one, because he didn’t. This was a lonely fact but, for Johnny and Teddy, not a strange one. They had no other family. Their mother’s parents had also died before the boys were born, and they had no aunts or uncles, no godparents, no cousins. They had their mother, more or less.
Until one late-winter afternoon shortly before Johnny’s sixteenth birthday, when he and Teddy were pushing the Horizon up Grammer Street to the gas station, their mother coasting in neutral, her fat arm hanging out the window. It was not