Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [83]
“Bonnie?” he said, and then: “Bonnie! Bonnie Michaels!”
Queen Bea actually jumped. She jumped backward. Then she lowered her fat ass back into the car and slammed the door. The guy had to knock on her window for a good minute. “It’s me,” he said, laughing, pressing his face to the glass. “It’s not him! It’s Max, Bonnie! It’s not Marshall!”
Johnny later gave considerable thought to what she might have been thinking about in that car. Was she considering denying it? Saying no, mister, you got the wrong lady? I’m Beatrice, Beatrice McNicholas? When she finally stepped out, she appeared to have collected herself. She began fiddling with the pump, dribbling gasoline over her boots.
“What the hell are you doing up here?” she demanded. “This is Vermont.”
The man was on his way to a hockey tournament in Montreal. He was meeting some old friends from the joint. He had just stopped to get gas! And Marshall had almost come with him! But Marshall’s probation officer had told him it was a bad idea to leave town. He and Marshall had moved from Miami back to Staten Island. Wait until Marshall heard who he saw in fucking Vermont.
Then he seemed to remember the two boys standing on either side of him. A shadow fell over his face. He had steel gray eyes and a three-day beard and sunken cheeks carved with acne scars. He wore a navy knit cap. He looked from Johnny to Teddy back to Johnny again. “I guess that’s him?” he said, nodding to Johnny, and the instant Johnny saw the man’s sheepish, scarecrow smile, he knew his mother was a liar.
“I’m your Uncle Max,” he told Johnny. “Marshall’s brother.”
“His twin,” Queen Bea spat.
And Teddy standing there with a shadow fallen over his face, too, trying to figure out where that left him. He cupped a hand over his eyes, trying to see the man more clearly. Then his eyes slid over to Johnny.
“You think my dad’s alive, too?” he asked Johnny that night. Queen Bea had gone off to get drunk somewhere.
Of course he was alive. They were all alive! Who knew how many people their mother had killed off? Two tragic accidents!
Johnny thought about Teddy’s question. He remembered a man with a dark mustache, an accent, breath like curdled milk. Ravi. He remembered hiding in bushes of sea grape while Ravi pruned them, and Ravi scolding him for touching the marble statue on his shelf, as smooth as the inside of a conch shell. For years the memory of Ravi had lived among the memories of Queen Bea’s many ex-boyfriends. It hadn’t occurred to Johnny until now that he could be Teddy’s dad.
But Johnny, feeling guilty over his newfound father, had said, “I doubt it, Ted.”
Before long he left Vermont and moved into his father’s apartment in Staten Island. Johnny’s own brother, until then his only male family, looked nothing like him, and now here were not one but two men with Johnny’s face. All this time, Marshall said, Bonnie had been keeping Johnny from him—so much lost time they had to make up! Marshall took him to the Hard Rock Cafe, to Coney Island. Twice he took him to Madison Square Garden—first to a Rangers game, then to a Bob Seger show. After the concert the two of them got high in Max’s parked Chevy Blazer, Marshall’s usual faraway look even more faraway, his steel gray eyes drifting over the windshield, and Marshall said, “Your mom was a piece of work,” and that phrase seemed right, seemed to explain everything—she was a liar, yes, but also the kind of woman men wrote songs about and regretted loving and were helpless over, and for that night, Johnny felt like a son, as though he had a mother and a father, parents who were screwed up in a legendary, acceptable way, their romance