The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [43]
“Tony tends toward the hysterical,” Mr. Warner said. “No one is going to hurt you.”
But I was not relieved by this. If Mr. Warner was my only protector against the cluster of fathers and strangers, then I was in what kids at school called “deep shit.” Mr. Warner knew the cuts and quarter cuts on every major meat. He could name them and tell you their qualities. Tender, stringy, chewy, or moist. Perhaps Mr. Warner would not be the one to do the actual quartering, but I could easily picture him pontificating over my corpse.
“Where’s the bitch?” Mr. Tolliver said. His face was bright red—swollen with pride.
“Where’s the crazy bitch?” said the father I didn’t know. Their particular macho one-upmanship involved adjectives.
Phoenixville Steel, I knew, had fired Mr. Tolliver that winter. Men all over the area were losing their jobs. My father, whose own job was secure, took the news hard each time he heard it.
“ ‘Let go,’ ” he would say, and shake his head. “I hate that phrase, as if the man’s an animal and he’s being released into the wild.”
Mr. Warner shot the men a sharp look.
I would find out soon enough that my mother, too afraid to watch, had locked herself in the downstairs bathroom and turned on the transistor radio.
“I don’t know what to do, Mr. Warner,” I said. He had sons. They were one, two, and three years older than I was and barely spoke to me except to grunt hello in the presence of adults.
“It really would be best if you went and asked your mother to come out. I don’t want you to get hurt. You haven’t done anything.”
He said this with the compassionate care that a physician delivering a temporary reprieve might. But the news I heard was still bad. My mother, if not me, would be hurt.
“I can’t do that, Mr. Warner,” I said. “Why are you here?”
I knew why, of course, but I wanted to hear them say it.
“Bitch,” Mr. Tolliver said.
I saw the line of distress cross Mr. Warner’s face. This was not, at least, what he had intended. It was also not what two or three others had wanted. I could see them splitting up behind Mr. Warner. There was Mr. Tolliver and the man I didn’t know, both of them wearing Phoenixville Steel softball jackets. And there were the others, like Mr. Forrest before them, who were beginning to edge closer to the corner of the yard, tripping into the front vegetable garden in which, since my earliest childhood, my father had planted and tended and snipped herbs for my mother.
It was this that finally pushed me to make a move. When Mr. Serrano, who was an accountant and had a young daughter, crushed my father’s Italian parsley, I dropped the quilt from my shoulders and stepped forward.
“You’ll kill it.”
It was that word.
Mr. Tolliver’s friend was suddenly to my right, but I was watching Mr. Serrano step carefully back from the border of the herb garden. Just as I exhaled, I felt the sting of a slap across my face.
I fell onto the grass, my own hand going up to my cheek. Mr. Warner was jumping past me to restrain the unknown father, whom Mr. Tolliver was patting on the back. I saw Mr. Serrano look down at me as he fled the yard. It was not my first awareness of the pity people had for me, pity like a vast sea that was impossible for me to cross.
The good men left with sincere apologies thrown over their shoulders, but not to me. They apologized to Mr. Warner. I was on the ground. I was a teenager. I didn’t matter. Mr. Warner said, “No problem.” He said, “Talk later.” He said, “Take care.”
He had stopped the man who’d slapped me from doing more, and so I supposed I should have been thanking Mr. Warner, but I wasn’t. I was edging toward the quilt, which I’d dropped a few feet behind me. It seemed the only thing in the yard to offer protection.
Mr. Tolliver and his friend had appeared ready to storm the house and find my mother, but they were no match for the law Mr. Warner laid down, and, I imagine, a female teenager in cutoffs and T-shirt lying