The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [118]
Annie would soon be back in L.A., resettling her life before she was asked to leave it behind again and start filming Lucy’s movie. She had invited Buster to stay with her, the house more than big enough to contain the two of them, but he had already enacted plans to stay in town, hoping he was not making a huge mistake. He had, due to some begging, some false praise for Lucas Kizza’s insane, rambling story, obtained an adjunct teaching position at the community college, teaching composition and technical writing. People would call him Professor Fang, which sounded so much like a supervillain that he wasn’t sure he could go through with it. He would move in with Suzanne, what they had talked about for a few weeks now and had been unable to find any reason not to do so. The Fang house would be left unattended, tied up in the vagaries of the law until someone made a decision on how to proceed. Annie and Buster had some ragged desire to burn it down or to blow it up, but they were done with this kind of messy grief, with how it was really just anger masquerading as mourning. They would simply leave it behind, never return, and if they were lucky, their brains would do the careful editing necessary to omit this part of their lives from memory.
For the time being, Annie and Buster went about a revised routine. Buster wrote, and Annie rehearsed. Sometimes Buster, as he had years ago when he had still been living with his parents and Annie had been in Los Angeles, would run lines with his sister, trying his hardest to keep up with her, finding it impossible. Any attempts to find their parents, all that work, that embarrassingly earnest effort, simply ended, and the two of them were shocked to find out how much more free time they had without it.
On one of the last evenings in the house, Annie locked in her room doing some kind of jazzercise along to a videotape she had found at a thrift store, Buster heard Suzanne’s car tires crunching over the gravel driveway, but he kept typing, trying to wring as many words as he could out of the story in his head. The novel seemed to be a cave of sorts, twisting, maze-like passages, but Buster focused only on finding an exit that was not the original entrance, pushing his way through the dark until he found a path that held the promise of escape. He knew that Micah and Rachel would emerge, finally, from the pit and take their places aboveground, but he had to get there, had to find the correct sequence of events that would unlock that image. He heard Suzanne’s voice calling from the hallway and he finally removed his hands from the keys of the computer. Suzanne held two paper bags of food from Sonic, the bottom of the bags wet with grease and steam, and, in her other hand, a tray that held two sodas in a size so large that the cups looked like barrels. “Dinner,” she said. He nodded, cleared off the coffee table in the living room, and they sat on the floor and tore into their burgers. Buster hadn’t eaten since that morning, and he let the food, the salt and the grease and the shocking tang of condiment, serve as a reward for having written enough to be satisfied. “Good day?” he asked Suzanne.
Suzanne had finished her burger and was carefully opening packets of mustard to dress up a corn dog. “Not bad,” she said. “Okay tips, no jerks, day went by fast. And I think I had an idea about the story I’m working on. I wrote it down on a napkin during my break.” Buster smiled. “I did okay, too,” he said. She smiled and kissed his cheek. “I knew you were doing okay,” she said. “It made me happy at work to think that you were writing the hell out of your book.” They ate their food, took sips of soda so sweet that it tasted like liquefied candy, and Buster allowed himself the