The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [40]
Later that night, having made plans to meet again in the morning, touched by the soundness of her decision to leave Los Angeles, Annie fried a slab of bologna in a pan and listened to George Plimpton read an audiobook of John Cheever stories, which she had bought but never listened to after losing out on the part of Cheever’s wife in a biopic that ended up never getting made. The soothing way that Plimpton’s cosmopolitan, almost British, accent filled the kitchen with tales of people that Annie would want to punch in the face under most circumstances calmed her, made her feel smart and capable and not at all crazy.
She slathered mayonnaise on two slices of white bread and added the now-charred slice of bologna to complete the sandwich. She filled a glass with ice and whiskey and, spurred by the cocktail-guzzling Cheever characters, dumped some sugar into the drink. She stirred it with her finger, called it an old-fashioned, and retired to the dining room table to enjoy her meal, pausing Plimpton’s voice in mid-sentence—“ . . . from bacon and coffee to poultry . . .”—the word poultry sounding, to Annie’s ears, like poetry.
Three bites into her meal, the phone rang and Annie, no longer needing the protection of the answering machine, answered. “Hall-ow,” she said, the bread sticking to the roof of her mouth, the mayonnaise like caulk in the ridges and indentations of her palate. “Annie?” the voice said.
She swallowed and then, her tongue able to move freely in her mouth, responded, “This is Annie.”
“You sounded like you were pretending to be retarded,” the voice said.
“Daniel?” she asked.
“Buster,” her brother said.
It was always a strange sensation to hear her brother’s voice, how it sounded not like an actual voice but a sound inside of her own head, that her brother was held in the cage of her ribs and only occasionally made his presence known to her. She hadn’t heard from him in months, when he had specifically told her that she should, under no circumstances, take off her top. She had then, of course, taken off her top. That she had not heard from him felt like a justified punishment.
“What’s going on?” Annie asked, genuinely curious as to her brother’s current status. “Did you kill someone? Do you need money?”
“I almost killed myself and I need about twelve thousand dollars, but that’s not why I called.”
“Wait, what happened?”
“It’s a long story that will make you very sad, so I’ll hold off on telling it. The real news is that it turns out that you can go home again.”
“Buster,” Annie said, her voice impatient and sharp, “I’ve been drinking all day so I’m having trouble understanding what the hell you’re talking about.”
“I’m back home,” Buster said.
“In Florida?”
“Tennessee.”
“When did you move to Tennessee?”
“I’m living with Mom and Dad.”
“Oh, Buster,” Annie said. “Oh no.”
“It’s not so bad,” Buster said.
“It sounds bad,” Annie responded and then, as if he could not wait for her to finish her sentence, he said, “It’s pretty bad.” Slowly, as if he could not quite believe it, he told her the story of the potato gun and the rearranged face and his new living situation.
“A few times, they’ve called me Child B. They say it, and then, when I call them on it, they pretend it didn’t happen. Maybe it didn’t. I’m not sure. I’m pretty loose on pain pills.”
“Get out of there, Buster,” Annie said, nearly shouting.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m stuck here for the time being.”
“You can’t stay there,” Annie continued, refusing to take no for an answer. “You need to escape.”
“I thought, actually, that you might come here,” he said. “Keep me company. See how old age is treating Mom and Dad.”
Annie imagined her childhood bedroom unchanged since she had left, lobby cards still hanging on the walls, a half-empty bottle of rigid collodion on the dresser, an unsmoked bag of weed in a hidden compartment beneath the floorboards of the closet. She had not been home since she was twenty-three, always seeing her parents in neutral locations, places agreed