The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank [35]
Mickey wasn't reading as much as being the boy he'd been—daring devil, winking leprechaun, smiling sociopath—especially when he got caught stealing, and his stepfather asked, "Are you nauseated, Mickey?"
In the audience's laughter, I heard Archie's.
I couldn't bear the prospect of him ignoring me. After the applause, I got my stuff together fast. On my way out, I heard someone from the audience ask the standard question What do you read for inspiration? and Mickey's answer: "Bathroom walls."
—•—
I was living at my aunt Rita's old apartment in the Village. Legally, I wasn't supposed to be there so I hadn't really moved in. There wasn't room, anyway; no one had moved my aunt's stuff out. It seemed less defined by my presence than her absence, and the little terrace was the only place in it I liked to be.
But I couldn't read out there. So I got myself a tall diet root beer and a coaster, and took Deep South to her big formal dining-room table.
The novel started on flora (dark woods, tangled thickets, choking vines) and went to fauna—if bugs counted as fauna. Bugs, bugs, bugs—too small to see or as big as birds, swarms and loners, biting, stinging, and going up your nose. The prose was dense and poetic; it was like reading illegible handwriting, and after a few pages my eyes were just going left to right, word to word, not reading at all. So, when the phone rang, I answered on ring one.
Archie said, "It's me," though we'd been broken up for almost two years. "What's the matter?"
I was too surprised to answer. Then, I started crying and couldn't stop.
Archie hated to hear anyone cry—not because it hurt him or anything like that, he just hated crying. I could tell he was calling from a pay phone and knew that he was probably out to dinner with Mickey and his entourage, but he didn't say. He was silent, waiting for me to talk.
Finally, I got out: "My dad has leukemia."
All he said was, "Oh, honey," but in it I heard everything I needed to. He told me to blow my nose and come over to dinner the next night.
I I
Archie answered the door, wearing the black cashmere sweater I'd given him as a Christmas present. "Hello, dear," he said. He sort of patted my shoulder.
Behind him I saw peonies on the dining-room table. They were white and edged with magenta, still closed into little fists. "Oh," I said. "My favorite."
He said, "Yes, I know," and his eyes said, You're not yourself.
While he poured club soda and squeezed lime into it, he told me that he'd stood over those peonies and asked, ordered, and begged them to open, but they were as resistant as I'd been at the beginning.
"Maybe they're seeing someone else," I said.
For dinner, we were having soft-shell crabs, another favorite of mine. "While he sauteed them, I told him that my father didn't have the leukemia you usually heard about; it wasn't the kind that killed people right away.
"Good," Archie said.
I said, "But he's already had it for nine years."
Archie was setting our plates down on the dining-room table, and he stopped and turned around. "Nine years?"
I nodded.
We sat. I repeated what my father had said about not wanting the illness to interfere with my life, but I was afraid Archie would suspect what I did, so I said it out loud: "I think maybe he didn't think I could handle it or help him."
"No," Archie said, "he didn't want to put you through it." My father had been strong and noble, Archie said, which was how I was trying to see it, too.
I told him that my dad's doctor—Dr. Wischniak—had come over and explained the illness to Henry and me privately. I reminded Archie that I'd barely passed non-college-bound biology, but I understood that the leukemia and chemotherapy had weakened my father's immune system, and he'd become susceptible to infections, like the shingles and pneumonia he'd already had. I told Archie that my brother