The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [42]
“I went down there to get the bicycle pump. My tires were flat. I think Go-Go’s been riding my bike. Have you seen him?”
“No.” He could tell Sean was frustrated. But he couldn’t follow up without tipping his hand. “Where was Go-Go today, anyway?”
“He was with that new friend, Billy or something. He goes to his house.”
“So Go-Go wasn’t around this afternoon?”
“I don’t think so.” Tim smiled in the dark. If Go-Go had been lurking in the basement, he would have made far more noise, probably jumped on Sean and Gwen, tried to join in the game they were playing. Go-Go knew how babies were made, technically, but he didn’t think it had anything to do with him. It was just something stupid that parents did.
As they fell asleep, Tim was pretty sure that Sean was whacking off. Lord knows, he was, and thinking about Gwen, although he felt a little pervy about it. Only thirteen, and his brother’s girlfriend. If he were to confess such things—and he never did—he wondered what the priest would find more egregious, the girl’s age or the covetousness. Not to mention all the impure thoughts backed up behind his desire for his brother’s girlfriend. The thing was, he didn’t want Gwen, not really. Mickey, maybe, but there was something about Mickey that scared him a little. He wanted a girlfriend. He had one at camp, last summer, and it was frustrating when they didn’t get to go back because he was pretty sure that he and Anne would have worked their way up to all sorts of things. Then his dad had to go and lose his job, and Tim lost his chance to get laid.
Tim was a virgin until senior prom, when his date seemed to assume that giving it up was virtually required, and he did nothing to disabuse her of that notion. But she wasn’t special. He met Arlene freshman year of college, however, and she was. Pretty and bubbly and in love with him, and he still can’t quite get over that fact.
When their girls arrived, Michelle and Lisa practically on top of each other, then Karen after a long pause, almost everyone made the same two observations. One: they were spaced out just like the Halloran boys, with only twelve months between the first two and then six years, a daddy-got-lucky baby. Then everyone added: “But girls are easier.” Really? Really? He looks at the three girls clustered together on the padded banquette in their breakfast nook and has to wonder. Sure, Go-Go broke their mother’s heart, driving into that Jersey wall, almost assuredly drunk after another failed attempt at sobriety. Go-Go had broken her heart over and over. With the first divorce and then the separation, which had led to the estrangement from her two grandbabies. Six grandchildren and only one boy, and of course it would be Sean who produced the much-beloved grandson, another chip-off-the-oh-so-wonderful block. When the families gather—rare, because Sean’s wife and her family have a stranglehold on Sean, and the distance is not insignificant—Duncan appears to be every bit as perfect as Sean, a dark and contained little soldier among his fluffy blond cousins. When they were younger, Tim’s girls had fussed over Duncan, but now Michelle and Lisa say he is stuck-up and boring. “Yeah, he makes his parents proud, with his straight A’s and cross-country running and jazz band, what a dipshit,” Tim wants to say. He doesn’t, though.
Aware of his daughters’ glares—even the little one is eye-fucking him and he hasn’t done shit to ruin her day—he hoists his golf bag over his shoulder and heads out to his car. His car, goddammit. He is entitled to take his car to the golf course on his day off, to have a little relaxation after working hard all week to buy their shoes and their criminally tiny T-shirts and whatever else they want. Isn’t he? But already he is thinking about dinner, concocting a plan that will make things up to them, assuming they will even deign to spend the evening with him and Arlene. Did he shut his parents out at that age? Of course he did. But his parents wanted to be shut out, whereas Arlene and Tim flutter around their children, courting them, wooing them.