The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [254]
“Because you gave me six raffle tickets,” the boy said.
Clearly, the boy had no concept of one’s being emphatic by varying the expected numbers: one rose instead of a dozen; six chances instead of just one.
Keller got up and retrieved the bag of doughnuts from the hall table. The grease had seeped through and left a glistening smudge on the wood, which he wiped with the ball of his hand. He carried the bag to Brad and lowered it so he could see in. Close up, the boy smelled slightly sour. His hair was dirty. He was sitting with his shoulders hunched. Keller moved the bag forward an inch. The boy shook his head no. Keller folded the top, set the bag on the rug. He walked back to where he’d been sitting.
“If you’d buy me a bike, I’d work next summer and pay you back,” Brad blurted out. “I need another bike to get to some places I got to go.”
Keller decided against unscrambling the syntax and regarded him. The tattoo seemed to depict a spike with something bulbous at the tip. A small skull, he decided, for no good reason except that these days skulls seemed to be a popular image. There was a pimple on Brad’s chin. Miraculously, even to a person who did not believe in miracles, Keller had gone through his own adolescence without ever having a pimple. His daughter had not had similar good luck. She had once refused to go to school because of her bad complexion, and he had made her cry when he’d tried to tease her out of being self-conscious. “Come on,” he’d said to her. “You’re not Dr. Johnson, with scrofula.” His wife, as well as his daughter, had then burst into tears. The following day, Sue Anne had made an appointment for Lynn with a dermatologist.
“Would this be kept secret from your mother?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. He wasn’t emphatic, though; he narrowed his eyes to see if Keller would agree.
He asked, “Where will you tell her you got the bike?”
“I’ll say from my dad.”
Keller nodded. “That’s not something she might ask him about?” he said.
The boy put his thumb to his mouth and bit the cuticle. “I don’t know,” he said.
“You wouldn’t want to tell her it was in exchange for doing yard work for me next summer?”
“Yeah,” the boy said, sitting up straighter. “Yeah, sure, I can do that. I will.”
It occurred to Keller that Molly Bloom couldn’t have pronounced the word will more emphatically. “We might even say that I ran into you and suggested it,” Keller said.
“Say you ran into me at Scotty’s,” the boy said. It was an ice cream store. If that was what the boy wanted him to say, he would. He looked at the bag of doughnuts, expecting that in his newfound happiness the boy would soon reach in. He smiled. He waited for Brad to move toward the bag.
“I threw your trash can over,” Brad said.
Keller’s smile faded. “What?” he said.
“I was mad when I came here. I thought you were some nutcase friend of my dad’s. I know you’ve been dating my mom.”
Keller cocked his head. “So you knocked over my trash can, in preparation for asking me to give you money for a bike?”
“My dad said you were a sleazebag who was dating Mom. You and Mom went to Boston.”
Keller had been called many things. Many, many things. But sleazebag had not been among them. It was unexpected, but it stopped just short of amusing him. “And if I had been dating Sigrid?” he said. “That would mean you should come over and dump out my trash?”
“I never thought you’d lend me money,” Brad mumbled. His thumb was at his mouth again. “I didn’t . . . why would I think you’d give me that kind of money, just because you bought twelve bucks’ worth of raffle tickets?”
“I’m not following the logic here,” Keller said. “If I’m the enemy, why, exactly, did you come to see me?”
“Because I didn’t know. I don’t know what my father’s getting at half the time. My dad’s a major nutcase, in case you don’t know that. Somebody ought to round him up in one of his burlap bags and let him loose far away from here so he can go live with his precious turkeys.”
“I can understand your frustration,” Keller said. “I’m afraid that with all