Tilt - Alan Cumyn [33]
Free lungs! He ran and ran. His body was so hot he didn’t feel the wet until he was nearly a mile away from the house.
The cold came even later.
14
“I’m Stanley. Stan Dart.” Stan tried to keep the trembling from his voice. “You must be Mr. Igwash.”
The man at the door stood in a pair of slippers, worn on the outside edges. He didn’t have a balanced step. But he towered over Stan. And it looked like his shoulders rubbed both sides of the doorframe at once. His hair was shaved nearly down to his skull. Stan’s hand got lost in the big man’s grip.
“Do we know you?”
Stan explained that he was Janine’s date for the dance. Rainwater washed down his neck even though the worst of the storm was over. The late afternoon had settled into a steady drizzle.
What time was it? What time was he supposed to show up?
Janine’s father turned his head slightly. He didn’t let his eyes leave Stan’s.
“Janine!” he called. He had the holler of a basketball coach. He looked like he could dunk without getting too far off his toes.
Janine appeared in the slight space behind her father’s bulk. Her hair was wet and it looked darker. Had she colored it again? Had she been out in the rain herself?
“There’s a half-drowned gent here says he’s going to the dance with you tonight.” Her father’s slate gray eyes glimmered with amusement.
“Daddy, this is Stan.” What was that in her voice? Some little-girl tone Stan hadn’t heard from her before.
“Why is Stan all wet? And why is he two and a half hours early?” Janine’s dad turned back to Stan. “Are you staying for dinner?”
Stan shifted his weight from one squishy shoe to the other.
“Do you have a change of clothes, son?”
Stan hadn’t thought it through. He felt himself shivering like Feldon had on his doorstep just a few hours before.
He didn’t want to go back home. Home felt impossibly complicated at the moment.
“Dinner would be delirious,” Stan said. Then he laughed. Was this what it was like to be drunk?
They let him in out of the rain. Their house was one half of a duplex — boring brown brick on the outside, spacious and neat on the inside. A hallway immediately offered three choices: left to the living room, straight ahead to the kitchen, where something was cooking, or upstairs to the bedrooms.
Upstairs looked dark.
That’s where her dying mother was, Stan thought.
He kicked off his muddy running shoes and stood shivering in the foyer in socks squishy with rainwater. He pulled off those socks, hesitated, then leaned out the door and squeezed them until gray water drenched his wrists and ran onto the porch.
“I can get you something dry,” Janine said. “Don’t worry. I have lots of boys’ clothes.”
“Boys’ clothes?”
“That’s all she would wear for the longest time,” her dad said. “Till she started growing in certain directions.” His right eye lowered a little when he might be teasing. He had a bony hooked nose that somehow had the same outline as hers, but hers was a lot prettier.
Janine headed up the stairs into the shadows, and her dad stood grinning like he was going to remember this moment for a long, long time.
“Are you coming?” Janine said.
—
The bathroom was large and orderly and didn’t smell of spilled perfume. Stan looked at himself in the mirror.
Drowned rat. Grinning fool.
She had given him a plaid shirt that fit perfectly and smelled a little like someone adorable had worn it not so long ago. It looked fine on him. It looked better than most of his own shirts.
The jeans were a little long but he could roll up the cuffs, and large at the waist. Janine wasn’t a big girl, not in the middle. But he was a skinny guy.
Stan went up for a pretend jump shot in the bathroom. The tips of his fingers brushed the ceiling on his follow-through. Monday morning, six-thirty — rendezvous with destiny. For just a moment he saw himself dribbling the ball through Karl Brolin’s legs, then pulling up, fading slightly on the shot. Nothing but net.
Sweetness.
Why did Janine Igwash wear boys’ clothes?
Because she could wear anything and still steal the eyes of most men with