Tilt - Alan Cumyn [52]
“You lost him?” Now his mother was waking up. Stan pulled back the rumpled covers as if the kid might have made himself so small he could be hiding there. Then Stan kneeled down and looked under the bed, remembering how Feldon had hidden in the kitchen cupboard just the day before.
No one. Feldon was not there.
“Your father left him in your care and you’ve lost him?”
“I gave him my bed and . . .” Stan didn’t want to go into any further details. It was his business what he did after saving his half-brother from a wasted life with a cowardly dimwit of a father.
“And what? What did you do?”
He could say that he had slept on the pull-out. It was still rumpled — probably. Probably it would sound true and all he’d be then was a liar.
“Mr. Strawberry!” Lily blurted and launched herself at Stan. “You found him!”
Her pajamas were soaking. Stan could smell it almost before —
“Lily! Oh, God, Lily!”
Lily started to just scream in the middle of Stan’s room with Mr. Strawberry wrapped around her neck.
“Stop screaming!”
Stan moved quickly to carry off the kicking girl. She screamed and screamed directly in his ear, and pounded her fists against his back, but he held on until she was simply sobbing against him.
“It’s all right. It’s all right, sweet knees,” he whispered to her.
He carried her downstairs. A sign on the toilet, in his mother’s hand, read FLUSH AND I WILL KILL YOU. Stan filled the tub for Lily, who started shrieking again until she couldn’t catch her breath anymore. Then Stan handed her a warm washcloth so that it became more or less all right.
Stan’s mother burst into the bathroom holding a reeking wad of Lily’s sheets. “Lily, where did Feldon go?”
“Feldon is gone?”
“It’s all right!” Stan said quickly. “Dad’s gone again. But I made sure he left Feldon. But we don’t know if Dad came back in the night to get him?”
Why hadn’t Stan paid more attention? It would be just like Ron to change his mind in the taxi and come back and steal Feldon away.
“Lily!” Stan’s mother said.
“Feldon would have told me if he was going anywhere.” Lily splashed quietly now, not looking at either of them.
“What I’m saying is that last night Dad was going to take Feldon away. They were both going to leave in a taxi . . .”
“But where?”
Someone knocked on the bathroom door. “I need to go pee-pee!” said a little voice.
Stan’s mother ripped open the door. Feldon was standing in his clothes — the ones from last night — holding himself and doing a little dance.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Stan’s mother said.
“Feldon slept with me last night!” Lily said.
“I have to go!” Feldon danced and held himself.
“Well, I don’t want to see your nib thing!” Lily yelled back.
Stan took him to the upstairs bathroom.
“It stinks in here,” Feldon said, but Stan got him to plug his nose.
“I thought you were gone!” he said.
“Lily came and got me,” Feldon said, his pants around his ankles.
“Lily did?”
“She saved me from the taxi man.” When Feldon turned around to explain he almost sprayed Stan, who stepped deftly.
“Keep your eye on the bowl there, big shooter!” Stan felt like laughing. “It wasn’t Lily, it was me, Feldon! I was the one who saved you last night.”
—
There was not much time now to explain it all again to Stan’s mother, to get her to understand. Some things she grasped much better than Stan, but they tended to be old things. Mortgages. Finances in general. Love, probably — although Stan was beginning to see that even now she hardly understood anything about it, and that was a sobering thought. The woman who had married Ron did not have a firm grasp on the most important human endeavor.
Love.
Love was the most important human endeavor. Stan could see that now, too, even as he was explaining Feldon’s presence and Ron’s absence yet again to his mother, who was running around in her bedroom looking for a clean outfit to wear to what might be her last day of work.
It was Monday, the day of the all-staff meeting when something extraordinary was about to be announced — extraordinary but probably not good. Good