White Oleander - Janet Fitch [36]
“I need some beer anyway,” he said. “You want to come, Astrid?” As if her smile couldn’t stretch anymore, it sprang back to the center, then she stretched it again. “You can go yourself, can’t you, big boy? Astrid needs to help me for a minute.” Pluck, pluck, tearing the baby spiders off with the dead leaves.
Ray got his jacket and ducked out under the waterfall of water coming off the corrugated steel porch roof, the jacket pulled up to cover his head.
“You and me need to talk, missy,” Starr said to me as Ray closed the cab door to the truck and started the motor.
Reluctantly, I followed her back into the house, into her bedroom. Starr never talked to the kids. Her room was dark and held the smell of unwashed grown-ups, dense and loamy, a woman and a man. The bed was unmade. A kid’s room never smelled like that, no matter how many were sleeping there. I wanted to open a window.
She sat down on the unmade bed and reached for the pack of Benson and Hedges 100s, saw it was empty, threw it away. “You’re having a good time here, aren’t you,” she said, peering into the drawer of the bedside table, rummaging inside. “Making yourself at home? Getting comfortable?”
I traced the flower pattern on her sheets, it was a poppy. My fingers followed the aureole, and then the feelers in the middle. Poppy, the shape of my mother’s undoing.
“A little too darn comfortable, I’d say.” She shut the drawer, the little ring of the pull clicking. She tugged the blanket up, so I couldn’t trace the flower anymore. “I may not be some genius, but I’m getting your game. Believe me, it takes one to know one.”
“One what?” I couldn’t help but be curious about what I was that Starr recognized in herself.
“Going after my man.” She straightened out a cigarette butt from the plaid beanbag ashtray on the nightstand and lit it.
I had to laugh. “I wasn’t.” That was what she saw? Bang bang bang, Lord almighty? “I didn’t.”
“Always hanging around, handling his ‘tools’ — ‘What’s this for, Uncle Ray?’ Playing with his guns? I’ve seen the two of you. Everybody asleep except the two of you, cuddling up, just as sweet as you please.” She exhaled the stale butt-smoke into the close, humid air.
“He’s old,” I said. “We’re not doing anything.”
“He’s not that old,” Starr said. “He’s a man, missy. He sees what he sees and he does what he can. I’ve got to talk fast before he gets back, but I got to tell you, I decided I’m calling Children’s Services, so whatever you were thinking, it’s all over now, Baby Blue. You’re history.”
I stared at her, her furry lashes. She couldn’t be that mean, could she? I hadn’t done anything. Sure, I loved him, but I couldn’t help that. I loved her too, and Davey, all of them. It was unfair. She couldn’t be serious.
I started to protest, but she held up her hand, the butt smoldering between her fingers. “Don’t try to argue me out of it. I got a nice thing going here now. Ray’s the best man I ever had, treats me nice. Maybe you haven’t been trying, but I smell S-E-X, missy, and I’m not taking any chances. I lived too long and come too far to blow it now.”
I sat like a fish in that airless room, flopping, as the rain battered the metal roof and walls. She was kicking me out, for nothing. I felt the ocean tugging me from my tiny little place on the rock. I could hear the river, carrying its tons of debris. I tried to think of an explanation, a reason that might satisfy her.
“I never had a father,” I said.
“Don’t.” She crushed the twice-smoked butt out in the ashtray, watched her fingers. “I’ve got myself and my own kids to worry about. You and me, we hardly know each other. I don’t owe you a thing.” She looked down at the front of her fuzzy sweater and brushed at some ash that had fallen on her full breast.
I was slipping, falling. I had trusted Starr and I’d never given her a reason to doubt me. It wasn’t fair. She was a Christian, but she wasn’t acting on faith, on goodness. “What about charity?” I said, like a falling man reaching for a branch. “Jesus