Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [70]
“You look tired,” she said, patting my cheek.
“I’ve been working hard,” I said. I wondered how much she knew about Emily and me.
“How’s the book?”
“Great, great. Just about done.” I’d been telling her the same thing since the days of her engagement to Philly. “Everything all ready here? Smells good.”
“More or less” said Irene. “I’ve had so much to do. Marie’s been such a big help. Emily, too.” She looked at me. “I’m glad she decided to show up a day early.”
“Uh huh,” I said. I thought she might be fucking with me—as a pothead, I spent a lot of time thinking that people might be fucking with me—but there was not a hint of sarcasm in her face or tone. That didn’t necessarily mean, however, that she wasn’t fucking with me. Before her own retirement Irene had for thirty years run a private agency that supplied the entire Ohio Valley with Korean babies, and she was master of a certain kind of administrative deadpan I’d never learned to read.
“I shouldn’t complain about having too much to do, though,” she said, with a dramatic sigh. With one automatic hand she reached into a pocket of her smock, brought out a chick wrapped in flashing yellow foil, peeled it, and neatly severed its chocolate head. “It’s better than being bored out of my skull.”
“Aw, Irene,” I said.
“I never should have let him talk me into leaving the house on Inverness,” she said, chewing.
“I know,” I said. During all her years there Irene had felt little affection for the house on Inverness Avenue, a cramped brick two-story, much smaller than all its neighbors, and she had been glad at last to see it sold. Since the move out to Kinship, though, the place had assumed in her mind the fabulous proportions of some lost Jerusalem or Tara. “It’s been hard for you.”
“It’s been very hard,” Marie told James.
“And I’m repeating myself, aren’t I?” Irene winked at James and sadly shook her head. Having devoted her life to the invention and licensing and construction of a thousand families all over western Pennsylvania and Ohio—the macromanagement of families, so to speaks—it was her melancholy fate to have ended up living far from her remaining children, in a ghost town, with a husband who spent most of his time locked up in a shed, building Wheatstone bridges and Kremlins for barn swallows.
“So where is everybody else?” I said, looking around. Beside the toaster, on a china saucer, sat the little memorial candle Irv had mentioned, in its jelly glass, its tiny fire pale and motionless. Its label, with blue mock-Hebrew characters, had been pasted on at a crooked angle, and it was priced with a fluorescent orange grocery-store sticker at 79¢.
“Deborah’s lying out on the dock” said Irene, following my gaze. “She’s been no help at all, of course. And I guess Philly—is he still down in the basement?”
“Of course. Playing with Grossman,” said Marie. “Mr. Grossman got out again last night.”
“Mr. Grossman?” said James. “Who’s that?”
“I’m sure you’ll find out,” said Irene, rolling her eyes. She looked at me. “And you know where Irv is.”
“In the springhouse.”
“Where else?”
“Maybe I’ll just take James out to meet him, then.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Irene. She brushed a damp strand of hair from her eyes with the back of one arm, then made a helpless gesture that encompassed all the saucepans, crockery bowls, and empty halves of eggshells scattered across every available surface of the kitchen. “I’m afraid we’re still hours away.”
“Oh, now,” said Marie. “It’s not that bad.”
“Oh, say,” said Irene. She looked at James. “How old are you?”
“Huh?” said James, startled. He’d been looking over at the modest, all-but-invisible light the Warshaws had lit to commemorate the anniversary of Sam Warshaw’s death. “I’m twenty. Almost twenty-one.”
“Well, then you’re the youngest.” Irene tried to keep her voice sounding bright and bureaucratic, but it got a little hollow here, and you could see she was wondering how it had come to pass that in her family a twenty-year-old stranger in an ill-smelling trench coat could pass for the child