Charles Grant: The Pet

His mouth worked at the start of a smile while he nodded to them all and told them his name.

From somewhere down the block, just past the middle, an engine rumbled softly.

Metal creaked.

A chassis rocked slowly back and forth in place.

He bit at his lower lip; he was scaring himself.

A headlamp winked.

Tires crackled as if they were frozen to the blacktop.

Jesus , he thought, and wiped a palm over his mouth.

The engine died.

Metal stopped shifting.

There was only the faint hiss of late downtown traffic.

He pushed off again and barely made the far corner without swerving off the road, then headed rapidly back up the boulevard toward home. A bus grumbled past him, exhaust clouding his face. He coughed and slowed again, watched as the amber lights strung along its roofline vanished when the street shrank into the dark that hung below the lighted sky above the next town.

Jesus , he thought again, and made himself shudder. He knew it was only heat escaping from the engines, released from the metal frames, that someone had only been warming up a motor in a garage. That’s all it was. Yet he made himself think of something else, like what it was like to live in a place where the cities and towns weren’t slambang against each other, like they were here, all the way to New York.

Spooky, he decided.

All that open space, or all those trees — spooky as hell, and anyway, Ashford wasn’t all that bad of a place.

He turned into his block again, saw the station wagon in the driveway, and pulled up behind it. After wiping his hands on his jeans, he walked the bike through the open garage door. There was no room inside for the car — too many garden tools and cartons and a thousand odds and ends that somehow always managed to be carted out here when there was no place immediate anyone could think of to put them. Like an attic with its house buried a mile below the ground.

He hesitated, and wiped his hands again as a sliver of tension worked its way across his back. Then he opened the door and stepped into the kitchen.

“I thought,” his mother said, “you’d been kidnapped, for heaven’s sake.”

The light was bright; he squinted to adjust.

She was standing at the sink with one hip cocked, rinsing out a cup while the percolator bubbled noisily on the counter beside her. Her hair was dark and long, reaching almost to the middle of her back, and when she pulled it together with a vivid satin ribbon the way it was now, she looked almost young enough to be one of her own students. Especially when she smiled and her large eyes grew wide. Which she did when he walked up and kissed her cheek, shucked his jacket, and draped it over the back of a chair.

He was going to tell her about the cars, changed his mind when she looked away, back to her cleaning.

“I was riding.”

“Good for you,” she declared, glowering at a stain that would not leave the cup. “Fresh air is very good for you. It flushes out the dead cells in the blood, but I guess you already know that from biology or something.”

“Right.”

A glance into the half-filled refrigerator and he pulled out a can of soda.

“But that gassy junk, dear, is bad for you,” she said, setting the cup down and rinsing out another. There was a stack of dirty dishes in the sink, soaking in hot soapy water. Maybe tomorrow she would get around to washing them all. “It’s not good to drink that stuff before you go to bed. It lies there in your stomach not doing anything but making you burp and giving you nightmares.”

“Am I going to bed?”

She tsked at him and pursed her lips. “Donald, it is now”—she checked the sunflower-shaped clock over the stove—”forty-seven minutes past ten o’clock. Exactly. You have school tomorrow. I have school tomorrow. And I’m tired.”

The percolator buzzed at her and she pulled out the plug.

“You didn’t have to wait up for me if you’re that tired, you know, Mom.”

She dried the cups and poured the coffee, everything perfectly timed. “I didn’t. Your father’s been on the phone since we walked in the door. By the way,” she added as he headed for the living room, “I saw that Chris playing the piano tonight. She’s really quite pretty, you know it? Are you going to take her to the do?”

“I don’t know,” he said, still walking away. “Maybe.”

“What?”

“Maybe!” he called back, and under his breath: “On a cold day in hell, lady.”

Chris Snowden was the new girl on the block, and in this case it was literal. She and her family had moved in three doors down in the middle of last August. Her hair was such a pale blonde it was nearly white, her skin looked so soft you could lose your fingers in it if you tried to touch it, and, Brian Pratt’s crudeness aside, she had a figure he had seen only in the movies. She was, at first glance, a laughable stereotype — cheerleader, brainless, and the football team captain’s personal choice for a consort. Which she had been for a while, while everyone nodded, then — professed shock and puzzlement when she started dating the president of the student council. She didn’t need the grades, so he wasn’t doing her homework, and she didn’t need the ride to school, because it was only five blocks away and she walked every morning — except when it rained and she drove her own car, a dark red convertible whose top was always up. Then just last week it was known she was on her own again, and those who decided such things decided she was only sleeping around.

Don puffed his cheeks, blew out, and sighed.

Chris’s father was a doctor in some prestigious hospital in New York, and if Don’s mother had her way, he would be taking her to every event of the town’s century-plus birthday— the Ashford Day picnic, party, dance, concert, football game, whatever. A full week of celebration. But even if he wanted to, he knew he didn’t have a chance.

Just as he reached the front hall and was about to turn right into the living room, he heard his father’s voice and changed his mind.

“I don’t give a sweet Jesus what you think, Harry. I am not going to take a position one way or another.”

Great , Don thought gloomily; just great.

The position was which side of the dispute to be on; Harry was Mr. Harold Falcone, his biology instructor and president of the teachers’ union.

“Look,” his father said as Don poked his head around the doorway, “I’ve pushed damned hard for you and your people since the day I walked into that place, and you know it. I got money for the labs, the teams, for the goddamned maintenance, for god’s sake, so don’t you dare tell me I don’t sympathize.”

Norman Boyd was sitting in his favorite chair, a monstrous green thing with scarred wood trim and a sagging cushion. His back was to Don, and it was rigid.

“What? What? Harry, goddamnit to hell, if my mother hadn’t taught me better, I’d hang up on you right now for that kind of nonsense. What do you mean, I don’t give a shit? I do give a shit! But can’t you see past your wallet just this once and understand that I’m caught between a rock and a hard place here? My god, man, you’re screaming crap in one ear and the board is screaming crap in the other, and I’m damned for doing this and damned for doing that, and double damned if I don’t do a thing — which is exactly what I feel like doing sometimes, believe me.”

He tapped a long finger on the handset, looked up at the high plaster ceiling, and used his free hand to rake through his greying brown hair. A deep breath swelled his chest beneath a white crewneck sweater; the tapping moved to the top of his thigh.

“I will be at the negotiations, yes. I’ve already told you that.” He shifted. “I will not—” He glanced over his shoulder. “Yes, of course my contract is up for renewal at the end of this year. I know that, you know that, the board knows it — for Jesus’s sake, the whole damned world knows about it by now!” He saw his son and grimaced a smile. “What? Yes! Yes, damnit, I admit it, are you happy? I do not want to jeopardize my job and my future just because you assholes couldn’t come to terms over the summer. No,” he said with acid sweetness, “I do not expect your support either if I decide to run for office.”