Charles Grant - The Pet

“Hey, stranger!”

He stopped and turned around, and shifted his feet when Chris came running up, her hair unbound, her shirt out of her jeans.

“Hi,” he said.

“God, you’ve been a ghost, you know that?” she said. “Where’ve you been hiding?”

He gestured toward the house, toward the men on ladders fixing the window. “Cleaning up, seeing my mom … you know.”

“Yeah. Hey, I’m sorry about what happened.”

She moved closer, and he could smell the perfume she used.

“Is it true,” she said, “that your father is leaving?”

“Yeah. A leave of absence. What with all the trouble and my mom and all, he needs the time, you know?”

“Boy, do I,” she said. “Is he really going to run for mayor?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s thinking about it, but I have a feeling things have changed.” Then he looked at her eyes and saw something missing. Her expression was friendly enough, her tone as gentle, but there was still something missing and he couldn’t figure it out.

“Hey, uh, look,” he said at last. “It’s Halloween this weekend, and … well, we kind of got screwed up last week, because of what happened. And I was wondering … that is, I—”

He jumped then when a car horn blared behind him, and Chris laughed, tapped his arm and walked over to Brian’s car.

“Hey, Duck, what’s up with your mom?” Brian asked as Chris opened the door and got in.

“She’s okay,” he said flatly.

“Good. Tell her I said hi.” He cocked a finger-gun at him and gunned his engine, and as he drove away with one arm around Chris’s shoulder, Don heard him say “Quack,” and heard Chris say, “Quacker quack,” and laugh.

“What?” he said. “What are you talking about?”

“Now look,” Norman said. “I haven’t got time to argue with you. I’ve done all the figures, and what with the medical expenses and the house, there just isn’t enough money. I’m sorry, but I can’t pull it out of the air, and I can’t spend it when it isn’t there. You’ll have to start looking closer to home, at the state colleges, where it’s cheaper. Besides, the way your grades are going, you’ll be lucky to graduate.”

Tracey was sitting on the living room couch, her mother in polite attendance. When he told her about his father’s dicturn, she commiserated and suggested he start looking at scholarships, student loans, and some of the local organizations who sponsor kids in college.

He hadn’t thought of it; he thanked her; he wanted to kiss her, but her mother wouldn’t leave.

In the cafeteria Jeff groaned and made to dump his tray over Don’s head. “What’s the big deal with Chris anyway, huh? I thought you and Tracey were … you know.”

“We are, I guess,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“But you don’t want to be tied down, huh?”

He looked up at the bitterness he heard in Jeff’s voice. “No, I didn’t say that.”

“I know you didn’t,” Jeff said. And pointed a fork at his chest. “Well, listen, pal — Tracey Quintero is one great lady, and you’d better not hurt her. You listening, pal? You’d better not do anything to hurt her or you’ll have to answer to me.”

He forced a grin. “Hey, is that a threat?”

Jeff didn’t smile back. “Whatever.”

And he almost gasped aloud when he realized that Jeff was in love with her too.

On Friday he stood at his mother’s bedside with his father and watched her easy breathing, watched the IV feed her, watched the screens of the instruments recording her life.

At five minutes to ten she woke up, saw her son, and screamed.

The room was dark.

Sitting on the desk chair with his back to the wall, he could see them on the shelves and on the posters — the elephants, the hawks, the bobcats, the panther in the jungle licking its paw.

The night was cold.

Downstairs, he could hear his father answering the door, handing out tissue-wrapped packets of candy to the trick-or-treating kids who were roaming the neighborhood in packs herded by parents.

Yesterday his mother woke up.

Today he had stayed home, sitting at his desk trying to make up his mind, and during a wandering through the house when his back grew too sore, he had looked out a side window just after sunset and had seen his father talking to Chris. It looked as if they were arguing, and he wanted to run out and tell her not to get his father mad, not now, for god’s sake, or she’ll regret it come June.

Then she had pulled a handful of her hair over her left shoulder and started walking toward her backyard. Norman, after a brief hesitation, had followed when she looked back and pouted, and thrust out her chest.

Norman didn’t come home for more than an hour.

Harry Falcone and Chris Snowden, and goddamn Sam was dead.

Nothing had changed.

Red.

People were dead, kids were dead, and nothing had changed.

A hazed red, like looking through a distant crimson curtain.

He spoke to Tracey on the phone and had found the nerve to tell her he loved her, and was puzzled enough not to ask why when she told him she liked him, but she wasn’t sure yet about loving. Instead, he changed the subject, to school, to Jeff when she asked how he was doing, to the weather and the coming holidays. And when they hung up, he looked at the stairs without seeing a thing.

And a few minutes later he sighed and rubbed his eyes.

She was wrong when she said he was all right now; she was wrong when she said she didn’t know about loving. Of course she did. He had heard it in Jeff’s voice, and he had just heard it in hers — she was afraid of him now, and she wasn’t afraid of Jeff.

So how could he be all right when nothing had changed in spite of what he’d done?

He stood in the kitchen and drank a can of soda, stood in the hallway and stared at the telephone for nearly five minutes before dialing Tracey’s number. She was surprised to hear his voice again, and sorry that she couldn’t go out with him next weekend because she had already promised Jeff a sample of her father’s intensive interrogation. She laughed. He laughed. She suggested that Don call him and give him some hints. He laughed again and told her he just might do that.

And hung up.

And went to his room where he damned them both silently, and wondered what he’d done wrong, wondered where his mistake was?

Change. He would have to change if he wanted to take her back from Jeff; he would have to change if he wanted to get the world straight again.

“No,” he said then.

No , he thought, eyes narrowed in a frown.

What was needed, he decided as he heard his father tramp up the stairs, was not a change in him, and not the simple recognition that his problems were no worse than anyone else’s. He knew that. He wasn’t stupid, and he knew that.

But what he knew that no one else did was that he had the means to do something about it.

Norman knocked on the door and opened it, grunted and slapped the wall switch that turned on the desk lamp.

“Jesus, are you a mole or something?”

“I was thinking.”

“Oh, good. It’s about time. I’m off to see your mother. You watch the door and hand out the candy. If you think of it, put some poison in the apples.”

Don smiled dutifully, and his father gave him a salute, then looked around the room and shook his head.

“Someday maybe I’ll understand all this,” he said as he took another step in and scanned the shelves and the posters. “Maybe I’ve been wrong, son. Maybe … well, maybe I’ve been wrong.” He lifted his shoulders and scratched his head. “When your mother’s feeling better, maybe you and I should have a little talk. I suppose better late than never, huh, son? What do you say?”