Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“Have you been driving all night?” he asked the cabbie .

“Yeah. I been working eleven to eleven. Beat the heat.”

He pushed a wad of money into the man’s hand and got out, in front of Nina’s building. He felt light-headed. He stood there and tried not to look like a crazy man or a drunk still stumbling from the night before. A woman with a baby in a stroller walked by and didn’t look at him, and a teenage girl dropped her eyes and quickened her pace. A garbage truck was out. It was going to be a hot, hazy day. Nina was right that he was a coward. How could he even admit to her what he had done? He would have to call Louise with some excuse. He had an appointment to talk with the police. But he was not even in Connecticut. He was in New York, in front of Nina’s, and the trick was to get into the building and up the stairs .

Child’s play: one foot in front of the other. Child’s play: bend your finger, pull the trigger. His son had shot his daughter .

HE WAS TRICKED. Parker set him up for it. After refusing to go into the city with John Joel, Parker called, suspecting, no doubt, that John Joel wouldn’t go alone. They talked for a while on the phone about trying to get a ride to the movies to see Moonraker . Parker told him he wouldn’t understand half the movie, but if he didn’t talk during it, he’d explain what he didn’t get afterward. John Joel’s mother was doing an errand for one of the hospital patients, though, so she couldn’t take them, and Parker’s mother had laryngitis. Parker had him hold the phone while he asked his mother if she was in bed because she was sick with something in addition to laryngitis, or whether she could get up and take them to the movies. Parker’s mother had written: “You don’t have a sympathetic bone in your body.” Parker suggested calling Frankie Wu. Wu’s mother didn’t work, and when they got to the theater, they could ditch Wu and meet him outside when it was over. John Joel said that wasn’t a good idea. Parker said, “Ah, you pansy.” When they hung up, John Joel went into the living room, sprawled in the chair, and got a comic to read. It was one he had borrowed from Parker, called Pig Fig , and it showed pigs being fed into a giant machine that ground them into pulp, and pig-faced bakers molding the pulp into the nearly round shape of a fig.

“So are you going to flunk summer school?” he said to Mary as she walked into the room to get her purse.

She had her tablet and her book in her hand. She picked up her purse, pretending not to hear him.

“Think I’ll go to New York today and have some fun,” he said.

Mary was doing something in the kitchen. She was humming a Linda Ronstadt song, getting something out of the refrigerator.

“Wanna make me another breakfast?” he said, following her into the kitchen.

“You need it,” she said. “You look like a breakfast. You know which part? The sausage part.” She jabbed her finger into the roll of fat above his Bermuda shorts. A pain shot through his stomach.

“I’m not ignorant, though,” he said. “Fuzz Scuzz.”

Parker had taught him that insult. Somebody that made you itch to look at them was a Fuzz Scuzz. He said it to her again, curling his fingers and making a face.

“How old are you?” she said. “Ten?”

“Daddy and Nick and I had lunch in New York,” he said. “You’ve never had lunch with Daddy in New York, have you?”

“If Daddy really wanted to see you, he’d live here,” Mary said. She got a Tab out of the refrigerator. “You’re probably why he doesn’t,” she said. “He can’t stand you.”

“I hear you’ve got a crush on Lloyd Bergman,” he said. “Somebody whose brother was at that party you and Angela went to told me. Want to know who?”

“No,” she said. She opened the Tab, took a sip.

“Frankie Wu’s brother. How come you don’t get a crush on him?” John Joel pulled the skin at the corner of his eyes, making them into slits.

“You don’t look as ugly that way,” she said.

“Are you the homeliest girl in summer school?” he said.

“Beat your meat,” she said. She slung her purse over her shoulder and picked up the can of Tab, clutched her books under her arm. She was carrying a lot of stuff, and he watched her, hoping she’d drop something going out the door. She walked very close to the door and opened it with a stiff flick of her wrist. She went out, and he heard the slow hiss as the door closed behind her. As usual, she had topped him with an insult he didn’t understand. It reminded him that he was hungry and hadn’t eaten for two hours, since his mother fixed him breakfast. He opened the refrigerator, saw that there was hamburger meat, and took out the package, ripped off a handful and made it round. He put a lump of butter in a pan and turned on the stove. When the butter sputtered into liquid, he pressed the hamburger into the pan. It was ten o’clock. She was late for school, and he was surprised that she was going. His mother had stalked out of the house, after calling Mary three times and getting no response. Mary’s breakfast was still on the table. The eggs had congealed. The toast was all buttery shine. The bacon looked fine. He picked up a piece and ate it. As the hamburger cooked, he ate the other two pieces.

He was finishing the hamburger when Parker called again.

“What do you want?” he said to Parker.

“I want you to come over. I want to show you something.”

“What have you got that I haven’t seen?”

“What are your big plans for the day?” Parker said. “I’ve got about a dozen comics you haven’t seen, for one thing. My mother made an orange cake before she got sick. She’s going out, anyway. Somebody just called her, and she’s getting dressed.”

“I thought she was sick.”

“Listen,” Parker said, “I’m not going to beg you.” He hung up.

John Joel took his last bite of hamburger and put the plate in the sink. He went outside and ran across the lawn, after a bird that was pecking in the grass. The bird flew away, and he watched it go, higher and higher, until it landed in the peach tree. The peaches got about half the size of peaches in the store, then turned gray and dropped from the tree. Mary had put one in his bed, and when he showed his mother, she had yanked Mary by one arm into the room and made her pick up the peach, which had burst, and throw it away. Then she had made Mary strip the bed and wash the sheet in the laundry tub. It was the first time he had seen Mary cry in a long time. It was also the first time he had seen his mother and Mary crying together. While they were downstairs, he had taken his mother’s little manicuring scissors and carefully cut the threads for about two inches along the seam of Mary’s jeans, in the crotch. He tugged, to make sure the seam had come apart. When he tugged, a couple of tiny threads he had missed burst. Parker had taught him that trick. He did it to his mother’s tennis shorts. “You can do too much or too little,” Parker said. “Cutting this much is about right. Don’t tug at the seam, and it’ll open gradually. It’ll open while she’s playing tennis.” Parker had his own scissors. He had scissors in about six sizes, that his grandmother had given him because he told her he was interested in paper cutting. Parker had cut a butterfly shape out of a piece of paper and sent it to his grandmother with a thank you note written on one wing. His grandmother had sent a small knife that had belonged to his grandfather that seemed never to go dull. Parker used that knife for fraying upholstery.