Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

It took cycling the ignition ten more minutes before the car would start, but finally it did. Jack drove to the airport without any idea about flights and without calling Deb, without calling Jolie. It was a pleasure not calling, building a dam between himself and the voices reminding him of all he’d done, and hadn’t.

He was glad to be getting rid of the red convertible, which, like the Super 8, had become a failed irony. Funny for the Queen of England to stay at the Super 8, or for the Very Famous Architect. Not for you. In the shower he’d found an old washcloth, dried stiff, that betrayed the history of the place, the sad naked men and women who’d preceded him. If the washcloth was from the last person, or the one before that, or how far back did it go.

Jack knew he was behaving irrationally — that he wasn’t behaving, period — which was why everything he did now, all he was permitted, seemed suddenly too easy. The Super 8 people, Jolie, the ear girl — nobody knew. The woman elevated up behind the counter at the car rental did not know, or care. Her job was to say yes. We do have an economy model available for one-way travel, yes. To Houston, no problem. We have a branch located at Bush Intercontinental, very convenient if you plan on flying out. Yes, sir, it’s a sedan. Four-door. Sorry? Black, I believe. Yes.

Jack was going home.

That afternoon it was back, the big gray one with the yellow eyes that Kay had started calling Wolf. The cat had a way of making its body thin on the sides and squeezing past their bedroom door even as Simon closed it, running always to the same place on Kay’s closet floor, the pile of her clothes a kind of bed or nest.

“It’s going to give you lice or fleas or whatever,” Simon said in the warpy full-length mirror. He was trying out his fifth shirt of the day, fifth of the last four minutes.

“He doesn’t have lice,” Kay said from the floor, where Wolf was kneading a red sweatshirt with his eyes closed.

“Just keep it out of my stuff.”

“He isn’t interested in your stuff.”

“Yeah, okay,” stamping on his shoes.

—

At first it looked like a pile of trash, the pots, buckets, and vases heaped on the fringe of pale grass outside the house that had to be hers. Not without some reluctance, either, did Simon decide it was hers, only it had to be, because of the yellow swings she’d mentioned, and because the number on the house to the left was too low and the number on the right too high.

There was a yard sale in front of it.

Or not a sale, because the cardboard sign, flat on its back and weighted with rocks, when he stood over it, read FREE! TAKE ALL! Most of the clay pots still had soil in them, and the glass vases looked not very well washed.

Simon rang the white plastic doorbell, which was slapped crooked by the door, and if it worked, if it did anything, the sound was not one he could hear. He stood on the porch that creaked under several rugs, and it was strange to have rugs outside, though he guessed welcome mats were like the same thing, and these might have been welcome mats, all overlapping each other, welcome welcome welcome. He thought about this so he would not worry about what was taking so long, if she’d forgotten the invitation, if he wasn’t really meant to come.

At last he heard a high shriek and a “Coming!” then a thumping down stairs.

The door opened to a green-beaded curtain and, behind it, Teagan, in a simple white T-shirt and the same shorts as before. Her eyes were rimmed purple, thick Cleopatra lines that curved out a little at the ends, like fish tails. She held out a bottle through the strings of twisted plastic. Beer, for him.

“My mom’s asleep,” she said, nodding in at the living room as they passed it, but he didn’t know if she meant they should be quiet. He couldn’t see anyone there, only the back of the couch, and for a moment the reflection, in the black, glassy face of an ancient Sony Trinitron TV, of what could have been a body or could have been only a mass of sheets and throw pillows. Of the house he was ready to say things like, No, it looks great, in case she said something like, Sorry for the mess, which she never said.

They came out onto the back porch, which turned out to be the same porch as the front, wrapped around. “He made it,” said a pair of legs high in a hammock. Pale and freckled legs, the girl attached near to upside down. An Us Weekly splayed open on her stomach, she held a cigarette in the air so that the ash, if it fell, might hit her face.

That “ he ” made Simon uncomfortable, as though they’d been talking about him recently. And there was another he that bothered him, but this one an actual person, sitting on the floor with his back against the railing.

“You know Laura, and that’s Manny. This is Simon.”

Manny tipped his beer. The whispery brown hair, the divot in one eyebrow, and Simon knew this was the cashier who’d bagged their groceries that first day, when his mother had called him “squirt.” Please may he not remember. Simon pressed the neck of his own beer against his chest and twisted the cap, hoping it was the twisting kind, and when it fell off a light mist rose up from the rim and the cold left a dark moon on his shirt.

Teagan kicked off her shoes, soft yellow Keds, and climbed up into the hammock with Laura and Laura’s legs. “So! Simon.” She blew invisible strands of hair from her face. “Tell us something.”

“Something,” Simon answered. No one laughed, or even smiled. “Like what? I mean, I’m from New York. My parents have a house here? Um.”

“What do you do for fun ?” Laura asked, idly turning the leaves of her magazine.

“Regular stuff, I guess. Hang out with friends, play videogames.”

“Gamer, huh?” Manny said. “Right on.”

“Quit being a dick,” said Teagan, though Simon hadn’t realized he was. “Simon likes to read, too, don’t you? Unlike some people.”

“Well, my school.” Simon swallowed. “I’m still in high school, and our school is like—”

“Wait,” Laura said, looking suddenly, troublingly interested. “Say again?”

“Just, we have like a lot of electives at our school, so—”

“You know we’re in high school, right?” Laura pitched herself forward, anchoring her chin onto Teagan’s shoulder. She’d lit another cigarette.

Simon could feel all parts of him tighten. “I know. Me too.”

“But,” Laura went on, “the way you said you were in high school, like we weren’t.”

Simon tried staring only at the piece of ash that had settled in a curl of her hair. “Yeah. Yeah, no.”

“We’ll be seniors in the fall,” Teagan said, “but Manny graduated.”

“Oh?” he asked, turning to the boy on the floor. “What are you doing now?” Like this was a person he wanted to know better. The nick in his eyebrow he’d probably had from birth, but here, minus apron, plus cigarette, plus girls, it seemed more like something he’d won in a fight.

Manny was no more interested in Simon than Simon was in him, or in anything — the world, it seemed like — except whoever or whatever was on the other end of the old flip phone he never shut or let out of his hand, pressing buttons that clicked. “Uh.” He looked up and then back to his phone. “I’ve got a band.”

“You used to have a band,” Teagan said. “He works at McQuades.”

At that, Manny snapped his phone shut. “Okay, it’s my time.” He grabbed the last beer from the tub of ice on the floor, mostly melted, and stood letting it drip as he and Teagan seemed to say something to each other without speaking. He might have been waiting for her to walk him out.