Chris Adrian - The Great Night

The new boy did the same thing to Malinda, singing between their parents to Craig, on the violin, and Clay, on the bass. He turned around to do the thing — a salute? a shake of the fist? — to Chris, on the drums, and to her parents, and then to little Melissa, a moving target since she played no instrument and did not sing but just danced around enthusiastically, and finally to the life-size picture of Jesus taped to the back side of the garage door, where a different sort of family, or a different sort of band, might have taped a picture of a stadium crowd. It was two shakes for Jesus.

He closed his eyes then, and kept dancing in place and mumble-singing the wrong words. “Jesus Loves You More” did not rock very hard. None of their songs did, though their father, who wrote them with minimal input from Mary and Craig, the two eldest, would have said otherwise. Molly did what she could to shake things up. She and Chris had a thing going, where she accented his drumming just so, jingling grace beats that brought out the rhythm underneath their father’s vanilla melody, which was always one of only four melodies. One could do only so much, though. If you shook it too hard, you only drew attention to yourself in a way that made it clear you had given up on the song or that you were trying to drag it someplace it just didn’t belong. It was a subtle bit of tambourine lore, not something to be intuited the first time you picked one up. But the boy was stomping and shaking and spinning and clapping to a song that was the breathless, hopped-up cousin to the one they were actually playing. Chris and Mary and Clay frowned at him, but the others, standing in front of him with their hearts turned to Jesus, didn’t notice for another minute. The song stopped, not entirely on their father’s karate-chop cue, but the boy did not. His eyes were closed, his hands and his feet were flying, and he was smiling as he sang. “Jesus, he’s my friend, sort of! He’s my kind of sometimes friend. Jesus!” Melissa laughed and danced along until Mary grabbed her shoulder.

“Paul,” their mother said. “Paul!” He stopped dancing and looked at her.

“When the music stops,” their father said, “the song is over.”

“My name,” the boy replied, “is Peabo.”

There was a time when they had just been the Archers, and not the Archer Family Band, but Molly could barely remember it. There was a time when her father had been a full-time instead of a part-time dentist, and her mother had been the dental hygienist in his office, when they had all gone to regular school instead of home school, when the family car had been a Taurus instead of a short bus, and when Melissa hadn’t even been born. Then their parents woke up one morning — without having seen a vision or having experienced a dark night of the soul — with a new understanding of their lives’ purpose. They both took up guitars, never having played before, and started to praise Jesus in song.

There was a time, too, before they had made albums or gone on tours or made Handycam videos produced and directed by their Aunt Jean, which aired (rather late at night) on the community cable channel and then eventually on Samaritan TV, when Molly actually liked being in the band and liked being in the family. She had had Melissa’s job once, and had danced as enthusiastically as Melissa did now, and had felt the most extraordinary joy during every performance, whether it was a rehearsal in the garage or a school-auditorium concert in front of three hundred kids. Then she had woken up one morning two months ago to find that the shine had gone off everything. It was a conversion as sudden as the one her parents had suffered. She had gone to breakfast feeling unwell but not sick, and was puzzling over how it was different to feel like something was not right with you and yet feel sure you were in perfect health, but she didn’t know what her problem could be until she noticed at breakfast how unattractive her father was. It wasn’t his old robe or his stained T-shirt or even how he talked with his mouth full of eggs; he wore those things every morning and he always talked with his mouth full; it was just how he was. She kept staring at him all through breakfast, and finally he asked her if there was something on his face. “No, sir,” she said, and a little voice — the sort that you hear very clearly even though it doesn’t actually speak — said somewhere inside her, He’s got ugly all over his face .

Peabo sat next to her at dinner that first night. Molly had just been getting used to the extra room at the table, to being able to eat with her natural right hand instead of her don’t-bump-elbows-with-Mary left hand. She had said goodbye to the empty seat the night before, when their father had announced to the family that they were getting another brother.

“Already?” Chris asked, because Jordan had been gone only three months.

“Already?” their father said. “You mean finally!”

“I miss Jeffrey,” said Malinda.

“His name was Jordan,” said Chris.

“What’s his name?’ asked Melissa. “Is it Jeffrey? Is it Elmo? Is it Sarsaparilla?”

“Paul,” said their father, and their mother said, “Paul Winner,” and Chris said, “Yeah, I bet he’s a real winner .” Colin gave him a high-five, and they were both subsequently disfel-lowshipped for the rest of the meal, their chairs turned away toward the wall, their faces turned to their laps, and their desserts divided between chubby Mary and fat Craig.

Chris and Colin stayed in the corner while all the others got to speak their gratitudes. Mary went first and used up the obvious one: she was grateful for their new guest; she was grateful for the totality of his life and for his spirit. She was always saying things like that. Molly could tell by the way Colin’s shoulders were moving that he was poking his finger in his mouth to gag himself. Clay was grateful for the tension in his guitar strings. Craig was grateful for the color alizarin crimson. Malinda was grateful for the note of D-flat, and Melissa was grateful for fur, but when pressed by their father to be more specific, she said “furry creatures.” Molly had been feeling a little panicked lately when her turn inevitably approached. There was a lot to be grateful for; the whole point of uttering one’s gratitudes was just that. It was meant to be easy, a nightly reminder that they lived their lives surrounded by visible and invisible bounty. But sometimes, out of sheer nervousness, Molly failed to think of anything, and sometimes the things that popped into her head were not the things she was supposed to be grateful for: the way her breasts were exactly the same size, while Mary’s and Malinda’s looked like they had traded four markedly different boobs between them; the way it felt when she rested all her weight on the tapering edge of her bicycle seat; the way Jordan’s right eye had been ever so slightly out of sync with his left eye. And lately the voice would speak with her, so when she said out loud, “Dandelion fluff,” or “The spots on the wings of a ladybug,” the voice would say Poverty or Measles . She said, “This fork,” and held it tightly, as if clutching it could keep her from saying “My asshole” instead.

Peabo was quiet during his first dinner. Colin had predicted that he would be ravenous and nose for scraps off other people’s plates, but he hardly ate at all, tasting everything and finishing nothing but praising it all politely. Molly watched him, expecting him to pick up his plate and shake it at her, but he only cocked his head when he caught her looking. The family made the usual first-dinner conversation. On their mother’s instructions, they were supposed to let lie all the presumed horrors and not ask him anything directly about his past, and so the gist of the conversation was something like “I like potatoes, Peabo … Do you like potatoes?” He answered these questions the same way every time, with a solemn nod of his head and “I do.” Molly thought about the presumed horrors anyway. He had a burn on his left arm that she had noticed right away, and though she didn’t stare at him she wondered how he’d got it, and there was a scar on the side of his neck that had healed all bunched up and thick.