Lily King - The English Teacher

The Belous, he learned, always stayed home and had very firm ideas about Thanksgiving. There had to be one of those dried-corn-on-the-cob arrangements on the front door, and a fat pewter turkey that they brought up from the basement on a table in the living room. The sweet potatoes had to have brown sugar and pecans on top; dessert could only be pumpkin pie. The meal was always served at five.

On Thanksgiving morning Peter woke up and felt it, the tightness in the air. He heard Fran scolding Caleb. He was surprised to see Stuart still in bed across the room. He was lying rigid on his back, arms at his sides, palms up. He was meditating, but his eyeballs were twitching against his lids and nothing about him looked relaxed. In the kitchen his mother and Tom were strategizing beside the raw rubbery carcass of a turkey: who would vacuum, who would do the beans, when the pies would go in, where people would sit. His mother looked like she did when she came out of faculty meetings.

He decided to skip breakfast and take a shower. It came to him that he didn’t like holidays. He never had. They bore down on you. Each one always ended up feeling like an exam you forgot to study for.

He stood wrapped in a towel before the photograph. He was used to her presence in the bathroom now. Water slid in beads off of his hair onto his shoulders. The frame was slightly steamed. She grew up as Mary May in Skaneateles, New York, a small town built around a large lake. Peter even knew how to spell it. He’d looked it up. She was an only child. She took piano lessons from her aunt Becky. Her favorite color was green. She met Tom when she was seventeen at a cookout in Plattsburgh, where he was training and she was visiting a friend. The picture had been taken before Stuart was born, Peter guessed. She looked so young, nearly his age, squatting there on a trail in the woods, tying her sneaker. He wiped the steam off of her. She was looking straight at the camera, straight at Peter, pleased by what she saw. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he whispered.

After he dressed, he decided to unpack the last of his boxes. Stuart had cleared off a shelf for his books, and the bureau Tom had brought up from the basement still had two empty drawers. He took his time. The energy outside his door made him uneasy. They were all setting up the living room for the guests and the meal. Stuart was moving furniture, Fran fussing about silverware, Caleb folding napkins. Their voices were louder than usual. He could hear his mother coming in from the kitchen to ask Fran something about glasses. She had forced a lilt into her voice. She was faking it, pretending that Thanksgiving was something special to her when all his life they’d tagged along at someone else’s holiday. She’d never stuffed a turkey or hung a decoration. It was nothing to her, nothing to him, and all day they’d have to act like it was, act like the Belous, to whom, despite death and rupture, Thanksgiving was still something sacred.

He was sitting on his bed rubbing his knees when his mother came in. “You look squeaky clean.”

He nodded. He wished she’d just acknowledge the act she was putting on.

“Could you do me a favor and walk Walt?”

“All right.” He was relieved to have an excuse to get out.

“Maybe you could get one of the kids to go with you.” She was wearing a tattered apron around her waist. Mrs. Belou’s apron.

He stood but she didn’t move out of his way. She was looking over his shoulder.

“I can’t believe you still have that old train book.”

Did she know what he’d hidden within its pages?

“It was my favorite book.”

“I remember.”

Still she didn’t move. He wanted to push her. Why was he so mad at her? She’d married Tom. She hadn’t messed that up. She’d never been mean; she’d never hit him or called him names like he’d seen Jason’s mother do. She seemed mad at him, too, wanting something from him.

“I put the leash around the knob on the front door,” she said, giving up, and left his room.

Walt was waiting for him, thwacking his tail against the door. Fran and Caleb were stacking plates. He waited until Caleb went to get more before he said, “Anyone want to go for a walk?”

She shook her head without looking up, then began counting the number of guests on her fingers. She had the ability to make him feel even smaller and less significant than he normally did. It had been nearly a month. When was she going to start treating him like a brother?

He clipped the leash onto Walt’s bucking collar.

“Can I come?” Caleb shouted.

“Sure you can.”

“Not too long,” Fran said. “We’ve got a lot more to do around here.”

It was typical Thanksgiving weather: overcast, colorless, and colder than it looked. Walt tugged hard to the left.

“He always knows just where he wants to go, doesn’t he?” Caleb said. “Can I hold him?”

Peter gave him the loop at the end of the leash. Walt pulled Caleb hard and they both had to walk faster to keep up. After a couple of blocks Walt reached the long row of maples he was most interested in and slowed down.

“Isn’t it amazing how he’s only lived here twenty-three days and he has his whole routine?” Caleb said. “He loves that little patch of moss right here and next he’ll go to the little sap hole there on that one. I love the way that branch up there has actually fused with that one. Have you noticed that before? See? They’re two different trees that grew one branch. Isn’t that cool?” Walt jerked Caleb over to the next tree, to the sap hole. And then to a cluster of tiny mushrooms. “I think he’s like a mastodon, just the way his shoulders rise so high when he bends down like that.”

They walked on, Walt tugging then stopping, Caleb chattering, observing everything. He was a scrawny kid, the very smallest in the third grade as far as Peter could tell from the class picture he brought home, with dark blond hair that grew in thick tufts in different directions all over his head. Peter wondered what the other kids made of him and all his thoughts. Since he’d been there, Caleb had never had a friend over. None of them had, except for Stuart and the girls he kept outside.

“I love it when the sun’s like this, when you can look straight at it behind a cloud but still see its shape perfectly, like it’s naked.”

Peter was tempted to ask him about his mother, about how he could be so enthusiastic about the world and everything in it when his mother was dead. When Peter was Caleb’s age just imagining his mother’s death could leave him weak and shaky. He could remember the terror he would work himself into waiting for his mother to come home from a party, the slow circles of the red hand on his clock as it got later and later, the conviction that the phone would ring, the babysitter would come in, and Peter’s life as he knew it would be over. He had nowhere to go. He didn’t even know his father’s name. It wasn’t Avery like his, because his aunt Gena’s last name was Avery, too. He realized that that fear was gone now that his mother had married Tom. The Belous would probably have to keep him if she died.

They headed back to the house. Walt was tired. His arthritic back legs bounced lightly behind him, unable to carry the full weight.

“He’s an old man, isn’t he?”

“A hundred and twelve,” Peter said.

Caleb stopped and bent down to look Walt in the face. It was completely white.

“You are a sweet sweet dog. Yes you are.” He hugged him tight around the neck. Walt, realizing this would last a while, let his head drop onto Caleb’s back. Caleb’s eyes were pressed closed as if he were praying for the dog. The hug lasted a long time. Peter waited, and felt ashamed he did not love Walt more. He didn’t really care that he was so old. Walt had always been Vida’s dog. She was the one who did what Caleb was doing now, stroked him, whispered to him. He remembered watching her years ago through a window once. She was out on the field with Walt, running and laughing, wrestling with him on the ground, then lying there with her head beside his for the longest time. Peter had been so angry he’d poured Spic ’N Span in Walt’s water bowl, but nothing happened.