Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

Buckles is locked in the guest bathroom, mewling to be let out. For the past few weeks, no one knows why, Buckles has become “stressed out” (Amanda’s term) and has started to throw up his food. The vet says there is nothing wrong with him. The summer is over, Vicky is in school again, and Amanda is now working. The cat is lonesome.

Amanda says she’s started working because she is bored with being a housewife, now that her daughter doesn’t need full-time mothering, but the fact is that Danny’s business has been flagging. With everyone so busy, sometimes the cat vomit on the windowsill or under the couch will go unnoticed for days until somebody smells something and then finds the awful little pile of dried-up goo, the muted, autumnal reds and browns of their brand of cat food, garnished with white-gray sprigs of shed fur and some new-grown mold.

One time I was going to see a concert at the arena, a band that Vicky also wanted to see. This doesn’t happen very often, us wanting to see the same band, so I offered to take her. “She can come with me and my friends,” I told Danny. “I’ll keep an eye.”

“It’s not that we don’t trust you, Kyle,” Uncle Danny said. “It’s just that Amanda and I don’t want Vicky exposed to that sort of influence.”

“I see what you’re saying,” I said, “but if she already knows the music well enough to want to go to the concert—”

“Kyle,” Uncle Danny said.

I had a better time without her, I’m sure, just getting fucked up and enjoying myself, but afterward I told her that I had tried for her, and gave her a shirt from the concert. I told her if her parents ever asked to say that one of her friends had gotten it for her. But her shirts, to her parents, are just shirts, vaguely offensive but not worth confiscating. They wouldn’t know any one of those bands from any other even if they did bother to read the names, always ornate silver script on black, some red-filtered cluster of sullen, long-haired guys.

“Try it on,” I said to her.

“Okay,” she said, but then did nothing, only stared, as if waiting for something.

“Just face away from me,” I said, “if that’s what’s bothering you,” and noticed a little Orion’s belt of pimples on the blade of one naked shoulder as she changed.

“You’re not even going to name your price,” Uncle Danny says.

I say, “I’m sure whatever you decide on will be fair. Besides, this isn’t business, it’s family.”

“Good,” Danny says. “That’s good. You’re a good kid, Kyle.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out two keys on a ring. The fob is a little clown head with red circles for cheeks and a cone hat and it squeaks when I squeeze it.

Back in the house, over oven-warmed supermarket apple pie and bright yellow vanilla ice cream, Aunt Amanda talks about her appointment tomorrow. It won’t be bad, and anyway it ought to be a quick visit, right? Everyone agrees. A few weeks ago she went in for a test, and Danny was grim-faced and Vicky went out of her way to be good. Tomorrow she goes for her results.

I ask Vicky how school is going. She begins telling about some especially unreasonable teacher of an otherwise enjoyable subject, then turns to Amanda. “I’m really sorry, Mom.” Her doe eyes are defined by the mascara she used to hide in her bag and put on at school, but which Amanda has only recently convinced Danny is not inappropriate for a young lady. He still says she looks painted, but he’s dropped any pretence of action. She is radiant, almost crying.

Desperate for another subject, Amanda asks me how my school is going, and I try to explain the concept of negative capability until she seems satisfied. I am pushing through the course with a solid C, which could even become a B if I ace the midterm, and in my heart I am not a student in junior college anyway. In my heart I have already left this miserable town behind for a place and future so bright with promise I cannot look directly upon it, which is maybe another way of saying that, though in my heart I am already gone, am calling my mother on her birthday or sending a Christmas gift to Vicky, I don’t know where I’ll go or how to get there.

When Vicky asks to be excused from the table, Danny says he will come by her room in a bit to check her homework. Toward the end of the last school year she slacked off and was not on the honor roll during the final quarter. She was grounded for the whole first month of her vacation. I told Danny, privately, that I thought he was being too harsh. “It’s the summer,” I said, “and she’s just a kid. My mom never grounded me for my grades.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

“Danny, he’s still crying in there,” Amanda says, after Vicky is gone. “And do you hear that? It sounds like he’s slamming himself into the door.”

“Okay, but it’s your job to keep an eye on him. I don’t work all day to spend my nights cleaning up cat puke.”

“None of us does,” Amanda says, so quietly I’m not sure I really hear her, so maybe Danny doesn’t. Or, maybe, he’s letting this one go.

Amanda opens the door to let Buckles out, but he just stands there, looks up at her, and mewls. She sees the cut on his nose, smeary pinheads of cat blood on the back of the door. She starts to cry. There is vomit in the sink and in the bathtub. She scoops him up and cradles him, buries her face in his belly fur. She is sobbing and Buckles, declawed, is pawing at her hair.

I touch Amanda on the shoulder, then the back. How warm she is, beneath her dress, how feverish and soft. In a flash that passes so quickly it might not have happened, I imagine her kissing Uncle Danny, in their bed, with a woman’s passion. Has he ever been able to equal her?

“Let me,” I say, meaning clean up the vomit.

As I am getting into my car, Danny, who has walked me out, says, “Kyle.” Even though he is the closest I have ever had to a father, there is always something formal in the way he says my name. His inflection is a horizon. It is a wall. He hands me some folded bills; I pocket them without looking. “So,” he says, “I suppose we’ll see you in a week.”

Around the corner, idling at a stop sign, I see that Danny has given me two twenties and a ten, and I have to remind myself that my uncle has always been unselfish about money, from diapers to baseball gloves, and dinner once a week for how long? Things must be truly tight for Danny and Amanda now. I wonder if their situation is precarious enough to be undone by something like another vet bill and, if so, what that means if Amanda turns out to be not okay. It must be this, and not the vomit, that led to his decision. But why isn’t he taking care of it himself? Either things are so bad at his office that he can’t skip out for a long lunch, or else he wants to be able to tell his family he doesn’t know what happened, and not be lying.

“Man, my uncle is one crazy motherfucker,” I tell Tyler. We’re having beers at McCarren’s because Sara’s working so they’re on the house. “You won’t believe what he’s got me doing.”

Sara’s over at the taps, waiting for a Guinness to settle so she can finish the pour.

I tell him.

“Shit,” he says. “You think you’ll be able to?”

There are some old timers at the far end. Lifers, Sara calls them. Sometimes I laugh hard at this and other times it makes me afraid.

“Hey, business is business.”

“So, what’d he give you?” Tyler asks.

“Four hundred,” I say.

Sara fumbles the keys out of her purse and then sets about negotiating one, the wrong one, into the lock. She tries another and that one works.

“I could use another drink,” she says. She only had a few before closing, and then one while she cleaned up. I say I’ll have one too and she eyes me, deciding whether to start in on the question of if I need another. I don’t, probably, no, I know I don’t, but if she doesn’t start in — she doesn’t — I will have what I want, which is different from what I need: what a surprise. She gets the vodka out of the freezer and I go for glasses, find some coffee mugs first, decide that these are good enough. Sara cuts hers with some grapefruit juice and we clink but don’t toast anything. We move to the living room, sit in the ambient glow from the kitchen.