A. Homes - Things You Should Know

“Thomas was my boyfriend,” I overheard a skinny girl with blond hair hanging down the sides of her face like wet noodles say. “No one was supposed to know, but since he died, the secret came out. It was the single most horrifying experience of my life.” She adjusted and readjusted the empty pink-and-white top of her bikini, pulling on the bottoms where they would have latched onto her butt if she’d had a butt. “The car stopped only after Thomas was sucked under and came out the other side, with grease smears down his body.” She took a breath. “My mother tried to hold me back, but I touched him. ‘Thomas,’ I said. ‘Thomas, can you hear me?’ He lifted himself off the street and walked himself over to the grass, then crumpled like when you pull the middle out of a stack of things and it all falls down. He opened his mouth and a brown nutty thing they said later was his tongue fell out. ‘Thomas,’ my mother said. ‘Thomas, everything is going to be all right. You’ve been in a little accident. These things can happen to anyone.’”

“What about the guy who did it?” the girl she was talking to asked.

“He sat in his car until the police came, and then jumped out and started to run. They chased after him and dragged him back so we could identify him.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, interrupting, without even knowing what I was doing.

“What does that mean?” the girl asked.

“It was on TV,” I said. “I don’t think he tried to get away.”

“So what if he didn’t, what do you care,” she said. “He wasn’t your boyfriend. And you’re not even from around here anyway.”

I shrugged and looked evenly at her. Without a word, I got up. As I walked, the rough cement around the pool sanded the soles of my feet. At the edge of the water, I threw myself forward, hoping that when the water caught me, it would not be hard, it would not be icy cold, it would be enveloping like Jell-O. I broke the surface for air and went under again. Without Henry, with nothing to do, I swam laps, back and forth a thousand times.

Henry and I made up. We didn’t talk about anything. He just came over to my house with new Ping-Pong paddles and said, “My mother bought me these, wanna play?” and I said, “Why not.”

Two weeks to the day after the accident, while Mrs., Henry, and I were eating lunch — reheated tuna noodle casserole, with fresh chips crumbled on top, and green Gatorade — someone rang the doorbell and, without waiting for an answer, tried the knob.

Mrs. went to the kitchen door, cracked it open, and called, “Can I help you?” around the corner of the house.

“I’ve come about my son,” the woman said. She stepped into the kitchen, opened her purse, pulled out a stack of papers, and with the palm of her hand spread them out into a messy fan on the kitchen table. Henry and I moved our plates back to give her more room. We held our napkins up to our mouths to hide our expressions.

“These are his report cards. He mostly got straight As except in spelling and music; he wasn’t very good at music, couldn’t carry a tune. This is his first school picture,” she said, digging out a photo with three rows of kids, twenty-six young scrubbed faces, one kid holding a black sign with white lettering, HITHER HILLS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, KINDERGARTEN. “We didn’t buy his school picture this year. He said he didn’t like it. He thought his hair looked funny. Why didn’t I just buy it anyway?” She was talking to herself. “Maybe if I’d taken the photo this wouldn’t have happened. Why do I have these?” she asked, looking at Mrs. “What are they for? The insurance company wants me to calculate what he would have been worth if he’d had a life. I have to give them a figure. It’s like playing The Price Is Right .” She stopped for a minute, drew in a breath, and pressed the back of her hand against her eyes, blotting them. “You want to see how it feels, you want me to take one of yours?” She put her hand on Henry. “Christmas is coming,” she said, even though it was July. “What will I do?”

The dead boy’s mother stood crying in the Henrys’ kitchen and when Henry’s mother tried again to touch her, to comfort her, she wailed. Then, without a word, without a sound other than the swallowing of great gulps of air, she turned and walked out the kitchen door.

Henry’s mother scooped up all the dead boy’s report cards, prize certificates, letters from the governor for being on the honor roll, and handed them to me. “Go on, get her before she goes,” she said.

I charged out the door, got to the lady before she got into her car, and said, “You forgot these.”

“I didn’t forget them,” she said, again blotting her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Well, I’ll put them in your car,” I said. I went over to the passenger side, opened the door, and left them there on the seat.

“You’re a good boy,” she said.

I fought the urge to tell her, I’m not one of them. I’m not his son. I’m just the boy who lives next door, part-time. I’m no one, nothing. Instead I said, “I hope you feel better soon,” and walked back toward the house.

Henry came out and on the ground where the lady’s car had been, there was a photo, it must have fallen out of her purse, my hands, the car. It must have just slipped away and landed face up next to an oil stain.

“That’s him,” Henry said, picking up the photo, wiping it against his shirt, rubbing the boy’s face over his heart.

“We should give it back to her.”

“No,” Henry said. “He’s mine.”

One afternoon while Mrs., baby June, and Henry were somewhere else, I watched Mr. digging a shallow trough through the yard. He was bent over a shovel, flipping clods of grass and dirt off to the side. He pulled a wilted piece of notebook paper from the back pocket of his shorts and consulted a diagram. Then, with his fingers as rulers, his feet as yardsticks, he began measuring his work. By the time I got from my bedroom window, across the tumor-o’-land, and into the Henrys’ backyard, Mr. was sprinkling the floor of the trough with lima beans.

“What are you doing?” I asked as he opened a third bag of beans and dropped them one at a time into the trough. He didn’t answer. “Planting?”

As soon as the beans were gone, he hauled over two large bags of charcoal briquettes and started laying the charcoal out over the beans.

“It looks like something out of Gourmet magazine,” I said. “A new kind of barbecue recipe.”

When he finished laying out all the charcoal, he sat down on a deck chair, took off his shoes and socks, pulled his shirt over his head, wiped his face and chest, dropped it down in a ball, and sighed a big one.

“They’re not home yet?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

Mr. got up off the deck chair, picked up a can of starter fluid and went down the length of the trough, holding the can at crotch level, squeezing it so the fluid arced up like piss then softly splashed down onto the coals. In seconds the coals went from matte black to shiny wet and then back to matte black, as the stuff soaked in. He put down the can and picked up a box of those long fireplace matches.

“What’s this supposed to be?” I asked. I thought it was probably another one of those things some people did that I just didn’t know anything about.

Mr. Henry stood at the end of his trough, his runway of coal, lit three matches at once, held them in a tight fist, bowed his head, then dropped them in one by one. A line of flame spread the length of the ditch, sometimes golden, sometimes blue, sometimes spitting on itself. The coals shifted. Mr. stood at the end of the line looking down at his feet. He stepped out off the grass into the fire. In a split second he had both feet in the fire and was doing his best not to run. You could see it in his legs, in the muscles twitching.