Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

Bette could not take her eye away. She had never looked deep into the Cosmos and seen another planet with her own eyes. Jupiter was gorgeous.

“Wait till you see Saturn,” Chick said. “Rings and moons and the whole shebang.”

“Show me!” Bette was suddenly hooked on celestial views.

“Can’t,” Chick explained. “Saturn doesn’t rise until very early morning. If you want to set your alarm for quarter to five, I’ll meet you here and line it up for you.”

“Four forty-five a.m.? That will not happen.” Bette stepped away from the telescope and those Jovian moons. “Now, explain Chick to me.”

Nora laughed. “Abbott and Costello. The skinny one was Chick in one of their movies. We watched it about a thousand times and I started calling my brother by it. Chick stuck.”

“Better than La-La-La-Larry Le-Le-Legaris.”

“I get that,” Bette said. “I was Elizabeth, along with seven other girls in fourth grade.” She looked at Jupiter again through the telescope and once more marveled at the sight.

“Here comes the old man.” Nora saw the headlights of her father’s car coming down Greene Street. Bette thought to bolt for her front door, but to do so now would be such an obvious dis that she waved off her flight instinct.

“What are you punks doing on my lawn?” Paul said, getting out of his car. Another fellow, a redhead not much older than Chick, climbed out of the passenger seat. “Not you, Bette. These two scalawags.”

Nora turned to Bette. “Dad uses words like scalawags . Sorry you witnessed it.”

“This is Daniel,” Paul said, pointing to the redheaded fellow, who, Bette could not help but notice, was very, very thin, possibly malnourished. He was wearing clothes that were brand new and surely not of his own taste, he wore them so uncomfortably. The kids exchanged greetings and Bette said hello.

“You have the Big Guy in sight?” Paul looked at the gas giant in the sky. “Daniel, you ever see Jupiter before?”

“I have not.” With no other comment, Daniel stepped to the big tube and looked into its eyepiece. “Wow,” he said with no expression.

“Bette? You have a gander?” Paul asked.

“I did. Made me say yowza .” Bette looked at Nora. “Sorry you witnessed me saying yowza .”

“ Yowza is good,” said Nora. “A catchall superlative. Like big-time or super-duper .”

“Like swingin’, ” said Chick.

“Or bodacious, ” said Paul.

“Or tits, ” said Daniel. Again, no expression.

No one knew what to say to that.

The Daniel fellow spent a few days at the Legaris place. Bette heard the two men talking in the mornings, their distant voices coming over the fence in the backyard. She saw them leaving together in the evenings around 7:00 p.m., and then one night the skinny redhead was gone. Greene Street became, once again, a place of bikes, balls, and kids playing with a decided headiness since the beginning of school was bearing down. The end of summer was suddenly in the air, palpable.

On the final evening of August, Bette took the kids for pizza at a place that was wall-to-wall arcade games. When they returned home, the block was a quiet heaven after all that noise. The Patel kids were playing with a garden hose on their lawn, so Eddie and Sharri joined them. Dale went into the house. Bette lingered out front in a cooling, lovely breeze that stirred the leaves of her sycamore. Some of the spare pizza made it from the take-home box and into her hand as she leaned against one of the lower limbs, nibbling away.

There was no sign of Paul Legaris. His car was not in his driveway, so she felt relaxed in the calm of Greene Street, though guilty over what was her fourth slice of pepperoni, olive, and onion. As she tossed the thin crescent of uneaten crust into the grass—some bird would soon find it—she thought she saw a very large insect crawling across Paul Legaris’s driveway.

She nearly let out an eek of terror—that could have been a huge spider—but then realized it was only a set of keys lying on the ground, right where Paul’s car would have been parked.

Bette, then, found herself in something of a dilemma—what was a neighbor to do? She should pick up the keys, hold on to them until Paul came home, then knock on his front door and return them. If indeed they were his keys, as was most probable, she would save him the angst of a fruitless search. Anyone would do that, but— pop— Paul would be so happy at getting his keys back he would insist on repaying Bette with a dinner he would cook himself. Say! How’s about I BBQ some ribs in the backyard with my own sauce recipe!

Bette did not want to go there. The simple solution would be for her to have Eddie return the keys. When Paul came home her son would scamper over and do the good deed and Bette would be inside her own house and that would be that.

She reached down and picked up the keys. There was a fob with the seal of Burham Community College, a couple of house keys and two industrial types with serial numbers stamped into them, a bike-lock key, and, the largest item on the ring, a plastic poker chip held in place by a hole drilled through its rim.

The chip was worn down, its serrated edges smoothed over. It had once been red but now was only flecked with faded spots. Still visible in the center was a big number 20. Paul must have won twenty bucks at one of the fake riverboat casinos at the state line. Or maybe the chip was all that remained of a two-thousand-dollar stake. She turned the chip over and saw NA on the other side. The letters were exotic and stylized, like a tattoo, sitting inside a square set on its corner like a baseball diamond. In the fading evening light, she saw some writing in the open areas of the chip, but it, too, was worn down and illegible save for a few letters—a g here, an oc, and what looked like vice but could have been roit or ribs or any four-letter word.

Across the street, the kids were playing Punch Ball against the Patel garage door. Bette took the keys inside to hold on to until she could assign Eddie the mission to return them.

Dale was on her laptop in the living room, watching YouTube videos of horse jumping.

“You busy?” Bette asked her. Dale did not answer. “Hey, kid-o-mine,” she said, snapping her fingers.

“What?” Dale did not look up from her computer.

“Can you google something for me?”

“Google what?”

“This poker chip.” Bette held up the key chain.

“You want me to google ‘poker chips’?”

“This poker chip.”

“I don’t need Google to tell you. That is a poker chip.”

“Where is it from?”

“A poker chip factory.”

“I am going to bounce this off your head if you don’t google this.”

Dale sighed and looked at her mother and the key ring and the poker chip and rolled her eyes. “Okay! But can I just finish this?”

Bette showed Dale the detail of the chip—the faded red, the 20, the NA on the other side with the rubbed-out letters—leaving the key chain behind to go wash her hands of pizza crumbs. She was loading the dishwasher when Dale hollered something from the living room.

“What?” Bette called back.

Dale came into the kitchen carrying her laptop. “It’s a thing for narcotics.”

“What is?” Bette was putting silverware into the top rack of the dishwasher.

“The poker chip,” Dale said, showing her mother a collection of images on her computer. “ NA is for Narcotics Anonymous. Like AA, but for narcotics. I entered poker chips with NA and a site came up, then I searched for images and there you go.”