Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

Lena eventually got in the habit of inviting Curtis to the apartment, just for meals at first: dinners or late Sunday breakfasts where he got to see Andre. On Sundays, the pancakes were dense. Lena piled the bacon in the pan, so it always came out soggy. It was greasy and almost sweet on the tongue. As it slid down his throat, Curtis held his hand to his mouth and gave Andre a funny look, but the boy seemed to like the food. He didn’t seem pleased with much else.

In the beginning, Lena told Andre the simple truth that Curtis was his father’s good friend. “He’s like your uncle,” she said, but the boy rolled his eyes. When he called Curtis uncle he said it with a hint of derision. The two of them got along well enough though. By the end of the fifth month, Curtis was frequently at their apartment; by the sixth, he and Lena stopped getting rooms. They both danced around the question in such a way that either of them could claim the other had asked about him moving in. When Curtis told his mother it was happening, she cried the way she did when he was sentenced to prison. He invited her to visit them, but she said she would need some time.

Curtis pretended Lena had never called him the boy’s uncle, but Andre went on calling him that anyway, still with a mocking tone. He liked to say it in the mornings when Curtis emerged from Lena’s bedroom, or right before he went in at night. “Morning, Unc,” he’d say, or, “Have a good night, Uncle Curtis.”

When they were in bed Lena would signal Curtis by rubbing her cold feet along his legs, and then there would be lovemaking. The first few times they slept together, he was surprised at how much pleasure her skinny body gave him. He wasn’t gentle with her, and the things she whispered to him made it clear she didn’t want him to be. But now he hated the little sounds she made, the words she said, loud enough that the boy would be able to hear. Sometimes, not quite meaning to, Curtis covered her mouth.

When summer arrived, Curtis took Andre to the basketball court in Lena’s old neighborhood and watched him hang listlessly from the rims. They took long walks together, though Andre complained. “Why don’t we just take the train?” he asked. They had macaroni pie at Culpepper’s, but the boy said Lena’s was better. Curtis told him about his time in prison. Andre seemed uninterested until Curtis began to exaggerate, and then the boy asked him if being locked up was the way they showed it in some movie Curtis had never even heard of. His reply was yes. Exactly like that.

One of Andre’s favorite things to do, because it made him laugh so hard, was to ridicule his mother. It bothered Curtis afterward but he joined in anyway, making fun of his own mother too. He laughed with Andre at the promenade when the weather was nice, tears wetting his eyelashes. Curtis often fell silent and made a show of watching the young women walk by.

“What makes mothers the way they are?” Andre asked one day. It was the first time he posed a question like this to Curtis, that of a boy seeking the wisdom of a man.

“They lose themselves and get all kinds of ridiculous,” Curtis said. “Ain’t no mystery to it.”

But Andre was quiet, and it was hard to tell if he was listening. Curtis fixed his gaze on a jogger in red shorts, and leaned forward to keep her in sight as long as he could. He pointed so that Andre would look too. Then the joke from the old song leaped into his mind. “Goddamn,” he said. “Do fries go with that shake?”

Andre turned to look out at the harbor, his eyes a bit dulled. His taut lips shifted from side to side, as restless as the river.

Curtis kept up the banter about the jogger. “You like that, huh?”

“If you say so,” Andre replied with a shrug.

“Well, she looks like a college girl to me anyway, young buck,” Curtis said with a laugh. “Might be out of your league.”

“Man, I’ma be so glad when I go off to college.”

Curtis nodded and listened as Andre continued talking about his future, his life of success, of accumulation and bachelorhood. “There’s one thing you gotta do, though,” he told the boy. “A house. When you make it big like that, you gotta get your mother a house.”

Andre seemed taken aback, and was quiet for a long time as he considered the idea. “Ain’t you supposed to do that?” he said. “I mean, I can come visit and everything. But you gonna be with her, right? You can make that happen. She’d like that, wouldn’t she?”

Curtis didn’t say so, but he supposed she would.

“Hey,” he said, “you never ask me anything about your daddy.”

Andre shrugged again.

“I got a lot of good stories. Don’t you want to hear them? You should get to know who he was.”

“What for? He’s still gonna be dead.”

“Your father was a good man,” Curtis said. “And—”

“I know, I know. You loved him like a brother.”

“No,” Curtis said. “That’s what people keep on saying but it was more than that, a lot more.” He was startled by the sound of his own voice, the force of it. He gazed down at his curled hands, unable to bear the gentle, curious way Andre was looking at him. He couldn’t find the words to explain the affection he felt, still, for the boy’s father, and in this moment he didn’t want to be misunderstood. Another jogger went past but neither of them paid her any mind.

“What happened the night you killed that lady?” Andre said.

“I was drunk,” Curtis said. “They said she had some drink in her too. She came out of nowhere and got in my way. That’s all.” He rubbed his palms against the knees of his pants. “I did something I shouldn’t have done.”

Since no one would hire Curtis for steady work, he was often free to spend time with Andre, when the boy allowed him to. Lena supported them, sometimes working extra shifts at the restaurant. She stood aside and let Curtis try to deepen his relationship with her son. She put a smile on her face when Curtis, and sometimes Andre too, made fun of her Sunday bacon, picking it up by one end and wriggling it in the air. She must have noticed the way they both looked at her when she reached for her cigarettes. Soon enough she stopped reaching for them, and then Curtis no longer saw them in the apartment at all. She didn’t buy tickets for movies on Fridays, unless she was going to the theater by herself. When the woman Curtis had struck with his car kept entering his dreams, Lena didn’t put her hands on his shoulder. If she ever cried at night, she refused to be comforted by him. She still signaled him with her cold feet, however. She still made her little demands for intimacy, and sometimes he did too.

Before they slept, she lay beside him in bed and listened as he talked about Andre, unable to stop himself. “He seems happier, doesn’t he?” Curtis asked one evening, and she agreed, as though he truly understood her son. It was true, Lena told him, and she called them her men, her two men, which she was in the habit of doing, as if they were all she had ever wanted. “I think Marvin would be glad,” he said, but wondered. Lena agreed again and appeared pleased at the thought of all her contented men. Curtis forced a smile onto his face too. He kissed her cheek, lightly, his lips barely making contact with her skin. He and Lena wouldn’t love each other, but there was love they openly shared, and that would be enough, for now, to make a kind of family.

Watch the boy, she had said.

Or had she? Some things he knew for sure. His name was Han Mo-Sae. His wife was Han Young-Ja. They had been married forty years, possibly fifty. The wife would know. They had two children: Timothy and Christina. They would always be his children but they were no longer kids. He had to keep remembering that.