Jim Shepard - Kiss of the Wolf

I warned her a thousand times about Bruno. She knows him better than I do. And I sit there and talk and it’s like talking to the wall. Her eyes are out the window, on the dog, everywhere but me. I tell her, Joanie, I’m only looking out for you. I’m not telling you this for my benefit.

It’s like she thinks that what’s behind her is gone, so she can either choose this or get nothing.

I asked Sandro to talk to her. He’s her father, he should talk to her. I wait for him to think of it, I’ll be ninety-nine years old.

He thinks I worry too much. Whatever it is, I worry too much. He still thinks the other one is coming back.

I told him: Civil War songs are coming back. Soupy Sales is coming back. Your mother, God rest her soul, is coming back.

That was the end of that discussion.

The first one, as far as I was concerned, was the kind of nightmare with no surprises. You marry Gary, you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. Bruno I didn’t even want to think about.

Oh, was I wild when I heard Joanie was out with him. I called to ask if she wanted to see a movie, Todd tells me she’s out on a date with Bruno. I said, Bruno. Don’t think that little stinker didn’t know what he was doing. Sandro gave up trying to calm me down. But he’s been working on me since: What good’s it gonna do to come in her house yelling? What good’s it done up to this point? Why not surprise her and not push it and try to work on her that way?

I’m her mother. I’m supposed to be looking out for her. I want to tell her to get a life, a real life. Though I don’t know what I’d say if she said back, Ma. Get yourself one.

Todd dreamed about the time he was almost hit by the car on Margerita Lawn: the slow motion, the pale-blue sky with the one cloud, the horn, the chrome fender. He never told his parents about it. He’d been in third grade and ran across the street to avoid being touched by Lori Malafronte. Lori Malafronte’s scream had shocked him. The dream turned into a memory of pushing snow down the curve of a car body, and he woke up feeling guilty.

He could hear Nina downstairs. It was raining. He sat up and swung his legs to the floor. He felt weak and fuzzy. He rubbed his ear until it was hot. He found a sock. It had dog hair on it and an unpleasant damp feel. He listened for arguing but didn’t hear anything. His mother’d be mad he told about Bruno. He pulled on the sock and his little toe slid through a hole in the end. He wiggled it and imagined being dead, the Mass said for him. Girls would be crying. His father would be sorry for what he’d done. He imagined funeral bells, the flowers on the altar, people filing in. Maybe he’d been a martyr somehow.

He stood up and stretched with both arms out in front of him, like a water-skier. He wandered over to the window. An animal that looked like a Davy Crockett hat wandered across his yard. A raccoon? Muskrat? Divorce, he thought. Separation. Remarriage. Stepson. By thinking of things you could understand them.

He finished getting dressed and tramped downstairs. “Here he comes,” he heard his grandmother say.

He went into the downstairs bathroom instead and stood pointlessly over the toilet, listening to them murmur in the kitchen. The new shower curtain had a surprisingly intense smell that he couldn’t track down. Then he could: pool liner. A kid’s pool, a wading pool.

“You want coffee?” Nina called from the kitchen. “We made coffee.”

“Ma, let the kid take a leak,” his mother said.

He flushed the toilet and came into the kitchen. Nina was wearing a white sweat shirt with FBI in big red letters across it. Underneath the red letters it said FULL-BLOODED ITALIAN in little green letters.

His mother gave him a big smile as he sat down.

“What’re you smiling at?” he asked.

“Listen to you. What a mouth on you,” Nina said.

His mother put an English muffin in the toaster for him. “So, Ma,” she said. “You wanna go to this pottery demonstration or not? ’Cause I’m goin’.”

“That’s terrible,” Nina said. “Who’d want to demonstrate against pottery?”

His mother waved her hand once, like there were gnats around, and told her it wasn’t that kind of demonstration.

They went on talking. He still didn’t have his coffee. He kept feeling he had to wash his face. He imagined he projected a bitter silence, but they didn’t seem to be noticing. His grandmother finished a story she’d been telling about an escape artist on the news. They’d put him in a box and put dirt and cement on the box and the box had collapsed and crushed him. Could they imagine? It was horrible.

“How was your date?” he asked his mother.

They both stared at him. The English muffin popped up.

“I don’t think that’s much of your business,” his mother finally said quietly.

He got up and hunted around the cabinets the way Audrey hunted in the tall grass. He left the muffin where it was.

“You looking for anything, you let me know, now,” his mother said.

“I’m gonna go over Brendan’s,” he said.

“You gonna eat your muffin?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“You gonna have any breakfast at all?”

“No.” He left the kitchen.

Brendan was still a little pissed at him, but he came around. Todd brought over the lacrosse helmet, and Brendan ignored it. They were sitting in the kitchen and Brendan’s mother kept giving Todd sympathetic looks that puzzled and annoyed him. Brendan’s little brother, Taylor, was playing guns outside with two friends.

Brendan’s mother hunched to look out the window. Across the yard, Taylor was sitting on one friend and beating him on the head with a plastic gun. Brendan’s mother called to him and wanted to know why they had to play so violently. Why didn’t they play where they didn’t shoot anybody?

“How do you play cops and robbers and not shoot anybody?” Taylor called.

His mother looked a little stymied by that. “Why don’t you just question Mickey?” she finally said.

There was a silence outside, while the kids apparently thought it over. Brendan rolled his eyes at Todd.

“Aw right,” Taylor called. Then he said, in a quieter voice, “But if he doesn’t listen, then we can kill him.”

Brendan snorted. Brendan’s mother finished cleaning the counter and then she left.

Brendan emptied two packets of presweetened Kool-Aid into two cans of Coke Classic. They could hear his brother making the sound of machine-gun fire outside. They sat there slugging the Cokes.

“I can feel my teeth like dissolving,” Todd said.

Brendan nodded. “Isn’t it great?”

They walked down to the park near Milford Beach. Todd wanted to tell him what was going on. The rain had stopped and the sun was out. The grass was still wet. Their sneakers were soaked. Todd’s were the Nikes his father had bought him, and the soles were separating at the instep.

They sat on two big tree roots and watched little kids play football. They knew one of the kids, a fourth-grader named Woods. Woods was wearing his PEE WEE jersey and his name was sewn on the back upside down, so that it read SPOOM.

“You left the lacrosse helmet at my house,” Brendan said. He was wearing a CLYDE THE GLIDE T-shirt that reminded Todd of his JUDGMENT DAY tank top.

“You can hang onto it,” Todd said. He never thought he’d get out of the mess he was in, except by some magical luck. He felt the need to be kind while he waited for that to happen, as if the world would recognize it and take care of him.

The kids in the football game ran a sweep. It looked like recess getting out. Both teams milled around for ten yards and fell in a heap. Todd looked over at Brendan’s T-shirt every so often, glum about the way everything seemed an ironic reference to his secret.