Josie And Jack: A Novel Part 2

I followed Jack inside and found him standing motionless in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen. I touched his back and said, "What's wrong?" Then I looked over his shoulder and saw what he saw.

The floor was covered with food. The milk from the refrigerator, the flour and sugar and cocoa from the cupboard, the pasta and the rice from their jars on the counter: all of it mashed into a thick, gooey paste that covered the linoleum. The bread had been pulled out of its plastic bag, slice by slice, and ground into the mess on the floor. The condiments from the refrigerator door, the pickle relish and the mayonnaise and the mustard, had been thrown against the floor in their jars. Shards of gla.s.s sparkled like diamonds in the muck. What couldn't be broken had been dumped. What couldn't be dumped had been broken.

Jack turned on his heel and pushed past me without a word. The expression on his face was dangerous. I let him go.

Slowly, I picked my way across the floor to the cupboard under the sink, where I found a dustpan and a rag. I used the rag to push the mess into the dustpan. There was an acrid chemical smell in the air, strong enough to make my eyes water, but I didn't identify it until I carried the first dustpan full of ruined food over to the garbage can and lifted the lid. There were three empty bottles of cleaning fluid lying on top of the garbage inside.

I sighed and found a pair of rubber gloves under the sink.

After a while, Jack came down and helped me. Cleaning the kitchen took us three hours, and the spoiled food filled two big garbage bags.

We were almost done when Raeburn appeared in the kitchen door, red-eyed, with a gla.s.s of whiskey in his hand. He stood and watched us for a few minutes.

"You're thinking now about the nature of my parental responsibility toward you," he said finally. His words were slurred. "But you'll soon realize that my parental responsibility is not the issue. Food is the issue. The parental responsibility construct is of no consequence."

I didn't look up. Took a rag from the cupboard and began to wipe up the last smears of food on the floor.

"Doesn't matter whether we're in Persia or Iraq," Raeburn said. "You're still going to bed hungry. Do you understand? Finally, do you understand?"

2.

EVERYTHING IN THE KITCHEN had to be replaced, so Raeburn left us a hundred dollars on Monday. Jack made me ask him for it. "He won't give it to me," he said.

"He won't give it to me, either," I said, but he did. I had to plead for it, though. We both knew he'd leave me the money in the end, but he wanted me to beg. When I gave the money to Jack, he counted it and stuffed it into his back pocket.

"And she says she doesn't know how to flirt," he said.

I turned away.

The nearest place to eat was a bar that served takeout sandwiches during the day, fat overstuffed things with coleslaw and French fries right there between the slices of bread. We drove to the bar in the clothes we'd slept in and ordered four of them, three fried chicken and one fish, and devoured them in the truck. There was mayonnaise and grease-soaked paper everywhere. I ate one chicken sandwich and half of the fish; Jack ate the rest. They were disgusting. They were wonderful. When we were done, we went back up the Hill and took showers. I washed my hair and brushed it until it gleamed.

Then I put on a pair of shorts and a T-s.h.i.+rt, what I always wore during the summer. Jack took one look at me and marched me back into my bedroom, where he made me change into a different pair of shorts and a different T-s.h.i.+rt.

"What's the point?" I said.

"The point," he said, "is that the first time, you looked like you were wearing your brother's old clothes. Now you don't."

"I like my brother's clothes."

"I like you in my clothes, but take my word for it. No, don't braid your hair," he said. "Leave it down."

"It's too hot," I complained, but I did as he said.

This time, Jack made me go into the drugstore alone.

If I was lucky, I thought, it would be the boy's day off and I could just buy toothpaste and leave. But there he was, sitting at the counter with his hair in his eyes, looking bored. He was wearing a green cardigan sweater against the chill of the air conditioning, the kind that Raeburn sometimes wore in the fall.

As soon as he saw me he jumped to his feet.

"Toothpaste?" I said, managing to smile.

"Aisle six," he said. "One aisle down from the aspirin."

He remembered us, then. The smile eased into my face a bit.

I walked to the aisle, chose a tube of toothpaste, and walked back. I could feel him again, watching me too closely. The scrutiny hadn't grown any easier to deal with. The muscles in my legs still didn't seem to remember which way to move.

As he rang up the toothpaste, the boy said, shyly, "Your name is Jo?"

"Josie," I said. "Well, Josephine, but-" I shut my mouth fast, in case I was babbling. I kept my eyes wide and my hands away from my hair, and tried to pretend that nothing I said really mattered to him. It was like talking to Raeburn.

"Oh," he said. "I heard your brother call you Jo the last time you two were in here. I'm Kevin."

We stood for a minute. The drugstore was so quiet that I could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights above me. I was waiting for him to talk; maybe he was waiting for me.

"Your brother drives a blue Ford," he said. "I see you two together a lot."

"We are together a lot."

"But you don't go to school."

I shrugged.

"That must rock," he said.

"I wouldn't know. I've never been to school."

"Believe me, it rocks," he said. "School's a drag."

"That bad?" I said.

"Yes," he said. Now it was his turn to shrug. "Or-I don't know. It's getting better, because I've got two free periods this fall, plus the jazz band. Other than that," he shook his head, "it pretty much sucks."

I tried to look sympathetic, but I had no idea what he was talking about. "How much time do you have left?"

"Two years."

Behind him, through the store's front window, I could see Jack's golden head inside the truck, waiting for me. Waiting for me as I flirted with a high school boy, I thought, a little bewildered. Was I doing a good job? How was I supposed to know? It would be easier if there were a meter that you could look at, like the temperature gauge in the truck.

Then Kevin said, "So what about you?"

"What about me?" I asked and smiled as if I'd said something witty.

Kevin smiled back and said, "What do you like to do?" His throat moved as he swallowed hard. "Do you like to go to the movies?"

"Sometimes," I said, although I'd only been a few times. The smile on my face was beginning to feel strained. "Not really."

"Me neither," he said, too quickly for me to believe him, and we stood in silence for another minute before he asked, "Do you ice-skate? Because the rink is open year-round now."

I was a good skater. Jack and I went every winter, as soon as the pond froze. The ice was always thin but we went anyway. The town rink, though-I'd seen the crowds outside the town rink on Friday nights. "I'm not very good," I told him.

"Neither am I," Kevin said.

I was confused. "So why did you ask?"

He shrugged and looked depressed. "People do it," he said. "What about music?"

I finally figured out what he was trying to do, and thought: coffee, ice cream, a bottle of rum in the alley-anything, but ask me something I know. Then I heard the bell over the door jingle and Jack was there to save me.

"What's taking so long, Jo?" he asked, but his voice was friendly. He looked at Kevin. "Hey."

"Hey," Kevin answered, and they introduced themselves. I stuck my hands in my pockets, fast, before anyone noticed that I'd been wringing them. Jack's grin was just enough, not too much. Someone who didn't know him would never have seen how intent and calculating his eyes were.

"We were talking about music," I said.

"Oh, yeah?" Jack said easily. "What kind?"

Kevin coughed and looked embarra.s.sed. "We hadn't gotten that far yet. But I'm into jazz, mostly, right now. The old stuff."

"Like Coltrane?" Jack said.

"I don't know much about Coltrane." Kevin looked as relieved as I felt to have something to talk about. "But what I know, I like."

Jack grinned. "I just picked up Blue Train down at Eide's. Great stuff."

"Eide's is awesome," Kevin said. "They've got everything down there."

The rest cascaded into place; my brother was a master. Before Kevin could figure out right from left, he had accepted an invitation to come up to the Hill on the following Monday night to listen to Jack's new Coltrane alb.u.m. All I had to do was stand there, smiling at Kevin and nodding enthusiastically when it seemed appropriate. I didn't know who Coltrane was, or what Eide's was, or what was going on, but Kevin's eyes kept drifting toward me and that despairing look was gone. By the time we'd said our farewells, he had begun to look hopeful, even excited.

I was surprised to find that Jack actually had the alb.u.m they had talked about. He dug it out from under his bed when we got home. There was a black-and-white photograph of a dark-skinned man with a saxophone on the cover. The plastic sleeve had a price tag stuck to it that said "Eide's."

"What's Eide's?" I asked Jack.

"Big record store in Pittsburgh. It's where all the cool kids go to buy their vinyl."

I stared at him. "How do you know these things?"

Jack shrugged. He was looking at the back of the alb.u.m cover. "That ratty green sweater he was wearing, it had 'dumb white jazz fan' written all over it." He glanced up at me. "White boy jazz fans tend to be heartbreakingly sensitive. Maybe he'll write you a love poem or two."

I pointed to the alb.u.m. "But how do you know about Eide's? When were you in Pittsburgh buying records?"

"Not records," he corrected. "Vinyl. When was I in Pittsburgh buying vinyl."

"When?" I repeated. "When was it?"

"Drove down there one day when I was supposed to be getting the truck tuned up."

"You randomly drove down there," I said, "and happened to find the cool kid record store. Randomly."

"I had that job there for a while. You remember. I told you about that."

"That was in Pittsburgh?" I said, disconcerted.

He nodded.

I didn't know what to say. "Well, what if the truck breaks down?"

He threw the alb.u.m down on his bed and took a cigarette from the pack on his dresser. "The truck is in better shape than Raeburn thinks."

He lit the cigarette and pitched the match out the window into the still water and rotting leaves in the gutter. I studied my bare toes. There was dirt in the crevices around my toenails.

Finally Jack said, "I can't take you everywhere," and I said, "I know."

The next Monday, Kevin McNerny showed up at our doorstep at eight o'clock, as arranged. Standing on our porch, his face so hopeful, he looked alien and out of place. For an instant I panicked. I almost told him to turn around and go home. I almost told him to leave us alone. Letting him take even a single step into our house was unthinkable. This was our house; this was where we lived.

Then he told me that my dress looked nice.

"Thanks, it was my mother's," I said and let him in.

The parlor was ours. Raeburn taught lessons there during the winter, when the light was a little better than in his study. Other than that he never used it. As I led Kevin in from the front hall, I could practically smell the curiosity coming off him in waves. And sure enough, even after the two of us were sitting on the dusty couch, he was still poking around the room with his eyes, inspecting and collecting everything that he saw. For a moment I let myself look through his eyes as if I didn't see the room every day of my life: the fraying, cloth-covered books in the bookcase, the dingy floral wallpaper, the shelves full of odd things that we'd brought from elsewhere in the house. But then I thought, let him look. We've got nothing to be ashamed of.

When he finally looked back at me, he blushed and looked embarra.s.sed. "I've never been in one of these old houses before," he said. "My mom went on that historic homes thing last spring when my aunt was visiting, but I didn't go. Do they all look like this?"

"This is the only one I've ever been in," I said.

"Are you on the tour?"

"We're not really an open-to-the-public kind of family."

"No, I guess you're not." He smiled. He had a nice smile, with straight white teeth. Some of my hostility melted away. "Well, I bet that none of those houses have as much cool stuff in them as yours does, anyway. Where did it all come from?" He stood up and walked over to the bookcase and took down a tarantula the size of my head, sealed in gla.s.s and framed in wood.

"My grandfather, mostly. That spider is older than both of us put together."

"Wow." Kevin sounded awed. "Was he a collector?"

"Sort of. He was a trader-he sold curios and things-and we ended up with some of the leftovers. I don't really know anything else about him."

"He was a smuggler," Jack said from the doorway, three bottles of beer dangling by their necks from one hand. "Used to ferry whiskey down from Canada during Prohibition. After that, I think he switched to art and artifacts." He crossed the room and handed a beer to Kevin, who seemed delighted to get it.

"That's awesome," Kevin said.