“You’ll show them. If anyone can, it’s you.”
Suddenly, I can’t sit on this bench any longer. This happens sometimes—after all those months of being motionless, I still get overcome with the need to move my body.
I say, “Let’s twirl.”
And this is what I love most about Rachel. She just gets right up and starts twirling, no questions asked, no fear of what anyone else might think.
Christmas Eve. I’m four. My grandmother gives Mom and me these giant matching Christmas skirts—one in green, one in red. They’re ugly, but they twirl, and so we wear them straight through New Year’s, twirling all the way. Long after I outgrew the skirt, we twirled for birthdays, Mother’s Day, anything worth celebrating.
Rachel and I spin till we’re dizzy and then fall back down onto the bench. I sneak-check my pulse without her seeing because there’s good breathless and bad breathless. I wait until I feel my pulse go steady, till I know I’m safe, and I say, “Do you know what happened to the bear? The one that was here?”
I can’t blame him for trying to take someone’s arm off. I mean, the man reached into his cage, and that cage was all the bear had in the world.
“The news report said they sent him over to Cincinnati for socialization.”
“What do you really think happened?”
“I think they shot him.”
On the wall above me, my great-great-something-grandfather stares at me from out of a giant frame, stern and wild-eyed. The stories paint him as a saintly man who lived to carve toys. If they’re to be believed, he was a kind of selfless Indiana Santa Claus. But in his photo, he is one scary old son of a bitch.
He fixes those wild eyes on me as I leave a voicemail for Kam: I’m sitting here at good old Masselin’s Toys, wishing you well on your journey home. Let me know if you need money for a plane ticket back.
I hang up and say to Great-Great-Something-Grandfather, “Don’t judge a man till you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.”
I’m in the store office returning emails, checking inventory, paying bills, work I could do in my sleep. Masselin’s Toys has been in our family for five generations. It’s survived the Great Depression and race riots and the downtown explosion of 1968 and the recession, and it will probably be here long after my dad is gone and I’m gone, long after the next ice age, when the only other survivors are cockroaches. Since birth, reliable, dutiful Marcus has been the one expected to take the baton from Dad. This is because for whatever reason everyone expects Great Things from Jack. But I know something they don’t. This will be me one day, living in this town, running this store, marrying, having kids, talking loudly to foreigners, cheating on my wife. Because what else am I possibly equipped for?
My phone buzzes and it’s Kam, but before I can answer, a man walks in (dark, wiry hair, dark eyebrows, pale skin, Masselin’s store shirt).
My dad clears his throat. The chemo has left him with hearing damage in one ear and a throat that constantly needs clearing. He says, “Why did you quit advanced chemistry?”
How the fuck does he know this? It only happened a couple of hours ago.
“I didn’t.”
I’ll tell you how he knows this. Monica Chapman probably whispered it in his ear as they were doing it in his car.
And before I can stop them, all these images go racing through my head of primeval naked body parts, some of them belonging to my dad.
He grabs a chair, and as he sits down I look away because I can’t get these images out of my mind. “That’s not what I heard.” As I was banging Monica Chapman all over the chem lab. As I was banging her against your locker, on top of your lunch table, on the desk of every teacher you will ever have.
I say, maybe too loudly, “I just changed to the other class.”
“What was wrong with the class you were in?”
And there it is. I mean, he must be kidding, right? Because there’s no way he’s actually continuing to ask me about this.
I can’t avoid it. I have to look him in the eye—something that makes me even more uncomfortable than this conversation. “Let’s just say I have a problem with the teacher.”
Dad’s shoulders stiffen, and he knows I know, and it is awkward as hell in there. Suddenly I don’t give a shit about the emails or the inventory. All I care about is leaving because why would Monica Chapman tell him anything if she wasn’t still sleeping with him?
This skinny kid with big ears sits at the kitchen table drinking milk out of one of the whiskey glasses my parents keep on the bar. Even though he’s just a kid, the way he’s sitting makes me think of an old man who’s seen kinder times and better days. His purse is on the table.
I grab a glass, pour myself some juice, and say, “Is this seat taken?” He pushes the chair out to me with his foot and I sit. I hold out my glass and he clinks his against mine and we drink in silence. I can hear the tick of the grandfather clock from down the hall. We’re the first ones home.
Finally, Dusty says, “Why are people so shitty?”
At first I think he knows about my conversation with Dad, or about me, about the person I am at school, but then my eyes go to the purse, where one of the ugliest words in the English language is scrawled across one side of it in black marker. The strap has been sliced in two.
My eyes go back to my little brother. “People are shitty for a lot of reasons. Sometimes they’re just shitty people. Sometimes people have been shitty to them and, even though they don’t realize it, they take that shitty upbringing and go out into the world and treat others the same way. Sometimes they’re shitty because they’re afraid. Sometimes they choose to be shitty to others before others can be shitty to them. So it’s like self-defensive shittiness.” Which I know plenty about. “Who’s being shitty to you?”