Five Tuesdays in Winter(32)

“How is God?” William called.

“Good,” the boy said, still running. It took a long time for him to reach us on his very short legs. “He’s very good,” he said crumpling his face into William’s thigh.

He was still holding my hand when he introduced me to them, his son, he said, and his wife, Petra.

He insisted she didn’t care, that their relationship had absolutely no restrictions, that they let each other be exactly who they were at any given minute. He always said that, any given minute, as if after sixty seconds you became someone else, wanted something different. I wished that were true. I only kept wanting him.

He liked to quote Ralph Ellison: “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”

He wore nothing under his dresses, it turned out. Up they came, so easily, in the handicap bathroom stall, the coatroom, the walk-in. Petra and I got pregnant the same month.

A robust month for my spermatozoa, he said. He loved it. He saw nothing wrong. My abortion made him sad, but he didn’t argue and paid half.

In early April she came into the restaurant before we opened for lunch. She was only there a minute, handing him a set of car keys, but it was a warm day and I saw the curve of her belly below the belt of her wrap dress. I put down the tray of salt and pepper shakers and walked out. I called my brother, stuffed my crap into Hefty bags, and drove up to Burlington.

A week before Saskia’s wedding, Wes and I made plans to go to the movies. I had a night off and Mandy was visiting her sister in Rutland. I met him at the bar he went to after work. He was in the corner, playing pitch with Stu, his work buddy, and Ron, the one who was always going into the hospital for his heart, and Lyle, who’d just gotten out of jail for a drug transport gone wrong at the Canadian border. I sat and waited for him to play out his hand. There was another guy at the table I didn’t recognize. He was young, probably still in college. He and Wes were both chewing on toothpicks.

Wes won the trick with the jack of clubs.

“That’s bull crap, Wesley Piehole,” Ron said.

They all called him Wesley. He never told them his first name was Westminster. He got up to pay the tab.

“So how do you know Wesley?” the kid with the toothpick asked me.

“He’s my brother.”

The kid laughed.

Across the room Wes nodded toward the door and I followed him out.

A few days later he asked if I remembered the young guy from the bar. I pretended I didn’t.

“College kid,” he said, as if he’d never been one. “Lots of hair. He said he didn’t believe you were my sister.”

“I told him I was.”

Wes smiled. “So you do remember him. He thought you were joking. About being my sister. I had to bet him a hundred bucks.”

“Wes.”

“All you have to do is come by the bar and show him your driver’s license. When’s your next night off?”

I gave him a look.

“C’mon. Easiest cash I’ll ever make.”

I went by. His name was Jeb. I brought my passport because the photo was better. He seemed bizarrely impressed by the passport, more impressed than a guy with a good haircut and a prefaded T-shirt should have been. For no good reason he showed me his license. His full name was Jebediah. The photo must have been taken when he was sixteen. He looked like hope itself. He counted out five twenties for Wes.

“I don’t know why you’re smiling when I’m getting all the cheddar,” Wes said.

“I thought you grew up under a rock, man. I thought you grew up out of the earth like a mushroom.”

After I left, Jeb asked my brother if he could ask me out.

We went to a candy factory out of town on a hill— everything was on a hill or nestled in a valley there—on a Thursday afternoon. Three old ladies in plastic caps gave us a tour and we ate warm dark chocolate nonpareils and soft peanut butter cups from a brown bag on some playground swings. All the facts of my childhood enthralled him not because they had happened to me but because they had happened to Wes. Wes had put a bit of a spell on him. To him, Wes had crawled out from under his rock and appeared at the bar with tarred teeth and BO and riffing on everything from Hume to Hendricks, gathering the young and the old, the honest and the corrupt, the dead broke and the slumming elite. Jeb had grown up wealthy in Connecticut. He said his nickname prevented people from seeing the Jew in him. His brother Ezra had had a different and more difficult childhood. Jeb had had plenty of exposure to Wasps, but he’d never met one like Wes who’d repented, recanted, who said when pressed that he grew up in Lynn, not Marblehead, who would never admit to tennis trophies or snorkeling in Barbados.

In the apartment below us were Stacy and her three kids. They were wild and yelled a lot and sometimes you’d see Stacy in a big woodsman’s coat, probably her ex-husband’s, across the street smoking a cigarette with all three kids wailing inside. But I could tell she was a good mother. From my desk I watched her take the kids to school, and she’d walk like a duck or croon out a cheesy love song. Her kids were too young to be embarrassed, and I could hear them all giggling even after they’d gone around the corner. I wrote a few vignettes about Stacy and her kids at that desk, but they never turned into anything. She’d been out of work for a while and when she finally found another job it was the graveyard shift, cleaning at the hospital. She had to take it, she told Wes. If her husband found out she didn’t have a job he’d try to overturn their custody agreement. After three months, she said, she could put in a request for daytime hours. So she made an arrangement with Wes and Mandy that if they heard anything they’d go down, and if the kids needed something they could come up. She left after she put them to bed and came back before they woke up.