The Mothers(35)

He sat by the kiddie pool, watching the Cobras’ children splash, and when they climbed out, they jumped on him, their bodies slick and cold as they tried to tackle him. He pulled himself out of a dog pile and found one of the wives—Gorman’s or Ritter’s, he could never remember—standing over him, blocking the sun from her eyes. She was smiling.

“You’re so good with kids,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said, embarrassed by how good that made him feel.

Late after one barbecue, when the party had died down and he sat under the fading tiki torch, finishing off his beer, he told Finch that he had been a father once, long ago.

“Fucking bullshit is what it is,” Finch said. “She wants to get rid of your kid? You got no say in that. But say she wanted to keep it. Guess who she’s hitting up for money? Guess whose ass is getting hauled off to jail if he can’t pay? A man’s got no rights anymore.”

Luke drained his beer, watching the flame above them flicker and dance. He felt pitiful, but if a man couldn’t feel pitiful late at night after drinking too much, when could he?

“She left me,” he said. “She went to Europe and shit and now she’s fucking some Arab motherfucker.”

Finch hooked an arm around his neck. “I’m sorry, brother,” he said. “That’s some bullshit and we both know it. I love my wife more than anything, but I’d kill her if she got rid of my baby.”

His eyes bulged a little, and Luke could tell he meant it. He suddenly felt sick. He stood too fast, the ground beneath him tilting and he felt dizzy, like when he used to put on his mother’s reading glasses and run around the house. Finch refused to let him walk home and pulled him inside. His wife put sheets on the couch for him, even though Luke told her he was fine with just a blanket. He felt touched by her extra effort, until he realized that maybe she just didn’t want him to puke on her couch. He hoped he wouldn’t. He stretched out, feeling the bumps in the cushion, his body taut with pain. He was grateful for how much he felt everything now. The wife brought a blanket from the hall and he closed his eyes as it fluttered on top of him.

—

MRS. FINCHER’S NAME WAS CHERRY. First name like the fruit, last name like the bird.

“Not Sherry,” she said. “Everyone wants to call me Sherry. Why would I want to be named after liquor?”

“I went to high school with a girl named Chardonnay,” Luke said.

“Well, you’re a baby,” she said. “You probably went to school with a girl named Grapefruit.”

She was always doing that, calling him a baby. He didn’t mind it. She wouldn’t tell him her age but he figured she was around thirty-five, not old but at the age where women start to think they are. If he ever got married, he decided, he would find a woman older than him. Too much pressure, being the older one in the relationship. When you were the baby, a woman didn’t expect much from you. She wanted to take care of you and he felt comforted by it all, her attention and her low expectations. If an actor over fifty appeared on TV, Cherry would say, “I bet you don’t even know who that is,” and he would shrug, even if he did, because it made her laugh. He’d sit at the counter while she made her kids sandwiches and although he never asked, she always made him one too.

He wasn’t attracted to her, not the way he usually was to women he chose to spend time with. She was fat. She had a too-wide smile and a strong chin. She was Filipina and she’d grown up poor in Hawaii. Luke had never even thought about there being poor people in Hawaii.

“Don’t y’all just surf and roast pigs and wear grass skirts and shit?” he asked. Cherry didn’t talk to him for two days.

“You got to shut off that TV and fucking go somewhere, Luke,” she said later. “Paradise ain’t paradise for everyone.”

She’d met Finch when he was stationed at Kaneohe Bay. She’d waited tables nearby at a tourist trap called Aloha Café, where the menu featured items with names like Surfside Steak and Luau Lamb Chops. Finch ordered the Beach Bum Brownies, but he kept calling them Butt Brownies, which made her laugh. She was eighteen. By the time she reached Luke’s age, she had married, moved to the mainland, and birthed three kids. Luke liked her children but he wondered if they were the only reason Cherry and Finch were still together. When he came over to watch a game with Finch, he studied the two of them, expecting to spot some invisible bond between them. But Finch rarely acknowledged Cherry and she was quiet around him, as if they had parceled out space in the house, carved it up like warring countries fighting over territory. Cherry behind the kitchen counter, passing through the living room like a tourist, Finch awkward anywhere near a stove, instead sprawling across the couch.

At Cobras parties, Cherry sipped pinot grigio with the other wives, always seeming a bit bored. Once Luke had heard the other wives call her stuck-up and he thought about her stories about eating sugar sandwiches for dinner, how she rarely saw her parents, who worked at the Dole cannery, how she’d grown up thinking that everyone knew their parents vaguely, by shadows cast in late nights or half-remembered forehead kisses at dawn. How she’d gotten married and grown fat and still felt the need to hoard—stashing candy bars in end drawers, packing old clothes in garbage bags at the back of her closet—because what if there wasn’t enough? Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full.