The Vanishing Year(51)
Evelyn screamed when the umbrella uprooted and skipped dangerously across the sand, toward the ocean. Beachgoers shouted, pointed, and ducked, but no one jumped up. She stood helplessly and watched our only beach umbrella pinwheel away. She flopped back onto the blanket and gave me a dazzling smile, all sparkling teeth, and shrugged, like it didn’t matter. Like we could just buy another one, which of course, I knew we couldn’t. I squinted down the beach, but the umbrella was gone. I went back to my digging, scooting down toward the wet sand, but she never called me back.
When I wandered back up to the blanket, a man sat next to Evelyn, his chest tan and shiny, his dark hair slick.
“Bud, look! This nice man here brought our umbrella back!” She rubbed his bicep.
“Hi, Hilary. Your mom was just talking about you. I’m Michael, but people call me Mick.”
“Not Mike?” There was a Michael in Mrs. Hoppit’s sixth-grade class, but everyone called him Mike.
“Nope. Mick. It’s Irish.”
He didn’t look Irish. Mick hung around all day, anchoring the umbrella deep into the sand, and I was relieved we wouldn’t have to buy another one. I hated buying stuff with Evelyn. She’d walk it to the counter, hesitate until the cashier huffed, and she’d put it back. It was embarrassing.
Back in our apartment, Evelyn made dinner and Mick stayed. When I woke up the next day, he was perched at the breakfast table while Evelyn hummed over a pan of fried eggs. When I got home from school, he was reclined on the couch, reading Evelyn’s newspaper that I was never supposed to touch because it was her only luxury. His dirty sneakers rested on the armrest. Hey bud, he said, and I said nothing because we were not buds.
He stayed for quite a while, his big hands around her shoulders as we watched baseball at night instead of our usual Golden Girls reruns. I tried to protest but Evelyn smiled and patted my knee, and kissed Mick’s cheek. He stayed through Evelyn’s birthday, which was in October, and right up to Halloween. I had wanted to be a hippie but Evelyn forgot to make me a costume so I was a scarecrow again, my outfit from the year before recycled. The jeans with the hay hems were too small, so we just left them unbuttoned.
When Evelyn and I came back from trick-or-treating, Mick wasn’t there. The next morning, he wasn’t at the breakfast table, or hogging the bathroom, filling it with steam and stink, and Evelyn’s face was red and her eyes were half-closed. I knew she’d been crying.
Then a week later, he still hadn’t come back and I was flopped in her room, watching her get ready for work after school. She stood facing her closet wearing just her bra, her hands resting delicately on her hip bones as her foot tapped impatiently. She was searching for her uniform, a starchy maroon-and-white thing. One of her jobs at the time was as a hotel maid working early mornings.
“What’s that?” I pointed to her arm, yellow speckled dots, four of them in a row, like thumbprints in icing.
She looked, casually, and ran her index finger over the smooth vanilla skin of her bicep and shrugged. “Oh I must have bumped into something.” But she turned away from me and put on her uniform real quick after that.
Only later, when I was a teenager, she’d tell me how hard it was to find a good man. I’d remember Mick and think, he was not a good man. Sometimes he’d come back, then disappear for long stretches, leaving her to cry alone in her room, long into the nights. I’d asked her once if my father was a good man. She’d laughed, always, that tinkling soft giggle. Only the best.
I swore I’d never be like her, the preening, making it all just so, promising this time would be different. I hated to see her weak, could hardly stand it.
Once I started college, I’d catalogue the boys I met: Good Men and Not Good Men. Sometimes it was easy to tell the difference, the Not Good Men would drink and paw at me, pulling on my jean shorts in dark corners of fraternity parties. If Evelyn had met Henry before she died, she would have clapped her small hands together and sighed. Oh! You found one! Evelyn was easily charmed, and Henry’s favorite pastime was being charming.
I think of Henry now and his gentle smile, his eyes crinkled in the corners as he humors me. The way only I can make him laugh. The way he checks up on me, worries about me, frets and fusses like a finicky cat. His soft, careful hands on my body, his mouth on mine. The way he gives me the last piece of lobster always. How he brings me gifts, small trinkets, flowers, a key chain, because he just can’t stop thinking about me.
He’s nearly perfect. But is he good?
CHAPTER 17
I lurk near a potted plant, my hair tucked back into a baseball cap that I found in the bottom of our closet, dusty and faded. I’ve never seen it on Henry. The gym buzzes with people entering one door in business suits with briefcases and attaches, exiting through another in spandex and Lycra, as though on a conveyor belt. I hover behind the one-way mirrored wall. I can see in, no one can see out. I scan the lobby. I’m semiprotected but nowhere near invisible. I have maybe five minutes. To see what? Hard to say.
Henry jogs on the treadmill, his cooldown pace, and on the machine next to him, the pink-spandexed blonde keeps pace as they laugh. He’s gesturing with his hands, and he throws his arms wide for the punch line. The blonde tosses her head back laughing and then stumbles, grabs at the safety bar. A sharp pain stabs my center and I grit my teeth. They both slow and step off, Henry towels the back of his neck and watches her while she pulls up one leg, then the other in a postworkout stretch.