Not Perfect(70)

“So, here’s the thing,” Rachel finally said when they were out of the elevator.

“Stuart’s gone,” Tabitha said, before Rachel could continue. Then she felt bad. “Wait, sorry, god I’ve been holding that in for so long. I wanted to tell you but, well, there’s a reason I didn’t. We are all pretty much falling apart. I just—”

“He’s gone?” Rachel asked. “I thought he was sick. I thought maybe, I mean, it didn’t make any sense, because if that were true, you would be with him, but I imagined he was sick somewhere, with some awful mystery illness, getting treatment.”

“I think that would be better,” Tabitha said. “Than this.”

Rachel leaned against the beautiful, fully-maintained, recently painted wall in the brightly lit hallway and sank slowly to the carpeted floor. She looked like she was getting ready to settle in for a while. But already Tabitha regretted what she’d said. The threat—“I’ll tell them what you did”—was now screaming in her head. It was always there, whispering, reminding her. But now it felt like she had unleashed it and there was no holding it back. “I’ll tell them what you did.” Why? She wanted to scream. Why will you tell them what I did? And more important, what did I do? Which thing? Was it the peanut oil or the morphine? Or both?

Tabitha could smell the food in the bag. She guessed some kind of stewed chicken in a Marsala sauce with mushrooms and noodles. That was one of the store’s specialties. But despite her having eaten so little today, she wasn’t hungry. She couldn’t imagine putting a piece of chicken on a fork and bringing it to her mouth, chewing. Fern must be hungry, though. Poor Fern, who had been alone for hours now.

“Let’s go inside,” Tabitha said, leaning over to offer Rachel a hand, which she took. “Besides, I sort of jumped in there. You said you wanted to talk to me about something. What is it?”



Levi did not have any intention of going to Butch’s house. He just couldn’t stand the thought of being with his mother for one more second. Why had he let that happen—to cry in front of her? What was he, like five? He didn’t even recognize himself anymore. So when his mother dropped him off just down the block, because there were no spots closer, he was glad. She might stay to make sure he got inside, but she was so distracted these days that he didn’t think she would.

He walked as slowly as he could toward the stoop leading up to Butch’s perfect house with his perfect family. He hadn’t talked to him all day—in fact Butch wasn’t even in school today—but he could just imagine them in there, all four of them, playing board games or watching some show together on the nature channel. Probably something about how animals stuck together, or how the male of the species rarely abandoned his young, and when he did, there must be something pretty defective about his offspring. After that, they’d go into their brightly lit kitchen, not a single light bulb would be blown out in there, Levi was sure of it, and they would eat something wonderful that Butch’s mother properly shopped for and maybe even spent much of the day preparing. Something like lasagna or brisket. No way, he couldn’t stand to see that today. But his mother didn’t leave. He could still feel the car behind him, he could hear it. He turned back toward her, just to get a sense of what she was doing, and he could see she was on the phone, and was she crying? Oh man, this couldn’t get any worse. He looked ahead again, fairly sure she hadn’t seen him. He was just going to have to keep walking, past Butch’s house, and if she called him on it, he’d deal with it then.

Butch lived on Mt. Vernon, two houses shy of Twenty-First Street, so if his mother wasn’t paying close attention, he might be able to make it look like he was moving toward his house when he was really going around the corner. He held his breath as he passed his false destination, waiting for a honk or to hear his mother call his name, but nothing happened, and then he turned right on Twenty-First Street and was out of sight. He moved fast and made the first right onto the next block, one he didn’t know at all, and waited. What he was waiting for, he didn’t know. So he decided to keep going on that block, back to Twentieth Street and beyond. At Nineteenth he started walking south toward the Ben Franklin Parkway and home, even though he had no intention of going home. There was the chance his mother would see him. It would be plain old bad luck if she did, but it wasn’t impossible. He kept his eyes open for their car, and he walked.

He was just across the parkway, near the main branch of the library, when he saw him. He was facing the other way, but it was him. His hair looked thinner, but that could be from all the stress, or something. He would have an explanation. He always had an explanation. Levi walked faster. He could see his shirt, a shirt he knew so well, mostly blue with red checks, it looked almost purple from a distance. He could see his hands. They looked like the hands he remembered. He couldn’t get to him fast enough. He started to run.

“Dad!” he screamed. “Dad! Dad!”

His father didn’t turn around, but he didn’t go the other way, either, which was what Levi was afraid of. Where had he been this whole time? Had he been this close? He was almost to him, and he could see that the shirt had a big hole in it. The khakis had an ugly brown stain on the butt.

“Dad!” he screamed again, and this time the man turned around. For a second he thought, how could he look so different? Could a person change that much? And then he knew. It wasn’t his father at all. He slowed just enough to get a good look, to be sure, before speeding up again. He kept running, right toward Logan Square, where the light for the westbound traffic had just turned green.