Here So Far Away(38)

“You’re his biggest extravagance. His only extravagance. He knows he needs you if this whole staying-at-home thing is going to work.”

“Can I ask you something? Why me? Why not post an ad for a housekeeper?”

“He wanted you. Just you. Said he could tell that you’re a real firecracker and a great defender of pigs.”

The mention of firecrackers silenced us both. I remembered again the weight of Francis on me, my shoulder blades pressing into the cool mud as colors rained down from the black sky.

“Hyperbole, but I’ll take it,” I said.

“I don’t think . . .” He hesitated.

“Does hyperbole not mean what I think it means?”

“No, you’re right. But it might be pronounced hi-PER-bolee.”

I’d said hyperbowl.

I wasn’t a blusher. Lisa couldn’t answer a question in class without red blotches appearing on her neck, and when she was truly mortified, she looked like someone had been hanging her by the ankles. Not me, sayer of anything, if not everything. As it turns out, not always correctly. I could feel the fire creeping from my collarbone to my cheeks. What evolutionary purpose could this be serving, announcing to the world that a person knows she’s humiliated herself?

“Sorry, that’s a dick move,” he said, “correcting someone’s pronunciation. I never know whether it’s worse to let people keep saying things wrong, or—”

“No, no, it’s fine. Fine. Whew, I don’t feel very well.” I rubbed the back of my burning neck, fooling no one, not even Shaggy, who was staring up at me with profound pity. “I’m gonna splash some water on my face.”

I was seething at the hose by the side of the barn. Not at Francis, at myself. God, I must have sounded like Mum. Was verbal dyslexia hereditary? I’d always had a problem with laborious—though it should be layborus—and ethereal, a frothy white dress of a word that my mouth was determined to turn into ereethral, which sounds like the end of an angel’s urinary tract. Worse than my fumble: the pathetic attempt to pretend that I wasn’t embarrassed when I so clearly was and should be.

This is why you are here, I reminded myself, patting my face and neck down with water, to earn money to go to a university where you will learn to be less of an idiot. Someday, maybe, I’d have a grown-up conversation where I said all of the words correctly and someone could bring up the history or politics of a random faraway place and I’d know—really know—what they were talking about. I used to fantasize about getting into a debate with an Ivy League grad at what appeared, in my imagination, like a kitchen party at Woody Allen’s apartment. Oh, that’s a rather simplistic way of looking at it, don’t you think? I’d say. What about the long history of turmoil between the Frodites and the Schmirnites? I believe the native word for it is . . . And everyone around us would smile into their wineglasses. How did you become a person like that when you were from a place like this? Could you?

I gave Shaggy a drink from the hose. He chewed at the stream of water, then put his head into it and shook like a dog. I gasped as the cold water splattered all over me.

“Okay?” Francis was leaning against the corner of the barn chewing a piece of straw, the same pose I’d pictured Rupert in earlier.

I pulled my wet shirt away from my body. Navy, thank god. “I think it’s passed.”

“Look, what you said before—”

“Oh, please don’t—”

“No, a while back, about finding the guy at his mother’s house. You were right; that’s where he turned up. I should have been more grateful for the advice. I guess I hated that I needed it so much.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“There’s this other thing I wonder if I should do. That is, I wonder if you think I should do it.”

He was looking over at a giant pumpkin sitting on a skid by his car.

“Where did that come from? Are you—”

“From the Johnsons’ farm up the road. And yes, yes, I am. Pumpkin regatta-ing, on behalf of the force. Or I’m supposed to. Do you think I should?”

“I think you should have made up your mind before you did whatever it was you had to do to get that pumpkin over here.” It was, well, large enough for a grown man to sit in.

“The Johnsons have a forklift.”

“So, you’re asking me if you should disembowel that pumpkin, decorate it, take it down to the bay, climb inside, and race it in the freezing-cold waters?”

“Why, you make it sound so impractical.”

I turned the hose on him.

“Holy shhhh—!”

I hit him again.

This time, he ran at the tap—“Ha! Ho! Ho! Ha!”—and wrenched it off.

“It’ll be a touch colder than that,” I said.

“Only if I tip over!” He shook the water out of his ears like Shaggy, then leaned over to catch his breath. “Is that a no?”

“No—I mean, yeah, I think you should. It’s like Dad said, let the community see you.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“The race was his idea—did you know that? This is the first time he’s missed it in, like, ten years.”

Dad had a tradition of always wearing his uniform, plus a little something extra. The previous year it was a purple tutu that collared the top of the pumpkin when he sat in it. He wasn’t even planning to watch this year. Said he wanted to be properly on his feet before going to a public event, and none of the people who’d called to coax him into making an appearance had been able to change his mind about that.