Unspeakable Things(43)
The next summer, though, other husbands took other men’s wives away, and then two summers back, one guy took Mom into a room, and after that, no one brought their kids anymore. The grown-ups didn’t pretend to want to play cribbage, either. They mostly kept to the big barn, which had been outfitted with garage sale pillows recased with glorious Arabian-style cases that Mom had sewn from scraps.
It was a fun place to play, though like the basement, we technically weren’t supposed to go in there.
Sephie and I were powerless to resist the barn, though. We never entered through the front door, which was secured with a combination lock that only Dad knew how to open. We’d sneak through a hole in the attached silo. This required crawling through sticky spiderwebs to reach the old chute hole in the silo’s base, squirming inside, and then using the chinks in the cinder block to propel ourselves up and up, twenty feet.
It was worth it every time, because the inside of that barn looked like a movie set. It smelled like salt and sweat and musk and powdery incense, but you could roll from one end to the other on a bed of pillows. I didn’t think about what was done on the pillows.
“Craig!” Mom bounced out of the house and wrapped Mr. Frais in a hug. “What are you and Mary Lou doing here?”
Mary Lou took some of that hug from her husband. “It’s been too long. We ran into Ray at Lake George, and he mentioned your party tonight. Hope we’re welcome?”
“Of course,” Mom said, taking the bottle of wine and box of potato chips Mary Lou offered her. “Always.”
“How are you and Persephone?” Mr. Frais asked me when Mom and Mary Lou took off toward the house.
“Fine.” I pointed to where Sephie stood behind the card table groaning under its load of liquor bottles, their amber warmth glinting in the afternoon sun. It was a cloudless day, which was good from my perspective as it kept the adults outdoors longer. “She’s bartending today.”
Mr. Frais chuckled. “Isn’t she a bit young for that?”
The honest concern in his voice woke up something desperate in me. “Mr. Frais, the parties aren’t like you remember.”
He shaded his eyes so he could see me more clearly. “What’s that?”
The front door slammed. Mary Lou and Mom walked out, Mom’s arm looped through Mary Lou’s, and she looked happier than I’d seen her in months. “Nothing. It just gets a little wild here.”
His smile faltered.
I dialed it down. “Nothing you can’t handle, though! Can I get you a drink?”
“It’s early for me to start drinking, but thank you.”
I don’t know why that made my eyes feel hot, but it did and I didn’t like it. “I better get to work. I need to finish setting up the lawn chairs.”
Mr. Frais watched me with a bemused expression as I jogged down the hill and toward Dad’s studio, which was a refurbished granary. It consisted of three rooms: Dad’s front brainstorm room, his back workroom, and the second-level storage room. Only his back room, where he did the actual sculpting, was heated. The brainstorm room was all chalkboard. When Dad was really cooking, he’d hold four different colors of chalk at once, scribbling furiously, sketching and scratching out his next project, outlining measurements. In the winter, it was so cold in there that he puffed clouds of white while the chalk dust flew. It looked like he was creating art in outer space.
The workroom housed his metal-cutting, bending, and welding tools, and we could only enter there with eye gear and permission, but Dad didn’t mind if we played around on the second level, a half floor where he kept a bed and some books and where the lawn chairs and card tables were stored. I pulled open the screen door and started up the wooden stairs leading to that level.
The burnished aggression of metal dust had settled on everything.
I located the spare lawn chairs behind the bed, which looked like it’d been recently slept in. Had Dad had a guest? I threaded my hand through the plastic webbing of as many as I could carry, leaving my other hand free to hold the steep wooden railing. I made my way down the steps, carefully. There was something sacred about this studio. It was the one place Dad seemed not exactly happy but at least like he didn’t mind wearing his own skin for a few hours. He even sometimes played hide-and-seek with Sephie and me down here; at least, he had when we were little. I couldn’t remember the number of times I’d fallen asleep to the click-clicking sound of his end sander. And the stuff he created here? If you never believed in magic before, you would once you saw his sculptures.
“Give you a hand with those?”
The back of my neck tightened. Four more cars had driven up as I’d made my way down the hill, but I hadn’t recognized any of the drivers. I turned, even though I knew the voice. “Sergeant Bauer?”
He stepped through the studio door. Dad had drawn a three-headed dog across the chalkboard immediately behind the sergeant. In a bizarre coincidence of space, its two-dimensional leash lined up perfectly with Bauer’s hand, like he’d brought a service dog from the underworld.
“Not here. Here I’m Aramis.”
I didn’t understand what he meant by hear—eye-mare-amiss. He must have gotten that from my face, because he started laughing, a wheezy-bag sound. “That’s my first name. Aramis. It was my great-grandpa’s name.”
I nodded, but I hadn’t hopped off the bottom step. Aramis was my favorite of the Three Musketeers. I didn’t like his name on Bauer.