She rubbed her forehead, but the pain—induced by repeated renditions of “Holly Jolly Christmas”—wouldn’t abate. It was clear this trip was a bust; she’d barely survive the line, let alone get back to shopping for Ward. She would just have to come back here another day and pick up some shirts or some ties, wrap them, and put the boys’ names on them. Maybe that’s what she should have done in the first place. Why drag everyone out here just so that you can say you did? Lu thought that too many people lived their entire lives that way. People who insist they are doing things for others, when they are simply doing for themselves, so that they can tell everyone that they did the right thing. Someone once commented that Lu’s sister, Annika, was sacrificing a lot to bring her triplets to term. Her sister, hugely pregnant, looked down at her own belly in amazement and said, “You think I’m doing it for them? I don’t even know any of these people!”
Sighing, Lu stood on tiptoe to see Santa put another little kid on his knee—not because she was all that interested or that sentimental, but rather to convince the boys that there was action up ahead. “Do you think it’s the guy we saw talking on his cell phone on the way here? Smokestack Santa?” she wondered aloud, not really caring that the boys ignored her. She remembered back to the last time she herself sat on Santa’s lap, the time immortalized in her mother’s favorite photograph. Her mother had insisted on going to the department store, though Lu hadn’t wanted to go. Lu’s father was supposed to pick her up; he’d promised to take her to the movies. Lu’s mother, however, knew some things that Lu had not: the fact that he had taken up with a receptionist named Winnifred and the fact that Winnifred didn’t much care for other women’s children.
“How much longer till Santa, Loopy?” Ollie whined in his best “I’m still a very tiny boy” voice.
“A couple of weeks, you loser,” said Britt.
“I’m not a loser.”
“Speaking of losers, here’s our friend again.”
Making his way down the line, God Man doled out his yellow smiley-faced cards to the line-weary parents and grandparents. Next to Lu, Devin tensed.
“They’re just cards,” Lu murmured. “No big deal.”
“He better not touch me,” said Devin.
Ollie opened his mouth, but Lu shushed him before he could begin. “Devin, relax. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay. It’s not.”
In front of them, the gray-haired man was taking a yellow card. “Merry Christmas,” he said. God Man didn’t respond. He took a card from his stack and held it out to Devin.
Devin smacked the card to the ground. “Keep that shit away from me.”
“Hey!” said someone behind them. “Watch your mouth! There are little kids here.”
“Look, sir,” Lu said, “we’ve already got a few of your cards.”
God Man looked at the card on the ground and then at Devin. He took another card from his stack. “I think this is something you need.”
Devin smacked this one to the ground, too. “I said, get away!”
“God loves you,” said the man.
“No, He doesn’t,” Devin said. His voice had taken on a strange, squeaky quality, as if someone had a hand around his throat.
“Hey!” Lu said. “Are you listening to me?”
“He does love you,” the man insisted as if he hadn’t heard.
“He doesn’t,” said Devin.
“He feels your pain. He holds you in His heart.”
“He doesn’t, He does not!” Devin shouted, the veins in his temples standing out.
Tentatively, Lu put her hand on Devin’s arm, and he shook her off, but not before she felt his muscles trembling. “You need to go,” she told God Man as firmly as she could. “Now.”
“You are a beautiful child of God, and He loves you.”
Devin’s shoulders collapsed inward. “You don’t know,” he said. “You don’t know anything about anything.” And then, suddenly, horrifyingly, he let out a sob, right there in the middle of the mall. Tears squeezed out from the corners of his eyes.
Britt looked about as freaked out as Lu had ever seen him, and Ollie cowered against her leg. God Man reached out to touch Devin, but Lu stepped between them. In the reflection of his glasses, her own furious face stared back at her. “Leave.”
“God loves him.”
“We heard you the first time. And the second and third and eightieth.”
“God loves all the sinners in this world.”
“That’s right,” said Lu. “I bet He loves you, too, even though you have no clue when to give it a rest.”
The man’s mouth opened, a wan little O, the yellow card poised in his hand. “I just want the boy to know.”
Lu poked a stiff finger in the man’s soft chest, daring him to try to touch Devin again. “And I want you to get the hell away from us.” Her limbs felt light and strong and fast. She thought for a second that she could break this guy’s nose with one good cuff, God Man or not.
The man stared at Lu for a moment, astonished. Then he stuffed his yellow cards into his bag and stomped off, not bothering with the rest of the line.
Lu swung around to Devin, who swiped at his face with a clawed hand. She wanted to ask him what was wrong, but she could see the anguish in his face, could see that it was huge and real but also shapeless and unnameable. He didn’t know the answer, and she knew that asking the question would just make it worse. All around them, the Santa line was still and quiet, waiting for what came next. From across the mall, a dog howled, lending a mournful note to “Jingle Bells.”
Lu started at the sound. “I just thought of the perfect thing to get Dad,” she said, surprising herself. Ollie and Britt looked at her expectantly, but Lu stayed focused on Devin. “Well? What do you think?”
Devin blinked his reddened lids, looking her in the eye for the first time in weeks. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s good.”
“Okay,” Lu said. “Let’s go.”
The three of them left the Santa line for the Humane Society, Ollie silent for once, as if he actually understood what was going on. Lu didn’t say anything, either, but she did allow herself one small gift: As they walked, she dug around in her purse until she came up with a single tissue, crumpled but clean. Devin didn’t need it, his tears had dried, but he said, “That’s okay,” and she said, “Keep it anyway,” and for once, he did.
PICTURE OF HEALTH
By the time Moira returned with the groceries, Ryan and I were in a state: Such a state they were in, you wouldn’t believe! First was the kiwi that I had innocently peeled instead of sliced, which sent him into a thirty-eight-minute screaming jag, complete with limbs flailing Gregor Samsa style. Then there was the Super Ninja mask he had to wear but could not locate in his closet or under his bed, which he had probably worn to his father’s house, which I refused, on principle, to drive over and fetch for him. And there was, as usual, that tone, the “why doth my God try me with imbeciles” tone—coupled with the chubby little arms akimbo—he used whenever he wasn’t getting his way, now, immediately, that brought me as close as I would ever come to homicidal.
The tone was because I made the most egregious of all errors; I threw away half an Oreo that he was—didn’t I get it? was I stupid?—saving to feed the lightning bug he’d caught in the yard the night before, a bug that had perished from fright or by choice almost the moment he was thrust, winking weakly, into a jelly jar.
His mother had told him that the bug was sleeping. The Oreo was to be its breakfast.
“Moira, what was I supposed to do? He took a swing at me.”
“So you, brilliant thing that you are, decided to take one at him? What the hell’s that supposed to teach him?”
Moira and I had been married for nearly two years, though we had been living together for almost four, along with her two children, Ashleigh, fifteen, and Ryan, seven. These twenty-two months had become increasingly more violent, or rather, put increasingly more violent thoughts in my
head. I had never hit a child before Ryan, never thought I, with my high boiling point, my twelve years as a fifth-grade teacher, could be pushed even to raise my voice, let alone pushed past words. This was just the beginning of the things you learn about parenting someone else’s children. They teach you not about what you are, but about what you are not.
“I think it’s going to teach him not to hit me again,” I said moronically, because I knew before Moira even opened her mouth that if Ryan didn’t hit me again, it was only because I had reminded him that I was bigger than him. “It was just a swat on the butt. Just one. And then I sent him to his room.”
“He says that you dragged him to his room,” Moira said.
“I picked him up and put him there, yes. There was no dragging. I didn’t drag him. I don’t know why he says those kinds of things.” Moira was looking out onto the porch that I had demolished three weeks ago with the intent to rebuild, her back to me.
“He’s having a hard time with his father being around so much all of sudden,” she said. “It confuses him, so he acts out with you. You know. A man he can trust? Why can’t you just give him a break?”
I said then what I always said. “He already gets too many breaks. There has to be a limit.” I knew that in an hour or two, when Ryan told me that I was really his favorite, his daddy daddy, I would feel like a monster.
Moira whipped around, glared. “Look. Look. Just don’t hit him again, okay?” she said, and so that I understood the conversation was over, she began to empty the organically grown fruit into the sink, throwing it hard enough to put fresh bruises on the peaches in addition to the organic ones.
“Hey,” I said. “What did the peaches ever do to you?”
Ashleigh burst in through the back door, hair freshly purple from the dye job she convinced us she deserved after earning a B in her summer English course.
“Hey, Mom. Hey, Ben,” Ashleigh said. “Want to see what I bought? It’s so cool.” She reached into a bag and pulled out a filmy white thing with some sort of lace or webbing hanging off it. I couldn’t even imagine what it was for. Or I didn’t want to.
“What is it?” asked Moira.
“It’s a shirt, Mom, what do you think?”
“I have no idea. What goes under it?”
“Under it? I go under it,” said Ashleigh.
“Uh-huh,” said Moira. “You and a camisole.”
Though I was sure this was exactly what Ashleigh expected, even wanted, to hear, she said, “Mom! You don’t wear anything under this! It’s supposed to be sheer, hello!”
“You’re fifteen, hello. You wear camisoles.”
“I don’t even own a cami-whatever.”
“Borrow one of mine.”
“I can’t borrow yours, Mom,” Ashleigh said, then added something I believed she had been itching to say to her mother for months, the reason she’d bought the filmy unwearable thing in the first place. “I have bigger breasts than you, you know.”
Moira poked her index fingers into the sides of a paper grocery bag, and it collapsed obediently. “I’ll buy you a camisole. Or how about an undershirt? Barbie, like you used to wear.”
“You’re just jealous,” said Ashleigh. “You are. Men stare at me all the time.”
“Your boobs are hanging out. People stare. The same thing would happen if I forgot to put on my pants.”
“I don’t think so.”
When Moira and I were still just dating and emanating pheromones others claimed hung about us like a fog, Ashleigh and I were often mistaken for father and daughter, that’s how close we were. I taught her to play softball, to pitch, to catch, to slide and steal. I taught her how to ride her bike again after a minor scrape with an out-of-control in-line skater years before had her too frightened even to sit on the seat. I taught her how to make tomato sauce, peach pie, and s’mores. Her doctor father started coming to ball games and piano recitals out of jealousy, an emotion he hadn’t shown a glimmer of when he came upon Moira and me making love in the backseat of her car while parked in the lot of his office, Moira’s idea. (She’s wicked, but not that wicked. She thought he’d already gone home.) But his paternal attention waxed and waned like the moon, and Ashleigh was mine. Was.
Then Ashleigh’s body popped like a kernel of corn, and she started wearing tops so small that her breasts burst from the neckline and sides. You could see her marveling at her own cleavage, smiling, sometimes drawing her elbows together at the dinner table to darken that dark furrow, drag us all in.
If it wasn’t obvious, Ashleigh wasn’t convinced it was actually there. She thought others wouldn’t see, or else they would forget from one day to the next.
I stuck my hand in the crisper, sifting through the vegetables for the least battered carrot. “Hey, doc,” I said through a mouthful, like Bugs Bunny, “you ain’t allowed to have boobs until you’re thirty-five.”
I got some stiff smiles, nothing more. “Boobs!” said Moira. “Look how you have us all talking. Ashleigh, why don’t you go and get ready for Auntie Flo’s?”
“Can Devin come with us?”
“No, Devin can’t come with us.”
“Why not? I haven’t seen him since—”
“Yesterday,” I said. “Oh, Devin!” I gasped, clutching the half-eaten carrot to my breast. “Oh, Devin!”
Ashleigh sniffed, was annoyed with the teasing. This, like her breasts spilling from her tops in a deliberate imitation of romance novel cover art, was new. “Yesterday was the first time I saw him in ten days because we were in stupid Florida,” she said, “remember?”
I felt a sinking in my gut, a feeling I was getting used to. “I thought you liked stupid Florida.”
“Yeah, well, not for ten whole days! Anyway, why can’t I ask Devin to come with us?”
“Your uncle is very ill. This is a family visit,” said Moira.
“Well, Devin is almost like—”
“Don’t even go there, Ashleigh,” Moira said. “I don’t have anything against Devin, but your boyfriend of three and a half minutes does not qualify as family.”
“You’re being mean.”
Moira sucked her breath in sharply through her nose, the way she did when she was trying to keep herself from saying horrible, terrible, cruel things, things that, if I read the look on her face correctly, she thought you deserved to hear. She had been sucking her breath through her nose a lot since her favorite uncle was diagnosed with cancer and since he had refused to get treatment for it.
“Your uncle is ill. This is not about you, do you understand?”
“All right, all right, I hear you!”
“No, you don’t. But it doesn’t matter. Get ready to go.”
Ashleigh’s narrowed eyes wished many gruesome deaths upon her mother, but Moira, unfortunately for Ashleigh, didn’t even catch head colds. I watched Ashleigh ram the “shirt” into the tiny silver bag in which it had been delivered to her, probably by some slatternly store clerk with black lipstick and a secret pierced labia, and added my two cents’ worth.
“And don’t even think of wearing that.”
I fell in love with the children first, a wriggling toddler in a grocery cart, an exhausted ten-year-old clutching a red purse.
I had offered to go to the store for my mother to spare her the ordeal of shopping with my father, who had suffered a series of strokes. I gathered Macintosh apples—my father’s favorite—in a bag, all the while sneaking looks at the cart parked by the potatoes.
“Sit down, Ryan.” The girl tugged on the boy’s fat baby arm when he tried to stand in his seat. “Mom’s gonna get mad.”
The boy shrieked and shook her off. The cart rolled a couple of inches.
“Stop it!” said the girl.
I sidled closer, sensing imminent disaster. The boy shrieked again and reached for a potato, purply and fist sized. The cart slid another few inches, and he fell to one knee in the seat. That’s when he looked at me, his eyes black and furious. He pointed a chubby finger an
d launched himself from the cart, landing on the floor.
I dropped the bag of apples and scooped up the howling boy as a woman with disheveled auburn hair, smeared eyeliner, and a gallon of milk rounded the corner, demanding to know what I was doing to her son.
“Ryan wouldn’t sit down. He jumped out of the cart and got hurt, and the man picked him up,” said the little girl. Up close, I could see that she was wearing lipstick.
“I think he broke his arm,” I said to the woman. “He needs a doctor.”
“Emergency room,” the woman, Moira, said, and the four of us ran from the store to the parking lot as Moira frantically punched in numbers on her cell phone. “The kids’ father will get us in fast,” she said. “He’s a doctor.”
At the car, she hesitated. “We’re divorced.”
“You drive,” I said. “I’ll hold him.”
“I don’t even know your name,” she said.
“Ben. Go.”
At the hospital, the boy’s howls subsided to faint moans, roving wasp eyes searching my face, fingers around my pinky in a death grip. When the doctors tried to take him from my arms to set him on the examination table, he screamed until they had to give him a sedative.
Six hours later, I came back to my mother’s house empty-handed except for the phone number bunched in my fist. Dad smiled. “Oh, hello.” To my mother, he said, “Who’s he?”
Mom looked up from the bowl of bananas she was mashing. “That’s Ben.”
Dad beetled his brows. “Ben isn’t that tall.”
Mom finished mashing and set the bowl on the table. “So are you going to tell me about it?”
I told her. About Ryan leaping from the cart. About Ashleigh clutching the red purse. About Moira dropping the gallon of milk to the floor and accusing me of kidnapping.
“They’re divorced,” I said. “I mean, she’s divorced. They don’t seem to be managing all that well.”
“It’s not a good idea, Benny.”
“What’s not a good idea?”
She looked at my father, a man she had been planning to leave before he had the strokes. “I know you,” she said.