Antsy Does Time (12 page)

“That's helpful.” I wondered which was worse, having a disease with few symptoms, or one with enough symptoms to let you know where you stood. “Well,” I offered lamely, “at least your lips haven't gone blue.”

Gunnar shrugged, and swayed a little, like maybe he was having one of his dizzy spells.

“So . . . you think you might make it all the way through next year?” I asked.

Gunnar looked at the stack of time in his hands. “It's possible that I could linger.”

Which was more than I could say for his backyard. I went over to his house that Wednesday to continue work on the dust bowl. It was hard spending time in the Universe of Ümlaut now. There were just too many things hanging in the air. Gunnar's imminent death, for example. And the weirdness with their father, and then there was the looming date with Kjersten.

I know that a date with the girl of your dreams shouldn't “loom,” but it does. It's worse when you gotta see each other
after
you've asked her out but
before
the actual date. It's kind of like saying good-bye to somebody and then realizing you both gotta get in the same elevator. You can't talk because you already said good-bye, so usually you both stand there feeling like idiots.

So now I'd asked Kjersten out, she said yes, and here I was at her house two days before the actual date. I knew as soon as she got home from tennis practice, it would be elevator time.

As for the Ümlaut backyard, it was officially dead—nothing had survived our herbicidal assault. Even a few of the neighbors' plants had suffered, because the herbicide had seeped into their soil a bit.

“That's what you call ‘collateral damage,'” Gunnar said. He looked at the growing desolation around us. “Maybe we can hire some bums and urchins to populate the scene.”

Right about then Mrs. Ümlaut called from the house, asking if we wanted hot chocolate since it was getting cold. Instead we asked for “a cuppa joe straight from the pot,” which was satisfyingly Steinbeck-like. Of course it would have worked better if she hadn't brought out an automatic-drip glass pot with a floral design.

That's when Kjersten got home, and came out to say hello. I was happy to see her, in spite of it feeling awkward.

“I hear you're the school's official Cupid,” she said with a smirk, obviously referring to the new currency of love in our school, for which I was supplying the paperwork.

“I don't shoot the arrows, I just load the bow.”

Gunnar groaned and rolled his eyes at that. The smile Kjersten had for me faded when she looked at the big hunk of granite in the middle of our dust bowl. I had gotten so used to seeing the unfinished tombstone there, I had forgotten about it.

“You should move that thing,” Kjersten told him. “It's an eyesore.”

“Naa,” Gunnar said. “People died in the dust bowl, so having a gravestone makes it more authentic.”

Kjersten threw me a look, but I turned away. I knew better than to put myself in the middle of this. Instead I just busied myself brushing dirt clods off my jeans.

“Are you staying for dinner?” Kjersten asked.

“No,” I told her, way too quickly. “I'm working at my dad's restaurant tonight.” After the last Ümlaut meal, I'd rather be pushing menus and pouring water than having to sit at that table again. I think I'd rather be ON the menu than have to eat with their father, if he came home.

Kjersten must have read my mind, because she said, “It's not always that bad.”

“Yes it is,” said Gunnar, chugging some of the hot coffee.

“Do you always have to be so negative?” Kjersten asked. I wanted to tell her that maybe she should cut her dying brother a little slack, but siding against a prospective girlfriend in any situation is unwise.

Gunnar shrugged. “I'm not being negative, I'm just telling the truth.” Then he glanced at the coffeepot. “Just like Benjamin Franklin said,
‘Truth can only be served from a scalding kettle; whether you blister or make tea is up to you.
'”

Kjersten gave him a disgusted look that actually made her appear slightly less beautiful, which I hadn't thought was possible. “My brother's nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is.”

Then she turned to storm off.

“I'm smart enough to know where Dad goes,” said Gunnar.

It stopped Kjersten in midstorm, but only for an instant. Then she picked up her stride and continued inside, without even turning back to give Gunnar an ounce of satisfaction.

Once she was gone, Gunnar and I continued to hurl plants into Hefty bags in silence. Now that Kjersten had reminded me of the gravestone, I couldn't stop looking at it. The elephant in the dust bowl. But for once Gunnar wasn't obsessing over his own eventual doom. His thoughts were somewhere else entirely.

“Three times,” Gunnar said, finally breaking the silence. “Three times I checked the odometer in my dad's car before he left and after he got back, then did the math. All three times, he traveled somewhere that was between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty miles away.”

It was good detective work, I guess, but was only half the job. “It doesn't mean much if you don't know which direction he's going.”

“Try northwest.” Then Gunnar reached into his pocket and flipped me a red disk. “I found this in his car.” Even before I caught it, I knew what it was.

“A poker chip? He's playing poker?”

“Probably blackjack or craps,” Gunnar said “Take a closer look.”

The chip was red with black stripes around the edge. There was an
A
printed in the center.

“The Anawana Tribal Casino,” Gunnar said. “And, according to MapQuest, it's one hundred and thirty-seven miles from our front door.”

9
Echolocate
This

Everybody gambles. You don't have to go to a tribal casino to do it either. You do it every day without even realizing it. It could be as simple as skipping your math homework on Tuesday night because you know that your math teacher has cafeteria duty before class on Wednesday, so chances are homework won't be checked, because cafeteria duty will crush the spirit of any teacher.

You gamble when you put off applying for a summer job until July 1—betting that your desire to earn money is outweighed by the fact that you probably won't get the job anyway, so why bother wasting valuable time that could be spent not cleaning your room, or not doing the dishes, or not doing math homework on Tuesday?

The point is, every decision we make is a gamble. My parents are in the middle of a major gamble themselves. They're risking everything on the restaurant. I admire them for it, because they're betting on themselves, which is kind of a noble thing to do. Then, on the other hand, there are the ten lottery tickets my mom buys each week, which are just plain embarrassing.

“What's the point?” my brother Frankie says whenever he sees one lying around. “Do you know scientists have determined that you're more likely to get struck by lightning five times than win?” Which makes me wonder if some poor slob gets his fifth lightning strike every time someone wins the lottery, and how badly do you have to piss off God to be that guy?

“I know the odds are terrible,” Mom always says. “But I still get excited. The excitement is worth ten dollars a week.”

I guess that's okay—but what happens when ten dollars becomes a hundred? Or a thousand? When does it become a problem? It must happen so slowly, so secretly, that nobody notices until it becomes a terminal illness of its own.

See, my parents can gamble with their restaurant and it's okay, because hard work and talent can change the odds in your favor.

But nothing changes the odds in a casino; they got all these big fancy hotels in Vegas to prove it. The house takes back around 15 percent of all the money gambled, guaranteed. You might win a thousand bucks today and you'll be all excited, totally forgetting that over the past year you lost a lot more than you just won.

Life is kind of like that—I guess Gunnar knew that more than anyone. All our little daily thrills don't change the fact that our chips eventually run out. It's the scalding pot of truth we gotta make tea out of. The tea's pretty good most of the time, unless you're that poor slob who got struck by lightning five times. If you're him, I can't help you, except to point out that your life has the noble purpose of making the rest of us feel lucky.

I didn't know where Mr. Ümlaut was on the lightning-lottery scale, but I had a feeling he was standing in a stormy field, wearing lots of metal.

 
 
On Saturday night I was determined to put all the struggles of the Ümlaut family out of my mind entirely. This was to be a night of fun. This was my first date with Kjersten.

Of course we wouldn't be alone—it was a double date with Lexie and Clicking Raoul. Like I said, I couldn't turn down the chance to take Kjersten to a fancy restaurant, and Crawley's was among the fanciest. I was quick to discover that the responsibility of dating an older woman is enough to fry all your brain cells. The logistics alone . . . How are you going to travel? Does she drive you? Is that humiliating if she does? Do you take a bus, and if you do, does that make you seem cheap? Do you call a taxi and go broke from cab fare even before you get where you're going? Or do you walk there together and have everyone snicker at you because she's taller than you?

In the end, I settled for simply meeting her at the restaurant. My mother raised an eyebrow when I let it slip before I left that Kjersten had a car.

“This girl you're seeing drives?”

“No,” I answered. “It's one of those self-driving cars—she just sits there.”

My mother is usually pretty quick, but I suppose she didn't trust her own grasp of changing technology, because she said, “You're kidding, right?” It was very Howie-like. I found that disturbing.

“I'll be home by eleven,” I told her as I headed out the front door. “And just in case I'm not, I put the morgue on your speed dial.”

“Cut my heart out while you're at it.”

“I'll put it on my to-do list.”

I made a mental note to actually put the morgue on her speed dial. She'd be mad, but I also knew she'd laugh. Mom and I have a similar sense of humor. I find that disturbing, too.

 
 
I arrived ten minutes early, dressed in my best shirt and slacks. Kjersten arrived three minutes late, and was dressed for an evening on the Riviera.

“Is this too much?” she asked, looking at her gown that reflected light like a disco ball. “I heard that Crawley's has a dress code.” Don't get me wrong, it wasn't tacky or anything—in fact, it was the opposite. Heads turned when she walked in. I kept expecting flashes from the paparazzi.

“It's perfect,” I told her with a big grin. The gown and the way she had put up her hair made her look even older, and I started to imagine us like one of those tests they give little kids. The one that goes:
What's wrong with this picture?
A girl in a gown, crystal chandeliers, a waiter carrying lobsters, and Antsy Bonano. A first grader would pass this test easy.

I greeted her with a kiss on the cheek in clear view of the entire restaurant, in case there was any doubt who she was with.

“You look great,” I told her. “But you already know that, right?”

We were seated at a table for four, and I wasn't quite sure whether I was supposed to sit next to her, or across from her, so I sat down first, and let her choose. This was probably the wrong thing to do, because the waiter gave me a look like my mother gives when I do something inexcusable. Then he went to pull out Kjersten's chair for her—clearly what I was supposed to have done.

“I hope you don't mind this double-date thing,” I said.

“Just as long as they're not all double dates,” she said with a little smile. She reached across the table and took my hand. “I've never been taken on a date to a place this fancy before. You score a ten.”

Which meant there was nowhere to go but down.

“Of course,” she said . . . a little bit awkwardly, “I've never been on a double date with a blind couple before.”

“Don't worry—they're just like people who can see,” I told her. “Except that they can't.”

“I don't want to say or do anything wrong . . .”

“Don't worry,” I told her, “that's
my
department.”

Lexie and Raoul arrived a minute or so later, and I wondered where they'd been, since Lexie lives right upstairs, and then I wondered why I'd wondered. I went up to Lexie and took her hand. Kjersten was confused by this, until I guided Lexie's hand into hers. It was something I was just used to doing; it spared Lexie the awkwardness of an inexact docking procedure when it came to shaking hands.

We sat at a table that used to be reserved for famous people from Brooklyn, until they realized that people from Brooklyn who got famous never came back.

Lexie released Moxie, her Seeing Eye dog, from his harness as soon as we sat down, and he obediently took his place beside her chair.

We made awkward small talk for a while about the differences between public high school and their ultra-high-end school for the wealthy blind. For a brief but unpleasant few moments, the girls had this little tennislike discussion about me, like I wasn't there—all I could do was follow the ball back and forth.

“I like Antsy because he's not afraid to say what's on his mind,” serves Kjersten.

“Believe me, I know,” returns Lexie. “Even when he shouldn't say anything at all.”

“Oh, but that's the fun part,” Kjersten smashes for the point.