Becky's Kiss (2 page)

“I miss home,” her mother said. Then she pulled away a bit, rubbed her nose, and kept her eyes on the road. There. It was out, better for her now, like a recovery phase.

Somewhere deep inside, Becky wanted to cry out that she was lonely too, that she missed Nicky and Lauren and Butch and the rest of the gang, hanging out at the Skatium and the lake, and sneaking up on the cars parked there with the older teens watching the ‘submarine races,’ and jumping out of the bushes in Halloween masks, shouting, then running off like idiots.

She missed stopping for white hots (white hot dogs to you) and trying cigarettes and not liking them and texting each other all night. Becky had been Facebooking, Tweeting, video-chatting, and calling for two weeks now, trying to do more than keep pace, but it was fading.

When you left home so Dad could keep his job in another branch in another town, another state, you were gone, for all intents and purposes. Messages went stale, because you weren’t there for the moment to moment stuff:
I’m worried about not making field hockey this year, I hope high school lockers actually
work,
I wonder if I’ll be popular for once, I just
know
tenth grade girls are going to hate me, I hope I’m not the shortest one again
. It was a slow death, but one she had already started to accept.

She really wanted a hug, like now, but it wasn’t as good when you had to ask for it. And it would have been totally weird having Ma pull over for it. Knowing their luck, they’d run over something and get a flat in the breakdown lane, or they’d scrape into some overgrowth and scratch the paint, or get rear-ended by someone coming over the rise texting.

By the time they pulled into the driveway, the urge for her mother to hold her was gone, and Becky just felt listless and tired. Mom didn’t get out with her. She was going to be late, and she had to run. In one of her rare sane moments, she stopped stressing and paused to really look at her daughter.

“I won’t call his mother about the shirt. But you should.”

Becky looked down. Nodded. Exited awkwardly. She hadn’t asked for pre-boyfriend advice and it was embarrassing. And she wasn’t about to call some strange woman just so she could spin some yarn about shirt lending. How about when his story didn’t quite match? Telling the truth wasn’t even a consideration—
oh, please, kill me now
—and plus, who was she to go calling boys she didn’t know? She was trying her best to blend.

But she did want to call him.

She could just
hear
him taking the phone, and saying,
“Hey, what’s up,”
as if they’d known each other for years. She would talk about her feelings, because she was feeling them of course, and baseball, since she’d been the scorekeeper for the boy’s middle school team back at Lincoln and she knew more trivia than most
guys,
at least about the American league.

Oh yes, she’d draw him in with a casual mention of Miguel Cabrera’s Triple Crown a few years back to see who on earth he rooted for around here. The Phillies? Where were
they
lately? At least Derrick Jeter bowed out last year in style, getting his Louisville Slugger bat, “P72” retired. In his final game on September 25
^th
, he had a walk-off single against Orioles pitcher Evan Meek to win 6 – 5. What did the guys in red pinstripes have? Rebuilding? Ryan Howard hitting .233 and all this crazy hope in rookies like Maikel Franco breaking his wrist and busts like Domonic Brown doing face-plants and giving up inside-the-park homers?
Don’t get me going!

Becky pictured this boy standing in his kitchen with the phone to his ear, interested in the fact that she knew about baseball and smiling wryly since she had zinged him. And even though he liked a bit of sass here and there, he’d answer back shyly if she posed a question about the feelings part, because he was sweet as apple pie, and he’d be right on the mark, since he’d really, really been listening.

She got to her room, changed out of the sweat suit, and put on her favorite jeans with the hearts on the knees. They were ‘inside the house’ jeans at this point, a bit too small, showing her ankles like a sailor avoiding deep puddles, but they were snug and secure and reminded her of home, not this new place where some of her stuff was still in boxes and there was no one around the corner to call anymore.

She gathered some clothes out of her hamper and made a pile. Tomorrow, she’d find this boy and give him back a clean shirt. She really wanted to offer him a small Tupperware container of pasta, because it fit the moment somehow, but carrying it to school would be awkward. She brought his shirt to her face and breathed in. Old Spice and porch swings and weeping willow trees, definitely.

Becky made her way to the utility room and put in the wash, careful in her mind to pronounce it “waaash,” like they did around here instead of “wersh,” even though it sounded horribly incomplete and snobby. She even set her cell timer and put the load in the dryer forty five minutes later, thinking herself ultimately responsible. It wasn’t until the clothes had about ten minutes left that she smelled something burning…gasoline, pungent and slick.

She came up out of the synopsis she had downloaded about
Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser, as Mr. Marcus had said that, by the end of the semester, everyone had to read a modern American classic off this sheet and find “three symbolic threads.” Eight page minimum!

She liked to get ahead on the first day of school, so she had scoured the titles, looking for something,
anything
for girls, and come up with boring Hemingway, confusing Ellison, awful Fitzgerald—that one on
The Great Gatsby
had posted the first introductory pages that no one in their right mind could possibly understand—and Cather, she who made Becky think of dust, creaky floorboards, and old ladies with their noses in the air, talking about sewing. And here, the
Sister Carrie
page wasn’t a synopsis, but rather some professor talking about the story in terms of “dichotomous merging of modernistic exploration and Victorian expectation,” and Becky Michigan had never felt so confused in her entire life.

Then the burning smell, thick with smoke and gas.

Becky jumped up, banging her knees on the bottom of her reading desk—only three blunders today, not bad, not bad—and ran to the hall. They had one of those ‘Rancher’ houses, all on one floor, no basement or attic, and Becky made the span of the place in about two and a half seconds, flying past the living room, through the kitchen, and out to the back porch, where the wall facing the back yard was a set of sliding glass windows.

She stopped.

It was Dad, standing with his back to her on the concrete pad in front of the tool shed at the rear edge of the property where the tall evergreen bushes made a slow spreading curve, separating their yard from the McKenzie’s. Brett Michigan was a big man, six-foot-seven, half Cherokee and half Dutch, giving him a Buffalo nickel pow-wow face and square head that had earned him the nickname ‘Flintstone’ so far back Becky didn’t even recall who had said it first. For some reason, he’d always kept his hair to match the cartoon classic, shaved up the back and close on the sides, with that little German flip in the back. Now it was up like a farm-hand’s cowlick, like he’d been running his fingers over the top of his head in reaction to some kind of desperate emotion, and there were flames in front of him on the concrete.

Under one arm, he had a bag of sand, ready to throw on the blaze, and that was a good thing, but in his other hand was the bottle of Old Grand Dad booze that he’d sworn he kept around only for guests. He raised it to his lips and took a drink out of it like it was filled with Gator Aid.

Becky ran to the porch door, also glass, and fiddled with the lock she wasn’t quite used to. Dad had stopped drinking last week—for the millionth time—and he’d
promised
he’d never go back, also for the million-
millionth
time. Outside, it smelled of the blaze, and Becky held her nose as she made her way over.

Dad turned slowly, the reflections of the flames dancing in and out of the contours of his face, strobe-lighting the Florida-shaped birthmark under his left jaw. He looked down at her with red eyes, shocked and glazed.

“Maggots,” he said. “It was crawling with maggots.”

Becky looked at the burning pile and saw a fleck of yellow material curling, twisting, and turning black. It was the boy’s tournament shirt, and she put both hands up to her mouth.

Brett Michigan brought the bottle to his.

Chapter Three

Becky slid the glass porch door shut behind her and marched to the utility room. There were tears brimming up, and she fought them. There were a million questions in her mind, but she buried them. You couldn’t talk to Dad when he was drunk, because he started making about as much sense as a square peg in a round hole.

Tears suddenly did run down her cheeks, but it wasn’t the frustration, the fact that her father had slipped back into the bottle, the idea that she had no choice but to tell this boy she had lost his tournament shirt or some other excuse that would make her look thoughtless and stupid. It was the utility sink filled with ammonia, and the rest of the load of laundry floating in there like victims.

She held her nose, bent closer, and of course, there were no bugs, not one, and why was she looking anyway? Clearly her father was coming up with random excuses for oddball behavior that covered up the fact that he wanted to drown out the world again.

Becky opened the window facing the driveway for ventilation, gas-tainted from the back yard or not. There was a cardboard box on the low table by the washer, and she turned to paw through the tangle of cords and drills and hand tools that hadn’t been put up on the pegboard yet. She finally found the flashlight and, after slapping the rim a couple of times, got a spill of weak, yellow light from the thing. She played the beam into the mouth of the dryer, just to be sure. I mean, maggots were ultimately gross, and if there was a remote possibility that they had been in the machine to begin with, she wanted to do more than soak her clothes in ammonia. Can you say shopping spree?

Bone dry, no creepy-crawlers, no hint of any kind of infestation, not even a ball of dust!

“Where did you get it?” her father said from the archway. She started and spun with a short shriek. His eyes were still bloodshot, but they were focused. He was still holding the half empty bottle. Becky shook her hair out of her face.

“What are you talking about?”

“The shirt.”

“I found it.”

“Where?”

“By the school…I don’t know.”

He raised the bottle up to his mouth and took a long pull, those road-mapped, bloodshot eyes never leaving hers. He finished and wiped off with the back of his beef-bull forearm.

“It was in tatters and dirty ribbons,” he said. Then he looked off in the general direction of the back yard shed, pointing that way with the index finger of the hand holding the bottle. “It was crawling with vermin, and smelled like death.”

“Why are you drinking again, Daddy?”

The words hung in the air. His shoulders slumped and he looked at the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’ll…I’ll stay in here for a while.” He pushed past to his bedroom door. “Make yourself a Stouffers or a pot pie.”

Becky wanted to point out that frozen lasagna and microwave pot pie were lonely dinners that made you feel like a fat failure, and that her father was drinking again because his job as an expediter had been just as bad at Syracuse Tool and Fastener as it would surely be here, and he already had high blood pressure, and just because they found this house for a song, it didn’t mean that he’d ever get used to the outside salesmen complaining that he’d forgotten to add stuff onto an order, or all the customers shouting that the sleeve anchors were M.I.A., or the firesafe was past its expiration date, or the rebar hadn’t gotten there yet.

Becky wound up saying nothing at all, just standing there for a moment looking at his bedroom door closing slowly behind him. Finally, she just gave a sigh and shuffled off to make herself some chicken noodle soup, remembering to leave a turkey sandwich in the fridge for her father. He’d grown up here, about two miles down Route 9 in one of the few poor sections of Lower Medford Township called Lewiston. Now, he’d returned to the general area, and it hadn’t been a homecoming he’d celebrated. In fact, from the conversations Becky had overheard, it was more like a last resort, the slim pickings left from a bad housing market, the closest buy in a good school district less than ten miles from the tool house in Philly.

She took her soup to her room and sipped at it. He hadn’t had a great childhood, but the reasons had never really been explained—spotty mentions, through the years, of a quiet mother and a domineering father, both of whom Becky had never met, both long passed. Evidently, there had been nothing for him here, and he’d left at eighteen, joined the Navy, moved to Syracuse, met Mom, and sold tools. Nothing special. He was good old “Regular Brett,” and she had really been looking forward to their time together tonight when they were supposed to watch the game on TV, joking about how much they missed the Bronx Bombers and trying to find something to like about these crumbling Phils.

But when Daddy drank, he went into his dark man-cave of a room and took the I-pod for himself, listening to the old-time trippy music he’d stuck on there, like The Moody Blues and The Doors. He’d be snoring loudly by the time Ma got home, and in the morning he’d be sad and apologetic, calling her “Miss Rebecca,” like he was addressing his elder. That was the worst part of it all, she supposed, because she wanted him to be consistently as strong as he looked. She wanted him to be the dad who had scrubbed her feet with a wire brush and alcohol when she was nine after she’d gone out barefoot to the street popping tar bubbles, then tracking the mess on their pretty white rugs…the dad who’d never let her lie to herself with excuses…the dad who taught her to love the game of baseball but was man enough to admit that he couldn’t play worth a lick. She’d asked him to have a catch once, and he’d laughed long and a bit too loud.