Belly (26 page)

He was too tired this morning to raise his hips and practice his range-of-motion exercises, and his whole left side felt bruised
and bullied. His release plan included a physical from Dr. Nielson, who’d written “68” under Life Expectancy on the form,
and the gift of new body parts was a prediction that he would barely make it to his seventies. This morning he was glad of
that. Sixty years of this life was plenty. Let the joints stiffen and halt, let them lead him into a corner and strand him
there.

The light diffused. Nora stood in the doorway between the TV room and kitchen, arms folded like a straitjacket. It seemed
like the first time he’d seen her without the baby straddling her ever-widening hip. He sat up on the couch, swooning, put
a hand to his head and felt dried blood. He looked at the bloodstain on the knees of his favorite jeans. Nora sat down next
to him. She had a warm, damp washcloth and she smoothed it over his temple.

“We have to get this checked out,” she said.

“Anybody call for me?”

“No one.”

She put a thumb and forefinger to his scalp.

“I was really looking forward to coming back to town,” he said.

“I know you were.”

“I thought it would be easy.”

“Nothing is easy. You taught me that.”

She raised herself from the couch. He heard the water running and she returned with the rinsed-out cloth and she put it to
his forehead one more time.

“We’re taking Margie’s car to go to the emergency room. I had the Bronco towed to the shop.”

“Nora —”

“I don’t want to know,” she said. “What happened, what you did, how you got home, who you were with, I don’t care. Don’t tell
me. I don’t want any information.”

“You sound just like your mother.”

“Mom’s very wise sometimes.” She put the cloth on her swollen belly and said, “Let’s go. We’ll just make sure you don’t have
a concussion. I’ve got a million things to do before tomorrow.”

They both hoisted themselves from the couch, him with his fake hips and her with her big baby-to-be. They looked like a comedy
routine, like father and daughter: the vaudeville act.

Margie’s car was an ailing 1978 Dodge Dart. He remembered the car—the same one she had in high school, that Henry would borrow
when he took Eliza out. “How is it possible she has the same car?” he asked.

“She never drives it. Ever. She walks, or if she’s going somewhere far away she rides with other people.”

He inspected the car. The rear end was covered in bumper stickers.
Keep Abortion Legal. El Salvador Is Spanish for Vietnam. Break All Ties with Apartheid. Capitalism Is Killing Music.

“Jesus, we can’t drive in this thing. We’ll get shot. The Lord will strike us down.”
Ratify the ERA. Impeach Nixon.
Some of these were older than the car itself.
I Believe You, Anita.

“Get in.”

The car started beautifully. “How does it work if she never drives it?”

“She starts it once a week and lets it run for fifteen minutes. She’s very organized.”

“She’s a nut.”

“That, too.”

“Why did Eliza ever marry into that family?”

“They’re a very nice family, they’re just incredibly strange.”

Nora drove down Broadway in the still sleepiness of a Saturday morning, and the town, for a minute, looked the way she did
in his youth, and he loved her.

“Where are the children?” he asked.

“With Phil.”

“No kidding.”

“He took them to the Great Escape.”

“What about the baby?”

“He took the baby, too.”

“What can a baby do at an amusement park?”

She put one of her unlit cigarettes between her lips. “He took the kids as a favor so I could take you to the doctor.”

She pulled into the hospital parking lot.

“Spending time with his own kids is a favor? Jesus.”

“He did it as a favor to me, because if you’d woken up before he left he would have beaten the shit out of you.”

“Oh.”

They walked through revolving doors into the emergency room. He stopped.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t have any health insurance.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. We’ve got it.”

He said, “No. Let’s just go.” He tugged at her sleeve but she inched herself away.

“Sit down, Belly. I’ll register you.”

She came back with a form on a clipboard, made him fill out his Social Security number and a few other specifics. She’d written
the number of her house down under “Permanent Address.”

The emergency room ticked like a slow clock, a million years between every tick and every tock, no one in there but a teenage
boy, scratching under his cast, and his overweight mother. He thought of all the times he’d been there before, for the birth
of his four daughters and the death of one of them, but the hospital had expanded and changed, refurbished into one giant
pink womb, Pepto-Bismol pink, Chinese restaurant pink, baby skin pink.

“I hate pink,” he told Nora as she lowered herself back into the seat next to him.

“It won’t be long. They’re not busy, but you’re not an emergency.”

“Then why are we in the emergency room?”

“Because doctors don’t see patients on Saturday.” She picked up the
Saratogian.
He could be in there, a description of the accident, or the incident, an interview with the girl.

“Nora, you don’t have to wait with me.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I can take care of myself,” he said, but the look on her face silenced him into submission. He could see how outraged she
was, and how sad, how much she hated him, and he thought maybe if he could keep pressing then she would set him free. If she
would kick him out then he could voyage all the way to vagabond, like those women who let themselves get really fat, he could
just give up or give in or give it all away, drink himself right back to jail, or right into the ground.

“Let me see the paper,” he said, and he scanned the police reports but there was only news of a drunken hotwalker, an attempted
break-in at the music shop, two teenagers—names omitted—caught throwing prunes at the windows of the new old-folks home. And
with that absence of his offenses in ink, Belly began to wonder if it had happened at all, if the girl in the pink sweater
was a drunken dream, a wake-up call, if that was Shannon’s apparition sent to tell him something. No, it had never happened.
He had not ruined the life of some helpless hippie girl. He would never hurt someone like that. He was a changed man.

He looked at Nora, reading a romance novel with one hand on her belly and her highlighted hair in a wave across her pretty,
swollen face, and he put his hand on her forearm.

“What?” she said, refusing to look at him.

“Hand me that
People
magazine.” And he took his hand away.

He read through the list of celebrity deaths, weddings, arrests, and divorces and thought about his three weeks of infamy.
The raid came off like a sitcom, some fuzzy television flash-forward. He’d received an “anonymous” phone call from the DA’s
office a month before telling him to close up shop. But Loretta told him they were bluffing. Loretta told him they had bigger
fish to catch and he kept the operation rolling, kept the bets coming and going from all directions, more like an orchestra
conductor than a bookmaker. Then they showed up, a whole flock of eager officers, one little rookie just to carry the paperwork.
They made a big show of reading him his Mirandas, formally announcing his long list of wrongdoings in front of the customers.
The strangest thing about it was the lack of drama, the flat voices, the cloudy smoothness of the operation. In the end it
was nothing like television, nothing worth selling the rights to like half of his podmates planned to do. His story was just
too small.

I used to own this city, he thought, and now I don’t even really live here.

Eventually they were seen by a triage nurse, who asked him if there was any deficiency in his vision or hearing, if he was
nauseous or dizzy, confused or losing memory. He wanted to say yes, to all of it, but he simply shook his head. The nurse
pronounced him fine, if hung over, slapped a little Neosporin on his scalp and sent them home.

Nora parked the Dart in the driveway, turned off the car, and faced him. “This is your last screw-up,” she said. “One more
stunt like that and you’re out on the street. Am I clear?”

He nodded.

“I mean it, Belly. Stevie’s confirmation is tomorrow and we’re having something like sixty people over to the house and you
are to be on your best behavior from this moment on. We were locked out of the house yesterday. You stole the keys, you stole
the car.” She swallowed hard, and the thought that she might cry launched Belly into a panic.

“Don’t,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder.

“You stole money from me,” she whispered.

His face erupted with heat.

“No more. No drinking, nothing. You’re getting a job and saving some money to pay me back and you will behave yourself. Do
you understand?”

“I’m not your child,” he said.

“Well, stop acting like one then.”

She waited for him to respond, and when he didn’t she continued. “Mom told me that when she left us, even though she was only
half an hour away, and even though she called every night and we saw her every weekend, she said she cried for three weeks
after she moved out.”

Belly didn’t know that she called every night—he was at work, of course. How would he know? And he didn’t know she was with
them on the weekend. He was with Loretta.

“And after three weeks of just crying her eyes out every night and being so angry at how things had worked out… . She was
so pissed at herself that she couldn’t quit drinking and she couldn’t make things work with you, and then she just hated crying
so much, she was so sick of crying, you know, she was so bored of it.” Nora cleared her throat. “And then she decided she
would move on. That’s her motto—that’s what she always tells the kids when she watches them and they have tantrums. Move on.”
She looked at him but he did not meet her eyes.

Nora wedged herself from the car and pushed the door shut gently, walked up the back porch steps, and let the screen door
slam behind her. Belly laid his head back on the bench seat. He was so tired. These women, they exhausted him. He closed his
eyes, just for a moment, and gathered the energy to move on back to his oldest daughter’s house.

H
e decided to fix the dining-room table. It was the least he could do. Nora was slaving away in the kitchen, then scrubbing
the house from attic to basement, fielding phone calls and arranging for Stevie Ray’s last-minute meeting with Father Keneally.
He retrieved Phil’s toolbox from the pantry and set about working on it.

It wobbled. The old thing, it had been his father’s, a long slab of mahogany-stained pine, nothing that should last, but here
it stood. One of the legs was loose. He could fix that.

He ducked under the table to examine the ailing leg. He had to lie on his side, his bruised-up hip burning against the carpet.
He saw that the table had been repaired before, two metal L-brackets hanging from the wooden leg. Shoddy workmanship, that
was the problem.

“What are you doing?” Nora’s chubby legs appeared before him.

“I’m fixing it.”

“You don’t have to. Gene’s coming over early tomorrow to do it.”

Belly crawled out from under the table. “That’s the problem right there. Gene.”

“Not one word.”

He was still on the floor. He had no idea how to raise himself up from that sunken-down plane of the carpet. Nora stood with
her arms crossed and resting on her stomach.

“Why?” he asked. “Just explain it to me.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“It is my business, Nora. People on the street are talking about it, and I’m, I don’t know.” He swallowed. “I’m worried about
it, is all.”

Nora took a deep breath and lowered herself to the carpet. She sat cross-legged in front of him, the big mound of her belly
resting on her legs. The late-afternoon sun came streaming through the window, lighting Nora up, and Belly sat in shadow.

“Okay, Belly, we’ll talk about this once more.”

“Good.”

“You remember when I went to Mexico right after high school?” He nodded. “Well, Gene and I were supposed to go together. We
were going to elope. And then I told him I wanted to go alone, and I didn’t tell him why, I just said I wanted to go by myself
and be alone for a while, and I crushed him. I broke his heart.”

“So now you have to adopt him? It’s twenty years later. So you broke his heart, so what?”

Nora rubbed her stomach. “Just try and imagine what it would feel like to plan your future with someone, to expect someone
to be with you till the end, and then have her disappear on you.”

He knew exactly what that felt like. More women than one had walked out on him.

“And then she comes back and marries your best friend.”

“Happens every day,” he said, but he could see that she was shaken, that the other secret held her hostage. He knew she was
pregnant when she went down there, and there was no baby when she came back. “Tell me,” he said. “Confess.”

Nora shook her head. “I never should have left. If I hadn’t left, Shannon would still be with us.”

Belly said nothing.

“I should never have left my sisters in the care of two mean drunks like you and mom.”

He was sweating, and he said, “We’re not talking about that. Not.” He began to shake, it must be the DT’s, already he had
the DT’s, after not even a week. He wondered if it was a world record, if he could finally make it into the Guinness Book.

“I’m responsible for two deaths,” Nora said, and he did not try to dissuade her. “Gene never married anybody. He never even
went out with anybody again, and we are not together, we are never together, but he’s never giving up on me. He just waits,
like he can make that baby come back from the grave.”

Belly took the ring finger of her left hand and rubbed on the knuckle. She folded her palm against his and they held hands
for a moment, in the heat, on the carpet. What could he say to her? This was his one chance to be a father to her, to reassure
her, to erase twenty years of exponential Catholic guilt, to assuage the pain of killing her baby. He knew how hard it was
to lose a child, even an unborn one. He could talk to her about that.