Everything Changes (16 page)

Pete gets off at two on Thursdays, so the plan is to stop at the house to say hello, then pick up the Mustang and drive it over to the Diamond Hardware store that Satch runs. At that point, I’ll explain the situation to Satch, who, I’m hoping, is open to reason and is not as prone to violence as he was when we were kids. In the meantime, Matt will stand in the background with his game face on, flash his tattoos, and look menacing. There’s no obvious role for Norm, who was a last-minute addition to the roster, but I will discourage any ad-libbing. Beyond that, I have nothing concrete in mind, except the notion that it seemed like a much better plan on the drive up.

Before any of this can happen, though, there’s the matter of Norm’s reunion with Lela and Pete, which is something I’d pay good money to not be present for, but I can’t see any way out. I’d love to wait in the car, but we can’t just spring Norm on Lela, even though that would surely be his preferred modus operandi, given the choice.

“What the hell is that?” Norm asks as Matt throws on the Elton John wig.

Matt flashes me a look that says he will not abide any remarks from Norm on the subject. “Just go with us on this one, Norm, okay?” I say.

“You look ridiculous,” Norm says, prompting me to wonder, not for the first time, how he’s made it to the ripe old age of sixty without getting the shit beat out of him repeatedly. The man has no filter.

“People in glass houses,” Matt says venomously, “should shut the fuck up.”

Norm defensively rubs the pitiful remnants of his failed hair transplant, but refrains from any further comments.

“Now, just stay in the car,” I say. “Matt and I need to tell her you’re here.”

“Got it,” says Norm, checking his teeth and patting down his pate in the rearview mirror.

Matt and I deliberately crowd the door frame when Lela opens the door. She’s in sweatpants, a white blouse with a faded floral pattern, and an apron, and I instinctively know she will consider this the worst outfit possible for facing her ex-husband again, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.

“Hi, Mom,” I say. “There’s something we need to tell you.”

“My Lord,” she whispers, looking past us to the car. “Is that Norman?”

“Yes.”

Her breath catches in her throat and she leans against the door frame for support. “What’s he doing here?”

“He just kind of showed up,” I say.

“We can’t seem to get rid of him,” Matt adds.

Lela’s hands operate on instinct. One flies up to gingerly assess her hair, combing it desperately with her fingers, tucking loose ends behind her ears, while the other absently pulls at her apron, smoothing out her blouse underneath it. “He’s so . . . old,” she says, her fingers now worrying the weathered contours of her own face self-consciously.

Behind us, the car door slams. Norm has apparently done all the sitting still he’s capable of, and he now exits the car and comes up the walk, his face hyperbolically solemn, his gait slow and formal, milking the gravity of this summit meeting. A peculiar half smile twists at Lela’s thin lips, her brows arched, her eyelids at half-mast. The alien expression transforms her, and I realize I’m seeing, for the first time, a side of my mother that has nothing to do with being a mother, the part of her that was all of her before she and Norm procreated and, ultimately, destroyed each other.

“Hello, Lela,” Norm says somberly. “You look wonderful.”

“Hi, Norm,” she says, her voice stronger and steadier than I would have thought possible. “It’s been a long time.”

He nods, but before the scene can play itself out any further, there’s a loud whoop from inside the house and Pete bursts through the front door in nothing but his underpants, eyes wide, tongue hanging out of his gaping mouth, and, leaping down the porch stairs in one bound, throws himself into Norm’s arms. “Daddy!” he shouts, hugging Norm fiercely. “I knew you’d come back! I missed you. Look, Mom. It’s Daddy. He came back.”

“Hello, son,” Norm says in a choked voice as he hugs Pete and pats his shoulders. “I missed you too.” He holds Pete at arm’s length to look at him, shaking his head back and forth, and suddenly his eyes are brimming with tears. And then he lowers his head and emits a high, strangled wail that seems to suck the energy out of his body, and he collapses against Pete, who isn’t prepared for Norm’s full weight, so they fall to their knees, locked in their embrace, Norm sobbing profusely into the hollow of Pete’s neck, Pete looking concerned, rubbing Norm’s shoulders and saying, “Don’t cry, Daddy. It’s okay. Don’t cry.” And on the porch next to me, my mother says, “I’ll get some coffee,” and then bursts loudly into tears.

Later, Pete, Matt, and I throw a baseball around outside while Norm and Lela speak in hushed tones about God knows what on the living room couch. She’s not necessarily happy to see him, but there’s no trace of the antagonism and bitterness I would have expected from her. And rather than being pleased with this unforeseen turn of events, I find myself taking offense at the way she’s let him in so easily, while I’ve been struggling, for her sake, to keep Norm at bay. After years of indirectly nurturing the anger in me, she has wordlessly invalidated my acrimony by effortlessly letting go of her own. Having been anchored in her rage for my entire adult life, I am suddenly cast adrift, with no idea of what to do with my own ingrained resentments. And I know these are all selfish and petty emotions, so on top of everything else, I get to feel like an asshole.

“What do you make of that?” I ask Matt, lobbing him the ball.

“It’s fucked,” Matt says, his tone indicating that I’ll get no more from him. He leans back and tosses Pete a high fly.

“Jeter’s under it,” Pete announces, exaggeratedly squatting to catch the ball. “And . . . he’s got it, and that will retire the side.” Pete has adjusted instantly to Norm’s return, like it’s been days, not years, since he saw him last.

Lela steps out into the front yard while Norm uses the bathroom. “I don’t trust him,” she says to me.

“You two seemed pretty chummy in there.”

“I was being civil, Zack, that’s all,” she says wearily. “When you have children in common, there’s really no choice in the matter.”

“If you say so.”

“He looks awful,” she says.

“He could lose a few pounds,” I say. “What do you mean you don’t trust him?”

“There’s something ragged about him, a desperate look in his eyes. He’s up to something.”

I shrug. “He wants us to forgive him.”

She shakes her head, watching as Matt playfully tackles Pete to the ground, Pete’s ungoverned laughter ringing loudly across the yard. “It can’t be that simple. He’s got something up his sleeve. He wants something else.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because with Norm, there’s always something else,” she sighs. “Peter!”

“Yes, Mom.”

“You’re wagging your tongue again.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

“You’re a boy, not a dog.”

“I’m not a boy—I’m a man.”

She nods, a fond smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “I stand corrected.”

Pete laughs and tosses me the ball, drawing me back into his and Matt’s game of catch. “Throw a pop fly,” he says.

Norm steps out onto the porch, surveying the scene with unconcealed glee. “So,” he says. “Let’s go see a man about a car.” He’s so goddamn proud of himself, so transparent in his glee and determined to view this quotidian tableau as a personal triumph, and only a great measure of restraint stops me from trying to split his face open with a well-aimed hardball.

Satch’s family owns the hardware store, and one would have hoped that a local merchant would have a greater sense of civic responsibility than to sell a car to Pete. In my memory, Satch is tall and beefy, with unruly dark hair and a threatening frown. In reality, the man finishing his cigarette underneath the store’s green awning is balding and dull faced and a good heel shy of six feet, but the hairy arms protruding from the rolled sleeves of his flannel shirt are corded with a telling topography of vein and sinew, and his Semper Fi tattoo pretty much nullifies whatever threat we may have imagined Matt’s scrawny, overly inked arms suggested. His remaining hair is crew-cut close, emphasizing his anvil of a head, his roughly hewn cheekbones suggesting that it would hurt just as much to hit him as to be hit by him.

“Hey, Satch,” I say.

“Zack, how are you,” he says, shaking my hand. “Long time.” His tone seems to indicate he’s been expecting me. “Listen,” he says, eyeing Matt and Norm leaning against the car in question, which Norm has parked illegally at the bus stop in front of the store. “Pete’s a good kid. Not for nothing, I even make a point to buy my shoes from him. I had the ‘for sale’ sign in that car for two weeks, and every day he would walk by and ask me to sell it to him, and I would laugh him off. But one day he comes in here with a check already made out to me, and he’s dead serious. Tells me he’s going to get his driver’s license. I mean, the kid can work in the shoe store, so why not a driver’s license, right? What do I know? Not for nothing, but I made sure he understood there would be no refunds.”

I hate people who start sentences with “not for nothing.” What does that actually mean, anyway?

“I hear you,” I say agreeably. “That’s why I made a point of coming up in person to speak with you. Pete speaks very highly of you. He’s very bright, in his own way, and I understand that he might have convinced you that a driver’s license was a possibility for him. But it isn’t, and he has absolutely no use for the car, so what we’d like to do is just give it back and chalk it up to a friendly misunderstanding.”

Satch appears to be lost in thought for a moment, mulling over the situation. “If you want me to try to sell it for him, I guess I could help him out like that,” he says.

“We didn’t come here to ask you to sell it,” I say. “We came here to return a car that should never have been sold to him in the first place.”

“I’m sorry,” he says with a frown. “I made the terms very clear to Pete, and I can’t just take it back.”

“Not for nothing, Satch,” Matt chimes in sarcastically. “But we’re not here to ask. The car is already back. Now we want Pete’s money.”

“Shut up, Matt,” I say, spinning quickly on him. “We’re going to work this out.” I turn back to Satch with a conciliatory grin. This is all a negotiation, and if there’s one thing I can do, it’s negotiate from the middle. “Now, Satch, I understand that the car has been off the market for two days, and that it’s possible you’ve missed some other selling opportunities. So how about we knock fifty bucks off the top for your trouble. I think that’s a pretty fair compromise, no?”

A small grin appears and then fades on Satch’s face. He sees the game I’ve started and is ready to play. “I’ll take it back for five hundred,” he says, nodding.

“Fuck that,” Matt says.

“Nine hundred,” I say.

“Five-fifty.”

“You had no business selling that car to him in the first place,” I say. “Eight-fifty, and that’s my final offer.”

“Six hundred,” Satch says. “Who the hell gives a retard a checking account anyway?”

“That’s it!” Norm yells, stepping forward, eyeballing Satch with disgust. “I can’t listen to this anymore. It’s bad enough that you took advantage of a mentally impaired man. But I’m not going to sit here and let you disparage him on top of that. You not only owe us a thousand bucks, you owe us an apology. Now, I’ll live without the apology, considering the source, but you damn well better believe that I’m not leaving here without that money. So we can do this quick, or we can drag it out. I’ve got nowhere I need to be.”

Satch makes a show of walking right up to Norm to stand in his face. “And who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Pete’s father,” Norm says. “And I know your father, George. I helped him board up that window right there when the store was vandalized in the seventies. I’m sure he would agree with me that this is something that needs to be undone.”

“Well, Pete’s father,” Satch says. “George is my grandfather, not my father, and you could go visit him in the nursing home to discuss it with him, except that he might not have time, what with his busy schedule of shitting his pants and asking what his name is.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Norm says respectfully. Then he steps right into Satch’s face, his belly brushing up against the younger man’s belt, and stares unwaveringly into his eyes. “Now, I’m through talking about this, so please, would you just give me my son’s money.”

“Jesus Christ,” Satch says, taking a step back. “What are you, getting hard on my leg?” And sure enough, there it is, the unmistakable protuberance in Norm’s pants. “You crazy faggot!”

“That’s right,” Norm shouts, eyes suddenly bulging, teeth bared. “I’m a crazy faggot. I get off on this shit. And there’s nothing I like better than ass-fucking jarheads, so you’d better get me that goddamn money now.”

“You sick fuck!” Satch says, roughly shoving Norm, who loses his balance and falls on his ass.

“Don’t you touch him!” Matt howls, and launches himself onto Satch’s back, throwing his arms around his neck, and the situation has officially gone to hell. Matt gets off two or three glancing blows to the side of Satch’s head before the larger man lurches back sharply, ramming Matt’s head into the brick face of the storefront. Then he grabs behind him for Matt’s head, but comes away grasping only the Elton John wig as Matt falls to the floor. “What the fuck?” Satch says, staring in abject horror at the wig and then at Matt’s bald head. The distraction provides me with a momentary opening for a football kick, which, though poorly executed, nevertheless connects solidly with the underside of Satch’s crotch. Satch spins around to face me, but then sinks to his knees in pain, and a second kick to the chest puts him on the ground. And then I’m on top of him, holding his shirt with one hand and pounding his face with the other. And the thing of it is, I can’t seem to stop, even after I feel his nose break on the third or fourth punch, even as I taste the copper salt of his blood flying into my mouth, which is open in an endless, primitive scream, even as the bones in my hand feel like they’re being shattered against his skull and his arms stop coming up in defense. Because somewhere beneath the pain and horror of it all, it feels good, a golden release, the first, greedy lungful of air after emerging desperately from dark, watery depths, and it doesn’t stop feeling like that, even after Matt and Norm pull me off, even as I’m vomiting onto the sidewalk, even as the police show up, sirens blaring, and lead us all, cuffed and panting, to the backseats of the waiting squad cars.