Heart of Palm (42 page)

“Hang onto it there, Biaggio,” Frank said. “We gotta secure it.”

He extended two accordion-shaped fins from the sides of the unit, which were clearly designed to hold it in place in a standard-size window frame, but the hundred-year-old Aberdeen-size window frame was still too wide to hold the AC securely.

“Crap,” Frank said. “It’s too small for this window.”

“It’s not too small,” Dean said. He stood back and squinted at the window, held his hands up and framed the AC between them.

“Take it back,” Arla said.

“It’s not too small,” Dean said.

“I’ll go with you to Home Depot,” Arla said. “Sometimes they give you trouble about returning things.”

“It ain’t too small,” Dean said. He nudged in between Frank and Biaggio. “You just gotta secure it better than that.” He stood crammed up in the window frame, and he was so close to them that Frank could smell Dean’s familiar scent of cigarette smoke and Dial soap, and he flashed back to a moment in his childhood when Dean carried him on his shoulders across the sand at Crescent Beach. Frank remembered he was dazzled by the height, and he’d put his hands in Dean’s thick black hair and tightened his legs around Dean’s back, and even when he got down, at the car, the smell of his father’s body stayed with him, lingering about his own small frame like an aura. But that was a long, long time ago. Frank felt old.

“Look here,” Dean said. He fiddled with the window, banged it down on top of the AC unit, wrestled with the side fins to try to extend them farther against the width of the frame.

“Get a screwdriver,” he said to Frank. “We’ll bolt it.”

“You can’t bolt it,” Frank said. “It’s all metal. How you going to bolt it?”

They’d all begun to sweat now, and Frank’s forearms were growing tired with the tension of holding the AC unit in the window frame.

“We could nail it,” Biaggio said.

“It’s too small,” Frank said. “You need a bigger unit. Did you measure the window before you went to Home Depot?”

“Get a screwdriver,” Dean said. “I’ll bolt it.”

“No,” Frank said. “It won’t work.”

“Get a screwdriver.” Dean was breathing hard, getting mad now, and they were all straining against the weight of the AC.

“God, it
is
hot in here,” Sofia said. “Are you almost finished?”

“They fuss at you if you don’t have the receipt,” Arla said. “Do you still have the receipt?”

“I’ll get the screwdriver,” Biaggio said agreeably.

“Let Frank get it,” Dean said.
What the hell?
It was like Frank was fourteen again, Dean bossing him around, barking orders, running the show, yet here he was a broken-down drunk sailing back in to save the day, standing in Arla’s bedroom like the second coming, and all Frank wanted to do was go to the God-damned acrobats with Elizabeth. A rivulet of sweat ran down his back. He wondered if his shirt was becoming soaked.

“But I’ll get the manager,” Arla said. “I’ll
make
them take it back.”

“Fine,” Frank said, “I’ll get the screwdriver.” But Biaggio was already in motion. He and Biaggio released the air conditioner at the same time. Dean was jolted forward with the weight of the unit, his too-big blue jeans flattened for a moment up against the front of the air conditioner and his torso straining to support the weight, and then his back tensed, his arms snapped back, and he gripped his backside with both hands and let out a cry of pain.

“Damn!” he said. “My cheek!”

The air conditioner tipped backward in what seemed like slow motion, and then it was gone. The electrical cord, snaking quickly up the wall, was the last thing Frank saw as the whole unit fell out of the window. He heard it crash solidly against the porch roof and then slide down the overhang and land on the walkway below. They all crowded around the window to look. The unit was smashed to pieces. One accordion side fan was already blowing down the driveway in the dissipating rain.

“Oh, no,” Bell said.

“Well,” Arla said. “Now
that
I don’t know if they will take back.”

“Nice job, Frank,” Dean said.

“Screw you,” Frank said.

Biaggio laughed nervously.

“Shit,” Dean said. He scratched his head, stared out the window, and then turned and looked at Arla. “Well, that didn’t work out as planned.”

“I’m out of here,” Frank said. He walked out of the bedroom and descended the stairs, to where Elizabeth was waiting in the open front door.

The moon was a slice of white in the sky, and the air was humid and hot, hanging like steam in the bowl of the amphitheater at the Utina Fairgrounds, where Frank, Elizabeth, and Bell sat together. In the stands, a flutter of white fans moved incessantly among the seats.

The acrobats were a traveling group from China, and Frank had no idea how they’d ever managed to get themselves booked here in Utina, of all the ridiculous places, where the amphitheater was parked in a hot, barren clearing south of the high school and where the regular acts were truck pulls, revivals, and craft shows, never something as culturally adventurous as Chinese acrobats. Another change. Another surprise. They seemed to be around every corner these days.

He felt sorry for the acrobats. This stillness. This heat. It was ludicrous, even for those who had lived here all their lives. The acrobats’ satin costumes were stained with moisture. Their faces shone with sweat and consternation.

“Did you know your father is not drinking?” Elizabeth said. She spoke quietly, not wanting her daughter to hear, but Bell was absorbed in the action onstage, where the acrobats were enacting a complicated series of maneuvers involving a long row of straight-backed chairs and a dozen spinning plates atop long wooden dowels. Frank doubted she was paying any attention to their conversation. Bell’s blond ponytail stuck to her back, and tiny drops of sweat ran down her face, but she seemed oblivious to the heat.

“Yes,” Frank said. “So I hear. Six whole days. What an achievement. I think we should award him a medal. Probably first time in his life. I think he started drinking in the womb, you know.”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “He’s trying, Frank. He’s making an effort.”

“Who wouldn’t? For a shot at all that money?”

She shrugged. The acrobats—ten of them, Frank counted—jumped down to the stage from atop their chairs, still spinning the plates.

“Well,” she said. She leaned forward and took three bottles of water out of her bag. She gave one to Frank and one to Bell. “Hydrate,” she said. “This heat, we’ll all pass out.”

“I used to think he was scary,” Frank said. He wasn’t sure where that observation came from, but it was true. He used to be afraid of Dean, used to shy away from his approach, duck his head, lower his voice. He could remember only a few times when his father had physically tangled with him, and in truth those times were more sloppy, clumsy, slapping sorts of dustups than anything dangerously focused or particularly painful. But still. “I used to think he was powerful.”

“Me, too.”

“But now—” Frank shook his head, annoyed. “He’s just a weak old man. No money. No sense. Drinks like a fish. Not much going for him at all.”

Elizabeth was quiet, regarding him.

“I don’t know why my mother ever took up with him,” he said finally, and it was true, he’d often thought it. The distance of years had given Frank a dispassionate ability to assess Dean in this manner, he supposed, and he felt as though he was mentally giving his father some sort of prenuptial critique. Besides a certain dark handsomeness that his father seemed to have possessed many years ago, he could see very little of redemption about the man.

“Oh, don’t be so sure,” Elizabeth said, evidently reading his mind. “Your father, he has a certain charm.” He looked at her, saw she was smiling. “All you boys do. It’s a Bravo thing.”

He held her gaze for a moment and then felt himself flushing like a preteen. He looked away, changed the subject.

“So my sister,” he said. “And Biaggio.” Onstage, a young Chinese man dressed in white tights and a blue sequined shirt now stood atop one of the straight-backed chairs. The other acrobats formed a circle around him. The blue-shirted young man hopped down, placed another chair on top of the first one, and did a handstand on top of the two of them. Frank glanced down at the program in his lap, found a photo of the blue-shirted acrobat. “Chao Li” the program said. “Man of Amazing Balance!”

“I know,” Elizabeth said. “They’re, like, a
thing
.”

“Have you known all along?”

“Just for a little while.”

“What do you think of that?”

“I think he loves her.”

Frank looked away.

“And you want to know something else? They’re going to get married,” Elizabeth said.

“You really think so?”

“I know so. He asked your father. I was there.” She rolled her eyes.

“Shit.” He shook his head. “He’s even crazier than I thought.”

“You should wish them well, Frank. She deserves to be happy.”

“I just worry.”

“I know you do.”

“She’s been so long with my mother. They’re bent. Both of them.”

“Sofia and your mother?”

“Sofia and Biaggio,” he said. “
And
my mother. Shoot. All of them.”

“They’re not as crazy as you think,” she said. She regarded him seriously. “And anyway, what does that really matter, when it comes right down to it?”

He shrugged.

“You think someone has to be smart, or even sane, to be capable of love?” She turned to face forward again, annoyed suddenly. “Smart’s got nothing to do with it.”

He’d made her angry, and he didn’t know how or why.

“Well, anyway,” he said. “They’re getting married. Go figure. I think—”he tried to put words to it—“I think he’ll actually take care of her.”

On the stage, Chao Li was on his eighth chair. Frank counted again to make sure—yes, eight chairs stacked top to bottom, and there he went, climbing, smiling, to the top, where he gripped the top of the chair back and did another handstand. He had to be twenty-five feet in the air. Bell stared, rapt, her bottom lip hanging loose, her small hands gripping the water bottle.

“Damn,” he said.

Elizabeth turned to him again, and her eyes were full.

“Maybe they know something all the rest of us can’t figure out, Frank. Did you ever think of that?” He thought at first she was talking about the acrobats, but then he realized it was Biaggio and Sofia she was thinking of, two people capable of love, if nothing else.

“Elizabeth,” Frank said. He felt the question rise up in his throat, a question full of desire. He wanted her. Her gaze was overwhelming. He looked back at the stage. Chao Li wobbled desperately but hung on. He wanted her. He wanted the light behind her brown eyes, wanted to travel directly into the core of her to find it, wanted it to eclipse and extinguish these other lights that fought so roundly in his heart, had fought for so long and so viciously and so completely, and he opened his mouth to say it, to ask for it, to beg for it,
please, please, please
.

“What?” She sniffled.

But he was silent.

“You going to ask me something?” she said.

He looked at her, her shoulders frail under her blue sundress, her hair like straw, those small, blessed freckles on her nose, and fear crept into his heart like a demon and struck him dumb.

“No,” he said, turning back to the acrobats.

Chao Li fell from the ninth chair. The audience gasped, but he twisted like a cat in midair and landed on his white-stockinged feet, turning failure to triumph and waving to the crowd with a thin, taut smile on his face. He limped off the stage, and Frank watched when he entered the wings, saw the way the smile faded, the way the shadow passed over the young man’s eyes.

They drove back to Aberdeen and Frank waited in the kitchen while Elizabeth walked upstairs to say good night to Bell. When she came back downstairs, he got up from the table, said good-bye, and headed for the door.

“Frank,” she said, and he turned to face her. He stood in the open doorway, his back against the frame. The light from the porch was diffused, weak, and a damp, creeping night breeze snaked along the floor and touched their ankles. The house was silent, and Frank pictured Arla, Sofia, and Dean upstairs, asleep in separate bedrooms like children in an orphanage.

“What were you going to ask me?” she said. “Earlier?”

He felt a little sick, like when he was a small boy and he’d been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. Snooping in his mother’s drawers. Sneaking chocolates from the corner store. Wanting something for himself that he wasn’t supposed to have. “Nothing.”

“Ask me,” she said.

“No.”

“Ask me.”

He shook his head. “I can’t, Elizabeth.”

She reached out and put her hand around his wrist, and they stood that way for a moment, looking at each other, silent, standing on the brink of hope and desire and certain disaster.