Little Children (23 page)

“So please ask yourself,” Father Mugabe intoned. “Am I truly loving my neighbor as myself? Is my heart open to the grace of God, or is it sealed shut by the glue of anger, the nails of vengeance?”

Larry stood up to leave, he couldn’t bear another word of it. But just as he was rising from his seat and stepping into the aisle, Phillip turned again, smiling so sweetly that Larry couldn’t help but mirror the expression, which would have been perfectly fine except that Ronnie McGorvey turned at the exact same moment, so that Larry found himself smiling, with a heart full of love, right into the face of the child killer. As if to mock him, the child killer smiled back.

Don’t you dare
, Larry thought. Instead of heading for the vestibule he found himself moving forward, toward the altar, toward his family, toward the grinning pervert.

“Don’t you dare fucking smile at me!”

Larry hadn’t wanted it to come to this. He’d asked McGorvey to leave in a polite voice, but the son-of-a-bitch refused. Then the old lady started in, telling Larry he should be ashamed of himself, disrupting mass like this, violating a holy sacrament. And then Joanie joined the chorus, pleading with him to stop, to not do anything stupid in front of the boys.
As if I’m the problem
, Larry thought bitterly. He’d taken hold of McGorvey’s arm, but the pervert had resisted, squirming out of his grasp and diving to the floor. Now he was cowering at his mother’s feet, his arms wrapped tightly around the kneeler.

“Stand up like a man,” Larry told him. “Don’t make me come and get you.”

“Just leave him alone,” said the old lady. “He never did anything to you.”

“Really,” said Joanie. “This is not the time or the place.”

Larry had no choice but to squeeze into the pew and grab hold of Ronnie’s legs, down by the ankles. He squatted and pulled, but McGorvey’s grip was tenacious.

“Please,” the old woman squealed. “Please don’t hurt him!”

“Ushers!” the priest was shouting. “Remove this man.”

Larry wasn’t sure which man they were talking about. He pulled even harder.

“Lawrence Moon,” Joanie said, employing that overly rational tone favored by people talking to lunatics or very small children. “You need to stop this right now.”

Larry glanced up at his wife.

“Not now, Joanie.” He gave another pull, and felt the pervert’s grip start to loosen. “I’ve almost got him.”

“Oh my God!” the old woman screamed, an edge of hysteria entering her voice. “You can’t do that!”

Larry shifted his attention back to the business at hand, suddenly understanding what had gotten the mother so worked up. It wasn’t Ronnie’s fingers that had given way, it was his pants. They were sliding down right in front of his eyes, revealing the hairy crack of the pervert’s ass, the blasphemous pallor of his butt cheeks. Larry twisted his neck hard, averting his gaze from the grisly spectacle.

“Oh, Jesus,” he groaned, loosening his grip so abruptly that he almost lost his balance.

Ronnie scrambled awkwardly to his feet, yanking up his pants, his face flushed with embarrassment. He looked at Larry as if he was about to cry.

“You’re the pervert!” he shouted. “You trying to rape me or something?”

“Shut your goddam mouth,” said Larry.

He glanced sheepishly at Joanie, who was staring at him in stern disapproval, hugging the boys close to her body. She’d actually placed her hands over their eyes, as if shielding them from some unspeakable horror.

“I’m sorry,” he explained. “I wasn’t trying to pull his pants down.”

Larry felt a hand on his shoulder. It was one of the ushers, an old man with a frightened expression.

“Please,” he said. “Please just leave.”

“We’ll both go,” Larry said.

He grabbed Ronnie by the ear and yanked him out of the pew, surprised by his sudden lack of resistance. Twisting the cartilage between his thumb and forefinger—just like the nuns used to do—and moving at a brisk pace, he led the cringing pervert down the aisle like a misbehaving child, past the startled but not disapproving faces of the parishioners. As he approached the vestibule, he saw his own neighbors—the sloppy guy, the asthmatic woman, the sad old fellow—nodding with quiet satisfaction as he ejected the evil man from the Lord’s House.

“Some Christian,” Ronnie muttered, contorting his head in what looked like a painful way to make this observation.

“That’s where you fucked up,” Larry told him as he kicked open the exit door. “I’m no more of a Christian than you are.”

The sunlight seemed harsh and baleful after the dimness inside, and Larry was suddenly at a loss. You couldn’t just drag someone out of church by their ear and then simply release them as if nothing had happened. You needed to
do
something—or at least say something—that would bring a sense of closure to the situation, do some kind of justice to the drama you’d just enacted. But his mind was blank. He stood paralyzed at the top of the stairs, squinting into the merciless glare.

“You wanna let go of my ear?” Ronnie inquired.

“Not yet,” Larry said.

They stood like that for another moment or two, Larry distracted, McGorvey bent double, bearing his pain and humiliation without complaint. Even his patience was annoying. For lack of anything better to do, Larry twisted the ear a little harder, amazed by the flexibility of human cartilage. Ronnie gave a soft whimper, his knees buckling.

“That’s for little Holly,” Larry told him.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for
, he thought. McGorvey finally in his power, just the two of them, man-to-man. He had a lot to say to him, stuff he’d been saving up for months. But for some reason, all he could think about was his father’s funeral.

The sun had been blinding that morning, just like it was now. Larry remembered how lost he’d felt, stepping into the cruel brightness after the funeral mass, seeing the hearse at the curb, the driver in his dark suit standing so casually by the open back door. The desolation of that moment had imprinted itself on his skin and gotten absorbed into his blood. It was permanent now, as much a part of him as his hair or his teeth.

“I’ll let you look at my ass again,” Ronnie offered.

Larry didn’t remember pushing him, just a flash of anger and the blur of Ronnie tumbling down, the sad
whump
when he hit the sidewalk. And the awful way he lay there, face to the concrete, not moving, the arms and legs at all those weird angles.

Larry barely had a moment to absorb the shock of what he’d done—
OhmyGod, not again
—when he was distracted by a surge of activity at his back, the church doors flying open, the people spilling out, the oppressive sensation of being surrounded by an angry mob, an accusatory chorus of gasps and exclamations, Father Mugabe grabbing him angrily by the shoulder and demanding to know what he’d done.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him,” Larry said, and the words sounded lame even to himself, worse than dishonest. He’d said the exact same thing in the mall, staring down at the awestruck face of Antoine Harris.

When he finally worked up the courage to turn back around, he saw, to his amazement and immense relief, that Ronnie was not dead, or even very badly hurt. He was sitting on the sidewalk with his legs splayed out, his right arm dangling limply from its shoulder, falling across his chest as if he were reaching for a sword. He grabbed the injured arm by the elbow and raised it slightly, the palm upraised, as if making some sort of offering to the spectators. He appeared to be in terrible pain, but not so terrible that he couldn’t muster a smile.

“I am gonna sue your ass so bad,” he told Larry. “When you get outta jail, you can come visit me in my mansion.”

KATHY’S FIRST REACTION WAS RELIEF. FOR OVER A WEEK, SHE’D
been obsessing over this mysterious Sarah, mother of Lucy, and the possibility that Todd was having an affair with her. But the moment her imaginary rival limped into the house with her daughter clamped to one leg and her much older husband at her side, Kathy’s fears seemed misplaced and exaggerated, the product of an overheated imagination. Despite the many warning signs—there were six, to be exact; she’d listed them yesterday during a lull at the VA Hospital—it was hard to believe that Todd could be cheating on her with such a plain and frazzled-looking woman. It just wasn’t like him. His entire romantic history—she’d made it her business to know this—had consisted of one stunningly pretty girl after another after another (herself included, she wasn’t ashamed to admit it), and she was convinced that old habits like that died hard.

“Welcome,” she said, her voice animated by a sudden infusion of friendliness. “It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

Sarah trudged forward with awkward tenacity, dragging her human ball and chain. Her hair was frizzy from the humidity, and her lipstick was the wrong shade of red, clashing both with her skin tone and her shirt, as though she were a teenager who still hadn’t quite mastered the grown-up art of color coordination. Kathy almost felt sorry for her, she had so completely failed to live up to the paranoid image she had concocted of the Other Woman, the Stay-at-Home Mom/Sex Goddess at the Town Pool.

“This is for you,” Sarah said, holding out a bottle of chilled white wine.

“Thanks.” Kathy glanced at the label, an Australian chardonnay, more expensive than what she and Todd were used to drinking. “That’s sweet of you.”

The husband thrust out his hand and introduced himself as Richard Pierce. He was a skinny, potbellied man with close-cropped gray hair and a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, wearing pleated navy shorts, a pink Ralph Lauren oxford with the sleeves rolled up, and Topsiders with no socks. Kathy didn’t approve of any of these choices in isolation, but taken together they gave him a confident, surprisingly distinguished air.

“Nice place,” he remarked, with obvious insincerity.

“We just rent,” Kathy explained. “We’d love to buy something, but we’re not quite ready yet.”

“It’s a tough market,” Richard observed. “Even the little starter homes are way overpriced.”

“Tell me about it. It’s hard to keep up with our monthly expenses, let alone save for a down payment.”

She glanced away from Richard just in time to see Lucy peeking out from behind Sarah’s right leg, a delicate elfin thing with rosy cheeks and silky blond hair, so different from her dark, curly-haired mother, who, despite her small size, gave off a strong impression of squat peasant solidity. Being the willowy child of plump parents, Kathy was familiar with the fluky nature of genetic transmission, and knew better than to comment on the apparent lack of resemblance. She got down on one knee to address Lucy on her own level.

“And who is this pretty girl?”

In lieu of responding, Lucy pressed her face into the back of her mother’s thighs.

“She’s a little shy,” Sarah explained.

“Well, I know someone who’s very excited about your visit.”

Kathy beckoned to Aaron, who was watching from the hallway, his face a horror movie mask of dread and despair.

“Come on, honey. Come say hello.”

He held up both hands and shook his head no, as if Lucy were a goon who’d come to collect a large sum of money he was in no position to repay.

“Aaron, you’ve been waiting for this all day.”

Richard knelt down and placed his hand on Lucy’s shoulder. In this position, his face was only a few inches from Kathy’s, and she saw that he’d grown his beard to artfully compensate for a weak chin.

“Is that your little boyfriend?” he asked, directing a sly wink at Kathy.

Kathy forced herself to smile, even as she hurried to stand up. She didn’t like being winked at, especially by older, bearded men. It was a constant thing at the VA Hospital, an epidemic of not-so-subtle innuendo. She got it from everyone—these battered, geriatric vets, toothless and shell-shocked, their limbs missing or palsied, some drooling and incontinent, all of them winking at her like sleazy British game show hosts. And now this guy, right in her own house.

“Not
boyfriend
,” Lucy said with bitter vehemence, as if she’d been accused of a crime she hadn’t committed.

Kathy smiled at Sarah.

“They just nap together,” she quipped. “It’s not like it means anything.”

Sarah smiled back, but only a little, and only after an uncomfortable hesitation. It was odd, Kathy thought. She didn’t look like a prude.

“Todd’s getting some beer,” she reported. “He should be back any minute.”

Kathy had never been one of those women with a thing for older men. She’d always been a little grossed out when one of her girlfriends confessed to a crush on a gray-haired professor, or an affair with a “senior colleague.” It seemed perverse to her, depriving yourself of the best years of your lover’s life, fast-forwarding to the inevitable period of decay and decline, the saggy pecs and expanding waistline, the cholesterol and blood pressure medicines, the god-awful snoring they all did, the ear wax and nose hair, the need to be compassionate and understanding if the plumbing didn’t work the way it used to.

The thing that really gave her the willies, though, was the idea of the guy having a massive heart attack in the middle of sex, Nelson Rockefeller-style, dying while he was still inside you. Everybody thought about it from the man’s perspective, like it was some kind of triumphant exit (
What a way to go,
they’d sigh.
At least he died happy
). Did anybody consider the poor woman? Could there be anything more horrible? It would probably take a few minutes for you to even realize what had happened—you might just think he’d had an especially intense orgasm or something—and the whole time you’d be lying there, hugging an old man’s corpse, talking dirty into its waxy ear. Just the thought of it was enough to make you start sleeping with teenagers again.

“Forget the old geezers,” she’d said, after her friend Anna had described a fantasy in which her sixty-eight-year-old father-in-law seduced her at the family vacation house. “Stick with the young studs.”

“But he’s so vital for his age,” Anna replied. “And he’s done so much with his life. You really feel like he appreciates things. Good food, good books, a vigorous morning walk. I’m sure he’d be like that with a younger woman. Polite and appreciative, and maybe even passionate, but in a dignified way.”

Oddly enough, Kathy found herself flashing back to this conversation while listening to Richard talk about his experiences as a restaurant consultant. Despite his yucky clothes and weak chin and annoying tendency to wink, there was a kind of expansive ease about him, a wealth of experience and opinions that reminded her of something else Anna had said about her father-in-law.

“He’s a man of the world in the old-fashioned sense. Guys our age don’t have the same sort of gravitas.”

Todd didn’t, that was for sure. He was a thirty-one-year-old man who’d accomplished nothing with his life except to father a child and avoid paying work for longer than she’d imagined possible. It wasn’t so much that Richard had achieved anything particularly significant, or even that he’d reached some especially impressive level of financial success, it was simply that he had some experiences to share, some stories to tell about his interactions with the world. All Todd could do was sit there and ask the occasional question.

“Are these guys Chinese?”

“Of course not,” said Richard. “That’s the beauty of it. They’re a bunch of fat cats from Tennessee. But they think they can create a chain of Chinese restaurants authentic enough to fool the average American boob. After all, people just like them have already gotten rich doing the same thing with Mexican and Italian food. Why not Chinese, right?”

“It just doesn’t seem right,” Todd reflected. “Chinese people should run Chinese restaurants.”

“That’s why they want to call it Charlie Chopsticks. They figure they can have a cartoon logo of this bucktoothed Chinaman, maybe even use him as a spokesman in commercials, and that would somehow convince the dining public that Chinese people are actually involved in running the restaurant. I keep telling them that it’s a racist image that’s going to cause them no end of trouble, but they just don’t get it. They say, what’s racist about buckteeth? And Charlie, what’s the problem with that? It’s just a name, it has nothing to do with Vietnam. I say, what if a bunch of northerners started a chain of Southern restaurants called Redneck Roy’s House of Grits? How would you feel about that? And they all nod their heads like, Hey, great idea! Let’s do that next year!”

“Have you suggested alternatives?” Kathy asked.

“That’s my job. I’ve given them at least a hundred. My favorite is Chow Down Here. It kinda sounds Chinese while actually communicating in idiomatic English. To me, it’s a home run, but the clients hate it.”

“I liked Chairman Mouth,” said Sarah. “That was clever.”

Richard shook his head sadly.

“You can imagine how that went over. No one’s going to get it, they said, and anyway, we’re not naming our restaurants after a communist dictator. So I said, you want something American, how about Wok ’n Roll?”

Todd laughed. “You could do Rock Around the Wok, or Wok Around the Clock. Or Wok Star.”

“Wok Steady,” added Richard. “Wok On By. I have two solid pages of wok puns.”

Sarah smiled fondly at her husband. “You’ve been wokkin’ overtime.”

It was such a lame joke, Kathy couldn’t help laughing. She sipped the excellent wine her guests had brought and thought about how long it had been since they’d spent an evening like this, meeting new people, enjoying some interesting adult conversation while the kids played quietly at their feet. It wasn’t what she’d expected—it was, in fact, quite the opposite of what she’d expected—but she was more happy than to admit that she’d been wrong, that she’d gotten herself all worked up over nothing.

The only thing that still bothered her was this: If Sarah was what Todd said she was—i.e., a casual acquaintance, the mother of one of Aaron’s playmates, a parent he occasionally bumped into at the pool; in short, no one she needed to worry about—then why all the secrecy? Why the denial? (Those were the first two entries on her six-item list, entitled
Reasons It Might Be True
.) Why had she had to hear about Sarah from her three-year-old son, instead of her husband? And why, when she first mentioned Sarah’s name, had Todd pretended not to know who she was talking about?

“Sarah?” he said. “I don’t know any Sarah.”

“Sarah from the pool? She has a little girl named Lucy?”

They were lying in bed in the dark, so she couldn’t see his face. But there was a hesitation before he answered, a slight pause that smacked of calculation.

“Oh, Lucy’s mom. That’s right. I forgot her name was Sarah.”

“Aaron says he plays with her every day.”

“Not every day.”

“He says he takes naps at her house.”

“One time,” said Todd. “We got caught in a rainstorm. The kids fell asleep in the stroller.”

“He made it sound like an everyday thing.”

“That’s an exaggeration. Maybe two or three times, but not every day.”

Now it was Kathy’s turn to pause.

“So what do you and this Sarah do while the kids are napping?”

“What do you think we do? We hang out. We talk.”

“Is that all?”

“Jesus, Kathy. If you’re accusing me of something, just come out and say so.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to figure out why you never told me.”

“It didn’t seem like earth-shattering news. Am I not allowed to make friends with the other parents?”

“You go to her house, Todd.”

“Just a couple of times. Mostly we just see each other at the pool.”

“What kind of bathing suit does she wear?”

“I don’t know.”

“You haven’t noticed? Because in my experience men are pretty much aware of what a woman’s wearing at the pool.”

“I’ll take notes tomorrow and bring you back a full report.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Not really,” said Todd, with surprising quickness. “Not like you.”

“Right.”

“Come to the pool tomorrow. See for yourself.”

“I can’t just come to the pool tomorrow, Todd. I have a job, remember? I’m the only person in this family who has one.”

“You think it’s not work, caring full-time for a little kid? You should try it sometime.”

I’d like to
, she wanted to tell him.
I’m happy to switch places whenever you say the word
. But she didn’t want to change the subject to the bar exam, and their less-than-perfect domestic arrangements. She just wanted to know what the hell was going on between him and Sarah while she was stuck inside the hospital all day, interviewing broken old men about Midway and Guadalcanal.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “Why don’t we invite Sarah and her husband over for dinner next week?”

“I don’t think so,” Todd mumbled.

“Why not? Doesn’t she have a husband?”

“She has one. I just don’t think he’s the nicest guy in the world.”

“Oh, so she complains to you about her marriage, does she?”

“Not exactly. I’m just reading between the lines.”

Kathy’s stomach hurt, and she wasn’t breathing right. She hadn’t felt this sort of sexual panic since high school, when she found out that Mark Rovane had cheated on with her with slutty Ashley Peterson a week before the junior prom, making out with her at a crowded party while Kathy was home with the flu. She should have told him to fuck off, but she was weak, and didn’t want to miss the prom. So she went with Mark and hated herself the whole time. When she got home that night, she made a vow never to be put in that position again.

“Invite them to dinner, Todd. I’d like to get to know my son’s friends. And my husband’s, too.”

Todd dragged his feet for a couple of days.