More Than Enough (21 page)

“Thank you,” our mother said.

The ceilings in the house were so high that Jenny and I couldn't stop looking up. “Wow,” Jenny said, “this is big, huge.” She actually said that.

“Shush,” I said, even though it was too late to shut her up.

“Your mother's going to give you the tour later,” Curtis said. He hung my mother's and sister's coats on hooks in the hallway, helping them take them off in a gentlemanly way. I refused to let him take mine. We wouldn't be staying that long, I told him. Then he led us into the sitting room through a tiled entryway that clicked beneath my mother's shoes and squished, slippery, beneath my sneakers. There were balconies on the inside of that house, too. They extended out from the second and third floors into the airy height of the steepled ceiling, cut in places by long, rectangular windows through which you could see sections of blue evening sky.

Our two families sat in the living room on couches opposite one another. I put my sack of shitty clothes down between me and my mother and sister. Because she knew what was in the bag, Jenny scooted farther away from me and closer to my mother, which I didn't mind at all. That's when I really noticed that room and a particularly freaky thing about it. It was more or less the living room I pictured in my dream—the one where my family was playing chess and backgammon and acting completely civil. The couches were the same soft shade of white as the couches in my dream. Just as in my dream, the pulled curtains were white, the carpet and two sitting chairs were white, and a large window in front of us looked out on what my father had called the million-dollar view, a view of the Salt Lake Valley where a wet, blue evening had just fallen over a grid of bright dots, alive, circulating with light.

“Do you play?” he asked me. I was looking at this grand piano—also white, a hard, shellacked, celestial white—pushed to the back of the room.

“No,” my mother said, as if this fact embarrassed her, “he doesn't.”

“Neither do I,” Curtis said. “But my daughter does. We could get you lessons if you wanted.”

I didn't respond. Curtis's son was picking his nose again and this time, without saying anything, his father gently took the offending hand and held it.

“I guess Steven doesn't want to talk right now,” my mother said.

“I understand,” Curtis said. I wished he hadn't said that.
I understand
. Jesus. How could he have really meant that?

When he looked over at Jenny, she said right away, “Hi, I'm Jenny.” She'd evidently decided to be as social as ever and to deny that anything terrible was happening. When she put her hand out, her skinny fingers were shaking, and we could all see that she was terrified.

Curtis smiled and reached across a glass-topped coffee table to shake her hand. “Very nice to meet you, Jenny.”

Then she went on to Curtis Smith's kids. “Hi,” she said to the little girl, who wouldn't even look at her until Curtis said “Andrea” in this disciplinarian tone, and she finally met my sister's gaze with her chubby face.

“Hi,” Andrea said, though she wouldn't shake my sister's hand, and Jenny had to move on to the little boy who, when she addressed him, buried his face in his father's side.

“Jenny is very sociable,” my mother said, laughing awkwardly. “She really likes people.”

“I wish I could say the same for mine,” Curtis said.

“She can be a real jackass, is what she can be,” I said.

“All right, Steven,” my mother said.

Curtis looked at my mother for a long moment without saying anything. “It's been raining all day,” he finally said.

“Yes,” she said. Her face was chilly and still.

“I'm glad you came, Mary,” he said. I knew—by the way he'd said that and by the way he couldn't seem to stop looking at her—that he must have had to convince her to come, that he'd had to ask more than once, that the decision hadn't been easy for her and still wasn't, and that more than anything in the world right then Curtis Smith wanted my mother to stay. “I really am glad you came.” You could hear it in his voice—how glad he was, how much he loved her, just as she'd said he did. She smiled at him—God, did I wish she hadn't smiled—and he smiled back, and they held each other's gazes for a long time and in a way that made me feel sick, though I was empty, hollow. I could neither throw up nor shit my pants. I could only sit there and be sick.

“What's wrong with him?” little Curtis asked, staring at me.

“Well,” my mother said, laughing very inappropriately, considering what she said next, “somebody hurt him, I'm afraid.”

“Oh,” the kid said, still looking at me.

Curtis Smith's daughter stood up from the couch, walked over to a side window, lifted the white curtain, and peered out. “You don't just stand up like that in the middle of a conversation, Andrea,” Curtis Smith said.

“Who was that man on our lawn?” Andrea asked, still peering out the window.

I saw my mother glance at Curtis Smith. “That was my father,” I said.

“Come back over here and sit down,” Curtis said.

Andrea didn't move from the window. She turned around and looked at me as if she were trying to see the resemblance between me and the man who had been shouting on her lawn. “Is he going to come back?” she asked. “I don't want him to come back.” Little Curtis was staring at me again with these large, dopey, frightened eyes.

“Stop staring at me,” I said.

“Steven,” my mother said.

“Is he?” Andrea asked again. “Is he going to come back?”

“No, Andrea,” my mother said.

“Yes, he is,” I said, looking right at Curtis Smith. “He said he was coming back.”

“When is he coming back?” Andrea asked.

“Nobody is coming back,” Curtis Smith said.

“I think he is,” Andrea said.

“He promised he would,” I said.

“See,” Andrea said.

“Enough, Steven,” my mother said.

“What's he have in his bag?” Little Curtis was pointing at it.

“Stuff,” I said.

“I want you to stop looking out that window, Andrea,” Curtis said. “Why don't you play us a song on the piano?”

“I don't want to play the piano,” she said.

“One song,” he said. “It'll make you feel better.”

She walked over to the instrument, sat down, and started playing this lush rendition of that old love song “The Rose”—all the girls in my junior high school in Boise had known it and sung it to each other on the bus—about rivers and thorns and flowing waters and how love is a rose, a very beautiful rose that has thorns. I was surprised by her skill, by the fact that she played without looking at her hands, her eyes closed and her small, pudgy body fluid and loose in that pink cotton-candy dress, as she worked the pedals with her feet and sang in this surprisingly big, womanly voice—a voice you wouldn't expect a ten-year-old girl to have—until she all at once stopped playing and said, “I think he's going to come back. I do.” She seemed about to cry.

My mother lost it then. “He is not coming back!” she half shouted. Andrea ran across the room and curled into her father, who looked ridiculous because he was actually smiling, straining to pretend that everything was as it should be. “I'm sorry,” my mother said to Andrea.

After that, we ran out of things to say for what felt like ten minutes. My mother cleared her throat, folded her arms, and unfolded them. Curtis fisted up a hand and kneaded it into his thigh until his knuckles cracked. His son was pulling on a button on the couch cushion and yawned without covering his mouth. “Well,” Curtis finally said, “this is difficult for all of us, I know. I'm a little nervous myself.” When nobody said anything, he tried again. “It's great for all of us to meet.”

“Yes,” my mother said. “It is.”

“What's that a picture of?” Jenny asked Curtis Smith. She was pointing to a photograph sitting next to me on a mahogany side table.

“That's me in front of my airplane,” he said. In the photograph, Curtis Smith was dressed in a flight suit, holding a crash helmet and standing in front of a small plane, which I happened to know was a P-38 Mustang; I'd built and painted a plastic model of that plane a few years before. “The P-38 was the best fighter we had in the Second World War,” he said. “A great war plane.” Something about Curtis Smith was surprising me. I hated the fact that he didn't look like a successful lawyer. I'd wanted him to be some rich man's shadow, some guy with a mirrored cigarette holder and an English accent. I'd wanted him to be a real asshole and not this squat, thick man who wore blue jeans and who might just be nice, as my mother had said. He was shaking his head, admiring his photograph before he put it down. “I get a little carried away with planes. I sometimes think I should have gone into aeronautics. You have any interest in flying, Steven?” he asked. He was trying to be suave and conversational now, threading his fingers together and pressing both hands against his knee, which had begun to motor up and down. “If you'd like to go up some time, we could do that. It scares Curtis here a little. He's not really ready for it yet, are you?” He gave the kid this very affectionate hug, pulling him in close because he was clearly afraid, though not at the moment, of planes.

“Steven's quite interested in flying,” my mother said. “He used to build model airplanes and paint them all the time. Didn't you, Steven?”

“Would you please shut up,” I said.

She grabbed a lock of hair at the back of my head and tugged. “You watch yourself,” she said.

Curtis turned around then and asked his kids to leave the room, to go down to the TV room for a while. “I'd like to talk to Jenny and Steven for a minute,” he told them.

“Why?” Andrea asked. “I don't want to leave.”

“I'm afraid you're going to have to, honey,” he said. He clearly knew how to lay down the law with his kids because she didn't ask again. She got up and took her little brother by the hand, and they walked out of the room and left us alone with Curtis.

“I want to assure you of a few things,” he said, turning back to us. He cleared his throat and looked at my sister and then at me. “You're both old enough to understand, and so I thought maybe you'd like to know something.” I had no idea what he was about to say and it half scared me. “Your mother won't be staying here at first. She'll be staying at my sister's until things get settled. You understand?” I didn't, but I didn't say anything. He explained that his sister lived just down the hill, that she was a very nice person, that her family would welcome my mother. “Mary will be here during the day. She'll be here for meals, for breakfast and lunch and dinner. Later,” he said, pausing, looking at my mother and smiling, then looking back down at us, “later, when things are more set, she'll be here more”—he was looking for a word—“permanently. We thought that, being a little older and understanding the situation, you might like to know that.”

I still didn't understand. I looked over my shoulder at my mother, who was blushing, ashamed as hell. “Please don't tell me anymore,” I said. “It's none of my business. I don't want to know it.”

Curtis's knee began motoring up and down again. For such a thick-bodied man, he was an emotional weakling. Both he and my father had that in common. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I thought you might appreciate”—he stumbled on the word—“understand—the morality of it.”

“No,” I said. “I don't understand anything.”

Because he couldn't look at me anymore, he looked at my mother. “Maybe you should show them around the house now, Mary.”

*   *   *

We followed our mother up a flight of polished stone steps, the open space of the first floor yawning beneath us. It was still drizzling outside. Tiny beads of rain accumulated on the black rectangular skylights in the ceiling above. The second floor was a balcony that circled the entire house, leading at both ends to staircases. A little white box on the wall flashed a red light at us as we passed. “What's that?” Jenny asked.

“That's a motion detector,” my mother said. “It's part of the security system.”

The air of that house smelled of Windex, of clean glass and cold, freshly scrubbed porcelain. “It's not comfortable,” I said. “It's too damn big.”

“I like it okay,” Jenny said. “Can we see Andrea's and Curtis's bedrooms?”

“We can peek in,” my mother said.

Little Curtis's room had a walk-in closet about the size of our rooms at home, a glass door leading out to a balcony, an attached bathroom with a tub the shape and size of a whirlpool, and a large mirror above the copper basin of the sink. He had Mickey Mouse stuff all over the place—Mickey Mouse sheets, a Mickey Mouse alarm clock and a set of ears on his dresser, a poster on his wall of Mickey and Minnie Mouse hugging each other, pressing their mouse ears together and knotting their mouse tails up in this very loving way. Andrea's room was the same as little Curtis's—with a bathroom and balcony and large walk-in closet—only it was all pink, pink walls, carpet, and bedding. Right away Jenny started touching stuff. “Andrea's bed has a canopy,” she said, letting her hand sink into one of the large pink pillows. She turned the closet light on, walked in, and came out with a bright red dress. “How many dresses does she get to have?” Jenny asked no one in particular. She was just looking at that dress in her hand, studying it.

“That's not your dress,” I said, because she needed to hear that. “Put it back. Tell her to put it back,” I said to my mother, who had wandered into Andrea's bathroom.

I picked up a pink cordless telephone on the bedside table, turned it on, and listened to the dial tone. “She has her own stupid pink telephone,” I said, surprised that it was real, more than just a toy. “She's only ten.” I was listening to the dial tone, still amazed.