The Dream Life of Astronauts (7 page)

She exhaled through her nose. “I think I get it,” she said.

“What's going on over there?” Clark asked from the corner.

Pepper rolled over. She moved backward until she was sitting against the headboard and drew her knees toward her chest. “Nothing,” she said.

Frankie heard the wingback chair creak. “Nothing?”

“He doesn't swing my way, Clark.”

“Sure he does.”

“I swing,” Frankie said, suddenly conscious of wanting to be a good guest. “But toward guys, mostly. Mostly only, I mean.”

“Are you kidding me?” Clark asked.

Pepper pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. For a while she just sat there, glancing around the dimly lit room. Then she got out of bed and reached for her panties and bra. “Jesus, Clark, can't you do anything right?”

“How was I supposed to know?” Clark asked.

“You're such a screw-up,” she said. “I don't know why I expect anything different.” She was as smooth at dressing as she was at undressing. She was already buttoning up her shirt. “Sweetheart,” she said to Frankie, “you swing any way you want. That's just fine. I'm really sorry about the misunderstanding.” She cut her eyes over to Clark again and said, “Jesus.”

“So I'm supposed to be a mind reader that he's a closet case?” Clark asked.

“I'm not in the closet,” Frankie said.

“Well, you might have told me that, buddy.”

“He shouldn't
have
to tell you,” Pepper said. “You could intuit, you know? You could learn for once in your life how to read people. Then maybe you'd get somewhere.” She turned to Frankie again. “Get dressed, honey. And please don't tell anyone about this.”

“Hey,
you
didn't do such a great job, either,” Clark said. “And what's that supposed to mean, ‘get somewhere'?”

“In your life,” Pepper said. “In your marriage.”

“I'm somewhere.”

“No, you're not. You're not even here, remember?”

Clark shifted his gaze from Pepper to Frankie, and for a moment he just stared at Frankie as if trying to make sense of him. Finally, he said, “Guess it's time for you to leave, buddy.”

Frankie gathered his clothes and clutched them in front of him as he made his way down the stairs.

“T
here's no end to the sickness and depravity of the human spirit,” Melissa said upon hearing the story before lunch the following Monday, on a bench in the commons. “I guess that's the good news.”

“Maybe,” Frankie said.

“I wonder if people like that would go for a chubby girl like me.”

“He's not nice. She is, but not him. You think he'll come after me?”

“Did you give him your phone number?”

“No.”

“Does he even know where you live?”

“No.” Frankie had his backpack open on the ground between his sneakers and was holding the moon fragment, turning it in his hands.

“You're a minor and they tried to have sex with you,” Melissa said. “
And
they gave you alcohol. If they came after you, you could go public and expose them as extreme molesters.”

Frankie brought the fragment up to his face and peered at its knobby surface. It smelled like gunpowder. “I don't feel molested.”

“I know. But it means you get to keep the rock.”

W
e never would have laid eyes on Ike if his dad hadn't gone to sleep on a pair of railroad tracks somewhere in Jacksonville. The man was either drunk or simpleminded—either way, he was gone and it must have been gruesome. I was untangling the garden hose when Mr. Beal told me Ike was coming to stay with us and help out.

“We've got more than enough day workers for the grove,” I said, “and there's not that much to do around here. How old is he?”

“Young, I guess. Maybe ten.”

“Why can't he stay where he is?”

Mr. Beal spat a dark rope of tobacco juice onto the dirt, wiped a finger across his lip, and said, “Hannah, you're about as friendly as a possum.” Then he told me the boy's father used to work for Mr. Merrick, and I knew the matter was settled. Mr. Merrick owned the orange grove and a handful of other groves in Brevard County. He owned a trucking company and half a dozen packinghouses. He was letting the Beals live on the farm because Mr. Beal had driven one of his delivery trucks for most of his life and Mr. Merrick wanted to show his gratitude. Whatever Mr. Merrick wanted was pretty much how things went.

I asked Mr. Beal for a pinch of his Skoal. Skoal wasn't for girls, he reminded me, but he dug the can out of his pocket and handed it over. My spit was too soon, hardly even brown. “We might have cabbage loopers,” I said, jawing toward the garden. “Something's eating holes in the lettuce.”

“You heard what I said, though.”

“Ten years old,” I said, giving the hose a snap. “What good's he going to be around here?”

“I want you to be nice to that boy,” Mr. Beal said.

“I've got no use for him.”

“Nobody's asking anybody to have a use,” he said. “If it's going to kill you to be nice, then you might as well get on with dying.”

Such was life at Cassandra Grove.

U
p till then, it'd just been the Beals, their adopted son Gary, and me. I didn't live in the house with the rest of them. I'd moved out to the barn two years earlier when I was fifteen, not long after Gary arrived—partly because I was tired of hearing Mrs. Beal's record player coming up through the floor of my room, and partly because I didn't much care for Gary, who was two years younger than me, nosy, and a boy. I dragged my mattress up to the barn loft, along with an orange crate to use as a nightstand. From up there, out the south side, I had a view of the field, the road, and the Indian River. Out the north side, I could see the orange trees, the swamp beyond them, and, way off in the distance like a mountain, the enormous building where they were putting together the next rocket, the one they said was going to the moon. If nothing else, the view reminded me there was more to the world than just the farm and the grove.

The Beals were old, at least seventy when they adopted Gary. They were calm, quiet people. The only time I ever heard Mrs. Beal raise her voice was when she caught Gary playing with himself on the tire swing behind the house. Mr. Beal and I were up on the roof fixing the shingles when she started hollering, and we edged over and looked down in time to see her walking in a circle and waving at the air while Gary swung around trying to get his pants buttoned.

That night at dinner, when the four of us were sitting around the table, Mrs. Beal said maybe we should have a family discussion about what was okay to do in private and what wasn't okay to do in public—say, in the backyard. In the tire swing, she added, just in case we didn't know what she was getting at. Gary flushed. I rolled my eyes, and Mr. Beal said, “That's okay, Mother.” It
was
okay, she said, but not in the tire swing, and Mr. Beal said her point was understood.

Gary and I had to wash the dishes together every night—it was the last thing I did before heading out to the barn—and I was staring at his hands and trying not to smirk, wondering which one he used to play with himself, when he dropped a pot into the sink and splashed water onto my shirt.

“Klutz,” I said.

“You're the k-klutz.”

“So what were you thinking about? Girls? Naked girls?”

“N-not you, that's for sure,” he said.

I hadn't been wondering that at all. I didn't want him or anybody thinking about me when they touched their penis. But I knew he was trying to be mean, so I asked, “Have you ever noticed your head is crooked?”

He told me to shut up.

“It is,” I said. “Your entire head is crooked. They probably squeezed the forceps too hard when you were born.”

“They p-probably squeezed your
five
-ceps too hard,” he said.

Not the sharpest nail in the toolbox, Gary. But even if he'd been sharp, I wouldn't have liked him much.

The truth was that, thankfully, not a lot happened at Cassandra Grove that involved other people. The day workers who picked the oranges had almost nothing to do with us and were gone by sundown. (I'd nod to a few of them now and then, but even the women eyed me with suspicion and wanted nothing to do with me.) The farm bordering the grove was hardly a farm at all. It sat far back off the road, tucked into the northern swell of the island, just below the Space Center. There was a gravel drive that ran from the road to the front porch and curved off to the barn and the rusted silo. Behind the silo was the shed where Mr. Beal kept the tools for Mrs. Beal's garden. Mrs. Beal hadn't worked in the garden for years, said she couldn't bend over anymore, but I kept it up. Lettuce and radishes, mostly. Kale, when I could get it to grow.

Mr. Merrick kept about forty head of cattle in the field past the barn, fenced and gated off from the house and the orange grove. We never had much to do with them besides giving them water and replacing the salt licks. Every so often, Mr. Merrick would send a truck over to take a few of them away. The cows would walk onto the truck like they were walking across the field, then they'd be gone. And the ones who were left behind seemed unbothered. They collected themselves around the gate near the house, until they got tired of Mr. Beal honking his horn every time he wanted to get his Nova through. Then they'd move out near the road and just stand there, all of them facing the same direction. Every once in a while we'd hear a gator growling out in the swamp, or a fruit bat banging against the inside of the silo, and one time something bit one of the cows and made its leg swell up to the size of a grapefruit for a few days. But for the most part, it was a stagnant place. Nothing moved unless it had to.

T
he cows were all out by the far gate the morning Mr. Beal drove to the bus station to pick up Ike. I watched him leave while I was sweeping the front porch of the house. Mr. Beal had had to drive on a schedule for most of his life, and now that he was retired, he was a slow driver. His Nova crept to a stop when he had to open and close the gate, and then crawled off toward the highway.

Behind me, I heard the screen door open. Mrs. Beal stepped out and stood on the porch, watching her husband drive away.

“It'll be nice to have a new member of the family,” she said.

“I thought he was just coming for a little while.”

“As long as he needs to stay. You want me to braid your hair so you look nice when he gets here?”

I didn't even answer that. Why in the world would I care how I looked? “Doesn't he have other family besides his dad? Doesn't he have a mom?”

“He does, but not that he can go to,” she said. “His mother's in the state hospital, tried to hurt herself. Don't you go talking about it, though. It's none of our business.”

“But he's got somebody.”

I felt her hand pat my arm, then rub up and down a little. It was the same rub she'd given me when I first got there. The same rub she'd given me when she tried to school me, with the help of some textbooks Mr. Merrick had sent over. She'd struggled, trying to keep me focused for two hours a day, but I felt like I'd already learned all I needed to in school before I'd come to the farm, and I had no interest in math or science. Or history. Or English. The books Mr. Merrick had sent over had illustrations in them. They were meant for kids.

But Mrs. Beal would rub my arm and tell me I deserved an education. She'd tell me not to forget how blessed we were to have one another, to be a family, and it always sounded strange when she said that, because the Beals hadn't asked for me to be there, and I hadn't asked to come. My dad was already out of the picture when I was still little. My mom had taken work as a cook at one of Mr. Merrick's camps and had done that till her cough got worse, when I was around twelve. Then she coughed for a whole year, lost weight, and died. Next thing I knew, one of the foremen from the camp dropped me off at the farmhouse. The Beals had had no choice in the matter.

For whatever reason, they'd decided they wanted a family in their ripe old age. After nobody else laid claim to me or took an interest, they asked me how I felt about being adopted by them. I told them I didn't feel right about that since I still had a dad out there somewhere, so they said I could stay on anyway. Mrs. Beal sewed me a dress, which I felt silly in and wore only once. They said I could call them Mom and Dad, or Mama and Papa, or Mother and Father, but that didn't feel any more right than letting myself get adopted. I was thankful for how welcoming they were, and I appreciated Mr. Merrick's generosity, especially given that I'd never even met the man. But I wasn't an orphan.

There were deliveries now and then. Things Mr. Merrick wanted us to store in the barn. Farm equipment, fertilizer, sometimes furniture—like whole houses somewhere had been tipped to one side and emptied out. We stored whatever we were sent until someone came to take it away, sort of like what happened with the cows. Earlier that morning, Mr. Beal had told me there would be some feed sacks coming in on a truck in a few days, so when I was done sweeping the porch, I walked out to the barn to clear one of the stalls.

I was dragging the tooth end of a chisel plow across the floor when Gary walked in.

He nodded at me, and I nodded back. He took off the work gloves he often wore—not that he ever did anything you'd call work—and laid them on a bench, then wiped his hands on his hips. His fly was open, but I didn't feel like saying anything about it.

“Dad's gone to get that boy,” he said.

I told him I knew that already and walked back into the stall.

Gary sat down on the bench. He was the bona fide orphan around here. He'd come from an actual orphanage, had been brought here by the Beals' choice, and he'd started calling them Mom and Dad almost from the get-go. He followed them around, those first few days, looking at me over his shoulder like he was trying to figure out who I was. Eventually, he started following me around, too. I would glare at him until he'd pick up a mud clot or an orange and throw it—not at me, but nearby, sometimes at the side of the barn—and then run back into the house.

In the evenings, after he'd gone to bed, I'd sit in the den and read to the Beals from
National Geographic.
Or we'd watch the news on the black-and-white television Mr. Merrick had sent over. The world's longest suspension bridge being built somewhere. The war on poverty starting up somewhere else. The stories we saw had nothing to do with us and felt just as exotic as
American Bandstand,
which I watched almost without blinking, I was so taken by the dancing and the way that entire room full of kids seemed to know one another. “Go up and ask Gary if he wants to watch the news with you,” Mrs. Beal had said one night, and I'd told her no way, I didn't like Gary almost as much as he didn't like me. “Nonsense,” Mr. Beal had said from his chair. “He's just sore because you got a head start on him.” What head start was that? I'd asked, and he'd said that, in Gary's eyes, I'd gotten the jump on his new life and he was coming to terms with that in his own way. I kept it to myself, but I thought that was one of the stupidest things I'd ever heard.