The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (24 page)

I shrug. I hand her the barbecue fork that's
also a thermometer.

"We don't have a barbecue, either," she
says.

"I think that's coming with the TV," Trevor
says.

"I'm sober!" Bex says.

***

178

179

At dinner Mom opens a bottle of wine, but not
before Trevor hunts around in the paper and packing bubbles and locates the new
one-touch bottle opener. Mom doesn't drink--I think someone from work gave her
the wine last Christmas. But now she sips it gratefully, sighs as if she's just
descended into a hot bath after a long day.

"Oh. My. God," she says.

"This is the best day of my life," Bex says.
She's wearing all three shirts I got her, and this cool hat with a feather in it
that looks a little like Robin Hood's.

"I thought your best day was when you collected
a hundred and sixty-three dollars at QFC for tsunami victims," Mom
says.

"Oh, that," Bex says.

Severin is wearing this abdomen exerciser we
bought him that increases muscle size without any actual physical activity. He
forks in a few bites of meatloaf, then undoes the Velcro strap with a
shh-shwick. "I
don't think I can eat with this on," he says.

"You look buffer already. More buff," I
say.

"Yeah, In, a buffer is something you shine a
car with," Trevor says, and I stick my tongue out at him. "Wait. Can we get a
buffer? For Bob Weaver?"

"Honey, I don't know if I can take another day
like this," Mom says. "Undoing all that packing tape and twisty ties alone has
given me a migraine." She's not even eating. She's just drinking wine and
nibbling at bread crusts. "And the makeup ... Honey, you're a natural beauty.
All that foundation--I think of bodies in caskets."

I decide to ignore her. I decide she just needs
time to get used to the new me. "Wait. Something's missing," I say. "How could
you even tell," she says.

178

180

"Something I got for you. It's probably with my
clothes."

I go into the living room, kick my way through
paper and plastic. Freud is sleeping on an open instruction booklet Severin was
reading. I find the shopping bags with my new clothes still inside. I reach my
hand around the crispy new fabric, feel for a small bag.

"Aha!" I shout.

"Oh, God," Mom groans.

"Oh, God," Chico says.

Back in the kitchen, I hold the bag out to her.
Trevor chuckles. "I know what it i-is," he sings.

Mom takes out a small box, decorated with color
tiles. She opens the lid. "It's a pillbox," she says. She knits her eyebrows
together, baffled.

"For your hormone replacement therapy," I
say.

"I am not in menopause!" she says.

"Yet," Bex says.

"Wow. What can I say," she says. "That was very
thoughtful."

"It's got the little squares so you can
remember to take them every day," I say.

"Just what I needed," she says. Sips her wine
again. Just then, one of the cell phones rings in the other room. "Hello?" Chico
says.

"Cell phone!" Bex shrieks, and runs there.
"It's mine!" she announces. Hers is pink. She's standing in the kitchen doorway,
pushes the talk button, then holds it up to her ear. "This is Bex," she says.
"Huh?" She covers the mouthpiece with one hand. "They want to order a
pizza."

"Ask them what kind," Severin says.

"What kind?" Bex says into the phone. She
listens a moment, 180
Deb Caletti,

181

covers the mouthpiece again. "Large Canadian
bacon and sausage."

"Where are they calling from?" Severin says.
"Take their credit card number!" Trevor says. We're all laughing now.

"Where are you calling from?" Bex says.
"Astoria?"

"Tell them we'll be there in about five hours,"
Severin says.

"Bex, tell them they have the wrong number,"
Mom says, but she's laughing too.

"We'll be there in five hours," Bex says. She
listens. "They hung up," she tells us. "My first call. Cool." She punches in a
few numbers and in a moment our home phone rings.

"Hello?" Chico says.

"I wonder who it is," Mom says.

In the middle of the night I am awakened by a
sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It's music. Wait, it sounds
like the ice cream man, in our house. Is this some kind of twisted nightmare?
The fucking ice cream man, breaking in to chop us all up in our beds, to the
tune of "Zippity Do Dah"?

I listen. It's coming from the bathroom. My
heart slows. I remember. There is no psycho ice cream man here. It is just our
new musical soap dispenser/alarm clock, singing at midnight.

182

11

Leroy is looking at the want ads again. "What
happened, Leroy?" I ask.

"The old lady I was watching? She wanted to get
out of the house. I took her out to see the salmon hatchery. She wanted a smoke,
so we were just sitting there on a bench, having--"

"You deserve whatever you got, then, Leroy." I
tie my apron behind my back. "You let an old lady smoke? You let yourself
smoke?"

"Hey, now, I haven't for years. Things have
been a little stressful in my life lately, you know.... And anyway--"

"She died on you. Right there on the bench,"
Trina guesses. "No--," Leroy says.

"She fell in the water," Nick guesses. "Slipped
and fell in."

"And then got chewed on by a giant salmon,"
Funny says. She cackles evilly.

"Broken hip," Joe says.

"I vote with Joe," Jane says. "Broken
hip."

"God, you people." Leroy gives up. He takes a
crunch of his wheat toast, goes back to his paper.

"What, Leroy, what?" I plead. "Come
on."

He chews as if we are all invisible. There's
only the
tink
sound of Funny's fork against her plate, and Luigi
whistling in the back.

"Oh, well," Trina says. "We'll never know. Big
deal. I'll have the chocolate pie," she says to me.

"Yeah, really," I say. "Who cares."

183

"All right, all right," Leroy says. His cheek
still has a round ball of toast in it. "We were sitting there having a smoke,
and who should walk up, of all people, but her grandson. Her grandson! He works
at the Ale House across the street, but Grandma didn't tell me that. I think she
wanted to get in trouble. Just to liven things up, only now she's gonna get some
nurse and the highlight of her day is gonna be when she gets her pulse
taken."

My cell phone rings from my backpack behind the
counter. I ignore it since I'm in the middle of my shift, but it goes off again.
Bex set up my ring tones, and now every time anyone calls it sounds like a
fucking circus. "Just a sec," I say to Trina. I trot over. Flip it open.
Melanie.

"You told me you'd call me right back," she
says.

"I'm at work," I say. I feel the little twingy
unease of wrongdoing, can see Jane's back straightening slightly at my voice on
this phone, now, during work hours. She's told me she doesn't want my phone
ringing every two seconds, that I should turn it off. Since no one hardly ever
calls me, I just keep it on low, in case of emergencies. Once you have a cell
phone, you can't imagine how you ever lived without it.

"I need to know if you want to go or
not."

"I told you, I've got to think about it. I'd
have to get time off of work, and I'd miss Trevor ..."

"Oh my God, Indigo. That's ridiculous. This is
a lifetime opportunity. There are going to be
parties.
The kind that
Hunter Eden goes to, do you hear me? Hunter
Eden.
And you are worrying
about missing
Trevor?"

Let's just say Melanie doesn't understand
Trevor. To her, Trevor doesn't have a future. And having a future apparently
means having the means to make money. If she didn't understand Trevor

184

before, she really doesn't understand him now.
"Melanie," I say. I'm ready to fight her on this, but just then two ladies with
laptops walk in the door, and Jane catches my eye. "I've got to go."

"I need to know by the end of the week,"
Melanie says. "Hey, did you get a dress? For prom?"

"What are you talking about? You know I'm not
going to prom. You know it'd take armed men to forcibly drag me to
prom."

"I just thought that now--"

"Right. I have money, so I'd want to go. That
not wanting to go was some sort of fake principle disguising the fact that I
couldn't afford a limo."

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry."

Jane gives me a real look this time. She grabs
the menus and seats the couple herself.

"I'm saying good-bye now." But for a moment,
just a moment, I picture myself back at the mall. I get the revved thrill
imagining buying dresses and earrings and shoes and beaded purses and shawls and
stockings; the image is shattered, though, when I picture Trevor and me in front
of a fake sunset.

I hang up, tuck my phone into my backpack. Jane
shoots me her displeasure through eye contact, but doesn't say anything. I take
the order of the laptop ladies (coffee for both, fruit, one poached egg). I seat
the bookstore guy, then an elderly man and wife.

"Shit. Look who's coming," Nick says. Bill and
Marty, the True Value guys. Bill is wearing his camouflage hat again, and a
T-shirt that reads get hammered , with a picture of a big hammer on it. Marty's
in a flannel shirt, even though it's seventy-five degrees

185

and beautiful out. In the Seattle area, in case
you don't know, when it's above sixty, convertible tops go down and people start
wearing shorts. Hey, our season in the sun is so brief, why let goose bumps stop
you? What's the big deal about hypothermia? But seventy-five and flannel? This
means his skin probably hasn't seen the light of day since chicks drooled over
Peter Frampton. "Hey, Killer," Bill says.

"You polish the old pistol today?" Marty says,
chuckling. They sit down beside Nick.

"Marty, you idiot, it wasn't a pistol. He
shoved her down stairs."

Marty looks up. His mustached mouth hangs open.
There really are those people whose mouths hang open upon shock or attempt at
deep thought. It's hard for them to think and operate parts of their body at the
same time. "No, it was a pistol."

"Stairs, you dumb shit," Bill says.

"No, Nick, tell him. Pistol."

Nick sighs. "She fell down stairs. Carrying
laundry."

A sick feeling, a solid regret, sits in my
stomach. And I wonder then, you know, why he puts up with this. Why not tell
them to shove off, to sit somewhere else? Why not take it up with his boss, or
get up and leave? It's true that there are two of them, and that they are both
larger than Nick, which may be part of it. It's always wise to be careful who
you say
Fuck off
to. But there is something else at work here, I
understand now. Nick has reached the point when a person stops fighting for
themselves. When a sense of powerlessness seems larger than any ability you have
to fight back. He has gotten to the place where the words "destiny" and "fate"
are not used as expressions of possibility, but as the words for forces that
always win. It is the way early settlers saw

186

fate (a storm, famine, disease, a harsh winter
that would take half the family), or maybe the way sailors did (too much wind,
no wind, a raging sea, a drowned ship). Maybe just anyone who's up against
things too large. He has lost the ability to wrestle and rail against; he's
given up his will to make things better for himself. It makes me sad for him.
But more than that, it makes me pissed off.

I bring the plastic menus to the table. And
here's what I do. I slap one down so hard onto the marble surface that all three
men jump. I point my finger at them, make it a weapon in the air.

"I want you to listen to me, and listen to me
good," I say, channeling some sheriff in a western my mother must have watched
while I was in the womb. "If you ever--and I mean
ever
--give Nick any
more crap about his wife again, God help me I will take you both down." I
realize I have raised my voice, not in a yell, but loud enough to still all
silverware and cups and dishes and even Luigi. The kitchen is quiet. Jack's ears
are perked up into two alert triangles.

"Indigo ... ," Nick says.

Bill smirks. "Are you smirking?" I say. "You
think I can't do it? Well, sweetie, you may want to wipe that look right off
your face, because I have a black belt. Got it? These hands are lethal,
understand? And if you still don't believe me, I'll be happy to write down the
name of the man I put in the hospital when he laid a hand on me in an
ungentlemanly fashion."

Bill gets serious. But the corners of Marty's
mouth are still turned up, ever so slightly. "Give me a napkin," I say. "Hand
over that napkin right now." I click my pen into working position, think
quickly.
Peter Frampton,
I write. Okay, so thinking quickly is not always
my strong suit.