The Silent Strength of Stones (25 page)

“Sure,” Pop said.

“Evan?”

“Sure,” said Evan.

“Toast?”

Everyone said yes. I heated the skillet and set up for a family breakfast, feeling strange. When Mom lived with us, breakfast together was an everyday thing; since she’d left it almost never happened. Eerie.

“Pop, can Evan live with us?” I asked when everybody was sitting down and eating.

“Wha-a-a-at?”

“I mean, he really doesn’t want to go back to his fa—fa—to, you know. Could he stay with us?”

Pop studied Evan, who put down his fork, sat up straight, and raised his eyebrows.

Pop frowned. “Nick,” he said.

“I know you don’t know anything about him, but I think he’d ...” I couldn’t figure out what to say that would recommend Evan to Pop. I hadn’t asked Evan about this, either. When I started to think of the real-world ripples this could have, I got dizzy. Would Evan go to school with me? Would he mooch off us? Would he even consider helping us? He didn’t seem to like helping his other family. Would he just keep sleeping on my floor? It might have worked if we were both ten years old, but we weren’t. These questions wouldn’t have come up if he were still a wolf, but he wasn’t. And how did magic fit into the picture?

Pop drummed his fingers on the table for a minute, then said to Evan, “Son, would you be willing to pull your weight around here?”

“What does that mean?” Evan asked.

“Learn the business or get an outside job that brings in a little income—rent and food money. There’s space in the attic; we could fix you up a room, if you really want to live with us. I know Nick’s been lonely here, especially in the winters.”

That surprised me. I had thought Pop didn’t notice things like that.

“I don’t know how good I would be at jobs,” Evan said.

“Nick could train you how to run the store easy, if you wanted to learn. I’m not sure there’s enough work here for three people, though. How are you on housekeeping? You know anything about boats or fishing? Archie could use some help at the dock. If you got any maintenance skills, people keep having little jobs come up—reroofing or fixing a step or painting. Any experience?”

“No,” said Evan.

“Or you could make deliveries, or Lacey might be able to use you for yard work—you know anything about that?”

“No,” said Evan.

“Where you been all your life?” Pop sounded intrigued, which I figured was better than irritated.

“I guess ... nowhere,” Evan said. He cocked his head.

“No special skills?”

“I can hunt, and I can track. I can do a lot of other things I don’t think people know enough to want.”

“Like what?”

Evan bit his lower lip. He lifted his left hand above the table, palm up, and danced his fingers above it until he pulled the yellow spiral of his signature up.

“Holy moley,” whispered Granddad.

“Magic tricks?” Pop asked.

“Yeah,” said Evan. He closed his hand and the spiral faded.

“You know any card tricks?”

Evan frowned. “Not yet,” he said. “I could probably learn.”

“Hmm,” said Pop. “We might be able to put something together with Parsley, if you could work up a show. You done any magic professionally?”

Evan glanced at me, eyebrows up. “Magicians put on these shows, where they perform for a big audience,” I said. “They make things appear and disappear, people float, change people into animals ....” I didn’t want to pursue that one. “Pull rabbits out of empty hats. People pay to see them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not good with crowds,” said Evan.

“So you’d have to work up to it,” Pop said. “Maybe next summer. Hmmm.” He drummed the tabletop some more. “Tell you what. We’ll float you for a while till you find your feet. Three rules. One: you have to be trying to find work—you get a job and give it an honest try, no slacking. You make it an aim to contribute to the household, and that means helping with the day-to-day, too. Two: you have to not steal anything—any abuse of our hospitality, and out you go. You’re welcome to whatever you find in those suitcases in the attic, though, long as you check with me first. Three: no smoking, drinking, or leading Nick into wild behavior, though maybe he knows more about that than you do. What do you say?”

Evan folded his hands and stared at the tabletop for a little while, then nodded and looked up at Pop. “I say thank you.”

Pop smiled and offered Evan his hand. They shook.

We all finished breakfast. When I got up to clear the table, Evan rose, too, and helped me, smiling the whole time at some inside joke. I ran hot water into the dishpan, thinking that Evan could probably make it hotter faster. “Pop, about what’s in the attic. There’s a locked trunk up there.”

“Shee-ooot, I forgot. That one’s off limits.”

“What’s in it?”

“Just things,” he said. “Private things. Nothing you’d need. Leave it alone, Nick.”

“Okay.”

Pop checked the kitchen clock. Still only around eight-thirty. “I’m guessing you haven’t got out much since you came here,” he said to Evan. “Otherwise people would be talking about you. Nick, you got more than an hour before opening. Why don’t you take Evan around and introduce him? Check if Archie still needs help. Show Evan to Mabel. Give things a feel. If nothing else suits you, Evan, I got work up at the motel you could do. You ever run a washing machine?”

“Nope,” said Evan. He smiled.

“How about a vacuum cleaner?”

“Nope.”

“Criminy,” Pop said. “Like the wild man of the woods or something.”

“Yeah,” said Evan.

Pop was still shaking his head gently as we left.

“Is this going to work?” I asked Evan as we walked along the road. He was barefoot. “I mean, isn’t this the same as Uncle Bennet telling you to get to work?”

“No,” Evan said. He had his hands buried in his overall pockets, and he walked looking at the sky and smiling.

“Why not?”

“Because your pop asked me. He didn’t tell me. He gave me a choice.
I
picked.”

“Hmm.” Pop had never given me a choice. Or had he? He’d never offered me the chance to not work. What if I just didn’t get up one day? What if I completely screwed up at work? What if I just left the house and ran around all day without telling Pop or asking him?

The way Evan had with his relatives.

I thought about that. I wasn’t ready for the kind of fallout I’d get if I defied Pop that way. But maybe someday I would be.

I introduced Evan around as my cousin and said he was spending the summer with me and looking for work. Everybody shook hands with him, and he smiled at them and they smiled back. Whenever they asked him if he had any experience, he said, “No, but I’m ready to learn,” Nobody said they had work for him. I figured they needed to get used to him first.

We got home in time to take another look through the clothes trunk in the attic. Evan tried on worn jeans that were loose around his waist, Pop having been bigger around than Evan even in the past. When I gave Evan a belt and he slid it through the belt loops and buckled it, he shook his head. “Too binding,” he said. Without the belt the jeans slid down. We gave up on the jeans and found him a couple more pair of overalls and some loose shirts. I wondered what would happen when winter came.

We stowed his extra clothes in my room and went downstairs to open the store. Evan really liked punching buttons on the cash register; accounting would be difficult at the end of the day. I tried to save all the receipts from his playing around so I could void them out later, and I showed him how to restock stuff to get him away from the register, then how to dust and straighten, and how to use the pricing gun, which he also liked. Granddad watched us from his seat by the stove, nodding once in a while. People came in and bought things. Evan soloed on the register, made change, smiled at strangers. I stood at the magazine display, looked at him behind the counter, and shook my head. Maybe I’d get used to seeing Evan in mundane contexts someday.

“These tasks repeat and repeat,” Evan said. He was lining up canned goods at the front edge of a shelf.

“That’s right. Once you know them you’ll get lots of chances to use them.” I was checking our stock of soda and making up an order form for the vendors.

“Discipline,” he said. “Don’t you get bored?”

“I might, if I stopped to think about it. So I don’t think about it. I have this model of the store as it should be in my head, and I try to make everything match that image. Keeps me busy. If everything’s perfect, I read a magazine or play solitaire, but that doesn’t happen often. It’s a living.” I listened to myself talk about work and realized I had never articulated my feelings about it to this extent before. Would this way of correcting things toward an imagined end translate to other types of work? I guessed detective work would involve gathering information to fix something that didn’t work the way it should.

“A living,” Evan said. “Hmm.” He pulled a wadded-up gum wrapper from behind the cans. “Where’d this come from?”

“Somebody tossed it there. So many agents of chaos ...” Well, you needed agents of chaos or you’d run out of things to do. Might be nice to try living without them for a while, though.

He frowned and tucked the trash into his pocket.

Mom came in and stood quietly beside the fishing rods, staring at me and Evan. Evan looked at her with narrowed eyes. “This is your mother?” he asked. I glanced at the mirror by the hat display and moved around until I could see her reflection in it. She looked like herself.

“Mom?” I said. I hesitated, then went toward her. Where was Pop? I was pretty sure he was up at the motel office. If he saw Mom being herself, what would he do?

“It is time for me to be brave.” She glanced at Granddad.

“Sylvia,” he said, standing up. He collected himself into being the person he had been when I was very little. It was strange to watch him shrug into awareness and intention as if they were a comfortable old jacket he hadn’t worn for a while.

“Leo.”

“Thought you were dead,” said Granddad.

“In a way, I was. It’s good to see you.”

Granddad walked over and stood in front of Mom, peering at her, his head forward, his eyes wider than normal. “You staying?” he asked after studying her for a moment.

She looked down and shook her head slowly.

“We been missing you.”

When she looked up again her eyes were tear bright.

“But,” said Granddad, “better if you stay away. You’re poison.” He shuffled back to his chair by the stove and collapsed down into his current self, his eyes going blank.

How could he say that to Mom? Had he always felt that way about her? I tried to remember back, but mostly what I remembered was how it felt to have her close; I would only have noticed how Granddad treated her if he had hurt her, and I couldn’t remember her telling me anything about him hurting her.

Mom blinked and a tear streaked down her face. She nodded at Granddad even though he wasn’t looking at her. “I’ve been building my strength,” she said in a low voice, “but I’m not strong enough to stay yet. Not in the face of that. Facing your father will be even more difficult. Nick, I love you very much, and I always will. But I have to go home now. I’ll come back.”

I tried to think about whether I wanted her to come back. Her presence confused me. I didn’t want our old closeness back, and I wasn’t sure what to want in place of it. I was glad to know she was doing so well and learning how to use whatever powers she had, and I was still mad at her for deserting me in such a clumsy way. I wondered if I could get Evan to teach me anything. Maybe if I asked him the right way ...

“Here’s my address and phone number,” Mom said, holding out a folded piece of paper to me. I took it without touching her fingers. “If there’s anything you need, or anything you think I can do for you, call me. Write me. Do you want me to call you?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said slowly. Suppose she called and Pop answered. He would know she was back in touch. There would be fallout from that.

She looked down. She looked up. Her eyes showed hurt. “You decide,” she said. She touched my cheek, and for an instant I was deep in the center of her sadness, a place of unceasing warm rain and dark skies. It was paralyzing. The bell rang on the door as she slipped out before I could even come up for air.

Mariah arrived at noon, as usual, and stared at Evan. He put down the videocassette he had been studying and stared back, his face quiet. She edged closer and circled sideways, watching him. His gaze followed her. After they had exchanged stares for a little while, I said, “This is Evan.”

“What?” said Mariah.

“This is Evan.”

“But the wolf—”

Evan cocked his head at her and gave her an open-mouthed grin. She blinked. “No,” she said.

He yawned, tongue curling, then smiled at her again.

“How can that be?” she asked.

“I think he’s staying the summer,” I said. “I’m teaching him how to run the store.”

“How can you take a thing out of a fairy tale and stick it in a convenience store? This makes no sense,” she muttered.

“Evan, this is Mariah.”

“I know.”

“Oh.” I had introduced them while he was a wolf.

“Delighted to meet you again,” Evan said to Mariah.

“I—oh, all right,” she said, and took his hand for a second.

“We’ll be back in about an hour,” I said to Mariah, and to Evan: “Let’s get something for lunch and take it outside.”

“Okay.”

In the kitchen I threw together a couple of sandwiches, and put them in a sack with a bottle of water. We ran away, Evan letting me set the pace and the direction. I plunged off my path to Lacey’s about halfway along, going to a place where big rocks stood in a flat-topped spine that ran from the shore out a little way into the lake. We followed the rocks out to the end and sat surrounded on three sides by water.

He wrinkled his nose at tuna, then bit the sandwich I gave him and chewed slowly, his eyes closed as though he were listening to the flavor. I looked out over the lake at the pines on the opposite shore. A speedboat towed a water-skier in the distance, trailing distant motor sound. Sun touched my head and shoulders, arms and legs, and drummed a ripe algae scent from the lake.