Where Love Goes (36 page)

She looks at him a little oddly, the way his sister does when he tells her he didn’t touch her Rollerblades. But she goes to check.

“I was thinking it could be in the
E
’s, too,” he says. “At some places they put them there.”

“We keep him in the
C
’s,” she says. Never mind. He takes out a Baggie with a dog turd inside. He sets it on the carpet. This is part of the plan Pete thought up to distract her later.

The younger guy Pete was expecting to see in the stereo equipment section must be off today. It’s this real geezer-ish person. Even better.

“My grandfather sent me money for my birthday,” he tells him. “I was thinking I might get a portable disc player.”

“They’re in the case,” the guy says. “We’ve got Aiwa, Panasonic, and Sony. All pretty much the same unit, only the Sony runs an additional twenty bucks, and in my opnion all you’re getting for your money is the name. There’s not much to see.”

“I’d just like to take a look at them up close,” Pete tells him. “I got pinkeye.”

The geezer hestitates a moment, then sets the three disc players on the counter in front of him. When Pete asks to see the headphones, he takes those out, too.

“The most recent Elvis Costello we have is this one,” the blond cashier calls out to him. “I never heard of any country album. You’ve gotta be thinking of someone else.”

“No, it’s him, all right. My friend saw it here the other day.” Now he leans over closer to the geezer. “Would you mind checking for me?” he asks. “Sometimes I’m not sure about her.”

Amazingly enough, the guy doesn’t argue with this. He heads over to the
C
section. Pete slides the Discman into his backpack. Like clockwork.

This is where Pete is supposed to step in the dog turd and act upset. He is walking over to the turd when he sees her. The kid from hell.
Ursula
. She is wearing her bicycle helmet and those thick glasses as usual, and she is looking in the video section with that geek father of hers. He’s wearing a helmet, too.

“We’re looking for the temporary tattoos,” he’s saying to the blond cashier. “For Halloween.”

Pete wishes they weren’t here, but there’s no turning back now. He slides into the dog turd and falls flat on his face. It’s even more dramatic than he’d intended.

“Shit,” he says. “I can’t believe you have dog turds in here.”

“It’s Pete with poop all over himself,” Ursula says in that deep, husky voice of hers that sounds like some porn star or a phone sex person.

Tim is rushing over to him now, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket. “Here, son, let me help you,” he says.

Son. Give me a break
.

“These were new shoes,” Pete is saying, though nobody seems to be listening but Tim. “My mom will kill me.”

“No she won’t, Pete,” Tim says. “She’ll understand it wasn’t your fault.”

“You don’t get it, Daddy,” Ursula is saying, louder. “He put that piece of poop on the floor in the first place. He did it on purpose. He put something in his backpack, too.”

Ursula stands over him like a toadstool, with that blank-eyed pink face of hers. He wishes his eyeballs could shoot out laser beams. He would like to smear dog poop all over her. Instead he bursts out crying. The gray-haired man is coming over to him now. Also the blond cashier. A crowd has formed.

“You’d better open up that backpack for me, my boy,” the gray-haired man says.

“You want me to call the authorities, Mr. Ellis?” the girl says.

“You better believe it,” the gray-haired man says. “Just because he’s a kid doesn’t mean we can afford to let him off easily. We’re looking at a serious juvenile offender here. Maybe he can set an example that will discourage some of his buddies.”

The most sickening part of all is that at this point Tim actually puts an arm around Pete and whispers to him, “Don’t worry, Pete. I’ll help you.”

Right. With any more help from him and that daughter of his, Pete might as well go jump off a bridge
.

T
hey have actually locked Pete in a cell like a criminal. It’s police policy with juvenile offenders like him, the sergeant explains to Claire, to treat these kids like any other offender. “Give them a taste of what they’ve got to look forward to if they keep up this way of life,” he told her. “Scares some sense into them sometimes.”

“Kid have a father?” he asks her.
No, I’m the virgin mother, she thinks of saying
.

“We’re divorced,” she says. “I called him. He’ll be over, too.” Before she’s even got all the words out, Seargant Donohue is nodding as if he assumes he knows the whole story.
Broken home. Troubled child. No consistent male role model. Weak, ineffective, defeated single mom. Kid’s sure to be a mama’s boy or a hood
. She’s on trial again.

“Pete never did anything like this before,” she says. Never mind the incident at school with the graffiti, though they will probably find out about that one now, too. “He’s a really good boy. There must have been some unusual circumstance.”

“This guy who was there when the arrest occurred—the one with the little girl?” he says. “He tells us he’s your fiancé?”

“Tim was there?” she says. This is news to Claire.

“Oh, sure,” says the sergeant. “It was his kid that alerted the store manager to the problem. Then you probably don’t know that your son assaulted her.”

“Assaulted?” says Claire.

“Punched the little girl in the stomach, as I understand it,” says the sergeant. “The father could have chosen to press charges, but he didn’t. The whole thing will be in the police report. The little girl is talking to the social worker right now, as a matter of fact. We don’t want to release her until we’re confident she hasn’t experienced a traumatizing level of harassment.”

Social worker. Harassment. Press charges. Police report. No
.

“My son has had a difficult relationship with Tim’s daughter,” says Claire. “But it’s not entirely his fault. Sometimes Ursula has a way of manipulating a situation to make herself look like the victim.”

Claire’s experience of the last five minutes has taught her something: In a true crisis, she will always defend her child above all others. If it means abandoning Ursula or Tim she will. In a burning building the ones she’d rescue first would be her own children.

Sergeant Donohue has led her into the squad room now. There is Ursula, wearing several of the items the two of them bought at the St. James thrift shop (orange turtleneck, purple flowered shorts with red tights), sitting at a desk across from another officer, her hands folded in her lap. Her voice is deep, hushed, serious.

“I bet Pete didn’t really mean to punch me,” she is saying. “Even though he did tell me one time he was going to kill me. It was probably just a accident.”

“Has he ever assaulted you in the past, Ursula?” the officer asks her.

“Well, not exactly,” she says, taking a slow sip of her milkshake. “Unless you count pinching. But he did make my dog die.”

Only now does Claire catch sight of Tim, standing a few feet behind Ursula listening to what she says.
“Stop her!” Claire wants to scream. You know it isn’t like that
. He isn’t saying anything.

“Sweetheart,” he says, catching sight of her. “It’s all going to be all right. We’ll iron this out. Pete just needs a little help right now. Same thing you’re always reminding me about Ursula. You and I both know he’s not a bad kid.”

She looks at him as if he were a stranger. For a moment she understands precisely the way Pete must have felt when he punched Ursula, because that’s what she feels like doing to Tim.

C
laire expected Sam to make this all her fault but he didn’t. He just said he wishes he’d understood sooner what was going on with Pete. Clearly their son has been going through some hard times. He must be terribly unhappy to do something like this.

“I didn’t tell you, but he called me last week to say he’d like to stay with me for a while,” Sam tells her. “I told him to tough it out. I figured you’d just get mad.”

“Maybe it would be a good thing,” she tells him. She feels incredibly tired all of a sudden, and not just because of the pregnancy.

“I’m on a big framing job right now,” he says. “But as long as he doesn’t mind lots of spaghetti for dinner, he’s welcome to bunk in with me.”

Claire doesn’t want to talk about it right now. She just wants to get Pete out of here. But she isn’t fighting him, either. “Can we see our son now?” she asks the sergeant. Tim just stands there watching the two of them go. Her and Sam.

I
felt it was only fair to warn you,” Vivian is saying. “Everybody wanted to know why you weren’t at last night’s board meeting naturally, and it turned out Marjorie Saunders’s daughter was over at Coconuts when this alleged incident or whatever took place yesterday. So there was no keeping Pete’s arrest from the board at that point. You know what Marjorie’s like. Then, of course, Doug Weintraub wanted to know what this could mean for the museum’s credibility with donors, that our director’s son was involved in events of this nature. I said, ‘This makes no difference whatsoever as far as I’m concerned, Doug. I’m behind Claire a thousand percent. Two thousand.’ But you know the board. Doug’s word always shakes everybody up, probably because he’s an attorney. So the question was raised whether you’d be able to provide the kind of leadership we need at this point in time.”

“What are you trying to tell me here, Vivian?” says Claire “Am I fired?”

“Heavens, no, what would give you that idea?” says Vivian. “I just thought you might want to be particularly careful about the way you conduct yourself at the moment.”

Right. No disreputable-looking teenage boyfriends up in my daughter’s room then, I suppose? No hostile ex-husbands. No questionable graffiti in the sixth-grade boys’ bathroom. No out-of-wedlock Pregnancy. No middle-of-the-night visits to my lover’s apartment. No dirty faxes, definitely
.

“Don’t get me wrong,” says Vivian. “The board all agrees you’re doing a super job, especially when we consider the kind of pressure you’re working under at the moment. Some people just wondered if maybe, given all that, you might want to take a leave of absence or something of that nature.”

And what would I do for money? Claire thinks. “Thanks, Vivian,” she says. “But I’m just fine.”

“Well, that’s terrific. That’s what I told them, too. And if you need the name of a good counselor for your son, just let me know. Not that either of my boys ever got into this kind of scrape, knock wood. But I know a gal whose son got into a little trouble a while back dealing cocaine. She took him to this woman over in Brattleboro who straightened him right out. Like a charm.”

“Thanks, Vivian,” says Claire. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

S
ally Jessy Raphael’s guest this morning is a girl who divorced her parents. Her mother locked her in a dog carrier, she said. Her father sexually abused her from the age of seven. “He used to come into my room after David Letterman,” she said. “He said it got rid of his headaches.”

Ursula pours herself a bowl of cereal. Her dad is out someplace having a job interview. They are almost out of money again. This supermarket job, if he gets it, will only be for a little while, until his grant comes through. Sandy will take care of her nights.

“So how did you go about it?” Sally Jessy asks her.

“You have to file formal charges, of course,” the girl says. She’s only a few years older than Ursula.

“I talked to my counselor at school,” she says. “She helped me get the ball rolling.”

“And how is it for you now?” Sally Jessy asks her. “Do you miss your parents?”

“Well,” says the girl, “I got to see them on a talk show last week. The actress that’s playing my mom in the movie is much nicer than my real mom. She was in that ‘Movie of the Week’ about the grandmother that murdered the kid.”

“Do you feel you have been permanently traumatized by these experiences?” a woman in the audience asks.

“Not really,” says the girl. “My counselor said the important thing is to get it out. The worst thing is holding it in all the time.”

T
he home pregnancy test has been sitting in the back of Sally’s closet for two weeks now. There just doesn’t seem to be any point in Sally’s taking it anymore, her symptoms are so obvious. Not just the nauseous feeling in the morning, either. She’s also tired all the time. Her chest has actually begun filling out and she’s too bloated to snap the top of her jeans comfortably, so now she mostly wears her overalls. In ballet class last week Madame LaFehr actually told her she should think about cutting down on her calorie intake.

The other day in driver’s ed, when Mr. Wayne showed them this really grisly movie about teenage drunk drivers, Sally had to run out of the room or she would have thrown up right there. She knew from experience, because a couple days before, when she and Travis stopped at a joke shop to try on Halloween masks, Travis showed her this one really gory mask of a face covered with eyeballs, and that’s exactly what happened. After Sally ran out of the store, Travis went back inside and cleaned up the mess, and didn’t even say a thing about it to her afterward. He bought her a Coke to get the bad taste out of her mouth.

Sally told Travis it’s all because she’s so upset about her family. First her dad turns out to be shacking up with Melanie, then her brother gets arrested. Now there’s this horrible news about her mother marrying the dork boyfriend, which means the Kid from Hell will move in with them. As if living with their farting dog wasn’t bad enough, now she’s got to share her house with a creepy eight-year-old who sneaks into her room and tries on her clothes and talks to herself all the time. Not to mention the father, who acts like a dog himself, the way he follows her mom around all the time. When he looks at her sometimes, he practically drools.

A girl named Bobbi that used to be in Sally’s gym class told her one time last year about this special Chinese tea you can drink that makes you get your period, absolutely no matter what. Finally yesterday Sally got up her courage and asked Bobbi if she could have some. “Not for me or anything,” she said. “Just somebody I know.”