"You have got to be kidding me."
"No," he said. "I'm not." He took a couple of steps away from her, held his hands out to the side so she could see he wasn't going to do himself. "Just tell me about your first kiss."
"What, you want me to say it was with my sister? My father?"
"No," he said, shaking his head. "Please don't lie."
She crossed her arms, her eyes giving him the once-over. "You're giving me fifty bucks to tell you about my first kiss?"
He nodded.
She looked behind her, then looked back at him. She counted the money out, crisp bills tugged from one hand to the other as her lips moved silently. "All right," she finally said, tucking the wad of cash down the front of her shirt. "Stewie Campano."
He laughed at the name.
"Yeah," she said, smiling for the first time. She had perfect, straight teeth. "Real Romeo, our Stewie."
"You went out with him?"
"Hell no," she said, insulted. "He was two years younger than me, one of my little brother's friends. We were playing around one day."
"Playing what?" Her brow furrowed and he quickly said, "No, I'm not looking for that. I just want to know what you were doing."
"Swimming in his pool," she said, hesitant, obviously still trying to see what John's angle was. "That was the only reason I'd go over there with my brother, because Stewie had a swimming pool."
John felt his smile come back.
She had decided to continue the story. "So, like I said, it was late one night, full moon and all that, and we were playing in the pool, just horsing around, and he looked at me and I looked at him and then he just leaned over and kissed me."
"Real kiss or a kid kiss?"
"Kid kiss," she said, a smile working its magic on her face. She was truly beautiful, the kind of dark-haired, olive-skinned woman that poets wrote about.
Her smile turned mischievous. "Then a real kiss."
"Go, Stewie," John said, creating the image in his mind—the backyard, the moon, the various floats and flotsam in a family pool. "How old were you?"
"Thirteen," she admitted.
"So Stewie was—"
"Ten. I know." She held up her hands. "Cradle robber. Guilty."
John was amazed at the kid's bravado. "God, I don't even think I knew what a tongue kiss was when I was ten."
"Yeah, well I was thirteen and I didn't know," she told him. Then she laughed, maybe at the memory or maybe at the absurdity of the situation. John laughed, too, and it was such a sweet release that for the first time in twenty-five years he honest to God felt like he was okay.
"Jesus," Robin said. "I haven't thought about that kid in years."
"What's he doing now, you think?"
"Doctor, probably." She laughed again, a short, sharp sound of pleasure. "Gynecologist."
John was still smiling. He said, "Thank you."
"Yeah." She pressed her lips together. "Hey, what's your name?"
“John.”
She laughed like he was joking.
"No, really. John Shelley." He made to offer his hand, and she took a step back from him. "Sorry," he said, dropping his hand. What had he done? How had he ruined this?
"It's okay. I just need to get back." She checked over her shoulder. "My minder's gonna be looking for me soon and I—"
"It's okay," he told her. He had put his hands in his pockets because he didn't know what else to do with them. "I'm sorry if I—"
"No problem," she interrupted.
"I can walk you back."
"I know the way," she said, practically bolting back toward the road.
All he could do was watch her go, wonder what he had said wrong that made her run. Fifty bucks. He could buy a lot with fifty bucks. Food. Rent. Clothes. Laughter. The way her eyes sparkled when she really smiled. That wasn't something you could buy. Yeah, she had taken the money, but that laugh—that had been a real moment between them. She had talked to him, really talked to him, because she wanted to, not because of the fifty bucks.
John stood in the forest, rooted to the spot, eyes closed as he summoned up the memory of her voice, her laugh. She had a brother somewhere. She'd grown up in a neighborhood with a pool. Her parents had spent some money on orthodontics, maybe taken her to ballet lessons so she'd have that lean dancer's body or perhaps she'd been like Joyce, the kind of girl who metabolized food so quickly all she needed to do was walk around the block to keep her figure.
From the road, a car horn sounded and John opened his eyes.
Why hadn't he gone into that hotel room with her? Fifty bucks. That was a good day's work for him. A full day of wiping cars, cleaning up people's shit, waiting for Art to come out and inspect his work, point to some nonexistent smudge on a windshield so the customer thought he was getting his moneys worth.
Fifty dollars and for what? The memory of someone else's kiss?
John snapped an overhanging twig as he walked back toward the road, careful to angle his path so he wouldn't end up at the liquor store. He could be holding her right now, making love to her. He stopped, leaning his hand against a tree, his lungs feeling like he'd gotten the breath knocked out of him.
No, he thought. He would be doing the same thing in that room that he was doing now: making a fool of himself. The truth was that John had never really made love to a woman. He had never experienced that intimacy that you read about in books, never had a lover take his hand in her own, stroke the back of his neck, pull his body closer to hers. The last woman he had kissed was, in fact, the only woman he had ever kissed and even then, she wasn't a woman but a girl. John remembered the date like it was seared into his brain: June 15, 1985.
He had kissed Mary Alice Finney, and the next morning, she was dead.
CHAPTER TEN
JUNE 10, 1985
When John was a little kid, he had loved playing in the dirt, building things with his hands then tearing them apart chunk by chunk. His mother would see him walking up the street, the mud on his pants, the twigs sticking out of his hair, and she'd just laugh and grab the hose, making him strip off his clothes in the backyard so she could squirt him down before letting him into the house.
At night, he slept hard from his busy days. John wasn't the type of kid to do things halfway. He was scrawny for his age, his chest almost concave, but he made up for it with sheer willpower. If there was any kind of game in the street, he was there, and despite his size, he was never picked last for any team. Stickball, baseball, dodgeball—he loved moving. Football was hardly a natural fit for his small frame, but he did all the leagues as soon as he was old enough to qualify. By junior high, he'd grown taller but his body was closer in proportion to a rubber band than a jock's athletic build. Still, the football coach had been impressed with his drive and John's first week of junior high found him on the field sweating his ass off, every muscle in his body screaming with joy at the prospect of playing with the big dogs.
In high school, he found out that you weren't allowed to play football when your grades sucked. He was more upset than he thought he'd be when he got dropped from the team. In a sudden burst of anger, he had thrown his helmet at the wall, punching a large hole into the Sheetrock. He had started walking around the neighborhood after school because he knew if he went home, his mother would ask him why he wasn't at practice. He had trashed the note the coach sent home and paid for the damaged wall with money from his illicit drug sales. He figured his parents would know soon enough what had happened when report cards were in and he wanted to enjoy his freedom as much as he could before Richard came down on him like the wrath of God.
Even after the rest of his life started falling apart, John still liked to walk. That first time he was suspended from school for the pot in his locker, he spent most of the day strolling around the neighborhood. After the cassette tape theft, his father grounded him for six months and except for his mother's kind heart ("Be back in an hour and don't tell your father") John probably would have atrophied in his room.
Sometimes, he thought that was just what his dad wanted. Let the bad son fade away on his own; out of sight, out of mind. Dr. Richard still had Joyce, after all. He had one good child left.
John liked being outdoors, seeing the trees sway in the breeze, watching the leaves sail to the ground. He never got high on his jaunts. He didn't want to spoil things. Besides, the allure of coke was quickly fading. The visit to the emergency room, waking up feeling like his head was on fire, blood streaming out of his nose as he puked up the charcoal they had forced into his stomach, had been somewhat of an eye-opener. He had decided then and there to stick to pot. Nothing was worth dying for. Woody would give him shit for it, but John wasn't going to kill himself because he couldn't stand up to his cousin.
The night of the overdose, John's father had come to the hospital, shirt hastily thrown on, buttons done up wrong. The nurse had left John alone with his dad, thinking they'd have a bonding moment or something.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Richard had demanded. He was beyond angry. His voice was strained like it was going through a sieve and John's ears, already buzzing from being sick, could barely comprehend what he was saying.
Richard liked his quotes. He kept some of them taped to the wall of his study, and sometimes when he'd pull John in to talk to him about his son's latest fuck up, he'd just point to one of the sayings. "Stupidity is a learned behavior" was one of his favorites, but that night at the hospital, John knew that the days of his father pointing to faded pieces of paper in the hopes of giving him guidance were over.
"You are not my son," Richard said. "If it weren't for your mother, I would toss your useless ass onto the street so fast your head would spin." He slapped John on the side of the head as some kind of illustration. It wasn't a hard hit, but it was the first time since John was six or seven that his father had raised a hand to him, and he had never, ever hit him anywhere but his bottom.
"Dad—" John tried.
"Don't ever call me that again," Richard commanded. "I work here. I have colleagues—I have friends—here. Do you know how embarrassing it is to get a phone call in the middle of the night telling you your worthless son is in the ER?" His face was red, and he was leaning over the bed, inches from John's face. His breath smelled of mint, and it occurred to John that his father had taken the time to brush his teeth before coming to the hospital.
"Do you know who does this shit?" his father had asked, pushing away from the bed. "Worthless junkies, that's who." He paced along the length of the small room, hands clenching and unclenching. He turned around and gave a single nod of his head like he had decided something and there was no going back.
John tried again. "Dad—"
"You are not my son," Richard repeated as the door closed behind him.
"He'll get over it," his mother said, but John knew otherwise. He had never seen that look in his father's eyes. Disappointment, yes. Hatred ... that was something new.
John was thinking about that look as he walked around the neighborhood the day after his father's confrontation in the emergency room.
"Just an hour," his mother had said, but she hadn't added, "Don't tell your father," because they both knew that his father didn't care. As if the hospital scene weren't enough, Richard had come into John's room that morning and told him point-blank that he would feed and clothe him until he was eighteen, and then he wanted John out of his house, out of his life. He rubbed his hands together, then held them palm out to illustrate. "I wash my hands of you."
The breeze picked up and John pulled his jacket around him. Despite nearly dying the night before, he wanted a bump of coke, something to take the edge off. He wasn't going to do it, though. Not for his dad or his mom, but because he was scared. John didn't want to die, and he knew the coke would kill him sooner rather than later. He'd only snorted it a handful of times anyway, right? It shouldn't be hard to quit. Still, no matter how much pot he smoked, the craving ached inside his body like he'd swallowed a razor. God damn Woody and his stupid parties.
Hey.
John looked up, startled out of his thoughts. Mary Alice Finney was sitting on one of the swings in the playground.
His hatred of her sparked like a flash fire. "What are you doing here?"
She said, "I didn't know you owned the playground."
"Shouldn't you be in school?"
"I skipped."
"Yeah, right," he said, snorting a laugh that made him taste blood in the back of his throat. "Shit," he said, putting his hand to his nose. Blood was coming out like a faucet had been turned on.
Mary Alice was beside him. She had a tissue in her hand—why did girls always have these things?—and she pressed it under his nose.
"Sit down," she told him, leading him over to the jungle gym. He slumped on the bottom bar, his bony butt feeling the cold through his jeans. "Tilt your head forward."
He had his eyes closed, but he could feel her hands on him: one on the back of his neck, one holding the tissue to his nose. You were supposed to lean back when your nose bled, but he didn't care as long as she was touching him.
She sighed. "John. Why are you doing this to yourself?"
He opened his eyes, watched blood drip onto the sand between his feet. "Did you really skip school?"
"I was supposed to have a doctor's appointment, but my mom forgot to pick me up."
John tried to turn his head, but she wouldn't let him. Mothers didn't miss doctors' appointments. It just didn't happen.
"Yeah," she said, like she could read his mind. "My parents are getting divorced."
John straightened up quickly, seeing stars for a moment.
She was embarrassed. She clutched her hands together, the bloody tissue between them. "My dad's been seeing this woman at his office." He could see the tight smile on her face. Perfect Mary Alice's parents were splitting up.
She said, "Her name is Mindy. Dad wants me to meet her. He thinks we'll be great friends."
John could hear Paul Finney saying this. The guy was a lawyer and he had the arrogance of most lawyers where he figured anything that came out of his mouth was the God's honest truth.
John stubbed his toe into the sand. "I'm sorry, Mary Alice."
She was crying, and he could see her watching her tears hit the sand just like he had watched his blood a few moments before.
He hated her, right? Only, he wanted to put his arm around her, tell her it was going to be okay.
He had to think of something to say, something to help her feel better. He blurted out, "You wanna go to a party?"
"A party?" she asked, her nose wrinkling at the thought. "What, with all your stoner friends?"
"No," he said, though she was right. "My cousin Woody is having a party Saturday. His mom's out of town."
"Where's his dad?"
"I don't know," John admitted. He'd never really thought about it, but Woody s mom was away so much that the guy practically lived alone. "You could drop by."
"I'm supposed to go to the mall with Susan and Faye."
"Come after."
"I don't really belong with those people," she said. "Besides, I figured you were grounded after what happened."
So, the whole school knew about his trip to the emergency room. John had figured he'd get at least a couple of days before the story leaked out. "No," he said, thinking of his father, the way he had looked at him this morning. It was the same way he had looked at dead Uncle Barry lying in his coffin, thin lips twisted in distaste. Glutton. Womanizer. Used car salesman.
Mary Alice asked, "Where does your cousin live?"
John told her the address, just three streets over. "Come on," he said. "Say you'll go."
She wrinkled her nose again, but this time she was teasing. "Okay," she said, then to give herself an out, "I'll think about it."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
OCTOBER 11, 2005
John was lying in bed at the flophouse, half asleep, when a knock came at his door. He rolled over and looked at his clock, squinting h
is eyes to read the tiny numbers. Six-thirty. He had another hour to sleep before he had to get up.
"Knock-knock," a woman said, and he laid back in bed with a grunt. "Rise and shine, choirboy," Martha Lam sang. The first thing he had found out about his parole officer was that she loved surprise inspections.
"Just a minute," he called back, sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes.
"Not a minute, cowboy," Ms. Lam insisted, her voice polite but firm. "Open up this door, now, you hear?"
He did as he was told—quickly—because he knew if she got it into her head she could throw him back inside before the day was out.