Men and Dogs (9 page)

“Wow,” Hannah says. “He seems to be . . . acting out.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not really going to—”

“Of course not,” Palmer says. “I’m no father.”

Hannah chooses not to answer.

“You want kids?” he asks.

“No.”

“Really?” Palmer says, pouring more wine. “That kind of surprises me. Is that true?”

True. Hannah once had a therapist who said something very wise about truth. She’s had five therapists. One woman, four men.
This was the woman, an attractive fortysomething. She always wore all black and was the best one by far. She was so good that
Hannah had to get out of the relationship, eventually breaking up with her by text. In the session before Hannah freed herself,
they talked about truth.

“I am not a natural liar,” Hannah told her. “But it seems like much of my life is fiction.”

The therapist suggested she say something true, and then add the word “because.”

“You’ll be surprised how that changes things,” she said.

“I thought the whole point of truth was that it can’t be changed. Otherwise you’ve just started out with a lie.”

“Oh, there are all sorts of varying degrees of truth. Come on—give it a whirl.”

“This sounds extremely dangerous.”

“Exactly,” the therapist said, leaning forward.

“OK,” Hannah said. “You want truth? Fine. I screwed around, OK? I cheated on Jon.”

“I cheated on Jon because I wanted to.”

“Not good enough.”

“I cheated on Jon because I drank too much.”

“No.”

So, her brother’s question. Does Hannah want a baby? No. She does not want a baby. Because? She does not want a baby because babies are loud and expensive. She does not want a baby because she is a disaster and will surely drop said baby, or accidentally leave the baby in a suitcase, or put the baby down in Starbucks on a chair and forget it’s there and leave the baby and then end up in jail. So, really, Hannah does not want a baby because she does not deserve a baby. Because she cheats on her husband and then climbs up balconies to get him back and then falls off buildings. The one bad thing she doesn’t do is smoke cigarettes,
and that’s only because she respects her teeth.

“Not right now,” she says. “So how’s it going with Tom, anyway?”

“It was pretty good, until this baby crap.”

“Living together,” Hannah says. “Big step for you.”

“Probably too big.”

He pours them both a glass of wine and begins clearing the table.

“Well, commitment’s always been a problem for the men in our family.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Dad took off.”

Palmer pauses at the sink, then sets the dishes in with a clatter.

“Dad drowned.”

“Maybe he left. People leave. Maybe he wanted a new life and felt this was the best way to go.”

“So, what, our father rigged a fake death? Tied a bag to his ankle, swam to shore?”

“If I was going to leave,” Hannah says, “that’s exactly how I’d do it.”

“You know,” Palmer says, leaning against the counter with his hand on his hip, “this is the center of it all.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is why you’re so . . . why everything is unraveling. Because you’ve never been able to just let this go.”

Hannah climbs up on a bar stool and looks at her brother intently.

“It screws with your head. Because there’s no proof whatsoever that you’re right.”

“So?”

Palmer throws up his hands. “You’re impossible.”

“Why are you so worked up about it?” she asks. “Why can’t you just let me think what I think?”

“Fuck it.” Palmer grabs his jacket from the wall. “Let’s leave this mess. I’ve got to go to the office.”

“The office?” Tom says, entering with Rumpus through the kitchen door. “Now?”

“Paperwork.”

“But the dishes—”

“Don’t touch them. I’ll do them in the morning.”

“Are you sure?” Hannah follows him to the door. She doesn’t want Palmer to go. She doesn’t want them to leave things like this. “Please don’t. I’m sorry I said that about Dad. Really. Stay. We could play cards or something.”

“Let it lie, Hannah,” Palmer says, glancing at her briefly, his eyes so dead they make her stomach turn.

How can you disappear so completely? Where did you go?

“Good night.” The door shuts behind him.

Let it lie. Let it lie. The words reverberate in Hannah’s mind. Familiar. Infuriating.

“Oof,” the dog whispers. “Oof.”

8
The Thing Palmer Did on the Porch

H
ANNAH WAS UPSTAIRS on the porch—eleven—sitting by herself on the joggling board. The funeral crowd pulsing in the house below. She rocked back and forth, watching her feet dangle. Those frilly anklet socks.

There was a rattling of the screen door. She hunched down. It was her brother.

Stole cigarettes from Dad’s closet, he said. Want one?

OK.

Don’t, though. You shouldn’t.

OK.

They could see the water. Hannah squinted. No boats.

We should have taken pictures, Hannah said.

Of what?

Funeral.

Why?

For when Dad gets back.

Stop it, Hannah.

Why?

He’s not coming.

He might.

He’s gone.

How do you know?

I know, OK?

How?

I just know.

What happened to your hand? she asked. Your knuckles are all—

Palmer suddenly flipped his arm upward. Without looking over,
he brought the lit cigarette down on his white wrist. There was a sickening hiss. The smell was worse.

Stop!

I can feel that, her brother said.

Palmer!

For the first time that day, Hannah cried. She remembers licking the salty tears off her lips. Palmer stayed for a few minutes,
not talking. After a while he pocketed the cigarette and slipped back through the curtains, leaving her alone.

9
What Palmer Won’t Ever Tell

T
HEY GREW UP on the same street. Palmer’s house was number two, Shawn’s was eight. Over the gardens, through the dense foliage of a live oak tree, they could just see each other’s bedroom window. Every night, they signaled by flipping their lights on and off.

They played soccer. Secretly, Palmer hated the game. He hated the way the uniforms itched, the dull obligation of practice,
the tedium of passing the slick ball from shin to shin. He especially detested when Charleston Prep faced off against better,
tougher teams from across the Ashley and Cooper rivers—their stronger legs, their country sneers. The thing was, he was really good at it. While the other kids toiled over passing skills and footwork, Palmer would spend six months never touching a soccer ball, only to show up and outplay everyone without breaking a sweat.

Shawn was quick on the field, but Palmer was, hands down, the stronger player. Together they were pretty invincible. Shawn would get the ball up to the front of the field, and then, just when he was surrounded, Palmer would catch up to reinforce.
It was the only reason he kept at the sport. He was able to save Shawn daily.

The first time Palmer saw Shawn Cohen, the boy was on his hands and knees in the dirt in front of his house. Palmer had heard about the new kid in the neighborhood—the Cohens were Jews, which no one on the all-Episcopalian street was thrilled about at the time. Curious, Palmer rode over to him on his bike.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Shawn, a floppy, licorice strip of a person, looked up.

“Planting.”

“Planting what?”

Shawn sat back on his heels. “My mom thinks they’re flowers, but this kid back home gave me some pot seeds. I figure no one will think to look right in front of the house.”

Palmer was fascinated. Drugs! Next door!

“Wanna help?”

“Awesome,” Palmer said, throwing his bike on the ground. When the pot plants failed to materialize (the seeds turned out to be ragweed), Shawn and Palmer conducted other narcotic experiments. (A batch of wine made from apples culminating in a foul,
chunky explosion in Shawn’s closet; an afternoon sniffing Elmer’s glue followed by four-hour, achy naps.) Soon the two were inseparable—sitting under tables playing war, thinking up long strings of swearwords. Shawn, it turned out, was truly talented at swearing. His combinations of words and images would ghost Palmer’s head for days.

“Greasy elephant fucker!”

They were behind the field house after a game, sharing a cigarette. Shawn was two years older than Palmer but in the same grade, as he’d been held back a year and Daisy had started Palmer early. “That forward was a shit-eating, greasy elephant fucker. Wasn’t he?”

“He was,” Palmer agreed.

“That was a great play. You’re a tiger-fucking good player.”

“Thanks.”

“That asshole. He should crawl into an old zebra ball sac and die.”

“Zebra ball sac?”

“Spooge-encrusted.” Shawn fell back into the early-spring grass. When he stretched out his arms and feet, it was a miracle of limbs.

Because Shawn was older than anyone, he soon ruled all of the middle school without contenders. When he wore a rugby shirt,
all the boys had their mothers buy them. If he hated the seventh-grade science teacher because she was an “itchy-loose-rat-butt-tonguer,”
down she fell. He could sway the opinions of his peers in a way that caused many of the teachers to predict a future in politics.
This made him valuable as a best friend. Middle school, after all, was a minefield; one day you were doing fine, the next you were exiled for a poorly timed fart. But as a friend of Shawn, Palmer was untouchable.

“Palmer’s coming,” Shawn would say to the other kids before they went anywhere. And if there happened to be a car involved:
“Scoot over for my man Legare.”

Palmer was thankful for this popularity, if wary of its negotiability. He was not witty—a little oafish, even. His status was entirely due to Shawn, and he was aware of its potential impermanence. Every night, he felt the same jolt of anxiety as he worked the light switch with his fingers, two ups and a final down. Sometimes there would be no reply, and Palmer would climb into the cool, slightly gritty sheets of his bed feeling wilted. Two nights out of three, though, the light flickered back, and Palmer turned joyfully into the pillow, acknowledging to God himself how lucky he was to have a best friend.
With a best friend, especially one whose lamplight he could make out through the leaves, he would never be alone in the world.
Shawn and Palmer. Palmer and Shawn. He had an other.

Then, the summer before eighth grade, things unraveled.

Shawn went away to camp in North Carolina with Roy and Ben, two other kids from Charleston Prep. Palmer chose to stay home and take sailing lessons. No one ever told him about camp—the bonding that would happen over cheap, watery meat, the loyalty born out of “color wars.” After five weeks together, Ben, Roy, and Shawn returned home inseparable, cheeks pink with mountain air, nails black with honest dirt. They spent hours reliving moments in the dining hall and at the lake; they sang angry songs about “Choctaws”; they collapsed into giggles over inscrutable private jokes.

The change was miserable. He and Shawn were hardly ever alone, and the configuration was all messed up. Now they roamed the streets as a foursome; nothing—not grades, not the latest profanity, not so much as a Cheeto break—was privately shared.

“Nintendo?” Palmer would ask.

“Cool. Roy and Ben can come,” Shawn would say. “Doubles.” Or:

“Want to go to the Seven-Eleven to score some beer?”

“Sure. Call Roy. His brother’s got an ID.”

But then, one Friday, a ray of hope. Shawn had just inherited a long-coveted digital Battleship board from his brother, complete with model ships, colored pegs, a green purring electronic screen, and sound effects that mimicked the whine of falling bombs and the roar of explosions. He asked Palmer three times to sleep over to play the game, and when at lunch Roy asked what they were doing that night, Shawn, to Palmer’s disbelief, turned and said, “Nothing.”

“Don’t tell Roy what we’re doing, OK?” Shawn whispered a few moments later. He squinted conspiratorially. “Only two people can play Battleship. It’s ear-fucking boring with three.”

It was not lost on Palmer that he was becoming overly attached to Shawn.

The recurring dream he had was simple: his friend’s dry fingers, reaching. Palmer would wake up, confused and throbbing,
to the familiar, sticky wetness that was beginning to lace his mornings.

He wasn’t alarmed that the cause had been a boy. He liked boys. This was something he had realized long before. Girls, at the time, repelled him—their lotion-tinged smells, the way they floated past in squealing herds. Perhaps this would change.
For his mother’s sake, Palmer hoped so.

“I’m getting bigger.”

Palmer froze momentarily, then silently continued to gather his belongings.

“Dude, you hear me?” Shawn whispered. “Seriously. It’s growing. Look.”

Concentrating very, very hard on the crucial neutrality of his expression, Palmer glanced over. Shawn was standing approximately ten feet away—a safe-enough distance—his legs braced beneath him. His green, puppy-patterned boxers were pulled down slightly,
and he was holding himself with both hands.

“Huh.”

“I used to be able to put only one hand around it,” Shawn said. “Now I can put two.”

“Wow.”

“Can you put two hands around yours?”

He averted his eyes to his backpack. “I don’t know,” he said. This was a lie. As a thirteen-year-old with a tape measure stored under his bed, Palmer knew exactly how much of his hands fit around it. He knew its exact length (four and a half inches),
its approximate diameter (one inch, four centimeters), its ability to harden (tireless), and how it stood in comparison with the eyeballed size of other boys’ (average). But what he understood that day in the locker room was that he was in the highest danger zone. One slip of the tongue or eye would alert his slightly-more-well-endowed-than-one-would-think-for-his-size friend of his desire to measure and test the body part in question in ways that would damn them both forever.

“Let’s go,” Palmer said.

Shawn gave a brief giggle, then zipped back up. Together they ran out to the idling station wagon that was waiting to take them to a pizza party—a warm, innocent house smelling of baking crust.

The whole week after, he felt unsettled. Had his best friend been trying to trick him? Some of Shawn’s favorite targets were
“faggots,” or, as he referred to them on more than one occasion, “antelope-asshole lickers.” Did Shawn know that Palmer was a faggot? Was he trying to get him to admit it so he could tell Roy and Ben and whomever else? Shawn was his best friend,
but he didn’t trust him, really. Palmer was left to guess that showing one’s privates to a friend was normal. Perhaps at camp everyone stood, boxers down, comparing penises before bed—a thought that excited Palmer wildly, given that his mother had already sent the check in to Camp Halowakee for next year.

And now, here he was, lying on his stomach on the deep-pile carpet smelling faintly of urine, blissfully aware that, just a few blocks away, his soccer teammates were trudging through a wet, mind-numbing practice. The gray afternoon dripped into evening, but Shawn didn’t seem to notice, too absorbed in the miniature war zone of Battleship.

“G four!” he cried, throwing forth a maniacal laugh when rewarded with that tinny explosion. They played all the way up to dinner, breaking briefly for a set of hastily ingested burgers provided by Shawn’s mother, who then left for a party at the
Meyerses’ house. By ten o’clock, Palmer’s eyes burned from staring at the screen; his fingers hurt from pressing down on the missile button; his mind was numb from boredom.