Not Exactly a Love Story (7 page)

“Don’t get wise with your mom,” Mr. B growled, but his eyes didn’t leave his plate. Neither did his fork.

“Clever. A clever boy.” She turned to Mr. B. “He’s not right somehow, Dom.”

“He’s not getting enough exercise,” Mr. B said. This was the start of a refrain that I could just about set to music, I’d heard it so many times, at school and at home.

The trouble with Mr. B as a gym teacher was his conviction that football was an important sport, maybe more important than baseball since it had a longer history. This led to two assumptions that formed his approach to teaching. One, that if you were good at sports, you played football. Two, that if you played football, he could make you a better player. Anyone else was a hopeless case and need not apply.

Since I’d failed gym, you should be able to figure out which group I fell into. This was okay, I guess, while he was just my gym teacher. But now I didn’t just have him for Tuesday and Thursday, second period, I had him for breakfast and dinner. Not that I hadn’t come to realize he was a good guy. I knew that about him, I really did. So I guess the trouble with Mr. B as a stepdad was only that he was mine.

“You said you’d go out for something,” he added.

“I’m thinking about it,” I said. He gave me the look that meant he was about to assign laps. “I mean, I will! I’m just trying to think of something I’d stick with.”

“Swimming,” he said.

“That was sort of a kid thing with me,” I said.

“Vinnie.” This was Mom. “You and your dad were going to the Y on Saturdays last January.”

“Yeah. Sort of a Dad thing too.”

While I was setting the garbage cans on the curb that night, I
saw Patsy’s mom heading to her car. I messed around with the cans, hoping to time it so I could get back in the house while she was in the garage. Actually, I saw Patsy’s mom pretty often, usually as we passed each other in the driveway, taking out the garbage. But tonight I didn’t want to face her.

She looked like she was going somewhere for the evening. Then again, she usually looked like that. I started back up the driveway, keeping in the shadows, as she threw open the garage door.

As I reached the back door, she looked over the top of her car and called, “Would you set mine out?”

“Sure!” Sure. All-around nice guy that I am.

Patsy’s father drove up about three minutes later, just after I’d finished with the garbage cans. He breezed by me at
the curb, and I got a look at him as he stopped under the light at their side door.

It was the first time I’d seen him, and I can honestly say, if I’d been picking sympathetic ears to listen to my problems, he’d have been my last and most desperate choice. He had a face that looked like it was carved from a cold, hard material.

As I stepped into the kitchen, I pictured Biff facing the introduction and grinned. I imagined facing it myself and groaned.

“Did you say something, Vinnie?” Mom was reading her horoscope.

“Not me, Mom.”

I wanted to forget the whole business. Just let it go, I said to myself about ten times in the hour before midnight. I couldn’t do it. I pulled a T-shirt out of my top drawer. Even though that hanky business is movie stuff. No way it really disguises a voice.

Still …

I stretched the shirt over the mouthpiece.

Finger poised.

Midnight. Ringing. I just wanted to hear her say one thing: that she knew all along I didn’t mean it. Well. Not that way.

I wanted her to know this wasn’t the real me. I was embarrassed, that’s the truth of the matter. Just thinking of how I’d acted made me cringe.

“Hello.” Sleepy. And on guard.

“Please let me say this.”

Silence.

“I need to tell you—” I stopped, hearing so much unexpected emotion in my voice. I lay back against the two pillows stacked against the headboard, the way I usually talked to Dad. I’d relax a little.

“What?”

“That I’m not what you think.”

“You have a nasty mind, and you’re developing a very nasty habit.”

“I just didn’t want you to be upset by my phone—”

Click.

“—call.”

I hardly slept all night. She might know my voice when she heard it again. She might already have recognized me. If she did, she’d tell her parents this morning. Her dad could be over here any minute, yelling at my mom.

Maybe he’d call the police first. After all, it wasn’t like I’d accidentally thrown a baseball through his window, barely a misdemeanor. I’d probably committed a felony.

I opened my door to hear part of a conversation going on below.

“—solution is a simple one, Dominic.”

“If all I wanted was a housekeeper, I’d never have gone looking for a wife.”

“Are you suggesting that—”

“No. Donna, don’t make anything more out of what I
say than what I meant. I can screw things up enough on my own.”

“Dom,” Mom said, her tone softening immediately upon some sign of vulnerability in Mr. B.

“I love you, Donna. For more important reasons than your housekeeping.”

“God knows you’d have to love me for more than that,” Mom said with a laugh. She’s a sucker for hearing someone loves her.

I shut my door again, very quietly.

Mom’s enthusiasm for playing with her new house had lasted through the holidays. As soon as Mr. B and I put away the Christmas decorations, Mom apparently forgot where to find the vacuum cleaner. The thing is, I knew Mom was doing her best. She can map things out, but she needs more than cooperation, she needs a support system. She has that at work, she had that in Dad. I loved her, but it might turn out that with Mr. B, Mom had to sink or swim.

When I went downstairs ten minutes later, everything had cooled down. Mr. B had gone, Mom was just leaving. I made a bowl of cereal for myself. I squinted at the wall clock, the way we all did—the field of Italian sunflowers on the face nearly obscured the numbers—and began to breathe easy. No irate fathers had pounded on the door, there were no cops surrounding the house.

My breakfast went uninterrupted.

There was a midmorning fire drill.

My second-period class filed out right alongside Patsy’s.

“Hey, Patsy,” the girl in front of me called out in a pretty voice with a strong Southern accent. She reached out for Patsy as she called her name, grasping Patsy’s hand to give it a little squeeze.

What followed happened so quickly, I would’ve missed it if I blinked once. Patsy’s immediate reaction was to return the hand thing, starting to smile, but she cut her own response short, the happy pink flush of her cheeks deepening to one of mild embarrassment.

“Sissy, I always mean to call—” Patsy said.

“I’m always busy anyway,” the girl ahead of me said, sort of too cheerfully. “You know that.”

“I know that,” Patsy echoed in a dismal tone. “Do you
like your teachers this semester?” she said, mustering up a conversation.

“Oh, yeah. They’re all real good about late homework and all.”

“How are your brothers and sisters?”

“Oh, fine. Bobby Wayne’ll be coming here next year.”

Brown Bunny moved in from Patsy’s other side just then. I had a feeling she’d been listening in from a few steps away. I didn’t think Patsy saw her until then, either.

“Say hi to everybody for me,” Patsy said quickly, stepping out of the loose formation of the line as she spoke.

A casual onlooker might think they’d spoken only in passing, the way Patsy handled herself. Sissy was in a couple of my classes, one of those serious kids teachers always seat squarely between two of the class loudmouths to tone things down. I’d never even heard her voice before.

I followed Patsy and Brown Bunny, something that was less conspicuous than it sounds. Students were shifting around, so all I had to do was look like part of any conversation if the girls noticed me.

“I didn’t know you were so friendly with her,” Brown Bunny said, letting her long teeth sink in.

Patsy said, “I was standing next to her, that’s all.”

“You had
something
to talk about,” Brown Bunny said, cutting off that line of defense.

“I used to hang out with her now and then.”

“Who?” Melanie said as she joined them.

“Sissy Donovan,” Patsy said, her facial expression plainly
communicating severe pain. “Melanie and I both did, didn’t we?”

“Hung out?” Melanie looked wary.

“Oh,” Patsy said, with a dismissive lift of her hand.

“It was more a matter of carpooling,” Melanie said, clearly irritated that her cover had been blown. “Our mothers arranged that, if you know what I mean. Before her mother died.”

“That must be why she is so completely without style,” Brown Bunny said, and it was hard to say whether she accepted the explanation or secretly reveled in her superiority. “Her hair looks like she cuts it herself.”

“She’s in charge of her brothers and sisters till her dad gets home from work,” Patsy said. “She makes dinner for six people. And she gets decent grades, so she probably doesn’t have much time for
style
.”

“Oh, who really cares,” Melanie said, and stalked away. I had the feeling she did care. And Patsy certainly did.

The bell rang, signaling the end of the fire drill.

I’d learned something about Patsy, the meaningful stuff of picking friends, and what we give up when we try to move up a level in popularity. If I was dating Patsy, this would be valuable. Of course, I wasn’t dating Patsy and it wasn’t likely I ever would be.

However, I was talking to her. Sort of.

12:00 a.m. and ringing.

“You again.”

“Just hear what I’ve got to say,” I began.

“I never heard of a creep who had this need to apologize.”

“Exactly! I’m just a regular person.”

“You sound weird. Like you have cotton balls in your mouth or something.”

“I’m talking through a handkerchief.” I didn’t think that sounded as creepy as a T-shirt.

She said, “If you need me to forgive you, it’s probably a sign that you’re neurotic.”

!!!

“What are you, a psychologist?”

“My dad’s a psychiatrist.”

“And you never tell him you’re sorry.”

“We were discussing your apologies, not mine.”

“That’s what
you
were discussing.”

I’d hoped to get a laugh, but she said, “I probably know you. Why else would you care what I think of you?”

I tried to sound like someone who sat next to her at school. Somebody she knew. “I’m not a creep, okay? I do want you to know I’m sorry. If I wasn’t, I’d be a whole lot worse than neurotic.”

“You’re going to get caught if you keep this up.”

Maybe that was it—I had a compulsive desire to be discovered. The idea gave me the willies. But I said, “I’m not crazy, either.”

She said, “
That
is what they all say,” and hung up.

The terrible thing, I was disappointed when she did.

Also, I was a little offended. Her tone of voice had been … ripe. Ripe with being sure of who I was. Well, not
who
I was, but the kind of guy she thought I’d have to be.

Actually, it was just possible she was getting a kick out of these phone calls. Oh, not that she was loving them exactly. But I noticed she didn’t hang up right away. She exchanged a few words with me, and when she had me where she wanted me, she hung up.

She must have been enjoying a certain sense of triumph when she hung up. Sadistic, that’s what it was. It made me queasy to think about it.