Chapter Two

Nana and Poppie were coming over for supper. This was a good thing, I figured. Maybe that would mean Mom and Jean-Paul would keep their hands off each other. I saw hickeys on my mother’s neck when she was in her bathrobe. She’s thirty-seven years old, for crying out loud.

“You better wear your turtleneck for dinner,” I told her.

She nearly died when she realized what I was talking about. Then she got in a snit.

“My sexuality is my own affair,” she said. No pun intended, I’m sure. I couldn’t help smirking.

So let’s not see you groping each other in the kitchen while you’re peeling vegetables, okay? I wanted to say. I didn’t though.

“Ready to go?” asked Jean-Paul, coming into the kitchen just then.

It was time for our traditional drive while the turkey was cooking. We don’t go to church but Mom’s always insisted we should mark this as a sacred day. Her words, not mine.

For about four years now, ever since we’ve had a car, we’ve been driving out to the same spot. It’s by the ocean. We go for a walk in the woods and end up on a ledge of rocks overlooking the sea. It’s a wicked spot.

This year though, the weather was miserable. It was snowing, a sort of frozen-spit kind of snow. It didn’t melt when it hit the ground. Chris and I had to shovel for at least twenty minutes to clear the driveway.

“Want some help? I have a shovel in the trunk of my car.” Jean-Paul asked.

I kept my head down.

“Sure,” said Chris.

After about ten minutes, Jean-Paul stopped to rest and lit a cigarette. Real good for the lungs, Bud, I thought. “Are you illiterate or just French?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

I grabbed the package out of his hands.

“La cigarette cause le cancer.” I read.

He laughed, but he only took one puff before he threw it away.

By the time we got the driveway shoveled, the snow had turned to an icy rain, the kind that numbs your face and turns it orange.

Mom came out all spruced up in her snowsuit and funky hat. She had make-up on. The wrinkles under her eyes were gone and those eyes seemed brighter blue than usual. When we started driving, Mom put on the radio.

“Bethlehem was peaceful this Christmas,” said the announcer. This made Mom start sniveling. Then she switched the channel partway through the next item. It was about Christmas at a hospice for AIDS victims.

“It’s Christmas Day. I don’t want to think about this today. Where’s the music?”

That’s Mom. Get rid of what doesn’t make you feel good. If it adds keep it in, if it subtracts take it out. It’s sort of her mathematical theory of life she explained to me once. Yeah? More like the process of elimination. Like what she’s always done with those other wanna-be Dads.

We drove slowly along the icy roads. It gave me time to play the videotape of one of those dudes in my head.

Candidate Numero Uno for Stepfather and Possible Husband was Winslow Thor-burn the Third.

The Turd. That’s what Chris and I called him. It’s all downhill from the moment you’re born with a name like that.

Winslow was as stuffed up and puffed up as his name. He was a professor type. Well, he was a professor. A professor of bugs. What’s it called? I forget. A bugologist or something. Anyhow, he looked like a bug. A cockroach. His eyebrow hair stuck out like antennae. His eyes were bulgy. I imagined them popping out if he were to ever get surprised. But he never did. Half the time, the guy was in a fog as thick as a cocoon.

Well, there was that one time, the first time we met him. That surprised him all right. Mom announced she had a date.

“Now boys,” she said. “Troy is going to baby-sit. My date is coming at seven. When the doorbell rings, I’ll get it and then I’ll bring him up to introduce you. I want you to be on your best behavior.”

When Dr. Winslow Thorburn the Turd rang the bell, we settled ourselves on the ledge above the stairs. As they walked up, we counted. “One, two, three!” Then we jumped on his back. The two of us. Well, we were only four and eight after all. We knocked him flat against the steps. His glasses flew off his nose.

“Boys! My god. Winslow, are you all right?” my mother gasped.

“Sure,” he coughed and sputtered. “Just knocked the wind out of me.”

My mother was fuming. Troy, who had only turned his back on us for a second, was trying not to laugh.

What gets me to this day was that the poor sucker kept coming back for more. We never ambushed him again but we learned, during the two years he hung around, to do other things that got on his nerves. Like squish any bug we could find. Like eating bacon with our fingers and not using a napkin. We just licked the grease off, finger by finger.

“Honestly,” he said one morning at breakfast, “can’t you two be more civilized?”

“This from a man who prefers the spruce bud worm to humans?” snapped my mother. “And whoever heard of eating bacon with a knife and fork, anyhow? Some food is finger food, Winslow.”

The Turd stopped coming around after that. Chris and I saw him once, riding a bike in the park. “Julian!” he shouted from across the street. “Chris!”

We ambled over.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Fine, thank you,” we said in unison.

“And your mother?”

Just in case he had any ideas about calling her up, I spoke right up.

“She’s got a new bo—,” Chris elbowed me in the ribs.

“Job,” I continued.

“Really?”

“Um, yeah, she’s a clown at birthday parties. Loves it.”

This was true. Molly the Clown Inc. was her latest sideline. Her regular job as a child-care worker never paid enough.

“There’s a fortune to be made at birthday parties in this city,” she said.

Then she sewed up a costume, painted her face, and studied books on how to make balloon animals. She spent hours learning to juggle and enrolled in mime classes. There wasn’t much money to be made, but she had fun.

“A clown?” he said, bulgy eyes bulging.

“Quite a woman, your mother.” As he said it, it seemed those eyes filled with thunder-clouds. I think the Turd was sad.

“Give her my best,” he said. Like a perfect gentleman. Then he biked away from us as fast as he could. We watched until he was a small speck on the bicycle trail. No bigger than a squished cockroach. And that was the last of him.