Belly Read online

  Of course she knew everything, knew the contents of every slip of paper in her dead sister’s toe-shoe boxes. She must have known that someday they would catch him, and she got out long before she could be implicated. A smart girl. So how had she ended up with this ’50s sort of life, this housewife nightmare, when there was so much she could do?

  Inside the house, he watched her remove the skin of an entire apple in one long ribbon of peel, this tiny perfect moment of home economics, and this was the life she chose. Her boys sat in the next room glued to the TV, waiting for their predinner snack, baby birds, waiting for their mother to serve them.

  Belly looked at the list of repairs on the fridge and then he stood on a chair and opened the cabinets above the sink. They stuck, so you had to tug with all your might to open them. He inspected the hinges that were rusty and crooked and maybe just needed some WD-40, a little grease to get them going.

  Nora looked up at him.

  “You have any 3-in-1 oil?” he asked.

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “I’m going down the list,” he said. “Cleaning up house.”

  “You don’t have to. Gene will do it.”

  “That’s all right. I can handle it.”

  “Don’t bother, Belly. Come on, come down. We’re going to Eliza’s for dinner.”

  “Listen, I had planned to help out around the house. I would have fixed the porch railing, but Gene did that. Maybe I could’ve cleaned out the gutters, but Gene did it. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Not really.”

  He could see that Stevie Ray was only half playing the video game. He lowered himself from the chair and hid deeper in the kitchen, nodded for Nora to follow. The baby waddled by in his walker.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Listen,” he kept his voice low. “What I’m saying is, you need to leave something for the men to do. The other men, the ones who live here.” He came and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Gene. You and Gene.”

  Without taking her eyes off Belly, Nora called over her shoulder, “Boys, go and clean up your rooms. Now.”

  They protested lightly and she repeated, “Now,” and they scampered away.

  Nora took Belly’s hand off her shoulder and led him to the kitchen table. “Sit down,” she said. He obeyed, and she put the baby in his high chair, poured herself a cup of decaf, and sat down across from him. “I’m only going to say this once. I never want to hear you speak about me and Gene. Not ever. You are not to speak one word against that man, or talk about his place here in this house. He is our family friend, and that’s all. You don’t know anything about any of it.”

  “I know what I know,” he said. “I got the fill-in from Margie, not to mention the whole pallet factory.”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  Jimi called from upstairs, “Mom, Stevie broke my Game Boy.”

  “He broke it himself. He stepped on it.” Their screams echoed through the house.

  “Stevie, apologize to your brother,” she called up through the vent. “I’ll be right up.”

  “Go ahead,” said Belly. “We’ll talk more about this later.”

  “We will never talk about this again.” Jimi was crying now, heavy sobs filtering through the house. “It’s okay, sweetie, I’m coming.”

  “You should have had girls,” he said. “That’s your problem right there. Boys will give you nothing but trouble.”

  “Watch the baby,” she said, and headed upstairs.

  He did. He watched the baby. He lifted King and took him back into the TV room, he sat on the couch and flipped on Animal Planet and put the baby on the floor, surrounded by a rainbow ring of plastic toys. The baby had a full head of brown hair, and Phil’s brown eyes, the same chubby cheeks Nora had as a baby. At least the baby looked like Phil, as far as he could remember. The man was never home for Belly to lay eyes on. The kid must be Phil’s. Gene had some kind of light-colored eyes, and once his third daughter had explained it to him, how brown eyes have the most power and blue eyes have the least and if the two parents had light eyes their children would have light eyes and if one parent had light eyes and the other had dark eyes it could go either way, and how if both parents had dark eyes then you could never tell. But two light-eyed parents could not have a dark-eyed baby, so this baby could not be Gene’s. The baby had brown eyes.

  His third daughter was so good at science, so good at school. She never had to try, and instead of asking him for help with her homework, she would explain it to him. Geometry, history, Shakespeare—she’d stop by the bar every afternoon, unwrap her silly pink sweater and sit atop it on the barstool, just so she could see her father for a few minutes before she went to dance class, and she’d go over what she learned that day. His third daughter would teach him.

  He’d stopped learning since she was gone. It was as if from that moment he could retain no more information in his head. There was no more logic. If only she were still here he felt certain he would not have lost his way, he would not have taken those bets, gone to prison, lost his bar, alienated Ann, let Eliza marry that hippie Jew, pretended he didn’t know that Nora got knocked up her senior year of high school and went to Mexico and did God knows what with the baby. If only his daughter had lived, none of this would have happened. She would have explained everything to him.

  “Where’s the baby? Where’s King?” Nora appeared in the doorway.

  “How should I know?”

  Nora searched frantically under the couch, behind the TV, in the kitchen cupboards. “You were watching him, dammit.” She was screaming and he heard chairs squeal and cabinets slam.

  The baby crawled in from the dining room, crawled right over to Belly, hoisted himself up with his hands on Belly’s knees, stared straight into Belly’s eyes, and made a cooing sound.

  “Help me look!” Nora yelled from the kitchen. She ran into the TV room and saw her father and her son together on the couch. “You bastard,” she said.

  “What? He’s right here. He’s fine.”

  “You bastard.” She hoisted the baby to her hip.

  “What? I was watching him. He was here all the time.”

  Her lips trembled and she closed her eyes and exhaled. She counted out loud to ten. In a low and steady voice she said, “You may not watch my child again,” and went upstairs. He heard her voice waft down to him. “It’s okay, King,” she said. Sometimes the lack of soundproofing in this old house was a blessing.

  “Train whistle blowing,” she sang. “Makes a sleepy noise. Underneath the blankets go all the girls and boys. Rocking rolling riding, out along the bay. All bound for morningtown, many miles away.”

  Belly laid himself down on the couch and he fell asleep.

  Get up!” Nora yelled.

  Belly sprang up on the couch so fast he wrenched his hip.

  “What the hell?”

  “Get up off that couch right now, Belly, you cannot just sleep away the days.”

  “It’s the evening,” he said.

  “It’s time to go. Eliza’s waiting for us.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Give me a minute, will you? I’m an old man.”

  “Since when?”

  In the bathroom he checked himself in the mirror. He had aged more since his release than the whole time he was away, a parabola of flesh drooping under each eye.

  They piled into the truck, Belly and the baby and Jimi in the back, Stevie Ray in the front passenger seat. They climbed in and Nora started the truck and they drove to the end of Spring Street, left on Court, another left on George, halfway down the block, and Nora said, “We’re here.”

  “Why did we drive one block?” Belly asked Nora as she unstrapped the baby and walked up the bumpy brick sidewalk in front of the house. “It’s environmentally unsound.” Jimi and Stevie Ray ran into the yard and Belly heard a dog bark, not a real bark but a weak sort of yip instead.
/>   Nora pushed open the front door and Belly said, “They don’t lock their house?”

  “Belly, please behave yourself. Just once, won’t you please be good?”

  Eliza came to the front of the house in a dirty apron. “Gimme gimme gimme,” she said, taking the baby from Nora. “Hi, Belly,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Right,” he said. His youngest daughter’s house seemed pickled—preserved in the same sad state of disrepair as when he’d last seen it five years ago. After Henry’s parents retired to Florida, he and Eliza moved in and vowed to fix it up, resurrect it, and match it to the bloom of renovated houses that surrounded it, keep up with the dusty roses and antique yellows of neighboring Victorians. Then they could sell it and make a profit. It was a little brick Italianate townhouse with a sloping side porch and no grass in the yard. The house hid behind Eddie Maple’s old colonial mansion on Union Avenue, the wide street of towering estates that ran from the park to the racetrack and then broke into a narrow highway out to the lake. The mansion’s yard housed great pine trees that shed their needles on Eliza’s tiny plot of land, making grass impossible. The yard was still nothing but dirt, spotted with piles of dog droppings.

  Inside he saw the same warped pine floorboards and peeling wallpaper, the puce-colored couch backed against the wall. The whole living room was drowning in books, books on shelves and on the floors, great piles of the things leaning anywhere they could.

  “Where’d you get all these books?” he asked, picking up an oversize hardcover with dark photographs of jazz musicians. “Do you get a discount on all these?”

  Stevie Ray called from the kitchen, “She gets the five-finger discount,” and he heard Eliza scold him.

  One bookcase was made up entirely from the self-help section, he noticed. Codependent No More. The Dance of Anger. Even a couple of classics he recognized: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Every book on the top shelf had the word “Divorce” in the title.

  “Who’s divorced?” he called.

  From the kitchen he thought he heard someone say, “You are.” But that couldn’t be.

  “Did the Kessels split up?” he asked Nora. She didn’t respond. He leafed through How to Survive Your Parents’ Divorce. “I bet that old hippie got himself a Ferrari and a tight young piece of ass.”

  “Oh shut up, Belly,” said Nora, pushing gently on his lower back to steer him toward the kitchen. He stopped, and reached back to press her hand harder on his sacrum, to see if she’d massage the maelstrom right out of him. “Move,” she said.

  The kitchen had undergone such extensive renovation it belonged in another house. Warm terra cotta tile—the kind they’d had years ago in their hotel room in Florida—and a doublewide fridge that took up half the east wall.

  Eliza sat at the table with King. Belly ran his hand along it, a huge slab of oak. “It’s called a farmer’s table,” she said.

  “You need one of these,” he said to Nora.

  “If someone fixes mine, I won’t need to buy one.”

  A small dog wound his way into the kitchen.

  “What’s this thing?” he asked.

  “This is Audrey,” Eliza said, her face nestled into King’s neck. “My dog.”

  “What kind is it?”

  “A mutt.”

  “I’ll say.” Belly pulled a stool up to the stainless steel island in the middle of the kitchen. “This dog is an insult to the memory of Seaver.” He looked at its runny black eyes. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “She’s going blind. She’s diabetic.”

  The boys chased Audrey around the kitchen table, reaching for her skeletal tail. The dog ran to Belly and hid behind him, her tail flopping between his legs.

  Nora said, “Jimi, don’t you touch that dog.”

  “She kind of reminds me of your husband,” Belly said. “Where is the guy, anyway? I thought he had summers off, gets to sit around all day and read books for money, or something.”

  “It’s just us,” Eliza said, without elaborating. She handed the baby back to Nora and stood up. Her spindly little legs jutted out from a batiked miniskirt, her shoulder blades like wings poking under her shirt.

  The table was set already and Eliza took a saucepan and a wooden spoon and dropped a pile of beige mush on each plate. The boys took their places at the table, frowning at their dishes. Belly saw them look up at their mother and saw her nod her head, a whole dictionary of movement that only parent and child could read.

  On a small plate in the center of the table was Eliza’s egg sandwich from two days ago, cut into triangles and rearranged to look like a sailboat.

  “Come to the table, Belly.”

  The dog followed him as he sat down, and he asked, “What are you serving us here, Eliza?”

  “Millet,” she said. “Very high in riboflavin.”

  “Well, thank God. I can just feel the riboflavin deficiency I developed in jail.”

  Stevie Ray actually cracked a smile, but Jimi began to cry softly. “I don’t want to, Mommy, I don’t want to eat this,” he whispered.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” said Eliza, holding a wiener on a fork. “I made NotDogs.” He stopped crying and Eliza put it on his plate and Nora cut it up into bite-sized pieces.

  Everyone ate in silence until Belly said, “What’s going on here? Where’s Henry?”

  “Well,” Eliza said. “Belly, I wanted you to come over today so I could tell you something.”

  Nora and the children looked at their plates.

  This had happened to him before. An intervention. Way back in the dark ages of the O’Leary family he had woken up one summer midday to find all his children and his wife and mother and even his no-good drunk of a brother there to tell him he had to go to rehab. But now he wasn’t drinking, and no coke, not at this moment, and he hadn’t hit anyone in years, and he felt the bile rise in his throat as his family cornered him like they were trapping a feral cat. “Whatever it is, no,” he said.

  “Well, you don’t actually have a say in it, Belly.”

  “You know, you girls have got to stop interfering in your old man’s life.”

  “Belly, just listen to me,” said Eliza.

  “What do you mean interfering? I’m the one taking care of you,” said Nora.

  “What do you mean, taking care of me? I’m not your child.”

  “Prove it,” Nora said.

  “Oh, fine, go ahead, lay it on me. What did I do wrong?”

  Eliza took a sip of organic juice. “Nothing, Belly. This isn’t about you. Believe it or not, this is about me.”

  “Oh.” He looked at Nora and she shook her head at him.

  “Yes. I wanted to tell you that I’m going to Alabama.”

  “When? Why?” Belly carved an x in the thick mush of millet. “Alabama’s not even a real state.”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow and I’m going to study with a woman at the University of Alabama.”

  “Study what?”

  “You know that book I made you? I’m going to do more things like that. They have a master’s program in Tuscaloosa.”

  “Tuscaloosa, what the hell are you talking about? Tuscaloosa,” he howled. He looked at his family and they were laughing. At him. They were laughing at him. “Tuscaloosa to make crafts.” He felt the unspeakable piercing of sobriety. “Tuscaloosa.”

  “Book arts,” she said.

  “What would you want to go and do such a thing for? You’re thirty years old, Eliza. You should be staying home and having some children.” Belly looked around the table at his family. Jimi munched away on a fake hot dog and Nora sipped her water and Stevie Ray looked right at him, a little smirk lining his lips. The baby rested in Eliza’s arms and stared up at her.

  “Wipe that smile off your face, young man.”

  “Whatever,” said Stevie Ray. “Ask her who’s paying for it.”

  “You know what, Stevie? We don’t need your input here,” said Nora
.

  Eliza stroked the baby’s hair. “Ann is paying for it all.”

  “Jesus,” Belly said. “She’s paying you to leave your husband. Why do you think that is? She’s trying to convert you.”

  “Oh, please,” Nora said. “That’s the best one yet.”

  “You can’t go,” Belly said. “Stevie Ray’s getting confirmed on Sunday and I just got here.”

  “I don’t care,” said Stevie Ray. “I think it’s cool.”

  “You shut up,” Belly told him.

  “Don’t tell Stevie to shut up. Apologize to him.” Nora wagged her pointer finger at Belly.

  “You tell him to shut up all the time,” Belly yelled. “He should be a good boy and keep his mouth shut.”

  “You shut up, Grampa.”

  Belly pushed his chair back and hovered over his grandson with his hand raised like a big white flag.

  “Don’t you dare put a hand to my son,” said Nora, standing too. “Belly, you sit in your seat and be quiet and listen to your daughter.” She put a hand on his shoulder and pressed down. “Sit,” she said.

  “Daddy, sit down. Sit down. It’s okay. Everything’s okay. I talked to Stevie Ray about it before and he doesn’t mind, and Nora doesn’t mind.”

  “So you all talked about this behind my back.” He speared a piece of hot dog and shoved it in his mouth. The hot dog tasted like rubber and he spat it out. “You go on and on about me being there and you’re not even going to show yourself.”

  Eliza adjusted the baby on her lap. “Belly, I feel bad that I’m leaving so soon after you’re back. But I just have to go. I’m sorry. I have to.”