“Sure.”
“I know you will. You’ll be so good to me. I’ll be all old and gray and all the sturdy young men on the plain will be in love with you. They’ll come by on their motorcycles or in their fast cars and they’ll have dark shining hair and straight white teeth and they’ll be tall and beautiful. You have to promise me you’ll go with them.”
The girl snorted.
“And I’ll fry you eggs early in the morning, and butter you a thick piece of cold bread, and I’ll slice the bacon myself, and bring you hot chocolate, and you’ll sit on the wood rail fence in your nightgown, and I’ll put my jacket over your shoulders, and we’ll balance our plates on our knees and watch the sun come up while we eat. And when I have to leave the house to go to work you’ll wait for me, won’t you? You’ll sit on the fence and watch the dirt road till you see me coming back home to you.”
“Will you be on the old horse?”
“Oh, you sweet girl. I’ll be that horse. Look at me. I am that sad old horse. I’ll come stumbling up the edge of the road. So tired. But if you put your face very close, here, to my breath—here, closer, like that—and if you listen carefully, you’ll hear me whisper. Come up. Let’s go get the world while there’s still some of it worth getting.”
They sat very still.
“You want to?”
She opened her eyes. “Yes.”
“Okay?”
“You mean really?”
“I mean really. Ready or not. How long do you need to pack?”
She grinned. “Oh please,” she said. “About one minute.”
He tipped back his soda and went aaaaahhhhh and grinned at her. “Wouldn’t it be fun if we could?”
“Can’t we?”
“Of course not, stupid.”
The dear girl. How could she not carry Lamb with her, all the grassy fields he painted hanging between her little face and the world, bright screens printed with the images he made for her: flashes of green and silver; huge birds circling in the wind; the wet brown eye of a horse; yellow eggs on a breakfast dish; the curve of their backs atop a weathered rail fence on a cool blue morning.
When she returned home the night after their tailgate picnic, it was almost dark. Lamb watched her go in and wait in the dirty yellow light for the steel elevator doors to open. She’d travel up the nine floors with a skinny boy whose face was lumpy and red with acne. He lived on fourteen. He wore skinny black jeans and a silver chain from his front pocket to the back. He might smirk and point his eyes at Tommie like he was hungry, and didn’t she know what for?
“What happened to your face?” he would ask her. “Did someone put a colander over your head and spray diarrhea on you?” He crossed his hands behind his head and leaned back against the metal wall. “I have a special lotion that’ll take them off. If you want me to spread some of it on you.”
Tommie would stare ahead until the boy spat across the car to the dented steel wall upon which she’d fixed her gaze. A yellow-brown glob would slide down the metal, and Tommie would shut her eyes, the bees and white heads of flowers nodding in the warm daylight and the silhouette of Gary’s baseball cap written across the inside of her skull.
Her mom and her mom’s boyfriend would be on the new couch watching TV, two plates greased and salted and peppered before them on the coffee table. The boyfriend—we’ll call him Jessie—would turn around when Tommie opened the door with her key.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Jenny’s.”
“Your mom just called there.”
“I took the long way home.” Her hair falling in tangled strings about her shoulders and her skin gray in the weak light.
“It’s not safe for you to be out walking around there alone in the dark, baby,” her mother would call out from the couch.
“Okay.”
“What do you mean okay?” Jessie would say, the girl’s mother lifting her drowsy head from Jessie’s lap.
“I won’t do it again.”
Say she stood there watching them watch the screen for a minute. Two minutes. Three. No one saying anything.
“I know someone who died watching TV.”
“No you don’t.” Jessie turning from the screen to look at her.
“Hey, baby. Come over here and say hello.” Her mother would be a little round, soft, heavy. Her hair short, all her movements slow and tired. Tired all the time. “Are you hungry?”
“Well, not someone I know,” Tommie might say, coming around the couch. “Just someone I heard about. One of my teacher’s dads.”
“He was probably old.”
“It just goes to show, you know. You die the way you live.”
“Who told you that?”
“Some families do other stuff.”
“Tommie, your mother is tired. She’s been working her butt off for you all day. We sit here worrying about you, wondering where the hell is Tommie, and the first thing you do when you come home is tell us you don’t get enough attention.” Jessie might raise his voice, his neck very straight and head lifted toward her but his eyes pointed at the television.
“Give me a kiss. And go take a shower,” Mom might say. “You smell like a puppy dog. Where were you all day?”
“Making mud pies.”
“There isn’t any mud around here,” Jessie would say.
“You have everything ready for school?”
“Yep.”
Then Tommie would go into the bathroom and move all her mother’s and Jessie’s things out of the way and fill up the tub and sneak her mother’s razor to shave her legs. First time.
The first Monday after his father’s funeral, a dark belly of heavy, low-hanging sky split open before the first line of daylight had cracked the eastern horizon. Rain splashed against the concrete and pooled in colored puddles of grease. The chilly images a forerunner of winter, an early glimpse of those dark mornings and afternoons that fill a Midwesterner’s heart with dread.
Miserable in jeans and his father’s ball cap nearly soaked a dark and even blue, David Lamb went in early to work, to pack up and clear out his desk. When Wilson came by in his long coat, still shaking out a cool slime of rain from his dark umbrella, Lamb sat down on the edge of his desk and faced the doorway.
“I’m sorry, David.” Wilson stood in the doorway. There may have been a time when Wilson would have called him Lamb. Would have had David and Cathy over for dinner with his wife and two daughters at Wilson’s house in Evanston, the kitchen full of clear, steady light glancing off the metal lake outside the French doors.
There was a time ten years earlier when he and Wilson met after work to talk about the five-year plan, the ten-year, and the twenty. Cheerfully bent on establishing their own firm, and equal partners. They took a vacation together, then two, with their wives, with Wilson’s girls.
“He was a good guy,” Wilson said.
“Thanks.”
Wilson held a stainless-steel mug of coffee before him like an offering, raising it a little in anticipation of stepping back and excusing himself.
“It’s been one thing after another,” Lamb said.
“Family in town?”