Nancy, from the kitchen, in a voice that almost topped Bud’s in pitch and command, said dramatically into the telephone (but so loudly that it was impossible to think of the phone as anything but a stage prop), “Look, I’m just going to have to call you back later!” Whereupon she slammed down the receiver, stalked past Bud and Suzy, and climbed the stairs to her bedroom, one hand firmly gripping the banister, the other held across her eyes as though the migraine brewing therein might just kill her this time, as if that’s what her family had been after all along.
They waited for her door to close before they resumed. Then they turned back on each other like cats in a tangle.
“Do you think”—Suzy’s fury was slow and leveled—“do you think I don’t work?” His oblivion was unfathomable to her. He imagined teaching to be a cushy sort of a pastime—like taking tickets at the movie theater, or babysitting a few afternoons a week—something that spoiled, lazy, loudmouthed girls like his daughter did so they didn’t have to work real jobs. Like what? Like running a hotel that was only open two months a year? By the time Suzy spoke again, she was shrieking. “I work twelve-hour days, five days a week. On the weekends I grade papers, I plan lessons, I advise three different extracurricular activities, I sell Oreos at intermission of the goddamn school play! Teachers get three months in the summer because we work so fucking hard the other nine months of the year, and I didn’t come here during my vacation to scrub toilets for six bucks an hour!” Suzy’s face was boiling red, and she was gesticulating wildly with her arms. “Did you ever have any intention of looking for someone to replace Lorna, or did you just figure it’d be easier if I did it this season and you’d deal with it in the fall when you had some more time on your hands?”
They stood, faced off, as she waited for an answer and he waited for the wrath to continue as it always did. He’d learned that sometimes the only way was to ride it through, let her tire herself out, the way you’d contend with a child’s tantrum.
They stood, glaring at each other, Suzy’s breath heaving now, the only other sound the chink and buzz of the window-unit air conditioner. It whirred and clicked and spun, and then it double-clicked, spat a hiss, and wound itself down for a brief thermostatic hiatus. In the silence that followed, Bud finally said, “Are you finished?”
Suzy said nothing. There was nothing to say. She spun around, threw open the front door, and walked out.
RODDY HAD STOPPED AT the Squires’ cottage around eight-thirty that morning, but there were no signs of waking life inside. At ten he knocked again. No answer. He tried the outer door, which was unlocked, but the screen was latched from the inside. Roddy could see in, through to Lance’s bedroom, where Lance lay sprawled across the bed, fully clothed, dead asleep. Further inside, the door to Squee’s room was also open, the boy a lump under a sheet, a blond mop of hair poking out at the top. Roddy stood for a moment, frozen, to make sure he could see Squee’s body rising and falling with his breath.
When Roddy came by again at noon, Lance was standing at the kitchen sink, ashing his cigarette into the drain. Squee was at the table, a bowl of cereal before him, though he was clearly not eating. He held the spoon in the milk as if he were about to eat but couldn’t remember the next step. His eyes were blank. He looked small, and anemic, and gray, and it made Roddy very afraid. But before he could say anything or even make a move toward the boy, Lance was laying into Roddy as if it were high school all over again.
“Ro-od-LESS!” Lance cheered. When they were kids, if Roddy so much as spoke to a girl, the ribbing from Lance and Chas and Jimmy Waters and all of them was relentless. It had been enough back then to pretty much keep Roddy from attempting to even make eye contact with anyone of the opposite sex. Lance stood beside the kitchen sink, cigarette in one hand, and lifted his arms and swiveled his hips in a burlesque move that was as embarrassing as it was awkward. “Woo-woo!” Lance hooted. “It’s Roddy the Rodless Wonder Boy!”
Roddy shot him a look: Not in front of Squee, at least not in front of Squee. At the same moment he caught sight of one of the Irish girls coming out of the staff quarters. Without pausing to second-guess, he pushed back open the door through which he’d just entered and called out to her across the path. It was Peg, whom he recognized, though he didn’t know her name. “Good morning!” he called. She looked up, then away, and continued toward the Lodge. “Miss!” Roddy shouted. “Um . . . Miss? Hello?” Peg stopped, looked around to locate the person being addressed, saw no one, then looked to the Squires’ porch and saw Roddy. She lifted two fingers to her breastbone—Me?—and then looked around again, making sure she hadn’t missed anyone lurking in the trees.
“Hi!” Roddy called again. “Hey, you’re one of the housekeeping girls, right? Hey, could you . . . Suzy wanted Squee here to help with something down in the Lodge—you think you could bring him down there with you, make sure he finds Suzy? That’d be great . . .”
“Of course,” Peg said, her brow knitted as though this new task might require a great intensity of focus. She waited, on edge, as if for the starter’s gun.
“Squee,” Roddy called gruffly. He didn’t look at the boy, just flicked his head. “Get down there, help Suzy,” he ordered, in a voice more Lance’s than his own. With one hand he held the screen door open. Roddy didn’t look at Lance, lest Lance take the opportunity to object. Instead, he squinted into the distance as though trying to make out something he couldn’t quite see.
Squee let his spoon fall into his cereal bowl and, also without looking at his father, walked stiffly across the room, past Roddy and outside. On the path, Peg clapped her hands to her thighs as if calling a puppy to come. The boy held the banister as he descended the porch steps, and there was something wrong about his carriage: he was off-center, or lopsided, as if favoring one side of his body but not sure which. When he’d made it to Peg—who put her arm around his shoulder and walked beside him down toward the Lodge—Roddy let the screen door close. Slowly he turned to face Lance, who was nodding his head with a patronizing swagger. “You got talking to do, Rodless. How’d you get in with that, old boy? Who’d ever think you’d grow up such a big stud? Such a fucking ladies’ man . . . RodLESS!” he cheered again.
Roddy took a big breath. “How’s things going, Lance?”
Lance looked around himself as if to assess his own situation right then and there. He looked down at yesterday’s clothes, unclean when he’d put them on. “Life’s a fucking piece of shit,” he said brightly, his smile pinched with sarcasm. “But who the hell cares about me? Who cares about me when our own little Rodless Dickless Rod is fucking the boss’s daughter? She good, Dickless? You know, I know how good she is, Rodless. You know, I fucked little Miss Chizek back then, when all you could do was cream your bed over her at night. Remember how it was back then, Rodless? Remember how much you wanted that fucking . . . that . . . You know, I’d’ve given her to you, buddy, back then, you know?” Here Lance’s eyes started to well with tears, and he lifted his cigarette to his lips and drew in long and hard. “I didn’t need . . .” He choked, coughed, took another long drag. When he spoke again his voice was wet and ragged. “I didn’t need that. I had Lorna. What’d I need with fucking Suzy Chizek? Suzy-fucking-Bud’s-daughter Chizek. I didn’t fucking need that shit.” Lance ground his cigarette out into the stained porcelain sink. “Get the fuck out of here,” Lance said, and turned on his heel, slamming the bathroom door behind him.