On the table was a note in her father’s wobbly scrawclass="underline" “Irene—Dinner Wednesday Palmer’s. Dress nice.”
“What’s this about?” Irene asked. Matty shrugged, reached for a cookie. His hair was mussed, and a pair of zits decorated his chin, but his father’s bone structure hid beneath the baby fat. The kid had no idea how handsome he was going to be.
“These are pretty incredible,” Matty said finally.
“I was about to say, you shoulda tasted Grandma Mo’s, but Buddy’s may be better.”
“So was it a job interview?” he asked.
“What? Oh, the skirt.”
“And the makeup.”
“I wear makeup.”
“Not since Pittsburgh. And, uh, it’s all smeared.”
She dabbed at the corner of her eye. “It’s not been a good day,” she said. She put on a smile to reassure him. He didn’t look convinced. “So how was your day? Is Frankie behaving?”
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.
“Neither did you. How about this—we go one for one. You answer mine, I’ll answer yours.”
“Like you’re really going to answer my questions.”
She laughed. “I will!”
He frowned, looking for loopholes in the deal. Teddy would have been proud. “All right,” he said. “But there’s a three-question limit.”
“You strike a hard bargain, Mr. Telemachus. So is that your first question—was I at a job interview?”
“You’re just going to say no, then ask me a question. So let’s make this short-answer: Where did you go?”
“To see a friend.”
“Was it the guy you talk to on the computer?”
“How did you—? And that’s two questions.”
“I’ll use both of them to hear this,” he said. “And it wasn’t hard to figure out. You’re on the computer all the time. I figured it had to be a guy.”
“I could be a lesbian,” she said.
“Really?”
“His name is Joshua.”
“Josh-u-a,” he said. “Josh. The Joshinator.”
“So how is it working with Frankie?” she asked. She could see that he wanted to bolt from the table.
“It’s fine,” he said. Then realized that wasn’t the truth. “It’s…intense.”
“Intense how?”
“Two questions,” he said.
“I also think this answer is worth it.”
“It got…I don’t know. Uncle Frankie expects, like, a lot out of me? I don’t think I can do everything he wants me to do.”
“Oh God, is he trying to rope you into that UltraLife stuff?”
Matty looked embarrassed.
“Jesus, you’re a kid. I’m so sorry, Matty. I’ll tell him to keep you out of it.”
“No! I mean, he’s not involving me in that. It’s just that working with him is hard, because he’s so…”
“Intense?” Irene said. “And grandiose?”
“That’s it,” he said. “Intensely grandiose.”
“I shouldn’t have pushed you into working with him,” she said. “I just thought you’d like it.”
“You didn’t push me into it. I want to do it, to make you some money—”
“Make me some money?”
He flushed again. “Make us some money, I mean.” That was the truth as well.
“Honey, that’s not your job,” she said. “I make the money. You’re the kid. I don’t want you to go through what I did.”
His eyes widened. “You mean like the ESP stuff?”
“No, I mean—” She wished he wasn’t so excited by the showbiz history. “I had to become an adult before my time. When Mom died, I was just ten, and suddenly I was the one having to take care of Frankie and Buddy. Even your grandfather.”
Matty picked up another cookie, looked at it for a long moment. “Frankie said Grandma Mo was so powerful the Russians had to kill her.”
“Frankie’s a conspiracy theorist. He also says the Astounding Archibald killed her. Or is Archibald a Russian spy now?”
“I know but…”
“But what?”
“She was a spy, right? She worked for the CIA?”
She worked for Destin Smalls, Irene thought. “She was employed by the government. I’m not quite sure which agency.”
“So did they, like…train her?”
“What?”
“I mean, someone like that, they would have taught her how to—”
“They taught her nothing.”
Irene’s anger came sudden as the bite of glass under a bare foot. There was something she’d forgotten. Something about Destin Smalls. But the memory refused to show itself.
“Mom?” Matty looked concerned.
“She was a natural talent,” Irene said. She cleared her throat. “They took advantage of her, and used her, and then she got sick. No big mystery.”
Irene remembered that morning, seven months before her mother died, that Irene found her sitting on the edge of the bed, crying. Then she’d wiped away her tears and driven off with Destin Smalls. That memory, at least, was clear and sharp.
“Why are you asking about this stuff?” Irene said.
“No reason,” he said. A lie.
“Stop it. There’s a reason.”
“This isn’t fair,” Matty said. “You have an advantage. But you lie to me and I’ll never know it.”
“I’ve answered all your questions truthfully and to the best of my ability,” she said.
He twisted his mouth into his thinking face. Planning his next move. “Okay, so this Joshua guy. Do you love him?”
She wiped her face with her napkin. “I’ve only met him in person once,” she said. “Just this morning.”
He laughed. “You are really not answering the question.”
“It doesn’t matter if I love him,” she said.
A memory was unspooling out of the dark: Destin Smalls and her father, standing in the living room, both of them looking at her.
“It’s not going to work out,” she said. She recognized doomed romance when she saw it.
Destin Smalls picked up her mother every morning, and dropped her off every afternoon. She learned to hate the arrival of his car, a gleaming hulk with a grill as wide as a whale’s baleen, and the way her mother hurried out to it. Eager. Laughing sometimes. In the afternoons Irene would watch from the front window as her mother sat in the car with Smalls, talking and talking, delaying her return to the house, her return to her children and husband. Her return to her duties.
Her mother seemed exhausted by whatever she did all day with Destin Smalls. When she was too tired to make dinner, she’d sit in the kitchen with Buddy on her lap, and instruct Irene on how to cook, only getting out of her seat in emergencies. When Dad came up out of the basement for the meal, he’d heap praise on Irene. She was happy to do the work, until the day she told her mother she’d rather play with her friend.
“We’re not playing now, we’re making dinner,” her mother said.
“Marcie’s waiting for me,” ten-year-old Irene said. “You make dinner.”
“Just put the ground beef in the pan,” her mother said, exhausted.
“First, brown the meat,” Buddy said. He was standing beside her chair, arms draped over her shoulders.
“That’s right,” their mother said.
“This isn’t fair,” Irene said.
“First brown the meat!” Buddy yelled. He didn’t like it when anyone argued with Mom.
As the summer wore on, her mother sometimes wouldn’t stay in the kitchen as she cooked. Mom would hand Irene a recipe card and then go up to her bedroom to rest. Irene liked it better that way.
One morning in late July or early August, her mother was still in the bathroom when Destin Smalls pulled up in his shiny huge car. Irene watched him from the living room, his big rectangle face swimming up to the windshield like a pale fish, peering up at the house. After a few minutes, he stepped out of the car. Irene jumped back from the window. His silhouette glided across the curtains. And then he rang the doorbell.