“You know,” Eric said, “I wish I could say things like that, sometimes.”
Mike raised an eyebrow. Then he chuckled and glanced at Eric. “You could — nobody’s really gonna care. Least ways nobody who knows I brought you up.” Then he added. “Course sometimes you gotta think twice about who you say it around.” He shrugged. “It’s just a kind of cussin’, I guess.”
And thirty-five minutes later they were on 31 East, where Barb had said they should be.
Mike muttered, “It’s at the end of Front Street…” He looked under the sunshade.
“This is Front Street.” Eric sat forward on the gray upholstery. “We just passed Front Street Drugs & Hardware.”
“But it’s closed up — ”
“It’s still Front Street,” Eric insisted. “Hey, there it is!”
“This is the end…?” Mike slowed. “It ain’t a whole block.”
By the docks, blue siding framed a plate glass window with café curtains pushed back and blinds. On the pane, a gold and black decal of a lighthouse was fixed beside black letters —
LIGHTHOUSE
COFFEE,
EGG
& BACON
— to suggest an aquarium’s interior, the window’s floor, visible under the half-lowered slats, was covered with coral, green, and blue pebbles — though it was without fish, ceramic anchors, even a menu. Above, rust reddened the seams between the awning’s pink and green panels.
Mike said, “I’m pullin’ around with those cars near the water.” The tires crunched into a small gravel lot, where three old pickups, two fairly new cars, and five old ones parked. Beyond, was the sea. “Yeah, that’s your mama’s Honda. She’s still drivin’ that thing — ?”At the top of some steps of triple-width white cinderblocks stood a screen door. On one side ran a pipe railing, bright yellow. A plank ramp sloped from the other. It didn’t look too steady.
Eric opened the car and again realized the discrepancy between the heat-drenched sunlight and the green tinted car window, which — with the air conditioning — had made the outside look ten degrees cooler than it was. As he stepped to the gravel and stood, he heard the ga-lunk of the door on Mike’s side, opening.
Then the screen banged back on the wall and a woman in a blue waitress smock and no makeup came down one step, hesitating — as if she might rush back in.
Till age twenty-seven, Barbara had been stunningly attractive, if a little less sure of herself than she might have been. At thirty-four, from the self-assurance of having men so often want her, she was becoming both matronly and handsome. The woman on the steps — his mother, Eric realized after a breath, with surprise — was both excited and happy.
Eric called, “Hey, Barb…!” Behind him he pushed the car door closed. From the slam, he realized he had pushed it harder than he’d meant: some of the excitement was his. Over the Chevy’s roof, Mike stood up.
“Oh, my God…” Barbara’s smock had a white collar. Inside it, a gold chain crossed low on her throat. “Oh, my…oh, my God…you’ve gotten so…big! I mean, you’re…” In wonder, she shook her head. Her blond hair was pinned up. “Your arms are…they’re as big as your dad’s!”
Eric walked toward his mother, thinking with the first step, her skin’s a little looser beside her eyes, at her wrists: She’s older…And, at his second: She’s heavier. He said, “You look so…” and surprised himself — “wonderful…!” Which was not what he’d started to say — but she did.
“It’s so good to see you!” Barbara turned her smile on her ex-husband: “And it’s good to see you, Mike. It really is. It’s good to see you…both! Come in.” In blue flats, Barb stepped down a step. “Come in. Have a cup of coffee.”
Mike said, “You want me to run Eric’s stuff up to wherever it is you’re — ?”
Barb came down the last step —
— and Barbara and Eric hugged.
It was sudden — and surprised Eric.
“Oh, honey…it’s so good — so good to see you!” By Eric’s ear she sounded happy, and he was surprised to remember the deepening in her voice that signaled it. He hadn’t thought of it in the year-and-a-half since he’d last seen her in Florida. Eric didn’t particularly recognize her scent, but Barb had always liked different perfumes; and there wasn’t a lot of it. Eric felt awkward and pleased and…happy, too.
Behind them, Mike laughed.
When Eric stepped back, so did Barb. “I wasn’t expecting you to have…well, grown so. What were you doing this morning? Working on the car?”
Eric realized that must be some automotive odor held over from the men at Turpens — which, he realized now, even he could smell. He smiled, trying not to look proud. Barb looked at Mike and repeated: “How did he get so…?” But she kept an arm around Eric.
Mike was smiling, too.
She guided Eric up the steps and through the screen door. “Come in, you two. Meet Clem — and see where I work.”
As they came in the side door, a country and western song Eric thought had been running through the back of his mind grew loud enough to recognize was coming from a booth CD player. The wood walled room had no air conditioning, but the tan blades of two ceiling fans turned above.
It was a little cooler.
In the room several men and a few women sat, most in booths along the side under the old faux-deco CD selectors, and three others at tables. Standing at the side counter, a heavy woman with orange hair, in another waitress smock, put down a coffee carafe on a tray covered with a checkered cloth, already stained with a spill.
“Clem — this is my son, Eric. I told you about him. This is Clem — Mrs. Englert. She runs the place. She’s my boss.”
“Clem Englert. Just call me Clem. Everybody here does.”
Half the people in the room twisted in their seats.
“Clem, this is Eric’s dad — Mike.”
And Eric recognized the two fellows in the side booth: the tall unshaven one, who’d written where to show up for work on Bill’s paper, and the light-skinned black kid across from him, with torn-off sleeves — in this light slightly darker than Eric but with kinky tan hair, the fuzz of a beard, and green eyes, near hazel, like the tall one’s. Still bare, his feet were apart on the floor planks. It took seconds to recognize it was really them: Dynamite and Shit!
At the truck stop john their names had been…well, eccentricities.
In the seaside café they were absurdities.
Eric stopped breathing. He stopped thinking. His vision momentarily fogged — but he didn’t stop walking. He blinked and looked away — only to realize then they had not looked at him any more than Ted had, back at the truck stop’s Parts & Notions.
His arm stiffened, but Eric made himself relax it around his mother’s back, hoping she would think it shyness before these strangers.
Last April, during spring vacation, the Sunday after the Saturday cocksucking marathon below the Atlanta highway, something had happened to Eric for the first time:
In the direction away from the overhead highway, two blocks beyond Mr. Condotti’s, where Montoya crossed Rosemont, was Entin’s Coffee Shop and Hamburgers, the Lamp Store and the Tobacco and Newspaper shop, the package store, and Ford’s Little Five Points Market. Mike and Eric had been strolling down to Ford’s to pick up salad makings — they’d done the staple shopping two days earlier — and were half a block away, when Eric recognized, standing before the iron gate over the package store window, the homeless black man, whom Eric had blown and who had blown Eric and all the other homeless guys the previous afternoon behind the Verizon sign. As Eric and Mike walked up, Eric’s throat dried, his heart started to pound — and Eric thought: He’s looking for me!