The Favor Read online

  The sudden silence is thicker than the cigar smoke fog.

  Then Gabe’s dad says quietly, significantly, “Little pitchers, Archie. Little fucking pitchers.”

  Gabe acts as if he didn’t hear what Archie said, or at least didn’t understand it, and in another half a minute the men are back to their laughter and jokes. Money’s tossed on the table along with a watch, a pocketknife, a slip of paper scrawled with an IOU. It’s become serious business, and Gabe’s not invited to play.

  He sneaks away upstairs, where the gables are so steep you can stand upright only in the center of the room, and if you’re on top of one of the six sets of bunk beds you’d better watch your head if you sit up too fast. He has a top bunk, of course, away from the rest of them. The room’s cold enough to show his breath, but he’s warm in his sleeping bag. His eyes droop. He sleeps.

  He’s woken by the sound of shouting from outside. Blinking, Gabe sits, forgetting the slope of the ceiling. Stars explode in his vision when his forehead connects with the slatted wood. Something that might be a spider, please Jesus, not a spider, skitters across his lips and he swipes at it frantically. The pain’s so fierce, so bright, he thinks it has made him blind.

  Of course, it’s just the darkness. Gabe twists in his sleeping bag to look out the window. The glass is rimed around the edges, but the center’s clear. Everything’s so cold in the room, even his breath, it hardly frosts the rest of the glass.

  Outside is a lot brighter than in, because of the fire in the pit and the single spotlight. The snow around the pit has melted, the dirt beneath churned to mud. Benches made from split logs ring the fire, and one of them’s been knocked over. Mud streaks the snow, which even farther from the pit has been gouged down to bare ground in places. That’s because of the men who are fighting, Gabe thinks, his brain still a little blurry from the whack he gave his bean on the ceiling.

  It’s his dad; he knows that at once. Ralph Tierney fights when he drinks. His friends know it, though it never stops them from offering that next beer.

  “You stupid bastard!” Ralph shouts, fists raised. Fluid that must be blood, but looks black, leaks from his nose. His thinning hair stands on end. His red-and-black-checked flannel shirt flaps open to reveal the stained white T-shirt beneath it. Gabe’s dad is muscular and lean most everywhere but his belly, which sticks out now. “You stupid, loud-mouthed, lousy son of a bitch!”

  “Jesus, Ralph, simmer down!” That’s Archie, whose friends all know he does have a loud mouth, the way they know Ralph gets fisty after his sixth or seventh Straub’s greenie. “How was I supposed to know?”

  “You should’ve thought about it, you stupid...” Ralph seems to lose steam at that. He staggers.

  Gabe turns away, feeling sick. The floorboards creak. It’s Eddie with a palm-size flashlight, hand cupped over the light to keep it from blinding anyone.

  “Go back to sleep, kid.”

  “I am.” Gabe scoots down into the sleeping bag, though he’s pretty sure it will be a long time before he can sleep.

  Eddie moves closer. He’s the youngest of Ralph’s friends, part of the group because his older brother, Frank, went to school with them all, plus Eddie married Archie’s younger sister, Denita. Eddie wears wire-rimmed glasses that always slip down his nose, and he pushes them up now as he looks out the window.

  “It’s just Archie,” he says supercasually. “Running off his mouth. He should know better than to piss off your dad.”

  Gabe says nothing. Archie ran his mouth about a lot of things; that wasn’t new. But what he ran his mouth about...that had been different.

  “He doesn’t know when to shut up, that’s all.”

  Gabe doesn’t look at Eddie. “He was talking about my dad’s...girlfriend.”

  The word tastes funny. Men Ralph’s age oughtn’t to have girlfriends. They should have wives, or old-maid sisters who did for them. Or housekeepers like Mrs. Moser, who’d been with them since Gabe was little. But girlfriend is a nicer word than whore, which is what Archie had called her.

  Eddie snorts softly. The light from outside flashes on his glasses when he turns. “Your dad has a girlfriend?”

  “I thought that’s what Archie meant.”

  “No. It was shitty of him to say it like that, but he meant your dad’s old lady. His wife. Your mom.”

  Gabe’s throat closes. His body goes stiff, like stone. He can’t move anything but his mouth, and he wishes he couldn’t move that because then he couldn’t answer. “I guess Archie’s an idiot then, because it couldn’t have been my mom. My mom’s dead.”

  A slow, awkward hiss of air slips from Eddie’s mouth. He moves closer. “Jesus, kid. I’m sorry.... I think it’s rotten your dad has been lying to you. But it’s gonna come out sometime or other.”

  Gabe manages to turn his head on the pillow and prop himself up to look at the man. “My mom’s dead.”

  Eddie shakes his head slowly. He smells like wood smoke and beer, and he’s clearly drunker than Gabe thought he was, because he wobbles a little when he bends to unlace his boot. He pushes it off with the toe of the other, then takes a break with a sigh. Eddie scratches at his face, then his hair. His face is nothing but shadow except for the twin bright disks of his glasses, reflecting the firelight coming in the window. It makes his eyes look as if they’re on fire.

  “I’m sorry to tell you, kid. But she’s not.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  GETTING BENNETT TO take a shower was not yet monumentally difficult, but it was a whole lot harder than it had been even a year ago.

  “It’s cold!” he complained, hopping from foot to foot, already in his pajamas.

  Compared to California, it was cold. Still, that was no excuse. “You can’t go to school looking like a hobo. I’m sure your friends’ mothers don’t let them go to school in ripped clothes with knots in their hair, either.”

  “Who cares?” he cried, suddenly vehement. “Who cares what anyone there thinks about anything, anyway?”

  “I care,” she said.

  “It’s my hair! My clothes! I should be able to decide what I want.”

  Without thinking, Janelle ran her fingers through her own hair, which was sleek and without tangles. How many times had she fought the hairbrush? How often had she been allowed to face the world with a dirty face and clothes because her dad had been more concerned about being fun than firm?

  “It’s my job as your mother to make sure you are taken care of and that you learn to take care of yourself,” Janelle told him. “No arguments. This is not a negotiation. Get in there and shower. Wash and comb your hair.”

  He stared at her, fists clenched, brow furrowed. Scowling. For a minute, Janelle thought he wasn’t going to go, but then he turned, muttering things under his breath she didn’t have the strength to ask him to repeat. She remembered the day she’d figured out her mother couldn’t actually force her to do anything she didn’t want to do. She’d never thought about the day when Bennett would figure out the same thing.

  “It’s my job,” she said softly.

  Then

  On the TV is some weird program showing how to make a telephone out of some string and two soup cans. It looks like fun. Daddy and Uncle Marty and Uncle Bobby and Uncle Joey are all sitting around the table with their beers and pizza, playing cards. Nan’s at work. Janelle’s eyes are droopy, but she wants to stay up until Nan gets home so it will be easier to sleep late tomorrow. If she gets up too early, she’ll make too much noise, and Daddy will yell.

  Nan comes home in her white nurse’s uniform. She hollers at all the guys to clean up their stuff and go home, but not like she’s mad. She even eats a piece of pizza with them before noticing Janelle still on the couch.

  “What’s that girl doing up?” Nan shakes her head. “No rules. You’re raising her like a wild animal, Ricky.”

  Daddy looks over at Janelle and gestures for her to come to him. She does, her eyes heavy with sleep, stifling a yawn she doesn’t want Nan to