The Figgs, page 10
“That stuff is obviously not staying.” She pointed to the gear. Kicked a few tent pegs into a pile. “He just brought it in here to air out.”
June nodded. There was a nightstand in the corner with a small table lamp, the cord wrapped around its base.
“I picked that up at a garage sale last night,” she said. “Three bucks.”
June didn’t know if it was the nightstand or the lamp Jenny was referring to, but she knew they were for Jaxx because they were little. She clenched her teeth until her jaw ached.
“Did you see that?” Jenny asked.
June whirled around to the other side of the room. Spread across the wall in the shape of an arc was the name JAXX. The letters were two-feet tall and had been sprayed with a graffiti-type script in shades of blue, outlined in black.
“What do you think?” Jenny folded her hands beneath her chin in anticipation.
June thought the artwork was more suited to a railcar driven by a giraffe or a drug addict. “It’s nice,” she said flatly.
“I know,” she beamed. “Do you think Mr. Figg would want to see?”
“Yes,” June replied. “He’d be delighted.”
Jenny bounded up the stairs, leaving June behind to break down. A lead skeleton. She felt like she’d been hit by a train. An old one with a boiler, and a plough in front to scrape people off the track.
Randy came up behind her. Jenny had stayed upstairs to see people out. June heard the front door open and close. A cacophony of goodbyes and high fives and hinges. June pointed to the wall.
“JAW,” Randy said.
“Jaxx, Randy. It says Jaxx.”
Randy read it again. “Jawwwwxx?”
She turned to look at her husband. His hands were on his hips. It wasn’t registering. Jenny hadn’t explained.
“We’re looking at Derek’s room. Jaxx and Derek’s room.”
“What do you mean?”
“According to Jenny, Derek is planning to live here. With Jaxx.”
“No,” Randy said. “Tom said he’d switch rooms with Derek so there was enough space for the crib. This is a mistake.”
“You’re right,” June nodded. “It must be for another Jaxx.”
“But why would he move out? He’d have to pay rent. Did you tell him he had to pay rent? He can’t afford rent.”
“No, I didn’t tell him he’d have to pay rent.” She hugged herself.
“Well, I don’t get it. We had it all worked out.” Randy tugged at his facial hair. “The boys switching rooms, the childcare, the feedings. Are you sure you didn’t say anything to him?”
“No. I mean, we’ve both talked to the kids about taking some responsibility for their lives…” June’s voice trailed off. Amongst the tent pegs was a pack of rolling papers.
Randy picked up the lamp. There was a sad brown owl on the shade. “Well, June. I guess this is what responsibility looks like.”
“I hope you’re not implying that this is my fault. Is it my fault? I didn’t mean for Derek to move out. Not now. Not with Jaxx.”
Randy traced the owl with his finger. He was silent.
June turned to go, but she saw something in the closet. It was Percy. He’d been abducted. She charged over, and pulled him out by the neck.
“Why’s Percy here?”
“You said to get rid of him.”
“You authorized this?”
Randy’s eyes shifted nervously. “Derek just said he knew someone who wanted it.”
June grabbed Percy around the torso, crashed up the stairs and out the front door. She slid him into the trunk sideways and climbed in to the front seat. Adrenaline zipped through her like a pinball, and she hit the steering wheel once, twice, sixteen times. Her seatbelt locked, and she thrashed around until it loosened.
Randy’s container of macaroons rested on the centre console and nearly toppled when she pulled into traffic. Stupid coconut assholes. When she braked for a crosswalk, the container tumbled and the lid popped off. Ah, you. Stupid. She grabbed a handful to throw out the window and instead stuffed them into her mouth. She wanted to say terrible things. Use the foulest of language, but even in her rage it was against her sensibilities. Instead, she swallowed another, and yelled out the window the names of things she hated: zoos, Jenny, cottage cheese, Pierce Brosnan! She smacked her knuckle on the doorframe and accelerated through the stop sign.
Her phone rang inside her purse. She fished it out. It was Randy. She pressed decline. He could get a ride home with Leslie and Vanessa. At the next light, she collected the remaining macaroons between her legs, periodically moving them back into the container, hollering: bed skirts, cankers, cilantro, sushi, retirement, Glenda.
June pulled into the driveway, turned off the car, and wept into the steering wheel. Chocolate melted between her legs and coloured the seat an ugly brown. Her head throbbed. She closed her eyes, breathed in the smell of coconut, the scent of her family: workshop, pet store, recycling, orange peels, and the faintest hint of newborn. She wiped her eyes on a napkin. In the rear-view mirror, she saw Tom coming up the drive, his work backpack slung over his shoulder, wearing around his neck the kind of complicated headphones she imagined a technician at NASA would use to communicate with someone on a space walk. When he got close, he peered in through the back of the van. She lifted a hand to wave.
He came around to the passenger’s side and opened her door. “Whatcha doing out here?”
“Oh, Tom.” She motioned for him to sit.
“What’s wrong?” He tossed his backpack on the floor and climbed in.
“I’ve just come from the shower, and there was a room done up in the basement for Derek. It even had Jaxx’s name on the wall. Did Derek mention anything to you about moving out?”
“First I’ve heard of it.” Tom pulled a box of doughnuts out of his bag and offered June one. “You don’t want him to?”
“Not with Jaxx! At least not until things get settled.”
Tom shrugged, biting into a lemon-filled doughnut. “Want me to text him?”
“Would you? Tell him you don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Tom brushed powdered sugar from the seat and told Siri to text Derek.
June tore her doughnut in half. “These are Mom’s favourite,” she said, swiping some of the lemon filling with her finger.
“That’s why I bought them. I dropped in to see her after work.”
“Today? How come? Didn’t you just take her that puzzle yesterday?” June put down her doughnut. She’d missed her regular visit with her mother because of Jaxx’s birth, and now she was too exhausted to feel guilty.
He shrugged. “I wanted to drop something off.”
“How was she?”
“Good. I wasn’t there very long because some kids’ choir was coming in to perform.”
“Did she eat the doughnut?”
“She ate two.”
June smiled. “Of course she did.”
A squirrel ran across the backyard and scaled the fence.
“Thanks for doing that.”
Tom ate another doughnut, looked down. “Derek says he’s not for sure moving out.” He scrolled the surface of the phone with his thumb. “Says it depends on Vanessa.”
“Depends on Vanessa? Why Vanessa?”
“She and Leslie are looking at a place this afternoon.”
“They’ve only just met.”
“Nah. It’s been a few months.”
“Really? Still. She seems a little too old for Vanessa.”
“I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”
“No?”
“When’s the last time you heard Vanessa tell someone to go die in a hole?”
June thought. “Christmas?”
“March, but close.”
“She does seem a lot happier.” June looked at her son, the empty box on his seat, the giant headphones wrapped around his neck. “What about you? Are you happy?”
Tom exhaled. “Kind of thought I’d have a kid before Derek.”
“I always believed Derek would be first. I’m just glad it wasn’t in high school. I always worried he’d be a teen dad.”
“Did you ever worry about me?”
June looked at Tom. “Parents always worry about their kids.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”
“I’m okay.” He folded the doughnut box in half. It reminded June of the Napoleon hats she made the kids when they were little.
“I hope Dad finds him,” Tom said. “Fergus or whatever his name is.”
“Yeah?”
“It’d be kind of nice to be the younger brother for once.”
A car pulled in the driveway behind the van, casting light into the back so Percy looked demonic. Tom and June both turned around.
“What’s he doing here?”
“Never mind,” June said. “Can you bring him in for me?”
“I can.” He handed June the empty doughnut carton and got out of the van. June followed and watched Randy say goodbye to Vanessa. A hula dancer bobbled on Leslie’s dash. She waited for Randy as Tom shut the trunk and took Percy inside.
“Why’d you leave me there?”
“I’m sorry. I saw that room with Jaxx’s name on it and I just couldn’t be there any longer.”
He held up a bottle of rum.
“What’s that for?”
“I won a prize.”
“What was the contest?”
“Beer chugging.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m kidding.”
They took their shoes off inside.
“I’ve got to go check on something in my workshop. I’ll be up in a bit to help you with dinner.”
Music blared from Tom’s headphones. He’d made himself a sandwich and was feeding Jerry bits of lettuce through the bird’s cage. Jerry stood on his dowel looking stoical. Beneath the lettuce, half a dozen celery stalks were stacked like timber.
June took an armload of multicoloured potatoes from a drawer and dropped them onto the counter. The purple ones had grown ears. She cleaned them and took out a knife. She thought of Vanessa’s bed being replaced by a crib. Would she even take her bed?
“You’re cutting those potatoes awfully small.”
“What?”
Tom’s headphones were dangling around his neck again. He cleared his plate.
June looked down at the cutting board. She’d chopped the potatoes, skin on, ears intact, into miniscule bits. She sighed, pushed them into a pot of water, and made herself a cup of tea.
The enclosed front porch was cool in the afternoon, so she set her tea on a plant stand and wrapped herself in an animal-motif quilt. It had been Vanessa’s and still smelled like a little girl’s room. The wicker loveseat creaked as June made herself comfortable.
“Knock, knock,” Randy said, closing the door behind him.
“Thought you were in your workshop?”
“And I thought you were in the kitchen.”
“I needed a cup of tea.”
“I made you something.”
June moved over so Randy could sit down. “What is it?”
Randy held up a wooden creature the size of an apple.
“It looks like an elephant,” June said.
“It is.”
June didn’t ask why the elephant’s trunk was so long or why one of its eyes took up eighty percent of its face.
“Elephants are one of the few species that have grandmas.”
June held the carving in her hand. The feet were perfect.
“It’s lovely,” she said.
Randy took the elephant and set it beside her tea. “Now,” he took her hand, “dance with me.”
“Dance with you? It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. I just hacked the potatoes to death and our grandson is probably back at the shower getting his lip pierced.”
“Come on, June,” he pleaded. “Forget about all that for a minute. Just one dance.”
June groaned. “I’m tired. And I didn’t visit Mom this week. Tom did, I didn’t.”
“You can visit her tomorrow.” He pulled June up so she was standing in front of him.”
“This is stupid.” She shook her head. “Dancing is stupid.”
“You used to love it when we danced.”
“Not in the front porch. People can see.”
“Then let them watch,” he said, taking her hand and placing the other on the small of her back. “What’s that saying? Dance like nobody’s watching?”
“I’m not dancing, and I’m especially not dancing because you used that expression. I hate that expression.”
“Fine, I have a better one.” He stopped swaying side to side, held his finger in the air, and said, “Keep calm and dance like nobody’s watching.”
“That’s even worse.”
“You’re no fun.”
Randy grabbed a hat from the coat tree in the corner of the porch. It was Vanessa’s Che Guevara military beret. Was this supposed to double as a top hat?
“How can you say no to this?” He twirled around on one foot.
June could think of a million reasons to say no. First of all, the beret was too small for his hair so it sat on top like a bowl. Second, he’d said keep calm and dance like nobody’s watching, and third, “There’s no music.”
“I can fix that,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
She plunked herself back down on the loveseat, drank her tea, which was already cold as a puddle, and wondered when she became so cynical. Dancing on the front porch — that was something Birte and Earle would do. And though part of her thought the notion of spontaneous dancing was unnecessary and contrived, there was another part of her that longed to be touched by familiar hands.
Randy returned with his workshop CD player covered in a fine layer of sawdust. He blew it away from her and plugged it in. “So, what do you say, my beautiful elephant?”
“Jesus Murphy.”
“That came out wrong.” He turned on the radio, pulled her back up onto her feet, and held her tighter than he had the first time. They moved in a clunky circle, tripping over the wilted porch carpet, the beret falling of Randy’s head onto a cactus.
June was somewhere between laughing hysterically and sobbing. And she was dizzy. She closed her eyes as Randy moved in to kiss her. It was an aggressive kiss. All tongue and stress. A hurricane in a box. But she kissed him back. Out of duty, out of guilt, out of possibility. She was bothered that it felt so unfamiliar. That it had been so long. That skin had wrinkled and paint had peeled since the last time they kissed like that.
June became aware of the music suddenly, in the way she did at a grocery store when someone turned it up a few notches out of the blue. She knew the song from when she was a young mother. When the kids wore overalls and got jam on their cheeks. The whistle, the references to Russia. A song about the fall of the USSR. Of Glasnost and Perestroika. But that was never what it felt like. She did not think of Gorbachev or abandoned Soviet athletic facilities or the expansion of McDonald’s into Moscow. She felt love. A Biblical love. Corinthians 13. And she kissed her husband back. Aggressive and hard because he was patient and kind and old and sad. Everything he’d ever done for her rolled off her tongue and back into him. He’d made her a dress on their first anniversary, and he didn’t drive too fast, or look at dirty magazines when she didn’t want to be touched, and he never complained when she asked would you mind just going to the store? He never minded. They kissed and shook like they hadn’t seen each other in years.
Randy and June didn’t talk about the incident on the porch. They finished cooking dinner in a hazy calm that made their kids suspicious. June felt ten years younger.
“Why are you guys acting weird?” Derek put on a shirt and joined the rest of the family at the table.
Randy picked up his fork. “We’re not acting weird.”
From across the table, Vanessa dragged her spoon across the surface of her stew. “What the fuck is this?”
“It’s stew.” June took a bite.
Vanessa slouched heavily into her chair, making the seatback bounce. “This is not stew.”
“Mmm,” Randy said. “Stew is subjective.”
“Music is subjective,” Vanessa argued. “Stew is supposed to have meat in it. This is pretty much potato paste.”
“Fuck off, Vanessa,” Derek said. “If you don’t like it, don’t eat it. You bitch about everything.”
“Whoa,” Vanessa mocked. “Is the new daddy tired? Were you up all day breastfeeding?”
Randy ate faster.
Derek shook his head. “You know, you can be an ungrateful bitch sometimes.”
She leaned forward. “No more than you.”
“No.” Stew dripped from his spoon. “You live at home, and you never offer to cook, and you’re pissed off all the time, and no one knows why. We always have to walk on eggshells around you. Mind your sister, she’s in a mood.”
“Maybe I’m always in a mood because you’re the bloody favourite.”
“We don’t have a favourite,” Randy interrupted.
“No, it’s true, I am the favourite,” said Derek.
June put down her spoon. “We don’t have a favourite.”
“Mom, don’t bother. We all know it’s true.” Derek got up from the table, took a roll from the counter, and dipped it in his bowl.
“I object,” she said. “We love you all equally.”
Vanessa pushed away her bowl. “Tom said you wanted him to move out.”
“Only because we thought it would be good for him. Not because we liked him less.”
“He also said you leave gym brochures and recreation guides all over the house because you think he’s fat.”
“Those were for you,” June said.
“See?” Vanessa poured herself milk. “You think I’m fat, you want Tom to move out, and Derek’s the golden boy. Maybe I should go get knocked up with triplets to improve my status, then my litter and I can take over the entire upstairs.”
“Vanessa!” June shouted. “I thought a little exercise might help release some of that anger.”
