“She lives in the pink house, Uncle Steve.” The kid sat down on the opposite end of the sofa from me, where he could watch TV.
“I just moved in last week, so I thought I’d introduce myself. Actually, I came looking for somebody to talk with. Another woman,” I added quickly so he wouldn’t get the wrong idea. I really had assumed there would be a woman in the house, a wife or a girlfriend. But if there were, the place would have had the pillows and tchotchkes it lacked. I couldn’t imagine any woman living here and not wanting to pretty the place up. “But there isn’t any, is there?”
The man’s inhospitable scrutiny had begun to irk me. Having asked a direct question, I made myself wait for an answer.
He backed off and sat down in an armchair, but he didn’t say a word.
I tried again. “Is your name Steven with a v or with a ph?”
Even though he did not actually roll his eyes, something in his silent stare made me feel as if he had.
“Are you the one who keeps this house so neat and tidy?”
Nothing. Not even a frown.
Screw him. I would get out of here soon, but I would stay long enough to show him that he didn’t faze me. I turned my attention to Justin. “What’s that on your T-shirt?” Like me and also like his uncle, he wore a tee with something printed on the front. Mine said, “Bad Spellers of the Wrold, Untie.”
Justin readily turned his attention away from the TV to answer me. “It’s supposed to be a dolphin.” He had a pleasant, husky voice, not quite a child’s voice yet far from being a rebellious weird-haired teen’s. “But it got kind of messed up, see?” Turning toward me, he tugged the tee straight, stretching it like a canvas.
I would not have been able to tell that the broken, smeared image was a dolphin. “I see,” I said. “Dolphin by Picasso.”
Justin laughed, and his grin seemed to light up the dim room. “Dolphin by jammed screen print machine,” he said. “Uncle Steve works at this business that makes T-shirts for tourists, and he brings home the ones that get screwed up.”
“That’s nice. Unless he screws them up on purpose,” I added, trying for another laugh.
“No, he’d never do that,” Justin said quickly, no smile, his voice stressed. “Uncle Steve’s a perfectionist.” But I heard no pride in the words, only smothered anxiety.
“Just kidding.” I glanced at the Stoat man, his nearly fleshless face still blank, a muddle on his T-shirt that looked like it might have been a skull and crossbones. If so, it suited him, the parchment skin of his head pitted with acne and etched with lines from being stretched too tight over his own skull. He was the sort of person who made me wonder whether anyone loved him. I looked away again, deciding to be interested in the TV.
“What are you watching?” I scooted along the sofa toward Justin.
“Rodeo. There’s nothing else on.”
“What would you rather be watching?”
“NASCAR.”
“What’s that?”
“You never heard of NASCAR racing?” His genuine and ingenuous astonishment touched off an unexpected ache in my chest; something about him reminded me of my own boys when they were that age, of how much they had still been children even though they looked like young men. “Children are still children for a long, long time,” my grandmother used to say before she died, and I had found out how true that was by my sons’ reaction to the divorce.
“Course, you come from up north, right?” Worried eyes on me, afraid he’d been rude, Justin tried to excuse my ignorance.
I smiled at him. “Do I have a Yankee accent?”
“Um, sort of.” Now he was even more afraid of offending me. “But it’s okay, you know? Nice. Just a little different.”
Peripherally I could see Uncle Steve, aka Steven Stoat, leaning back in his chair, but I sensed more than saw that he was not relaxed at all. Too bad for him that he didn’t like company. I’d leave in a minute, when I was ready. “Oh, look!” I said of the picture on the TV screen. “Barrel racing!” and I paid close attention as a girl in a huge pink cowboy hat and matching outfit spurred a black horse toward a barrel and skidded him around it. As she completed the course, her time was announced by a deep, drawling voice, which went on to say, “Now, while we wait for the next rider, folks, please listen up to this important appeal.”
A picture of a dark-haired boy with shining brown eyes and a winsome smile appeared on the TV.
I gasped, recognizing him instantly, although he looked a couple of years younger and he had done radical things to his hair. “Justin, that’s you!”