That night, after they’d changed out of their good clothes, the ones they’d had in closets in plastic bags, they sat down to watch television. Mr. Favero had been on the couch there since dinner. He hadn’t done the dishes. There wasn’t enough room for all of them on the couch, so Jamison lay on his stomach on the floor. He was laughing at the sitcoms. After the news, Mrs. Favero asked the boys to take the recycling out. Jamison looked at her strangely. Dad always takes the recycling out, he said. He was leaning up on his elbows. You could do something around here sometime, she snapped. Jamison got up and Lorris went with him.
They lugged the white bags out of the trash cans, in the backyard, dragged them around the alleyway and out to the front. Lorris noticed that the tree, in the backyard, looked even more like a face than it usually did—like one of those children’s movies where inanimate objects come alive.
Check out the tree, Lorris said, while they passed it. The face.
Jamison looked at it. I never notice it, he said.
They put the recycling where it belonged, matching the rest of the white bags in front of the other houses. Lorris watched the grease from the tomato cans color the bottom of his bag. He thought about how long it would take to pool through the bottom. Jamison took out his cell phone, wiped his hands on his pants before touching the screen.
Who’s that? Lorris asked.
A girl, Jamison said.
You’re so full of it, Lorris said. You make it like it’s a different girl every day. Show me the text.
I’m not showing you anything.
Here, Lorris said, and reached for the phone. Jamison jerked it away, finished the text, and put it back in his pocket. Give it up, Jamison said. He started walking up the stairs to the house. When he got to the top of the stairs he said, Maybe we can play some baseball this weekend, before you leave. He looked back at Lorris like he was waiting for an answer, so Lorris said, Course. Jamison went in and the door banged. It made Lorris feel good. Jamison was back and forth like that all the time. While Jamison went in, Lorris saw an upstairs light go off in the Dentons’ house.
It was still light out, and warm. It would almost be summer. Lorris checked to see if the screen door stayed unlocked and walked up Avenue R, toward Flatbush. He didn’t even have a sweatshirt on. There were no spaces between the houses here, as there weren’t until right by Flatbush, after which they changed back again. They grew into each other on both sides. Most of them were painted red. Lorris wondered if someone had planned the houses out beforehand, or if they shot up in perfect rows. Suddenly he felt claustrophobic, the way he sometimes did on bus rides, when the ride was too long and it was already dark outside the window. There would be the cars flashing by on the other side of the highway, sometimes a gas station and lit-up rest stops, but that was it. The emptiness made him feel restless. That’s how his legs felt, like even if he wanted to he couldn’t get up. Tomorrow he would take the bus back to college.
On Quentin Road, in front of the supermarket, Lorris leaned back against a fire hydrant. A man on the same side of the street was washing his car. He was scrubbing with a thick sponge. Lorris watched him twist the material in his hand. There was a bucket of water on the ground next to him, the water sloshing against the edges. The hose next to the sidewalk was leaking and getting Lorris’s shoes wet. The man worked over the same point on the car for a long time, and then he leaned his forehead on the hood and kept pressing, not looking. The metal at the top of the fire hydrant was biting into Lorris’s leg, but he felt that it would be the most impossible thing in the world for him to leave just then.
THE TREE
We were heading out to buy a Christmas tree off Knapp Street. I thought we used to go to Marine Park, Lorris said. Tuh, said our mother. We never went there, she said. We haven’t been there in years, she amended—They’re too expensive. I thought I remembered always going to Marine Park to get our Christmas tree when we were kids, even after—sawdust on the ground, a pile of old cut-up trees in the corner of the parking lot, which would stay there until spring, when the Parks Department trucked them away: same weekend they dragged the baseball fields—but I guess I was wrong. My mother, a school secretary, is nothing if not together. Since Lorris has been in college she’s been substituting in math. I’m in the basement, which has its own bathroom, just for a while. My father just kept driving. Is this Katy Perry? he asked Z100.