Isa sang out, her voice restless and uneasy. “It’s morbid. It gets in my head.”
As I stepped onto the threshold behind Ray, nudging him into our stale air conditioning, he resisted. I wanted the escape of my room, but now Ray wouldn’t budge. Our front door opened to a seam between kitchen linoleum to the right and family-room carpet to the left, as if the doorway had been built before the rooms were laid out. To the right of the entry, a spot where the linoleum buckled meant two steps to the kitchen table, plus three more to my room, depending on the odd chair in the way.
Before us on the linoleum lay a startling sight, I know now. But at the time, I assumed it was Isa’s tone that made Ray hold back; he hated confrontation. His mother had died almost a year ago, and his dad was in Soledad, a maximum-security prison—that was how he’d come to us.
“It’s a business investment,” Patrick said irritably. “Every time I have a breakthrough, every time I show initiative, every time I come up with an original idea to put food on this table, you have to bring me down. Have a little faith, for God’s sake.”
Patrick was thirty-eight and was always trying pyramid schemes and so-called business investments to get rich quick. For the past six months, most of 2005, he’d been trying to sell prefabricated homes, but they hadn’t taken off as quickly as he’d expected. Before the modular units, it had been Japanese kitchen knives, which he’d bought below wholesale, from an importer facing bankruptcy, and tried to sell to housewives. He still had sixty in slim wooden boxes in the hallway. Before cutlery, it had been obscure bones, most of which he’d bought in Mexico and smuggled across the border for resale as juju, or fetishes, to fortune-tellers and kooks, as far as I could tell. He’d participated in an archaeological dig in Mexico years ago and claimed to have smuggled Aztec jawbones into California for a professor. He said he carried stingray barbs, python vertebrae, and coon bones, but I never trusted what was in the cardboard boxes stacked in the corner of his room. Once, when he was away, I opened a box, expecting to find human-like tibias or femurs, but the bones I felt were thin and brittle, gritty, like whittled chunks of chalk.
This was soon after we’d moved in together, Isa, Patrick, and I. When they were applying to be foster parents, he hid the boxes from the people at Children and Family Services and said he was an under-employed cook, which was true; he’s the best cook I’ve ever known. He’d studied to be a chef somewhere back East or in the South—he was always vague about where. Before Isa and I met him, he worked in some top kitchens in L.A., but he could never keep that kind of job, where he had to get along with lots of people in a crowded space and submit to a chain of command. He started doing speed and blow to stay on top of things. And when he was high, he couldn’t stop his mouth. He would make snide remarks that undermined the head chef or humiliated his coworkers. That’s what he told us at Channel House.
As I look back now, I sometimes wonder: if Patrick had been able to run his own kitchen—if he hadn’t stumbled into the consequences of his own youth—then maybe he’d be a more generous man.
But I doubt it.
“Of course I have faith in you,” Isa said to him, her voice thicker than before. “But I’m not talking about business. I’m talking about Daddy.”
“Sweetie, this is what he wants,” Patrick said, almost pleading. “Something handmade. Wooden. You told me so yourself.”
Their voices came from the kitchen, from near the table. I heard no footsteps; no one seemed to be moving or acknowledging Ray and me in the doorway.
“I ain’t going to Florida,” Devon declared from the opposite direction, from the family room, somewhere beyond the couch. “With or without that thing.”
What thing? I wondered. What had Patrick taken up now? I took a step past Ray along the seam between the living room and kitchen.
“Let’s see what Kevin thinks,” Isa said, as if I’d just appeared.
“Kevin,” Patrick said sarcastically. “Now there’s business savvy.”
“Why can’t I stay home with Kevin?” Devon complained, trying to sound tough but coming off as whiny. “I’m off probation. I passed every class last year. I hooked myself a job. You guys treat me like a sucker.” At sixteen years old, he was taller than any of us, six foot two, and bony at the elbows but filling out his biceps. “Black as Mississippi mud,” Patrick had told me several times, though how would I know that color?
As I took off my hat, a hand touched my arm, startling me. Then I smelled Isa’s perfume. Woody. Like sweet wine.
Sometimes I hear people’s steps, sometimes not, depending on the room, the footwear, and my focus. Ray was easy to decipher, with his quick, fidgeting steps. Devon usually dragged his feet, shuffling in long strides, as if the bother exceeded the effort—unless he was wearing flip flops, and then he slapped the floor, which gave the same long strides a sense of urgency. Patrick’s pace I couldn’t predict: brisk and controlled one moment, silent and cunning the next. When Isa was wearing her wedge sandals or boots, she walked with soft thuds I liked to hear. But when she was barefoot, she could slip up on me, like Patrick could, but with different effect.
Ray leaned toward Isa as she hugged him with a flourish. I’d always loved that about her, the way she could dote and incite with a touch. But I pulled away, not trusting my reactions. She tugged me toward her and gave me a quick hug, brushing her side into me, setting off tingles. I couldn’t help it; my head drifted as I thought of my lost job. Would I ever be able to sustain myself? Would I always be dependent?
“What’s the matter?” she said. “What happened to you?”
I collected myself, stiffening. “Nothing. What? Nothing. What are you guys talking about?”
Ray swept by me, disappearing. Was he still holding Charlie? I closed the front door.
“You never listen to me!” Devon complained. “I ain’t going!”
“You raise your voice once more . . .” Patrick said, letting his threat hang there.
Patrick was always threatening without filling in the blanks, so he couldn’t be held accountable. He called himself a Christian Libertarian; I don’t know if he invented the term or got it from somewhere, but it gave him a belief system (after the recovery home, anyway) that was open and rigid at the same time. As a Libertarian, he believed in maximum freedom—under God, which was the Christian side of the equation. Take it or leave it; it’s up to you whether you want to be saved, but don’t try to butt in on Patrick’s freedoms. For him, free choice was the right of all Americans to make their own stupid mistakes and be damned to Hell if they didn’t correct their ways. That was the genius of the American Christ.
Yet he expected us to do as he said. He loved to talk about smuggling of all kinds, ripping off the government, treating neighbors with respect so long as they stayed on their side of the fence, obeying the laws that mattered, patrolling the borders of this great country, and leaving a better world than you inherited. He wasn’t muscular so much as solid. He had a shotgun locked in his closet. I’d felt the threat of his grip on my arm plenty of times. I still think of him as sinew and gristle.
Isa, on the other hand, was a dream I couldn’t make real and couldn’t quite get over. In the doorway, she took my hat from my hand. I meant to touch the small of her back but found her hip instead so that half my hand felt her soft skin, the other half touched her belt and hip huggers. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself: I dipped two fingers just beneath the waistline of her jeans, aware of Patrick in the kitchen. Could he see? Was he looking at his wife? It had been over a year since I’d touched her like that, and I’d never done it in front of him. I chided myself even as I relished the touch of her warm skin. Hadn’t she just brushed her body into mine? Why couldn’t I be affectionate and flip-pant too, particularly now, after losing my job?
“You can’t make me go,” Devon muttered in a low voice that was plenty defiant. “I’m staying with Kevin.”
Back then I knew Devon better than Ray, even though Ray had lived with