effort of the highest sort, or she could say that she was fond of Ed, that the fact that he took the circulars and seemed to at least consider the value of tofu bites had awakened something in her. But all of these things were too close to the truth to admit, even to herself. Damn Ed, she thought as she exited the jail. Damn him to hell.
Faith was in her living room in mountain pose an hour later when she heard Ed’s Buick clanging up the street. She was fully prepared to give him the ultimatum: help yourself or I can’t help you. The night before she’d dreamed about Marvin, who turned into Ed and then back into Marvin so gradually that one man’s head topped the other’s body. She would tell him this, all of it, make him see it her way. She exited her house at a good clip, but when Ed pulled into the driveway she noticed it: he had been in an accident. A strange one. The driver’s side door was caved in, the left front quarter panel was missing, and the antenna was bent double. Still, she stalked across the mowed section of Ed’s lawn toward his driveway with resolve, sensing eyes peering at her from behind curtains and hedges, lawn mowers and garages. As Ed struggled toward the passenger door, muttering and cursing all the way, Faith rubbed the dry patch of skin on her left elbow that had suddenly burst into a flaming itch. The curses rose several octaves when Ed couldn’t force open the door, and when he started kicking at it Faith rushed to his aid.
“Keep your shirt on,” she snapped, and when she looked at Ed through the cracked passenger window she saw a little boy; his clothes were rumpled, his hair a mess and—the most shocking of all—he was crying. She opened the door quite easily and noticed then that the inside handle was missing. Ed stared at the dashboard, breathing heavily, but made no effort to get out of the car. He looked defeated, worn down, resigned to spending the rest of his life perched uncomfortably on the cracked vinyl seat. A few of the neighborhood kids gathered at the foot of the driveway, mouths agape and fingers pointing, and Mrs. Bushnell across the street was on tiptoe, leaning against her broom to get a better view of the mangled carcass of Ed’s car.
“Ed,” said Faith quietly, “let’s get you inside.”
Ed turned to her then, his eyes red and swollen, and sighed. “I can’t,” he said.
“Sure, you can,” said Faith, and in one motion her inflamed elbow was hooked under Ed’s bulk and pulling as if her life depended on it. Ed tapped his feet on the passenger-side mat, as if checking to see if they still worked, and slid them slowly toward the door. After rocking to-and-fro several times, he exited the car on shaky legs and the neighborhood kids started cheering.
Once inside, Faith deposited Ed’s mass on the sofa and then, to avoid giving the neighbors an encore, ran to her house via the back door to retrieve two Edamame Rice Bowls, some mango juice and her arnica gel (surely Ed’s muscles were stiff from sleeping on that rack Sheriff Waldon called a bed). But when she returned to Ed’s place she heard the distant buzz of a beehive, a motorboat: he was snoring into a paisley sofa cushion. Just then it started to rain, and as Faith placed the tube of gel on the coffee table beside Ed she felt eyes boring tiny holes into the small of her back. Turning suddenly, her throat seizing up, she saw it there, not six feet away, its scaly feet and long, threadlike-fingers splayed against the aquarium wall. As Faith approached with trepidation, the tiny creature remained still but for its eyes, which followed her as she inspected its scaly green body, its long, narrow tail, the fringe on its oversized head. “Why, you’re a lizard,” she said. “And you must be a hungry one.”
The cupboard beneath the aquarium was empty, so Faith heated one of the rice bowls in Ed’s microwave before searching his cavernous cupboards for a small container. All she found were two cans of Campbell’s Chunky soup, some Hamburger Helper and a bag of cheese popcorn. Processed food, she thought, would drive anyone to drink; she had to stop herself from trashing it all.
“Here you go, darlin’,” she said as she flipped open the aquarium lid and scooped three teaspoonfuls of rice into the creature’s corroded dish. But it remained immobile, its stony silhouette reflected in the wall of glass adjacent to it, evidently imbued with the patience and fortitude of its prehistoric ancestors.
Faith swayed slowly from side to side and watched the lizard’s eyes rotate to keep its gaze fixed on her.
“Why, you’re a little hypnotist,” she said. “You’re really something.”
She smiled at the little green dinosaur because she believed it liked her. As a child she felt she had the ability to communicate with animals, driving the baboons into a frenzy at the zoo by planting thoughts of freedom and rebellion into their heads, or calming a skittish horse by speaking gently into its ear of brown oats and alfalfa. She never told anyone about it—after all, who would believe her? But she felt a connection to the little green reptile, and so she told it to march right up to its food dish and eat. It must have liked her quite a lot, she thought, because it remained propped against the glass, its tiny fingers twitching, saliva dripping from its puckered mouth.
Faith didn’t know how long she and the creature stared at one another, silently commiserating about the challenging task of befriending Ed. At one point she thought she saw the little green head nod, its black eyes full of the wisdom of the ages, and although at the time she did not know it, somewhere inside the recesses of her heart she began to nurture an admiration for the wreck of a man who lay snoring on the sofa behind her, a man with the wisdom or intuition or simple dumb luck to acquire such a stoic and majestic pet.
“My wife never liked him.” Faith turned to see Ed rising slowly, almost gracefully, into an upright position. He rubbed his head and nodded toward the aquarium. “Little Richard,” he said. “Carmen never liked him.”
“Why not?”
Ed took a deep breath. “Well, first off, he stinks. And he drools. And he never liked her.”
“He’s just following his nature,” she said.
“That’s right,” said Ed. “That’s right. Come to think of it, that was something my wife didn’t like about me either.”
“Well,” said Faith, choosing her words carefully, “who we are is who we are. But how we behave … well, now that we can control.” She looked to Little Richard, her confidante, her sounding board.
Ed just laughed. “I wouldn’t place any money on that,” he said. “Take last night, for instance.”
Faith was wildly curious about the events that had culminated in Ed’s bail being doubled and his car looking like it had lost the demolition derby. But she held back; she would emulate Little Richard’s detached calm.
“It was Carmen,” he said. “My ex. I don’t hate her, although I’d like to. She lives in Oakley with some guy owns a junkyard. I’ll tell you what, that guy can take a car apart.” Ed laughed, rubbed his left eye. Then he stared right through Faith, and she knew he was watching Carmen with someone else, watching his car being broken apart like a puzzle.
“Ed,” she said, “you don’t have to talk about it.”
“She come sashaying into the Tap Shoe like she owned the place,” he said, “wearing some checked ruffled number looked like a goddamn kitchen curtain—pardon my French—hanging onto her grease monkey like he was a magnet. I ignored them, I did.” He looked at Faith, his expression one of defiant sincerity.
“Why, sure you did,” said Faith. “What else were you supposed to do?”
“Then the little monkey says, ‘That him? That the guy? You there,’ and Carmen’s trying to shush him but he keeps on until I offer to buy them a drink. How do you like that?”
“That was very generous,” said Faith.
“The monkey walks over and calls me Diamond Jim. ‘Diamond Jim’, he says, ‘big shot. Buying rounds with money you stole from this lady and her twin boys.’ He points to Carmen, and she looks sorry. Sorry that she lied about the money, sorry she came into the Tap Shoe in the first place, sorry she’s tangled up with this monkey. She tells him let’s go but he keeps on until his voice becomes like kindling,