"Growing," a story (ii)

"I'm going to play ball," Abby had said when she'd finished up dishes. "I'll be back later."

She meant she was going to play basketball with some of her friends. It was a half‑truth, and they both knew it. She was going to the court behind school to meet Budge. They knew that much, and she knew it too. But it was the game they played with her, part of the lie they'd lived with since she'd found the guy. If they called her bluff, said she was going there to see him, she would simply deny it. Other kids would be there too‑‑she was half right. That was the game they played.

"You have your homework finished?" he'd asked her. Anita had her finger on the garbage disposal switch, waiting for it to stop grinding.

"I don't have nothing," she said. "Got it done in study hall."

Two weeks before, her Budge had broken into the visiting team's bus during a football game and scribbled obscenities in magic marker all over the place‑‑on the walls and the windows, slashed a couple of seats.

"Why don't you stay home tonight, honey?" Anita said, drying her hands at the sink, not looking up.

"I never do anything," she said.

It was hard for him to take her callousness. Sometimes he thought he could handle outright defiance more easily than the kind of sleazy disregard she could show when she would shrug her shoulders and grunt as if she'd never learned the language. Once he chased a kid out of class for shrugging his shoulders that same way Abby did. The kid's name was Bob, and a year later he'd been arrested for stealing beer from one of those trucks with dies that roll up.

"Abby," he'd said, "listen to me."

She had spun away from him and faced the door, looked up as if she wanted to scream.

"Listen to your father," Anita said.

"No," she told them, "I promised Lanny I'd be there. You know what a promise is?"

Fourteen years ago he and Anita had stood up in front of the whole church, his first daughter dressed in her mother's own baptismal gown, her parents promising before God Almighty.

"Is it Budge you promised?" he said.

She banged her fists against the door. "I hate it that my dad's a teacher," she said. "I just hate it." She stood a foot from the door, staring straight into a green humpback camel Lisa had drawn in art class.

"Why don't you just stay?" Anita said. "Just one night?"

Her right hand was on the knob, her jacket flung over her shoulders. From the back, her hair was a buzz of curls. "I can't," she said.

"Why not?" Gerald said.

"You don't know anything," she said. "You don't understand."

When she'd turned to face him, he saw her mother's cheeks, full and high, beneath the same deep‑set eyes, the same skin tones‑‑soft white sand, tanned, even in March. But it wasn't her mother's stare he felt, and not her mother's soul. It was his sister's fire‑‑Abby's Aunt Gracie's, the way her jaw clenched and her eyes brimmed with nothing less than sheer will, perfectly firm with an odd guiltless passion. So much like Gracie.

"Why can't you stay home?" he'd said again.

"Must you know every last detail of my life?" she said.

He knew more about his daughter than other parents. He saw her every day, knew whether or not she finished her assignments, whether she was going on detention, whether she was spending too much time in the hallways.

"We think it best that you stay home," Anita said.

She traced the outline of Lisa's camel with her orange fingernail. "May I go now?" she'd said, as if the strain were nothing but empty ritual. "I know the lecture."

"Don't get smart," he told her.

"I just want to leave," she said.

In the eighth grade, Budge got caught masturbating in the back of the library. He was in high school now, when he was showed up.

Anita pulled a chair out from the table and sat, the dishtowel in a bundle in front of her. "Why don't you just stay home with us? ‑‑really, Abby, just listen to your parents‑‑"

"When don't I listen to you?" she said. "So tell me one time when I don't listen to you. Tell me."

"Abby, if you love us‑‑"

"Mom, don't pull that 'if‑you‑love‑us' junk. All I got to do is go out for awhile is all. I'll be back. Just let me go, for Pete's sake."

"Stay home, Abby," he told here. "You aren't going anywhere tonight, and that's it."

Abby rolled her eyes and tapped her fingers on the counter. She didn't take off her jacket or the scarf around her neck. She simply stood there at the door.

"You heard me," Gerald said.

Her eyes avoided them, swinging around the room into every corner. She shifted her weight to her left foot, then back to the other, grabbed both ends of her scarf, let her hands hang there against her chest. She growled something that neither of them really wanted to hear. Finally she walked past them and into the living room, threw herself in the chair, and picked up a magazine, her jacket still wrapped around her.

Anita got back up and poured water in the coffee pot.

Abby paged through the magazine from back to front without reading a word, without even stopping to look at pictures, just fanned through the pages. She picked up another when she finished the first, went through three that way, flapping and slapping, a show, sheer defiance.

"You must have something to do," he said, opening the paper. "Kruse said he was giving this big test‑‑"

And then she threw the magazine against the wall on the other side of the room, threw it with all her might so the magazine smashed up against the wall like a large bird into a
picture window, and without another word, without running, in fact, without even looking back at either of them, she walked straight out of the front door. To hell with them, she said‑‑to hell with you, not out loud but in her own way, the door slamming behind her. It felt like profanity.
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Tomorrow: Gerald is haunted by his sister Gracie's story.