RUNAWAYS, Part II
by Clarissa Romano
“It’s simple,” Molly said to him when he got her on the phone. “Wyatt and I live here now. You live here. Why shouldn’t you two have a relationship?”
“Hey, I’m not dense, all right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m catching up on a few years of being in the dark, if you’ll forgive me.”
“I understand.”
“So I have a few questions.”
“I’m not after your money, if that’s what you want to know.”
“Why not? I mean, I’m sorry, but I have a few questions—”
“What if we all have dinner Saturday night? Jim wants to meet you. We can put it all on the table.”
“I’m not sure,” Nicholas admitted.
“We’ll pick you up. Wyatt wants to see where you live, anyway.”
“He said that?”
“How’s two o’clock?”
Nicholas had to deliver a side table on Saturday morning and when he returned home he found Molly and Wyatt and Tina sitting in the living room. “Whoa,” he said.
“I made tea,” said Tina. She was wearing her cut-off jean shorts, the ones she was wearing the night they met. Her bare legs were crossed, the top one bouncing.
“Hiya, Nicholas,” said Molly, smiling up at him from the couch. He knew that smile, lazy and knowing. He just couldn’t remember what it meant.
“I don’t drink tea,” said Nicholas.
“I know you don’t,” said Tina.
“I like your house,” said Wyatt. He was sitting next to Molly, a cushion across his lap.
“Oh yeah?” Nicholas looked around, dragging a hand through his hair.
“I thought maybe you could take Wyatt over to your shop,” Tina said. “Show him what you do all day.”
“Yeah, we could do that.” Something was going on with Tina. She gave him a look she gave people she didn’t like. He’d never seen it pointed at him before.
“Actually,” said Molly, tossing her left wrist to glance at her watch. “We should get going. Jim said he was going to fire up the grill at five o’clock sharp.”
“And he’ll do it, too,” said Wyatt.
“Great,” said Nicholas. “Let’s go.”
“Do you need to do anything? Change, or anything?” Molly asked, looking him up and down.
“Why, should I change?”
Tina cut her eyes at him and then got up and went into the kitchen.
“You look fine,” said Molly. “I was just wondering.”
“She said you have a workshop where you make furniture,” Wyatt said.
“It’s true,” said Nicholas. He wondered if Tina was going to come back, or if she’d left the room for good.
“I made a box in woodworking class last year.”
“Oh yeah?” His eyes rested on Wyatt. Watching him, he noticed, made him feel calm.
“So should we go?” Molly asked, leaning forward.
Nicholas started. “Gimme a sec, okay? One sec.”
He found Tina in the kitchen, washing mugs. “Hey there,” he said, sliding his hand across her shoulder blades.
She shrugged him off.
He leaned against the counter so he could watch her face. She kept staring at the mugs. “You gonna tell me what’s wrong?”
Twisting towards him she said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were having dinner with them tonight?”
“You’re working tonight.”
“I could’ve gotten my shift covered.” She went back to rinsing.
“I didn’t think you’d want to come,” Nicholas said. “It’ll be weird. Boring.”
“This is important.”
Nicholas shrugged. “Yeah it’s important. To me. It’s my bullshit.”
She started shaking her head. “Forget it. Forget it.”
“You coming?” Molly called out.
Nicholas rolled his eyes. “Can you believe her?” he whispered to Tina. “It’s my own fucking house. Yeah,” he called back. He searched Tina’s expression but there was no way in. “We’ll talk about it later, okay?”
“When?”
“Tonight, tomorrow, whenever.”
“Forget it.” Her hands were frozen beneath the stream of water. “Just go.”
Molly had parked halfway up the street. Wyatt walked ahead, dragging a stick across the metal fences as he went.
“She’s a nice girl,” Molly said. “Smart.”
“Yeah, she’s smart,” said Nicholas, keeping his eyes down.
“How long have you been living together?” Molly asked, tossing her purse on top of her maroon Camry, patting down her jacket for keys.
“I don’t know,” he said. “A couple months?”
Molly laughed. “You really haven’t changed, have you Nicholas?”
“What?” Nicholas demanded, but she had sunk into the driver’s seat. He looked at Wyatt, whose bright blue eyes were frozen on him. “Your mom really knows how to piss me off,” he told him.
“Stick stays outside, Wyatt,” Molly instructed from the car.
They lived in a narrow craftsman duplex off Ocean Park, ten blocks from the beach. Wyatt jumped out before Molly killed the engine. “You have to go around the back, like this,” he said, disappearing down a gravel path.
“Nice spot,” said Nicholas.
“Good local schools,” said Molly.
Jim was standing next to the porch, feet squared, spatula in hand, tending to the grill. He waited until Nicholas was only feet away before looking up. “Nicholas,” he said, clapping him with a charged handshake. He had a deep suntan and graying hair scraped into a ponytail. “Good to see ya,” he said.
“Hey, babe,” said Molly, kissing him on the mouth.
“You talk to Sam?” Jim asked her.
“I spoke to his secretary but I left a voicemail, too. I bet he’ll call,” she said, as Jim tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “Maybe he hasn’t gotten a chance to look over the papers yet.”
“Call again tomorrow,” Jim said, nodding.
She peered over his shoulder onto the smoking grill. “Smells good.”
There were three bicycles on the porch, an oversized cooler dusted with sand, a pile of plastic shovels and buckets. Beyond the screen door, the place was surprisingly dark and cool. In the living room, bamboo furniture was upholstered in tropical fabrics, parrots and banana leaves. A shelf of records dominated the far wall, most in their plastic sleeves. Above the mantel hung a black and white photograph of the Grand Canyon. “Jim took that,” Molly said.
“You wanna see my room?” Wyatt asked, sucking on a grape Popsicle.
“Hell yes,” said Nicholas.
“I picked the color myself,” Wyatt told him, sitting on his bed and leaning against the mint green wall.
“I like it,” said Nicholas. “Very refreshing.”
“Do you ride a motorcycle?” Wyatt asked.
“No.”
“Oh.” He slurped the base of his Popsicle, eyeing Nicholas’s leather jacket. “Do you, or did you ever, have a dog?”
“Yeah, I had a dog,” Nicholas said, leaning against Wyatt’s desk. There was a map of the world tacked to the wall behind him, a stack of used textbooks next to a pencil sharpener. “Had a Border Collie named Muffy.”
“What happened to her?”
“Ah, I couldn’t keep her.”
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t ready for a dog. They’re a lot of responsibility, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Wyatt. “That’s what Jim says. I still want one, though. He says I’ll have to walk it twice a day.”
“Probably be good for you,” said Nicholas.
“Huh?”
Nicholas shook his head. “Never mind.”
“She reminds me of my friend Sherry,” said Wyatt.
“Who, Molly?”
He shifted. “I forget her name.”
“Tina?”
Wyatt nodded. “Not just the way she looks, but how she talks, too. The way she moves her hands and stuff.”
“No kidding.”
“She said we could play Atari sometime.”
“Yeah, you could do that. She’s pretty good, though.”
“How do you know I’m not?”
Nicholas laughed. He set the box down and picked up a stack of baseball cards. “I’ll put in a good word for you, okay? About the dog?”
Wyatt slurped hard on his popsicle. “Well,” he said at last, his eyes off somewhere in the corner. “Only if you think it would help.”
The dining room table was set with teak candleholders and straw mats, daisy heads floating in a Japanese bowl. Jim set down the plate of barbecue with reverence, lifting the tin lid in one swoop. Though the timing was impeccable, fish and tofu steaks were hardening into one mountain of barbecue. Nicholas noted a flash of disappointment cross Jim’s face. “Looks great, man,” Nicholas said. To his surprise and relief, no one said grace.
There was talk of planting a vegetable garden. Had Nicholas ever planted his own fruits and vegetables? No, he had not. Molly had been waiting to buy a house of her own before they began to dig, but that possibility seemed less likely. “We love the neighborhood,” she explained.
“The market is on a curve,” said Jim, raising a hand in demonstration. “In three years, it’ll dip back down again, and that’s when we’ll buy.”
“Sounds like you got it all figured out.”
“Some things are unknowable,” Jim said, smiling at Nicholas. “Other things only seem unknowable, to the untrained eye.”
“So how’d you two meet, anyway?” Nicholas asked, directing the question towards Molly.
“You’ll never believe it, but Jim was my sponsor in St. Petersburg.”
“No kidding.” He looked at Wyatt, who was deeply absorbed in his dinner plate. “You miss Florida, kid?”
Wyatt shrugged. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Some of the people and stuff. And some of the places we used to go. But, other than that, not really.”
“What brought you out here, anyway?” Nicholas asked.
“Jim got a job out here. Tell him, honey.”
Jim swallowed and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I work for an architecture firm that deals in eco-sustainability.”
“You’re an architect?”
“No.” Jim gave a little laugh. “I work for the firm. I negotiate contracts, oversee the shipment of low impact materials and energy use. That kind of thing.”
“I think I read an article about that,” Nicholas said, shooting Wyatt a smile.
“Oh, there’s more than one,” said Jim, extending his right hand with his eyes locked on Nicholas. Molly handed him the shish kabobs. “Believe me.”
Dinner was through, and hardly a single question had been directed Nicholas’s way. He wished, suddenly, for Tina. He imagined her sitting next to him, cleaning her plate with her cornbread.
As Molly began clearing plates Nicholas leaned back, folding his hands across his belly. “I should’ve brought some dessert,” he said. “Didn’t even occur to me.”
“We’re trying to cut back on our sugar intake, isn’t that right, Wy?” Jim asked the boy.
Wyatt nodded, pressing down on the tines of his fork so the stem lifted.
“You gotta enjoy life a little, man, don’t you?” Nicholas said.
“You heard of Type II Diabetes, Nicholas?” Jim knocked twice against the tabletop. “One out of four children.”
“That is a staggering statistic.”
“Hey, Wyatt, you wanna help me put up the grill?” Molly asked.
Nicholas followed Jim into the kitchen, carrying the last of the dinner plates.
“Can I offer you anything else?” Jim asked. “Coffee? Tea? A ginger beer?”
“I’m good.” He noticed a jar of lip-gloss on the window ledge and thought again of Tina. He pointed to the back door. “I’m gonna step outside for a minute,” he told Jim.
He had to call 411 to get the number. The phone rang four times before he heard somebody answer. For a second there was only the sound of machines whirring, silverware tinging, patrons talking. Then he recognized Deanna’s voice saying “Coffee Spot.”
“It’s Nicholas. I’m calling for Tina.”
“Oh.” There was the loud chiming of a cash register. “Hang on, Nicholas.”
He shook a cigarette free and lit it up. The back deck, four by five feet of rough clapboard, was on a slight hill, and he gazed at a slope of telephone wires, tiled roofs, and traffic lights. After a few hundred yards, the fog began, blurring everything ahead.
“Hello?”
“Tina.” He was so relieved to get her on the phone, he forgot what he wanted to say.
“What’s up?”
He took a swift drag and turned his back on the view. “I thought you said Deanna quit.”
“That’s what she told us,” she said, dropping her voice. “Shit.” He heard a loud clatter followed by a rustling. Then Tina was back on. “Where are you? Are you at Molly’s house?”
“Yes.”
She giggled. “How is it?”
“Awful. I want to come home.”
Someone shouted an order and Tina muffled the phone to respond. He wondered what part of her body she’d pressed the receiver against. Her shoulder? Her stomach? “Hi,” she said at last. “I have to go.”
“I miss you,” he said.
He heard her breathing. He wished he could see her face. “I have to go,” she said again.
Nicholas ground out his cigarette and flicked it over the deck. When he walked back inside, Jim was Saran-wrapping the leftover kabobs. “Cigarette?” he asked.
“You want one?” Nicholas asked, reaching into his pocket.
Jim laughed. “No thanks,” he said.
Nicholas withdrew his hand. “You were just asking if I smoke cigarettes?”
Jim flicked his gaze up to meet Nicholas’s. Then he returned to his kabobs. “That’s right. I’m curious about your lifestyle, Nick. If you’re going to be playing a role in Wyatt’s life.”
“Is that a question?” Nicholas said.
“Yeah, it’s a question,” said Jim. He straightened up and placed his hands on his hips. “I’ve got a few questions.”
“Let’s hear it, Jim.”
“Do you still party?” he asked. “Get high?”
“Is this an intervention?”
“Would you like it to be?”
Nicholas shook his head. “I don’t think you want to do this.”
“I’m looking out for my family,” said Jim.
Wyatt appeared, panting, in the doorway. “Hey,” he said. “You want me to show you the box I made? The one I was telling you about? It’s in my room.”
“Sure thing. I’ll meet you in a minute.”
The doorway emptied, and Jim and Nicholas stared at each other.
“I’m not a fuckup,” Nicholas said.
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Jim.
“This is my family, too.”
Jim crossed his arms. He looked down his nose at Nicholas, like a bouncer. “Those are some big words.”
Nicholas laughed. “I think I can handle them.” He eyed the sink, crowded with dirty dishes. “Thanks again for dinner,” he said. “I didn’t know you could do that with tofu.”
Wyatt was seated, cross-legged, on his floor, taking action figures out of a wooden box. “I keep my action figures in here,” Wyatt explained.
Nicholas inspected the box with great care. “This is some fine workmanship,” he said. He shut and removed the lid. “It could use a snugger fit. I could show you how to do that.”
The front door banged shut. “Honey? D’you have my bike lock?”
Jim’s footsteps echoed down a hall, followed by his muffled response.
“Jim’s okay,” said Wyatt. He picked up an action figure and set it on his knee. “I can tell you don’t like him.”
“Don’t know him,” Nicholas replied. He watched Wyatt release his grip on the toy. It balanced for a second before tumbling to the floor. “I like him if you do.”
“I asked my mom why you guys got married,” Wyatt said, leaning backwards against his bed. He laced his fingers behind his head.
“Oh yeah? Yeah, I forgot about that. What’d she say?”
“She said, ‘Tell him to ask me himself.’”
“Ha,” said Nicholas.
When he got home that night, the house was dark. His stomach ached. He wondered what was in those kebabs. He walked straight to the kitchen. He blinked into the glare of the refrigerator before removing a Rolling Rock. He tossed the bottle cap in the sink and looked out the window. He took a long pull off the beer.
He walked into the living room, lifted the remote off the coffee table, and turned on the television. Tina’s favorite cartoon was on, the one about the Chihuahua and the cat. Instead of changing it, he sat down and put his feet up. A few minutes later, she opened the door.
Read Part I
