Free Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley by Ann Pancake Page B

Janie? Why don’t you write a story about that?”
    And now, her glass squeezed between her hands, her mired in the blank, ground-bound sadness that always came after a drunk if she wasn’t quick enough to fall asleep first, Janie understood one part of the Nathan ooze. That the drugs, the alcohol, had never really dissolved barriers, never brought her closer to others. They just generated an insulation whose padded distance made her feel safe enough to make believe intimacy.
    TEN DAYS PASSED after that last drive to the stucco house without a word from Nathan, twice as long as he’d ever vanished before. Janie stayed off the porch this time. She watched from the window only. A Ferris wheel revolved through her head, each car pausing for her to sit in its feeling a while: rage at his ignoring her; relief that she possibly wouldn’t ever talk to him again; pride that she did not reach out to him (she suppressed the fact that her not reaching out was more fear of rejection than anything noble); but, suffusing all of that, and this not suppressible, her desire for him anyway.
    Only once did Uncle Bobby notice anything was amiss. “Wonder where Nathan’s been keeping himself at these days?”
    Then, a week before she was to return to college, when she and Uncle Bobby had already started saying good-bye to their places, she was upstairs pulling on her black popcorn girl pants for the evening shift when her grandmother called from downstairs, “Nathan’s on the phone.”
    Janie held the receiver a little ways from her ear, as if this might help. She stared through her grandparents’ living room window, at the brick walls across the street. But Janie could not picture him, invisible inside that near room.
    He told her his parents had gone out of town.
    â€œYou and Bobby want to come over for dinner tomorrow night?”
    No , a rigidness inside her hissed, say no . But that part was too brittle, too grown-up, to overcome the other. The seductive teasing in his voice, she heard it even in two sentences as bland as those. The nonchalant confidence, his wanting her and Uncle Bobby there. What’s there to lose? Janie thought, and said, “What time?”
    Nathan opened the front door, extended one arm, and pulled her to him. He turned his crotch into hers for a moment like a promise. In those ten days, he’d grown back the beard he’d shaved during the Melissa breakup, and she flinched at the prickliness. “Whatcha gonna put on the grill, Nathan?” Uncle Bobby was saying. “I could smell the coals clear in my bedroom. I could smell the coals clear in my bedroom, Nathan,” and as they passed through to the kitchen, Janie was aware of the garage a story under their feet. How seldom she’d been in this part of the house except in secret, while his parents slept, she and Nathan tiptoeing up to his single bed.
    â€œSirloin, Bobby. Only the best,” Nathan said. Uncle Bobby had dressed up, his nicest blue and green polo shirt, his new khaki shorts the requisite one size small, them riding high on his tree-trunk thighs. “You all want a beer or a rum and Coke?”
    â€œBeer, please,” said Uncle Bobby.
    â€œRum and Coke,” said Janie.
    â€œYeah, that’s what I want, too,” Uncle Bobby said.
    She saw right away that Nathan expected her to pull together most of the meal from groceries he’d bought—iceberg lettuce, baking potatoes, bacon bits—while he fretted over the three steaks on the grill. She set her drink on the windowsill and scrubbed potatoes while Uncle Bobby hovered between her in the kitchen and Nathan outside, Uncle Bobby knowing better than to help with hot things. All afternoon hadbeen pumping up to storm, Janie could smell the lightning making, she didn’t have to look at the sky, and the air-conditioning at Nathan’s was a good five degrees cooler than her grandparents would run it, the chill