Free Wildlife by Richard Ford Page B

Oldsmobile was parked halfway up the driveway, and farther down the street I could see the blue light of the Italian steakhouse. In front of Warren’s car, in the shadows beside the house, I saw there was a motorboat on a trailer, the smooth white hull pointed up.
    ‘It’s all lit up in there, isn’t it?’ my mother said. She seemed pleased by the lights. She turned the rearview mirror toward her and opened her eyes very wide, closed them and opened them again as if she’d been asleep. I wondered what she would say if I told her I didn’t want to go in Warren Miller’s house, and that I wanted to walk back home over the bridge. I thought she would make me go anyway, and this was something I had no choice in. ‘Well,’ she said, turning the mirror back in the dark. ‘Handsome is as handsome looks, too. Are you going inside with me? You don’t have to. You can go home.’
    ‘No.’ And I was surprised by that. ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.
    ‘Great,’ my mother said. She opened the car door onto the cold night’s air, and together we got out to go inside the house.
    Warren Miller opened the front door before we were all the way up the front steps. He had a white dish towel tucked inside his belt front like an apron. He was wearing a whiteshirt, suit pants and cowboy boots, and he was smiling, not so much in a happy way as in a serious one. He seemed older to me and bigger than he had the day before, and his limp seemed worse. His eyeglasses were shining and his thin black hair was slicked back and gleaming. He was not handsome at all, and did not look like a man who read poetry or played golf or who had a lot of money or holdings. But I knew those things were all true.
    ‘You look like a beauty pageant queen, Jeanette,’ he said to my mother on the steps. He talked loudly, much louder than he had the day before. He was framed in the lighted doorway, and inside the house on a table by the door, I could see a glass he had been drinking out of.
    ‘I was–on one occasion,’ my mother answered. And she walked right by him through the door. ‘Where’s the heater in here? I’m frozen,’ I heard her say, then she disappeared inside.
    ‘You have to say the nice things to women,’ Warren Miller said to me, and he put his large hand on my shoulder again. We were in the doorway, and I could smell whatever he was drinking on his breath. ‘Do you always say them to your mother?’
    ‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘I try to.’
    ‘Are you looking after her welfare?’ I could hear him breathe down in his chest. His eyes were watery blue behind his glasses.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do that.’
    ‘You can’t trust anybody.’ He gripped my shoulder hard. ‘You can’t even trust yourself. You’re no damn good, are you? I can tell. I’m part Indian.’ He laughed when he said that.
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘I guess I’m not.’ And I laughed, too. Then, holding my shoulder, he pushed me through the door and into the house.
    Inside, the air was very warm and thick with cooking smells. Every light I could see was turned on, and the doorsto all the rooms were open so that from the middle of the living room you could see into two bedrooms where there were double beds and, farther on, into a bathroom that had white tiles. Everything in the house was neat and clean, and everything seemed old-fashioned to me. The wallpaper had pale orange flowers in it. All the tables had white lace doilies under the lamps, and the pictures were all framed in heavy, dark-looking wood. It was nice furniture–I knew that–but it was old and curved, with fat legs. It seemed unusual for a man to live here. It was nothing like we had. Our furniture was not all the same. And the walls in our house were painted and did not have wallpaper.
    Warren Miller limped through the living room back into the kitchen where he was cooking, but right away brought my mother a big drink of what he was drinking, which must’ve been gin. My mother stood over the floor