Free A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans Page B

I propped under it was still there. Someone was trying to enter. The door was shaking, jostling the chair aside.
    “George!”
    Finally the chair fell over. The door opened, and my mother’s silhouette filled the bedroom door. Yellow light from the hall burned around her.
    “George, are you awake? What is this chair doing here?”
    She crossed into the dark bedroom.
    “How was your night?” I asked, trying to be casual.
    “I thought I heard you talking. Were you talking in your sleep?”
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    “I guess so.”
    She sat down next to me. She smelled of sweet perfume gone rotten with scotch and the faint mingled scents of cooking oil and bleach—
    restaurant odors. Her breath was tobacco-y. She began stroking my head, somewhat clumsily.
    “I got the job. Isn’t that exciting?”
    “Mm.”
    She paused. “Tom Harris said you got upset tonight.”
    I was silent.
    “Was everything okay?”
    “Yeah.”
    She sat in silence next to me, waiting for more. “Why did you put the chair in front of the door?” she asked firmly.
    “I don’t know. I guess I was upset,” I said, seizing on her word.
    “Can you tell me why?”
    I thought for a moment.
    “When Dad went away,” I said, “did Tom Harris want him to go?”
    My mother turned aside, as if this question caused her pain.
    “Sweetie, Tom Harris opposed your father’s going for the same reasons we all did. It was dangerous down there.” She peered at me in the dark. “Is that what this is about?”
    “Did Tom Harris tell Daddy that? Or did he just tell you he told Daddy?”
    “He told your father directly,” she replied. “George, what’s this about?”
    “Are you sure he said that to Daddy?”
    “George!” she said, exasperated. “What is all this?”
    But I closed my eyes to make her think I had fallen asleep. She waited for a time. Waited for me to stir and say something to ease her anxiety, something concrete and solvable that she could actually address with her ample combined powers of intelligence and love. But I didn’t. Eventually she rose from the bed and crept out quietly. I heard the sink running, the aspirin bottle pop open, the pills rattling. Then 60
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    I drifted off for real, and, as I did, I recalled an image: a man with a thick mustache lounging on our sofa at Christmastime, bearing eau-de-vie and sweet dessert wines, telling outlandish stories, with fingers that fiddled and twitched with continual impatience. My godfather, I murmured to myself: Freddie Turnbull.
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    He was high up on the property, a little toy figure bending and bowing, seemingly dancing in an odd halting step—a kind of Electric Slide—all by himself. He was raking, actually. But the rake was invisible in his hands against the house, the yard, and the trees, all colored in the ash-brown hues of autumn.
    Rosetta was the name of Freddie Turnbull’s house. It was situated just south of town, on a hillock overlooking a quiet patch of Main Street past two hulking Presbyterian churches and an old hotel named for P. G. T. Beauregard, now a halfway house for local lunatics who on mild days could be seen lolling on rockers under the columned porch.
    Rosetta was a broad-shouldered, brown brick house, with ivy crawling on every side, that wore, as it were, a Victorian lace cap in the form of a whitewashed, latticed widow’s walk flanked by two chimneys. Its yard ran a hundred feet down to Main Street, and its interior was the pride of its owner: a shadowy place slathered in oriental carpets and antiques. Every year the house would be opened up for parties, and Freddie—Uncle Freddie, my godfather—would escort his friends around to show new acquisitions or restorations. Uncle Freddie had inherited a fortune from his parents, as well as Rosetta, so compared 61
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    with his scholarly peers—he was a professor of art history at Early—he lived like a baron.
    When he saw me