Mean Season

I never found out what Judy said to my mother to get her to agree to allow Joshua Reed to sit out his sentence under our roof. Momma didn’t seem too excited about the idea when I first mentioned it, what with him being a drunk driver and all. She put down her quilting and stared hard at me.

“You know what you’re asking? You really want for me to do this?” Momma asked.

“It was just an idea,” I told her. “I just thought, maybe.”

“You been with that fan club how long now?”

I reminded her that it had been seven years.

“I suppose you think this guy’s worth some trouble,” she said. “I’m not convinced of it, but maybe you know better.”

The next morning, Momma told me that she’d take a call from Judy, and whatever Judy said convinced her to go along. I always figured it had something to do with money.

So it was a week after the arrest that Joshua sat in the courtroom at the arraignment, frowning as Judge Weintraub asked for the plea and the Charleston lawyer said, “guilty.” And after that, it was over. At least, most of the legal part.

As Judy predicted, Joshua wasn’t too excited about spending ninety days in Pinecob, even if he’d be allowed to commute to the movie set once production started. But I got the impression that whatever Lars and Judy had on him, it was enough to make him simmer down and sit tight. Lars kept pointing out how lucky Joshua was, though I didn’t get the impression that he saw himself as lucky to live with me and Momma and Beau Ray, even when the other choice was the Jefferson County jail.

“Fuck that,” Joshua Reed said that morning in the Harper’s Ferry hotel, after he’d come back to the table by the breakfast buffet and Lars mentioned the house arrest idea. “You can’t be serious.” He looked at Lars, then Judy, then back to Lars. “There’s got to be another way. Can’t we—I mean, I—just pay a really big fine? Or, I don’t know, talk to high-school kids?”

Lars and Judy had shrugged. As it turned out, Judge Weintraub didn’t think that fining rich people was an effective deterrent (although he did slap Joshua with a $5,000 fine and the cost of the repaired fence and the cow’s vet visit). Judge William Weintraub believed in families and he believed in house arrest for ninety days for Joshua’s sort of a DUI. The terms of Joshua’s sentence were this: He would have to wear an ankle sensor so that the county police would know where he was at all times. He wasn’t allowed to leave the house without police supervision, except to go to required alcohol counseling classes, which in Pinecob meant AA twice a week over at Potomac Springs Senior High. And he lost his license for a year.

“Fuck me,” Joshua had said, leaving the courthouse after all the plea bargaining was done. “This is going to give me a rash.”

I think he meant the ankle sensor.

“Three months in fucking Pinecob. It’s a fucking bad dream.”

By the time Momma got back from the Y with Beau Ray—that first afternoon with Joshua Reed in the house— Lars and Judy were on their way to the airport, and Joshua was tucked behind the closed door to Vince’s old bedroom. I asked Beau Ray to keep extra quiet that afternoon. I thought Joshua might be sleeping, although I didn’t know. I could have walked in easy enough. There was no lock on the door to Vince’s room. Except for the bathrooms, there were no locks on any of the inside doors in our house. Dad hadn’t believed in them, and after he died—well, it would have felt disloyal to make an addition like that. The Gitlin family rule was that closed doors were as good as locked, so you were supposed to assume that the person who’d done the closing didn’t want to be barged in on. You were supposed to knock before walking in. Although, logically, I knew that he had to eat, part of me wondered if we would ever see Joshua Reed again.

“Leanne,” Momma said, “you come over here and help your brother put to right his playing cards.”

I’d been in the living room, comparing our own setup against the picture of Joshua’s “artist’s cottage” from the home decor magazine Judy’s assistant had sent me. The quilt that Momma had laid over the long couch hadn’t been cleaned in a while, so I’d hauled it out to soak in the laundry tub and replaced it with one I thought was prettier, made mostly of blue shirting. But even that didn’t look like something you might see in a magazine.

Don’t get me wrong, our house was fine and it’s not like we didn’t have room enough. Momma and Dad had moved in back when Tommy was a toddler and Susan, just a baby. So I’d been conceived there, and before me, Vince and before Vince, Beau Ray. Growing up, Dad was always the one with big plans—tearing out a wall to expand a room, adding another bedroom out back. But most of those plans never materialized. And after Dad died, Momma wouldn’t talk of renovations. As the seasons passed, that meant that the kitchen floors sagged a bit along one edge, and the basement tended to smell a little swampy. Ours just wasn’t a home decor house.

Beau Ray had rushed off to his room upon returning from “Move Your Body, Move Your Mind.” Even though I knew that extended periods of quiet were usually followed by the discovery of some sort of chaos—like the time he’d dunked all of his clothes in the bathtub or cut his hair in jagged layers or tried to repair an old model plane but only succeeded in pasting it to his arm with superglue—I hadn’t felt like checking in on him. Transitions home from the Y tended to be difficult, but that day had also been Raoul’s last before moving back to Mexico to be with his family. Raoul was a physical therapist’s assistant, and Beau Ray had worked with him for the previous two years. There had been a going-away party the week before, but there’s nothing like the very last day you’re going to see someone to make the loss hit home.

“Leanne, didn’t you hear me? I’m talking right at you,” Momma said. She sounded mad. “Beau Ray’s done mixed up all his playing cards, plus the ones from the game chest. I don’t know, just fix it!”

“Yes, Momma,” I told her, and I put the artist’s cottage picture inside the pages of the fancy Bible that Susan had given us the year before.

Beau Ray’s room was a mess of playing cards.

“Beau Ray,” I said to get his attention. I could see how Momma had probably taken one look and called for me. There were cards strewn across his bed, across the rug, across the dresser, everywhere. If there’d been anyone else to ask, I’d have kept passing the buck.

Beau Ray was squatting in the doorway of his closet, pretending to play solitaire. Sometimes, even though years had passed, I’d have these split-second moments when I’d forget all that had happened, that Beau Ray wasn’t exactly Beau Ray anymore, that there was a new person in our midst.

“What’s with all the cards?” I asked him.

He looked up at me, confused, and it all came back.

“Playing solidtare,” he said.

“Solitaire,” I told him. “But what about all these?”

“Playing twenty-eight pickup,” he said.

From the door, I could see that he’d mixed at least four different decks, four different designs including one from my room that had roses on the backs and gold around the edges. I don’t put too much stock in playing cards, but Vince had given me the rose deck when I was twelve, so they were not something I wanted to see torn up or stepped on.

“Looks like two hundred and eight pickup,” I said, doing the math.

“Two hundred eight pickup,” Beau Ray said. He threw his solitaire pile into the air. On the outside, it looked celebratory, the cards fluttering around him like petals and whirligigs. But he didn’t look happy.

“Momma says we’ve got to clean this up. Help me get the cards into a big pile, okay?”

Beau Ray nodded but didn’t move. I started gathering the cards into one pile and finally he shrugged, then helped a little. I told him that I wanted him to ask before he took the deck of rose cards, and even though I was trying not to sound mad about it, Beau Ray started to rock back and forth as he did when he sought to comfort himself.

“Beau Ray, it’s okay,” I said. “I’m not yelling at you. It’s just that they belong in my room—like this is your room and your cards live here, right?”

He nodded, but I knew that we’d be having the same conversation again about something else, some other thing he found and would take or break or both. I’d learned not to become too attached to things since Beau Ray’s fall. Nothing lasted.

Beau Ray was a good guy—at least, he meant to be. That he’d always been mellow, even back when he was functioning at normal levels, was a saving grace. I’d heard stories of people, brain-injured like him, full of adult-sized rage but without the ability to put it anywhere. So my brother marked Raoul’s departure by throwing four packs of playing cards in the air. That wasn’t so bad.

Maybe an hour later, I was in my room replacing the rose-backed cards in my desk drawer when Joshua opened Vince’s door. He stood in the doorway, stock-still for a moment, staring across the hall into my room. He looked both sleepy and mad, like a toddler roused too early from a nap. His dark hair curled out in different directions. Then he shuffled across the hall and stood at my bedroom door, frowning out my window toward the yard below and the street beyond. He looked down at his left ankle, where the gray plastic sensor with a locked band hung. He shook his left foot, and I could hear the plastic rattle and thud against his skin.

“So it’s not a bad dream,” he said. “Fuck.”

“You awake?” I asked him and then cringed to myself. It was a stupid question, given that he was standing before me, his eyes open. “You want to see the rest of the house now?”

Joshua shrugged. “I guess. Whatever. Why the fuck not?”

He hated us, I thought, if he could be goaded to feel anything at all. At least, he acted like he hated us, and as Judy had pointed out, Joshua Reed was a fine actor.

“Great. I’ll give you the grand tour,” I told him.

I thought about what Judy had told me to do—or rather, how she’d told me to act. But still I heard myself being nice to him before I knew if I wanted to be, before I’d even thought about what I wanted. No one ever noticed, I don’t think—that I tended to be nice as pie even when I didn’t mean it. But it was a quirk that bugged me, and I realized that if I were going to be aloof to Joshua, I’d have to become a better actress. I’d have to practice.

He’d already seen most of the upstairs, what there was to it. He’d seen his room, and mine, and the hall bathroom. Besides that, there was Momma’s bedroom and Susan’s old bedroom, which had years back been converted into the sewing room where Momma did all her machine piecing. I pointed out both rooms on the way downstairs, but Joshua didn’t seem to care. There was a lot of shrugging.

Downstairs, Beau Ray sat on the couch watching This Old House on television. He had quieted down and for that, Momma had given him a slice of cake. Momma sat beside him, stacking fabric squares. She nodded up at us.

“Joshua, this is my brother Beau Ray. Beau Ray, say hello,” I said.

Beau Ray didn’t look up.

“Beau Ray, it’s polite to say hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he said but still didn’t look up.

A streak of chocolate icing colored his face, across his mouth and cheek. I usually wouldn’t have cared about something like that, but I remember being a little embarrassed just then.

“Joshua’s going to be our house guest for the summer,” Momma said. “Isn’t that nice?”

Joshua looked a little uncomfortable. Beau Ray finally tore his eyes from the television set and glanced up at Joshua.

“Hey, man,” Joshua said.

Beau Ray’s eyes went wide. “That’s!” Beau Ray said. He pointed at Joshua Reed, then turned to me with an incredulous smile, mouth open, icing everywhere. “That’s!” he said again.

I had to smile back. Anyone would have.

“Yes. It is,” I said. “Remember how I was telling you? And you didn’t believe me.”

Beau Ray scrambled to his feet, his eyes locked on Joshua the whole time. Chocolate crumbs fell to the floor and got mashed into the carpet as Beau Ray rushed over and enveloped Joshua in a huge hug. Joshua looked at me like he could use some guidance.

“It’s!” Beau Ray said, hugging him close.

“Now, now, dear,” Momma told my brother. “Of course you’re excited but let the man alone!”

But Beau Ray was a lot beefier than Joshua, and he was holding on tight.

“It’s!” Beau Ray said again, laughing a little. His laughter shook Joshua up and down.

“It’s cool, man,” Joshua said, but I thought he looked sort of scared. His arms flapped a little—as much as they could pinned beneath the hug.

“Beau Ray, please let go of him. You’ve got the whole summer to hug him,” I said. I must have sounded serious because Beau Ray released Joshua, then came to my side. He poked me in the shoulder, like I hadn’t seen Joshua yet or if I had, didn’t realize the magnitude of amazement he warranted.

“Cool man,” Beau Ray said to me, poking me hard.

“Ouch. I know,” I said.

Joshua was catching his breath. He’d taken a couple steps away from Beau Ray and was wiping chocolate icing from his cheek.

“I’ll get you a towel for that,” Momma said. “You got some on your shirt, too. I’ll get the soap.”

“Really, don’t bother,” Joshua said, but she was already halfway to the kitchen.

“Beau Ray,” I said. “Have you cleaned your room? Because I want to show Joshua your room, but I want to make sure it’s clean first.”

“It’s clean,” Beau Ray said, still staring, as if Joshua might disappear if he looked away.

“Really?” I asked.

Beau Ray cast his eyes to the floor. The playing cards had been only the top layer of disorganization. I’d taught Beau Ray to throw all his things into the closet and shut the door if he couldn’t actually get them put away in time for company to see. I figured that’s what still needed doing.

“I’m gonna go clean my room,” Beau Ray said. “Cool man.” He smiled at Joshua and hustled off. Joshua stared after him.

“He was just excited to meet you. He’ll calm down,” I told him. “He’s the one I was telling you is disabled.”

“I see it didn’t stunt his size,” Joshua said.

“He used to play a lot of football,” I said.

“When did, you know, his head happen? You said it was a fall?” Joshua asked.

“I was thirteen,” I said, trying to remember. “It was January, so he was seventeen. So twelve years ago. He’s turning thirty this summer. You’ll be here.”

Downstairs, in addition to the living room with the TV and the two couches and Dad’s old reading chair, there was Beau Ray’s room and his bathroom, the dining room and the kitchen. Another set of stairs, near the door of the kitchen, led farther down, to the washing machine and the swampy basement with the Ping-Pong table that no one ever used, the computer Judy bought me, and my fan club filing cabinet. Joshua didn’t say anything as I showed him around. He sniffed a bit and frowned a lot, but he didn’t say a word.

Outside was the big backyard and smaller front yard, and between the front yard and the door, a covered porch with a clothesline and a rickety table. On one end sat half a motorcycle Tommy had abandoned a few summers back, and at the other, an old tire that Momma had fashioned into a marigold planter. We ended up out there after I ran out of things to show him inside. Joshua sank into our one porch chair, so I sat on the two-step stoop, looking out at the driveway, beyond which Joshua couldn’t go. For a while, he held his head in his hands, like he had the worst headache. I asked him if there was anything he needed.

“A drink,” he said.

“You mean a liquor drink or a soda or something because Lars told me he didn’t want—” I started saying, but he cut me off.

“No,” he said. “Nothing.”

“I usually go to the Winn-Dixie on Sundays,” I explained. “But if there’s anything special you want, let me know. I could make an extra trip.”

“What the fuck is a Winn-Dixie?” Joshua snapped.

I felt my cheeks go hot. Sandy was right, I thought just then. Joshua Reed was a butthole. Joshua was a butthole and this was day one of ninety. The summer stretched out farther into the future than any of us could see, like the bend in Prospect Street when you turned left. There was never any way to know what might be coming at you there, so it was best to take it slow. That’s what Dad had always said.

I didn’t answer him, and eventually Joshua Reed looked up at me. I still didn’t answer and he frowned, then looked a little ashamed, then broke out one of his smiles.

“Sorry,” he said. “Winn-Dixie?”

I took a breath and thought, okay, I’ll forgive him, the way you forgive a kid who is done with time-out, even though you know that he’s bound to start roughhousing again. I took a breath and thought, start slow.

“For groceries. It’s a supermarket,” I told him. “I guess they don’t have them in Los Angeles?”

He shook his head. “There’s nothing I need. Wait. I’ll let you know. I can’t even think right now,” he said.

I looked at my nails. I was still sporting the polish I’d put on the night I first met Joshua Reed. It had begun to flake and crack, and I picked at it as I looked out into our driveway. A car rolled by. I didn’t recognize who it was, but I waved like I always did and whoever it was waved back. Joshua turned to me.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, though I knew that his look carried something with it.

“You want lemonade?” I asked.

He kept staring into the street. I stood up.

“I could use a beer,” I said.

Lars had asked me not to serve Joshua alcohol so long as he was under house arrest, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t indulge, even if it was mostly for show. As I opened the screen door, Joshua buried his head in his hands again.

“Fuck me,” he muttered. And then louder, like he was really angry, he yelled it. “Fuck me!”

“Hey,” I said to him, walking back near. “About the swearing. You can’t be doing that. You can’t be swearing like that around the house.”

He turned to me. “What?” But I could tell he had heard me, because he sounded fed up. I suddenly got all nervous.

“It’s just…you can’t…you shouldn’t…not around the house.”

Joshua looked like he didn’t know where to begin. “People swear in prison,” he finally said.

“On account of Beau Ray,” I explained. I told him how Beau Ray had this bad habit—more annoying than bad, I guess—of mimicking. Especially with swear words. “We’ve all trained ourselves not to,” I told him.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks,” I said, and went to get my beer. From behind the screen door, I heard Joshua again.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered.

The house was quiet that night, but I didn’t sleep well. Joshua’s door was closed, and Momma had closed hers, too. As I padded down the hall, ready to crawl into bed, I wondered what Momma was really thinking. She’d been fairly closemouthed on the subject of Joshua up to then. All I knew was that she saw his house arrest as an extension of my fan club duties, as if Joshua were a hobby of mine I had to keep neat and in the right place, like the plastic horses I’d collected when I was little. She’d already told me that I’d be the one driving him to AA. I would also be the one to buy groceries and whatever else he might demand. That night, Momma had gone to bed before dinner, saying that she was tuckered and had a big day ahead. I wondered if it hadn’t been the arraignment and being civil to Judy and Lars and worrying over Beau Ray. Or maybe it was just having someone in Vince’s room after all that time.

I had always slept with my door open. When I was younger, it was so I could look into Vince’s room and see his feet sticking up under the covers and know that he would hear anything awful or scary and could rush to my side in seconds. Not that anything awful or scary ever happened—not that he could prevent at least. And after Vince left, I’d kept my door open so that I would be able to see if he came back in the night. And years after that, it was habit. But that night, that first night with Joshua, I’d closed my door, and with all the doors upstairs closed, it felt like a different house. Like my family wasn’t my own anymore. I wondered if we’d made a mistake.

Often when I couldn’t sleep, I called Sandy late at night. But that night, she was with her family at the beach—would be for the next week, too—and I was afraid I’d wake everyone. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d sit on the porch and listen to the crickets. But closing my door seemed so final, and I didn’t want to take a chance on running into Joshua while I was in nightclothes. So I stared at the ceiling and wondered how long ninety days would last. Start slow, I told myself.

I’ve been an early riser since forever—or at least since my teens. Usually I’m up around six. I don’t know where it comes from, since no one else in my family gets up so early. Beau Ray had long been one of those guys who’d sleep until noon in a bright room. And Momma was more of an eight o’clock riser—earlyish, but not early. But me, I’ve never even had to set an alarm. I could always tell myself “get up at five forty-five” or “get up at six-fifteen” and my body would obey (although daylight saving time would have me off-kilter for a couple days). So even though I didn’t sleep well, I still woke up by six-thirty that first morning after Joshua moved in.

I got up, got dressed and took Momma’s station wagon to SpeedLube for an oil change, and then I drove into Charles Town and it was still but seven forty-five. I had a key that got me into the county clerk’s office, no matter what the time, and I went to my desk and organized my things like I’d meant to do the day before, except the arraignment had gone longer than I’d figured. For the next eighty-nine days, I was only going to be working half-time, since it turned out that we would be getting paid for taking care of Joshua.

I hadn’t been thinking anything about money, I’d swear on Susan’s fancy Bible, when I offered up Vince’s room. Heck, I hadn’t even known it the day Momma signed the guardianship papers, though I think Momma might have. Momma had told me that Judy and Lars were fixing to pay her $200 a day for the use of Vince’s room and meals and laundry and not killing him (that last part being a joke). Judy said that it was like paying for a hotel, which they would have been doing had there been such thing as hotel arrest. Judy even asked Judge Weintraub whether he thought that was fair, and he said he didn’t see anything wrong with it.

Two hundred dollars a day was a lot more than I was making at the county clerk’s office. It was probably more than what Momma and I together brought home. And Momma said that if we were getting paid like that to take care of Joshua, we sure as hell better take care of Joshua, which meant she wanted me to be around more.

This is the way Momma would talk: “Leanne, I’m wanting you to stick around the house more this summer.” It sounds polite and all, but if I’d ever said no, all of that niceness would be gone and she’d start in with how ungrateful I was and didn’t I see how hard it had been for her, and I’d end up doing what she wanted anyway. I knew it, and she knew I knew it. But it still irked me because I also knew that it was awful convenient that Beau Ray would be watched over at the same time. And that screwed me, since summer was when Momma usually did more watching so I could take my extension courses. It’s like she had forgotten that I was the one she’d pushed to think about college, well, me and Vince. I remember wondering whether Vince had found his way to college, wherever he was, as I straightened my desk in case Mr. Bellevue assigned someone else to sit there on Mondays, Thursdays and Friday afternoons.

I saw that Mr. Bellevue had left a note for me.

Leanne, it read, I’m terribly excited for you!!! Enjoy this experience—but of course you’ll have to tell me everything! I’m sure it will be unique and memorable!!