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  “So because you’ve got Niddy, you don’t need me.”

  Dad shook his head. “When you act like Niddy, then I’ll need you.”

  “But, Dad,” said Ryan, so hurt and angry now that he decided to say this terrible thing. “You’re not as good as your word.”

  Dad fell silent.

  “Wasn’t there something about ‘till death do us part’?” asked Ryan.

  Father stood up. “Walk on back to the bus now, Ryan.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No you’re not,” said Dad. “I have to get the time sheet from Niddy so he can go home.”

  “I don’t have the bus fare home,” said Ryan.

  “That’s not very good planning,” said Dad.

  “I was hoping you’d give me bus fare.”

  “I never said I would,” said Dad.

  “But . . . you’re my father.”

  “Not judging from what you just said to me,” said Dad. “You’ve got a longish walk ahead of you, and night comes pretty early these days, so you’d better get started.”

  “I don’t know the way.”

  “Man,” said Dad. “You’ve got a problem.”

  “Can I use your phone to call Mom?”

  “My phone doesn’t call your mother. It receives calls from her, but it doesn’t initiate those calls.”

  “It wouldn’t be you calling, it would be—”

  “It would be my name popping up on her phone, and if experience is our teacher, that means she will not answer, she’ll just text something unpleasant to me.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Ryan.

  Dad handed him the phone, then opened the door and stepped down and quietly thanked Niddy, who was the guy who had brought Ryan the hard hat, not the one who yelled at him.

  Ryan punched in Mom’s number. It rang a few times. Then it stopped. It didn’t go to voicemail. Instead, a text message appeared. “Die,” it said.

  Oh. That was illuminating. Dad was telling the truth. Mom was not just freezing him out. She was cruel. It had never crossed Ryan’s mind that maybe Dad was putting up with some hard things in the dissolution of their marriage. Mom’s version of everything made it Dad’s fault that they would never be getting back together. Dad who had another family he liked better. Dad who left home to please himself instead of keeping his marriage vows.

  And suddenly Ryan wondered if Dianne might be right about whose fault this whole divorce thing was.

  No. One mean-spirited text message wasn’t “the truth” as Dianne saw it.

  Ryan climbed down from the camper and walked over to Dad, who was still talking to Niddy. Ryan handed him the phone. Dad took it, saying nothing. Except to Niddy. “See you tomorrow, Nid. And thanks again.”

  Niddy grinned. “Have a good night, sir.”

  Dad went back up into the camper.

  Ryan stood there looking at Niddy.

  “Something I can do for you?” asked Niddy.

  “Thanks for the hard hat,” said Ryan. He took it off and handed it over.

  Niddy set it down on the ground, then got his wallet out of his pocket and pulled a few bucks out. “Your dad doesn’t want you walking home the whole way after dark.”

  Ryan took the money, then looked at Niddy again. “This isn’t from my dad, this is from you.”

  “It will be from him, when I tell him I gave it to you, before he takes off looking for you on the street.”

  “He’s not going to do that.”

  “He talks hard, kid, but he loves you more than life. This is from him.”

  Then Niddy trotted back into the garage of the half-built house and put the hard hat back on the stack. Ryan watched him and thought, this is a guy who doesn’t have to be reminded to take out the garbage. This is a guy who puts things away where they belong.

  Suddenly Ryan felt an urgent need to get home and check how full the kitchen and bathroom trash cans were. He pocketed the bills Niddy gave him and took off walking toward the bus stop. His watch told him that if he really booked it, he could catch the next bus instead of waiting an hour for the one after. He started jogging.

  4

  So it was a sure thing. Ryan would never be able to go out with a girl, because he was never going to have a driver’s license or a car, and he was never going to have a car, because he was never going to get the kind of job that would allow him to pay for a car. Besides, if he made that kind of money, he’d contribute most of it to helping pay for food and stuff, because now that he was noticing things around the house, it was more than overflowing garbage cans that blighted the place. The upstairs bathroom and the half-bath downstairs each had exactly one roll of toilet paper. It made him more careful about pulling off too much paper for each job, because he didn’t want to be stuck with too little paper to finish. The rolls disappeared more slowly, but rationing was the kind of thing you did when buying toilet paper was something you had to think about. And that was even true when you were using some generic sandpapery toilet paper brand that wasn’t good enough to be used in a gas station restroom.

  Garbage cans, toilet paper, and paper towels. Ha. Paper towels were a distant memory. Apparently, they had used them too freely before, and now there weren’t any. Spill something? Grab a rag from the rag drawer and wipe it up, then put the wet and dirty rags in a laundry basket in the basement so they could be washed and dried and folded and put back for next time. Or, if you were a lazy kid, drop the rag on the back of the sink.

  Seeing how endless the whole laundry situation looked, Ryan took a bunch of stiff, mostly dried rags and ran them through the washer and dryer. Before they were fully dry, Mother called him and led him down into the basement. “Your heart was in the right place,” she said, “but we can’t afford to use soap and water and wear and tear on the washing machine on a tiny load like a dozen rags. Plus, the rags need bleach to make sure they’re sterile. Plus, putting them through the drier uses a lot of electricity, and you put a whole drier sheet in with them.”

  Only then did Ryan remember that when drier sheets got accidentally left in with a batch of his clothes—sometimes hiding in his underwear, sometimes in a T-shirt—it was always about a quarter of a sheet. So he had used four loads’ worth of drier sheets on a single tiny load of rags.

  “We don’t use drier sheets on rags,” said Mother.

  “I didn’t know,” said Ryan.

  “Therefore, I’m telling you,” she said, with an edge of “duh” in her tone. “But I’m so glad that you did your trial laundry run with rags, because you washed in hot water and dried at top temperature. What if you had tried to wash a batch of clothes? My clothes, Dianne’s clothes, even your clothes? On those settings, only your T-shirts and underwear would have come out okay. Nothing of mine would have survived. Dianne’s clothes would be too small for a Barbie doll, if she owned such a thing.”

  Then Ryan remembered how annoying it was that there was always a drying rack set up in the basement, festooned with Dianne’s and Mom’s jeans and tops as well as their underwear, which he shouldn’t have to look at. They were drying there because the actual drier would have killed them.

  “I won’t wash anything of yours or Dianne’s,” said Ryan.

  “I could teach you how to wash them—cold wash, cold rinse, Woolite for the woolens, soak this, don’t spin that, knits laid flat to dry because you can’t hang them wet. I could teach you, but I won’t, because you wouldn’t remember.”

  “I remember things,” said Ryan, a little sullen now.

  “You remember things that you care about,” said Mother, “like every other human. Dianne and I remember which clothes have to be treated in certain ways, because we’re going to wear them. We have to remember. But you’ll think you remember, you’ll think you got it right, but we’ll be out some clothes that we can’t afford to replace. So here’s the deal. When y
ou find your socks and underwear and T-shirts and pants running low or smelling so bad that even you are offended, then you are free to wash your own clothes. But if you put something red in with a bunch of whites, then you’ll just have to wear pink T-shirts and socks and underwear because we can’t afford to replace them.”

  “Got it,” said Ryan.

  “You can go upstairs now,” said Mother. “The lecture’s over.”

  As he headed up the stairs, he heard her mutter, “Or you can take all your clothes to your father and see if he can get someone else to wash them for you.”

  So with garbage, sure, take initiative. But with important things, Ryan, you are not trustworthy or even worth training.

  I should have tried to get Dad to let me live with him.

  But that wasn’t the problem, not really. He was doing better already at always noticing the garbage and never taking out a bag until he filled it completely from the bathroom and bedroom trash cans, so their supply of plastic trash bags didn’t get depleted too fast. He noticed when it was time to sweep in the kitchen and vacuum in the great room or the bedrooms. He noticed when he got splashes of urine on the lip of the toilet, and he wiped it up and even sometimes put some cleansing powder onto the toilet and then used some dampened toilet paper to give a more thorough scrubbing.

  There was probably a better way, but at least he could flush the toilet paper when the job was done, and he didn’t have to see Mom on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor around the toilet. He never wanted to see that again, because there was only one man in the house splashing urine onto the floor around the toilet because you couldn’t always aim right on the first squirt, and besides, piss came out whatever direction it felt like and it splashed everywhere anyway.

  He was doing better at all those things, and the reward was that every now and then Mom had time to sit and watch TV or even, like, converse with Ryan and Dianne at night. And he dropped hints to Dianne and then sat her down and talked to her so she would do her homework without Mom having to nag her all the time. When she gave him snotty answers, he just let it flow past him. The house was a quieter place, even if it didn’t actually make Dianne nice to him.

  With all this stuff, he knew he was doing what Dad wanted him to do. But he didn’t congratulate himself about it, because he understood now that this was the bare minimum. He didn’t deserve a medal for doing stuff that he should have been doing all along.

  He also didn’t allow himself to wonder where Mother went all day if her lawyer was telling the court that she needed child support and stuff from Dad because she was unemployed. Of course she had a job. He just didn’t know what it was.

  Yet with all of this new adult-style watchfulness sucking time out of his life and still not making him proud of himself, the thing that bothered him most was that the nicest, smartest, funniest, and, yes, prettiest girl who had ever talked to him on purpose lived on the other side of the wall running down the middle of the house, and he knew he would never be able to take her out on a date, because they only had one car and Mom had it and couldn’t pay for insurance if Ryan got a license, so he would never be able to drive anybody anywhere.

  Sometimes, though, in spite of the fact that Ryan would never be girlfriend-ready, she came out onto the back deck of her half of the house and he would come sit on the second-from-bottom step off her deck down to the shared lawn, and they would talk. About nothing. About something. Some weird metaphysical idea that occurred to him in science or math, or some historical thing that he had read about in the library at school, and she would listen and then answer in a way that showed she understood what he was talking about, even when she disagreed, and he’d get this sad yearning sickness in the pit of his stomach that he finally decided to call “love” for lack of a better word.

  “You love her,” said Dianne one evening when Ryan came back inside when it was pitch dark.

  Ryan didn’t want to fight with her, so he didn’t say, “Shut up.” He didn’t say anything, just walked past her, heading for the kitchen sink for a drink of water.

  “I think it’s kind of cool,” said Dianne. “I mean, she’s cool, and if she thinks you’re cool enough to talk to, that makes you, not cool, really, but sort of . . .”

  “Cool-adjacent,” said Ryan, echoing a term Dad used when making fun of the way pretentious wannabe neighborhoods were described in real estate ads.

  “Naw,” said Dianne. “I’ve listened to you guys talking, and I’ll just admit it, you’re killer smart and so is she and you’re both cool. Even if nobody at school knows it.”

  “You don’t go to my school,” said Ryan. “How do you know we’re not the coolest kids there?”

  “Maybe you are, but, like, if nobody knows it, Ry, then what good does it do you?”

  After that, instead of being the enemy—albeit one that Ryan was keeping a one-sided truce with—when it came to Bizzy, Dianne was his ally. Something he would never have thought possible.

  It was Dianne who broached the idea of dating. “Why don’t you take her out?”

  “All I can afford to do is bring a couple of Dad’s scrapers and the two of us can scrape gum off the bottom of the school bleachers and then dispose of it in regular garbage bags destined for the landfill, since chewing gum is mostly plastic and isn’t biodegradable or recyclable.”

  “So . . . a service project date,” said Dianne.

  “No, Dee. Not a date.”

  Dianne laughed. Since he no longer reacted to her with rage, he just silently heard her laugh and decided the conversation was over.

  “She likes you, bonehead,” said Dianne. “What do you think a date with her has to be? Car? Dinner? Movie? That’s for people with money. She doesn’t have any money, she knows you don’t have any money.”

  Ryan didn’t say, because Dad won’t hire me so I can earn money and pay for those things.

  “Ryan, she has feet. The same number of feet that you have.”

  Ryan imitated a female voice. “I have the best boyfriend. We walk everywhere together. None of that automobile stuff for us.”

  Dianne just shook her head, looking sad. “You’ve talked to her for, like, a hundred or two hundred hours this fall, and you still don’t know her at all.”

  “And you do?” said Ryan.

  “How many other guys do you see her hanging out with and talking about deep stuff with? Is there a long line of them? Does she have a hard time fitting you into her packed schedule? You’re the only name on her dance card, dimwit.”

  “So it must be love,” said Ryan.

  “Eventually, some older guy is going to realize what a looker she is,” said Dianne, “and then you’ll be S.O.L. Right now you’ve got this narrow little window in which you just might be able to get yourself out of the friend zone into the boyfriend zone, if you just show her that you like her.”

  “Boyfriend zone” made him think of the Slovenian word “fant,” which made him think, “fant zone,” and therefore “phantom zone,” but this wasn’t a Superman comic. “So, I’m supposed to know she likes me just because she talks to me and makes time for me, but my going out into the backyard in the cold, just to wait for her to come out onto her deck and talk to me, that isn’t enough to tell her I like her?”

  “Life is so unfair, Ry,” said Dianne. “You’re going to die childless and alone, wondering why nothing ever happened between you and Bizzy.”

  Ryan wanted to say, Why don’t you tell her for me?

  Because he knew Dianne would go all innocent and say, Tell her what, that you like her? Speak for yourself, John Alden.

  No, Dianne would say, she’s three years older than me. It’s actually illegal for me to talk to a high school student without being invited. Especially not as a go-between for my cowardly big brother who thinks big thoughts but can’t do the small things that would make his life worth living.

 
Dianne wouldn’t say any of those things. It was Ryan saying them to himself, all the time. It was part of the agony, the ache of being in love with a girl who thought of him as some kind of brother.

  There was one other person who apparently took his relationship with Bizzy at all seriously: Mother.

  “That girl next door,” said Mother.

  “Bizzy Horvat,” said Ryan, knowing that Mother perfectly well knew all the names of the family through the wall from them.

  “You spend a lot of time on her.”

  “I get my homework done,” said Ryan. “I do my chores.”

  “I know that,” said Mother. “But you are both bags of undifferentiated hormones as volatile as nitroglycerin. So I’m warning you. Keep your clothes on, buster. Keep your fly zipped. Don’t get that girl pregnant.”

  Ryan blushed with shame, as if he had actually planned to do exactly what Mom accused him of. He had no such plan.

  The thought had occurred to him. Not getting her pregnant—that would be crazy—but doing the stuff that might lead down that road. Kissing, anyway. He thought a lot about kissing her. If he could just stop talking once in a while, so there was time to do something else with his mouth besides trying to dazzle her with words.

  “I see you blushing and I know it only means that you’re embarrassed, because if you were actually fooling around with her, you would have started right in lying to me and saying you never touched her.”

  “I never touched her,” said Ryan. “It’s not a lie.”

  “Come on, Ryan, how old do you think I am? You think about her all the time. In bed at night. In the shower. Sitting at your desk pretending to study.”

  “What makes you think you know anything about me?” asked Ryan.

  “Because you’ve got testicles that pump out testosterone every second of every day,” said Mother. “Like all the other men.”