Talk of the Town (4 page)

Gary, however, wasn't connecting any dots. By the time a man reached thirty, most of the available women he met either had children or were looking to have them—immediately. Eight or nine years later, dating single mothers was just part of the game.

"How do you do, sir," he said, holding a friendly hand out to Earl before he really noticed that the old man's were both full, a large styrofoam cup in each.

"Humph," Earl grunted with a nod of acknowledgment. He was as chatty as he was deaf—not at all.

"Here, let me get that door for you," Gary said, reaching out to turn the doorknob for him. "Those chocolate sundaes sure look good."

Earl walked past him and into the garage. Rose could hear him on the stairs before Gary looked back up to the window. Harley was leaving the diner again.

"Should I come up, or will you come down?" Gary asked, knowing an open, door of opportunity when he saw one.

"You should go home," she said, not unkindly.

"But I brought stuff. Don't you want to come down and look at it?"

"Not really. I told you, it has to speak to me. When it speaks to someone else, it never works for me."

"It might be different this time. The three of us could be speaking the same language," he said, indicating the box as if it were a third person.

Harley had crossed the street and come up behind Gary. He was staring at the box, hoping there was a midget inside. This was no small man before him, and Harley didn't relish the idea of confronting him if he was hassling Rose. He spooned in another mouthful of hot fudge sundae, thinking it might be his last.

"You can leave the box if you want, but I've had a long day and I'll probably have another one tomorrow, so I—"

"Hey, Harley, how are you?" he said, cutting off her dismissal when he noticed the boy behind him. He put out his hand for a friendly shake—waiting patiently while Harley wiped his sticky fingers on his shirtfront before taking it. "I'm Gary Albright. I met your mom a few days ago, and she's making me crazy," he said, only half joking. "She won't even talk to me. I have a steady job. I've never been to jail. I don't smoke or lie or cheat on my taxes. I do have an occasional drink, usually a beer with the boys, but I haven't gotten sloppy drunk in years. I am divorced, but I don't have any children, and I own my own home in Fairfield. That's about halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento, which works out pretty well because I do a lot of business in both places . . . and it's pretty quiet out there, away from all the big city hubbub. My friends think I'm a pretty decent kind of guy, but I can't get your mother to give me the time of day. What should I do?"

Harley was still shaking his hand, nodding, his mouth hanging open in dumb disbelief. Over the years, other men had come sniffing around his mother. Only a few had paid him the slightest heed; most disappeared in light of her indifference; none of them had ever asked his advice.

He shrugged, his hand dropping to his side when Gary released it.

"Do you have a girlfriend?" Gary asked.

He shook his head.

"But there's a girl you like a lot, isn't there?"

Heather Underwood. Pale yellow hair. Big, sky blue eyes. Huge breasts and long legs . . . Harley shrugged and moved his head a little. Gary saw it as a definite maybe.

"Then you know how it is," he said, demonstrating the male bond between them. "Getting a particularly fine lady to notice you're alive or to speak a few kind words to you can make you a little nuts sometimes. Women are hard to figure, unless there's someone around to help you out. What do you say? Got any pointers for me?"

Harley looked up at his mother.
His mother,
not a particularly fine lady in his opinion, but a pretty good mom nonetheless. He liked her, most of the time. There didn't seem to be any good reason why some other man wouldn't like her, too, he supposed. His stomach made a sudden queasy flip. Man, what if this Albright guy was thinking of his mother the way he thought about Heather?

"Where'd you find this one?" he asked her, all too aware of her amusement. That was always a good sign— something the man would want to know if he felt like telling him, which he didn't.

"At the dump," she said, half laughing.

"The dump?" He looked back at Gary, surprised. At fourteen, even he knew that the dump was no place to pick up babes—not that his mother was a babe in the first place.

Gary made a helpless gesture. "She stood out like a diamond in coal. A silk purse in a pile of sows' ears. A Rose in a weed garden. What could I do?"

Rose laughed aloud and her son frowned.

"You need help, mister."

"I know. That's what I've been trying to tell you.
¹
'

Along with his homely phase, poor Harley was also going through a period of unpredictable mood swings. She often thought of him as a two-headed monster. One pure sweet Harley, the other a ghoul from the gates of hell. And she never knew which head she was talking to or which would react first. He still laughed sometimes, but he didn't take to teasing and joking as well as he used to. She could tell by his stance that he wasn't enjoying Gary's jovial disposition.

"Okay. You win," she said, hoping to defuse the situation. "I'll change and be down in a minute."

She put on jeans and a T-shirt in a hurry. Harley was a smart kid who knew not to pick a fight he couldn't win, and Gary wouldn't dare raise a hand to her son if he knew what was good for him. Still, he was a strange stranger, and she hadn't been able to describe Harley's behavior as anything but weird for the past twelve months. She didn't like leaving the two of them alone.

As was often the case, she was right to worry, but her concerns were once again misplaced.

"Most of these are collectibles," Harley was saying as she came barefooting through the door of what once had been the business office. They were hunkered down beside the box together, looking for all the world to be old pals. "Mom brings 'em home sometimes and gives 'em to Janice Tharp. She has the antique store a few blocks down, just before you get back on the highway. She fixes 'em up and sells 'em. I can't see it myself, but you wouldn't believe how many people collect these old lanterns. What's.this?"

"I wasn't sure at first, but I think it's a waffle iron. It opens up here, see?"

"Stokin'," he said, turning the black disclike object over in his hands with interest. "She says it's part of the magic, you know? To get something as strong as steel to bend to her will, to get it to do what she wants it to do. Even steel beams in an unfinished building are a big deal to her." He put the waffle iron back in the box. "But she won't use any of this. Justin says it's distracting." He said the name as if it left a cod liver oil taste in his mouth. "He says it pulls the focus of the work to another time and place . . . whatever that means."

"It means that people spend more time trying to figure out what everything in the piece was used for, than in trying to see what the artist is trying to say through his work," she said, walking up to them.

Harley rolled his eyes and Gary stood to greet her.

"Hi," he said, his voice like a warm, intimate caress. The expression on his face was even less settling. His pleasure at seeing her was embarrassing—and nice, in a long-forgotten way.

"Hi," she said, feeling an urge to squirm. She looked down at the box, taking a quick inventory.

"Nice. But ... you won't mind if I pass these on to Janice, will you?"

"No. You can put them back in the trash if you want. They've served their purpose here." All he wanted was to stand close to her again. "Who's Justin?"

"A friend," she said, hesitating. "An art dealer in San Francisco. He gives me advise and is acting as my agent for a while."

"Some agent," Harley muttered, getting to his feet. "Show him what he's making you do."

Making you do? The words twisted Gary's stomach and furrowed his brow.

"He's not
making
me do anything," she told them both, but spoke directly to Harley.

"He's not letting you do what you want to do. He's making you unhappy. You hate what you're doing."

"No, I don't," she insisted, needing to be convinced as much as Harley did. "He just suggested that I try something a little different, a little more commercial, to get started. That's all."

"Come'ere and look at this stuff," he said, slapping Gary on the sleeve with the back of his hand. He led the way to his mother's makeshift studio in the old garage.

"Harley, they're not ready," she said, following third in line. She was half angry, anxious and feeling very defensive. "They're not done. I'm not ready to show them yet. Please. He's a garbageman. He doesn't know anything about art. . . . No offense."

"None taken." Gary was having a grand time. The kid was coming around. Rose was nervous. He was being included in a family dispute, and he was going to see her work. Things were working out just fine.

"You're really a garbageman?" Harley asked, turning abruptly. "You work at the dump?"

"Sometimes," he said, nodding.

"Nitro." He looked impressed.

When he continued into his mother's studio, Gary turned to her and said, "See? Kids, dogs, and flies love me. How bad can I be?"

She didn't mean to chuckle, but she did. And it took some of the edge off having him look at her sculptures. She stood in the doorway as he approached the newest piece, studied it, walked around it twice, and then moseyed over to the three standing off to the side. When he finally turned to face her, his expression made her heart sink deep in her chest.

"Your mom's right. I don't know anything about art. I wouldn't know where to begin to say whether this is . . ."

"You know junk when you see it, don't you?" Harley asked, unreasonably angry in Gary's estimation. That he had strong feelings about his mother's work was clear, but agreeing with him might not be wise either.

He glanced briefly at Rose before trying to answer.

"Usually. But one man's junk is another man's—" He stopped when the boy held up both hands.

"Okay. You wanted my advise, so here it is."

"Harley . . ." she said in warning. The boy was out of control again. There was no doubt about it anymore, she was going to have to kill him one of these days.

"Don't lie to her. She flips out"

"She flips out?" The kids were always the best and most honest source of information on the mother— something else he'd learned early on in his dating career.

"Goes ballistic. She says I can rob banks, but I better not ever lie to her again. Come here. Look at these," he said, walking to the corner of the room behind the three iron sculptures to pull at a tarpaulin cover.

"You're really pushing it," she warned him a second time.

Under the tarp was a table covered with metal objects. Others sat on the floor below. The closer Gary got to them, the easier it was to see how different they were from the larger, bulkier sculptures he'd just looked at. These: pieces were intricate. Where the others were fluid and graceful, these were distinct, defined . . . delicate almost.

Several pieces were a mixture of metal and stained glass. A little like church windows, but finer with multifarious metal work on each, so that every cut of glass was a work of art inside a work of art. There were copper and bronze pieces as well, elaborate and complex; multifaceted pieces that were a study of labor and intense thought and emotion.

Gary knew little of art, it was true, but he knew what he liked.

"These are incredible. Really beautiful," he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper that echoed through the old garage. Picking up one piece he was most intrigued with, he added, "It must have taken you hours and hours to do this."

"That's a good one," Harley said, approving his choice. "I like those two there too. She used to sit down here and work on these at night. She even sold two of them once. But Justin has her convinced there's no market for them. He's got her welding those jungle gyms together."

Okay. No more warnings. Three strikes. Harley was outta there.

"All right, Harley, that's enough," she said, finally moving away from the door. "You and I have had this conversation before, and Gary doesn't need to hear it. Go find something else to do. Now."

"Like what?"

"Homework?"

"Done it."

"TV."

"Seen it,"

"Clean your room?"

"Been there. Don't want to."

"Then go out and chase cars, but
go now.
"

"This is good," he said as he walked by Gary. As stormy as his emotions had been moments earlier, he was just as calm and playful now. "She wants to be alone with ya, man. I'm warnin' ya though, treat her bad and I'll . . . me and Grampa'll be down on you like flies on—"

"Harley."

". . . at a picnic."

"See ya, Harley," Gary said, listening to the boy's slow, reluctant steps on the stairs between the office and the garage.

"Not if I see you first, man."

Rose sighed loud and long-suffering. "If he hadn't been such a cute, sweet little boy, I'd pay someone to drown him."

"Well, you couldn't very well do it yourself. He's a big boy."

She nodded. "It's unnatural. Kids shouldn't be allowed to get bigger or smarter than their parents until after they leave home."

"He's okay for a kid his age."

"Says the father of none," she said, picking up the tarpaulin and throwing it back over the table.

"Says an objective observer who's seen his share of really rotten kids," he said.

She detected a sharp edge to his voice and kept her back to him. She glanced down at the few uncovered pieces of metal sculpture on the table and felt a frustrated need to cry. She was tired; put out with and constantly worried about Harley; unhappy with her work, her life, and the rapid passage of time. She didn't know if Gary wanted a child, but if he ever had, her words had been cruel.

"You're right," she said, arranging the canvas over the table, carefully hiding what she loved to do so she could concentrate on what she felt she had to do to get her work noticed. "That was uncalled for and . . . well, you're right about Harley. He's not a bad kid. I get so wrapped up in him sometimes, I forget to stand back and take a good look at him." She turned to look at Gary then. He was still holding the stained glass design he favored in both hands. "Those with the glass are prettier in the light," she said, motioning him into the circle of brightness in the middle of the room. He kept shaking his head gently in wonder and awe, turning it in his hands, seeing new beauty in every aspect. "Sunshine is even better," she said softly, impulsively adding,. "You can have that one, if you want it."