Whitechurch (7 page)

We look at each other, me and Lilly. We don’t know why she’s here. We are very glad she is.

“The more I thought about it … you don’t need this crap work, Paul … come on home.”

He is flabbergasted. “What are you doing here? I didn’t tell you to come … you’re ruining everything …”

“Let’s get out of here, Paul—”

“Fuck, Lilly. I’m onto something huge here. I told you that. What are you—” He stops himself, very quickly stares into me—rips off the sunglasses to do it—then at her. “Sonsobitches,” he says low, then puts the sunglasses back on. “You’re wrong. This time you’re wrong.”

“Pauly,” she says, sympathetically, which is her mistake.

“Just shut up,” he says, then leads her out. “C’mon, I’ll drive you home. You can lie on the floor if you’re too embarrassed to be seen with me.”

He is making tracks, and she rushes to keep up. Uninvited, I follow.

It’s a pretty silent ride, and I can feel Pauly pulling away from us. Down down down the old hill we go until he kicks her—and me, go figure—out of his truck which isn’t even his, right outside the church. She tries to speak, but he pays no attention.

“What the hell?” is all Lilly can say as we stand there watching the pickup tear down the street.

“He’s convinced this time.” I shrug.

“I almost wish he wouldn’t even try….”

The sound of that bottoms me out so badly, I can’t muster the muscles to shrug. Then the two of us, Lilly and me, me and Lilly, which I normally love to hear myself think in either direction but now feels so fractured, we sit right there on the curb waiting for the inevitable. “Inevitable,” it occurs to me, is a good word for events in Whitechurch.

It takes roughly ninety seconds to drive the length of Main Street, turn left, come up the same length of Middle Street, and wind up back here at the church.

“He thinks he’s really got it for sure this time, huh, Oakley?”

“He thinks so. I don’t know what Dizzy told him, but Pauly’s long-gone sold.”

Lilly leans into me with her shoulder, and ever so ever so slightly I let the weight of me fall into her. “Ah, Oakley,” she says, and she sounds exhausted.

“Ya,” I say.

It’s been just about ninety seconds.

He pulls to the curb. No, he creeps to the curb. Rolls down the window.

“You gotta baby-sit tonight?” Lonely, he asks.

She nods.

“Can’t I, you think, this once?”

She shakes her head.

“Oh, go on, ask him. Whatsit hurt?”

“The Rev hates your guts, Pauly. There’s no way.”

He looks at me, looks and sounds genuinely angry with me. “Get your shoulder off my girlfriend.”

I don’t.

“See me later, then,” Pauly says. Strong. A statement.

Lilly waits. Not a flutter.

“See me later, then?” Pauly asks. Soft. A request. More than a request, really.

“Sure,” she says. “Love to.”

He is so excited, smiling goofy like a child. Also like a child, he seems like maybe he shouldn’t be allowed to drive a truck. He races the engine, accidentally lets it roll. Puts it in reverse to return to the conversation. Gone, he is, off to Lovelillyland. Like she has said yes for the first time right here right now instead of right here four years ago. Gone, like he is every time. First time every time.

“I’ll come get you here, at nine then, is it?”

“Nine it is.” Lilly stands. She is smiling, no longer tired. She has made Pauly happy, or whatever it is Pauly gets when the rest of us would get happy. All she wanted to do in the first place. All right now. All nice.

“And you, bird-dog girlfriend-stealing skinny bastard. Get in the truck. I’m gonna take you someplace secluded. Kick yo’ ass. Teach ya not to be messin’ with my old lady.”

I stand, look slowly up, then slowly down, the street. I brush off the seat of my pants. “Might as well, I guess. Nothin’ else doing around here around now. Kick my ass, then we’ll get back to work.”

He’s up again, Power Pauly. I love to see him this way. And I worry.

“First, lemme buy you a Coke. And while we’re drinkin’ I’m gonna lay out the Plan.”

“We got time?” I ask.

“Get in the truck,” he says.

I climb in the truck.

Then he’s buying me the Coke, at the fountain at the counter in the drugstore where they still have fountain drinks. I realize in lots of places this just isn’t so anymore, but Whitechurch simply couldn’t be, without the drugstore with the fountain where you can get a vanilla or cherry Coke and it may be too flat and so syrupy you’re happy you’re drinking in a place that also sells mouthwash, toothpaste, and floss. The cell phone rings but Pauly ignores it. He’s talk talk talking, about the Plan, which I thought would be about high finance and real estate, but turns out to be about a potbellied stove and exposed beams and parquet flooring. The kitchen. His kitchen. And nothing but the kitchen. He’s ignoring the phone, which keeps ringing, and the looks from customers and Willomena who works the fountain when her mother is around to watch the kids.

“It’s just gonna be for Dizzy. He should have a service for that. I got more important things to do with my time. He brought me in to come up with killer ideas and imagination, like I’m doing right now. A hot knife through butter, I’m gonna be in this organization.”

The more important things amount to talking. This Pauly can do with the best of them. He’s talking, right, about what he’s going to do with that house when he gets it, and what he’s going to do in and around that house when it’s just right, and which bedroom is going to be mine and the hundred and fifty million thousand things he can do in that house to make Lilly happy. But in Pauly’s view it all—the house, the business, the future, everything—revolves around the masterpiece that will be that kitchen. Lilly would die for a kitchen like that, he says.

“You know, Oak,” Pauly says, and I can see the sincere dripping out of the corners of his eyes, sunglasses or no sunglasses, “I love to make her happy.”

And like, what the hell. How could you ever tell him the truth?

The phone rings again.

“Pauly, what if it’s not
for
Dizzy? What if it
is
Dizzy?”

It’s my own fault, but he pops off one of his awful instapoems, which he thinks are okay because he figures you get extra points for on-the-spotness, but I figure you don’t.

Dizzy #1

When opportunity rings

you best take what it brings

Don’t try to guess what is

cause it might look

like

Diz

It rings on, whether it is opportunity, Dizzy, or any combination thereof.

“Willow,” Pauly calls, and she slides on over to us. “Willow, honey it’s for you.”

She takes the phone. “It’s for me? Nobody ever calls for me. Damn.”

I wish he would just play this one straight. “Cut it out Pauly, take the call.”

“What? What? I can’t hardly understand you,” she says, wincing at the phone, pulling back and looking at it as if to understand it better. “Ya, he’s here. Where is here? Well here is the drugstore of course, where’d ya think? Hello? Hello?”

She hands Pauly back the phone.

“Was it Dizzy?” I ask, because Pauly is not concerned enough to do it. If he would only be concerned enough … so many times, so little effort, would save him so much trouble.

“Two more Cokes please, Miss Willomena?” Paul asks.

“Yes,” she says to Paul, then, “Yes,” to me. “I believe that’s who he said he was. And he said to keep your ass on that stool ’cause he’s on the way over.”

“Cool,” Paul says. “Then make it three Cokes. We’ll do a deal over a couple of cold ones right here.”

“Ah, maybe I better go,” I say. “You and your uncle might want to—”

“Still no stomach for the fast lane, huh?” Pauly says as I give up my stool.

Dizzy bursts in. He marches toward the counter so hard you can just about feel him pounding over the broad black-and-white tiles.

Pauly opens his arms.

Dizzy walks right up to him. Slaps him across the head. Not that hard, not punishing, but an attention-getter.

I grab Dizzy’s arm and he turns a meaty dark glare on me that nearly makes me let go and run. I do neither, though. I look at Paul, with the glasses now hanging diagonally across his pale soft face, one gray eye exposed in all its sad disbelief.

Willomena is placing two tall vase-shaped glasses on the counter. She backs quickly away.

“I bought you a Coke,” Paul whispers.

“I want to give you chances, Pauly,” he says, not unkindly but killer anyway, maybe because of the not-unkindness. “But you just don’t have a thing, nothing on the ball. I put you in charge for half a day, you disappear. You don’t answer the phone, book out of work, don’t do one single thing. Have I got it about right, Paul? Is this pretty much what you accomplished today?”

I wish Dizzy had just silently beat him up instead.

Pauly is nearly crying. “It’s not like that, Diz. I was working. I was doing some serious planning, designing, figuring….” He picks up off the counter a napkin on which he had been drawing while talking to me. I was not even aware that the talk and the drawing were related.

“Good, Paul,” he says, “so you drank Coke
and
doodled. Big day.”

Dizzy reaches out and practically decapitates his nephew with the chain as he takes back the sunglasses. “I’m sorry,” he says. “But, ah, no …”

Paul’s still whispering. “Diz. My house—”

“Excuse me?”

“My house. You said we could work something. With the house. Do a deal. Then it would be
my
house.”

Dizzy grabs Pauly’s face with his two hands and holds it there, talking slowly and directly into it. He is a surprisingly powerful man, but he holds Pauly’s face with great gentleness, restraint.

“Pauly. Pauly. I was just talkin’. Don’t you understand? Don’t you know the difference? You’re a talker yourself, right, so you should know. You’re supposed to know the difference.”

Pauly hands over the phone. Already Dizzy seems different, no longer all that angry, a little regretful. That’s Pauly’s life for you, right there.

“Pauly, Pauly, Pauly. You’re just … dangerous, is what you are. You don’t think like the rest of us think. You’re a good kid with some nuts and bolts that just ain’t tightened all the way up.”

With his phone and his glasses and not another word, Dizzy heads out.

I expect drama. I expect now for Pauly to take a bite out of the Formica counter or remove his shoes and throw them through the plate-glass window. I think that’s what I would do. And if he wants me to help him damage something that isn’t himself, I believe I will.

But he quietly sits back down in front of his drink. I sit in front of the other. He takes a big slurpy-sound drink, then grins. He has a beautiful smile, Paul does.

“I’ve got your nuts and bolts right here, Dizzy,” he says, jingling the keys to the house.

When Lilly comes by at ten that night, I’m already ready to go.

“He never showed,” she says, in a voice I know pretty well.

“Uh-huh,” I say. “You up for a walk? Probably take us an hour.”

She sighs, takes my hand.

The part I know is that we will find him in the house he thought would be his. And Lilly’s. And mine. The part I worry about is what kind of antics he will be up to when we get there.

We find him in the kitchen. He’s eating a bowl of cereal. He sees us come in and pours, as if we are right on time, two more bowls.

I pray that he has at least rinsed them out, because I
will
eat in this kitchen. The three of us eating in our kitchen.

M
OST PLACES I GO
, I want them with me. Or anyway I want at least one of them with me. Like, at the movies, I want either one of them with me and I don’t particularly care which one as long as it’s not both because together they talk too much. At the schoolyard basketball court it’s Pauly, and at loads of other places it’s Lilly. It all makes its own and of sense and we don’t for the most part need to question it too much. But then sometimes we do. Sometimes we need a place apart.

The library is that place. The Whitechurch Library. If ever my friends cannot find me, that’s where they search, and that is where they usually succeed in locating me. The way an old dog finds his way back over miles and miles to his home when somebody tries to shove him off on a farm someplace, that is how I find my way back to the library. It’s my place, even more than my place is. Though I find myself spending less time here over time. As a kid I spent day and night in this building, warmed and entertained by it. Day, and night.

“You are so boring, Oakley, you’re in a category all by yourself,” Lilly teases as the two of them come ambling through the door.

“Good,” I say. “So get out of my category.”

“Come with us,” Lilly says, taking my. hand and pulling gently, playfully. “You don’t even read. Why bother?”

But I don’t want to play. “Am I bothering
you
?”

She’s right, though. About the no reading. Didn’t use to be. But is.

“As long as we’re here,” Pauly says, “why not let’s look him up?”

I pay no attention as Paul trots off to get the dictionary and look me up. I am staring at Ophelia Lennon, the one and only librarian of the town of Whitechurch. There used to be two. She is tall, maybe five ten. And slim, with square shoulders that make her look like one fine column all the way to the floor, the line of her yellow-flowered brown dress unbroken by any hint of hip. All her dresses reach the floor, and that is part of the mystery of her—there could be anything under there. Her hair is in between brown and black, with generous splatters of gray all over. It is combed straight back to reveal a mighty forehead, and to rest in a gentle flip at the base of her neck. She moves deliberately, surely, but it seems she’s going at a speed one tick slower than the rest of us, like the Disney heroines always do. Grace, is what it is. And she wears perfectly round rimless spectacles that are exactly the same size as her eye sockets, giving her pale, nearly white eyes the ghostly look of ancient Greek statuary—which the library features in miniature in every cranny and cove. She looks very much in fact like a statuette in nonfiction called
Aphrodite Victorious
. Maybe not the body, exactly, but their faces are very much alike.