(earlier version appeared in Leland Quarterly #1.1)
My new father Steve said he would be waiting there for us at six o’clock but it was almost eight. It was as dark as eight o’clock and under the eaves of our new home my mother and I sat on our luggage, because it was raining and there was nowhere dry to sit. My mother saw me shiver and she squeezed my fingers and said You’re going to love him as much as I do, and I wondered about that; I wondered how much she loved him.
At this time, everything that was new to me was old. My new father was older than my old father. The new town was an old paper town with that evacuated look to it, half-cemetery. And my new home was a bungalow with faded Sears-brown paint situated at the end of a cul-de-sac, not substantially different from the one-room efficiency where we had been living since the divorce. The flagstone walkway leading to the front door had fragments missing, leaving behind wide divots in which brown water collected, too big to step cross in one stride.
I had never met Steve or seen where he lived, probably because my mom believed that the negotiations of post-marital courtship, the unromantic complexity of adult love, was something I should be shielded from. For the whole span of their acquaintance up until their abrupt engagement, all I knew about Steve was what I’d gleaned from a photo of him a New Year’s Eve party, where even in his rented tux you could see he was a big bruiser of a guy, one who wore a cross on a gold chain whose links, you could tell, were wide enough to thread a shoelace through. My mother and I were of solidly Jewish stock, but the religion didn’t matter to my mother; what mattered was that Steve was a strong man, a real man, creed be damned. He had a tattoo of some bird of prey on his chest and a one of a fist on his left bicep: symbols of power, oddly proportioned as they were. Strength, it seemed, was his strong suit. Stronger than my other father, my mom assured me. That was important for my mother, for since the afternoon one month ago when my father had explained to us in a voice full of mucus that he had been seeing a woman for two years—no, okay, paying a woman for two years—it was my father’s weakness she blamed. He was powerless to resist, she had said.
Resist what, I had asked.
Resist himself, she said.
At eight-fifteen, Steve’s muddy Toyota rolled into the gravel driveway of my new home. The headlights made golden shapes in the fog. As he climbed out of the car, into the darkness of eight-fifteen, he seemed bigger than he did in his New Year’s Eve photo. He had a pink face and long sideburns, and the way he swung his arms as he walked was heavy, as if he were carrying buckets of water. Leaving the enging running, he slammed the car door shut, jaunted over to my mother, put his arms around her waist and swayed with her in a tuneless little dance. Her body relaxed, surrendering the stress of the last few hours, of her last marriage and her whole life and probably the life before that, and she turned her head and flashed me an encouraged smile before Steve surprised her with a hard kiss. There was my introduction to adult love, and so much for that. By the time they finished it was noticeably colder out.
“Hon, I’m late and I’m sorry. I was out picking this one up from an audition.” Steve gestured at his car, which was still idling with its headlights on. He let go of my mom but kept his thick arm around her waist, and turned his attention to me.
“How we doing over there, big guy?” His voice was loud and chummy.
I smiled with my mouth, and he leaned over and shook my hand. In the sweat-cloud of his breath I smelled beer and something pickled.
“What’s your name?”
“Joe,” I said, and I wondered briefly how much—or even if—my mother had mentioned me to him.
“Joseph, you look like a real smart guy,” said Steve.
I shook my head. “It’s just Joe. My full name is Joe.”
His smile dimmed. “Cup a’ Joe, Joe Blow. Joe, you look like a smart guy. A tall guy.”
We were still standing in the beams of the car’s headlights, which lit up the streams of car exhaust that hung around our legs. I realized that there was someone else in the car—a girl who hadn’t come out to meet us.
That was Lorraine.
Steve jogged back to the car and opened the passenger’s side door, uttered a few short sentences under the chug of the idling engine. I squinted to see her face but couldn’t. When she finally moved, she got out of the car in hurry; she re-cinched her dark gray trench coat and threw a wine-colored scarf over her shoulder, then kicked the car door shut. Steve opened the door again and cut the engine.
She wore sunglasses, and I couldn’t tell if she looked at me as she walked by, or if she looked at my mother, whose arms were outspread in greeting. But she passed by without a word, walked up the path to the house and let herself in, leaving the door open behind her. Steve’s eyes tracked her, and after she was out of sight, he looked at me and my mother with half a grimace. My mother asked him, “How did it go?”
“Christ. Another lousy commercial audition and she acts like she’s going out for Shakespeare. Those microwave potatoes, those… Instabakes, that’s it. We drove out forty minutes to have her to say ‘Mom, we forgot the potatoes!’ Like she’d ever touch a baked potato anyway. So she says the line and they tell us we’re done, move along. Well, what does she expect. She’s probably gonna lock herself in her room for a week or so.” Steve scratched his head, eased back into his grinning swagger. “She doesn’t know where to look. No matter what she’s supposed to be doing or selling, she looks straight at the camera. What I keep telling her is she needs to keep focused on the situation, you know, do some acting, and stop playing so god damn Miss Hollywood all the time.”
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