Oliver Loving by Stefan Merrill Block

Author:Stefan Merrill Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Where were you last night?” Charlie asked idly the next morning, just after dawn, when he found Ma combing through a mound of walnuts at the kitchen table. “I didn’t hear you come in until—it must have been near midnight.”

“Peggy gave me a few more hours with Oliver. They’ve been nicer to me lately. All those nurses and doctors, just wanting to shuffle into Oliver’s little halo of fame. It’s twisted, but that’s people for you.”

Charlie wasn’t too exhausted to miss that Ma likely intended twisted as a dig, but he was too exhausted to muster a comeback. Charlie had hardly slept, had spent the greater part of the night watching a blue square of moonlight scroll across the cheap drywall, spotlighting delicate fissures and a perfectly still scorpion. The old Navajo blanket smelling of mothballs, his brain a monstrous contraption, thumping, grinding, beating away, unable to process what Mrs. Dawson had told him. Hector had been one of his father’s students? Even now, at the kitchen table, Charlie was wondering how he might relay this information to Ma. But this new variable seemed, in some calculus Charlie couldn’t quite grasp, bound up with something unspoken between his mother and him.

Ma consulted her plate, pulverized the meat of a nut. “Hey, where are your glasses? I thought you wore glasses now.”

“Oh, right. Thanks. I forgot.” Charlie did not really need the glasses he now retrieved from his milk carton nightstand. He was only a tiny bit nearsighted. In his solitary Brooklyn days, the glasses often stayed on the secondhand bookshelf for whole weeks. Charlie knew his mother suspected the truth, that he wore them mostly for the professorial air of legitimacy their thick tortoiseshell frames lent him.

“Big plans for this morning?” Ma asked. “I hope you are being careful out there. And, I hope you won’t feel—what was your word for it? Infantilized. I hope you won’t feel infantilized when I tell you that I really don’t love the idea of you riding around on that ridiculous motorbike.”

“Actually, I was thinking I might go for another hike today.”

“Oh?”

Last night, Charlie had powered down his phone, shoved it into a drawer, but now he was imagining Jimmy Giordano’s many calls going straight to voice mail, imagining the man in his grimy Gowanus office, plotting his Plan B. Charlie swallowed, nodded, wondered if he really could do the thing he had in mind.

* * *

Lajitas, when Charlie was a kid, had been home to a bona fide national celebrity: the town mayor, the Honorable Clay Henry, who was a goat who drank beer. “A beer-drinking goat!” The friends Charlie made at Thoreau had always said this at some point in the first day or two of their acquaintance. It was a story to dine out on in preppy New England, that folksy, yokelish charm. “Hand to God, I’m telling the truth,” Charlie would say, his voice slipping a little Texan for effect. Charlie never mentioned the sad fact that a town

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