The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,163

dad had been home. You know? I wish that guy would beat his ass. I really do. He deserves it.”

Boris kicked my ankle. His feet were black with dirt and he also had black polish on his toenails, courtesy of Kotku.

“You know what I had to eat yesterday?” he said sociably. “Two Nestlé bars and a Pepsi.” All candy bars, for Boris, were ‘Nestlé bars,’ just as all sodas were ‘Pepsi.’ “And you know what I had to eat today?” He made a zero with thumb and forefinger. “Nul.”

“Me neither. This stuff makes you not hungry.”

“Yah, but I need to eat something. My stomach—” he made a face.

“Do you want to go get pancakes?”

“Yes—something—I don’t care. Do you have money?”

“I’ll look around.”

“Good. I think I have five dollars maybe.”

While Boris was rummaging for shoes and a shirt, I splashed some water on my face, checked out my pupils and the bruise on my jaw, rebuttoned my shirt when I saw it was done up the wrong way, and then went to let Popchik out, throwing his tennis ball to him for a bit, since he hadn’t had a proper walk on the leash and I knew he felt cooped-up. When we came back in, Boris—dressed now—was downstairs; we’d done a quick search of the living room and were laughing and joking around, pooling our quarters and dimes and trying to figure out where we wanted to go and the quickest way to get there when all of a sudden we noticed that Xandra had come in the front door and was standing there with a funny look on her face.

Both of us stopped talking immediately and went about our change-sorting in silence. It wasn’t a time when Xandra normally came home, but her schedule was erratic sometimes and she’d surprised us before. But then, in an uncertain-sounding voice, she said my name.

We stopped with the change. Generally Xandra called me kiddo or hey you or anything but Theo. She was, I noticed, still wearing her uniform from work.

“Your dad’s had a car accident,” she said. It was like she was saying it to Boris instead of me.

“Where?” I said.

“It happened like two hours ago. The hospital called me at work.”

Boris and I looked at each other. “Wow,” I said. “What happened? Did he total the car?”

“His blood alcohol was .39.”

The figure was meaningless to me, though the fact he’d been drinking wasn’t. “Wow,” I said, pocketing my change, and: “When’s he coming home, then?”

She met my eye blankly. “Home?”

“From the hospital.”

Rapidly, she shook her head; looked around for a chair to sit in; and then sat in it. “You don’t understand.” Her face was empty and strange. “He died. He’s dead.”

xviii.

THE NEXT SIX OR seven hours were a daze. Several of Xandra’s friends showed up: her best friend Courtney; Janet from her work; and a couple named Stewart and Lisa who were nicer and way more normal than the usual people Xandra had over to the house. Boris, generously, produced what was left of Kotku’s weed, which was appreciated by all parties present; and someone, thankfully (maybe it was Courtney), ordered out for pizza—how she got Domino’s to deliver all the way out to us, I don’t know, since for over a year Boris and I had wheedled and pleaded and tried every cajolement and excuse we could think of.

While Janet sat with her arm around Xandra, and Lisa patted her head, and Stewart made coffee in the kitchen, and Courtney rolled a joint on the coffee table that was almost as expert as one of Kotku’s, Boris and I hung in the background, stunned. It was hard to believe that my dad could be dead when his cigarettes were still on the kitchen counter and his old white tennis shoes were still by the back door. Apparently—it all came out in the wrong order, I had to piece it together in my mind—my dad had crashed the Lexus on the highway, a little before two in the afternoon, veering off on the wrong side of the road and plowing headlong into a tractor-trailer which had immediately killed him (not the driver of the truck, fortunately, or the passengers in the car that had rear-ended the truck, although the driver of the car had a broken leg). The blood-alcohol news was both surprising, and not—I’d suspected my father might be drinking again, though I hadn’t seen him doing it—but what seemed to baffle Xandra most was not his extreme drunkenness