whom he and Renee had taken Grizzly after his first seizure had told them that dark and quiet would help the dog recover more quickly, he sat on the floor beside him, stroking his fur, while the dog’s eyes squinted at him in a way that seemed beseeching. “I wish I could stop it, boy,” he said as the dog continued to quake.
Sitting on his kitchen floor until the seizure ended, he listened intently to the loud conversation next door, wondering if Renee’s voice or laugh would emerge from the general noise. “No, no, no, no,” a man said. There was an explosion of laughter, the squeak of someone raising a plastic cooler lid, the pffft when they opened the beer.
He had met the Duboises on the day he moved in: Ron and Rhonda and their three children, whose names also began with “R”: Ron Junior, Renee and Rose. Ron Junior was still in high school then and Ron and Rhonda had sent him over to help Edward Everett carry in boxes from the U-Haul and then had invited him for Sunday dinner. “You can’t have a thing unpacked yet,” Rhonda had said when he protested. “It’s just ussens and some KFC. Hope you won’t be offended by paper plates and plastic sporks.”
It was a crowded table: Ron and Rhonda; their three kids; Rose’s fiancé, Chuck; Ron Junior’s girlfriend, April; Renee’s husband, Art. The Duboises were all plump except for Renee, who had earned a college scholarship for track and still jogged four days a week. Everyone talked at once, nearly shouting, everyone reaching across everyone else for the bucket of legs and breasts, for the dish of potatoes and gravy, and he could make out nothing of what they discussed: it was as if they were piecing together conversations they had been having for years, arguing over ridiculous topics:
I found this picture, remember that Halloween …
You promised.
Speaking of that, Chuck, I heard that Paula was back in town.
Almost simultaneously, they all sang, It’s too late to turn back now, exploding into guffaws.
During the off-season, when Edward Everett was home on Sundays, they sometimes asked him back and began inviting him for family parties: for Chuck and Rose’s wedding reception; for the send-off when Ron Junior joined the Army; for Ron Junior’s wedding, when he and April decided to get married just before he was deployed to Iraq for his first tour. That was the start of his relationship with Renee.
Then, the yard was crowded with out-of-town relatives who had come to wish Ron Junior and April well and Ron Junior “Godspeed.” Over and over, tipsy, bleary-eyed uncles, aunts and cousins came up to him, asking, “Who are you, exactly?” Tired of explaining himself—“I’m just the neighbor”—and wanting to be useful, he’d gone into the kitchen and started scrubbing a pot in which Rhonda had burned the chili. At one point, while he was elbow-deep in the blackened water, his hands raw from the Brillo pad, Renee wandered in looking for ice.
“Hello, baseball man,” she shouted, obviously drunk. “Got you on KP.” She had shed the beige suit jacket she’d worn for the ceremony, and her white blouse was untucked from the skirt.
“I just thought I’d give your folks a head start on cleaning all this up,” he said. Out in the yard, April and her father were dancing to some country song, while the other guests stood along the perimeter, every once in a while a camera flash exploding.
“You’re a saint,” she said. “Saint. Saint. Saint.”
“Not really,” he said. “More like a lot of sins to make up for.”
There was no ice in the freezer and when Renee went to the bedroom where everyone had dropped their coats and came back with her purse, fishing out her car keys, he stopped her. “You can’t drive.”
“A saint and a safety patrol boy,” she said. “I’m fine, really.” But he had insisted, telling her he would take her for the ice. He rinsed his hands under the faucet and poured the dark water in the pot down the drain; disappointed at his lack of progress, he filled the pot with dish soap and water to soak, and followed her to her car.
It was a four-year-old red Corvette—a consolation prize for her recent divorce, she said—with a standard transmission. He had driven nothing but automatics for years, and twice before they even got to the end of his street, he killed it, letting off the clutch too quickly. Then lurching onto Carter,