The Odds of You and Me Read online

  She is still muttering as I dash upstairs to Angus’s room, peek inside. It’s empty. “Angus?” I see the lump in my bed across the hall before it moves, and squish in tightly against the sack of warm knees and elbows. He reaches up from inside the covers, his tiny starfish hands feeling around for my face. “What’s the deal, O’Neil?” I ask, lowering my head. “Why didn’t you get up for Nanny?”

  “I’m tired!” The voice comes through the covers, small and muffled. “I didn’t sleep good!”

  “Why not?”

  He throws back the covers, gazing up at me. “I had bad dreams.” He reaches up with his hands and squeezes the hollow part beneath my cheeks as if emphasizing this statement.

  “Again?” I stare down into the small, rumpled face looking out at me, searching for signs of distress. He has eyes like blue bottle glass, skin like a ripening peach. On any given day, at any given moment, his beauty astounds me. “Why are you having bad dreams, Boo?”

  He shrugs just as Ma appears in the doorway, wiping her small hands on the corner of her apron. “I wanted to ask you, Bernadette, before I forget—” She breaks off suddenly, spotting Angus. “Angus Connolly! What are you doing in your mother’s bed again?”

  Angus ducks back under the blankets, clutching them tightly around his head.

  I rest my hand lightly along his back. “Don’t, Ma.”

  “How many times have I told you not to let that child get in bed with you, Bernadette! The longer you perpetuate this kind of dependence, the harder it will be for him to—”

  “Ma!” My voice is sharp. “He just came in a little while ago. He was in his bed when I left this morning, and he spent the whole night in his room. Now stop, okay? I mean it!”

  She stares at me for a moment, a look she has given me so many times over the years that sometimes I see it in my sleep. It’s a pitiful expression, mixed with a vague sort of terror. I am too far out of her reach; she cannot save me, nor by extension Angus, no matter how desperately she continues to pray, or how often she attends morning Mass. I reach over, brush the edges of her fingers with my hand. “C’mon, what were you about to say?”

  “I left my sweater at church yesterday.” Her voice is quiet, still hurt by my reprimand. “And I was wondering if you could go pick it up for me this morning on your way to Mr. Herron’s. It’s on the way, and I have to go to the Reynoldses’ house, which is on the other side of town.” She looks down, brushes a crumb off the front of her apron.

  “Sure. I can do that.”

  “I shouldn’t be more than a few hours at the Reynoldses’ place,” she says. “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t need me to do any laundry today. I can come help you finish at Mr. Herron’s, if you want. Just in case he gives you any trouble about being late. You know how he can get.”

  It occurs to me to ask why, if she can come help me at Mr. Herron’s house, which is just a few blocks away from the church, she needs me to go pick up her sweater. Why can’t she just swing by herself and get it? Have a little chat with Father Delaney, the pastor, while she’s at it? Maybe talk to him again about how to save my soul? But then she raises one of her hands to brush a wayward curl off her forehead. Her fingers are thick and calloused from years of scrubbing other people’s floors, the knuckles swollen so badly on her left hand that she cannot wear her wedding band anymore. Some nights when she comes home after working all day, she falls asleep in her chair. And that’s before dinner.

  “No, there’s no reason to do that.” I put one of my hands over hers. “Getting your sweater won’t take me more than ten minutes. Besides, I don’t want you doing any more than you’re already doing.”

  She gives me a weary look. “It does get done faster if we do it together.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say, patting her hand. “I’ll be fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “All right, then.” Her eyes flit over the front of the Metallica T-shirt I am wearing, and she makes no attempt to hide her disgust. “Oh, Bernadette. You didn’t just wear that to the probation office, did you?”

  She shakes her head slowly. “Would it kill you to at least try to look like you’re turning over a new leaf?”

  “Because I have a Metallica T-shirt on?” My voice is already rising. “Are you serious? Do you really think—”

  “Never mind, Bernadette.” She cuts me off with a brusque wave of her hand. “I don’t want to start.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Father Delaney asked for you again,” she says wistfully. “Yesterday, after morning Mass.”

  “That’s nice.” I look over at Angus, hoping he’s still breathing okay under all those sheets still wrapped around his head and that maybe, somehow, he is not listening to our conversation and will not pop his head out and ask who Father Delaney is. I know Ma will be all too thrilled to tell him that he is the pastor at Saint Augustine’s where, when I was a little girl, I used to go every Sunday morning with her and Dad. She’ll probably even launch into the story about the horrible nickname he dubbed me with—Bunny-Bernie—because I used to wiggle my nose when I got nervous.

  “You know what he told me?” Ma asks.

  “What?”

  “That every single time he says Mass, he looks out over the congregation for you.” She opens her eyes wide at me. “You, Bernadette.”

  I throw the covers off, walk over to my dresser, and pick up my hairbrush. A few years ago, I might have thrown the brush across the room when Ma started talking like this. Now, I just yank it through my hair, static crackling angrily. “Well, next time Mr. Delaney says something like that, tell him he’s wasting his time.”

  Ma looks startled. “Father Delaney, Bernadette. And when you speak to him, you must use that formality. It’s not Mister. It’s never Mister. Father only.”

  I whirl around, brush in my hand. “When am I going to speak to him, Ma? I don’t go to church, okay? And I’m not going to go to church. I haven’t been inside a church in almost ten years.”

  Her eyes are piercing blue, the color of a gas flame. “I’m talking about this morning. He’ll be at the church. To give you my sweater. I’ve already talked to him about it.”

  Oh. Well, of course she has. This whole conversation “asking” me to go get her sweater has just been a formality. I was one hundred percent right to think of questioning her opportunity to retrieve it later. Everything has already been set in motion. Her way. Father Delaney will give me her “forgotten” sweater, while taking the rare opportunity to ask me how I am, what I have been doing, and why he doesn’t see me around anymore. Why am I surprised? It’s the way she’s always done things, will probably be the way she does things for the rest of her life. Dad used to call it using the back door to get out the front, which I’d never understood until I got older. Now the phrase reverberates like a bell inside my head.

  “Okay, Ma. Fine. Whatever.” I lean over, pat the blankets with my free hand. “Let’s go, Angus! You have T-ball practice tonight, too, which means we have to pack your uniform. C’mon, now. You have to get dressed.”

  Angus’s voice comes out from beneath the covers. “I don’t wanna go to T-ball practice! I hate T-ball!”

  Ma presses her lips together. “You do not hate anything, Gus, especially T-ball. You just had a hard time with it last week because of all that sneezing you were doing. It was hard to focus. You’ll do much better this time, now that your cold is gone. I promise.”

  Angus shoves the blankets off with a few rapid scissor kicks. The top of his Thomas the Train pajamas are twisted around his belly, exposing a smooth, half-moon of skin. “But I sneezed two times yesterday! How do you know I’m not going to sneeze today?”

  “You’ll be just fine.” Ma heads downstairs, dismissing Angus’s concerns with a wave of her hand.

  “You won’t be fine. You’ll be awesome!” I jump on the bed, tickling Angus’s tiny rib cage. He shrieks and flails, laughing in the kind of way that makes me feel sometim
es that nothing will ever be wrong with the world again.

  “More!” he screams breathlessly.

  “Nope. You have school in less than an hour, and Mom and Nanny have work. C’mon, let’s get dressed and then go downstairs. I bet if you ask, Nanny will make you peanut butter pancakes.”

  “Yes!” Angus bellows, zooming into his room across the hall. “Peanut butter pancakes rock!”

  Inside his room, Angus is struggling with his shirt; it’s on backward, and he already has an arm in the wrong sleeve.

  “Hold on, Boo.” I kneel down in front of him. “You’re going to pull a muscle in your neck if you keep doing that.” His arms fall limp as I help him out of the shirt. It’s his favorite one—yellow, with little green turtles all over it. He wore it yesterday. And the day before that, too. He scratches his belly button, watching me. “Getting dressed looks easy, but it’s really not.”

  “I know.” I squat down, smooth my hand over the pale arc of his stomach. When he was an infant, the thought of dressing him almost gave me a panic attack. His arms were like pipe cleaners, his wrists the circumference of a Magic Marker. What if they broke off when I tried to bend them through the tiny armholes of his clothes? What if they accidentally snapped out of the sockets? They didn’t, of course, thanks to the odd rubbery quality of his limbs, which were a marvel all to themselves. I touch him all the time now, cupping a cheek against the inside of my hand while he sleeps, tracing my fingertips along the length of one arm. He’s put on weight, but his skin is still as smooth and pale as marble, his knees as perfectly shaped as keyholes. “You know, I had an awful time learning how to get dressed when I was little, too.”

  “You did?” Angus’s eyes open wide. “How come?”

  “Same as you. I had a hard time with arms and getting things turned the right way. And I always put my shoes on the wrong feet.” His right arm goes in, then his left. There is a stain on one of the turtles, right at the hem of the shirt. Barely noticeable.

  He grins, showing the hole in his mouth where his front tooth used to be, a tiny, cherry-stained cave. “Did you walk funny?”

  “You bet I walked funny.” I imitate a duck, walking across his room with my toes spread wide. “I walked like a dorky little duck!”

  Angus’s laugh slows suddenly. “Did the other kids make fun of you?” He is doing that thing to his neck, pulling at the soft skin of it with his fingers until little red welts appear. Sometimes, when he stands in front of the T-ball mound, he will do that. It makes me crazy to see that kind of nervousness in him. I’ll look around from my seat in the bleachers, trying to figure out who might be responsible: the coach, maybe, who has a voice like a megaphone? Or could it be that bigger kid, the six-year-old, whose father screams from the bleachers? Maybe it’s from Angus’s own father, who I didn’t know very well when I got pregnant, at least not well enough to pick up on little details like that. It’s hard to tell. Sometimes, I mentally will him to stop; from my seat behind the mound, I will close my eyes, concentrate on sending him good energy: Mom loves you Angus, no matter what. Please stop doing that thing to your neck. Everything’s going to be okay.

  But it doesn’t work. Every time I open my eyes again, his fingers are still working the soft skin, his eyes large and fearful. He gets it from me, that inner anxiety. He must.

  I walk back over to him now, drop down to eye level. “No, no one made fun of me back then. Why? Is someone making fun of you at school?”

  He shakes his head slowly. His fingers have dropped away from his throat.

  “Are you sure?” I rub my hand in slow circles over the small of his back. “Angus? You can tell me.”

  “Bernadette! Gus! Time for breakfast!”

  “Pancakes!” Angus shouts, bolting from the room. “Let’s go!”

  And like a shot, the moment is over.

  Chapter 4

  The kitchen smells like warm peanut butter when I come back downstairs. Ma is at the stove, poking at two pancakes with a spatula and fiddling with the TV channel with the other hand. Angus is standing atop one of the kitchen chairs next to the stove. He is on his tiptoes, leaning precariously over Ma’s arm. A tuft of hair sticks out from the back of his head like antennae.

  “Angus,” I say. “Get away from the stove.”

  He pulls back, whines. “But I’m watching Nanny cook the pancakes! She said I could look for the bubbles!”

  “Right now.”

  Ma looks over at me, annoyance knitted across her face. “I’m right here next to him, Bernadette. He’s fine.”

  “You’re not even watching him!” I nudge her hand away from the TV. “What channel do you want?”

  “Twelve. The news.”

  “Angus.” I use my warning tone, still flipping the channel. He whines, louder this time, and does that droopy thing with his eyebrows. “Do not make me say it again. Away from the stove.”

  “Oh, Bird.” Ma whispers her disapproval as Angus gets down slowly and drags his chair back over to the table.

  “Don’t ‘oh, Bird’ me.” I yank out a chair across from Angus, give him my best I’m-still-in-charge-here-buddy stare as I sit down. “I’m his mother, Ma.”

  “I know, I know,” she says, managing to sound agreeable and dismissive at the same time. She slides Angus’s plate in front of him and leans in for a kiss. He gives her a big one, right on the cheek, while staring pointedly at me. Traitor.

  I get up to pour myself some coffee, concentrate on keeping my voice casual. “So I’m going to be working some double shifts over the next few days. Get a little extra money. Mr. Randolph said he could use me one day this week, and I’m going to ask Mr. Herron . . .”

  “Doubles?” Ma interrupts, flipping another pancake. “Why? You don’t need to do that.”

  “Well, the opportunity’s there, Ma. It’s stupid not to take advantage of it. It’s more money.” What I don’t say, of course, is that the extra money will be going toward the new apartment. The only thing that Ma knows about my future plans right now is that I’m “saving up.” She has no idea about the place on Moon Lake or that in less than two weeks, Angus and I will be moving out of here for good. It’s shitty of me, I know, especially because the reality is that our leaving—or at least Angus leaving—is going to be hard on her. I hadn’t wanted to get into it with Mrs. Ross earlier because, frankly, it was none of her business, and also because it would have extended a conversation I didn’t want to have, but now I feel the same twinge of guilt I did in her office. Ma hates being alone, has always hated it, especially in this house. Even before Dad died, she used to make sure she was out doing something at church or at a friend’s house if she knew neither of us would be home until later. And having Angus in the house has brought a level of joy into her life that I don’t think anything else has been able to after losing Dad.

  But I can’t stay. And I’d rather not face that hurdle until I absolutely have to.

  She turns back to the stove, and then leans in suddenly, staring at the television next to it. “Is that James Rittenhouse?”

  “James who?”

  She points at the screen with her spatula. “James Rittenhouse. His father owns a construction company, doesn’t he? Or at least he used to. He worked on our house a while back, when the roof needed to be retiled. Or maybe it was the chimney.” She squints again at the television. “Is that him?”

  A flash of white heat travels through my belly as the image of a slight, scruffy-looking man dressed in a green T-shirt and brown cargo pants appears on the screen. He is being led down a set of steps by two grim-faced policemen, each one holding an elbow. His hands, cuffed at the wrists, hang down awkwardly in front of him, and his head has been shaved smooth as a pool ball. Behind him, the sky is the color of a bruise, the sun still hours away from rising.

  “Oh my God,” I say. “That is James.”

  “You know him, too?” Ma asks.

  “I used to work with him. A long time ago. At the Burger Barn.”

 
“You never told me that.” Ma puts a hand on her hip. “How did I never know that? I came over to see you at that place a number of times. I never saw him anywhere.”

  “He was the cook.” I am still staring at the screen, my words coming from some small, faraway place inside. “He worked in the back. You wouldn’t have seen him.” He looks older somehow, although how is that possible? It’s only been six years since I spoke to him last. I move closer, trying to discern his features. But he is looking down at the ground, shying away from the camera, as if the light is hurting his eyes. He walks with a shuffle, as if his feet are bound, but there is nothing around them, no chain or rope in sight.

  “Well, what happened?” Ma has turned back to the pancakes, flipping them deftly. “What’d he do? Are they arresting him?” Ma has always been a huge fan of local gossip, although she tries hard not to indulge in it, especially during Lent.

  “Shhh!” I turn up the volume as a female reporter begins speaking:

  “Police arrested James Rittenhouse early this morning after an altercation at a local bar led to a man being seriously wounded. The victim, whose name is not being disclosed pending further investigation, is currently in the critical care unit at New Haven Hospital with severe head injuries. Police say James Rittenhouse, who was heavily intoxicated at the time, has admitted to the crime and will be held at the county prison until formal charges can be filed . . .”

  My mouth falls open, listening. Critical care unit? Severe head injuries? James?

  The television camera pulls away as one of the patrolmen leads James toward the back of a police cruiser. Just for an instant, he lifts his head. He has the same narrow nose, although the ridge of it has a wound across the top, dark and thin as a parenthesis, the same flat cheekbones and deep-set eyes. But they look exaggerated under his bald head, larger somehow than the rest of him. And why is he bald? Where has all that beautiful reddish-brown hair gone?

  “. . . Police say Rittenhouse will be held in the county jail without bail until his arraignment . . .”