or at least always had been, until he got sick, a very heavy drinker, and his drinking was to blame for his disease. Victor’s mother had mentioned all this in the context of explaining that his uncle and cousin lived with his grandmother, and not the other way around. “Buzz has never been able to take care of himself,” she’d said. “He went into the military right out of high school, just like your father, but he got kicked out as soon as he met poor Shelby’s mother.” ‘Poor Shelby’s mother’ was the only way Victor’s mother ever referred to Shelby’s mother, and she would only say that she was ‘unfit,’ but not why. She must be a monster, Victor figured, given that his mother seemed to consider Shelby’s alcoholic and apparently unemployed father to be more fit than this absent, enigmatic female figure.
He looked across the round kitchen table at his cousin Shelby and tried to conjure up the image of the monster that gave birth to her. Shelby didn’t on the surface resemble her father, but if one really looked one could see that they shared the same square, pointed chin and they both had slim, delicate looking fingers. It was hard for Victor to imagine Shelby having any other mother besides their grandmother, who, having eaten half of her own tomato sandwich was now standing by the sink smoking a cigarette and peering at the label on one of Uncle Buzz’s cans of nutritional supplement.
Shelby seemed to detect Victor’s scrutiny of her, and looked up. He blushed and looked down at his plate, which, with its half-eaten sandwich lying in nervous pieces upon it, seemed horribly unappreciated. Shelby’s plate was clean. She pushed back her seat, stood, and the bracelets on her arms jingled as she smoothed back her wild mass of hair and twisted it into a loose, but steadfast knot at the nape of her neck. “I’m going to my room to write in my journal,” she said pointedly, and took her plate to the sink. “I’ll be out when it’s time to go to work,” she spoke to their grandmother, but it was clear to Victor that he was the one being told to keep his distance for a while.
Victor left the house with the vague notion of figuring out if it would be possible to find, and walk to, the beach, but as soon as he stepped out of the cool darkness of his grandmother’s house onto the white hot concrete stoop that served as the front porch, it was obvious to him that to walk far would be to risk not only getting lost, but getting sick. The sky above was clear and pale, and the sunlight bore down on the crown of his head like a heavy hand. He didn’t want to go back inside, though, so he looked to the right and to the left, and, finding that there were children playing in a yard a few houses to the right, he headed to the left. Through the soles of his sneakers he could feel the heat of the road’s surface, and he hadn’t walked a block before all of his clothes were damp with sweat. There was a relentlessness to the heat here that he couldn’t recall ever experiencing before, for one thing, it seemed that all the trees here were thick and short and scrubby, and there were only a few of them scattered among the yards along the street, whereas back in the city, particularly in the suburbs near his apartment, there were tall cool pines everywhere.
He came to a side street and looked up at the street sign, noticing for the first time that the street his grandmother’s house was on was called Blackbeard Lane. This brought to mind a distant and long forgotten memory that made him pause in his aimless tracks, of a morning long ago; it must have been a weekend morning, because his father was never around on weekdays, back when they lived in New York. He could not have been more than four or so, and he was complaining to his father, as they drove somewhere on some errand, that he did not like their last name, Flowers, because, evidently, some other child had taunted him on account of it. Other children, he had realized, had last names that were words in their own right, names with complicated sounds that meant nothing other than to indicate the family that shared it. But his last name, he was now abashedly aware, meant something besides his family, it meant flowers, and to his mind this had an embarrassingly girlish connotation. He had suggested, riding in the car alongside his father, that they change their name to something better.
“Better!” his father had bellowed, in exaggerated indignation. “You want a name that’s better? Well, I’ll tell you boy, there is no finer name than that of Flowers! There have been Flowers’ in this country since before it was a country! I’ll have you know that the very first Flowers, your great, great, a million times over great grandpappy, sailed with Blackbeard the Pirate!”
Victor wiped his brow, remembering. That had been his father’s way, and still was, for all he knew, of dealing with troubles, he made light of them masterfully, with his easy manner, and compelled you to take lightly whatever it was that distressed you. Only his mother, Victor thought, could withstand his father’s insistent levity, and she did so, he knew, with a consistency that was just as impressive to behold. Victor stood now on the corner of Blackbeard Lane and some other street, and wondered if and how his parents ever got along with one another.
He turned right, down the street that branched off of Blackbeard Lane, a long dead end called Shackleford Drive. One yard down on the left a shirtless old man wearing loose yellow shorts and a dingy fisherman’s cap on his head with a bandage over one eye was watering his front lawn with a hose. The man lifted his hand to Victor, and Victor lifted his in return, caught off-guard. He looked down to the dead end of the street and knew he would have to pass the old man again in order to get back home. He foresaw the ordeal with disproportionate dread. The simple gesture of friendliness seemed too strenuous to repeat; yet it could not be escaped. He might even be obliged to speak, if the old man spoke to him. Victor was suddenly seized with a longing so sudden and fierce that it nearly doubled him over and caused his heart to race, for the regimented anonymity of his high school, for the torpid misery of his life with his mother, for the clinical scrutiny of the treatment center, for all those suddenly inaccessible areas of his life where it was not expected or required of him to be civil. When he got to the dead end of Shackleford Drive and doubled back, the old man in the yellow shorts and the fisherman’s cap had gone inside, or had taken his hose to the backyard. Along with the sensation of relief, the thought of suicide came to Victor and coursed through his consciousness like a balm. The relief it brought him was in exact proportion to the sense of abandonment he felt. For the first time he realized he would not shrink from death, if his life continued on its pointless course inward. It was with this secret strength that he returned to the house where he was a stranger, yet family.
Close to the corner of the house, where the fence began, there was a gate. Victor lifted the latch and let himself into the backyard. A medium sized dog dashed out from the darkness under the back porch and gave voice to such aggressive barks that Victor felt his heart in his throat. Before he could get the gate back open the dog stopped short in front of him and began to sniff his feet, legs, and behind. Once he realized he was not going to be bitten, Victor offered his hand again to be sniffed, and at the same time squatted to come face to face with the dog. The smell of the animal was strong and rank, and that along with the matted state of the fur around her belly and tail suggested that if the dog had ever been bathed, it hadn’t been recently. And yet while the smell was unpleasant, it was not overpoweringly so. The dog’s breath was hot and meaty. “Phew,” whispered Victor, “You’re a smelly old mutt, aren’t you? But you’re nice,” the dog blinked and panted, as indifferent to Victor’s remarks as a queen to the mutterings of a peasant. But his attention seemed to please her, or at least interest her. She circled him, snuffling, paying particular attention to his hindquarters until finally Victor had to laugh and push her away. Though there was no one but the two of them around, it was embarrassing, to have one’s ass investigated by a dog in broad daylight. Still squatting, Victor reached to pat the dog’s head, which was warm and hard, then he ran his palm along the length of her body. Her coat was so invitingly warm with the stored heat of the sun that despite the heat of the day, Victor let his hand, then his whole forearm, rest against her. A lump, then a tickling sensation, arose in his throat. He let his arm drop. He had not had such prolonged physical contact with a living being in years.
He stood, but the
