your son worked at, then?”
“Taught school some at first. Operated a TV camera for a while. Lots of stuff. Sold encyclopedias.”
“A college man?”
“Yeah, well,” Charlie said. “But it took him a long time to finish up his degree. He kept changing directions up yonder at Lamar. Engineering at first, then that worked out to be too hard. Then math and that got too far out for him. He said they were expecting him to solve problems that didn’t have a thing to do with this world at all. Finally settled up with education.”
“He wasn’t teaching in this last position, was he?”
“What?” Charlie said. “Oh, no. This last business was at the BP refinery job in Beaumont. I figured he was set up there for life, too, dern it.” He stopped speaking to regard Hazel’s cosmetic operations as she shifted from one eyebrow to the other. “That’s sure a pretty color lipstick on your mouth,” he said.
“Thank you, sir,” Hazel said without losing concentration on her left hand, the wrist of which she steadied with her right. “So your son— Waylon, is it?—is now on the Charlie McPhee dole. How lucky for him that you’re able to take him in.”
“Don’t get me wrong, now,” Charlie said after a moment. “He’ll pitch on in and help around the house, Waylon will. He’s always good at that. Picking up, cooking, grocery shopping, all that kind of stuff.”
“He won’t be able to earn his keep, though, I wager,” Hazel said, finishing up and straightening her back to rest it from the strain she had been placing it under. “You’ll be paying the large portion of his tab.”
“He’ll give me rent,” Charlie protested. “Every month that rolls. Waylon, he always does that.”
“At a sharply reduced, non-competitive rate,” Hazel said. “I warrant you.”
“Oh, honey,” Charlie said, standing up beside the bed and looking for his shoes, “Waylon’s not like what you’re thinking at all. You’re really going to like him. You just wait and see.”
“I’m sure he’ll be perfectly charming,” Hazel said. “I have no doubt about that.”
Pushing back the bench on which she’d been sitting, Hazel rose and looked one last time at her image in the glass before turning toward Charlie. “Do you want to put my brassiere back on me now, love?” she asked.
Shoes forgotten, Charlie moved in her direction.
Waylon’s older sister Beth lived out toward Sabine Pass with her husband Wayne DeCluitt and two wire-haired terriers named Bip and Bop. Jason, Beth’s and Wayne’s only child, worked in the information technology division of a multinational corporation in Dallas and didn’t get home much anymore, so the terriers figured largely in the emotional life of the DeCluitt family, enough so that Terry hated to visit her sister and brother-in-law.
“It’s going to be a pain in the you-know-what,” she had told Waylon on the phone. “Those damn dogs will be all over anybody new that walks in the door, but there’s not any way around it. All three of us have got to get together to talk about Dad and that woman.”
“Put your foot in their faces and shove,” Waylon said. “That’ll back them off.”
“You don’t know Bip and Bop. They spend all their time trying to climb onto your leg. That, or they’re going at their little pillows that Beth made for them.”
“Are they possessive about their pillows?” Waylon said. “Will Bip let Bop have a turn at his pillow and vice versa?”
Terry had not answered that question, so Waylon went on. “It’ll be something to watch anyway. While you and Beth talk about stuff.”
“You pick me up early and we’ll go in your car,” Terry said.
“Can’t. Let’s just meet there. I’ve got an appointment in the afternoon.”
“Job-related, I hope.”
“We’ll see,” Waylon said. “I’ll keep you posted. You’ll be the first to know.”
Once he got past the main body of traffic coming in for the eight o’clock shift at the Texaco refinery, Waylon found the drive south from Port Arthur toward the Gulf of Mexico pleasant. Red-winged blackbirds were working the swarms of insects above the rice fields on both sides of the highway, swooping and diving in graceful arcs as they fed. He rolled his window down to listen to their cawing despite the damp heat of the breeze which rolled into the car, and twice he saw ospreys perched at the tops of telephone poles along the roadbed, waiting to spot something moving in the dark waters of the marshes.
The sight of creatures working for their breakfast lifted his spirits, and by the time he had driven eight or ten miles, about halfway to the subdivision where Beth lived, Waylon felt good enough to let himself think about the time he had lived in his own house with a wife and child. He remembered the circular driveway that led in from the street and took up most of the front yard and how Brian had peddled furiously around and around it on a yellow Big Wheel trike, trying his best to make his vehicle spin out on the tightest part of the curve.
“He never could make it work out,” Waylon said out the car window toward a circling moil of red-winged blackbirds. “He ought to have let his old man show him how to get that centrifugal force working. Make that back part swap places with the front. It’s a gift.”
When in about twenty minutes he pulled up in front of Beth’s house on Dick Dowling Drive, Waylon saw that Terry had beat him there, her Honda Civic with the Pro-Family, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life sticker parked precisely in the middle of the driveway. The door to the house opened as he killed the engine, and Beth stepped out and waved as though to tell him he had found the right destination, Bip and Bop swarming to get past her feet to the ourdoors.
“I’m not going to let your dogs hump my leg,” Waylon said as he approached the stoop. “Tell you that up front, Sis.”
“They don’t do that anymore,” she said. “Wayne broke them of it.”
“Not what I heard,” Waylon said, staring at the dog closest to him, so excited it seemed to be trying to stand on its rear legs. “Down, no, uh-uh.”
“Like I told you,” Beth said. “They won’t try to do that to you. It’s called aversion therapy. You’re late.”
“How could I be late?” Waylon said, moving past Beth into the house and looking around for Terry. “You’re not running a business establishment here, are you? Seeing people according to a tight schedule these days?”
“Not hardly,” Beth said, bending over to scoot Bip and Bop away from the door and back into the house. “But you’re still late. Nuh-uh, Bop.”
Terry was sitting on the far side of a coffee table, taking a bite from a pink-colored pastry out of a Dunkin’ Donuts bag and holding a napkin under her chin to catch the crumbs. She looked up at Waylon and gestured toward the bag, her mouth too full to speak.
“No, thanks,” Waylon said. “I’ve already had me a big vegetarian omelet this morning for breakfast.”
“See,” Terry said to her sister,
