“Perhaps he’d like to tell you why.”
She reaches for her mug of cold coffee and sets the photos on the window ledge. Charlie comes on, his voice pitched so low she can hardly make out what he’s saying.
“What’s up, Charlie?” she asks.
“I seem to have forged this person’s signature.”
Silence.
“Keep going.”
“I seem to have forged this teacher’s signature on my skip sheet.”
There is muttering in the background, a correction being issued. Lucy is pretty sure she catches the word seem spoken with inflection.
“Mr. Hyke says I’m suspended. Just for a day.”
“Hang on. You forged whose signature?”
“Leftko. Mr. Leftko.”
She never remembers teachers’ names. “And he teaches …?”
“Math.”
Charlie bombed math. On his midterm report he’d received a single-digit mark.
“Then you better come home,” she says, choosing a tone of weary patience but actually feeling a wave of panic. When will she practise? For each day missed, a notch of technique slips from her fingers. “Put Mr. … the vice-principal back on.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, Charlie.”
A few seconds of transfer, background of PA announcing the track meet, city finals. Imagine, Lucy thinks, having sons who enter track meets.
“Hyke here.”
“Will this suspension go on Charlie’s academic record?”
“I don’t know who else’s.”
The rage nodule leaps up her brain stem and settles like a pulsing coin behind her eyes. “Has he apologized to the teacher?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Good,” she says firmly. Someone has taken charge of the matter.
She dresses quickly, pulling on jeans, a blouse, and a pair of Mark’s sneakers. Now she’ll have to hang around all day and monitor Charlie, making sure he doesn’t fool with his PlayStation or run off to the park for a toke. Not for the first time, she envies Mark as he issues a soft warning into the hushed museum room: “Please stand back from the painting.”
She can hunker down at the computer and do the books for her catering business. Not a chance of practising now, not with the mood she’s been zippered into. Who’s she kidding — pretending to be a serious musician in her forties puts her on a level with those women in floppy hats who set up easels by the riverbank.
Charlie will arrive in half an hour, dumping his pack in the front hall, ranting about the uselessness of school and how teenagers have no status in society. He will glare, daring her to contradict these obvious truths.
One of the boys in Uncle Philip’s pictures sprawls outdoors on a wrought iron bench, leg swung over the opposite knee, hand resting on his inner thigh. He stares into the camera, lips parted, showing even, small teeth. The boy wears only a vest, tossed open to display a smooth torso. His genitals are more or less hidden by the leg position, but he looks as if he might shift any minute — this is the magic of the pose, the source of its tension. In another shot the boy appears to be emerging from a bathroom or sauna, towel slung over one shoulder. Is he scowling? Hard to tell, the lighting is so bad. His complexion is pitted, unless that’s just dust on the lens. Uncle Philip needs to spring for a digital camera and Photoshop. The next picture is more intriguing: a boy, perhaps twelve or thirteen, crouches naked on the dirt floor of a shack, his baseball cap twisted sideways. He’s smiling, and the smile is friendly and unforced. The pose is unselfconscious, the small genitals hanging like baby fruit. Behind him a woman, possibly his mother, reaches for something high on a shelf.
Lucy shuffles the photographs and stares at them again. What kind of life does Uncle Philip lead over there with these boys, their skin glistening as if oiled? Her own body, she must admit, has seen better days.
Is it so strange to search for beauty?
That’s hardly the point, she reminds herself.
Charlie kicks open the front door on the dot of the half-hour, drops his pack, then begins to bustle about the kitchen below, at the same time popping a basketball, an activity that makes the whole house shake. The racket is pure theatre. He’s proclaiming that he is in no way ashamed of the day’s mishap. In fact, it’s a bonus, because he gets the remainder of the day off. He knows she’s up here; he’s waiting for her to come down and issue the predictable lecture, which he’ll mouth word for word in tandem.
The computer monitor displays a breakdown of prices for the job on Saturday, dinner for eight, three of whom are lactose intolerant. Before each job she determines to earn a higher hourly rate, but somehow it never ends up that way. The twins, Charlie and Mike, hover in the kitchen as she carves the elaborate garnishes that are her specialty: olive rabbits, radish flowers, tomato roses, carrot daisies embedded in aspic, and the boys will say, not inaccurately, that it’s this manic attention to the “crap no one eats” that squeezes her profit margin. You can say that about Baroque embellishments, the mordents and trills that decorate the musical line. Yet it is precisely because they serve no purpose but to please the eye that she fusses over her food decorations. She snaps photographs of the spreads before delivery and mounts them in a portfolio to show prospective clients.
Charlie launches into singing “Stairway to Heaven” in his newly developed baritone voice that still thrills him, and drums on furniture until the microwave dings. He’s slid a pair of chocolate chip cookies in there, liking the way they go soft and gooey, chocolate oozing onto the glass trivet. Lucy knows he’s wondering why she isn’t there laying down the law.
She won’t mention the photographs to Mark, because he’ll want to see them, and Mark is a literal sort of man. He’d insist on shredding them into tiny pieces right away, ensuring they didn’t turn up in recognizable flakes scattering down the street.
“Disgusting old goat,” they’d agree. Then they’d fret over whether Philip had approached the twins in a creepy way during one of his visits. That might explain Charlie’s nosedive at school. And why did Uncle Philip suddenly grow this family feeling after years of nothing more than a UNICEF card sent at Christmas? The visits started three years ago, coinciding with his trips to Thailand, but also with the twins’ free fall into puberty.
“Hey.” Charlie stands in the doorway of her study, gangly five feet eight inches, shaggy hair, ancient Pixies T-shirt.
She looks up, pretending to be surprised.
“I suppose you’re pissed off,” he says through an elaborate yawn.
“I suppose I must be.”
He squints, suspicious. “You don’t sound very.”
“Other things are on my mind at this moment, Charlie.”
He snorts, knowing better. “Hyke
