Little Blue Lies Read online

  She stares down at me with her hands covering her mouth, but they don’t filter out any of the blubbering. “Awwwwww,” she says.

  “You’ve got some rust starting under here,” I say, so unbelievably composed that I fall instantly in love with myself and curse the fact that Junie Blue is not right here to see it. Actually, lots of neighbors seem to have gathered, so I squiggle around to see if maybe . . . but no. My heart, despite appearances, is running at about 8,000 rpm, so I can’t be all that cool, although to be fair it’s been at about 6,500 since I got the text.

  “Wait!” the driver woman calls as I scoot off in the direction of the Blue house—it’s brown—without even a little bit of further ado.

  “Do it again,” a guy yells from the sidewalk. “I didn’t have my camera ready.”

  I get laughter and applause, and I wave over my head as I run, and realize my elbow is damn banged, but hey, what’s an elbow but a broken arm with a hinge anyway, right?

  The doorbell does not work at her house, but they never bother fixing it or leaving a note or even putting a discouraging strip of tape across the thing, because the Blues would be just as happy if most people just went away, or better yet pressed the button a bunch of times and then went away, while the Blues watched from a window. So I knock, loud and fast and happy and nonstop until the door swings open.

  Oh.

  “Hey, Ronny.” Ronny is June’s fatherlike substance.

  “Hey, O. Were you the dickwad slithering under traffic there on the corner?”

  “How the hell did you see that?”

  “I was at the upstairs window. None of your business.”

  Ronny and I don’t get fantastically along.

  “You going to let me in?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Peeking around Ronny’s shoulder is Leona, June’s mom. I like Leona, more than a lot of people do. She’s not bad, just mostly beat down by Ronny.

  “Are you okay?” Leona asks me softly. “I heard Ronny at the window laughing something crazy, and he said you were squashed under a truck.”

  “I wasn’t squashed, Leona, but thanks.”

  “Why are you here?” Ronny asks.

  “I was summoned.”

  “Let the boy in, Ronny.”

  “Who summoned you?”

  “Who do you think? June.”

  “June ain’t here,” he says.

  “Let him in anyway. You want a drink or something, O?”

  “She texted me. And told me to come here.”

  “Not here,” Ronny says.

  “Here,” I say. “When somebody says ‘come over,’ if they don’t say anywhere else, it means come over to the place where they live.”

  “That’s true,” Leona says, “but she really ain’t here.”

  “Hiya, O,” Maxine says, walking across my field of vision behind her parents. Maxie is June’s older sister.

  “Hiya, Maxie,” I say.

  “So ya see,” Ronny says, “you weren’t summoned here.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So where is she?”

  “She was here just a short while ago,” Leona says. “She was here when I went to the drugstore, but then when I got back, she was gone already. Where is she, Ronny? D’ya know?”

  “She went away. For a vacation.”

  This, is something. Ronny likes messing with me, always liked messing with me, even when he liked me, even though he never much liked me, but now when he clearly doesn’t like me, he will mess with me beyond banter-type messing. And this, is something.

  “Junie never takes a vacation. Never, ever.”

  “Well, that was before,” Ronny says.

  I hear a blender kick up and screamy-whine in the kitchen.

  “Wouldja let the boy in, Ronny,” Leona says, but it’s not really a request, since she reaches from behind him and pulls me by the hand into the house.

  “You want a smoothie?” Maxine says as I am seated at one of the high breakfast stools at the bar that separates the kitchen from the dining area.

  “No, thank you,” I say.

  “How ’bout if I put a little rum in it?”

  “Fine, I’ll take the smoothie. But not the rum.”

  Ronny takes a seat at the kitchen side of the bar, diagonally across from me. Leona excuses herself and is gone in a sad puff of sigh. Maxine sits across from me and pounds two smoothie glasses down on the bar.

  “That’ll be ten cents, pardner,” she says.

  “Put it on my tab,” I say. We clink glasses. “What do you mean, Ronny, ‘that was before’? Before what? What was before?”

  “Before she off-loaded you, of course. Ain’t that obvious? I thought you was supposed to be smart. Maxie, wasn’t this guy supposed to be smart?”

  “He is smart, Dad. Shut up.”

  “Anyway, yeah, like I was saying, ah, the life Junie’s leading these days, you wouldn’t recognize it. She does stuff, you wouldn’t believe it. Party stuff, guys . . . whoo the guys . . .”

  I am boiling. I hate it when I’m boiling, because I have a face that announces to the whole world I am boiling. Fuchsia, I believe is the color.

  “Look, he’s boilin’,” Ronny says, pointing and laughing like I’m in a glass display case.

  “She does nothin’, O,” Maxine says. “Don’t listen to this guy. Nothin’. No guys, nothin’. She works the stupid store, she walks the dumb dogs. That’s it.”

  The joy rising in my guts now, chasing the flush right out of my face, is something I should not be proud of. She should have a life. She deserves a life, and a fantastic one.

  And she should be here.

  “Where did she go, Ronny?” I ask with the slight crunch of demand in my voice that is never a good idea with this man.

  “I told you,” he snarls, “vacation.”

  I turn to Maxine, my palms upturned to catch some help.

  “No idea, O. I just got home. Why don’t you just call her?”

  Ronny laughs and points a bread stick at me, and I realize the extra awfulness of making his day like I am.

  “Because I’m a dope,” I say, pulling out my phone and pressing her number.

  In a couple of seconds the room tinkles with small music. Small music and big laughter.

  The music sounds just like one of those little kids’ plinky toy pianos, playing “Hello, Dolly!” Junie’s ring tone. The laughter is Ronny.

  “June’s phone,” I say, looking all around, at the counter and the floor and the Blues across the bar from me, because that’s where the sound is coming from.

  Maxine turns sideways in her chair, scowls, and reaches down into the vicinity of Ronny’s back pocket. When she produces the phone and he produces a higher volume of laughter, she biffs him right on the side of the head with the phone.

  “Was it you? Texting me?” I ask him.

  That sucks the mirth right out of him. “Hell, no,” he snaps. “I don’t think so.”

  “Where is she?” I shout. I don’t care how angry or violent he gets now, because this is not the way it should be going. “Junie never ever goes anywhere without her phone. She doesn’t go to the bathroom without her phone. She doesn’t even shower without it.”

  “And you would know these things how?”

  “Come on, Ronny. I’m really getting worried here.”

  “Don’t get worried. You got nothing to worry about. You know why? ’Cause you got no business with my daughter anymore.”

  “Christ, just tell him where she is, Dad.”

  Maxine seems utterly unconcerned, which should relax me some but relaxes me none.

  “She is on vacation, just like I said.”

  “Where on vacation? Who with?”

  “Listen,” Ronny says, standing up. The way a guy stands up. You need to take notice when a guy stands up that way, especially a guy like Ronny. “I have to politely point out that you are out of line. That, lest you forget, my daughter dumped you and she has a life of her own and it is none of your
damn business where she goes or who she goes with. I have to politely point out that you are entitled to none of the information you are demanding, but I will tell you she left here a short while ago in the company of a man, and I point this out only because it pleases me to do so. And now I will politely point you in the direction of the exit.”

  “Polite my ass,” Maxine says, shoving her father back down onto his seat and walking around to my side of the bar. She takes me by the arm as we walk to the door.

  “Sorry about that, O,” she says. “You know how he is. If I get anything more out of him, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks, Maxie,” I say.

  When we get to the door, Leona appears, standing in the doorway that leads to the living room. She looks haunted, fragile.

  “Where is she, Ma?” Maxine says flatly. “I bet you do know. Wouldja just say, so he can not worry a little bit?”

  It would not be correct to call the noise from the kitchen a bark. If a bear put its voice into a bark, it would sound like this.

  “LeOna!” Ronny calls.

  Leona raises her hand to cover her mouth and nose. Her sigh hisses through the grille of her fingers before she turns and walks back into the living room.

  • • •

  “What is wrong with you?” Mom says when I’ve made my third lap of the house. I pace. When I’m trying to think or to unthink, I pace, which makes the machinery of my mind far too visible to the people who know me well.

  “Nothing,” I say, passing her right by.

  She is sitting at the dining room table, sketching. She has her own study, where most of her contracted commercial design crap gets done, but when she’s in itch-a-sketch mode looking for inspiration, she plunks down wherever the plunkin’s good.

  “Your sweat stains say otherwise,” she says.

  It takes about twenty seconds at this pace for me to make the circuit—living room, hallway, dining room, kitchen, hallway, living room again—which gives us both good time to compose snappy retorts for each other by the time I pass through her space once more.

  “Sweat doesn’t speak,” I say.

  “Neither do you, and that’s not healthy. What’s wrong?”

  “Are you sketching me?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Cut it out. You know I hate it.”

  “I’ll stop if you stop.”

  She has a giant portfolio of her me-as-salesman portraits. I look like my father, I suppose, only less successful.

  “Want to see?” she says as I sit across the table from her.

  I nod weakly.

  Okay, this one is different. She has drawn me the way cartoonists draw two characters chasing each other around a tree—just a blur of circular lines with what looks like my nose and furrowed brow emerging somewhere in the middle of it.

  “That’s instantly my favorite,” I say.

  She looks far more pleased than this kind of statement should make a person. I have to remember how much she cares what I think, what I say. I have not always used my powers wisely there.

  “I’m going to frame it,” she says, signing the corner carefully. “You going to talk?”

  I think about it. I decide I am. Sort of.

  “There’s nothing to say,” I say. “I’m just a little concerned about Junie. But it’s probably nothing.”

  She turns the page in her big sketchbook and starts with the telltale scratchy-sounding strokes and furtive glances that mean I’m sketch material again.

  “Jesus, Mom . . .”

  “Shush. Stay still. I mean, don’t shush. But do stay still.”

  “Fine. Well, we’re not together anymore, so it’s really none of my business. . . .”

  “You are going to have to move on somehow, unfortunately. It’s going to take some time, and some pain.”

  “I know. But it’s not just that . . .”

  “Speaking of Junie, did you hear that that awful man over there, that One Who Knows character, won the lottery? Again?”

  “What?”

  “Yes. Rumor has it that he’s won the lottery. Again.” My mother hates the way people do air quotation marks with their fingers, and she is constantly at war with what she considers to be the corroding effects of all things cliché, so at times like this, when she says words like those—“won” and “again”—to register her scorn she puts them in italics by placing her hands karate chop fashion alongside her face at 45 degree angles and chopping the air. That she also goes bug-eyed and lurches forward when she does it is, I believe, involuntary.

  “Where did you hear that rumor?” I say, chopping crazed italics in the air.

  “Your father brought it home from the office, naturally.” If there is a financial transaction, legitimate or otherwise, that happens in this state at ten in the morning, those guys are discussing it over lunch.

  He’s not a bad guy, my father. But if water were money, he’d be a fish.

  And as for money folk, they don’t come any fishier than One Who Knows. He may not have actually won the lottery that time a few years back, but he certainly collected it. Very publicly too, so everyone could see. See, it is commonly known in that neighborhood that anyone in the area who wins the lottery in any meaningful way should come to Juan with the ticket. I was never clear about what the deal on offer was, but I got the impression it involved the winner being paid a generous chunk of the cover price of that windfall, tax free, combined with a job for life and all the fringe benefits implied by joining the select company of Juan’s nearest and dearest.

  And if the famously work-shy Juan was able to show everybody, especially his ninety-seven-year-old mom and his neighbors and the Internal Revenue Service his great honest good fortune on the evening news, well, a feel-good story all over it surely was.

  A sweet deal, some might say, and one reason the man so famously splashes out on tickets for almost everybody he meets. If you couldn’t really tell which tickets you bought on your own and which were the result of the large largesse of the man himself, well, then maybe all tickets were his tickets. He spikes the punch, it’s his buzz as much as yours.

  He tended to see it that way anyway.

  “Good for him,” I say. “Such a lucky, lucky guy, huh?”

  “Indeed. Hey, maybe he would like to have his portrait done to commemorate the fortuitous moment. I could do that thing they do, the Roman emperor approach, where I do him from the shoulders up, robe hanging off him, hair all slicked down and ringed with a laurel wreath?”

  I picture it and I laugh, and some of the tension I felt earlier washes away as I watch the crinkly lines at the corners of my mother’s eyes deepen. She is happy, grinning away and scribbling, and this is something we can enjoy, do enjoy, having fun at somebody’s minor expense. But somebody who invites it, of course.

  “Hey,” I suddenly say. “You’re doing it to me right now, aren’t you?”

  She giggles and scribbles.

  “Fine,” I sigh. “Show me.”

  Yup indeed. It’s toga-party me, laurel leaves and all, and she has even gone to the trouble of giving me those Roman bangs that make it look like I cut my own hair. And I still look like I’m selling something.

  “Can I have it?” I ask.

  She is beaming, like a kid.

  “It’s not that big a deal, Mom. I wish you wouldn’t be like this. It puts a lot of pressure on me.”

  She is signing the portrait with a flourish. “And God knows you don’t need any more of that, Mr. Pace Car. You’re pretty torqued up already.”

  “Yeah. It’s just . . . Yeah, sorry. I’ll be all right.”

  She hands me over the sketch and then goes all weird coy on me.

  “Listen, if you need to . . .” She does this awkward head tilt and thumb point in the direction of upstairs, and the pained expression that comes over her makes me sympathy wince.

  “What?” I say. “If I need to what?”

  “You knowwww.” She drags it out agonizingly. “You might have to
. . . relax, and I’ll just leave you to it. I won’t bother—”

  “Mom!” I say, and jump up from the table. I instinctively know that I will someday laugh my head off at this, but right now I am far, far too mortified, and so is she.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, biting her knuckle. “I was just trying to relieve . . . You look so . . .”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” I say, launching into what looks like my pacing pattern but is in fact a roundabout dash for the door.

  “Yes,” she says. “That’s better anyway. A good brisk walk, that will sort you out.”

  Sort me out. By the time I pull the front door closed behind me, I am already almost to the point where I can laugh. But that’s probably more from the relief of escape than anything else.

  My mother always has my best interest at heart, but we both really need to get out of the house more.

  • • •

  I am standing at the Blues’ door again, with the rolled-up portrait of Caligula O’Brien in my hands.

  “I thought I threw you out on your ear,” Ronny says, both smiling and snarling. He likes to be displeased.

  It’s one of the reasons he and I are such a great match.

  “I brought a present for my girlfriend,” I say.

  “O,” I hear Maxie call from off in the distance. “What are you doin’? I told you I’d let you know. You tryin’ to get the man to punch you in the head?”

  “One,” Ronny says, holding up his thumb, “she ain’t here. Like I already told you. Two,” he says, adding the pinky finger for styling purposes, “she ain’t your girlfriend. And three”—he adds the ring finger, and now I am certain he practices this—“are you tryin’ to get me to punch you in the head?”

  The rain has stopped, but the air is still so heavy with warm damp that it hardly matters, and it doesn’t seem like I’ll be invited inside anytime soon. I kick anxiously at the concrete two-step of the Blues’ stoop, and I persevere.

  “I’m not trying to get you to do anything of the kind, Ronny, I assure you, but something’s wrong here, I can feel it, and if I have to take a punch in the head to find out what’s going on with Junie, then I am prepared to—”