Wayne had carried both bags of groceries into his girlfriend’s house, so when he got home, and his wife held out her arms to receive hers, he had nothing to put in them. All he could do was walk into the out-stretched embrace, and try make up for it with a kiss, but it didn’t work.
“Save it for Doreen,” she said,
and he flashed back to the fury emerging from the tub.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Where’s the bag? In the car?”
“Uh … no..”
That’s when the phone rang. Perfect
timing. Melissa picked it up. “Uh-huh… Oh. Okay. Yeah, thanks.”
And put it down with what could
only be called a wry smile. “She says they’re over there. She’s bringing them.”
She did. And she stayed to help
with the party. He had two wives. Who the hell wants two wives?
Then there was the party itself.
It rained the whole fucking weekend, so they were in and out of the damn tent, which
it was lucky they had. They munched their celery sticks and broccoli, waiting for
the main course, chicken, and the other main course, ribs. Black soul food, the
staple of the White barbeque. They drank their artisanal beer and organic red and
white wine, and talked about their backyard gardens, their kids, the local wineries,
the racist Republicans, the cut school budget…
Out of the corner of his eye, Wayne saw Stevie (not Stevie, Steve; he was Steve now) round the corner of the house with his pack of teen-agers, and disappear into the little woods. Going to get high, he thought. Good for them. Kids don’t care about the world. Why should they? They can’t do anything about it. Neither can the grown-ups, but they have to pretend they can.
Lets follow the kids into the
woods.
Natalie Winegrove is leading the
pack. Natalie lives at one of those wineries. Her parents are old friends of the
Harris’s, and she and Steve were an item in the fifth grade. Now they’re just friends.
Steve brings up the rear, and between them are the Branson twins, and Sally Jackson,
their sequential girlfriend, Tom’s ex and Tim’s current.
There’s a downed log in the little
woods, and the five kids sit down along it, Sally sandwiched between the two T’s,
as they’re called, Natalie and Steve on the ends.
Nat takes out a little bag of
leaf and some rolling papers and prepares a neat, skinny joint, crumbling the marijuana
into the white trough, licking the seam, and, her special trick, popping the whole
thing, for a second, into her mouth, and drawing it out along her lips, to keep
it from burning too fast.
The joint goes down the line,
then Steve gets up, carries it back to Natalie, and sits down next to her. “When
do you leave?” he asks.
“I don’t. Didn’t they tell you?
I’m not going.”
Steve’s surprised. She was all
set to go to Oneonta and become a teacher. “Why not?”
She shrugs. “I don’t want to be
a teacher. I don’t want to spend a pile of money to get turned into something I
don’t want to be.” She adds, “And I don’t have to go to college to learn how to
drink. I was born in a winery.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Work.”
“Work? At what?”
“Making wine.”
‘Squashing grapes with your feet?”
he asks.
She laughs. “The front desk,”
she says.
Tim and Tom aren’t interested.
They’re starting their junior year, far from having to think about college.
Sally Jackson is very interested,
but has kept mute. She knows Natalie’s got something else going - a thriving business
growing weed, and passing it off as her cousin-from-Connecticut’s. Sally carries
water and fertilizer up the mountain behind the winery, and gets her cut of the
crop. An all-girl operation. You’d have to be crazy to trust guys. Guys are show-offs.
Guys can’t keep a secret.
The kids are ready to go back
to the party. Fortified, at peace with themselves, they wend their way back to the
barbeque. “You see that picture of the dead kids in Syria?” Steve asks Natalie.
She nods.
“My mother’s got it nailed up
on the wall over her computer,” he says. “I heard this banging, and opened the door.
There she was with a hammer. I thought the wall was going to come down. She and
my dad always fight about politics, but this time they’re on the same side.”
“And my parents are on the other
one. None of our damn business, they say; let the bastards kill each other.”
The sun has come out, and fried
chicken is in the air. “The whole thing’s too confusing,” Steve says.
“Hey, there’s Doreen with
Billy the Kid,” Natalie says. Steve knows nothing about it, but 13-year-old Billy
is one of her ‘clients’. “I’m going to walk him back to the log.”
