“I know what you’re worried about, Daddy,” Aunt June said. “But there’s absolutely no chance of you getting dependent on this medication. The company did all kinds of studies. I can show you the package insert.”
She was in the kitchen which was part of the living room, the whole downstairs being one big room. I watched her down there, shiny Posh Spice hair, tight black shirt tucked into the waist of her jeans, and wondered how pervy was it that I still thought she was hot. That I thought she and her niece-slash-daughter were hot. She’d baked a chicken for our dinner, and a birthday cake. My birthday was the reason of us coming over that day. Fine, I was in love with the lady. Now she was packing up all the leftovers for them to take home. Mrs. Peggot would say no, now y’all keep some of it for yourselves, but June would win. This family was a story I knew.
Mr. and Mrs. Peggot had sunk together into the couch while Kent wore them down. A Burt Reynolds type, mustache, too dressed up for a Saturday, shoes like nobody from around here. Looking down on him, I could see a pink shine on top of his head with the dark hair pulled across it. Not a full Homer Simpson like Creaky’s, just a little beginner’s hamburger helper up there. But do you trust a guy that cheats on his own head? Aunt June was bottom-feeding.
Emmy was on the step beside me. My knee touched hers but she didn’t notice. She was eyeing Kent like she wanted the right superpower to vaporize him.
“We ask the patients to look at the chart and put a number to their pain,” June explained, scooping potato salad into an empty yellow butter tub. “Kent’s company came up with that.”
“We believe your pain is a fact,” said Kent. “Not just an opinion. That’s all I’m saying.” Definitely not all he was saying. I looked at Emmy and made an oh-brother face.
“Our mission is to get every suffering patient to zero on that chart,” said Kent.
Emmy made a finger-pistol and shot herself in the head.
Mr. Peg ended up accepting a free coupon for Kent’s miracle pain pills, probably to shut him up. Stronger than anything ever made. Not the usual stuff you have to take every four hours, this one lasts around the clock! For the first time in years, you’ll get a good night’s sleep!
Outside in the truck, he barely got the engine turned over before Mrs. Peggot said, “Give that paper here, old man. If you
try bringing them pills to the house, I’m flushing them down the commode.”
32
Christmas was coming, and I was nervous of Coach getting done with me. This being the time of year people start noticing who’s family and who’s not. I asked Angus what they usually did for Christmas. She said nothing much. We were up on the roof cleaning the gutters.
“But what do you do?” I asked. “Like, where do you go cut your tree?”
She squinted her eyes at me. She’d worn her oldest, stickiest Chucks to climb out on the tin roof, while I stayed on the ladder. “You mean that stupid thing of a tree inside the house?”
Not even whenever she was little? Not even then. “We’re not religious,” she said, like I was the one being weird. And I was like, Who said religious, this is fucking Christmas we’re discussing. Who ever heard of a kid thinking it’s no big deal?
Angus was that kid. If she wanted something, Coach always just said go buy it. No need to involve fat guys in fake beards. Another one of these Coach rules that was just normal to Angus, like no pets, always do your homework. She said Christmas was a downer for him due to her mom dying of her cancer right before or after, possibly the day of. She wasn’t sure.
Normally this guy named Happy would have been cleaning their gutters, but Mattie Kate had called and called. Finally his wife answered and said Happy fell off a barn and broke his back, so call back in a few months. Coach didn’t trust anybody else to work on that house, mainly due to nobody wanting to do it. It was over a hundred years old and had its dicey aspects. Imagine if some handyman screwed up Coach’s house? He’d have to leave the county. But the gutters had gotten so clogged with leaves, the roof was leaking in our TV den. I told Angus I was going up. I asked her not to tell Coach if I screwed something up or, like, fell. She said she was coming too, if we screwed it up, he couldn’t fire us. And I thought, Speak for yourself. Coach was out of town that weekend for the playoffs. I’d thought he might ask me to go with them to help out, but he didn’t, only U-Haul. It was December. My days in that house were numbered. Which is what got me on the subject of Christmas and death.
“That makes two of us,” I said. “As far as holidays wrecked by dead parents. Not that the Fourth of July is comparable, but that was Mom’s downer. She’d always get moody over my dad being dead, to where she’d put the shuthole on fireworks.”
Angus gave me a look. Maybe Coach had fireworks rules. That family was hard to figure.
“I’m saying not even sparklers. Let alone your better class of explosives.”
“Are you telling me your dad died by exploding?”
“No, it was water. I never got the particulars, just the place. And the day.”
“And then she died on your birthday. Fuck a duck, bro. You win.”
I thought about my last birthday I’d had at Aunt June’s. Mom didn’t really enter into it. I told Angus my mom being dead wasn’t something I pinned exactly on my birthday. “It’s more like this bag of gravel I’m hauling around every day of the year. If somebody else brings it up, honestly, I’m glad of it. Like just for that minute they can help me drag the gravel.”
“Huh,” she said, raking brown glops of leaves out of the gutter with her bare hands, which was brave. I mean, things could dwell in that shit. Primordial life. My job was holding up the bucket until it got full. Then down the ladder I’d go to dump it on this swamp-stinking pile we’d started, far from the house. What implements Happy used for this job, we had no idea.
Angus said it was different for her, because she didn’t remember her mom. Not a bag of gravel. “It’s more like this shiny little thing I wear around my neck. Once in a while some lady will lean over and say, ‘Honey, she was so pretty’ or ‘She was a jewel.’ And I just say, ‘Okay, great. Thanks.’ ” Angus slopped more glop in the bucket. “Ignorance is bliss.”
I’d suggested that smoking pot could make this enterprise more enjoyable. I’d scored some respectable weed from a guy at school as payment for body-part drawings. Angus almost never took my suggestions, especially anything that could bring scandal to the house of Coach, but this time she was extreme. Was I crazy, did I want to fall off my ladder and end up like broke-back Happy? Etc. Turns out she’d never smoked pot in her life. That’s how her innocent mind could fall prey to the whole weed-makes-you-go-insane theory the DARE cops promote at school, and I had to set her straight, explaining how it could make you pay more attention to your work, while not minding the shittier sides. No dice. She couldn’t smoke anything whatsoever, due to asthma. I’d seen her use her inhaler, but never knew that’s why her dad quit smoking and went over to using dip. She said it put her in the hospital a few times as a kid. Any time she got too emotional, good or bad, she’d break out in hives. I’d not seen that in Angus, the hives. Or the emotional.
So she’d missed out on all the best things in life: pot, having a mom, Christmas. Unbelievable. I told her I couldn’t argue with bad luck as regards death and asthma, but that Christmas was still on the table. She said she didn’t see the point.
“That’s because you don’t know what you’re missing.” I went to dump our bucket, and she sat up there shivering, knees to her chest, hands in her coat pockets, stocking cap pulled over her ears. Gray manga eyes looking out at the world like a small kid abandoned on a rooftop.
The point, I told her after I got back, is presents. Totally different from shopping. People give you stuff you didn’t know you wanted. Or were scared to ask for because too expensive.
She said that sounded wasteful.
I told her surprised is the point. Waiting is the point. Watching wrapped-up secrets pile up under the tree, that you shake and poke till you feel like the cat that’s going to die of being curious. So what if Mom never had two bucks to her name and got all my presents on employee discount, we fucking did Christmas. As far as being too excited to sleep, listening with all my ignorant little might for reindeer hooves on top of our chimneyless single-wide? Totally.
Angus didn’t think Coach would go for it.
I was shocked. Generally speaking, Angus could be a giant ass-pain as far as looking on the bright side. “Demon,” she was always saying, “life is a wild, impetuous ride. There could be good shit up ahead, don’t rule it out.” Which I mostly did, rule it out. But Christmas? I was not giving up that one. I told her we didn’t have to get Coach involved that much, we’d just give presents to each other. She admitted there was maybe a point in time where she’d been jealous of kids that got to do Santa. But if she’d asked him, it would have been like betraying her dad. I listened while she talked herself through this. Maybe he was past that now. Maybe he didn’t actually care one way or the other.
“Fine,” I said. “I know where we’re getting our tree.”
We stole one.
Never mind realizing after we got it home that we had nothing to decorate it with. We hung whatever the hell we felt like on that tree: spoons, mint Life Savers, CDs, some earrings and shit that Mattie Kate had given Angus over the years in a futile attempt to mold her fashion sense. Pretzels. It was our tree of utter ridiculousness. Epic.
We got so psyched over our presents, we couldn’t wait. The round-the-clock Christmas movie reruns start playing well before, which makes you think it has to be already Christmas somewhere. Around midnight of maybe the twenty-third, halfway through our second or third Chevy Chase, we called it. Ran downstairs like kids, tore everything apart while Coach was asleep. Angus got me amazing comics including a manga series of a kid named Gon Freecss on a journey to find his dad that left whenever he was a baby, and was said to have superpowers. Obviously a hit. Also clothes, which sounds boring but this being Angus, was not. Not the badass stuff she liked, either. She thought out the angle of Demon, Popular Kid, from head to toe: a Members Only jacket, parachute silver, just for example. I would own the school in that jacket.
The thing about Angus. We both had our crap to live with, and her way was to give no shit whether you liked how she was doing it, or not. But if I wanted to be a different type person and try for popular, she wasn’t going to stand in my way. She was going to help. Not very usual.
