All That I Can Fix Read online

  And though I was never planning on telling anyone, I ended up telling him about George, because I loved her even then.

  We were out there for what seemed like five minutes, but all of a sudden Mom was shouting that it was time for dinner. Dad got out from under the car first and helped me up, and as we headed back to the house, we walked in perfect step with each other.

  • • •

  Sam and I had finished our first coat of paint when Mom brought Mina home from flute lessons.

  “Ron-Ron!” Mina cried as she ran at me. She hugged me before I could even turn around, which meant she hugged my back. That didn’t seem to bother her. Also, she’d called me by my nickname in front of Sam again, but for some reason that didn’t bother me either.

  “Hey there, kiddo,” I said as I turned to face her, my brush dripping paint down my forearm.

  “Whatcha doing?” Mina asked.

  “We’re fixing the wall,” Sam announced. He put his brush down on the paint tray.

  “Can I help?” Mina asked, hopping on one foot.

  “Nope,” I said. “And we’re about done, anyway.”

  A foghorn went off in the distance.

  “It looks nice, Ronney,” Mom said, sticking her head into the living room.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Someone had to do it.”

  Mom disappeared, and I heard her in the kitchen shaking her pills out from her pill bottle. My jaw clenched.

  “Please can I help? Pretty please?” Mina tugged at the sleeves of her orange shirt.

  “Like I said, we’re almost done,” I said, putting down my paintbrush. “We need to wait for this coat to dry.”

  “Oh,” Mina said. She started playing with one of her spiral curls, which she does when she gets shy, and then tinkered with the wads of key-chain toys on her backpack. After a while she poked around at our brushes, and I guess she was getting excited again, because she said, “Did you know that the last word in the dictionary is ‘zyzzyva’? It’s a kind of beetle.”

  “What are you doing still using dictionaries?” I asked.

  “I like books,” Mina said.

  “Beetles are cool,” Sam said.

  “You’re weird,” I said to Mina. “And you’re going to rule the world.” Then I remembered that I had told George the same thing when we were looking for the panther, and my chest got tight. I forced that memory from my mind.

  “I’m going to rule the world first,” Sam said.

  “Are not.” Mina stuck out her tongue at Sam.

  “Are too.” Sam stuck out his tongue back.

  Mina grabbed her orange bouncy ball from her pocket and gave it a good bounce so it hit the ceiling.

  I was getting overdosed on fourth-grade-ness. “Okay, guys, painting fun is over. Sam, I’ll clean up, okay? You and Mina can hang.”

  Sam and Mina ran down the hallway to Mina’s bedroom, which was across the hall from mine. I guess I had left my door open, because I heard Sam shout, “Whoa!”

  I found him in front of my doorway, looking into my bedroom.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. I felt kind of pissed he was looking at my shit.

  Sam pointed. “The poster. You put up Nick’s poster on your wall.” Sam grinned at me.

  “What?” I asked, trying to play innocent. Then I looked away, briefly. “My wall needed a poster,” I muttered.

  Sam’s face was one huge beacon of joy.

  13

  THE NEXT EVENING MOM AND I were in the car, headed to the store to get her a new pair of jeans. At first I had told her I was busy, but she kept nagging me to go with her until I said I’d go. She needed someone to tell her if the jeans looked right, she said. That’s Dad’s job, I wanted to say, but then I realized I’d rip a hole in her chest by saying that, and I wasn’t feeling up for doing that.

  We were approaching a stop sign, when out of nowhere a monkey came sauntering along and started picking at some grass in the median. Mom slowed to a stop. “They didn’t say anything about a monkey,” she said as she picked up her cell.

  “Mom, don’t call,” I said.

  “That monkey could get hurt.”

  “It probably likes being free,” I said.

  She paused, then put her phone down. We drove in silence the rest of the way until she pulled into the parking lot. That’s when my phone buzzed—it was another text from Jello, but I mumbled something and turned off my phone.

  As I was sliding the phone back into my pocket, the guy on the radio started talking all rapid-fire about how the cheetah had just attacked some kid in town and was gorging on the kid’s entrails when something scared it away. Of course, the authorities were out looking for it even harder now that there was all this screaming going on. My first thought was Maybe it got Jello, and I got all sweaty and nervous for a moment, and I realized that I wasn’t as mad at him as I thought I was. Then the announcer mentioned the part of town the kid was from, and it couldn’t have been Jello, and the bitter part of me completed that thought: But maybe it should have been.

  I’m not the jealous type. Really. Jealous types get pissed when they don’t get something they think they deserve, and I see no reason to expect I’m going to get all this great free shit falling from the sky. But you see, George has been my friend for years, and it just seems like the most natural, plausible thing in the whole world for her to fall in love with me. We do all kinds of stuff together outside of school. I make her laugh. Once, when she was trying to teach me how to play the guitar, I made her laugh so hard she peed her pants. She literally peed her pants. And I was there helping her clean up the floor. What more do you freaking want? I mean, if I were to come to you and say, Hi, my name’s Ronney and I’ll help you clean your piss off the floor, but I just want you to love me, don’t you think you would?

  Maybe because I helped her clean up the floor, I thought she’d see me as better-than-friend material. I don’t know. Or maybe because I held her when her last boyfriend dicked her over. Or I listened to her go on and on about colleges and grade point averages when she knows I don’t care about them. Or that I tell her I don’t care if she’s perfect, she’s great the way she is, which is absolutely true. I know I can’t do anything to make her love me, but God, I just wish she would.

  They couldn’t even tell me. That’s one of the things that ripped me apart. I mean, it’s not like I would’ve been celebrating, but at least they would’ve been real about it. And goddammit, they know that I hate fake people, and nothing’s faker than your closest friends lying to your face and pretending they’re not. The fact that George, the girl I loved, and Jello, my best friend who had once saved my life, were all over each other made me want to go and find that cheetah and shoot it myself. Maybe that’s what Rockfeller was feeling when he took down that lion.

  When we got to the store, I tried to hide in the electronics section, but Mom dragged me to the women’s department, where she sat me down and made me give her my opinion on which pair of jeans looked best. Gag me. If I had to do this for George, it would be a completely different story. But my mom? So I told her which pair I liked best, which was a complete and utter lie, since they all freaking looked the same to me. What the hell was she talking about, which one looked better? They were all the same: They were blue, and jeans, and she could zip the goddamn zipper up on each one, so what difference did it make?

  As Mom was trying them on, it did give me time to think about Dad. He hadn’t always been depressed, and I’m sure in the past there were at least a couple times when he was sitting in the chair I was sitting in, looking at Mom’s various jeans, and lying through his teeth. I don’t know, maybe he even liked it. But those times were long gone, and it must have sucked for Mom to know that.

  Really sucked.

  The pair of jeans Mom wanted wasn’t on sale—in fact, they were the most expensive ones—so she ended up not getting them after all. She was really bummed about it, like a pair of jeans actually mattered, and I wanted to say, Hey, it’s a Thursday;
of course they’re too expensive, but she doesn’t believe in Thursdays like I do; she makes weird comments when I bring Thursdays up.

  “Maybe they’ll go on sale,” Mom said cheerfully as we were driving back home.

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  Mom didn’t hear me. “I could hide that pair of jeans in the store so no one will buy it in the meantime.”

  “Well,” I said, “since they’re so great, they’ll probably never go on sale and they’ll sell out and you’ll never get them, period.”

  Mom swerved to the side of the road, and I grabbed for the handle in the door. The tires screeched long and hard.

  Mom looked at me. “Stop it.”

  I stared at her. “What?”

  “I’m sick of you acting like you know everything and don’t care about anyone.”

  How I don’t care about anyone. Isn’t that what George said, I’m cold? “Is this a girl thing or what?” I said. “I was just saying—”

  “I highly doubt that only females want decent human beings to deal with, Ronney. Or tell me, do you enjoy dealing with jerks?”

  My mind immediately went to Jello and George. I grimaced.

  “I’m sick of your attitude,” she continued. “I only wanted someone, anyone, to go shopping for jeans with me—”

  Then, to my horror, she started crying. Hard. I guess she had been thinking about Dad all along, even more than I had. Maybe she was lonely—I mean, you have to be lonely to ask your son to shop for jeans with you. That thought made me feel like a total dickwad. I wanted to say something nice to make her feel better, but I didn’t know what I could possibly say and I didn’t want to make things worse, so I just sat there.

  At that moment the radio announcer came on saying the cheetah was still on the loose and last spotted on the west side of town, just where we were headed. They got the crying family on the radio and asked lame-ass questions like how do you feel now that your son has been killed by a cheetah and shit like that. Mom took a couple deep breaths, and with the announcer going on and on about the cheetah, she drove us home. She even started humming, which is what some relaxation guru she’d watched on TV said helps calm you down, and which she only does when she’s really pissed and trying to be nice at the same time. I looked out the window and tried not to hear the radio announcer or the humming.

  I don’t know why she doesn’t believe in Thursdays. The proof is freaking everywhere.

  • • •

  It had been a Thursday two years ago when Dad plunked a gun down on the dinner table. At dinner. He didn’t even say much, just, “Look what I got today.”

  Mom put down her fork. Mina watched Mom put down her fork and then put down her own fork.

  It was a gun: black, compact, and powerful. It had a four-inch barrel and roughened texture for the handle. The safety was on the side.

  “Whoa,” I said. “That’s cool.”

  “Roger,” Mom said. “What is this all about?” Her voice trembled a little.

  “I’ve been thinking of getting one for a long time,” he said. He rubbed his nose.

  “For what?” Mom said.

  “Protection.”

  Mom didn’t move. “Against what?”

  Dad mumbled something.

  “Against what?” Mom repeated.

  Dad shrugged. “You don’t get it.”

  Mom stared at the gun, silent. Her eyebrows drew together.

  “Are you going hunting?” Mina asked. This was a couple years ago, so she was eight. “Are you going to shoot a bear?”

  “It’s not a hunting gun,” Dad said.

  “Then what are you going to shoot?” Mina asked.

  “Yes, Roger, what?” Mom asked.

  “He said it’s for protection,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Can I see it?” Mina said.

  “Sure,” Dad said, and handed it to Mina.

  “Roger,” Mom said, and her voice was hard.

  “What?” Dad said, taking a bite. He swallowed. “It isn’t loaded.”

  “It’s always loaded,” Mom said. “I thought they taught you that.”

  “Bam,” Mina said, pointing the gun at the food on our table and mock shooting it. She looked at Dad for approval. “Bam, bam.”

  Dad smiled and nodded.

  Then Mina pointed the gun at Dad. “Bam.”

  “Roger!” Mom said. She snatched the gun from Mina’s hands, slammed it on the table, and left the room.

  Mina’s eyes grew big and watery. “Dad?” she said in a small voice.

  “Don’t point it at people, honey,” Dad said gamely.

  Now, I have nothing against guns: They can be pretty great if you know how to handle them. But for some reason, seeing Mina shoot that gun at Dad made my stomach churn and the room go heavy. The resentment lasted for days.

  • • •

  With the killing of that kid, the gun rights folks in City Park went all apeshit at the gun control folks and animal rights folks, howling that that cheetah should have been shot a long time ago, and if it had, the kid would still be alive. I don’t really know what happened since I wasn’t there, but I heard that Rockfeller was calling for everyone to open carry their guns, and if they didn’t have a gun, to get one any way that they could; we had to stop waiting for the government to do something that we as individuals can do ourselves. That got the gun rights folks all pumped up, and they started whipping out their rifles and handguns and shit, and then the gun control folks started messing with the gun rights folks—bottom line, two people got shot by accident, one seriously, and were whisked off to the hospital.

  But Rockfeller was still on a roll, and the gun rights folks decided to disperse from City Park and go looking for the cheetah, the tiger, the cougar, the python, maybe the hyena, and the camel. That was a couple days ago, and we had to see even more of Rockfeller’s ugly face as a result. I have to admit, it was kind of strange in the mornings to see grown-ups with rifles and ammo and gear as they drove their kids to school. The gun control people protested that folks were selling their extra guns to people like they were candy, and that people were carrying guns without a license; the mayor replied that a license can take sixty days, and he didn’t seem bothered by all the guns, or maybe he was just too chickenshit to put a stop to it. Either way, there we were with the “blind eye” thing again, and that was that.

  All this time, I wasn’t talking to Jello. Or George. One day—precisely a week after the panther incident—Jello texted me. I figured I would look at it since it was the third time he had texted me, and that I would try to be nice.

  Hey, Ronney.

  Fuck you.

  Come on, R-Man.

  Fuck you, twice, rolled through a pile of shit. A pile of filthy, fucking, stinking shit.

  I’m still your friend. I should’ve told you, okay?

  Um, yeah, you should have. Exactly how do you define “friend”? Let me share with you a little story as an example, based on personal experience: Friend #1 goes behind Friend #2’s back, secretly dates the girl Friend #2 likes, chooses not to say anything, and in fact hides all evidence until one day Friend #2 happens to find out by accident. Friend #1 then expects Friend #2 to say oh yeah, we’re friends, it’s cool. No big deal.

  Jello didn’t respond.

  Well, it’s not cool. None of it is. Am I supposed to be okay with this? Fuck you.

  He didn’t text back, and I was grateful he didn’t—I mean, would Jello’s trying to be my friend three times be the same as asking me for something three times? And if it was, what would he be asking of me, and would I have to do it? Luckily for me, it wasn’t a Thursday, he only texted what he did, and I didn’t have to deal with him after that.

  • • •

  It turned out that Sam was eager for anything I put him to, including taking out the garbage. I mean, really? Was life at home so bad that he’d be happy to take out the trash? Maybe it was, because he was over at our house a lot, and our garbage cans were
pretty empty. At some point Mom called his mom, and they talked for a while, and when she hung up, she had a confused look on her face. What did his mom say? I asked. Oh, nothing much, Mom said, but I knew it was a lie, and also that I wouldn’t get anything out of her.

  So we had another kid at our house. For a ten-year-old, he was pretty cool, and smart, given that he didn’t turn in his homework. One day, while Mina was doing her social studies lessons, Sam was playing with her bouncy ball and said to me, “How come you don’t do homework?”

  My face got hot. “Why don’t you?”

  Sam shrugged. “It’s stupid.”

  “Well, there you go,” I said. “I have too many other things to do.”

  Sam looked at me and nodded. “Like the living room,” he said.

  Mina put down her pen. “But I’m going to rule the world,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Because rulers of the world do their homework.”

  Mina’s look got wobbly. “But then what about you, Ron-Ron?”

  “What about me?” I said.

  “I want you to rule the world with me.”