Lucy brushed a lock of hair o= her forehead.
“Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Charlie shrugged and coughed into his >st, cast
down his eyes to avoid her glare. He felt like scratching a hole in the dry dirt and climbing in. The kid
nosed the bottle and burbled as if it was a baby—their
baby. Charlie was starting to like the kid. It was the
only thing on the place that had a sense of humor.
When Charlie arrived in June, Lucy was just
recovering from kidding season and desperate for
help. He was desperate, too—the truck had broken
down just seventy->ve miles out of Red Bank, like a
>nal fuck you from Darryl, and he’d blown most of
his money on a new starter when he found Lucy’s
help wanted ad on a bulletin board at the gas station.
He was grateful that she didn’t ask questions. A
week or two, tops, he thought, surveying the old
frame farmhouse and rolling >elds, deciding it
might not be half bad. Then he had started to drag
his du=el bag into the house, and Lucy shook her
head and pointed up to the barn. He thought she was
kidding. She gave him a foam mattress, a lamp, a
few milk crates, and an armload of blankets and told
him to make himself at home. For real? he said, and
she gazed at him with those blue eyes, challenging
him. None of the others have ever had a problem with
sleeping in the barn.
You can do this, he told himself, lying on the ?oor
of the grain room that >rst night, ?ies dropping
from the rafters to land on his lips and the tinkling
of the goats’ bells waking him every time he started
to nod o=. Be a man, Charlie. Buck up. So she didn’t
seem to particularly like him. Who cares, he
thought, so what? He was used to being misunderstood. He went about the world in two ways:
there was the real Charlie, and then the Charlie he
showed everyone else. He had learned never to say
what he was thinking, because no one else was
thinking the same thing. Oh yeah, Mr. Know-It-All?
Darryl would say when Charlie started speaking his
mind. I got news for you. You think you’re so smart.
Smarts ain’t all you need, you know. Plenty of smart people end up cleaning up other people’s shit for a living. So
you just remember that, smartass.
There were women at home—mothers of his
friends—who tried to take care of him. Let him
spend school nights at their house, always tried to
send him home with leftovers. He would sometimes warily accept their o=ers of kindness, but
mostly he’d curl up tight like a pill bug until they
left him alone. Refuse the hot dinner even when his
stomach was rumbling with hunger. Shrug the
friendly arm o= his shoulders. He was determined
to show everyone that he could take care of himself.
If that meant being alone in the world—well, in the
end we all are, aren’t we?
“I’m afraid,” Lucy said one blistering morning,
“that we’re going to have to put that kid out of its
misery.” Charlie had only just crawled out of the
barn into the white sun. Lucy, done with the milking, was out front, watering a pitiful rose bush. Its
?owerless branches were akimbo, as if reaching out
for someone.
Charlie was clutching the barn radio. Lucy had
bought it for him at the thrift shop in town, replaced
the missing knobs with a pair of clamps, and
declared it good as new, but it was always breaking,
and he had brought it outside with the intention of
working on it. He looked down at it as if he suddenly
had no idea how it got into his hands. He could hear
the kid out there, mewling under the pear tree. He
could always hear it. It was just a matter of tuning it
in or out. No, he thought. Hell no. He moved into a
tiny patch of shade and scowled at her.
She shook a kink out of the hose, slapping the dry
ground with it, ignoring his >xed gaze. “Fill a pail.
That’s the quickest way.” Her voice was measured,
matter-of-fact, like she was assigning him any old
chore, weeding, spackling, that she knew he was
bound to screw up. Don’t talk to me like that, he
thought, his grip tightening on the radio. I’m sick
and tired of it.
“I’ve done this a dozen times. Trust me, Charlie.
Above all it’s got to be quick.”
Quick, Charlie thought. Ha. When the male kids
turned one month old, Lucy took each one and
stretched a rubber band around its scrotum. Go
ahead, she said. Call me the ball breaker. Just don’t
