After a while, my father and Pete, his cousin, returned from the funeral home, quiet and clumsy. I had a feeling they were drunk. My dad opened a beer too fast and sent foam frothing to the linoleum. Pete hit his head on the bathroom door jamb. ‘Does it smell like smoke in here?’ he asked. No one cared enough to pursue it further.
‘How was it?’ I asked my dad. I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the place mats, which were a map of the world circa 1954. Most of Eastern Europe was named something I didn’t recognize.
‘Oh, she looked beautiful.’ Pete smiled at me. ‘Really nice.’
The kitchen’s wallpaper was divided into squares. Each square contained a fruit, a vegetable, or a flower, and then the big letter of the alphabet they all started with. A was an avocado, B a banana, and so on. It was all done in pastel greens and browns and oranges. On the buttercolored fridge were heavy, lacquered magnets molded into the shapes of common American dinners, a mini-hamburger and French fries, a plate of pasta, a steak and baked potato.
Stella started on dinner, spaghetti, plopping a big wad of butter on the noodles before pouring the sauce on top. The meat in the sauce looked like little gerbil poops. Pete wafted in and out, a ragged, paperback book in his hand. I’d met Pete a few times-he visited us in Brooklyn after my mom left, driving all the way from Arizona, where he lived. Last summer, my father suggested I visit him there-Pete lives in a geodesic dome, he singsonged, as if this were temptation. He’s a nature guide. You could go on some amazing hikes. He raises parakeets!
Pete drove across the country to get here, too. When he found out Steven and I were good students, he showed us the books stacked in the passenger seat of his old Honda Civic. ‘You know how some people eat to live?’ he said to us, his eyes wide. ‘Well, I read to live.’ Except Pete hadn’t attended college. My father was the only one in the family who had done that.
A woman from across the street, Crystal, showed up for dinner, too. She was somewhere between my dad’s and Stella’s age, and wore a paunchy blue dress that draped all wrong on her bony body. ‘I brought you some muffins.’ She handed Stella a plate wrapped in tinfoil.
‘Muffins!’ Stella cried, as if they were some new thing.
We used a slotted spoon to slop the spaghetti onto our plates. The chipped spaghetti bowl had a bunch of bloody grapes painted on the side. Flies buzzed all over the kitchen, landing on the lips of the beer cans, the edge of the butter dish, the tip of the faucet, vigorously rubbing their feelers together in a way that was vaguely sexual.
‘So, do you think he did it?’ Stella said, winding the pasta around her fork.
‘Who?’ my father asked.
‘OJ! Do you think he killed that wife of his?’
‘I think he did,’ Samantha said a little loudly. Stella was letting her drink a beer. ‘Why else would he run like that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Pete answered. ‘He was the obvious suspect. Even if he didn’t do it, maybe he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get out of it if they took him in. Because, you know. He’s black.’
I thought of what that Philip boy had said earlier. You’re the only white person in America who thinks that.
‘Oh, that has nothing to do with it.’ Stella waved her hand.
Pete sat up straighter. ‘The rest of the country thinks it does.’
‘He killed her because she was cheating on him,’ Stella said. ‘She loved someone else. Adultery is a big motivator. Crime of passion and all that.’
I slumped down and stared at the strip of wallpaper under the window. V was for violet. W was for watermelon. Y was for yam. Z was for zinnia. They’d skipped X, the cheating bastards. Part of the wallpaper was peeling. I took the edge of the alphabet wallpaper and pulled. I couldn’t help it. It came off easier than a Band-Aid. There was another layer of wallpaper underneath, fat stripes of blue and gold. The edge of it was crumbling as well, so I peeled that back, too. Boyish plaid. There was a gash in the middle of it, and I could see the next layer down. Roses. Perhaps this house didn’t have plaster or framing, but was instead held up by wallpaper, hunting paintings, and pictures of Frank.
‘So, Summer, have you had a prom yet?’ Stella asked.
‘No,’ I managed, dreading what I knew was going to follow.
‘Why not?’
‘Our school doesn’t have one.’
‘What school doesn’t have a prom?’ Crystal piped up.
‘A loser school,’ Samantha muttered, taking a healthy sip of beer.