On the walk home that night, I kept thinking about Mr. Grierson. He used to come into the diner fairly often by himself—I discovered this after I started waitressing there in the fall. Like Patra, he had always been left out of the small talk at the counter. The few times I waited on him he’d ordered the Eggs Special, scrambled, and he read fat paperbacks with spaceships on the covers as he forked his food down. He called me Miss Originality, for the prize I’d won in History Odyssey the year before. “Thank you, Miss Originality,” he’d say, holding up his white mug for more coffee. I hadn’t known what to say to that. Sometimes he’d ask me a few questions about my new teachers at the high school before he went back to his book. Usually he’d just ask for cream, his finger on the sentence he longed to return to.
The last time I saw him, though, in early November, I wasn’t on the clock. I’d only stopped by the diner to pick up my check, so it was probably a Friday evening around five. The first blizzard of the year had been predicted for that weekend, and I’d just come from Mr. Korhonen’s grocery store. I had a backpack full of last-minute winter supplies—kerosene, salt, toilet paper, that sort of thing. Flakes so big and wet they looked like elaborately folded pieces of origami hung in the air outside all the windows. As Santa Anna tallied my wages at the register, I’d brushed snow from my hair and pretended not to see Mr. Grierson in the back booth. I never knew if the Miss Originality thing was mocking or friendly. I never knew what to say to him once the History Odyssey competition was over and I stopped meeting him after class. I remember the diner was unusually empty that day, everyone at home preparing for the storm. The frayed vinyl booths looked especially lonely and cold with all the snow whitening the gray evening outside. Did Mr. Grierson see me standing there? I don’t think he did. He was dividing his food with a fork and knife, dumping half his eggs onto a second plate, and only after I’d left with my check did it occur to me that maybe someone had been sitting across from him in the booth, back to me. And only much later, when I was walking home from Patra’s that warm May night, the night she first called me governess, did I wonder if it could have been Lily.
Occasionally Leo the husband called before dinner was over, Patra’s cell phone startling us all with its Star Wars ringtone. On those nights Patra pushed back her chair and mouthed thank you in my direction as she headed toward the deck with her phone. Thank you meant Patra wanted me to put Paul to bed. So I did, reluctantly, herding him into the bathroom, pleading with him to brush his teeth, threatening him if he didn’t stay under the covers.
“You’re supposed to count to a hundred!” he’d yell, when I tiptoed for the door.
“You’re supposed to be out cold,” I countered, turning back, pushing him down.
“You’re supposed to be nice to me!” He squirmed under my hands.
“You’re supposed to be sweet and cute,” I whispered. “You’re supposed to be a lovable little boy. You’re supposed to be lots of things you’re not always.”
*
Once, Star Wars lit up the phone on the table just as Patra was finishing Paul’s bedtime bath. Patra dashed out of the bathroom to answer it, a towel slung over her shoulder and a naked Paul tearing out from behind her. He darted around the house dripping, scaring the cats, clambering over the couch and under the table. I must have grabbed his arm harder than I meant because he cried out as though stabbed. When I pulled him toward me, he spun around and slashed a fingernail across my face. I could feel the bright stinging trace of it in an arc from eye to ear. I looked for Patra, but she had already gone out onto the deck with the phone. Something revised in me at that point, changed course, and I simply lifted Paul full body—wiggling, naked, everywhere arms—and carted him to bed. I tossed him down, load-of-logs-like on his mattress. He looked pathetic, dampening his sheets in his naked crouch. He couldn’t breathe around the phlegm in his throat, dragging a few long, gurgling breaths as he glared up at me.
“That’s an education.” I felt like my dad. That’s what he said when I’d carried the canoe on a three-mile portage through the mud. I felt like my dad, and at the same time like the kid who’d carried that canoe, who was desperate and aching and crying from exhaustion.
“Be quiet!” Paul yelled.
“You want me to be quiet?” I asked him. I could still feel the long scrape his fingernail had made across my cheek, the wet shape he’d printed on my flannel. “You want me to be quiet?”
His face was marbled white and red. “I’m a perfect child of God,” he said.
“What did you say to me?” I grabbed at Paul’s arm. There was something in the singsong lilt of his sentence—like when he’d spoken to that girl on her back in the playground—that made the back of my neck prickle unexpectedly. “Who are you?” I found myself hissing at him.
I must have truly scared him I guess, because when I let go, Paul pushed his hands in under his butt, sucked in his cheeks, and hunched up his shoulders. He was so naked his skin looked like clothes to me. He seemed sealed up in a very tight pink suit, without a wrinkle or a seam to be found. Wet and unfathomably opaque. Smelling of baby shampoo. Of urine.
I heard Patra whoop with laughter all the way out on the deck—then add something and start laughing again. I walked over and closed the bedroom door.
“You cut your face,” Paul noticed.
“You wet the bed.” I’d noticed, too.