I nodded. “College. I want to be a professor.”

“I always thought I’d make a good highway patrolman,” he said. “A motorcycle cop. They like tall guys for that job. I passed the height test.”

“What happened?” Shirley asked.

“Too smart on the aptitude test,” he said. “I’d have had to go in at a higher rank than usual. The cops’ union didn’t like that.”

Shirley looked as if she really believed him. Jack grinned at me. I looked into my teacup to keep from laughing. My mother glowered, and Nana came to our rescue.

“So you’re going to be a sailor,” she said, patting Jack’s arm. “All the nice girls love a sailor!”

“A marine,” Jack replied. “Not a sailor.”

“A marine,” Nana pondered. “I don’t know how the girls feel about them. Poppy, how do you feel about marines?”

That wiped the smile from my face. Jack looked away, and I felt the blush begin in my cheeks and creep down to my neck. It was then that my mother spoke up for the first time since we’d ordered dinner.

“When I was a girl,” she said, “we called Marines jar-heads. No offense, Jack.”

“None taken.”

“Now,” she continued, “does anyone mind if I finish the General Tso’s chicken? It’s hard work listening to bullshit. It makes me hungry.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Hunter came home at three o’clock that night, three sheets to the wind. It was no surprise. He’d been displaying all the usual signs of an impending binge. That morning, none of us could do anything right. When my mother failed to laugh at one of his jokes, he said she was a Friday fart at a Saturday market. Nana, he accused, was buzzing around like a fart in a windstorm, and for no reason that I could discern, he called me a dried apple fart. He said we all drove him crazy. I said that was because he was a miserable old fart himself. That did it—I’d summoned the devil. A crack, a sizzle, a whiff of bourbon, and he was off.

I had time to lock Maurice in my bedroom before Hunter stomped back in, a six-pack in one hand and a can of tomato juice in the other. It was going to be a long night. Hunter diluted his beer when he wanted to stay drunk but not pass out.

“He doesn’t know shit from Shinola,” he muttered. He got a glass from the kitchen and flopped himself onto a dining room chair. “The sorry son of a bitch. Thirty-four thousand goddamn dollars.”

Nana sat yawning in the rocking chair. I sat yawning on the sofa. My mother had long since gone to bed. Hunter poured himself a beer and tomato juice and stared at the glass as if it were about to spew forth some oracular wisdom.

“Sorry,” he said again. “Sorry son of a bitch.”

According to time-honored family practice, it was my job to ask him who the sorry son of a bitch was. Instead, I kept mum. I thought about Susan and my pending escape. She’d assured me that the woman at the Cat’s Cradle was just a friend. She seemed pleased that I’d been jealous and was inclined to tease me about it. I didn’t mind. I took the reassurance at face value. We had a real relationship, something that would continue into the future, something that would last. We’d be together, no matter what. Hunter had to repeat himself twice more before I finally said, “All right, who in the hell are you talking about?”

He frowned at me and took a sip of his drink. The new drapes on the window behind him were ugly, but they were fireproof. I wondered idly if flame-retardant had to mean beige.

“Larry Wisniewski,” he said. “That’s who.”

“Wisniewski?”

“Wisniewski-ski,” he stuttered deliberately. “Another goddamn Polack. We’ve got a plague of Polacks, don’t you know? They fall from the sky like shit-brown rain.”

“It’s raining shit and Polacks,” I agreed, looking at my watch. “You missed dinner with Lucky Eddie and his new squeeze.”

“His what?”

“He brought his girlfriend with him. Shirley Chantrell. They met in Parents without Partners.”

“Chantrell,” he said, as if testing the name for flavor. “Chantrell, hell. Parents without what?”

“Partners. I’m guessing they didn’t have a chapter of Parents without Children, so he had to join this other group. Jack said he did it to pick up chicks.”

“Chicks,” Hunter replied. “More like chicken shits. Ha! You hear that? Chicken shits.” He laughed, and unless I laughed too, he was bound to repeat the punch line.

“Ha-ha,” I said. “What’s the problem with Larry Wisniewski?”

Hunter fixed me with a glassy stare. “He makes six thousand dollars a year more than I do, that’s what’s wrong. That sorry son of a bitch. Where’s Eddie staying with this Parents without Pussy?”

“The Brentwood. How do you know Larry makes more money?”

“Why’s he staying at the goddamn Brentwood?”

“Because he can’t stay here. How do you know Larry makes more money?”

“Fred saw his goddamn paycheck, that’s how. I’d sleep in a goddamned ditch before I slept at the fucking Brentwood. There’s no telling what’s in those sheets.”

“How do you know they have sheets?” I didn’t bother to ask how Fred had gotten hold of someone else’s paycheck. Found it, no doubt. He was probably out trying to cash it.

My grandfather dropped the subject of Lucky Eddie for the time being. “I trained that son of a bitch, Wisniewski-ski. He didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. I taught him, and they pay him five hundred dollars a month more than they pay me. I’ve been there forty years, since 1944.” He waved four fingers in the air for emphasis. “Since 1944, and they piss in my goddamn face.”