TriQuarterly Books, 2023, 248 pp.
“I only need two minutes of your time.”
Beginning at age six, when she was first allowed to answer the clunky rotary phone on the wall in her family’s cluttered kitchen, Tess had heard these words emerge from the mouths of hundreds of fast-talking salespeople. Some were calling to sell life insurance policies or poisons to make the lawn greener; others accosted her outside of Las Vegas time-share offices or in front of mall kiosks festooned with mobile phones and sunglasses—for decades now she’d been enduring strident pleas to take out her wallet and hand over her money—to a stranger, no less! To make matters more absurd, not once had she wanted what anyone was selling.
The landscape of her life—of everyone’s life, she had to think—was thronged with desperate characters begging you to buy things you didn’t need. She’d been raised to ignore their pitches and was both surprised and distressed when her brother David called to say their frugal father had just bought a pygmy horse named Peanut Sundae Pie and was using the garage as a stable and the quarter-acre backyard as a pasture.
A week earlier, he’d purchased a derelict school bus and had told David his plan was to transform it into a camper by installing bunk beds, a shower, and a galley kitchen. It presently filled his entire driveway and neighbors had begun to knock on his door to demand he remove the hulking orange eyesore from the neighborhood, or else they would be forced to call the cops. The bus’s bumper protruded a couple of inches over the sidewalk, which the neighbors claimed was illegal.
“You have to come help me,” said David, his voice strained on the other end of the line. “Dad doesn’t care what I think. He’s been calling me Shaggy again too. I’m almost bald now but he won’t stop.”
“You’re not bald,” she said. “Are you?” She hadn’t seen him in six months, not since Christmas.
“Can you come?”
“You should try rosemary oil.”
He ignored this. “Can you come or what?”
She was in her study, looking out the window into her neighbor’s backyard. Mrs. Penina, whose husband had his own house a mile and a half away, was picking lettuce in her small vegetable patch. Her cat, a tabby named Harry, was skulking in the bushes behind her, as he often was. Tess disliked her neighbor’s laxness: she let the cat go after birds. Tess rarely saw Mr. Penina, who was at least ten years younger than his wife and didn’t like the cat either—Tess had once heard them arguing over Harry, who was allowed to sleep with them because he’d spend the night clawing at the bedroom door if locked out.
“Yes,” said Tess. “I’ll come.”
“Last week he bought three stars in some galaxy with a number for a name too,” said her brother. “Some con man saying he was with NASA called and told Dad he could name the stars whatever he wanted if he bought them.”
She saw Harry dart from beneath the bushes around the side of house. Mrs. Penina didn’t appear to notice. “Dad’s never cared about space before, has he?” she asked.
“Not that I know of,” said David.
“I’ll be there tonight,” she said. “Is the horse nice, at least?”
“She’s old. She needs to be on one of those farms for retired circus animals, or whatever they are. I think she’s lonely. She looks sad.”
“The poor thing.”
“He’s been sleeping out in the garage with her.”
“Is he afraid someone will steal her?” Outside, Mrs. Penina stumbled on her way back into the house and upended the bowl of lettuces. She glared at the greens for a moment before she began snatching them up.
“I think it’s a compromise,” he said. “He’d probably let her sleep in the house, but there’s not enough room.”
“This isn’t normal, even for Dad.”
“No. It’s not.”
Their father wasn’t wealthy. He lived on a government pension and social security checks. His house was small and full of undusted surfaces and old, crunchy carpet. Tess had offered more than once to pay to have it replaced, but he’d declined. “Who do I need to impress? Save your money,” he’d said, querulous.
Their mother had died twenty years earlier and Tess’s father had never recovered. As if in full retreat from his once-happy life, he’d sold the house Tess and her brother had grown up in less than a year after their mother’s death and had moved into a glum, drafty bungalow with north-facing windows that rattled and whistled throughout the winter. David called it the hovel, sometimes within earshot of their father.
Her brother had his own problems, but Tess tried not to instigate arguments. She was the older child, the peacekeeper, her mother had called her, fondly, most of the time. At forty-one, her brother made a small, hangdog living doing food deliveries and renting out half his house, having lost a much better job at a furniture company that had gone under a year earlier, after its owner was arrested for embezzlement. He had no girlfriend Tess knew of, but he did have an estranged daughter, Jenny, born when he was a sophomore in college. Jenny was presently in her third year at Cal Poly, and lived with her mother and stepfather in Los Osos, a coastal town fifteen minutes from San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly. Tess had visited twice while Jenny was growing up and had advised David to move to California, but he’d refused, claiming he’d been shut out of his daughter’s life by her mother and stepfather. Now that Jenny was an adult, however, Tess thought she could decide for herself whether to let David back in, but her brother’s resentment and stubbornness appeared to be keeping him from doing anything other than sulking where his daughter was concerned.
And now, despite his relative youth, David was living like an embittered old man, and their father, an actual old man, was living like an eccentric. Tess could imagine what they said about her: a goody two-shoes control freak who should have married the first man who asked but didn’t, and when a second man asked, she said yes but he ended up dumping her.
This was inaccurate—it was she who’d kept putting off the wedding—she had wanted to live with Jason, her second fiancé, indefinitely, but wasn’t sure when she’d be ready to get married, to him or anyone else. She’d later regretted the breakup, but by the time she realized she’d made a mistake, he’d moved on. In the three years since they’d broken up, she’d dated a few men inconclusively, and for the last year and a half had sworn off dating all together and dedicated her free time to getting into shape and running a marathon. She’d also been promoted at the law firm where she practiced tax law, her salary nearly doubling, but she’d stopped liking her job years ago. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life other than spend it running and traveling to places where she wanted to run.
Her friends thought if she were married and had kids she’d have less time to brood, but from what she’d observed, her friends were more miserable than she was. (“The doctor said all three of my kids need Ritalin.” “My husband keeps having affairs but I signed a fucking pre-nup!” “I should have finished medical school but I was twenty-five and stupid and got married and pregnant instead.”) She wasn’t unhappy, but she didn’t know what exactly she felt half the time, or what she wanted most. (“Silence,” her married friends would say. “And uninterrupted sleep. No fucking bouncy castle birthday parties either—someone always ends up with a black eye and chipped tooth.”) One Saturday morning earlier in the year, she’d gotten into her car and driven three hours to Madison, where she’d gone to college, but when she got there, after an abject hour on State Street, she’d turned around and gone right back to Illinois. She knew no one in Madison anymore, and so many of the places where she used to go had disappeared. It felt like a foreign country.
Her brother and father lived in Indianapolis, David near the airport on the south side, their father thirty minutes due north. She lived thirty-five miles outside of Chicago in Lake Bluff, and could make the drive in four hours if traffic cooperated. She did not call to alert her father she was coming—she knew he would tell her not to—the drive was too long and traffic would be onerous, and why did she want to sit in his house with him, even for a day, and pretend she wasn’t bored? Her tacit role was to ignore his protests, and his was to act the widower curmudgeon and claim he didn’t wish to inconvenience her, but she knew he didn’t mind her visits, whether he admitted it or not.
It was after dark when she turned onto his street. From the corner, she could already see the school bus looming in the driveway, its sun-bleached orange paint glowing dully under a streetlight. Her father’s aging beige Corolla was parked along the curb, doubtless now its permanent parking spot (another source of outrage for his neighbors, probably). She doubted the bus was drivable, and on top of that, a tiny horse now purportedly lived in the garage. Her father had made some questionable purchases in the last few years, but they had been limited to very heavy pieces of damaged Shaker furniture and boxes of moldy books from flea markets and garage sales. To her knowledge, the horse, the bus, and the three stars in Galaxy 60048 were by far the most inscrutable, possibly insane, purchases her father had ever made.
David was supposed to be there when she arrived, but she didn’t see his car. The school bus, at least, looked better than she’d expected—no visible dents or rust on the body, the tires properly inflated. She thought she smelled hay and manure as she climbed out of her car and tugged her bag out of the backseat. The air on her skin was warm and a little humid, a half-moon looming overhead. The solstice was only a few days away. This time of year, thunderstorms roamed the area, but tonight the sky was clear.
She heard someone start singing in an uneven masculine voice—her father, she realized with a start. He was behind the closed garage door, serenading the horse. She left her bag on the front stoop and squeezed into the narrow gap between the bus and the garage. The hay and manure smells were stronger here—until now, she’d irrationally been hoping her brother was wrong about the tiny horse. She pressed her ear to the cool steel plank of the door, involuntarily holding her breath.
Now that I’ve lost everything to you, you say you want to start something new . . . Her father, whom she hadn’t heard sing anything but the birthday song in over twenty years, was rasping out a Cat Stevens song to Peanut Sundae Pie.
She could picture him with his arm around the horse’s neck, his cheek pressed to her muzzle as he crooned to her. Tess wondered fleetingly if the horse was annoyed or afraid, but perhaps Peanut Sundae Pie liked the attention—she might have been used to being neglected.
Tess stood wedged between the garage door and the bus, waiting for her father to finish the song, but on its heels he began another, “Morning Has Broken.” She didn’t remember him or her mother ever playing Cat Stevens records when she and David were children. And where the hell was her brother?
“Dad?” she said, knocking softly. She pictured the horse’s long, doleful face as her father sang to it, its tail hanging limply between its flanks.
The singing stopped.
She strained to detect signs of movement on the other side of the door but no sounds reached her ears. “It’s Tess, Dad. Can I come in?”
“What are you doing here?” He sounded aggrieved.
“I wanted to see you,” she said.
“David called you, didn’t he.”
“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “He’s been a little worried about you.”
“Because he thinks I’m spending all my money and there won’t be any left for him when I croak.”
“Dad. David’s not like that.”
There was a distinct pause. “He might not have admitted it to you,” he said, “but I’m sure that’s what he’s thinking.”
“Can I meet your horse?”
“It’s her bedtime.”
“I won’t keep her up much longer. Can I come in?” Tess gripped the garage door handle and tried to lift it, but it didn’t rise in its usual loose-jointed way. “Will you let me in?”
She thought she heard her father sigh before he said in a low voice, “You want to meet your sister, Peewee? Do you?”
To Tess he said, “Come around to the side door. Peanut gets upset when I raise the big door. It’s too late now to get her riled up.”
Tess did as he asked but found the trash and recycling bins were blocking the smaller side door. The bins had previously been stored inside the garage; she knew the raccoons that lived in the nearby woods would discover them soon if they hadn’t already.
Warm, barn-like air rushed toward her when she opened the side door, the pungent smells of motor oil, lawn fertilizer, and deteriorating rubber less detectable now. It was dim in Peanut Sundae Pie’s ersatz stable, the only light source a floor lamp Tess recognized from her father’s living room, one bulb of three switched on. He and his pygmy horse peered at her from where they stood next to the ancient, scarred workbench, two small hay bales balanced on top of it. Her father’s tools still loomed on the pegboard above the bench, but the garage’s previous occupants—the lawn mower, the yard tools, her father’s car, the raccoon-attracting garbage cans—had either been exiled outside or herded into the corner opposite the lamp. The rusted brown wheelbarrow Tess and her brother had played with as kids had been enlisted to serve as a grain trough. A red drywall bucket next to it held what Tess assumed was the horse’s water.
A few yards farther on in the gloom, spread out next to the garage’s primary door that could only be raised by hand—her father refused to install an electric opener, certain it would break down and trap his car inside—she spotted a large plaid dog bed. She’d never heard of a horse sleeping on a cushion, but perhaps million-dollar racehorses did. Most of what she knew about horses came from the movies The Black Stallion and The Horse Whisperer: don’t startle them and don’t walk behind them. If you want them to like you, give them sugar cubes and carrots and other crunchy treats. The thought of her solitary father driving to the giant pet supply store a few miles away to buy his new horse a dog bed made tears prick her eyes.
Peanut Sundae Pie was about the same height as a Great Dane, but stockier. Her coat was newsprint-gray, her fetlocks almost black. She peered at Tess with brown, mournful eyes, Tess’s father’s expression mirroring his horse’s. He needed a haircut, a thorough shave, and a bath. His clothes needed washing too.
“Can I pet her?” asked Tess shyly.
Her father looked at the horse. “What do you think, Peewee? Should I let her pet you?”
The horse averted her gaze. Tess stepped forward and gently stroked Peanut’s mane and the soft pelt at the base of her ears. She nickered and tilted her head toward Tess’s father.
“Peewee’s had a hard day,” he said, patting her neck, the horseflesh beneath his hand quivering. “I had the vet here this afternoon. He said she’s in pretty good shape, but she needed a couple of shots.”
“Can I have a hug, Dad?” asked Tess, moving closer. Peanut inched backward, jostling the drywall bucket. The transformation of the garage into a horse barn seemed at best provisional, at worst inhumane. What her father needed to do was find a stable and lease a stall to ensure his horse had proper care and regular exercise, but she doubted he could afford it. She also had a hunch it was illegal to keep a barnyard animal in a residential neighborhood. An ordinance permitting people to keep chickens in backyard coops had been voted down in the last local election—her father, ironically, having voted against it.
He submitted to a hug, barely, his body rigid, his face rough against her cheek. He was thinner than he’d been during her most recent visit, over Easter weekend. “Are you eating enough?” she asked, trying to catch his eye. “You’re skinnier than you were in April.”
“I’m the same as always,” he said brusquely.
He wasn’t, but she didn’t bother to contradict him. Behind her, the side door opened. David, finally.
“Bedtime for Bonzo?” said David with feigned cheerfulness. He shut the door and made his way over to Peanut, who shifted closer to their father, one of her hooves nearly landing on his left foot.
“Hey, Sis,” said David, holding out his arms to Tess as if she were a child.
She smelled beer on his breath as she hugged him. Like their father, he needed a haircut—he didn’t appear to be going bald, despite what he’d said on the phone.
“Hey you,” she said.
Annoyed by the intrusion, their father turned with a scowl toward the workbench and wrestled a sleeping bag roll out from behind the hay bales.
“Dad,” she said. “You’re not really going to sleep in here, are you? It can’t be comfortable. And what if Peanut steps on you in the night?”
“Hasn’t happened yet,” he said.
She glanced at David, whose eyes were raised to the ceiling—he was doing a breathing exercise, she assumed, the same one he’d told her a few weeks earlier was keeping him off of blood pressure medication. “You’ve only had her for three days, right?” she said.
Her father continued to scowl, his brown, bloodshot eyes moving from her face to Peanut’s before he looked at Tess again. “What exactly are you doing here?”
“What do you think she’s doing here?” said David. “You won’t listen to me.”
“I don’t need to listen to you or your sister, but you two do need to listen to me and stop worrying and gossiping about what I’m doing.”
“Who sold you the horse?” asked Tess.
Her father turned away. “I’m not sending her back. They’ll make glue out of her.”
She looked at David, who was again gazing up at the ceiling, doing his breath work, or more likely trying not to roll his eyes. “Do they still do that?” she asked.
“Of course they do,” said her father. “Glue and dog food. That’s her fate if I don’t take care of her.”
“What about the school bus?” said David. “Were they going to turn that into dog food too?”
Their father stooped down and started unrolling his sleeping bag on the floor beneath the workbench. “Have you eaten dinner, Tess?” he asked over his shoulder.
“I had a sandwich in the car,” she said. She’d also had two Hostess Snoballs from the gas station in Merrillville and what she hoped was decaffeinated coffee, but she wasn’t at all tired—someone had likely mixed up the carafes.
“There’s some leftover spaghetti in the fridge if you want it. It’s only a few days old. You might as well eat if you’re planning to stay the night.”
“Is there enough for me?” asked David.
Their father grimaced.
“Is there?” David repeated.
Tess touched her brother’s arm. “I’m not hungry. You can have it.”
“You need to eat, Tess,” said their father. “You’re the one who’s too skinny.”
That wasn’t true, but she didn’t bother to argue. She was thin, yes, but entirely fit. Her doctor had said at her last checkup that she might be overexercising, but to her mind, too much exercise was better than too many Snoballs. What she probably needed was a boyfriend, not more miles or more food, but unless she forced herself to try the dating apps, she didn’t see it happening. Her father and brother were lonely hearts too. Of the few women her father had had dinner with after losing his wife, he’d said, “They’re not your mother. She was the only one for me.” Tess wished he’d talk to a therapist, but she’d stopped suggesting it several years ago when he locked her out of the house and refused for an hour to let her back inside. She would have driven back to Illinois, but her suitcase and car keys were up in her old bedroom.
There was enough spaghetti for both of them, but it didn’t smell right. David prepared himself a plate anyway while Tess loaded the dirty dishes in the sink and on the table into the dishwasher, which also smelled off—who knew how long since her father had last used it. She programmed it for the longest cleaning cycle and added extra soap. The bag of trash under the sink needed to be taken out too, but she suspected if she stowed it in the can outside the garage, raccoons would doubtless arrive in the night to ransack it, and Peanut Sundae Pie would hear them and grow frightened and probably step on her benefactor’s head. He was semi-protected beneath the workbench, but this wasn’t the most reassuring thought—she really wished he wasn’t such a stubborn old grouch.
David ate at the table as Tess tidied up and fretted silently over the fact her visit already bore the earmarks of a fool’s errand. She hadn’t yet had the will to bring up the school bus or the NASA stars, but it seemed best to wait until the morning to get into a full-fledged argument with her father.
“You sure you don’t want any of this?” asked David, motioning to the red-lidded Tupperware container in front of him.
“I’m sure,” she said, scrubbing hard at a crust of burnt meat on her father’s one good frying pan. “You might want to stop after one helping. It doesn’t smell very fresh.”
“I’ll be fine. I have the stomach of a goat,” he said, patting his belly, which she’d noticed in the garage was beginning to hang over his belt.
“Have you talked to Dad again about getting rid of his landline?” she said. “The last time I mentioned it, he wouldn’t consider it, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone manages to steal even more of his money.”
“I doubt there’s much left to steal, but I’ll talk to him again.”
“We need to get him back in the house tonight.”
“Not going to happen,” he said, spooling more spaghetti around his fork. “But go ahead and try. You know he never listens to me.”
Tess set the frying pan in the sink and filled it with soap and hot water. It would need to soak overnight, the crust unresponsive to her scouring. “That horse might step on his head,” she said.
David forked a meatball out of the Tupperware and dropped it onto his plate. “Dad’s going to do whatever he wants. You know that.”
“You need to go out there with me. I drove down here because I thought we were going to work on him together.”
He bit into the meatball. “You’re lucky you don’t live as close to him as I do,” he said, chewing.
“You don’t see him that often,” she scoffed.
“I see him more than you do.”
He and her father were so much alike it was almost farcical. “Too bad you never see your daughter,” she said, regretting the words as soon as they were out of her mouth.
He jerked forward in his chair, almost knocking over his water glass. “Don’t start with that,” he said. “I’ve offered to go see her, but she’s not interested. And she’s perfectly capable of getting on a plane and coming to see me too. I’ve told her I’ll pay for her ticket. But has she done it? No.”
“You have to go to her. Make an effort and she’ll be a lot more likely to make one for you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, as usual.”
She shut off the tap and stalked outside to the garage where she discovered her father had locked the side door. “Dad?” she said, knocking softly. “Can you let me in?”
He didn’t reply. She pressed her ear to the door but heard nothing on the other side. She knocked harder. “Dad? Are you in there?”
“I was asleep,” came his muffled reply. “Go back in the house and go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Please open the door.” She pictured him huddled under the workbench, the hay bales looming above, a restive horse with its stony hooves a few inches from his unprotected head. Maybe she could convince him to sleep in a helmet.
No, of course he wouldn’t agree to that, and she didn’t have one, anyway. She wasn’t sure if people could even sleep in helmets, unless they were sitting upright? “Your horse will be fine,” she said. “Come sleep in the house.”
“Her name is Peanut Sundae Pie,” he said wearily.
“Peanut Sundae Pie will be fine. She’s not a baby. She doesn’t need to be monitored all night.” A wave of desperation rose in her chest. Her father was losing it, or perhaps had already lost it. She knew she needed to see this for what it was—before he was unfit to care for himself, let alone an aging horse. And who knew if someone in the neighborhood was a PETA member and on the verge of reporting him for animal cruelty. She knocked a third time. “Please come out, Dad. Please.” She was crying now, her voice shaking a little.
“I told you, I’m sleeping in here,” he said, his voice rising. “Leave us in peace.”
An owl’s spectral hoot came from somewhere nearby. She’d heard owls on previous visits as she lay sleepless on her old bedroom’s lumpy mattress or while she and her father played rummy or Yahtzee after dinner. There were still hundreds of trees in the neighborhood, one of its few charms, along with the nearby Monon Trail where she’d gone running on her last few visits.
“We could play some cards. It isn’t that late yet.”
“Go to bed, Tess,” he said. “And don’t send your goddamn brother out here to harass me, either.”
Her heart was beating hard, as much from outrage now as worry. She thought of her mother’s gradual disappearance from bone cancer, her father less and less like himself as the disease progressed—he’d been funny, mischievous, reliably jocular during her childhood, but after her mother’s death, he’d lost interest in almost everything, including, it felt to Tess most of time, her and her brother’s lives. Friends who’d also lost a parent prematurely had warned her that the surviving parent sometimes forgot the children were suffering too, so absorbed were they in their own grief and loneliness.
In the kitchen, her brother was still at the table, the Tupperware container in front of him now empty. “I probably shouldn’t have eaten all that,” he said, noticing her wet cheeks. “Why are you crying?”
“Why do you think?” she said snappishly.
“If that’s how you want to play it, fine.”
She raised her eyes to the ceiling, doubting he got the reference. “I’m exhausted, David. I drove four hours here after working a full day, and Dad’s sleeping in the fucking garage with a horse. I haven’t had much to eat all day, and—”
“You could have eaten,” he said. “You just didn’t want to.”
She looked at his sad, stubbly face, biting back a retort, before she went upstairs to the bedroom where earlier she’d deposited her wheelie bag, thinking at the time there might still be a chance to turn things around. The room was stuffy and more crowded than on her Easter visit with its crumbling cardboard boxes and grocery bags erupting with old clothes and other motley junk her father had promised in April he’d donate to the Goodwill or else haul out to the curb for the trash collectors.
The bed had the same unwashed sheets on it as at Easter. She ripped them off and trudged back downstairs to the cobweb-strewn laundry room off the kitchen. David hadn’t moved from the table, but his gaze had migrated from the Tupperware container to his phone.
“Call your daughter,” said Tess. “If she doesn’t pick up, leave a message telling her you miss her and want to see her.”
“Sure, boss. Whatever you say.”
The sheets she’d pulled off the guest bed were gray-white from laundering with non-whites. She wrangled them into the machine, poured in a capful of detergent and another of bleach. It was after ten and by the time they were washed and dried, it would be close to midnight, but she doubted she’d be able to sleep much anyway. In the kitchen, she heard David murmuring to himself. Across the street, a dog barked at some invisible disturbance.
She felt the beginnings of a headache and tried to ward it off by loosening her shoulders, knowing she’d been hunching them as she drove. In the corner by the washer she noticed large gray tufts of lint and two expired dryer sheets. She missed her house in Lake Bluff, her comfortable bed, the homemade banana bread she’d forgotten to grab on her way out the door. The phone on the wall in the kitchen started ringing. “Were you expecting a call from anyone?” she asked, passing her brother on her way to the phone.
He shook his head. “Don’t answer it.”
She ignored him and grabbed the handset. “Yes?” she barked. Their father didn’t have an answering machine. Whoever it was, she supposed, might keep calling if she didn’t pick up.
The man on the other end of the line released a startled laugh. “I wasn’t expecting a lady. Is Ken home?”
“Who is this?”
The man hesitated. “Is he there? He’s sort of expecting my call.”
“At ten fifteen?” She looked at David who mouthed, You want me to take it? She shook her head. “Who is this?” she repeated.
“His friend Chuck.”
“He doesn’t have any friends named Chuck as far as I know.”
“I’m a new friend,” Chuck said gamely.
“You can call back tomorrow at a more reasonable hour. My father’s already in bed for the night.”
“You’re his daughter?” he said, wariness creeping into his voice. “I didn’t know he had one. Just a son, I thought.”
“How long have you been friends? My brother’s here with me. You can talk to all three of us tomorrow. I’m going to hang up now.”
“Ma’am, wait,” he said. “Your dad and I run a vending machine business together. I really need to talk to him tonight. Our service truck broke down and—”
“A vending machine business,” she said flatly. “Great.” She covered the handset and looked at David. “Do you know anything about Dad starting a vending machine business with some guy named Chuck?”
David stared at her. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
“Ma’am?” said Chuck. “I really do need to talk to your dad.”
“How much do you need?” said Tess.
“Pardon?”
“You’re calling because you need money, right? How much?”
Chuck cleared his throat. For a second, she almost pitied him. “The mechanic’s estimate was a thousand dollars, but it might be a little more,” he said, chastened. “I won’t know until the morning, but I was hoping to come over and have your dad write me a check. That way I can pay the guy and get back on our route and fill the machines before noon. The rest area up by—”
“He’s sleeping,” she said. “With his horse. Have you met his horse yet?”
He laughed a little. “I didn’t know he had a horse too.”
“As of three days ago. She’s living in the garage. Her name is Peanut Sundae Pie.”
Chuck was silent for a few seconds before he said, “Well, doesn’t that just take the cake.” He had a mild southern Indiana accent. Unaccountably, Tess found herself wondering if he had sandy blond hair and wore cowboy boots like Robert Redford’s character in The Electric Horseman. She still had a crush on him.
“Are you some kind of grifter, Chuck?” she said. “Because lately my father appears to be the victim of multiple people selling him things of questionable origin and quality.”
“I’m not a grifter, ma’am. You can google me, Chuck Wendell, W-E-N-D-E-L-L, and our vending machine business, Chuck-a-Block Vending. Your dad and I met when I was calling bingo over at the Elks Club a few months back. Real nice guy. He won the blackout jackpot that night. Five hundred bucks. Did he tell you about that? What a night.”
No, he hadn’t told her. “Please call back in the morning,” said Tess. “I have to go now.”
“Ma’am, hold on, I—”
She hung up and looked at her brother. “Jesus Christ.”
“You sure it wasn’t that NASA guy again?” he said. “How much did he want?”
“It wasn’t the NASA guy. This guy, who claims he met Dad at the Elks Club, wants a thousand dollars to fix his van.”
The phone rang again. She let it ring five times, willing it to stop, before she pulled it off the wall and yanked its cord from the jack.
“Don’t forget to plug it back in tomorrow morning,” said David.
“Are you staying here tonight? If this guy shows up, I don’t want to be here by myself.”
He nodded. “My tenant’s mom is visiting from Florida. She turns the TV up so damn loud I can hear it in my bedroom.”
“You could ask her to lower the volume.”
“No, not worth getting into it. My tenant’s a pain in the ass, but he pays his rent on time.”
Chuck did not show up in the night to try to strong-arm a thousand dollars out of her father. She would have heard him if he had—as she’d known would happen, she’d lain awake until very late, wishing she were at home in her own bed where, on most days, she had fewer conflicting feelings to manage. Here in her father’s cramped house, old resentments and insecurities always slipped out of the cellar where she’d tried but failed to bury them.
She slept at most four hours. Before turning off the light, she’d googled Chuck and wasn’t surprised to find him, but his presence on the internet didn’t mean he wasn’t a criminal. She knew scammers were increasingly savvy about using fake websites and burner phones to rob their victims, and although his website looked professional enough, if she’d spent a few hours learning HTML on YouTube or wherever the deadbeats were learning their trade these days, she too could start bilking innocents and dummies of their hard-earned money.
A little after six, she was awake and glaring up at the ceiling, wondering if David and their father had managed to sleep any better than she had. Through the open window, she heard her father’s voice, followed by a soft whinny. She drew back the blankets and went over to the window that overlooked the backyard. There he was, at the edge of the patio, wearing a filthy Butler University sweatshirt and a pair of baggy blue jeans, feeding Peanut Sundae Pie from a small burlap sack. He patted her neck as she snorted and chewed, her father happier than she’d seen him look in years. The horse kept taking mouthfuls from the bag, its rubbery lips and jaws working mechanically, her father watching and cooing. She had the sense then that if someone were to take the horse away, it would kill him.
She shut the curtains and went back to bed. A few minutes later, she heard him and the horse move back into the garage through the side door. There were no sounds of activity in the house, and outside she heard nothing other than birdcalls and the surf-like woosh of morning traffic on 91st Street, a few blocks away.
Her brother still hadn’t stirred a half hour later, after she’d showered and dressed and started the coffeepot. She went out to the garage and knocked. This time the door wasn’t locked, and she opened it without waiting for her father’s reply. The smell of horseflesh and hay was stronger than the previous night. She hoped her father wasn’t leaving Peanut’s manure lying about. She took a furtive glance around but did not spot any droppings. Under the bare bulb dangling overhead, her father was brushing Peanut, the old horse submitting stoically to the grooming.
“Good morning,” said Tess. “Did you sleep all right?”
“Just fine,” he said curtly.
“I’m making coffee. Do you want any? I could scramble some eggs for you if you’re hungry.”
He didn’t look up from the horse. “There aren’t any eggs, unless you brought some with you.”
Tess watched him work on Peanut for a moment before she said, “Someone named Chuck called last night. He wanted a thousand dollars to fix his van. He said you and he are running some sort of vending machine business together.”
Her father kept his eyes on Peanut’s flank as he moved the brush over it.
“What’s going on, Dad?” she said.
“Nothing’s going on,” he said gruffly.
“A vending machine business?”
He finally looked at her, the bags under his eyes purple. She knew he’d lied about sleeping well. “Why are you needling me? What’s this really about?”
“They’re going to make you move the horse,” she said. “She needs a pasture and a proper barn. People will complain if they haven’t already and someone from the city will come and take her. And your school bus—they’re going to make you move that too.”
He turned his back and stooped down to brush Peanut’s belly. “That’s a good girl,” he murmured. “Just stay calm now.” The horse shifted backwards. “I know, I know,” he said. “I’ll be careful.”
Tess held her tongue until he started on Peanut’s mane. “Please don’t give this Chuck guy any money,” she said. “If he owns the van, he should be paying for the repairs. What’s your share of the profits supposed to be?”
“Are you my business manager now?” he said.
“I’m trying to look out for you.”
“You and your brother need to stop jumping to half-baked conclusions. Chuck’s a good guy. I trust him.”
“How much did the NASA stars set you back?”
He let out a harsh laugh and shook his head. “I might buy a couple more. They weren’t expensive. Now go back in the house and drink your coffee.”
“What about the bus? What are your plans for it?”
“I suppose I’ll fix it up and travel around the country, kidnapping little boys and girls along the way.”
“That’s not funny,” she said.
The exhaustion and unhappiness on her father’s face knifed through her. “What are you planning to do with the rest of your life, Tess?” he said. “Stay in a job you don’t like and continue to live alone in your little old lady house until you die? Why didn’t you marry that boy back in your twenties and have a couple of kids when you had the chance? Or that Jason fellow? I liked him. Why did you let him go too?” His cheeks were turning ruddy as he spoke, Peanut restive behind him, her ears twitching. “What’s wrong with you and your brother? My one grandchild lives on the other side of the country and doesn’t even know who the hell I am.” He glared at the floor. “Stop worrying about me. Everything will be fine if you and David live your own lives and stop fretting so much about how I live mine.”
“What’s wrong with David and me?” she said, her voice catching. “What do you think’s wrong with us?”
He was shaking his head, a bitter half-smile on his lips. “If I only knew.”
There was a knock at the side door. “Who is it now?” her father said angrily.
A man Tess didn’t recognize opened the door a few inches. He was short and bearded and dark-haired. He had on a red windbreaker and faded black jeans, the knees almost white. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said sheepishly.
“Come on in, Chuck,” said her father.
Chuck stepped tentatively into the garage. “So, that’s your horse? She’s a beauty, Ken.” He looked at Tess. “Are you the lady I spoke with last night? Ken’s daughter?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m Tess.”
Her father set the brush on the workbench and went over to shake Chuck’s hand. Peanut started pulling mouthfuls of hay from one of the bales with her big, discolored teeth. They all gazed at the horse. “Looks like she’s got a hearty appetite,” said Chuck.
Her father nodded. “She likes a good snack. The man who sold her to me said appetite is always a good indication of a horse’s health.”
“Is he a veterinarian?” said Tess.
Her father ignored her and looked at Chuck. “What brings you here this morning?”
Chuck glanced uneasily at Tess. “The van’s at the garage.” He faltered before blurting, “I need some help paying the mechanic, but we’ll make it back soon. You can bet on that.”
“What’s wrong now?” her father asked, frowning. “Didn’t we just put new brakes on it?”
“Dad,” she said. “Don’t—”
“Go in the house, Tess,” he said. “You’re making Peanut Sundae Pie uneasy.”
Chuck laughed. “That’s her name?”
Her father nodded before he turned to Tess. “Go in the house.”
“No,” she said, wishing her brother were with them, even if his usefulness was debatable. “I’m not leaving, and you shouldn’t be giving your money to one con man after another.”
“I’m not a con man,” said Chuck, more forlorn than offended.
“How do I know that?” she said.
“Go in the house. Now,” her father roared.
“No,” she said, staring him down.
He moved abruptly forward and slapped her. “Do as I say. I’m still your father.”
She stared at him, her hand on her stinging cheek. “I’m not so sure,” she said. “I thought you gave up on parenting when Mom died.”
He drew back and collided with Peanut Sundae Pie, who reared her head up from the hay bale and knocked him in the eye. “Goddamn it,” he said, elbowing the horse again as he covered his injured eye.
“Be careful,” cried Tess.
“I’m all right, Jesus.” He put his hand on the horse’s neck. “You’re okay, Peewee,” he murmured. “No one’s going to hurt you.”
“Chuck, please go,” said Tess. “My father doesn’t have a thousand dollars to spare.”
“Don’t speak for me. Give me a minute, Chuck, and I’ll go in and get my checkbook.”
“Thank you,” said Chuck, avoiding Tess’s eyes. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t really need it.”
“I know that,” said her father.
“Dad,” she said helplessly.
Her father ignored her, his eyes obstinately on his horse.
“I’m not trying to con anyone,” said Chuck. “I swear on my mother’s grave.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” her father said, finally looking at her. “If things get bad, I’ll just drive my school bus over the nearest bridge.”
“Ken,” said Chuck with a pained laugh. “You’re scaring your daughter.”
She could see he wasn’t a bad person. Possibly he was a real friend to her father, and maybe their business would thrive, but she doubted it, and she also knew you didn’t have to be a bad person to make a mess of everything.
“Tess can handle it,” said her father. “She’s always been tougher than her brother.”
She wondered if this was his way of apologizing for slapping her. “I don’t think that’s true,” she said.
“Go in the house and have your coffee and get your brother up. I bet he’s still in bed.”
“Are you going to keep that bus?” Chuck asked as Tess left the garage. “I know someone who might want to buy it.”
“You think they’d give me a good price?” she heard her father say as she closed the side door and went back into the house, her stomach in a tight ball.
David was awake now, the radio on the counter next to the empty cookie jar tuned to local sports news. He sat at the table eating cornflakes, the sugar bowl unlidded next to him. “They’re stale, but they’re not that stale,” he said, spooning milk and cereal into his mouth. He was wearing a rumpled Colts T-shirt and a pair of raggedy gray sweatpants he’d had since high school. “You want some? At least the milk isn’t sour.”
“No thanks.”
“What’s up?” he said.
“I have no idea.”
He took another mouthful of cereal. “I called my daughter last night,” he said. “She didn’t answer.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Did you leave a message?”
He shook his head.
“Call her again and leave a message.”
“Maybe.”
“Just do it,” she said. “We could go see her together.”
He wouldn’t meet her eye but she saw his jaw unclenching. “That’s not a bad idea,” he mumbled.
She poured herself some coffee and wondered if it was too soon to go back to Illinois.
David looked up at her, spoon hovering above his bowl. “Is Dad okay?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He slapped me.” Her cheek throbbed at the memory.
“What?” He dropped his spoon into the cereal, splashing his T-shirt.
“I don’t think he’s done that since I was in grade school.”
“Did you slap him back?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. She sipped her coffee, bitter and very hot. “He might sell the school bus.”
“He just got it.”
“I know, but it sounded like he might. That guy’s here. The one who wants money to repair his van.”
“Do you want me to go out there and beat him up?”
“Stop making a joke of everything.” She took another sip. “He doesn’t seem like a crook.”
“We’ll see,” said David, unconvinced. “Are you okay?”
“I’m all right, but I think I’m going back to Lake Bluff this morning. Dad doesn’t want me here and I can’t help him right now if he won’t let me.”
A few seconds passed before her brother said, “Do you think I’m a fuck-up?” His face was open and boyish and worried. She remembered him asking a similar question not long before he left for college, their mother’s health already beginning to fail, but no one knowing yet what her symptoms meant. “What if I’m not smart enough?” he’d asked, plaintive. “Maybe I shouldn’t go.” At the time, he was tan and fit from a summer of mowing lawns for a landscaping company owned by one of their mother’s high school friends. He was learning to play guitar and trying with some success to grow a beard. Girls were taking notice of him and he couldn’t believe his luck.
“You’re just lonely,” she said. “So is Dad.”
“Aren’t you?”
Peanut Sundae Pie’s lugubrious gaze rose up in her thoughts. “I suppose I am,” she said.
David shifted in his chair, the milk splash rippling on his shirtfront. “I don’t know what to do about it.”
She touched his shoulder. He put his hand on top of hers, holding it there.
“At least you have friends,” he said. “More than I do.”
“You have friends too, but you should call them instead of sitting here complaining about never hearing from them,” she said.
He exhaled. “You’re right.”
“I’m going to go pack,” she said, gently extricating her hand from beneath his.
“Do you think Jenny really does want to see me?” he asked as she turned toward the hall.
“Of course she does,” said Tess.
Several minutes later, she heard their father come in from the garage with Chuck, both of them laughing. She heard Chuck greet David, followed by a pause before more laughter reached her ears. She didn’t think it would last, this quasi-détente or halfhearted madness or whatever it was. Her father might spend all his money and have to move in with her or David, and for a while they would all be miserable, more miserable than they were now. The horse would have to be given away, probably soon, unless her father moved to some shack in the country or found a stable he could afford. Maybe Chuck knew someone. Maybe their vending machine business would make them rich.
Much more likely was that she would have to pay for a stable. It was she who would have to come to everyone’s rescue, which she realized had become her role in the family years ago but until now, no one, including herself, had been willing to acknowledge it, probably because she wasn’t very good at it. Her father would soon have to accept her help anyway, whether he liked it or not. She would never let him slap her again, either—next time she would see it coming. He was a bully, but she was stronger than he was, and they both knew she had been for a long time.
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Christine Sneed is the author of three novels, most recently Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, and two previous story collections, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men. She has received the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. Her stories have also appeared in The Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories. She lives in Pasadena, California.
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Copyright © 2023 by Christine Sneed. Published 2023 by TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
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