Fights
Catherine Uroff
The police found Dewey over by Stuyvesant Plaza. He was beat up, kind of confused, so they took him to Samaritan. Rita picked him up after he was discharged. When she walked into the hospital, through the sliding glass doors, she found him sitting in a plastic chair next to the Information Desk. He had his hands in his lap. He looked patient and relaxed, like he was waiting for a bus or something. He had a cut on his chin and on the bridge of his nose. His eyes were swollen and bruised. “What, Dewey?” Rita said but then she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
She drove him back to his house, just outside of Troy. As soon as he got inside, he went upstairs. He said that he was tired. It’d been impossible to rest in the hospital with all the nurses checking in on him. She listened to the creak of the floorboards as he paced the length of his bedroom upstairs. Then she took the South End Bridge back to her house to pack a small bag. Ray was at work so she was able to take her time. She called his cell phone, left a message, said that she was going to stay with Dewey for a while. How long? She didn’t know. “Ray, my brother needs me,” she said in her message.
~ ~ ~
Ray came by Dewey’s a few hours later. He rapped on the front door, and Rita felt like the whole house was shaking. Dewey was still upstairs, resting. Rita waited for him to come downstairs and then, when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to, she opened the door to greet her husband.
“Now Ray,” she said.
“You going to let me in?”
“I won’t leave if that’s why you’re here.”
“I’m here to find out what in hell my wife thinks she’s up to.”
“Someone hurt Dewey.”
“I’m not surprised. The way he carries on.”
“I need to find out what’s going on. He’s my brother. I owe him that much.”
Ray slammed his hands against his chest, pretended to clutch his heart.
“Poor, poor, pitiful Dewey. OK? Now let me in.”
He followed Rita into the kitchen. It was a small room that had a square table pushed in front of a window. She’d just been sitting there, enjoying a cup of coffee, looking at the back yard. Ray picked up her coffee mug.
“You going to get me some?”
“If you want.”
“I do. I do want,” he said. “I also want my wife to come home. What in the world do you think you’re doing? Staying here, of all places.”
He looked around. She could see him taking it all in: the kitchen cabinets with the doors that didn’t hang right; the cracks and cuts in the laminate countertops; the linoleum that curled up off the floor by the fridge. Dewey’s house was old and needed a lot of repairs. Easy fixes, the kind that Ray was good at. Every wall wanted a fresh coat of paint. The toilet seat in the powder room was broken. The fireplace hearth in the living room was missing a few bricks. The house was right on Route 7, and there was a guardrail in the front yard. Still, the back yard was nice with a cluster of tall trees that blocked the view of the neighbor’s house, thick grass that sloped down to a slow running stream. Earlier in the day, she’d stepped onto the back porch and imagined she was in the middle of a forest.
“I like it here,” she said.
“Rita, don’t be dumb. This place is a dump. Let’s go.”
“I told you. I won’t. And I can’t tell you when I will.”
“The hell you say.”
Dewey came into the kitchen then. He looked very thin and pale. He hesitated when he saw Ray. Rita thought he was afraid to enter his own kitchen, and she was embarrassed for him.
“Dewey,” Ray said. “Man of the hour.”
“Now, there’s no need for any trouble,” Dewey said.
Ray stood up. He was a very big man. Unusually tall. Stocky legs. Bulging arms. Broad chest. Thick neck. It was one of the things Rita had admired most about him when they first met. How he was heads above everyone else. A real giant of a man.
“I’ll want her back,” he said to Dewey, and he could’ve been talking about something else, something that Dewey had borrowed and that Ray needed returned. A gardening tool, a wrench, some shovel.
~ ~ ~
After he left, Dewey shut all the windows on the first floor.
“He won’t come in through the window, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s too big, for one,” Rita said.
“This isn’t funny. You should just go home, back to him. I don’t know why you’re still here.”
“I’m here because I’m your sister and someone hurt you and you shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’m fine.”
“I wish you’d tell me more about what happened.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“What were you doing hanging around Stuyvesant in the first place? You have to invite trouble by going over to places like that?”
Rita hadn’t lived in Troy since she got married, twenty years ago, and she hardly ever had reason to go back into the city. She lived in Colonie now, a nice suburb of Albany that had big houses on wide lots. Still, she never forgot the old neighborhood, the place where they’d grown up.
“Never mind all that,” Dewey said. “Don’t worry about me. You’ve got enough to worry about. Why don’t you just do what Ray wants and go home? I mean, it’s not like you can stay here forever.”
“Who says?”
“What are you saying? Wait. You’re kidding me, right?”
“I could stay and—“
“What are you even talking about?”
“It’s not such a crazy idea. If you really think about it,” she said and she hoped that her brother wouldn’t recognize the truth: that it was something she’d just come up, a few hours before while he was sleeping.
Dewey put his hands on his hips. He was wearing tight jeans and a clingy t-shirt, his clothes emphasizing how skinny he was. Bony really. Rita noticed his tight jawline, his long neck, the sharp collarbones sticking out below his throat. When had her brother started to look like this?
“Give me a break. You can’t just leave Ray like this and move in with me.”
“Why not? Why can’t I?”
“You need a plan, for one.”
“This,” Rita said, spreading her arms out, “this is my plan.”
~ ~ ~
She offered to get him some coffee but Dewey just shook his head and went back upstairs. She sat down at the kitchen table again and drank her coffee even though it’d gone cold. She was breathing a little hard and the right side of her jaw ached, like she’d just tried to crunch down on something very hard.
Her cell phone was on the kitchen counter, in front of the toaster, and it started jumping and buzzing with texts. She knew they were from Ray, furious messages about how stupid she was being, how she couldn’t do anything to help Dewey so why even try, how she should stop pretending like she was close to her brother because he knew the truth, which was she hadn’t spoken to him since Christmas of last year and that was only a three minute awkward conversation about the weather and how the snow was keeping most people indoors that day.
But—and this was also just as true, Ray knew this too even though he grew up in Saratoga, nowhere near Troy—she used to be quite close to Dewey. When they were growing up, their parents fought a lot, so much and so loudly that sometimes the neighbors would call the police. Dewey and Rita always stuck together as they waited out the fights. They’d even sleep in the same bed sometimes. Then there was a period of time when their father left the house and they had to rely on each other even more. “A temporary situation,” was how their father explained it as they watched him pack a small suitcase. “Just until Mom and Dad get their act together.” But he didn’t come back, not for a long time. And with him gone, their mother went downhill fast, drinking a lot, spending most of her time in bed until one morning, she didn’t wake up. It was a school day. Rita was in fourth grade and Dewey was in sixth. Right before leaving to catch the bus, they tapped on her bedroom door to say good-bye but there was no answer. They were fine with it at the time. Actually, and Rita remembered this feeling distinctly, they were relieved. Sometimes their mother could be mean. Very irritable. She’d reach over to pinch Rita if she thought she was talking too much. She’d call Dewey a coward when he didn’t want to kill the stinkbugs in the bathroom for her.
When they got home from school that day, their mother’s bedroom door was still closed. They knocked again but she still didn’t answer. Rita made them dinner that night. She sprinkled a layer of salt in a skillet and put two hamburger patties down on it, pressing with the spatula until they sizzled. This was something she’d watched her mother do but when she cooked, gray grease puffed out from the hamburgers and stuck to the bottom of the skillet. It looked disgusting so she turned the burner off. She served Dewey his food, and he got teary because his burger wasn’t cooked enough. He could see pink when he cut it open, and he didn’t like that. Rita snapped at him. “Stop your whining,” she said and she sounded so much like their mother that she started to cry also.
After dinner, they argued about what to do. Rita wanted to check on their mother. Dewey thought they should go to bed, worry about it in the morning. He tried to block her from their mother’s bedroom door but Rita managed to get around him. Actually, what she did was kick him in the shin and when he bent over in pain, she brushed past him, turned the knob, pushed the door open. What she saw next made her freeze, reach behind her for Dewey’s hand. Because their mother was sprawled, face up, on top of the bed. Very still. Her mouth was open. She’d thrown up something pink, and it was dried all over her.
They ran out of the house, straight to their next-door neighbor, who took one look at the kids in front of her, hopping up and down, stuttering about their sick mother, and called the police. Their mother was whisked into the back of an ambulance and her stomach was pumped and a social worker stayed with them until their father showed up. He moved back in after that. But it wasn’t long before they were fighting again.
~ ~ ~
The next day at Dewey’s, Rita woke up early. She was sleeping on a cot that Dewey had put up for her in the utility room off the kitchen. The room had a washing machine and dryer in it, sitting up on planks, and metal bookcases that had cans of engine oil and balls of twine and boxes of light bulbs and stacked clay pots on its shelves. The morning light streamed into the room from the bare window above her bed, brightening up the pockmarked wood floor, the balls of dust in the corners of the room. She adjusted the pillow beneath her head. She wasn’t unhappy.
Then she heard something. A light thump coming from the front of the house. She got up and stood at the base of the stairwell, calling her brother’s name. He didn’t answer. Then she went to the front door and pulled it open. There, on top of the faded Welcome mat, was a bouquet of roses, tied loosely together with a thick green rubber band.
She picked the flowers up right away. She looked around but couldn’t see anyone. The thorns pricked her hands. Most of the roses hadn’t opened yet but some of their petals were already edged in black.
“Ray,” she said, “is this you?”
He’d only given her roses once before and that was back when they’d been newlyweds, after her first miscarriage. She’d miscarried three times after that—“There’s no rhyme or reason to it but for some women, it just doesn’t work,” the doctor had told them—but Ray never gave her flowers again.
She called out again, raising her voice slightly. For some reason—and maybe it was as simple a reason as sleeping somewhere else for one night—she was beginning to feel very brave.
“You shouldn’t have done this, Ray. I’m sorry but I don’t want these. I’ll just throw them away.”
She waited a moment and then she cocked her arm back and threw the bouquet as hard as she could. The roses flew up in the air and then landed in different places. One balanced on the porch railing. One got as far as the road. One landed on the short, cracked sidewalk that led up to the house. She heard the roar of a car’s engine and even though she couldn’t tell if it was coming towards the house or driving away, she darted back inside, flipping the lock over and pulling on the doorknob several times to make sure it wouldn’t open.
~ ~ ~
While Dewey slept, she went through the stack of mail on the kitchen counter. She browsed the recently dialed numbers on his landline phone. She slid open the cabinet drawers in the kitchen. She wanted to find something: a scrap of paper with someone’s name on it, a business card, a book of matches, a receipt. But there was nothing unusual. Utility bills. Mailers for $5 off pepperoni and cheese pies from Tony’s Pizza Parlor. Tidy drawers for the forks, knifes, and spoons, measuring cups, rolls of tin foil and plastic wrap.
She imagined Ray watching her. “Face it,” he would say. “He’s a stranger to you now.” Like it was all her fault. She’d tried to stay in touch with Dewey after she got married. One time, she’d invited him over for dinner. She planned a big feast, lasagna, homemade rolls, green salad with cut up carrots and celery and mushrooms in it, and at first, everything had seemed fine. Dewey showed up early. He was wearing a baseball hat and he took the hat off when he stepped inside. He stayed in the kitchen while Rita cooked. Ray was in the living room, watching television. Rita was having fun talking to Dewey. They were gossiping about people they knew from their old neighborhood, teachers they’d both had in school. They even talked about their parents, divorced now, both of them living with other people in other states: one in Florida, and one in North Carolina. Then Ray called for her from the bedroom. Dewey raised his eyebrows and Rita felt a little silly as she excused herself. As soon as she stepped into their bedroom, Ray pulled her to him and kissed her hard on the lips. Then he started to paw her, lifting her shirt up. She looked behind her. The door was open. She could hear Dewey in the kitchen, humming to himself.
“Stop it. My brother is here,” Rita said.
“Yeah? Well, get him out of here.”
“What? He’s expecting dinner, Ray.”
“I don’t want him here. His kind. You should hear what people are saying about him.”
“What is someone saying about Dewey?”
Ray kept trying to kiss her. She told him to stop, to tell her what he’d heard about her brother. Then Dewey was there, standing in the doorway. He had his hat back on.
“I’ll go,” he said.
There was a moment when Rita should’ve said something but she didn’t. When Dewey left, Ray put his hands over her again. He was like a blind man trying to find something. She stayed very still. She let him do what he wanted.
Afterwards, Ray told her that Dewey was known for hanging around the public bathrooms in Washington Park. “Whatever for?” she asked, and Ray smiled. “Use your imagination, Rita,” he said. And she remembered how kids at school used to make fun of her brother. During Dodgeball games, he’d get smacked in the face by the red rubber ball over and over again. It became a game in of itself. See how hard you could hit Dewey Warren. She’d always assumed he’d been teased because of their parents, because everyone knew that they came from bad people and that made them different from everyone else.
But after Ray told her about Dewey, she thought about the time, a few years back, when she’d been with Dewey in downtown Troy. They were on 2nd Street, headed south, going somewhere for lunch. She’d been bragging about Ray’s family, how they did so much together—camping trips on Lake George, summer vacations in Maine, big picnics and parties to celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July. While she was talking, she noticed a young man walking towards them. He was wearing a windbreaker zipped all the way up to his neck. He had a shock of white blond hair sticking up from the top of his head. She wouldn’t have thought anything of him. Just another somebody. But this man, as he got closer to them, was looking right at Dewey and when she turned to her brother, she saw that Dewey was looking at him too. At the time, she’d wanted to scold that young man. “Don’t look at my brother that way,” she’d wanted to say. But it’d never occurred to her to say anything to Dewey.
~ ~ ~
In the late afternoon, Dewey came downstairs. He took the stairs very slowly, as if it was hard for him to keep steady. He looked a lot like their mother then, or at least that was what Rita thought. He had the same sunken-in eyes, a pinched look to his mouth. She pulled out a chair for him to sit in at the kitchen table, and he snapped at her. “I’m not an invalid,” he said.
She followed him into the living room.
“We need to talk,” she said. “There’s so much we need to say to each other.”
“I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to say one word actually.”
“You can’t just stay here and do nothing. You need to tell someone what happened. Go to the police.”
“I’m not talking to the police.”
“Why not?”
“You want me to do something? Fine. I’d like to go to the movies then.”
“The movies? That’s not really what I was talking about.”
“The Atrium’s showing one I wouldn’t mind seeing.”
“The Atrium? There must be other movie theatres we can go to.”
The Atrium was an old-fashioned movie theater in north central Troy. It had cathedral ceilings and red velvet seats but it was known to have bed bugs and it was in a rundown neighborhood, full of boarded up buildings. She thought of the theater complex close to her house. It had ten different screening rooms, two wide concession stands, seats that reclined. She’d gone there with Ray to celebrate their last wedding anniversary. During the previews, Ray had shushed the people in front of them who were talking too loudly. “My wife is trying to concentrate,” he’d said.
Dewey shrugged.
“I prefer the Atrium,” he said.
“Of all places.”
Dewey looked out the front window. She knew he could see the roses, littering his front yard, and she hoped he wouldn’t say anything to her about them.
When Dewey turned back to her, his face was even paler than before.
“Look,” he said, “I’m going to the movies. Are you coming with me or not?”
“Yes,” she said quickly.
~ ~ ~
They were the only people in the theater. Rita kept her purse on her lap. The movie had Tom Cruise jumping from burning helicopters, skittering across the tops of speeding trains. After it was over, Dewey wanted to go across the street to Maniello’s Tavern. It had a lit sign of a frosty beer mug in its window. The sign was motion-animated, the beer mug slowly tipping and then righting itself over and over again. Rita tried to argue with him, saying that they should probably just go home, but he told her that he didn’t need someone to babysit him and that if she didn’t want to join him she could take the car and he’d find his own way back home.
Maniello’s was almost empty. Still, they sat in the back, in front of the unplugged jukebox next to the pool tables. Rita went up to the bar and ordered two bottles of Budweiser. The bartender had red hair and he asked her how Ray was doing and she tried not to appear startled as she told him that Ray was just fine.
“You can’t avoid it,” she said when she got back to Dewey.
“Avoid what?”
“You have to talk about the fight. The assault. Whatever happened to you. Like I said. The police should get involved, at least.”
“No.”
“Well, I want you to know that you can tell me anything.”
“OK.”
“Anything at all.”
“I heard you the first time.”
Rita took a deep breath.
“I have to ask, Dewey.”
“No, you don’t. But you will anyway.”
“When did you know?”
Dewey paused. For a second, she thought he wasn’t going to answer her.
“People always like that question.”
“I mean, was there a certain time when it just came over you?”
“It doesn’t quite work like that. Anyway, what difference could it possibly make to you?”
“These are things I should’ve asked a long time ago. I guess I was afraid to. Which I know is stupid. But now? Well, it’s all over the place these days, Dewey. People talk about it all the time. It’s not like it was when we were growing up. People get married now and all. That’s all I’m trying to say.”
“I just want to sit here and enjoy my beer. Is that too much to ask?”
“And then there’s Bruce Jenner. He’s a woman now and everything.”
“I’m not—“
“I’m not saying you are. I’m just saying that here is this Olympic Champion. He used to be on cereal boxes. Remember, Dew? And now he’s wearing dresses and his hair is long.”
“Bruce Jenner has nothing to do with it. Look, don’t you need to concentrate on yourself? Are you even thinking about Ray?”
“Of course I am.”
“Yeah, well, what are you going to do? And don’t tell me that staying with me is it. You can’t decide something like that on a whim. Spur of the moment like.”
“Why can’t I? Why can’t I just start over? You can too, you know. Both of us can.”
“I shouldn’t have had the hospital call you. I don’t know what I was thinking, getting you involved like this.”
“But I’m so glad you did. Things can be better now. Like we can be honest with each other and you can help me and I can help you and everything that came before, well, it doesn’t have to matter anymore.”
Dewey put his beer bottle down hard on the table.
“Oh for fuck’s sake. Look, sweetie, don’t you get it? Do you understand anything at all?”
Dewey’s voice had changed. There was something new to it that Rita hadn’t heard before.
“Do you really think it’s that easy? That things that have been going on for years and years and years will change all of a sudden? Give me a break, will you? Just because everyone’s posting rainbow flags on their Facebook page to show their friends how open minded they are doesn’t change a thing for me.”
“That’s not true, Dewey. Things are different. They are. I’m sorry I never asked you or talked to you—“
“Faggot. Cocksucker. Fairy.”
“Jesus, Dewey, don’t say those words.”
“Well, but I thought you wanted to talk about it.”
He picked up his beer bottle and took a long swallow. When he was done, he gritted his teeth, as if swallowing hurt him.
Rita blinked quickly to stop the burning in her eyes. She was going to say something to him, acknowledge her mistake. “You win, Dewey,” she’d say. “I give up.” She imagined they’d go back to his house where she’d quickly get her things together, leave the house without saying goodbye. She’d drive back over the South End Bridge. Ray would be at home, waiting for her. “What took you so long?” He’d ask.
But before she could do anything, something at the front of the bar caught her attention. First, it was just a flash of color. Blue. It made her think of Ray. His favorite shirt was that same royal blue color. But then she looked closer and saw that it wasn’t just a color. It was him. Ray. He wasn’t at home, where she expected him to be, crowding out their galley kitchen or stretched out on his recliner in the living room, TV remote in his hand. He was standing right inside the door of the bar, and the bartender was calling out his name, beckoning him to step further inside.
“I’m sorry, Rita. But starting over isn’t for me,” Dewey said. He was looking at the beer bottle in his hands, scraping off the label with his fingernails, unaware of what was going on at the front of the bar. “I don’t think it’s possible, for one. I think where we are now? Well, that’s where we’ve always been and always will be.”
Rita watched her husband shake the bartender’s hand. They were talking and laughing together while her brother shook his head and pursed his lips. She knew she had to warn Dewey, whisper to him, nudge him with her elbow. She imagined Ray storming over to their table. He’d be furious, embarrassed that someone had to call him to tell him what his wife was up to. He’d want to get back at her over what she did to his roses. His anger would cloud over him and he’d yank them out of their seats, lift them so high that their feet would scramble to touch the ground. And there Dewey and Rita would be, dangling from his arms, like they were kids again, swinging on the big branches of an enormous tree. Just like they would’ve done when they were younger, if there had been any trees in their front yard for them to play on.
“Stand up,” she whispered to her brother. “Come on. We have to stand up.”
“What are you talking about?”
There wasn’t time to explain. She cocked her head towards the bar where Ray was still chatting with the bartender.
When Dewey saw Ray, he jumped a little in his seat. Then he got up, taking his beer with him. He held the bottle upside down, pouring what was left of the beer on the floor. Ray laughed when he saw that.
“Hey, tough guy. What do you know?”
~ ~ ~
The fight was both quick and very slow. Ray was leaning against the bar, chatting with the bartender, and then he was at their table. He was smiling, his lips stretched out so wide that she could see all his teeth, and then he was scowling. His hands were still, his fingers caught around his belt loops, and then they were up in the air, slapping Dewey in the face so hard that it made his head snap back.
Dewey made this high-pitched, yelping noise, which startled Ray and gave Rita enough time to push her husband as hard as she could, her hands swallowed into the puff of his stomach. As Ray swore and grabbed for her, Dewey started swinging and it wasn’t his fists he was using. He had his beer bottle, and at one point he just threw it as hard as he could and then there was glass everywhere.
~ ~ ~
“I should call the cops,” the bartender shouted but he seemed mostly concerned with taking care of Ray, who was bleeding from a cut on his head. Dewey was next to the jukebox, his elbows on his knees. His wrists were limp and his hands were sliced up and weeping blood. Rita crawled over to him.
“What do we do now, Dew?”
The bartender sounded very far away. She could detect a certain urgency in his voice but she couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying. She couldn’t stop looking at her brother, the strange, almost composed look on his face. He was breathing deeply, slowly, and it reminded her of what he used to sound like when they were kids, lying in bed together against their parents’ rage.
“Dewey,” she said again and he smiled at her. It was grim and small but it was still a smile. They stayed that way for a while, down on the sticky, bloody floor, smiling at each other, and no one touched them—not for a very long time.
Catherine Uroff
The police found Dewey over by Stuyvesant Plaza. He was beat up, kind of confused, so they took him to Samaritan. Rita picked him up after he was discharged. When she walked into the hospital, through the sliding glass doors, she found him sitting in a plastic chair next to the Information Desk. He had his hands in his lap. He looked patient and relaxed, like he was waiting for a bus or something. He had a cut on his chin and on the bridge of his nose. His eyes were swollen and bruised. “What, Dewey?” Rita said but then she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
She drove him back to his house, just outside of Troy. As soon as he got inside, he went upstairs. He said that he was tired. It’d been impossible to rest in the hospital with all the nurses checking in on him. She listened to the creak of the floorboards as he paced the length of his bedroom upstairs. Then she took the South End Bridge back to her house to pack a small bag. Ray was at work so she was able to take her time. She called his cell phone, left a message, said that she was going to stay with Dewey for a while. How long? She didn’t know. “Ray, my brother needs me,” she said in her message.
~ ~ ~
Ray came by Dewey’s a few hours later. He rapped on the front door, and Rita felt like the whole house was shaking. Dewey was still upstairs, resting. Rita waited for him to come downstairs and then, when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to, she opened the door to greet her husband.
“Now Ray,” she said.
“You going to let me in?”
“I won’t leave if that’s why you’re here.”
“I’m here to find out what in hell my wife thinks she’s up to.”
“Someone hurt Dewey.”
“I’m not surprised. The way he carries on.”
“I need to find out what’s going on. He’s my brother. I owe him that much.”
Ray slammed his hands against his chest, pretended to clutch his heart.
“Poor, poor, pitiful Dewey. OK? Now let me in.”
He followed Rita into the kitchen. It was a small room that had a square table pushed in front of a window. She’d just been sitting there, enjoying a cup of coffee, looking at the back yard. Ray picked up her coffee mug.
“You going to get me some?”
“If you want.”
“I do. I do want,” he said. “I also want my wife to come home. What in the world do you think you’re doing? Staying here, of all places.”
He looked around. She could see him taking it all in: the kitchen cabinets with the doors that didn’t hang right; the cracks and cuts in the laminate countertops; the linoleum that curled up off the floor by the fridge. Dewey’s house was old and needed a lot of repairs. Easy fixes, the kind that Ray was good at. Every wall wanted a fresh coat of paint. The toilet seat in the powder room was broken. The fireplace hearth in the living room was missing a few bricks. The house was right on Route 7, and there was a guardrail in the front yard. Still, the back yard was nice with a cluster of tall trees that blocked the view of the neighbor’s house, thick grass that sloped down to a slow running stream. Earlier in the day, she’d stepped onto the back porch and imagined she was in the middle of a forest.
“I like it here,” she said.
“Rita, don’t be dumb. This place is a dump. Let’s go.”
“I told you. I won’t. And I can’t tell you when I will.”
“The hell you say.”
Dewey came into the kitchen then. He looked very thin and pale. He hesitated when he saw Ray. Rita thought he was afraid to enter his own kitchen, and she was embarrassed for him.
“Dewey,” Ray said. “Man of the hour.”
“Now, there’s no need for any trouble,” Dewey said.
Ray stood up. He was a very big man. Unusually tall. Stocky legs. Bulging arms. Broad chest. Thick neck. It was one of the things Rita had admired most about him when they first met. How he was heads above everyone else. A real giant of a man.
“I’ll want her back,” he said to Dewey, and he could’ve been talking about something else, something that Dewey had borrowed and that Ray needed returned. A gardening tool, a wrench, some shovel.
~ ~ ~
After he left, Dewey shut all the windows on the first floor.
“He won’t come in through the window, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s too big, for one,” Rita said.
“This isn’t funny. You should just go home, back to him. I don’t know why you’re still here.”
“I’m here because I’m your sister and someone hurt you and you shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’m fine.”
“I wish you’d tell me more about what happened.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“What were you doing hanging around Stuyvesant in the first place? You have to invite trouble by going over to places like that?”
Rita hadn’t lived in Troy since she got married, twenty years ago, and she hardly ever had reason to go back into the city. She lived in Colonie now, a nice suburb of Albany that had big houses on wide lots. Still, she never forgot the old neighborhood, the place where they’d grown up.
“Never mind all that,” Dewey said. “Don’t worry about me. You’ve got enough to worry about. Why don’t you just do what Ray wants and go home? I mean, it’s not like you can stay here forever.”
“Who says?”
“What are you saying? Wait. You’re kidding me, right?”
“I could stay and—“
“What are you even talking about?”
“It’s not such a crazy idea. If you really think about it,” she said and she hoped that her brother wouldn’t recognize the truth: that it was something she’d just come up, a few hours before while he was sleeping.
Dewey put his hands on his hips. He was wearing tight jeans and a clingy t-shirt, his clothes emphasizing how skinny he was. Bony really. Rita noticed his tight jawline, his long neck, the sharp collarbones sticking out below his throat. When had her brother started to look like this?
“Give me a break. You can’t just leave Ray like this and move in with me.”
“Why not? Why can’t I?”
“You need a plan, for one.”
“This,” Rita said, spreading her arms out, “this is my plan.”
~ ~ ~
She offered to get him some coffee but Dewey just shook his head and went back upstairs. She sat down at the kitchen table again and drank her coffee even though it’d gone cold. She was breathing a little hard and the right side of her jaw ached, like she’d just tried to crunch down on something very hard.
Her cell phone was on the kitchen counter, in front of the toaster, and it started jumping and buzzing with texts. She knew they were from Ray, furious messages about how stupid she was being, how she couldn’t do anything to help Dewey so why even try, how she should stop pretending like she was close to her brother because he knew the truth, which was she hadn’t spoken to him since Christmas of last year and that was only a three minute awkward conversation about the weather and how the snow was keeping most people indoors that day.
But—and this was also just as true, Ray knew this too even though he grew up in Saratoga, nowhere near Troy—she used to be quite close to Dewey. When they were growing up, their parents fought a lot, so much and so loudly that sometimes the neighbors would call the police. Dewey and Rita always stuck together as they waited out the fights. They’d even sleep in the same bed sometimes. Then there was a period of time when their father left the house and they had to rely on each other even more. “A temporary situation,” was how their father explained it as they watched him pack a small suitcase. “Just until Mom and Dad get their act together.” But he didn’t come back, not for a long time. And with him gone, their mother went downhill fast, drinking a lot, spending most of her time in bed until one morning, she didn’t wake up. It was a school day. Rita was in fourth grade and Dewey was in sixth. Right before leaving to catch the bus, they tapped on her bedroom door to say good-bye but there was no answer. They were fine with it at the time. Actually, and Rita remembered this feeling distinctly, they were relieved. Sometimes their mother could be mean. Very irritable. She’d reach over to pinch Rita if she thought she was talking too much. She’d call Dewey a coward when he didn’t want to kill the stinkbugs in the bathroom for her.
When they got home from school that day, their mother’s bedroom door was still closed. They knocked again but she still didn’t answer. Rita made them dinner that night. She sprinkled a layer of salt in a skillet and put two hamburger patties down on it, pressing with the spatula until they sizzled. This was something she’d watched her mother do but when she cooked, gray grease puffed out from the hamburgers and stuck to the bottom of the skillet. It looked disgusting so she turned the burner off. She served Dewey his food, and he got teary because his burger wasn’t cooked enough. He could see pink when he cut it open, and he didn’t like that. Rita snapped at him. “Stop your whining,” she said and she sounded so much like their mother that she started to cry also.
After dinner, they argued about what to do. Rita wanted to check on their mother. Dewey thought they should go to bed, worry about it in the morning. He tried to block her from their mother’s bedroom door but Rita managed to get around him. Actually, what she did was kick him in the shin and when he bent over in pain, she brushed past him, turned the knob, pushed the door open. What she saw next made her freeze, reach behind her for Dewey’s hand. Because their mother was sprawled, face up, on top of the bed. Very still. Her mouth was open. She’d thrown up something pink, and it was dried all over her.
They ran out of the house, straight to their next-door neighbor, who took one look at the kids in front of her, hopping up and down, stuttering about their sick mother, and called the police. Their mother was whisked into the back of an ambulance and her stomach was pumped and a social worker stayed with them until their father showed up. He moved back in after that. But it wasn’t long before they were fighting again.
~ ~ ~
The next day at Dewey’s, Rita woke up early. She was sleeping on a cot that Dewey had put up for her in the utility room off the kitchen. The room had a washing machine and dryer in it, sitting up on planks, and metal bookcases that had cans of engine oil and balls of twine and boxes of light bulbs and stacked clay pots on its shelves. The morning light streamed into the room from the bare window above her bed, brightening up the pockmarked wood floor, the balls of dust in the corners of the room. She adjusted the pillow beneath her head. She wasn’t unhappy.
Then she heard something. A light thump coming from the front of the house. She got up and stood at the base of the stairwell, calling her brother’s name. He didn’t answer. Then she went to the front door and pulled it open. There, on top of the faded Welcome mat, was a bouquet of roses, tied loosely together with a thick green rubber band.
She picked the flowers up right away. She looked around but couldn’t see anyone. The thorns pricked her hands. Most of the roses hadn’t opened yet but some of their petals were already edged in black.
“Ray,” she said, “is this you?”
He’d only given her roses once before and that was back when they’d been newlyweds, after her first miscarriage. She’d miscarried three times after that—“There’s no rhyme or reason to it but for some women, it just doesn’t work,” the doctor had told them—but Ray never gave her flowers again.
She called out again, raising her voice slightly. For some reason—and maybe it was as simple a reason as sleeping somewhere else for one night—she was beginning to feel very brave.
“You shouldn’t have done this, Ray. I’m sorry but I don’t want these. I’ll just throw them away.”
She waited a moment and then she cocked her arm back and threw the bouquet as hard as she could. The roses flew up in the air and then landed in different places. One balanced on the porch railing. One got as far as the road. One landed on the short, cracked sidewalk that led up to the house. She heard the roar of a car’s engine and even though she couldn’t tell if it was coming towards the house or driving away, she darted back inside, flipping the lock over and pulling on the doorknob several times to make sure it wouldn’t open.
~ ~ ~
While Dewey slept, she went through the stack of mail on the kitchen counter. She browsed the recently dialed numbers on his landline phone. She slid open the cabinet drawers in the kitchen. She wanted to find something: a scrap of paper with someone’s name on it, a business card, a book of matches, a receipt. But there was nothing unusual. Utility bills. Mailers for $5 off pepperoni and cheese pies from Tony’s Pizza Parlor. Tidy drawers for the forks, knifes, and spoons, measuring cups, rolls of tin foil and plastic wrap.
She imagined Ray watching her. “Face it,” he would say. “He’s a stranger to you now.” Like it was all her fault. She’d tried to stay in touch with Dewey after she got married. One time, she’d invited him over for dinner. She planned a big feast, lasagna, homemade rolls, green salad with cut up carrots and celery and mushrooms in it, and at first, everything had seemed fine. Dewey showed up early. He was wearing a baseball hat and he took the hat off when he stepped inside. He stayed in the kitchen while Rita cooked. Ray was in the living room, watching television. Rita was having fun talking to Dewey. They were gossiping about people they knew from their old neighborhood, teachers they’d both had in school. They even talked about their parents, divorced now, both of them living with other people in other states: one in Florida, and one in North Carolina. Then Ray called for her from the bedroom. Dewey raised his eyebrows and Rita felt a little silly as she excused herself. As soon as she stepped into their bedroom, Ray pulled her to him and kissed her hard on the lips. Then he started to paw her, lifting her shirt up. She looked behind her. The door was open. She could hear Dewey in the kitchen, humming to himself.
“Stop it. My brother is here,” Rita said.
“Yeah? Well, get him out of here.”
“What? He’s expecting dinner, Ray.”
“I don’t want him here. His kind. You should hear what people are saying about him.”
“What is someone saying about Dewey?”
Ray kept trying to kiss her. She told him to stop, to tell her what he’d heard about her brother. Then Dewey was there, standing in the doorway. He had his hat back on.
“I’ll go,” he said.
There was a moment when Rita should’ve said something but she didn’t. When Dewey left, Ray put his hands over her again. He was like a blind man trying to find something. She stayed very still. She let him do what he wanted.
Afterwards, Ray told her that Dewey was known for hanging around the public bathrooms in Washington Park. “Whatever for?” she asked, and Ray smiled. “Use your imagination, Rita,” he said. And she remembered how kids at school used to make fun of her brother. During Dodgeball games, he’d get smacked in the face by the red rubber ball over and over again. It became a game in of itself. See how hard you could hit Dewey Warren. She’d always assumed he’d been teased because of their parents, because everyone knew that they came from bad people and that made them different from everyone else.
But after Ray told her about Dewey, she thought about the time, a few years back, when she’d been with Dewey in downtown Troy. They were on 2nd Street, headed south, going somewhere for lunch. She’d been bragging about Ray’s family, how they did so much together—camping trips on Lake George, summer vacations in Maine, big picnics and parties to celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July. While she was talking, she noticed a young man walking towards them. He was wearing a windbreaker zipped all the way up to his neck. He had a shock of white blond hair sticking up from the top of his head. She wouldn’t have thought anything of him. Just another somebody. But this man, as he got closer to them, was looking right at Dewey and when she turned to her brother, she saw that Dewey was looking at him too. At the time, she’d wanted to scold that young man. “Don’t look at my brother that way,” she’d wanted to say. But it’d never occurred to her to say anything to Dewey.
~ ~ ~
In the late afternoon, Dewey came downstairs. He took the stairs very slowly, as if it was hard for him to keep steady. He looked a lot like their mother then, or at least that was what Rita thought. He had the same sunken-in eyes, a pinched look to his mouth. She pulled out a chair for him to sit in at the kitchen table, and he snapped at her. “I’m not an invalid,” he said.
She followed him into the living room.
“We need to talk,” she said. “There’s so much we need to say to each other.”
“I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to say one word actually.”
“You can’t just stay here and do nothing. You need to tell someone what happened. Go to the police.”
“I’m not talking to the police.”
“Why not?”
“You want me to do something? Fine. I’d like to go to the movies then.”
“The movies? That’s not really what I was talking about.”
“The Atrium’s showing one I wouldn’t mind seeing.”
“The Atrium? There must be other movie theatres we can go to.”
The Atrium was an old-fashioned movie theater in north central Troy. It had cathedral ceilings and red velvet seats but it was known to have bed bugs and it was in a rundown neighborhood, full of boarded up buildings. She thought of the theater complex close to her house. It had ten different screening rooms, two wide concession stands, seats that reclined. She’d gone there with Ray to celebrate their last wedding anniversary. During the previews, Ray had shushed the people in front of them who were talking too loudly. “My wife is trying to concentrate,” he’d said.
Dewey shrugged.
“I prefer the Atrium,” he said.
“Of all places.”
Dewey looked out the front window. She knew he could see the roses, littering his front yard, and she hoped he wouldn’t say anything to her about them.
When Dewey turned back to her, his face was even paler than before.
“Look,” he said, “I’m going to the movies. Are you coming with me or not?”
“Yes,” she said quickly.
~ ~ ~
They were the only people in the theater. Rita kept her purse on her lap. The movie had Tom Cruise jumping from burning helicopters, skittering across the tops of speeding trains. After it was over, Dewey wanted to go across the street to Maniello’s Tavern. It had a lit sign of a frosty beer mug in its window. The sign was motion-animated, the beer mug slowly tipping and then righting itself over and over again. Rita tried to argue with him, saying that they should probably just go home, but he told her that he didn’t need someone to babysit him and that if she didn’t want to join him she could take the car and he’d find his own way back home.
Maniello’s was almost empty. Still, they sat in the back, in front of the unplugged jukebox next to the pool tables. Rita went up to the bar and ordered two bottles of Budweiser. The bartender had red hair and he asked her how Ray was doing and she tried not to appear startled as she told him that Ray was just fine.
“You can’t avoid it,” she said when she got back to Dewey.
“Avoid what?”
“You have to talk about the fight. The assault. Whatever happened to you. Like I said. The police should get involved, at least.”
“No.”
“Well, I want you to know that you can tell me anything.”
“OK.”
“Anything at all.”
“I heard you the first time.”
Rita took a deep breath.
“I have to ask, Dewey.”
“No, you don’t. But you will anyway.”
“When did you know?”
Dewey paused. For a second, she thought he wasn’t going to answer her.
“People always like that question.”
“I mean, was there a certain time when it just came over you?”
“It doesn’t quite work like that. Anyway, what difference could it possibly make to you?”
“These are things I should’ve asked a long time ago. I guess I was afraid to. Which I know is stupid. But now? Well, it’s all over the place these days, Dewey. People talk about it all the time. It’s not like it was when we were growing up. People get married now and all. That’s all I’m trying to say.”
“I just want to sit here and enjoy my beer. Is that too much to ask?”
“And then there’s Bruce Jenner. He’s a woman now and everything.”
“I’m not—“
“I’m not saying you are. I’m just saying that here is this Olympic Champion. He used to be on cereal boxes. Remember, Dew? And now he’s wearing dresses and his hair is long.”
“Bruce Jenner has nothing to do with it. Look, don’t you need to concentrate on yourself? Are you even thinking about Ray?”
“Of course I am.”
“Yeah, well, what are you going to do? And don’t tell me that staying with me is it. You can’t decide something like that on a whim. Spur of the moment like.”
“Why can’t I? Why can’t I just start over? You can too, you know. Both of us can.”
“I shouldn’t have had the hospital call you. I don’t know what I was thinking, getting you involved like this.”
“But I’m so glad you did. Things can be better now. Like we can be honest with each other and you can help me and I can help you and everything that came before, well, it doesn’t have to matter anymore.”
Dewey put his beer bottle down hard on the table.
“Oh for fuck’s sake. Look, sweetie, don’t you get it? Do you understand anything at all?”
Dewey’s voice had changed. There was something new to it that Rita hadn’t heard before.
“Do you really think it’s that easy? That things that have been going on for years and years and years will change all of a sudden? Give me a break, will you? Just because everyone’s posting rainbow flags on their Facebook page to show their friends how open minded they are doesn’t change a thing for me.”
“That’s not true, Dewey. Things are different. They are. I’m sorry I never asked you or talked to you—“
“Faggot. Cocksucker. Fairy.”
“Jesus, Dewey, don’t say those words.”
“Well, but I thought you wanted to talk about it.”
He picked up his beer bottle and took a long swallow. When he was done, he gritted his teeth, as if swallowing hurt him.
Rita blinked quickly to stop the burning in her eyes. She was going to say something to him, acknowledge her mistake. “You win, Dewey,” she’d say. “I give up.” She imagined they’d go back to his house where she’d quickly get her things together, leave the house without saying goodbye. She’d drive back over the South End Bridge. Ray would be at home, waiting for her. “What took you so long?” He’d ask.
But before she could do anything, something at the front of the bar caught her attention. First, it was just a flash of color. Blue. It made her think of Ray. His favorite shirt was that same royal blue color. But then she looked closer and saw that it wasn’t just a color. It was him. Ray. He wasn’t at home, where she expected him to be, crowding out their galley kitchen or stretched out on his recliner in the living room, TV remote in his hand. He was standing right inside the door of the bar, and the bartender was calling out his name, beckoning him to step further inside.
“I’m sorry, Rita. But starting over isn’t for me,” Dewey said. He was looking at the beer bottle in his hands, scraping off the label with his fingernails, unaware of what was going on at the front of the bar. “I don’t think it’s possible, for one. I think where we are now? Well, that’s where we’ve always been and always will be.”
Rita watched her husband shake the bartender’s hand. They were talking and laughing together while her brother shook his head and pursed his lips. She knew she had to warn Dewey, whisper to him, nudge him with her elbow. She imagined Ray storming over to their table. He’d be furious, embarrassed that someone had to call him to tell him what his wife was up to. He’d want to get back at her over what she did to his roses. His anger would cloud over him and he’d yank them out of their seats, lift them so high that their feet would scramble to touch the ground. And there Dewey and Rita would be, dangling from his arms, like they were kids again, swinging on the big branches of an enormous tree. Just like they would’ve done when they were younger, if there had been any trees in their front yard for them to play on.
“Stand up,” she whispered to her brother. “Come on. We have to stand up.”
“What are you talking about?”
There wasn’t time to explain. She cocked her head towards the bar where Ray was still chatting with the bartender.
When Dewey saw Ray, he jumped a little in his seat. Then he got up, taking his beer with him. He held the bottle upside down, pouring what was left of the beer on the floor. Ray laughed when he saw that.
“Hey, tough guy. What do you know?”
~ ~ ~
The fight was both quick and very slow. Ray was leaning against the bar, chatting with the bartender, and then he was at their table. He was smiling, his lips stretched out so wide that she could see all his teeth, and then he was scowling. His hands were still, his fingers caught around his belt loops, and then they were up in the air, slapping Dewey in the face so hard that it made his head snap back.
Dewey made this high-pitched, yelping noise, which startled Ray and gave Rita enough time to push her husband as hard as she could, her hands swallowed into the puff of his stomach. As Ray swore and grabbed for her, Dewey started swinging and it wasn’t his fists he was using. He had his beer bottle, and at one point he just threw it as hard as he could and then there was glass everywhere.
~ ~ ~
“I should call the cops,” the bartender shouted but he seemed mostly concerned with taking care of Ray, who was bleeding from a cut on his head. Dewey was next to the jukebox, his elbows on his knees. His wrists were limp and his hands were sliced up and weeping blood. Rita crawled over to him.
“What do we do now, Dew?”
The bartender sounded very far away. She could detect a certain urgency in his voice but she couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying. She couldn’t stop looking at her brother, the strange, almost composed look on his face. He was breathing deeply, slowly, and it reminded her of what he used to sound like when they were kids, lying in bed together against their parents’ rage.
“Dewey,” she said again and he smiled at her. It was grim and small but it was still a smile. They stayed that way for a while, down on the sticky, bloody floor, smiling at each other, and no one touched them—not for a very long time.
