One morning a car slowed beside us. A man leaned over to peer through the open passenger window. It was Coach Marty.
“What are you kids doing?” he asked. “Joe Skinner, is that you?”
“We’re on our way to practice,” Renee answered, still walking. “I’m taking Joe to the field.”
Coach Marty’s car inched along beside us as he considered this answer. He looked at me chewing a wad of bubble gum too big for my mouth, and then he pulled to the side of the road just ahead.
“I’ll take you,” he said. “Get in.”
Renee hesitated. Later we would come to know Marty Roach very well, but on that morning he was only Joe’s coach, the funny man with the dark mustache whom we glimpsed from afar on the field.
“We’re good at walking,” Renee said carefully. “We do it every week.”
It was a cold spring day, and the wind whistled along the road and the grassy fields and reached through our thin coats. We were all shivering, hands in pockets. Caroline’s long hair whipped around her face.
“Please, Renee,” said Caroline. “Let’s go with him.” There were dark half-moons beneath her eyes. Her tolerance for this life had reached its limits.
Renee looked at the road, she looked at Joe, who nodded, and then she said to Marty, “Okay.”
Marty’s car smelled of mint and tobacco, not cigarettes but the ripe, woody scent of pulp tobacco, and it seemed to me a cozy place, like a room with a fireplace in the days before Christmas. Years later I would date a much older man who smoked a pipe—pure affect, we didn’t date for long—but the first time he took the pipe out and lit it, I returned again to the back of that car. Coach Marty’s huge, meaty hands on the wheel, the back of his head a white dome striped with the dark brown of his comb-over. Gray vinyl seats, a pull-down armrest in the center that he pushed up to accommodate us, releasing a grainy silt that he wiped away with the back of his hand onto the floor of the car.
“There you go,” he said, and the four of us packed thigh to thigh into the back seat.
Some say there are no secrets in small towns, but I believe this to be false. There were people in Bexley who knew about Noni—I’m sure of it—but they kept the matter to themselves. Noni was a secret; Noni was something no one discussed. Back then there was no “reply all” or neighborhood message board. You had to pick up the phone and hope that the person to whom you wished to speak would answer. You had to walk out your front door and start up your car and drive to the Skinners’ new house and knock on the front door and hope that Antonia Skinner would not send you immediately away, as she did to Mrs. Lipton when she tried to drop off a tin of cookies that first Christmas.
The Skinner children went to school. We were fed. It was a difficult time—of course it was, everyone understood that. No one wanted to intrude. We were left alone.
Only Coach Marty did not leave us alone. Maybe it was the week after that first ride to the field, or the next month, or next season. I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember that one day Marty Roach came home with us.
That night there was a baseball game, a midseason corker between the Mavericks and the Eagles from neighboring Milford. Joe scored three runs, committed no errors, caught a high fly ball to close out the sixth inning, and you could see the hope drain from the faces of those Milford boys. The sun lingered in the sky after the game, bright pinks and orange, and in the air there was a buzzy warmth. My hands were sticky from melted ice cream. Joe’s purple-and-green uniform looked regal in the dying light, a worn-out king touched with glitter and dirt.
After the game Marty drove us home. I remember standing with him at our front door, which was painted the same dingy gray as the rest of the house. Our screen was torn, broken long ago during a game of pirates between me and Joe. The corner hung down, nearly touching the ground.
Renee used her key to let us in. She did not hesitate. She threw open the door as if to say, Here it is. Look and tell me, is this okay?
Coach Marty stood in the middle of the living room—a mess of unpacked boxes and dirty dishes, games, forts, discarded clothing, a trail of checkers I had laid days ago for a lost stuffed bear—and called for our mother.
“Mrs. Skinner? Mrs. Skinner? Antonia?”
No answer. And so Renee yelled, “Noni! Noni, come here!”
After a spell we heard a creak of floorboards. Noni emerged at the end of the hall in her bathrobe, which was dirty, her long hair wild around her head, and in that moment we saw her anew. Her face was indoor pale, her feet bare. I noticed the musty stench of the house, of unwashed floors and dirty dishes, damp towels, dusty corners. What before had been only Noni resting, always resting, now appeared to me terrible.
Our mother looked at Marty and said, “Oh. Hello.”
* * *
Not long after this, our Aunt Claudia arrived from Cleveland. She was childless, our father’s much-older sister whom we had met only once before at his funeral. She had tightly curled gray hair that sat like a bathing cap on her head and a long, horsey face. Claudia brought with her one pink suitcase and an air of rigorous competence. Our mother left the house; our mother returned; the house became clean; we became clean. Our mother left the house again, only this time she wore a neat blue skirt suit and lipstick colored a race-car red. Claudia told us that Noni was looking for a job, and about time, too.
“You’ve got to get on with things,” Claudia said as we watched Noni drive away. “Too much laying around isn’t good for anyone. Remember that. Keeping busy is the best defense against feeling sad. It’s simple, but it’s true.”
Aunt Claudia was proof of this lesson. She was the least sad and most busy person I had ever met. She swirled around our house with a cloth and a spray bottle like a bird looking for an exit, and everything she bumped into became clean, tidy, sparkling. Back home Aunt Claudia worked as a teller at a bank in North Royalton, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. She described for us the intricate details of her job, the piles of twenties wrapped in special paper, the safe as big as a room, the secret slots of the safe-deposit boxes where people placed the oddest things.
“Once a man came in and rented one for a pair of shoes, ladies’ shoes,” she told us. “Now, why would anyone do such a thing?”
For four weeks Claudia cooked large, well-balanced meals that we ate until our stomachs groaned; she cycled load after load of dirty clothes through the washer and dryer; she read aloud books we had read before, but still we listened; she bought us art supplies, and we colored diligently the pictures of forest animals and trees, though we were far too old for coloring books.
I wrote muscle, broom, thick, bristle, warm, squeak, soap, gravy, meat, full.
What we liked best of all was Claudia telling stories about our father when he was a boy: his extreme fear of ants, his favorite food (meatballs), the operation he had when he was ten to fix the knuckle of his right thumb (trigger thumb, she called it). When she recounted these episodes, her eyes would become glassy and she’d dab at them with a tissue she pulled from a small plastic pack that accompanied her everywhere.
One day we were eating lunch when Aunt Claudia said, “Joe, you look just like your father.” She paused to blow her nose into a tissue. “You’re the man of the family now. Don’t you forget it.”