“No.”
He hunched over the camera and adjusted a dial. The camera seemed too complicated for a nine-year-old, and she’d tried to discourage him from bringing it on the trip. On the flight from Chicago, instead of reading a book, he’d fiddled with the thing incessantly, clicking and turning every clickable or turnable part. He’d done the same thing at Disneyland. He had only three minutes of film, and he was anxious, visibly stressed, about misusing it—kept raising the camera and hesitating, fiddling with it, frowning. She was anxious herself, about the freeway, and needed more cigarettes than she felt she could smoke in front of him. It was only three thirty when he ran out of film. Money had been spent, Frontierland not yet visited, but he said he’d had enough. In the Disney parking lot, before returning to Pasadena, she’d smoked two Luckies.
“Put the camera down,” she said. “You’ve played with it enough.”
He set it aside with a theatrical sigh.
“Are you unhappy about something?”
He shook his head.
“Is it me? Is it my smoking? I apologize for smoking.”
The oriole was singing again, so very yellow. He glanced at it, reached for the camera, and caught himself.
“Sweetie, what is it? You haven’t seemed like yourself.”
His expression became morose. With the return of ordinary hearing came a more general sharpening of her senses.
“Will you tell me what’s bothering you?”
“Nothing. Just … nothing.”
“What is it?”
“Perry hates me.”
She had another flutter of guilt, more pronounced.
“That’s not true at all. There’s no one Perry loves more than you. You’re his special favorite.”
Judson’s mouth curled inward as if he might cry. She moved over to his recliner and pressed his face to her chest. He was so skinny and unhormonal, she could have gobbled him up, but she could feel his resistance. Her old bathing suit now gaped at the top and gave her breasts a wanton latitude. She let him pull away.
“Perry’s sixteen now,” she said. “Teenagers say all sorts of things they don’t really mean. It has nothing to do with how much your brother loves you. I’m sure of that.”
Judson’s expression didn’t change.
“Did something happen? Did he say something that upset you?”
“He told me to leave him alone. He used a bad word.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”
“He said he was sick of me. He used a really bad word.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”
She embraced him again, this time positioning his head on her shoulder. “I don’t have to see my friend today. I can stay here with you and Antonio. Would you like that?”
He squirmed out of her grasp. “It’s okay. I hate him, too.”
“No, you don’t. Never say that.”
He picked up the camera and clicked something. Clicked it. Clicked it. She’d never had to worry about Judson, but his absorption in the camera recalled her own unhealthy absorptions. Out of nowhere, she was seized by an image so vivid that she quaked with it, an image of her soul mate on top of her, rampant in her utter openness to him. Her bathing suit was loose on her—she’d lost thirty pounds—for him—it was crazy. Oh, the relief of being obsessed, the blessed banishing of guilt. The switch in her was still there to be flipped.
“Judson,” she said, her heart beating hard, “I’m sorry if I haven’t been myself. I’m sorry Perry hurt you. Are you sure you don’t want me to stay here with you?”
“Antonio said he’d play Monopoly with me.”
“You don’t want me to stay?”
He gave a shrug, a child’s exaggerated shrug. The right thing was to stay with him, but an afternoon of Monopoly would pass quickly enough, and Antonio had promised to make crispy tacos. Nothing she could do today was so urgent that it couldn’t be done tomorrow, except seeing Bradley.
“Let’s go inside, then. Maybe Antonio will make you a smoothie.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Did you not see the sign? No unaccompanied children under twelve.”
Antonio had introduced Judson to the concept of a “smoothie,” a sort of milkshake blended with banana. Antonio had retired from the job that had brought him and Jimmy to Los Angeles, but he was still vigorous, his hair splendidly white, his face handsomer than ever. He could easily have found a new lover, but instead, every morning and every evening, he visited the nursing home where Jimmy was bedridden. She saw that in her youthful prejudice, because Antonio was Mexican, she’d misread his relationship with her uncle. Antonio, not Jimmy, had always been the man of the house. Jimmy’s art had never really found a market, and now he was just a sack of bones, his vertebrae so badly crumbled that even a wheelchair was uncomfortable. All he had left were his wits. When she’d inquired about his brother, Roy, he’d mentioned that Roy’s first great-grandchild had been born on the day Nixon was elected. “I’ll let you guess,” he’d said, “which of those two events made him happier.”