“That’s bull crap, Wesley Piehole,” Ron said.
They all called him Wesley. He never told them his first name was Westminster. He got up to pay the tab.
“So how do you know Wesley?” the kid with the toothpick asked me.
“He’s my brother.”
The kid laughed.
Across the room Wes nodded toward the door and I followed him out.
A few days later he asked if I remembered the young guy from the bar. I pretended I didn’t.
“College kid,” he said, as if he’d never been one. “Lots of hair. He said he didn’t believe you were my sister.”
“I told him I was.”
Wes smiled. “So you do remember him. He thought you were joking. About being my sister. I had to bet him a hundred bucks.”
“Wes.”
“All you have to do is come by the bar and show him your driver’s license. When’s your next night off?”
I gave him a look.
“C’mon. Easiest cash I’ll ever make.”
I went by. His name was Jeb. I brought my passport because the photo was better. He seemed bizarrely impressed by the passport, more impressed than a guy with a good haircut and a prefaded T-shirt should have been. For no good reason he showed me his license. His full name was Jebediah. The photo must have been taken when he was sixteen. He looked like hope itself. He counted out five twenties for Wes.
“I don’t know why you’re smiling when I’m getting all the cheddar,” Wes said.
“I thought you grew up under a rock, man. I thought you grew up out of the earth like a mushroom.”
After I left, Jeb asked my brother if he could ask me out.
We went to a candy factory out of town on a hill— everything was on a hill or nestled in a valley there—on a Thursday afternoon. Three old ladies in plastic caps gave us a tour and we ate warm dark chocolate nonpareils and soft peanut butter cups from a brown bag on some playground swings. All the facts of my childhood enthralled him not because they had happened to me but because they had happened to Wes. Wes had put a bit of a spell on him. To him, Wes had crawled out from under his rock and appeared at the bar with tarred teeth and BO and riffing on everything from Hume to Hendricks, gathering the young and the old, the honest and the corrupt, the dead broke and the slumming elite. Jeb had grown up wealthy in Connecticut. He said his nickname prevented people from seeing the Jew in him. His brother Ezra had had a different and more difficult childhood. Jeb had had plenty of exposure to Wasps, but he’d never met one like Wes who’d repented, recanted, who said when pressed that he grew up in Lynn, not Marblehead, who would never admit to tennis trophies or snorkeling in Barbados.
In the apartment below us were Stacy and her three kids. They were wild and yelled a lot and sometimes you’d see Stacy in a big woodsman’s coat, probably her ex-husband’s, across the street smoking a cigarette with all three kids wailing inside. But I could tell she was a good mother. From my desk I watched her take the kids to school, and she’d walk like a duck or croon out a cheesy love song. Her kids were too young to be embarrassed, and I could hear them all giggling even after they’d gone around the corner. I wrote a few vignettes about Stacy and her kids at that desk, but they never turned into anything. She’d been out of work for a while and when she finally found another job it was the graveyard shift, cleaning at the hospital. She had to take it, she told Wes. If her husband found out she didn’t have a job he’d try to overturn their custody agreement. After three months, she said, she could put in a request for daytime hours. So she made an arrangement with Wes and Mandy that if they heard anything they’d go down, and if the kids needed something they could come up. She left after she put them to bed and came back before they woke up.
The night after my date at the candy factory with Jeb—he’d kissed me at a stoplight and shot me little grins the rest of the way back—Wes, Mandy, and I were woken up by a piercing scream—a howl, really—like someone had been bitten by something. It was the youngest, A. J., who’d dreamt he’d been attacked by a kitten.
“Kittens can be terrifying,” Wes said after he’d brought all three kids up to our kitchen and was heating up some milk. “They have very pointy teeth and if they are mean then their cuteness is even creepier.”
Little A. J. was looking down at his hands on the table and nodding. His face was red and sweaty. The oldest looked like he wasn’t really awake yet, and the girl was walking around saying about nearly everything in the room: “Mumma has one of these.” Wes told her he needed help getting the honey from the high shelf and set her up with a stepladder and held her hand as she climbed to the top. When they all had mugs of sweetened milk in front of them, he reached for the salt and pepper shakers on the table and turned them into two friends named Willy and Nilly who were lost in the woods. By the end we all believed those small ceramic shakers were actual children, the way he made them move and speak and duck down when the eagles came looking for them, and that the toothpick he pulled out of his pocket was their mother come to find them. Mandy had tried to enter in with a spoon meant to be the father, but her voice was all wrong and I was glad when A. J. told her there was no father in the story and took the spoon out of her hand. We brought the kids back down and tucked them into bed.