Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips Page A

I tell him, but he does anyway. As long as he holds it, he’ll be trying to make it talk. I take the radio out of his lap and put it back on the counter, and I hold a bowl of icing down low. I hold the little bottle of blue in Termite’s hand, and we let just three drops fall. Divinity icing makes peaks and gets a sweet crust like meringue. Mine is like sugared air that disappears in your mouth. Nonie says I’m a fabulous cook. I could cook for a living, she says, but not at Charlie’s, or anywhere like it. The egg whites can go bad fast in hot weather but I turn up the fridge to keep the icing cool on the lowest shelf. We’ll eat the cake today, this birthday, and Nick Tucci will take some home to his kids. Nobody makes those boys cakes. Rat boys, Nonie calls Nick’s kids, like she’s disappointed in them. Delinquents like cake too, I tell her. You be sure cake is all you’re making them, Nonie says. Then she’ll say she wasn’t born yesterday, like anyone ever bothers me. I tell her no one does. They only look.
    It’s true. It’s like I’ve got a beam out my eyes that backs people off. Now that I’m older, I’ve got a clear space around me I didn’t have before. I wonder if that’s like a future, or a place where a future will be.
    Pale blue divinity sounds like a dress or a planet. Blue icing does look strange, like Martian food, unless I trim it, save out some white for a lattice over the top, or garlands or flowers. A decorated cake looks like a toy, and people do want it. I’m putting the icings away to keep them cold and I’ve got my whole face in the fridge, near the steaming icebox at the top. The sweat across my upper lip dries in a sudden tingle and then I hear someone at the door. The bell rings in a way I can tell is new.
    Good thing or bad thing, I think.
    Termite gets quiet.
    “Who can thatbe,” I say out loud, like a charm. Like we’re in a TV show about a charming mother and her kid. We don’t have a TV. Termite doesn’t like those sounds. Back then, all those summers, Joey always had the TV on at the Tuccis’, and Termite wouldn’t even go inside. He liked to be moving, or by the river, under the cool of the bridge. There are two bridges, opposite sides of town, both spanning the river; the spiny one for cars, all metal ribs and rattles, and the stone one for trains, wide enough for four lines of track. Once they used all the tracks, Nonie says. Now only two are kept repaired, but two arches of the railroad bridge stand up in the river just as wide, and two more angle onto the land. The tunnel below is still as long and shady and deep. There used to be a road inside but now the road is broken, smashed to dirt and weeds and moss. It’s cool in summer, and the tracks run overhead on their uphill slope to the rail yard. Termite likes the tunnel best. The echoes.
    The doorbell rings again, twice. Somebody won’t give up.
    I push Termite’s chair out past the dinette into the living room. I leave him sitting by the piano and look through the window in the front door. I see somebody. Brown suit coat and trousers, in this heat. Tie and button-down shirt. Glasses. I open the door and there’s a man standing there with his briefcase in his arms, like he’s about to hand it over to me. Not an old man. Thick lenses in the glasses, so his eyes look magnified. Owl eyes. White blond hair parted to the side under his hat. Fedora, like a banker’s.
    “Hello there,” he says. “Hope it’s not too early to stop by. I was hoping I could speak to—” He looks down at the papers he’s got on top of the briefcase.
    “My mother’s not here,” I say.
    “—your aunt. It says here your aunt. You must be Lark.”
    “You’re from Social Services,” I say.
    He nods. “Actually I live two streets over, moved in a week ago. I was on my way to work, so I thought I’d stop.” He smiles in a nervous way.
    “I didn’t think Social Services was open on Sundays.”
    He looks blank for a minute.