The Book of Joe

strict regimen of invisibility. His attendance in school became highly sporadic, and when he did come, he moved through the halls like a phantom, keeping close to the walls, slipping unobtrusively in and out of classrooms. His hair, no longer sculpted into a pompadour, grew long and lay flat against his skull, and he always appeared rumpled and slightly askew, as if he’d slept in his clothing. On those rare occasions when I did run into him, he offered short, perfunctory conversation, scrupulously avoiding eye contact.
    I dropped by his house on a few isolated evenings, motivated less by friendship than by the possibility that maybe he’d heard from Wayne. But Sammy was sullen and uncommunicative, and after sitting in his room for ten minutes or so, the conversational well would run dry. “He’s in trouble, Joe,” Lucy said to me on one such night as she walked me down the stairs to my car. “I can’t get through to him.”
    “Me neither,” I said. “It’s like he’s pissed at everyone.”
    She leaned against my car, smoking a cigarette and shivering slightly in the cool night air, looking small and vulnerable.
    On the pedestal in my mind, she always loomed larger than life, and it was a revelation every time I noticed how much taller than her I was. It would be so easy, I thought, to just step forward and wrap my arms around her. “It’s driving me out of my fucking mind,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “He barely eats; he won’t talk to me. I don’t know what the hell to do about it anymore. I think I’ve been a good mother to him, you know? I mean, Sammy’s no picnic, let me tell you.”
    She blew out some smoke and then waved it away in quick, nervous motions. “And I know I’m nobody’s idea of mother of the year; I have no illusions about that. I was just a little older than you when I had Sammy. Just a kid, really. I always said we were better off without his scumbag father, but I don’t know. Maybe if he had a father ... ” Her voice trailed off, and she looked up at me with a sad grin. “I’m going a little crazy, aren’t I?”
    “It’s okay.”
    “I’m sorry, Joe. I don’t mean to lay this all on you. It’s just - I don’t know. I’m so frustrated.”
    In that moment I understood something new about Lucy.
    Until she’d given birth to Sammy, she’d sailed through life on the wind of her looks. Then she got divorced, and her life became filled with a new breed of tribulations that were largely impervious to her beauty. She seemed to feel unqualified to help Sammy, and despised herself for feeling that way.
    “It’s okay,” I said again. “I just wish I could do more to help.”
    “Just don’t stop coming here,” she said. “He needs a friend so badly right now.”
    “He doesn’t want me around. He barely talks to me.”
    She reached out for my arm and held it with both of her hands. “Don’t stop trying, Joe. He’ll come around. He always does.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I won’t.”
    But I did. I couldn’t stop blaming Sammy for what had happened to Wayne, and every time I saw him staring for-lornly into space, I was seized by a fury so raw it threatened to overwhelm me. I wanted to scream at him, pound him into a bloody pulp, and tell him how much I wished he’d never come to the Falls. I had offered him friendship, and he’d repaid me by shredding the very fabric of my life. On some level, I knew that I was taking a childish view of things, that there were greater and more complex truths in play here, but that knowledge did nothing to dissipate my anger.
    “Stop hounding Mrs. Hargrove,” my father said to me one night, sticking his head into my bedroom as he passed by on the way to his own. He was slouched and sweaty from work, his eyelids sagging with exhaustion. His chinos were worn nearly to transparency in the knees and frayed at the cuffs, and I felt a brief flash of intense sympathy for him. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to buy some new pants without my mother there to tell him to do so.
    “What?”
    “That poor lady’s been through enough. She doesn’t need you calling her night and day and reminding her.”
    “I don’t call her night and day,” I said.
    “Well, she practically attacked me in the parking lot at Stop and Shop and told me you were making her crazy.”
    “She was already crazy.”
    “You show some respect,” he said sternly, stepping fully into my room for what had to be the first time since Reagan was elected.