While I took down the strings of green and red lights I’d looped around our young maple tree before Christmas, my wife Christine followed the boy who lived next door up and down the sidewalk as he rode his new bike. Joey had been riding in front of his house and ours every day since Christmas, over a week now, the training wheels squeaking as if they were begging to be taken off. Christine walked beside him. “I thought I could help,” she said, when I asked why Joey’s father, a schoolteacher, wasn’t outside. “Brad’s working on his screenplay,” she said. “He hasn’t gone out since Christmas except to get the mail.”
“When school starts up again, Brad will have to be normal.”
Christine stared at the house where Joey and his father lived as if she expected Brad to be at the window waving a just-completed manuscript. “It’s hard for him without a mother.”
“Joey or Brad?” I said.
Christine kept looking at the house. “He doesn’t even have an aunt.”
I put the lights away while Christine and Joey made a last run or two the length of our yard and his. Christine’s face, when she stepped inside, was flushed from the cold. She slapped her hands together as if gloves were something she enjoyed not wearing. “Brad told me Joey’s too afraid of falling,” she said. “Like the sidewalk is a black hole, figuratively speaking.”
Figuratively speaking was Brad’s favorite expression. He was so fond of metaphor, his screenplay was going straight to the art house slush pile. “Did he explain what a black hole is?” I said, marveling at the judgment of a father who thought a part of the universe collapsing in on itself might be fascinating rather than terrifying for seven-year-olds.
“Brad thinks Joey is too soft for a boy.”
I looked across the street at where acres of corn stalks waved in the wind, neglected, we’d been told, when Christine and I had bought the house, because the farmer had died a few weeks earlier. The first time we’d met Joey he’d said, “Aliens live in that corn field.”
Brad had tousled Joey’s hair and said, “We watched that movie Signs last week. Christine had smiled so broadly I thought she was going to reach out and rub Joey’s head as well.
A week after Joey went back to school and kept his squeaking training wheels for late afternoons and weekends only, Christine yelled, “Oh, shit!” and slammed the oven door shut, telling me her chicken-in-a-bag had burst into flames. I glanced through the door’s small window. Without much air, the bag was smoldering. “Look at that,” she said, and so I did, opening the door just enough to reignite the flames while she punched in 911.
“451,” I said, closing the door and remembering the novel about books burned by firemen, the classics and the popular all flaring forty-nine degrees below the heat called for in the recipe for “Chicken in a Sack” that she’d cut out of the Sunday paper and laid on the counter. “There’s a misprint here,” I said, pointing.
“No, there isn’t,” she said. “They have proofreaders.”
“Ray Bradbury says otherwise,” I said, but she just blinked.
Within three minutes, there was a siren coming down our street, and for a moment, until there was banging on the door, I thought the truck had gone to the wrong address. A fireman carried the burning chicken outside as if it was some sort of flambé entrée and pitched it into the newly fallen snow. I started to rethink dinner, what else to eat to celebrate our rescue. “I hate cooking enough already without this mess,” Christine said. “Call somebody and get us a pizza.”
“Anything special on it?” I said, watching Christine making herself a drink.
“It’s just pizza, Nathan. Nothing’s special.”
I asked for half plain and half pepperoni and went outside to wrap that sorry chicken in a fresh sack and add it to the week’s curbside bags.
The next morning, I discovered that something had shredded its way inside, scattered the bones on the snow, none of them retrieved by the garbage men. As I was scraping pieces of the carcass together, Joey waved from his driveway. “Is that what the fireman threw?” he said.
“It was supposed to be our dinner.”
“Last night, it looked like he’d found a meteor.”
“A homemade one,” I said, but Joey had already turned toward the sound of Brad sounding the horn of his black SUV.
It was dark when I got home from work, but Joey was on his bike without the training wheels. Christine was steadying him as he went down the driveway and back. Brad was standing inside the garage, visible from the floodlight illuminating the driveway. The two of them switched steadying Joey each time he entered the garage like he was landing on a carrier. “There’s hoagies from Amato’s,” Christine announced. “Take your pick—Italian or turkey.” I watched four trips before I went inside.
There was mayo on both, a bad start, but I chose turkey and opened a magazine at the kitchen table. I was nearly finished when Christine walked inside looking excited. “I read Brad’s screen play today. It’s so good.”
“He let you walk out with it?”
“Of course not. I sat there on his couch. He took the day off to celebrate finishing. I could feel him watching me the whole time, hoping I’d love it.”
Christine opened her hoagie. “You know the best part? He put me in it. Not just a cameo. I have three lines. A real actress will play me.”
“Will she need a body double?” I said, but Christine was furiously chewing, and I settled in front of the tv to watch an old movie, the one where the world is being threatened by an enormous asteroid, something impossible to be saved from, and yet, despite everything, the characters I loved would be saved.
