Lauren couldn’t decide between a good saucer or one of the chipped ones for an ashtray.  None of their friends smoked.  Anymore.  Her husband Mark and his stepbrother sat on the deck in the dark, talking about her husband’s half-brother.  That made him the stepbrother’s stepbrother, she thought, though she could never quite keep the story straight.  Who was who to whom.  She set back the good saucer and chose the nicest of the saucers that did not match anything else they owned, one that had appeared out of nowhere, didn’t belong, but was nice just the same.

She skirted the dining room table, saw her notebook there with its inspirational “You ARE a Writer!” cover, hesitated, grabbed it, and hurried back out to the deck, so she wouldn’t miss anything.  As Lauren had risen to get the saucer, Mark’s stepbrother had said, “Sometime I’ll tell you the story of how he saved my life, your dad.”  She couldn’t just sit down again, though that is what she wanted to do.  It was sure to be a good story, and Lauren was upset she might miss part of it, or all of it.  Now that would be a shame.  

They weren’t saying anything when she came through the French doors, and she hesitated a moment, then set the saucer on the table where Mark’s stepbrother, Rusty, sat smoking, and he lifted it, tapped his ash in and gave her a nod.  She sat across from him, tucked the notebook under her thigh, Mark at her right.  Rusty blew his smoke away from her. She wished he wouldn’t. She wished she could tell him she used to smoke too, missed it sometimes, but there was nowhere in the conversation for that.  Nowhere for her really at all, and she didn’t want anyone to have that thought. She wanted to stay and listen to the stories.

“So Dwayne’s living with Dad?  In the trailer?” Mark asked.  Lauren couldn’t tell if he really cared about the answer.  It wasn’t like he was close with his father.  In fact, this stepbrother and the half-brother Dwayne, were closer to Mark’s father.  

“No story.  Taken it over.  Dwayne might be sleeping in one of the outbuildings, sure has enough of his shit in there, but I think he’s in the trailer right with him.  Why not, since Shirl died,” Mark’s stepbrother said.  Lauren didn’t remember his name, not his real one, just that they called him Rusty, for his hair. Thinning, cut short and almost brown, like it was too much a little-boy thing, having red hair.  “Since Shirl died, he’s got all that room,” Rusty said.

Mark gave a chuckle, twisted his beer bottle on the table.  “I’m surprised there’s room for even one more thing in the outbuildings.  Last I was there, you couldn’t even walk two feet into the turtle barn.”  Turtle barn.  That was how different this was, Lauren thought.  Who knew there even was such a thing?  But this was Florida.  And apparently there were turtle barns in Florida.

“Room in the trailer,” Rusty said, as if a clarification was necessary.  Lauren could tell Mark and Rusty didn’t talk too often.  And what was there to talk about?  The turtle barn?  The trailer?  Lauren had been in the trailer once, parked on the piece of land Jimmy and Shirl had discovered at the land records office, had squatted until it was theirs.  Jimmy was resourceful like that.  Lauren and Mark had gone to visit once with all three kids, to meet their “other” grandfather.  Just one night with Jimmy out of their Florida trip to see Mark’s mom, Nancy, at her retirement community.  The whole visit had been a mistake, though the kids had a good time with the dogs and the tractor.  Lauren had hardly slept for the cigarette smoke haze that never lifted, never moved after it had seeped in, soaked the sheets.  It made her children smell like they weren’t her own, were kids she’d want to save.  That wasn’t who she was, not her life now.  No surprise Shirl had died of cancer, left so long they didn’t even try any treatments, just let her die.  

Shirl was the sixth wife.  But wait, not really.  Because the accounting got funny. Jimmy had married Rusty’s mother, Roberta, twice and then never married Shirl at all, which tickled Lauren.  I mean, you couldn’t make this stuff up.  Shirl and Jimmy never married, but she was with him longest of all.  And her death left Jimmy with no one.  Dwayne had moved in.  Mark’s half-brother, not even a year younger, just a bit more than six months between them.  This much of the story Lauren knew.

“I thought you all should know. About Dwayne.”  Rusty sucked on his cigarette, the red-dot glow a simple period.  The “you all” was Mark and Tanya, Mark’s sister, the eldest of Mark’s four siblings, the full-blood siblings.  And Barry, the next oldest. They were the ones who lived in Maryland still, and Lauren had called them to come to see Rusty after he’d phoned from his truck, saying he was passing through, could he stop by?  Tanya would be over for sure.  Lauren wouldn’t be surprised if Barry didn’t show up at all.  There were two other full brothers, Ray and Tom, who lived in Florida like Jimmy now. But Lauren didn’t know if they spoke to their father. Stepbrother Rusty was the one who looked in on him from time to time. And the half-brother Dwayne.  

It had taken Lauren years just to keep the full siblings straight, and now this.  Hopeless.  But it was worth a try.

The stories were that good.

Mark was silent, detached, like he got when he was thinking about work, writing code in his head.  Rusty didn’t seem to mind—almost done that cigarette now—and Lauren could tell Mark’s silence wasn’t because he was uncomfortable, though Lauren wouldn’t have blamed him if he was.  Mark had only known Rusty for about a year when he was six, the year his mother Nancy had remarried, to Len, the accountant at the office where she had gotten a job as secretary.  Len, Mark’s stepfather, was the one who raised him really, was the reason Mark was unlike all the others, even his full siblings, who had lived with Jimmy before he left their mom.  Jimmy was Mark’s birth father, sure, but he hadn’t even stuck around for the birth, just donated sperm and skipped off with someone named Faye, who was only in the picture as the second wife for about six months, and even then, it seems Jimmy had been fooling around with Dwayne’s mom, Lou Ellen. 

Before all that, Jimmy had left Nancy and four little ones.  Five, considering Mark was still incubating. 

Lauren was busy trying to keep it all in her head, to catch up, and she didn’t want them to notice her too much in any case, or the stories might get guarded, they might stop altogether.  She itched to take out her notebook, then realized she didn’t have a pen.

“Would you like another beer?” Mark stood.  Rusty held up his bottle, gauged its contents, tipped back the rest into his mouth and set the empty down.  “Now I would,” Rusty said, and he winked at Lauren in just the way Jimmy had that one visit to the trailer.  Jimmy had been balding then, and Lauren was pretty sure his straight white teeth had been false, but she’d felt it, that wink.  Felt the charm, the Jimmy of six wives, or five and change if you were counting true.  

Lauren didn’t say anything, tried to review what she knew about that year in Florida when Mark had known Rusty.  As if Rusty might quiz her before Mark returned.  There had been nine of them—eleven counting adults—in Jimmy’s Florida stilt house the only year you might say Jimmy had really been a father to Mark.  Had Jimmy even seen Mark, his own son, before then?  The stilt house had already housed Roberta’s four, Rusty the youngest, matching Mark in that.  So in all of that tangle of nine children, and for only one year, who’s to say Mark even really knew Rusty at all.  

But Mark had told Lauren the stories.  And the kids, sat around a campfire on mountain vacations or huddled close in a windy gazebo at a rented beach house.  Told about the bathtub that drained into the sandy crawlspace, so the boys would skinny under the house and poke out the drain plug while the younger girls, Tanya and Rusty’s sister, True, were bathing.  About the car bumpers they would grab and drag behind, cutting parallel gullies in the dirt road with their sneaker toes or heels.  About the schoolteacher who used a ruler on knuckles, a switch on backsides.   

And stories Lauren wouldn’t let Mark tell their children.  Blowing up live frogs and fish with firecrackers.  Standing on the backs of tortoises lumbering in sandy scrub.  Mark’s brothers sometimes kissing True.

But Rusty didn’t ask Lauren anything about what stories she knew, just sat in the dim light coming from the family room through the French doors.  He was really almost done that cigarette.  Lauren felt she had to say something.

“I wish all the kids were here tonight.”  Emma was at a sleepover, Corrie at a play with her Girl Scout troop.  And Lenny was at a friend’s, the friend with the video games Lauren wouldn’t let him have.  Should be dropped off in about an hour.  Lauren hoped Tanya would remember what Lauren had said and park in the road, so there wouldn’t be any musical minivans.

Rusty leaned forward and gently rolled the remaining coal of his cigarette on the rim of the saucer until it came loose from the filter and sat there a moment, glowing, until he gently snuffed it, then laid the filter next to it.  Neatly. Almost daintily.  Lauren wondered if she could ask him about The Story, the one where Jimmy once saved his life.  She had never heard that one. Or any with philandering Jimmy as any sort of hero. But maybe it would be rude to ask if Rusty had already told it to Mark.

Lauren thought of how she and her college roommate had played a game, a spin-off of the old who-would-you-invite-to-dinner game.  Lauren asked her what she would say if she ever met a character from a favorite book, and what more they could tell her that wasn’t in the book.  And here she was now, meeting Rusty, a side character in all of Mark’s tales of Jimmy, their father.

“They would have liked to have met you, the kids.  From the stories Mark has told them.”

Rusty raised an eyebrow, looked at her, then into the house, from which Mark still hadn’t returned.  “You have a nice house.”

“Thank you.  It’s something of a mess, and we’re never finished renovating.”

“I just left a buddy’s house, up in PA?  Bought a bike off me.  I drove it up on my trailer to deliver it.  Nice piece of land.  Put up one of those fancy modulars, all new.  Had it designed for him all the way down to the wallpaper and all put together in a warehouse, then shipped out on two trailers, craned in place, hooked together right down the middle.  Real nice.  But you couldn’t get me to pay what he paid.  Guess how much?”

Lauren blinked, didn’t know what to say.

“A touch over a hundred grand. Nice house, but a hundred grand?”

Lauren wished Rusty would light another cigarette, wished Mark would come back.  She looked away from Rusty into the house.  The lights were blazing in the family room, the couch Lauren’s mother had handed down to them even though she didn’t like it, the wool rug she had saved for. The television cabinet towered over it all.  She and Mark had built it together from a kit years ago, and Lauren had stained it on this very deck, hoping the smell of the stain, the polyurethane, wasn’t bothering the neighbors behind them, who were so particular about their yard, who had put on the back of their house an addition that cost more than what Rusty had mentioned.  Who were redoing the front of the house this year.  

Mark came back then, two beers in hand.  Lauren had stopped drinking when she’d had the babies, quit smoking and had never started again.  He handed Rusty one, took a slug of his own while Rusty looked over the label on the bottle.

“You heard from Dwayne?  Did he let you all know when he moved in with Jimmy?”

Mark shook his head.  “We don’t really keep in touch.”  Mark didn’t really keep in touch with anyone.  As if he’d had his fill of siblings from his first twenty years of life and decided not to have much to do with them for the second.  Lauren was the one who kept the kids in contact with the cousins, the one who sent birthday cards with a dollar for every year they were old.  

Lauren remembered she’d met Dwayne a few times when still living in Maryland with his second wife, who also wanted cousins to know each other. Dwayne was good-looking like Mark, yet harder somehow, sharp, and always with a confused anger about him that reminded Lauren of James Dean.  Or Heathcliff.   Or that Brando character in black and white.  But they hadn’t seen Dwayne since he’d divorced that second wife. And then she too disappeared, no longer caring if the cousins knew each other or not.

So Dwayne’s kids—one ex-wife with two, second ex-wife with one—had always been a gray area.  Should she send a card or not?  They didn’t for her kids, but then, shouldn’t she be the one to set the example?  She was never sure, so some years she sent one, other years not.  It was a problem.

“Well, I don’t know how you all are with Dwayne, him being half-blood.  At least blood.  But I don’t think Dwayne ever liked me, liked us.  I mean, your dad left his mom, married mine.  Must’ve been tough on him.  Guess he was only a tyke.” Rusty turned to Lauren. “This was after Jimmy left Mark’s mom, Nancy, before he married mine.  Dwayne came in the middle of it.

“But I don’t regret that Jimmy left Dwayne’s mom for mine,” Rusty continued. “Four kids and we were living with my mom’s pop, a mean old son-of-a-bitch.  You don’t mind me cursing?  Because that’s what he was.  We’d been living with that SOB since before I could remember, but he didn’t like it one bit, even if my mom cooked and cleaned for him, had True and Diane help too, and all of us with chores.”  

Rusty tipped his beer to the porch light, looked again at the label, as if written in a foreign language.  “That SOB would get real drunk and angry on the weekends.  My mom would always put us to bed with our shoes on.  If her pop got real bad and she couldn’t bring him down, she got us out real quick, shooed us off into the woods.  We knew where to wait, behind a bunch of logs he’d never got around to cutting, thick enough that we’d be okay even if he got out the guns, felt like shooting at nothing.  When she got us later, maybe even next morning, she’d have a cut lip or some bruises, a black eye.”  He stopped, took out another cigarette.

Mark was looking at him now.  Lauren hoped Tanya wouldn’t show up, break into the story.

“Jimmy—your dad—he got real pissed when he saw that.  The bruises.  I think he would have beat the hell out of my granddad if it wasn’t for all the guns.  Jimmy never did have many guns.  I didn’t know why he didn’t take us away from there.  But he was still with Lou Ellen and Dwayne, and then there was you all. It wasn’t so simple.  To take us away.”

Rusty drank down half the bottle.  Lauren noticed Mark’s empty.

“So we stayed with that SOB. He had high blood pressure, one heart attack already.  He had pills.  For when he’d get all worked up.  Well, like I said, it was getting bad that summer, and one night my mom woke us, told us to go.  I heard him in his bedroom, worse than ever. I asked Mom that time if she would come with us.  But she was already headed back to his room to try to calm him.  And I saw his pills on the kitchen table.”

Lauren glanced at Mark.  He was looking straight at Rusty.  

“I took them.  The pills.  No story.  Grabbed them and ran out after True and Derek and Diane.  I shoved the bottle up under one of the logs and just sat there watching the house.  It took a while—I think True fell asleep—but not as long as I thought.  Then there was the ambulance, lights going but not the siren.  And then the ambulance drove off, no lights, took him with them.  We still didn’t come out.  Mom hadn’t called or come.  But then Jimmy drove up in one of those Jaguars he’d be fixing.  He couldn’t really fit all of us, but he took us away.  I sat on True’s lap, squashed on either side.”

Rusty’s cigarette ash was a long gray cinder, but he didn’t tap it off before taking the next drag.  Lauren could see the red coal buried beneath it glowing hot now.

“I had to take those pills.”  He looked back into the lit house.  Then he tapped the cigarette hard, spilling ash into the saucer.  “Didn’t expect Jimmy would ever take us. But like I said, I didn’t know about Jimmy’s other families.  Till your sorry asses showed up in Florida that year, all the way down from Mary-land.  You were just a little snot then,” Rusty said and grinned.  Mark grinned back.

Lauren wasn’t ready for the story to end. “Hell,” she said.  “Little snot?  Mark wasn’t even born when Jimmy walked out on them.”

Rusty looked at her a second.  Mark looked and kept on looking.

Lauren stared back at her husband, kept talking. “I mean, it’s one thing to leave a kid when he’s a toddler, when at least he’s had a taste of you, leave him with a mother who only had him to worry about.  It’s another to leave a kid before he’s even born.”

Mark looked into the house.  Lauren followed his eyes because Rusty wasn’t looking at her either.  

“We did okay,” Mark said, staring into the family room through the glass doors.  “We were fine.  Dwayne had it pretty rough compared.”

Lauren didn’t want to hear about how it all turned out fine, about Dwayne having it worse.  Mark was ruining her part, his own part of the story. Mark kept his eyes off her but looked away from the house.  Lauren willed him to look at her.

“I remember,” she said, like reciting a fairy tale, “that one story of how Lou Ellen left Dwayne for two weeks when he was what, eleven?  Left him with just the food that was in the apartment, went on some bender.  And then she just showed up again one day. Poor Dwayne.”

Rusty shook his head, broke her narrative.  “Dwayne’s taking advantage.  Jimmy worked hard all his life.  He’s still working time to time.  Maybe wouldn’t if Dwayne wasn’t there mooching.”

Mark didn’t move, but his voice came out of the dark.  “I haven’t talked to him in a good while, Rusty.  Maybe you can talk to Ray and Tom.”

Lauren watched as Rusty did that same gentle rolling thing with the red coal of his cigarette on the edge of the saucer.

“I know you’re not close.  Maybe I should talk to Tanya.  She’s oldest of you five.” Rusty took a sip of his beer, looked at Mark now with the same intensity as he’d looked at the imported beer label. Like Mark were something foreign.  He swallowed, set his bottle in his lap, started picking at the label.  “I was real mad when your dad left my mom.  He did it to marry some other woman, but he came back, they got married again.  But then he left a second time, and I was pretty sure it was for good.  I was fifteen.  The next year, I dropped out, was doing stupid shit, losing jobs.  A bunch of us one night smashed a big old plate glass window.  We were just fooling around.  But I got caught, hauled in.  I was sixteen, so they called my mom.  I hadn’t been staying at home much, so she wouldn’t bail me out, told me to call Jimmy.  They wouldn’t let me make another call, but someone must have called him because I woke up a few hours later, and there he was.

“He took me to my mom’s, told me I’d be sleeping there again whether I liked it or not.  Then he picked me up a few hours later, just when the sun came up, and he had a big old sheet of glass strapped on the side of his truck.  Took me downtown, taught me how to put it in, made me do it right then.  Picked me up the next morning, took me to work with him, working construction on some new shopping center or restaurant pad.  Picked me up every morning till I was of age.”

Rusty drank off the rest of his beer, let himself wince at the last swallow of it.  “I would be in jail.  No story.  All those guys I was with that night?  Each of them.  Every one.”

Tanya came just then, through the French doors, and it was all hugging, exclamations, and laughter. Lauren stood, gathered her notebook, the empties, asked Mark if he wanted another.  Asked Rusty, Tanya.  No one wanted more.  

Lauren stood at the sink, rinsing bottles for recycling, trying not to feel irritated at Tanya’s coming then, just when this last story was getting good.  She could see it, the broken glass, the brand-new sheet strapped to the truck’s side, the two of them, Rusty and Jimmy, fitting it in where there was a big square hole. 

Lauren dried her hands hastily, grabbed a pen, and went into the dining room, sat down with her notebook, found a fresh sheet way in the back.  She’d had a short story published last year, not a big journal, but she wrote while the kids were in school, hoped for more someday.

“What are you up to?” Mark came in, stood there while she finished a sentence.  “You disappeared.” 

“Just writing down some of Rusty’s stories.  Before I forget.  I suppose he’s stopped now?”

“He’s talking to Tanya about Dwayne.”

Lauren sighed, chewed the end of her pen, reviewed what she had written.  “I wish Tanya had gotten stuck in traffic.  I was hoping he’d tell the one about the time when Jimmy saved his life.”

Mark took the pen from her hand, laid it on the table.  “Honey.  Those were the ones when Jimmy saved his life.”  

Lauren wrinkled her brow at Mark, looked at her page, picked up the pen, crossed through a line.

Mark grabbed a bowl, a bag of chips and went back out.  Lauren didn’t.  She chewed on her pen but couldn’t think what else to write.

Rusty waited, with Tanya and Mark, out on the deck for their brother Barry to show, but he never did.  When Rusty left, Lauren came to the door and gave him a hug.  He smelled just like Jimmy, cigarettes and beer.  

“Well, that was quite a night,” Lauren said to Mark, closing the door. “Those stories.”

“You liked those stories?”  Mark closed his eyes a blink.

“Are you okay?” Lauren asked.

“Just tired.  Rusty said he would check in on Jimmy.  On my dad.”  

“I’m going to jot down some things I just remembered.” Lauren gestured toward the dining room, her waiting notebook. 

Mark’s eyes looked red. Too much cigarette smoke, Lauren thought. 

He brushed his lips on the top of her head. “Okay, then,” Mark said.

He went up the stairs, past the photos hanging there, the artful black and whites Lauren had taken of the family over the years, all arranged neatly in their matching gallery frames.

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