Clyde handed her the letter. She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and read with moving lips. Some of it she read out loud as Clyde paced the tiny, checkered pink and baby blue linoleum floor. It was the ugliest floor Clyde had ever seen. “Well,” his mom said, dropping the hand that held the letter. “I don’t know. Just ignore it.”
Clyde snatched the letter and slapped it down on the counter by the old push-button cash register that didn’t work anymore. It hardly needed to. “Can’t ignore it. Just makes it worse. You ignoring everything’s why we’re in the mess we’re in.”
“Well, ex-cuse me.”
He sat opposite her in one of her striped folding chairs, shaking his head. Getting this letter felt like a punch to the chest, it really did. “This is all I fucking need. They know how much I make in a week?” His mom watched him in a way that made him sick. He didn’t want to see pity in her eyes so he changed his tune. “Ah,” he said, waving a hand. “Whatever. You’re right. Anyway, I don’t even have eight hundred dollars. If I had eight hundred dollars, I’d . . . ” His thoughts drifted off into the possibilities.
She looked at him a moment longer before lifting the magazine again. “Lose your wallet?” she said behind it.
He jumped. “You find it?”
“No.” She shook her head against the drier. “But somebody did.”
Next to the register a phone number had been scribbled on an envelope in her shaky hand. “They leave a name or anything?” His mom didn’t say but when he looked over she was still shaking her head. He went into his small bedroom and closed the door. His TV was on, muted. Usually he just left it on, day and night, for company. He dialed, looking at the mounted buck above the television, a gift from Willie and, with a six-point rack, still the biggest deer Clyde had ever bagged. When the call connected, he heard TV noise in the background of the other end.
“What you want?” A man’s voice.
“Uh.” Clyde was confused. They were watching the same show as him but there was a slight delay between the sound in the phone and the picture on his TV.
“This Clyde Twitty, ain’t it?” the man said. That made Clyde even more confused. “Born August thirty-first, nineteen eighty-nine?” The man snickered. Okay, Clyde got what was happening. “Brown eyes, five foot eight inches tall, organ donor? Gonna save some alkie’s life with your virgin pink liver, are ya? You’re a regular Superman, Clyde Twitty. Hang on,” the man said, smothering the phone and yelling a name. A brief conversation followed before another phone picked up with a beep and a scrape. No one said anything.
“Hello?” said Clyde.
A girl spoke. “Uh, Dad, you can hang up now, I got it.”
“What are you wearing?” the man whispered, breathing heavily.
“Oh. My. God,” she said. “Dad!”
“So solly, daughter-san, belly belly solly,” the man whined. “Don’t be, uh, mad-oo wiz papa-san.” He put the receiver sloppily onto its cradle and was gone.
The woman said, “Sorry, buddy. My dad’s crazy. This Clyde Eugene Twitty?”
“Uh, yeah, but,” Clyde started. The sound of the TV coming through the phone fell away.
“You left your wallet in my Firebird, dipshit.” Now he remembered the hard seat, rushing to beat the clock, Jay Smalls, his daughter. “I’m just kiddin,” she said.
“Okay,” Clyde said. He got a pen off his bed and uncapped it. “Where you live?”
“My dad won’t let me say our address over the phone.” Clyde laughed, touched the pen to paper. “I’m serious,” she said. “Where you live?”
“Strasburg.”
“I know Strasburg ain’t exactly a thriving metropolis or nothin, buddy, but I figure you still got an actual street address?”
“You gonna bring my wallet to my house?” Clyde said. She didn’t reply. He gave her his address.
“I’m gonna send you an invitation to an event I’m holding Saturday. Come to that and you can have your wallet back.”
“That’s four days away.”
“Is it?”
“I could kinda use my wallet the next four days.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, buddy.”
Clyde figured his uncle’s twenty would last him. It didn’t look like he had any other choice. In the salon, the dryer shut off and his mom shuffled around the kitchen, making noise. She called Clyde’s name a couple times before giving up. When he finally came in a small chocolate cake and coffee sat on the table. “What’s all this?” he said.
“I,” his mom said with a great emphasis, “was offered a job.” She finished setting the table. “The Omega’s got a new hairdresser.”
“The old folk’s home?”
She nodded. “Sunday. One o’clock.” In addition to being her son, house cleaner, and accountant, Clyde was also his mom’s driver. “Don’t forget.”
“All right.”
“You gonna write it down?”
“When’s the last time I forgot to do something you asked me?” His mom looked up at him smiling. She was small, and getting smaller. “How about, uh, never?” he said.
Two days later Clyde got Tina’s invitation. It was a card covered by a picture of an old man with a droopy face looking surprised.
Dear Clyde Twitty,
You are cordially invited to the Summer 2011 Amway Sales Event at the Smalls residence in Liberty Ridge in Boonville, Missouri, this Saturday, May 28, to begin promptly at noon. Please arrive early for a good seat!
Sincerely,
Tina Smalls
P.S. Your wallet will be returned to you at the end of the event.
Clyde checked inside and out, but there was no house address, just “in Liberty Ridge in Boonville.” Tina had put a little asterisk after the word “residence” and written at the bottom, You’ll know it when you see it!
When Clyde got to Liberty Ridge he saw what Tina meant. Starting at a rock and metal sign by the roadside, which today had a handmade Amway Sales Event banner draped over it, the Liberty Ridge development spread out across an enormous slab of flat, barren land. There was a grid of new roads, hundreds of telephone poles and streetlamps, empty foundations as far as the eye could see, but only one house. It was a big house, more than twice the size of Clyde’s, split-level, painted yellow and white, and built on a square of springy green sod that ended at road on one side and dirt on the other three; it was the only real grass in the whole place.
A few vehicles were parked in the road. Tina waved from a picnic table in the yard where a small group had gathered. She said something to a woman and the woman walked over to Clyde. “Clyde Twitty?” she said, moving her cigarette to her other hand so they could shake. “I’m Tina’s mom. Jan.” Jan Smalls, Clyde thought, must have had Tina very young because she didn’t look much over thirty. She looked more like an older sister than a mother: the same pretty green eyes and summery skin, but darker hair, bigger teeth, and no makeup. Her fingernails were plain and saw-edged. She was thinner than Tina, with the hips of a boy and a flat ass, but her top half was all breast. A stained white T-shirt pulled so tightly around her front that Clyde had to curse himself not to look. His eyes flicked behind Jan to Jay, coming out of the house, and he thought he saw in the man’s crooked grin something like, I see you looking at