The Kind of Luxuries We Felt We Deserved

Playboy's College Fiction Contest Winner

University of Iowa

my stepbrother Donny's 12th birthday was all boys and Melanie, my stepsister. I deejayed, but it was no use. Donny and his friends just grouped up in a half circle behind the turntable and kept requesting the same three Van Halen songs. From our spot near the sink, Melanie and I watched the boys bump shoulders while one of them tried jumping into a half-split in front of the refrigerator. After a while, Melanie got sick of the Van Halen and told Donny that his friends had no chance of ever getting girlfriends if this was the coolest they knew how to be. Finally, the boys got bored and began poking around the house for some action. A few of them ended up in the garage fooling around with my free weights and looking through Donny's new Car and Driver, and the rest took off behind the pool and started smoking a joint in the backyard.

Melanie wanted to dance now on the Chattahoochee stone floor of the screened back patio. She was looking tight and nasty, and she knew I'd want to see her shake that body. In the bathroom earlier I had stood aside while she whipped her hair around getting ready for the party. She'd asked me to smell the rose-citrus perfume on her collarbone and tell her whether I thought Bobby, her old boyfriend, would like it. I put my nose in her moussed hair on the way down. She knew I was in the bathroom to see what she had on. A black nylon shirt and a big yellow beach towel. We had bedrooms across the hall from each other.

When I wouldn't play the song she wanted, Melanie went to her room and called a guy. I could hear his truck gurgle up to the house a half hour later. She clapped her heels down the hallway tiles and called one of Donny's friends a starved little pervert on the way out. The boys who had been smoking came back inside and wanted to get into the liquor, but I wasn't about to let them do that.

"Stop giggling like it's your first time," I said, "and maybe I'll let you watch some cable."

Our parents came home before the good movies started. Liz brought a sheet cake from Publix for Donny, with a Matchbox car and the number 12 in blue plastic on the icing. For a present she had gotten him a pair of ten-pound dumbbells, the kind I had told him to ask her for. Donny's friends wanted to take their paper plates back outside to listen to more Van Halen on the patio. My dad asked where Melanie was.

"I have no idea," I said.

"What do you mean, no idea?" Liz said.

"She didn't tell me."

"So she just left?"

"I'm telling you, lady," my dad said.

"Your daughter is out of control."

"Listen you, friend. I'll worry about my daughter. You just keep worrying about you and your son."

"Everybody's been partying just fine without her," I said.

"That's right," said the scrawny pervert kid who had been hooting at Melanie.

"Let's enjoy some birthday cake," Liz suggested to Donny and all his friends, "and then Larry and I are going to have to drive you little guys home."

•

Melanie got back about 1:30 and cuh-clacked cuh-clacked down to her room. I could tell no one in the house was asleep when she threw her purse down on her bed. She went into the bathroom to take off her makeup, and Liz followed her. They were in there for a while. Melanie said "Goodnight, Mom" real loud, and they went back to their rooms. I could hear Liz creak into bed on the other side of my wall. My dad wasn't snoring yet. The fan was on but not the air conditioner. I had just a sheet over me. I was hot.

Melanie waited about ten minutes before she came to my room. The way she would do it, she really didn't give a shit. Melanie in pink heels, heavy stepping on the carpet, the collarbone that I liked so much, baby bread-roll neck, acid-wash jeans with fringes along the seams, the blonde bangs curled with (continued on page 108)Luxuries(continued from page 92) mousse and sprayed down to her eyebrows, fat, rolling, sexy, and I couldn't wait until she would kneel down in front of my pullout sleeper and put her elbows on my legs.

"You suck," she said.

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm just kidding."

"What did you do tonight?" I said.

"How much do you want to know?" she said.

She bit her lip and touched my chest. I flexed.

"Was it Bobby?"

"Bobby's an asshole."

"So where'd you go then?"

"Chris' boat."

"Chris the contractor?"

"He is so cool."

"I thought he lived in the Keys."

"I told my mom I went to the game. You better not say anything."

"Your mom's a bitch," I whispered.

"Oh yeah, and your dad."

We stopped talking and listened across the wall. Nothing but snoring and the cricking of bugs outside the window screen. It was dark in the room. I could not see Melanie's ears behind her hair. The hair was everywhere, over her shoulders and down to the tops of her breasts, with smoke, perfume, beer coming toward me, and the harbor I could imagine down off Old Cutler Road.

We didn't start talking again. Something felt different. Melanie's fingers moved down the sheet to what was waiting there between my legs. She held it there. I swallowed my breath. She was looking at me, the stupid look, when her eyes crossed and she looked like a retard. She had me. I was thinking of a 26-foot boat and her sitting at the bow.

I kept holding still. She had the tip of her tongue between her lips. Then Melanie did something no girl did before. She brought that sheet down and she tied it around my ankles. I looked up over my head and saw a lamp.

Melanie said to me, "I can't help myself anymore."

"No problem," I said.

I wondered what she was thinking of mine, if it was ugly to her or if she thought that Chris the contractor's was nicer or more mature. Afterward, Melanie was biting her lip again, and her hair smelled a little like me now, too.

"I think I love you," she said.

"You can do that any time you want," I said.

•

The next day was Saturday, and when I walked into the kitchen for cereal, Liz was in her purple quilted robe and fuzzy slippers, picking at leftover birthday cake and browsing catalogs and junk mail. She was a board, no body, just long and bony like all the women my dad ever went out with. Donny sitting next to her with his new ten-pound iron dumbbells at his feet. I could hear my dad coming in through the garage from a run.

"Were there boys smoking marijuana cigarettes in this house last night?" Liz said to me.

"No," I said.

Donny sat sideways in his chair, facing the pool.

"Did you see any of the boys here last night smoking marijuana cigarettes?"

Donny curled a dumbbell with his right arm. I could tell she had already questioned him.

"I didn't see anybody doing anything."

"This is my house, Mr. Vince. And you're an influence on these children. What in the hell were you doing last night while we were gone? Dealing drugs at a birthday party?"

"What's your problem, Liz? You already know what I was doing last night. I was playing music, like Donny asked me to."

"And that's all you know about the drugs?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Well, I think you're a liar."

"Well, I think you're a schnauzer."

My dad walked into the kitchen in his blue running shorts. His quads had some definition. Donny was still looking out at the pool. He knew if he turned around and looked at me, I might come over there and beat his face.

"Larry."

"That's me."

"Donny's friend Todd's mother called this morning. Todd told her some of the boys last night went out to the backyard and smoked marijuana cigarettes. While we were gone and your son was in charge.

My dad was breathing heavily. His running shoes had mud on the soles. Sweat was trickling into his headband and down the hair on his arms to his wristbands.

"You know about that, Donny?" he asked, holding up the side entrance to the kitchen with his hands.

"Donny wasn't involved. This wasn't all the boys, just some of them."

"Who started it?" my dad asked Donny.

"She's trying to tell me I gave them pot," I said.

"Who was in charge?" Liz said to my dad. "And watch your shoes, please, on the kitchen floor."

My dad jumped up and started curling himself on the lintel at the kitchen entrance. He did one pull-up, then two. He kept his legs straight. One of Liz' framed pictures, with oranges and grapefruits and a border of white blossoms, shook on the wall behind the table.

"If that breaks."

"You're hysterical," my dad said. "You know that?"

"Get out of my kitchen," Liz said. Then she hollered it. "Just get out of my sight, and take him with you. I don't want one more day of this."

•

My dad and I showered and went to the movies. After that we went looking for an apartment. We stuck to the area near Dixie above 136th, near where we lived. Every manager wanted to rent to my dad. He had a decent job, and he brought cash. But my dad couldn't settle on an apartment. Not even the one that had a sauna, a Jacuzzi, a pool, a basketball court, a shuffleboard court, a game room, a security guard and about 20 fine single women in bikinis lying out and sipping drinks from fluorescent plastic cups. He just kept saying to me, "One divorce is one thing, two divorces--it's humiliating."

•

The next week Liz stopped talking to me completely. Two words at a time, most. "My refrigerator!" "My house!" I could see that she and my dad were going to start losing it on each other soon, but I didn't give a shit. I was working light construction during the week, and I was getting big. My upper body was smoking. Weekends, I would bench rounds of 180 in the garage and polish it off with some lats. I kept wishing Liz would lay a finger on me the wrong way, so I could pick her up with one fist and crack her over my knee. Instead, she kept spazzing about little things. She would come out to the garage in the middle of my workout and stretch over me for a broom like my body was the biggest inconvenience to her. Or she would come up behind me in the pantry, wagging a finger, and (continued on page 165)Luxuries (continued from page 108) I would flex my shoulders and pecs and just growl in her face--ruff ruff ruff, grrrr. Melanie asked me to be nicer to her mom. I said, "For you, Melanie," and I brought my hips up closer to her chest and slid a leg across her cushiony body.

Melanie liked to come in my room when our parents were making up. She would kneel in the dark in front of my pullout sleeper making sexy breath noises in my ear while her fingernails skated across the rips in my abs. We couldn't hear the words our parents were saying on the other side of the wall, but we knew from their voices what they meant. If the TV was on, that was a peace sign. It meant the grown-ups had gotten in a better mood, and they'd be fucking the creaks out of the bed frame soon. Their starting in was like the sound of rails splitting to me. Their voices hush, Liz legs spreading, coochie-coo, and you could feel the jolting of the headboard. Melanie and I would stop what we were doing, sit up in the shadows of each other's bodies, me hating her mom, her hating my dad, and crack up to ourselves about the way grown-ups were until she was sucking on her lower lip and I was holding whatever parts of her were closest to my hands.

Melanie started spending less time at home. She was getting more involved with Chris the contractor, who was 27 and had a mustache. She was skipping school and going sailing with him. She kept telling me how mature he was. She would tell me this like I should be jealous. Her mom didn't know about this guy. When she got Ds in geometry and U.S. history, Liz asked her if she needed a tutor. Melanie told Liz her teachers hated her. Liz believed her. At dinner my dad told Melanie her problem was laziness. He asked her if she planned to graduate. Then Liz cleared her throat and made my dad look at me.

"Living at home, almost 19 years old, flunks his first exam at community college and decides he's just going to drop out. I think before you criticize someone else's child, you ought to take a good look at the one who belongs to you. Speaking of laziness, not to mention a future."

"I'm saving for a car," I said. I wanted to call Liz a bitch. A nasty bitch with a slut daughter. "And a better set of speakers."

Liz wouldn't talk to me. She wouldn't look at me.

"You're not buying a car until we talk about it," my dad said.

He was trying anything he could think of to bond with Liz.

"I'm getting a Testarossa when I'm 21," Donny said.

"And you're taking me to the beach," Melanie said.

"If I feel like it."

•

One night, Donny knocked on my door when Melanie was inside with her fingers on my balls. He said he had to use the dictionary for a school paper. The lights were off, and I was wearing just a pair of sweatshorts. Melanie had on a plump white undershirt and dancing tights. I was warm and stiff and I dragged the sheet up over myself.

"I don't care," is what he said.

I turned on the lamp. Donny was a porky little brown-haired dude in an Italian-striped racing shirt and colored underwear.

"You don't care, what?" his sister said.

"Anything."

"Donny, are you just going to stand there half naked or are you going to get whatever you came in here for and leave?"

"I don't have to listen to your ass," Donny said.

I checked out Melanie's rolls in the light by the bookcase. I wondered what her and Donny's father looked like. Who'd mated with Liz and produced these two?

"Just wait till you need me," Melanie said.

"For what?" Donny said.

"Wait till you're trying to get a girlfriend. I could say whatever I want to them about you. Just remember that."

Donny made a pathetic muscle and showed it to me.

"When I do my curls, I keep my back straight," he said.

"You're getting there," I said. "Now you got to gradually increase your sets. And remember your breathing. But don't overdo it. You're just a kid."

"Why don't you go work some of that baby fat off right now, Donny? I don't think anyone invited you into Vince's room," Melanie said.

Donny looked at me.

"You heard her," I said.

Melanie sat back against the wall on my sleeper. My dad shouted out to us to get in our own beds. Melanie made a face. There were sea-grape leaves and hibiscus bushes outside shaking from the long, whistling gusts of wind.

•

That Saturday we were supposed to have brunch as a family at 11 o'clock. It was already storming when I woke up, the big raindrops popping against the shutters and bushes. We waited at the table for Melanie, who I knew would be hungover. At three in the morning she had shown up in my room wasted, in heavy mascara and a pink net blouse, blubbering "Chris is an asshole" onto my leg. She smelled like puke and rose citrus. I didn't want to see her cry. I lifted her into her own bed.

At 11, Liz was walking through the kitchen in her quilted robe like she had something to say and she wasn't saying it. I was sitting at the table across from Donny. In a paper-thin jogging suit, my dad was flipping French toast and singing "Rain, rain, go away." He put out the napkins and the silverware. None of us could hear Melanie moving in the back of the house.

"I'm going to count to ten, and I promise I will not lose my patience," my dad said.

I turned around, and Liz took a hard look at me.

"Do you know what time she got in last night?"

"What are you asking me for? Didn't you sleep in this house last night?"

"Don't answer her like that, Vince," my dad said.

"I don't know when," I said to my dad. "Maybe Donny knows. Donny knows all."

Donny had wandered out onto the patio floor, which had puddles all around the edges of the pool. He was barefoot with his head down, punting up little splashes of water with his toes. He was moving away from us. The sliding glass door to the patio was open, and it was moist in the kitchen and loud from the rain.

"Do you know or don't you?" my dad said.

"I don't know," I said.

Liz walked to the back of the house. My dad put the oval serving plate of French toast in the middle of the table next to the syrup, the jam and the margarine. Everyone had a cut grapefruit on a plate.

"Now!" my dad called to Donny.

Then he lowered his voice and leaned down to me.

"I'm asking you not to push Liz."

We ate brunch without Melanie. Liz kept giving me looks in the silences. My dad finally asked about Melanie's status. Liz said she wasn't going to make it to the table, and my dad said that was obvious. He took Melanie's grapefruit and put it on his own plate. Then he realized he was about to start another fight, and he asked Liz if Melanie was feeling OK. Liz said she thought Melanie had a fever. My dad put his fist in his teeth and looked at his wife with puffy eyes.

After brunch Liz was going to take Donny to Cutler Ridge Mall, but Donny couldn't find his money. He whimpered about how he'd put a twenty right next to his bed yesterday. Liz said they'd find it later, she wanted to get out of the house now. My dad said, after they left, "Let's just take a drive."

We ran out to the driveway with our hoods over our heads. He turned the ignition, but he didn't shift into gear.

"Do you think we should just move out?" he said to me. He was staring at the flat-tile roof of the house.

"I didn't marry her," I said.

Above my dad's head I could see the patterns of rainwater beating down on the T-top. His gold chain was outside the zipper of his jacket, and he had deep lines across his forehead that looked like ripples of muscle to me.

"I won't get anything," my dad said. "I'll get half of nothing. It'll all be hers."

"It was all hers to begin with," I said.

"That's not what marriage is supposed to be," he said. "It's supposed to be half and half."

"It was never equal. Her last husband was loaded."

"But we've bought a lot of things together," my dad said with a crack in his voice.

"Well, we'll take them," I said.

"If we do leave," he said, "you have to treat Liz with dignity."

I looked at my father. I didn't know what he was talking about. I knew Liz had some kind of control over him, and once he told me he was in love with her. I felt sorry for him. I wondered what it was like to be forced to still care about someone like Liz six years later. I clicked the garage door closed and looked in one more time at my bench and free weights. I could picture Melanie lying on her back with stuffed animals and messed hair all around her, winding the curly phone cord across her bed, talking on the phone with some other guy.

•

The next day when my dad got back from a long run, he told me the plan for how we were going to move out. He sounded scared, but like he was going to do it. Tomorrow he would make a deposit on a two-bedroom apartment in the complex with the sauna and all the females. Since Liz worked three days as a hygienist, 8:30 to 4:30, my dad and I would both take a day off work one of those days, rent a van and move out as much stuff as we could while she was gone. We could probably make it with all our stuff in three trips.

My dad set the date for a week from Wednesday. It was in the middle of the workweek, in the middle of the month, so Liz would never suspect.

"This is the best way," he said to me more than once, confidentially, that week. "Because I want to be fair, and at the same time I know that if I sat down with her and tried to reason out a separation, there'd be fireworks. You've seen how unreasonable she's been getting the past few months."

Now my dad was telling me every reason he had ever thought of why it was a good idea to move out of Liz' house. What a temper she had, how bossy she could be, how moody. He busted on Melanie. She was proof that Liz was a bad deal. Melanie was an overweight, out-of-control delinquent, and Donny a spoiled child. If Liz had ever really cared about their marriage, she'd have put him before them once in a while.

Alone in my room, I practiced how many clothes I could carry in my arms at one time. How many magazines, lamps and porcelain figurines of Liz'. The move on Wednesday was making me feel like I was leading a two-man adventure quest. I stood on the thin foam mattress of my pullout sleeper and struck Mr. Universe poses. "Can our hero safely liberate the palace treasure before the dragon witch returns and starts breathing down spears of fire?" I asked out loud.

I consoled Melanie about Chris. She told me her problems, and I listened to them. If she wanted to give me a blow job afterward, I let her. I rested my head back on my hands and let her get to work. I was out of there. I didn't give a shit.

•

The morning of the move, all of us wound up in the kitchen at the same time. Liz was wearing her all-whites, and she had her wiry hair up in barrettes the way she always wore it to the office. Melanie had on a large football jersey from our high school with a lineman's number on it. Tight-ass jeans and plenty of lip gloss. She was pouring two glasses of Five Alive by the sink for herself and Donny. My dad was next to the refrigerator, chugging coffee.

"I'm leaving," Liz said. "Be good."

"Love you, Mom," Melanie said. "We will."

"All right, Larry," Liz said.

"I'll see you," my dad said, like he was about to cry.

Liz kissed Donny on the forehead. Donny had pretty much stopped talking to me, too, lately. He picked up his things and walked to the bus stop.

In a few minutes Melanie went out the front door to wait for her ride. I went down the pathway after her. Her tight jeans were looking good.

"Is number 61 Hector Villanueva?" I said when our feet were on the edge of the street. I used to play some JV cornerback.

Melanie was looking up the block to see if anyone was turning our way.

"Uh-huh," she said.

"I know that guy."

"Yeah, he said he knew you."

"That guy can squat," I said. "Especially for a Cuban."

Melanie wasn't saying anything about him.

"How much is he squatting now?" I asked her.

"I only just started hanging out with him," she said. "I can just tell you he's built."

A car came up our street, but it wasn't Melanie's ride. Already the sky was blue like the middle of the day, with a sun you couldn't put your eyes near, and all the big white clouds were whizzing by over other people's houses.

"Are you into him?" I said.

I checked out Melanie from the side. She shrugged and pushed out her lips.

"Doesn't he have a black Trans Am?" I said.

"Stick."

"I bet it's nice inside."

"Leather interiors."

"When were you guys hanging out?"

"Why are you asking me all this shit?"

"I don't know. I'm just trying to remember what the guy's like."

"He's hot," Melanie said. "He's fuckin' hot is all I can say."

Melanie had her fingers combing through the back of her hair and her curvy ass sticking out in my direction. She was wearing Wayfarers and looking upward slightly. I was standing there taking her in and not just her body. Her face. What it really looked like in the daylight, the shape of it around the sunglasses. The way her mouth would smile and perk up when she saw Villanueva in the parking lot before school.

"That guy's on 'roids, isn't he?"

"Excuse me?" she said.

"I knew it."

I wanted Melanie to look at me, at my arms, the color of my tan and the definition. Then I said to her, "You're going to be late." I said it twice.

"Could you write me a note, please? Daddy?"

"Funny," I said. "Nice mood today."

"I'm just kidding."

"That's cool," I said.

A bunch of girls pulled up in a white Rabbit on the other side of the street, and Melanie got in the far door with her books against Villanueva's jersey. I walked back into the house past the banyan tree with its long mossy branches set up along the gutters of the roof.

My dad started getting panicky in the garage, but I calmed him down. We got a van with a luggage rack on top.

"All right," he said in the driveway with the garage door open. "I just want you to get our stuff. I don't want you even touching anything that belongs to Melanie or Donny. You understand me? We're going to do this completely fair and square. You carry, I'll load. Then I'll go do a check inside and make sure we got everything."

My dad kept stopping and catching his breath.

"What about stuff that's both of yours?" I said. "Like the bedroom TV. And what about the gas grill? That stuff?"

"Anything we bought while we were married, we'll deal with that at the end. Just get all the stuff that's only ours first. That's going to take at least two trips by itself."

I had on my brace for lifting. The first thing I grabbed was my dad's exercise bike. Then all the other things of his that took two hands. Most of what was in my dad's bedroom belonged to Liz anyway--the bed, the artwork, the chest of drawers. I emptied his half of their walk-in closet and laughed at how lopsided it looked. I gathered big clumps, stretching my arms around them.

We took the first load over to the new apartment complex around 11:30. Our unit was on the second floor. We unloaded the van and stacked everything in a mixed-up pile right inside the front door. A shoe falling in a blender, a jump rope around a jockstrap. I was bolting up and down the stairs about three times as fast as my dad, leaping from a few steps up and landing on the run.

"You got to pick up the pace," I said. "Don't get beat by the heat."

We were both sweating like animals when we got back to the house. No shirts. My dad was bouncing on the tips of his shoes on the hot driveway, waiting while I cleared more stuff out of the house. He kept looking around the crazy trunk of the banyan tree to see if anyone was coming. He told me to go faster, just get the important stuff. He was starting to get worried that Liz would come home before we were finished, think that we were stripping the house and lose her mind.

The more worried my dad got, the rowdier it made me. I was starting to want to do everything he had instructed me not to. Just take random shit from everywhere and throw it in towels and load it up. I had the air conditioner down to a nice moving temperature. A rolled bandanna around my forehead, cutoff blue jeans, the leather brace and steel-toed work boots. I felt wild.

In front of Donny's room, I plotted what kind of damage I could do and how quickly. What could I take that would piss Liz off the most? I jumped up and slapped the hallway ceiling, straight vertical, ten times in a row. The idea that I was never going to have to look at Liz' face again was making me feel like anything was possible for me. I did 20 clap push-ups and ten more on fists.

With my chest out as far as it could go I flung open the door to my room. I didn't own much. What I had didn't even fill up the van. My dad said don't forget the rest of his kitchen stuff, and living room stuff and patio stuff. While I was back inside, I started doing some rearranging. I tucked Liz' diaphragm under Donny's pillow. Then I dropped one of her silver rings in the toilet tank in the master bathroom. After that I turned over all the photographs of her and my dad together.

A few more trips, and I wasn't satisfied. So I began taking. I wanted Liz to know that she hadn't gotten away with the last six years. I took all the quarters out of her change tray in the pantry, dumped them in a pillowcase with some other things she would notice were missing, like her two-liter plastic bottles of Diet Coke, and carried the whole package out to my dad in a paper grocery bag. I took Donny's ten-pound dumbbells, wrapped in one of my sheets. I wanted more, so I went for Donny's baby teeth that Liz kept in a little lined box in her bathroom. I put the clasp box in my front pocket until I could decide if I really wanted to take it.

By 3:30, the second load was at the new apartment, and my shoulders were getting pooped. Now my dad had to make the big decisions. What to do about the three major items he and Liz had acquired as a couple: the Sony color television in the bedroom, which had remote and a better picture by far than the living room TV; the gas grill, which he had gotten the deal on from knowing the floor manager at Service Merchandise; and the Chinese screen that Liz had picked out at an art fair on Key Biscayne, and which my grandparents had bought for them as an anniversary gift.

My dad wanted to discuss these three items with me. He said, "Disregard all the money I've spent over the years on repairs and improvements to the house."

I said no question, the gas grill was ours. My dad did all the grilling, replaced the canister. Liz would not miss the grill. My dad agreed.

The other two items were a different story. Liz was attached to that television, and she had a possessiveness about the painted bamboo screen, too. We were going to have to pick one or the other.

I uncabled the TV and hoisted it with my elbows. My dad wanted to make a final sweep of the house while I packed up my weights and gear from the garage. We would roll out the gas grill together as the last thing, close up the house and stop for subs on the way over to the new apartment.

In the doorway leading out to the garage, with the sweaty TV almost slipping in my fingers, I practically knocked into Melanie and Donny. Melanie had a fat new hickey. Her breasts were shapes of hills coming up out of the six and one of Villanueva's shirt.

"You really think you're taking my mom's TV?" she said.

I was looking at her neck. I could feel the weariness in my arms.

"I know you didn't take anything out of my room," she said.

"I'm just doing what my dad told me to," I said.

The garage smelled like a swamp. I tried to let the two of them by, but they didn't want to move.

I kept waiting for Melanie to do something extreme. Grab the TV, beg me not to leave. Maybe wrestle me down and have Donny pile on.

"What, did you and Brainiac just skip work and try and get whatever you could out of the house when my mom wasn't looking?"

My dad came around the front of the garage, gesturing to me in confused hand signals. Melanie shot a repulsed look at him, and she and Donny took off past me for the back of the house. I felt a cool little rush of breeze from Melanie. I held the scent of it in my nose. I let it wash across my face.

"I think we probably ought to get going pretty quick," my dad said. His gold chain was swinging against his chest of hair. His work slacks looked tight around the middle.

"No shit," I said, walking the TV to the van.

I started hating the van. I started hating everything that was going on the whole day. The bags in the back, everything I'd switched around. I threw my brace into the van and shut the doors.

"What time is it?" my dad said. "I got to make sure that I get everything I need out."

"I'm not leaving without every single one of my weights."

"First you're helping me get the grill."

"I'm telling you, Donny is not going to get those weights."

"I'm telling you, she's not going to walk away with two out of three."

I followed my dad to the back patio, and we started rolling the gas grill across the Chattahoochee floor. The sound of the squeaking and rolling made me want to kick something hard. Donny opened a door from the bathroom and shut it right away. I could picture the expression on his pudgy white face when he realized his little curl bar was gone. His box of baby teeth kept rubbing against my thigh. I was walking backward. He saw my eyes.

My dad and I were pulling the grill across the grass to the driveway when Liz showed up. My dad's arms clenched. His mouth was a straight line.

He walked slowly toward the van, and I stayed put on the grass. Then I walked behind the van on the other side of it from my dad and her. I didn't know the plan. I stayed at the back of the driveway behind the van, almost on our next-door neighbors' lawn.

"You are shit," Liz said to my dad from in front of the garage. "You are so full of shit I can't believe it."

They were less than three yards from each other, and Liz was standing, guarding the inside of the garage. My weights were behind her. She had taken out her barrettes, and she looked as though she had a black-and-gray terrier lying across her head.

"Where are my children?" she said.

"They're in there," my dad said.

"So what are you going to do now? Pack up the grill, call it a day? Huh? That's not your grill, partner. Not."

Liz waited. My dad didn't talk.

"God help you if you took one single thing out of this house that doesn't belong to you."

Liz waited again for my dad to say something.

"You just stay right where you are," she said.

"This is my home as well as your home," my dad said. "And I'm going to go in there and get the rest of what's mine."

"Don't threaten me, Lawrence. Bad idea."

Liz went inside. Her white hygienist outfit made everything feel more serious. My dad stepped back toward me, and I came up close to him.

"I'm not taking any chances with her," he whispered. "I want you to go call the police. I mean it. I'm not taking any chances. I'm going to try and settle this with her the peaceful way, but I want them here just in case. There are still things I need to get out of the bedroom--and we're taking that grill."

The way the sky was, and the sun, it felt like it had been the middle of the day all day.

•

I took my dad's car up to Old Cutler Road and called the police from a gas station. I said there was a domestic situation. The whole time the lady on the other end was talking to me, I was thinking of Melanie's bedroom. Me with my knees on her comforter and Melanie doing her nails over the carpet, telling me things in private.

I drove back to the house about ten miles an hour. I kept punching the buttons, looking for anything decent that wasn't love songs or talking. I parked a ways up from the driveway and walked very slowly across the front lawn toward the garage.

I didn't have to see her to know Liz was on the warpath. My dad had apparently done something to piss her off royally. And not just my dad. Vince is a lying thief, Vince is a bully, Vince thinks he can bluh bluh bluh bluh bluh bluh bluh. Talking about marijuana and a $20 bill and bullshit from five years ago that I didn't even know what she was talking about. I got up closer so I could see her. She was standing with her knees in position like an ogre in dentist-office clothes ready to defend its cave. She said if either one of us touched another thing that belonged to her, she was going to go into that kitchen, get her sashimi knife and cut him up.

Now I had my boot against the back fender of the van. All five of us again. The dumb faces of Melanie and Donny on the steps at the back of the garage. Our parents between us. My dad wanting to whisper something in my ear, but I wouldn't lean in to hear it.

"Well, I guess she told us," I said pretty loud. I was ready to go toe-to-toe with Liz. Once and for all. I was ready to pick her up by the hair, swing her around the garage a couple times over my head and whack her up against my bench set.

Melanie pfffed like she was so disgusted about something, she couldn't take it. I gave her a look. I let her know she wasn't all privileged and special now that she was letting some 'roid-freak lineman suck on her neck.

My dad told Liz he had only wanted to divide things up the fairest way. She didn't need to overreact like this. "The marriage has run its course," he said. "We can both agree on that."

He said to Liz, "I just want to get some papers from the bedroom. I'm not even going to discuss the grill right now, OK? We'll let the lawyers do that."

"Just get out!" she said. "Leave. And don't you dare stand there and tell me I'm overreacting. Goddamned coward. You and coward junior slinking around my house all day with a moving van while I'm at work. How the hell do I know what the two of you took?"

Liz was turning pink and red. I was just standing back, checking out my triceps, letting my dad do all the work.

Liz waved Melanie and Donny back inside the house. Donny looked at me the way I raised him to look at me, like he better respect me or keep his fucking head down. Melanie I wondered. What she might start saying about me now when I wasn't around.

I could see the green-and-white sheriff's car pull up in the front yard under the banyan tree while Liz was still screaming her lungs out about dignity-her-ass. One big old flappy-cheeked Dade County sheriff behind the wheel with a writing pad and a shotgun right there next to him.

Liz saw the car on the lawn and started patting herself all over, nervous. She put a barrette between her lips, then pinned back one side of her hair. I waited for her to pin back the other side, but she didn't, and by the time the sheriff was walking up to us, she looked even battier than she did before.

My dad didn't bother to put on a shirt. I didn't either.

"Folks," the cop said, pacing toward my dad. He was about my dad's age, nicely shaven, with a big, beige patrol-man's hat on, and uniform pants tucked into knee-high black boots. "Came to check on a disturbance. This the proper residence?"

"Yes it is, sir," my dad said.

Three of Donny's friends came by on motocross bikes, saw us, checked out the sheriff's rifle and his V8 Caprice, and walked their bikes into the house through the front door. It was the first time all day I noticed anyone on the block even being around.

I had my eyes on the cop, his mirrored sunglasses hanging off his shirt pocket. He was nodding and sweeping his eyes around. Taking notes.

"I don't see any disturbance," the cop said.

"Actually, sir, my wife has stated that I am forbidden to enter my own house."

"You let your wife talk to you like that?" the cop said.

"Not usually," my dad said. "No. But she's been getting a little rough around the edges today. You know."

"This your residence?"

"It is my residence. My son and I live here, and we want to be able to go into the house peacefully and get the rest of what belongs to us.

We all looked at Liz. She had a face like she was choking on ideas.

"Officer, I can't believe what's going on here."

The sheriff stood there and gave Liz the once-over. Chewing on his ink pen, jotting down notes.

"Officer, that man and his son went into my house while I was at work today and put things in that van that do not belong to them. The definition is stealing. Stealing is what that is. That grill belongs on my patio, and that television belongs to me too. And my son is missing things. Valuable things. You can put that in your report. And there's going to be other things, except I haven't even looked around yet to see what else. You know, if the chicken liver wanted to move out so much, nobody was stopping him. Do you see me stopping him from moving out now? I'd prefer it if he left."

"Lady, let's get this straight. I am not the judge."

The cop paused to make sure we were all listening. His radio was steady, the static over the dispatcher's other calls.

"Festivities are over. End of round one. Going to be nothing else going, nothing else coming. I'm working on 16 hours straight, and I've seen all the trouble I'm going to see for today."

My dad was starting to get mopey now--drooping his eyes, hanging his face, holding himself like you'd think someone was forcing him to stand up on his own two feet.

"And there's been plenty of it," the sheriff said. "First thing this morning took a dashboard out of a baby's sternum. Going to be half the right side of that kid's face. Bloodbath. Perfectly avoidable, too. Vehicle trying to pass on a two-lane across a double-yellow. So I spent all morning with the kid in emergency, spent the rest of the day helping out on a kook with a hostage, and my work isn't done yet. Got to stop at Eckerd's after this, pick up some vapor rub for the mother-in-law, or no one's letting me in the front door when I get home. See, it's trouble and a mess out there, but so easily avoided. You gentlemen have another place to sleep tonight?"

"Yes, sir," my dad said.

"Suggest you lay it down for today."

I'd never taken my eyes off the sheriff. His bulletproof upper body, the knife on his belt. He had a legitimate chest. I was judging from his upper arms.

"Excuse me," I said. "I just have one request."

I looked the sheriff in the eyes. I wanted him to know I was different from my dad and Liz.

"What if there's one thing of mine, right in the garage, that I could just load up in about five minutes? It's all it would take. Anybody can watch me."

"Son, how's your hearing?"

My dad muttered that we were on our way. He said we would get the court to give us the rest of what was ours.

Liz was still standing in front of the garage, waiting for us all to take off. I looked in behind her at my 180-pound bar on the bench stand. I could picture her throwing the iron wells one by one against the floor of the garage after I was gone, or clearing out everything that was mine in there and promising to buy Donny a whole new set of weights.

The sheriff nodded to us and got on his radio. Then we drove toward the new apartment complex in a kind of procession. First the sheriff, then me, then my dad in the rental van. When we got to Dixie, the sheriff turned left. I honked goodbye and waved out the T-top. The sheriff flashed his yellow roof lights, and I honked some more and blasted the speakers.

•

The rest of the week I called in sick. I kept going for swims and taking showers. I used Liz' quarters on video games. I set up my stereo, but that was it.

My dad kept bellyaching how much worse this was. He ate frozen enchiladas by himself on the carpet. He asked if I thought things were really over with Liz. I put on some trunks and went down to find the sauna.

I had never actually been in a sauna before. It was just a wood-slat stall with a wood-slat bench. I shut the door behind me and stripped naked in the room. I found the heat dial on the wall and turned it up to the max. I was thinking about that baby that lost half its face.

I tightened my abs and let them go. I pretended I lost half my own face. With my fingers like a cutting knife, I cut myself down the line of my nose and all the way down the middle of my skin. I kept one eye shut the whole time I was cutting. Then I cut the base of my belly in half. Then halfway diagonal across my chest. I cut an X where my sternum made the center. I made squiggle cuts all over my flesh.

Afterward I took a Jacuzzi and let the water swirl around in the net of my trunks. It was Saturday afternoon, and there were bodies galore. The whole scene outside the community building was blowing me away, the landscaping of the walking paths, the vanilla smell of lotion, the row of green coconut palms in the turf around the pool. The place was loaded. I approved. I could hear Jimmy Buffett playing on somebody's tape deck. Guys at the hibachi were getting high. There were girls with loose bikini strings getting rid of their tan lines, rubbing their shoulders down with cocoa butter and tropical oils.

I had my left arm at ease along the edge of the tub. Across from me, a couple of stewardesses were dipping their toes in the steaming water, talking about their hectic flying schedules. Now they were laughing about the bubbles and climbing in. They had one-piecers on but some action underneath.

As soon as they were sitting, one reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a cold bottle of pink champagne. "We've got to celebrate, Julie," she said.

Behind me, in the rush of the water jets, I could feel Melanie's excited hams around my ass, the pulse from her body streaming under my legs. I felt the grip of thighs, the press of breasts to my back.

The stewardesses raised a toast. They clicked their cups as if they were about to sail off on a cruise.

Now I could feel Melanie beside me, and I tried to think of some way that all of us could get acquainted. We live in the Palm Springs apartments, too, I rehearsed in my head. Personally, I work construction, and Melanie here's still in school. We used to have a house together not far from here, but it didn't have the kind of luxuries we felt we deserved.

On the other side of the tub, Julie was pinching herself about her new promotion and tipping some champagne on the other one's hair. "Par-ty," they said together.

I still couldn't get over the landscaping job. I stretched an arm a little farther around Melanie's shoulder and asked her if she could believe all this was ours. I was pretty sure she was starting to feel more at home in the Jacuzzi. Just the way she was biting her lip and not saying anything, moving in closer like nobody was watching.

Melanie's fingers moved down the sheet to what was waiting between my legs. I swallowed my breath.

Second place was won by Bonnie Jo Campbell of Western Michigan University. Third prizes went to Kevin Brockmeier of the University of Iowa, John Warner Fulton of the University of Michigan and Josh Pryor of San Francisco State University.