He listens, even though Danielle says, “No! Let’s stay up all night long!”
Johnny Rotten and I get Danielle onto her mattress, and then I say, “I’ll take it from here. Thanks.”
“You sure you’re good?”
“Yeah,” I say, and escort him out the front door.
When I return to her bedroom, Danielle’s giggling on her back with a fistful of bloody napkins on her nose.
“Please tell me you didn’t drive home,” I say to her.
“Relax. We were drinking at the Manor. Lisa made him walk me home,” she says and then starts laughing. “But I do like him. Very cute. Noticed a rather large bulge in his pants too.”
“You need to sleep it off, Danielle.” I bring her some water, and then I go back to Tommy, who looks whiter than the sheet covering his legs and torso.
“I didn’t like that guy,” Tommy says.
“Neither did I,” I say, wondering what would have happened to drunk Danielle if I weren’t here to put her to bed and send her escort home.
Of course Danielle sees our man again and makes him her regular boyfriend. Johnny Rotten’s real name turns out to be Randall Street, which has to be the dumbest name ever.
Many times, Tommy tells Portia and me that he doesn’t like Johnny Rotten, and we fumble around for what to say back to him, because Danielle seems happy, albeit distant. I ask her to double date with Portia and me, so I can get to know Johnny Rotten better and alleviate my fears, but Danielle just laughs and says, “We’re dating people from different planets. Let’s not start an intergalactic war, okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re happy. I’m happy. Let’s not push our luck. Just be happy with Portia independent of us. I’m fine. You’ve already done enough for me, big brother.”
The truth is that while I love my sister, and I really do, carrying her financially and emotionally has been draining. The break Johnny Rotten provides is somewhat of a relief.
And so when Portia gets her own place in Collingswood, a little two-bedroom apartment above a flower shop on Haddon Avenue, I gradually move most of my stuff over there. She sets up a small sofa bed in her office for Tommy, so that he can sleep over whenever Danielle asks us to babysit, which is often. Even though I am still paying the rent on the Oaklyn place, Tommy tells me that Johnny Rotten’s been staying there more and more.
Tommy doesn’t like jumping back and forth between the two apartments, but he’ll get used to it, and to Danielle’s new boyfriend, who seems okay, from what I’ve observed. If he makes my sister happy, well, then I’m all for that. And so I tell Tommy, “Look for the good in this guy. He may just surprise you.”
Portia’s writing a novel now. That’s what she does all day long.
I’ve never met anyone before who was writing a novel, and now my girlfriend is a full-time fiction writer, which makes me proud, I have to admit. It seems so glamorous, even though no one is paying her to write this book, it’s just something she does alone in a room. She says she can get an agent when she finishes and then that agent can sell the book to a publishing house in New York City—“a real one,” she’s always saying. She reads books about how to do it and chats with all of these other writers on the Internet, which makes her hopeful.
Portia works with her door closed and always covers the laptop screen with her hands whenever I knock and stick my head in. She says she can’t talk about her book because the talking will rob her of the creative energy she needs to write, which sounds a little like bullshit to me, but what do I know. She even wears this lucky hat when she’s working—it’s a pink Phillies baseball hat that they gave her for free on ladies’ night at the ballpark when one of my customers slipped us tickets as a tip. The writing makes her so joyous—she seems determined and driven—that it probably doesn’t really matter what she’s wearing or doing in that room. It’s all good, as far as I’m concerned.
Late at night, after she’s had a few drinks, she’ll talk about how she first decided she wanted to write a novel back in Mr. Vernon’s class, and how the world knocked the belief that she could do it out of her.
“How does that happen?” she says. “You can’t look back and pinpoint an exact moment when you give up on your dreams. It’s like someone stealing all of the salt from your kitchen, one tiny crystal at a time. You don’t realize it for months, and then when you see that you are low, you still think you have thousands of little crystals left—and then bam, no salt.”
Sometimes when she talks like that I feel stupid, because I don’t think about the world the way she does, and yet I love Portia, so I nod and agree. I feel completely lost when she asks, “What do you think about that?” and I can’t think of anything to say.
But she never seems to mind. Portia says I listen to her and “don’t piss on her dreams.” She never really talks about her husband directly—it’s sort of a taboo subject—but I’ve been able to infer that he made her feel stupid and small and weak.
Apparently, when they were in New York City, Portia told Mr. Vernon that she would publish a novel and dedicate it to him, and now she thinks that if she can keep her promise, Mr. Vernon might discover her book, read the dedication, and maybe it will save him after all.
That’s her new great hope.
Portia Kane’s latest master plan to save our old teacher.
We asked the Oaklyn Police Department for information on Mr. Vernon, but by law they weren’t permitted to share any developments or details, or so they said.