Belly Read Free Page B

time.
    “Looks like we got ourselves a makeover.” He motioned at the white picket fences and mums that circled the big oak trees,
     yellow ribbons panting from lampposts.
    “Those are the same decorations they put up every August. It’s track season, remember?”
    He remembered everything about track season. War Bar was his for more than thirty years, and the first twenty, the racetrack
     barely seeped inside. They might put the harness races up on the TV for a laugh, or take a glance at the Whitney, or some
     tourists might sit up at the counter on Dark Tuesdays and study up the tip sheets purchased from street vendors milling around
     the side gates. That’s how it was before his mistress, Loretta, wandered sideways into War Bar in the hot August afternoon,
     not a week after the accident, fixed herself a Cuba Libre behind the counter, and turned on the TV to catch the tail end of
     the Travers. He remembered that foggy light in her eyes, the realization that even after she’d analyzed the Pink Sheet all
     morning she forgot to place the bet, her saying, “Put one in for me, would you? I’ve got Tsunami to place, Nada, Nada, Nada
     to show, and Ivanhoe to win.” He remembered the soggy fifty-dollar bill that started the whole mess, that turned him from
     barkeep to bookie. It was all her idea. It was all her. He remembered this clearly while everything that went before, his
     real wife and daughters and their whole life together, remained a blur.
    They passed Furness House, the old brown Queen Anne mansion on Union where the Down Syndrome kids used to live. It was pink
     now, or peach or salmon or one of those food names for pink, and it was a bed-and-breakfast with a fat, pastel “No Vacancy”
     sign out front.
    “Where did all the retards go?” he asked.
    “We have no idea,” said Nora. “We’ve been wondering that ourselves.”
    Belly shifted back and forth in his seat, massaging his new titanium hips, looking at the new face on his old town. Saratoga
     was as strange and cold now as his metallic body parts, and August, he thought, was like any woman you couldn’t live with
     or without. He thought of his grandmother in that last stage of her life, her dyed-rust pixie cut showing gray-white underneath,
     a marshmallow alcoholic smile continually pasted on her perfectly round face. Every time she looked up, it was as if she’d
     never seen you before. Right now, Belly felt just like that, like his grandmother, looking up and seeing Saratoga and her
     summer inhabitants as if for the first time, looking up and saying, again,
Who the hell are all you people and what have you done with my town?
    They turned down Circular and drove past Congress Park, the site of everything that ever happened to him—first kiss, first
     fuck, first coke cigarette. “Thing about this town is, you could have your whole life in a six-block radius, you know?” Belly
     asked.
    His daughter nodded.
    “Every mistake you made’s in walking distance.”
    Finally they turned onto Spring Street, down one block and into the driveway. It seemed like the car ride took longer than
     the bus, and Belly just wanted to sit in the truck and take a nap, to wake and have his life be settled the way it was before.
     They all sat in the truck for a minute, Belly and Nora and the three kids, all quiet.
    “The house looks good,” said Belly. He was lying. An Erector set of scaffolding held up the front porch, and blobs of white
     paint dotted the soggy cedar siding. The houses all around looked pristine, straight out of a magazine, but their house seemed
     to belong on a long-gone block.
    “It’s getting there,” Nora said, getting out and unstrapping the baby from his car seat. “Gene’s been working on it for us.”
    “Gene, huh? He’s still around? What about your husband?”
    Nora pulled the baby up her hip and the boys ran ahead inside and she said, “Don’t start.”
    They walked up the creaking side porch steps. “No one’s