“Very good fit. Where’s it from?”
“Kiton,” Carver said.
Nora let out an impressed-sounding whistle as she continued to dab at Chip. Finally Chip twisted his head away, putting hishand up to block hers, and said, “This is stupid — you can tell I’m wearing makeupandyou can tell there’s a bruise.”
“I’m layering it. You have to let me layer it. I know what I’m doing.”
“Wipe it off and just let me go with two black eyes. What’s the big deal? Shit happens. If people ask me, I’ll tell them the truth.”
“They won’t ask you,” Nora said. “They’ll be polite and then talk about it behind our backs.”
“No, if we don’t cover it, it’ll be fair game and they’ll ask what happened,” Chip said. “If we cover it, they’ll think I’m trying to hide something, like Maggie’s been beating my ass.”
Carver couldn’t help laughing at this. Nora sighed.
“It’smyface,” Chip said, watching his mother in the mirror.
“Fine.” Nora threw her hands in the air. “Fine. Do what you want. I’m going to go round people up.”
She swept out of the room in a flash of green floral fabric. As she ducked to pull her gauzy shawl up around her shoulders, Carver got a look at the crown of her head, where he could see two weeks’ worth of graying mousy roots starting to bloom beneath the salon blonde. Every time he spotted his mother’s roots he got the deranged impulse to point at them and shout, A-ha!
Carver went and sat on his parents’ neatly-made California king, then picked up a New Yorker from the bedside table so he could look at the cover illustration. Chip dabbed at his face with makeup wipes for a minute or two before turning to him, swiveling on the vanity’s stool. While Carver was worried about the few pounds he’d lost since he was fitted for his tux, he could tell Chip had put on a few since buying his. Like Doug, weight gain and graying hair seemed to distinguish rather than diminish him. In a tux, Chip looked like he was about to receive an award at a Chamber of Commerce dinner.
“It’s hilarious how much this is pissing Mom off,” Chip said. “And somehow she doesn’t blame you for the bruising, only the initial incident. Like she thinks I should have toughened up and just sucked the blood back into my face.”
Carver laughed. “That’s the British in her, I guess.”
“No kidding, she’s always been like that. Every hard hit in football, she was like, walk it off, kid. The only time I really saw her worried was when you fucked your shoulder.”
“She was worried?”
“Yeah,” Chip said. “We all were, they took you off the field on a stretcher, we didn’t know if it was cervical or your head or what. Drama queen.”
“I didn’taskfor the stretcher. I couldn’t even talk, I was trying not to throw up.”
Chip shrugged. “It was a hard hit. Fietz was probably worried about your neck, too.”
Carver realized that in his own bizarre way, Chip was trying to apologize for the comments that had led to his black eye.
“When they came to see me in the hospital, they didn’t seem worried,” Carver said. “They were like — ‘Tough luck, kid, maybe throw the ball next time, you got surgery on Thursday and physical therapy starts the week after.’”
“Yeah, well. I think they had this idea that…” Chip scratched the back of his head. “I get it a little better now that I have kids. Like, when they fall, you’re not supposed to make a big deal at first, because they take their cues from you. So if you freak out, they’ll start flopping at every little thing, and they won’t be as resilient.”
“Flopping? Like in the NBA?”
“You know what I mean, man.”
“But when they get old enough to tell you how bad it was,” Carver said, “maybe it’s better to take them seriously.”
Chip shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t have faith that they made us resilient.” He laughed. “Actually, I know they don’t.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, for one, I can tell, and for another, Dad’s basically told me as much. He actually thinks you have the most grit out of the three of us, but then you explode in hysteria —”
“I don’t havehysteria—”
“— he thinks you’re a pillhead with an eating disorder —”
