Read The Wave for Free Online Page B

stories. He probably sat around with GT here and told him about us, about the big stories. I’m sure there are some things he couldn’t know.”
    GT was smiling at me. He had one arm around my sister and his bare feet out of my shoes and crossed before him. I had seen my father sit like that a thousand times in our old house, on the old sofa.
    “What are you grinning at?” I asked the young man.
    “You were always stubborn, Errol. Always trying to prove something in your mind when the truth was right before your very eyes.”
    “You can’t be who you think you are, GT,” I said. “My father is dead. He died nine years ago. How could you be him?”
    “I’m not him,” he said, “not exactly. I am his memories, his blueprint. His heart.”
    “How can that be?”
    “The Wave.”
    “What’s that?” Angelique asked.
    “Some cult he belongs to,” I said.
    “It is the fount, Waterwog.”
    “Where we all come from?” she asked, bedazzled.
    “Yes,” he said. “And where we all shall go.”
    “This is crazy,” I said. “He was a homeless man living in the graveyard until yesterday. How can you think he’s some kind of second coming?”
    “Why not?” Nella and Angelique said together.
    “Because,” I said. “Because it doesn’t make any sense. People don’t just rise up out of the grave.”
    “Jesus did,” Nella said.
    “My father wasn’t any kind of Jesus. He didn’t go to church. We had to pay the minister to read over his grave because Dad had never been inside a church.”
    “I know,” Angelique said. “Let’s ask Mama.”
    “We can’t do that.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because what if he isn’t some divine spirit and instead the nutso bastard son of our father who is still dead? How do you think Mom will feel about that?”
    “We could call her up and ask her a question that only she and Papa would know the answer to. Something that he’d never talk about to children.”
    “She has a strawberry tattoo under her left breast,” GT said.
    “What?” I asked him.
    “She has a strawberry tattoo under her left breast,” he said again. “Bobby Bliss made her get it. She said that she just went crazy one day, that her hairdresser told her about a tattoo parlor. She said that all the girls from the beauty shop went in to get them, but later on, she admitted that it was her lover who wanted her to make the vow to prove she loved him.”
    Tears flowed from GT’s eyes again.
    “Mama cheated on you?” Angelique asked.
    “She said that she still loved me as a friend, but her heart belonged to him. We stayed together because of you children, but our bed was cold as a stone.”
    I thought about Shelly and Thomas Willens, about her coming in late every Tuesday and Wednesday for six months. She’d said that she had a flower arranging workshop, that they all went out for drinks after the class. To prove it, she brought home samples of flowers that she had arranged.
    Fool that I was, I believed her.
    “Newspaper,” she said, as she always did when she answered the phone at work.
    “Hi, Mom, it’s me,” I said.
    “Oh, hi, Errol. I was just thinking about you. Are you all right?”
    “Sure I am, Mom. I’m fine. How are you?”
    Angelique wasn’t exhausted anymore. She’d made tea for Nella and was holding GT’s hand. They were all sitting on the blue couch, the one soft spot in the blond-wood room, watching me talk on the cordless phone.
    “I’m fine, hon,” my mother was saying. “Have you gotten a job yet?”
    “I’ve made a line of mugs, Mom. I’m going to be selling them at the Third Street Fair in Santa Monica.”
    “That’s nice, honey. But have you at least called AT&T? Mona Ramp says that they’ve been hiring computer people.”
    “Uh-huh,” I said. “Yeah, you told me. Listen, Mom. I have something to ask you.”
    “What is it?”
    I spied a huge white cloud out Angie’s window. It seemed to be rearing up like a great reptile, but not a species I had ever seen