Lost Between Houses by David Gilmour

very excited about my new job,” she said.
    “I am. I’m just tired of being stuck up here.”
    Which was a funny thing to say since I’d never thought that for a second.
    “You should get a job down here. Then we could hang out all the time.”
    “That’d be great.”
    “Maybe I could ask my father. He’s got connections. He might get you a job in a theatre.”
    “Like as an actor?”
    “No, as an usher.”
    “I don’t know if I’d want to be an usher.”
    “Why not? You’d get to see all the movies free.”
    “Yeah. The same one over and over again.”
    “Well, like no job is perfect. Mine isn’t either. It gets pretty boring sometimes.”
    “That’s not how you make it sound.”
    “Well, I wanted it to sound great, you know. Make all my friends jealous.”
    “I don’t think I’d make anybody real jealous working in a movie theatre. Wearing those stupid little blue jackets. Look like a fucking bellhop.”
    “It’s just an idea.”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    That night when I went to bed, I thought about Scarlet. I always did, just after I got curled up and closed my eyes. Sometimes she was in her bra and panties, sometimes she was asleep with her hand over her face, other times she’d be sitting on the bed looking at me. Or sometimes she was sitting in front of that mirror, naked.

CHAPTER FIVE
    O NE AFTERNOON near the end of July I was out in the garage murdering deer flies when I noticed dust floating over the road, just where it met the main highway. A moment later, a blue Morris came bouncing down the driveway. It came to a stop, a big cloud of gold whirling overtop, the sun shining off the windshield. Still holding the fly swatter I came out of the garage. The door opened. The old man got out. My stomach just sank, like somebody dropped a lead pipe into a river. All things considered, it was just about the worst thing that could have happened, this bomb going off right in the middle of my summer holiday.
    But there he was, standing in the driveway, looking pretty good, I have to say, sort of fresh, pants flapping in the wind, hand cocked in a wave. He was happy to be back, you could tell. He must have missed us.
    We went inside. The old lady didn’t look at all surprised. She must have been expecting him. But it worried me she hadn’t said anything. Like maybe it was a surprise. Guess who’s back for the
rest of the summer?
I sat around for awhile in the living room, waiting for the verdict. I couldn’t very well come out and ask, like, are you here for long? Besides you could see he was making an effort. You know, to be interested, ask questions, even listenall the way through the answers. I made them short, just in case. In spite of myself, I got sort of excited and started offering up a whole lot of stuff, I mean it’s more effort to hold yourself in than it is to talk, at least for me it is, so after awhile I was on the edge of the couch, just chatting away a mile a minute. Him nodding like he’s giving it real thought. Me rising up for more of it just like a seal after a fish.
    “So tell your father about your report card,” Mother said, like it was some kind of rare document. But I got to hand it to her. Even when we were little punks she made a fuss over everything we did. Even the littlest, shittiest drawings ended up on the fridge like they were Picassos. After awhile those retardo doodlings started to look interesting even to me. Until I went to the art teacher, a sullen weasel named Vernon Mould, and asked him if I could get in the art programme, and he looked at my little trees going straight into the ground and my psycho school house and said that in his opinion, the art group was pretty much full up.
    I went and got the report card off the fridge and showed it to the old man.
    “Say, that’s pretty good,” he said, holding it at arm’s length.
    Even though I knew it was bullshit, I still couldn’t help feeling good. It’s your parents, right? They got you by