Belly

by Lisa Selin Davis

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Belly marks the arrival of a talented young writer whose assured debut has the perfect blend of humor and poignancy. Lisa Selin Davis gives us an engaging story of fatherhood, daughters and family ties that will undoubtedly have wide appeal.

Release date: January 13, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 288

Sample

SARATOGA SPRINGS was stoic as the Statue of Liberty with Grace Kelly’s face and the body of Bettie Page. That’s the way Belly O’Leary thought
of his town, like she was a woman in a Greek robe, to be revered. He stared out the big tinted front window of the Greyhound
bus as it hobbled north on Route 9, down the long line of motels that sat hungry all winter and grew fat with tourists in
the summer. They were fat now. August. Cars streamed out the little roundabouts and bled onto the highway.


August changed the face of Saratoga, from Grace Kelly to something a little brassier. Kim Novak, maybe, or any of the girls
on the Alberto Vargas cards his father used to keep hidden in his sock drawer. For one month a year, she was a woman with
a bad dye job and too much makeup, and this was the town he was coming home to in 2001; this was the lady welcoming him back.


Only he didn’t recognize her. Where once green fields graced the sides of the highway, glass-box office buildings now rose
like the great pyramids. Traffic and strip malls and smog choked the last promising stretches of hillside that used to hug
the town.


The closer he got to home, the sicker he felt. A moan rumbled in his solar plexus. He recognized it as heartache. He was returning
two years early to his hometown, four instead of six, his sentence commuted for good behavior—something he’d never been accused
of in his life. He worried now he was back too soon. The town wasn’t ready for him. He’d walk in on her with another man.
He’d catch her in a lie.


For four years he’d kept quiet in a cinder-block cell, waiting to hear from his old mistress, Loretta, waiting for word from
their colleagues at the New York Racing Association. They’d advised him not to talk. They’d sent Loretta to the courtroom
to remind him, quietly, with a hand pressing gently on his shoulder, that two of his three remaining daughters still lived
in this town. Loretta with her lips twisted into that sideways life-threatening smile, walking off with his unmarked $172,000
stashed in her fake Hermès Kelly bag.


He half imagined her waiting for him, his midwestern princess, at the bus station now, opening her arms to him, opening the
sack of cash, pulling out from her cleavage a shiny gold key to a small office at the back of City Hall, where the NYRA boys
and the Republican chairman would offer him cigars and checks bubbling with zeroes and shake his hand for not giving up their
names. But he only wanted to see Loretta in his fantasies.


The bus pulled up to Springway Diner and squeaked to a stop. He sat there, in seat 3C, the other passengers milling about,
collecting their things, getting up to stretch as the driver turned off the engine and announced a twenty-minute rest before
continuing on to Montreal. He sat there and thought about what the prison doctor had told him after his release physical:
no salt or cigarettes or alcohol, nothing that might raise his blood pressure. He wanted all of those things now, anything
to calm the erratic beating of his heart, to lengthen his short breath. His hands shook. Only two other times in his life
had he been this nervous, so nervous it burned, it was something that had to be doused: at his wedding and then, twenty years
later, at his third daughter’s funeral. Both those times, and now, he just wanted the moment to melt away, to have already
happened. He wanted to turn around and see the hard times behind him.


He stepped off the bus into a blast of heat that surrounded him like an embrace. He’d left a dewy, cool Pennsylvania that
morning for this: a thick stew of atmosphere, the air heavy and wet, and he was at that moment so very tired. Across the street
from the bus stop were new stores and crummy old motels with new paint jobs and the road sparkled with new, dark tar. His
oldest daughter, Nora, was not waiting for him. No one was. He looked at the strangers and tourists loitering on the concrete
outside: Who the hell are all you people and what have you done with my town?

This used to be a twenty-four-day town, Belly thought. He remembered the queer quiet just before the racetrack opened each
summer, the whole town preparing for the rain, the reign, of tourists to descend. It was like that every year: upscale specialty
shops selling fancy linens and New Age chachkas and glossy horse paintings bloomed on Broadway, only to wither once track
season ended. But now, since he’d been away, the racetrack stayed open almost twice as long, reaching back into July and stretching
all the way to Labor Day. A season of horse racing straddled the town, scarring it up for the rest of the year, just like
what they used to say in AA: one foot in tomorrow, one foot in yesterday, and you’re pissing all over today.


He pushed the door open and stepped into the air-conditioned paradise of the perfectly preserved Springway Diner, to wait
for Nora. The same greasy red booths, the same metallic wallpaper with flowers of orange and brown. The walls were plastered
with black-and-white photographs of the grumpy old Greek who owned the place standing with celebrities—Liza Minnelli, Bob
Dylan, some short guy with huge glasses Belly recognized but could not recall—who passed through on their way to SPAC, the
performing arts center in the state park. In every picture, they held up a big white cake with strawberries dotting the top,
the Greek’s smile wide and white as the frosting. In every picture, the same Greek and the same white cake, and it seemed
like this was the only thing in Saratoga that had not changed: cake.


He realized now this would not be easy. The whole time he was in, he just wanted to be out; the whole time he was away, he
just wanted to be home, but now he stood on the horrible bridge between his two worlds, stretching like a big grin between
his old town and what it had become. He stepped into the bathroom and checked himself in the mirror. A face returned his gaze,
a countenance surprisingly unchanged, just grayer, somehow, the skin looser around the curve of his jaws. Someday, he realized,
jowls would swing at his neck, but for now, for now, he could pass. The fifteen-hundred-some nights spent in a cell with two
other men, in a pod with three other cells—the stress of all that time hadn’t surfaced. He put his hands in his pockets and
did something he hadn’t done since the days of high school dances: he winked at himself. He watched the lid close over one
icy-blue eye, watched his right side grow dark, then lifted the lid and let the light back in. He decided he could pass for
forty-five of his fifty-nine years, and he nodded at himself and stepped out.


He made his way back toward the door, looking over the counter at the desserts for the big white cake, but he saw only the
same sorry pies they’d always carried. They looked like home, those crushed-in tops and browned meringue, and he decided to
buy one for Nora and the kids, if they ever showed up to retrieve him. That seemed like the right thing to do in a situation
like this. He had no one to ask.


The waitress met him at the counter. “Can I get one of those pies?” he asked her. She was a fine-looking woman, or girl; he
couldn’t remember what you were supposed to call them anymore.


“Which?” she said, and he didn’t know one from the other so he just said, “Lemon,” and she took it down from the display and
wrapped it in a pink box.


“It’s eight seventy-five,” she said, not looking at him.

He had one crisp twenty-dollar bill and a couple of ones crumpled in his pocket: all his money in the world. He would buy
something for his family first, then he would get himself something he’d been waiting four years to wrap his fingers around.
“Give me that lighter,” he said. He’d been scrounging for matches for four years, and with the power of lightning in his hand,
the weight of change in his pocket, he was half Thor, half Donald Trump, sans combover. “And some Newports,” he added. It
would be great to even have a box top after all those smuggled-in soft packs with the cigarettes smooshed.


“What color?” she asked, and he pointed to the red lighter.

He flicked and flicked, but he could not light the thing.

“Hey, miss, I think this lighter’s broken.”

The waitress turned around from the society section of the Saratogian and took the lighter from him. She pushed a microscopic lever on the back and rolled the gear till it lit. “Childproof,”
she said, handing it back to him.


Belly took it from her, but he just stood there holding it in his hand.

“You just get off the bus?” she asked, finally looking straight at him as she rolled a penny between her fingers. Her nails
were an inch long, painted with palm trees, and she’d written “cat food” on the back of her hand with a ballpoint pen.


Belly nodded.

“Where you from?”

She was staring at him now, all the youth of her taking in his age.

“I’m from here. I’ve been gone four years. I just came back from Pennsylvania.”

“What’s there?”

“Prison,” he said, watching her. She didn’t even flinch.

A little flash erupted in the general area of her eyes, some curl around her brows and raising of the lids that made him think
he’d been recognized. “Well, since you’ve been in, they made these new childproof lighters with these little buttons and stuff
you have to push.” She took the lighter back, her nails lightly scratching his fingers, showed him the tiny piece of metal.
“But you can get rid of it.” She pressed her thumb against it, and off popped the lever. She handed it back to him, circumcised.


He looked at her. She might still be in her twenties if he was lucky. Her name tag said “Maybelline.”

“Named after the Chuck Berry song?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “The makeup company.”

Maybelline didn’t look too bad. Lots of orange hair, curlied up and shiny, like copper. And her skin was kind of coppery,
too, all metallic with goop. He looked at all that orange on her and thought about the business Nora used to have on Caroline
Street, Everything Pumpkin, that sold food and clothes and anything orange. Maybelline could have been a mannequin there.


“You work here long?” he asked, shuffling his feet a little. He’d been wearing jail shoes—Velcro-and-canvas sneakers—these
four years, and his cowboy boots weighed about a million pounds, mashing up his toes at the pointy fronts.


“Not too long.” She took out a straw, unwrapped its white paper shroud. “I used to work at the Stewart’s on Route 50 but things
got kind of slow, so I came to work here.” Then she took the straw between her lips, blew air through it, nibbled on it with
her teeth.


She smiled and he turned to look behind him, but no one was there.

“I’m Belly.”

She said, “That’s what I thought,” and she reached out to shake his hand, wrapped her soft fingers around his callused knuckles,
and let them remain just a second too long. Her fingertips were cold and the rest of her hand was warm and kind of clammy:
he could incubate there. Something could grow.


How do you know, he wondered, how do you tell if the woman wants you or is just playing with you or if that’s just how she
is? He was so out of practice, all his flirting skills dormant and foreign, but he kept looking at her, and she kept looking
back at him, and he thought, Maybe, maybe. He looked at her orange-tinted lips and thought, Maybe.


He packed the Newports, peeled open the wrapper, and popped open the top and offered her one, and when she took it, he said,
“You want to go out sometime?”


She nodded. “Sure.”

“You want to go out tonight, maybe?”

“Okay.”

Finally, that stinging feeling of nervousness began to float away.

“What time do you get off?”

“Six,” she said, tossing the straw in the wastebasket.

He asked her if Ruffian’s was still open and held his breath while she rolled her eyes back to search her memory, and when
she said, “I guess it’s there,” he exhaled.


“Maybelline,” he said, “I will meet you there at six.” She handed him her phone number on the back of a Springway Diner business
card. He tried not to smile, but a big dumb grin erupted on his face. He thought of that one dead tooth, that brown bicuspid
poking from the side of his mouth, and he hoped she couldn’t see it. She sashayed back to work, and he watched her ass move
in acid-wash jeans, and he changed his mind: everything would be fine, easy as pie.


He stood at the window, smoking and staring into the sun. How many years since he’d whiled away an afternoon at Springway Diner?
Of his four daughters, only the third one ever wanted to come here, the one who was not with him anymore. Sometimes he’d take
a break from the bar and walk down to meet her here, him and the kid in her favorite old-lady pink cardigan with the Izod
alligator, slurping a cup of hot chocolate while she showed him her plans for the science fair: The Secret Life of Tornadoes.


He flinched when he saw Nora pull up alongside the diner, the tires of his sweet black Bronco squealing to a stop. It was
a great truck, the best he’d ever had, with rock-stomper rods and 230 horses, tinted windows and chrome rims and a thin red
pinstripe clinging to the sides. He could see two small dents like vampire bites by the rear left fender as he went out to
meet her.


“I thought you quit,” was the first thing Nora said when she saw him drag on his Newport, though she had an unlit cigarette
poking from between her first two fingers. Her three boys in the backseat kept quiet.


“I did,” Belly said, “but only ’cause it was so freaking hard to get cigarettes.” He tossed the cigarette to the ground and
swiveled his foot over it.


She didn’t get out of the Bronco, just let her cigaretted hand hang out the open window, so he stood by the door and put his
free hand on her shoulder, making a right angle. There was so much space between them.


“Nice to see you,” he said.

She said, “Get in.”

The burning feeling was back. He walked around to the back of the truck, his shirt sticking to him in the heat, and threw
his duffel bag in, continued around till he got to the passenger door, and climbed inside. His license had run out almost
two years before, and he knew his near future included a trip to the dreaded DMV, but not yet, not right away. He lowered
himself into the seat and thought how he’d never been on the right side of his own truck. It was only five years old. He’d
bought it just a few months before they locked him up.


Nora put the truck in reverse.

He turned to his grandsons. “How you boys doing?”

They just stared at him: a teenager, a little kid, a baby in a car seat. He noticed a slight tremor in his hands, like his
fingers were saying hello without his consent. He placed one hand on top of the other to still them.


“You guys remember me?”

“It’s only been four years, Belly,” said the middle boy.

“That’s Grampa to you,” and he turned back around. This, he thought, is what it feels like on the first day of a new job you
didn’t want to do, standing there waiting for someone to direct you through a series of meaningless tasks, waiting for the
day to end.


“Isn’t it funny,” he said, slipping the cigarette from Nora’s hand and lighting it. “I think the only other time you drove
me around was right after you got your permit. You must have been sixteen.”


“You let me drive when I was twelve.”

“Did I?”

“You made me drive even when I didn’t want to, when you were too drunk.” She rolled down her window to let the smoke escape
and pressed the button to open Belly’s. “You mean Eliza. You made Eliza wait till she was the right age.”


“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Four daughters and three grandchildren and their names circled above him like a fly he couldn’t catch. Their differences eluded
him.


“Well,” he said, turning back to the boys. “Which one is which now?”

“See the one who’s not even a year old, Belly?”

Why couldn’t she call him Daddy?

“That’s King. You haven’t met him before.”

“I’ve seen your picture, though,” he said to the baby, who drooled on a plastic bib around his neck. “Who’s this one named
after?” he asked the oldest boy, the one who had turned into a teenager, pimples beginning to surface on his pale Irish skin.


The oldest boy turned his attention out the window and the middle boy said, “B. B. King.” He looked down at his lap, then
raised his eyes to his grandfather. “I’m Jimi,” he said. “That’s Stevie Ray.”


“I know that,” said Belly. “Stevie Ray with the big birthmark on his knee.” He looked at the stretched-out teenage boy and
could not believe he was the same little kid he said good-bye to four years ago. “How old are you now?”


The boy said nothing. “Stevie, your grandfather is talking to you,” Nora said. “You know, when somebody talks to you, it’s
polite to say something back.”


The boy shrugged.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, young man.”

“I didn’t,” Stevie Ray said in a small voice, a voice far too delicate for a boy with O’Leary blood.

“It’s all right, Nora. Jesus, give the kid a break. Sometimes a man just feels like keeping quiet.” He nodded at the boy,
but the boy’s face was stone. Belly cleared his throat.


“So it’s dead guitarists for all three of you, then?” he asked.

“B. B. King is alive and well,” Nora said. She put a hand on her round stomach. “And number four is on the way.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Don’t say anything, Belly.”

“Am I saying anything?” He looked at his grandsons. “Did I say anything?” The oldest one still wouldn’t look at him. Nora
took another cigarette from the pack on the dashboard and put it to her lips. “Aren’t you supposed to give that up?” he asked
her, and she turned and glared at him, let the car move down the street without even watching where it rolled.


“Do you see me smoking it?” she growled. “Dr. Pearson said this is the best way to quit.” She nodded toward the ashes leaping
from the tip of his cigarette. “You’re the one infecting us with the secondhand smoke. I’m just holding the thing.”


Belly cleared his throat. “Well, how’s it going, then? Getting a girl this time around?”

Nora turned her eyes back to the road. “I don’t know yet.”

“Well, you better hope it’s a girl. Girls are so much easier.” He turned and winked at the boys in the backseat, but they
didn’t even blink.


“How are you doing, Belly?” Nora asked him. “That’s the million-dollar question.”

“Hot.”

“Me, too, Mom,” Jimi called. “Can you turn up the air-conditioning?”

“When Belly’s done smoking.” She turned to him. “There’s a heat wave on. Supposed to last all week.” They were still on Broadway,
inching down with racetrack traffic, and he noticed now just where they were.


“Don’t you want to turn down Spring Street?”

“We may as well just go on by there now,” she said. “Get it over with.”

He nodded, adjusted the seatbelt that hugged the hollow of his stomach. There it was, the corner of Washington and Broadway,
the large glass doors on the street level, his old apartment teetering on top. It used to be his Man-o-War Bar, though everyone
called it War Bar for short. He threw his cigarette butt on the sidewalk.


“What is it?” he asked.

“Café Newton,” she said. She pulled up alongside it, put the truck in park. “I’m running in. You want something? A cappuccino?”

Belly shook his head.

“Be right back.” Nora climbed out the door. He could see now that she was pregnant, her stomach starting to pop out, leading
her like a divining rod.


He watched tourists mill in and out of his old bar, women in broad-brimmed hats and too much makeup and their toupeed husbands
with diamond cufflinks glittering; he could almost see the clouds of perfume and cologne punctuating the air. These were people
who never would have stepped foot in War Bar, and here they were surrounding it, squeezing the last bit of life out of its
memory.


Jimi scooched forward in the seat, his hands grabbing Belly’s headrest.

“Stevie Ray’s getting confirmed on Sunday,” Jimi said.

“That right?”

The oldest boy looked at his hands.

“I thought they did it older.”

“They let you do it whenever you want to,” said Jimi.

“Who’s your patron saint?” Belly asked his oldest grandson.

The boy didn’t answer.

“Do you talk?”

“He talks when he feels like it,” said Jimi.

“Now tell me your ages again. I haven’t seen you boys since you were this big.” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together.

“You can’t see a baby when it’s that big,” said Stevie Ray. “Except on the ultrasound.”

“Thirteen, eight, and eleven months,” Jimi informed him. “I’m the eight.”

Nora came back with a large coffee. “Sure you don’t want some?” she asked. “It’s decaf.”

He raised one eyebrow at her. “Are you trying to make this hard?”

“It’s just a latte,” she said, but she was smiling, as if she’d won something.

She started the car and lifted another unlit cigarette, and he leaned over and eased it out of her hands, and he thought how
they were old enough now to share all their bad habits.


“Belly,” Nora said, and he said, “What?” and she said, “Can you hand me another cigarette if you’re going to keep that one
yourself?”


He handed her one, and they continued down Broadwa. . .