The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  Hattie was not a jealous person, but in the years the dog had been a member of the household she’d taken Hattie’s place in her husband’s affections and this, Hattie supposed, was what made the creature’s offenses harder to bear.

  At seventeen Toodles was at the end of her days, blind, arthritic, incontinent. The living room carpet was ruined, dotted with the salt mounds Hattie sprinkled in order to soak up the uric acid. Worse, lately the beast had taken to ricketing her hindquarters into the firebox of the big stone fireplace in order to void her bowels, which were often loose. A decision was past due, but Abel couldn’t bear the thought of having to make it. Finally Hattie laid down the law. She would feed and water Toodles as before, let her in and out, but she would clean up no more messes. To Abel she’d said, “I will not keep house for an animal. You have to help me, Abel.”

  But nothing happened and the messes grew more frequent. Abel continued to greet Toodles at the door when he came in from the barn, to feed her raisins and licorice jelly beans and chocolate cake and whatever bowel-loosening-else she begged for.

  Hattie had had it. According to her temperament and upbringing and beliefs, she had submitted unto her husband as was required of her by the Apostle Paul. But she’d reached her limit. She gave Abel one last chance, waiting for a morning when Toodles had again made the firebox her latrine. “Abel,” she said, “there’s been another incident. Now, I believe I told you that…”

  When cornered, Abel often fell back on cross-examination techniques. He did so then, turning to leave for his machine barn but tossing over his shoulder a question to which there was only one possible answer. Hand on the doorknob, he inquired with a maddening air of patient reasonableness, “And is there anything of a material nature preventing you from cleaning it up?” Having phrased his question impeccably, he did not wait for her answer.

  Later, when Hattie told her sister Sammie of the act that nearly brought down their marriage, she would say that it was as though, around noon that same day, a voice spoke to her. “Hattie, pick up your purse and car keys,” the voice said, and she had obeyed. When the voice went on, “Now pick up the dog,” she had done this as well. Toodles snarled and bared her gums and feebly tried to squirm into biting stance, but she was too old and soon gave up. Next, a hand not Hattie’s opened the front door, feet not belonging to Hattie walked to the car, and the will of a person not Hattie drove to the ASPCA to deposit Toodles at the front desk. “She’s old,” Hattie told the receptionist. “She needs to go.”

  When Toodles lost control of her bladder on the desk blotter, the woman said, “Looks like she’s went already.” Hattie hadn’t remembered the woman’s joke until afterward, but even after all this time, she couldn’t laugh. The receptionist petted the hoary little head, looked into the milky eyes. “Not enjoying your life anymore, sweetie?”

  “No,” said Hattie firmly, “she’s not.” She signed the forms, and later in the exam room she cradled Toodles, crooning and stroking her gently as the injection went in and the breath of the little beast’s spirit went out.

  Only after the deed was done did she allow herself to consider Abel’s likely reaction. He would be angry. He would feel betrayed. But what about her feelings? He hadn’t listened. He hadn’t respected. Wasn’t a wife more important than a dog? True as these justifications were, they didn’t stop her from feeling heartsick. On the way home she planned the story she would tell, and as she prepared his favorite pot roast she practiced words that would not be an out-and-out lie, only a half-truth. “In her sleep,” she repeated. “Toodles died in her sleep.”

  At the usual hour the back door opened and Abel entered, calling in the tender voice he reserved for the dog, “Where’s my Toodles-girl? Where’s my little sweetheart?”

  Hattie summoned her strength. “Abel, I’m afraid she died.”

  By then he had made it to the kitchen table, where he gripped a chair back for support. “What happened? Was she hit by a car?”

  That light deer hunters used to stun their quarry, that’s what Hattie saw in the glare of his stricken look, a jacklight. But even under pressure she remembered the words, “She went to sleep.”

  Abel’s shoulders sagged as understanding dawned. In a tear-clogged voice he asked, “But she didn’t suffer?”

  “No,” Hattie told him, grateful that the hardest part was past and she no longer had to lie. “She went fast.” To hide the sudden welling of her own tears at seeing him so shattered, she turned to her dinner preparations.

  When he asked forlornly from the chair he’d sunk into, “Where is she?” Hattie realized her mistake. He would want to bury his pet. Would want to see her a last time. From some inner stronghold, she was able to say, “It’s all done. It’s all taken care of.”

  “You buried her?”

  Suddenly the lie could bear no more weight, and the truth tumbled out. Hattie confessed, adding that he hadn’t listened to her complaints and she’d had no other recourse and it was a mercy to the suffering creature. For a moment she thought she had gotten through to him. Then she remembered the way the little body had felt as life ebbed, the sudden heaviness, and she made her final mistake, saying, “You should thank me for doing what you couldn’t.”

  He bolted from the chair and charged toward her, palm raised, and for a dread second she feared he would do the unthinkable, that he would strike her. But instead he stalked out the back door to his machine barn, where he spent the night. He took up living in his barn, coming into the house only to shower and change clothes. For a month he refused to speak to her. Dutifully she prepared trays of food and left them at the door by Ebenezer. She went about contritely, speaking docilely to him, even understanding why he’d been so angry. In the years that followed she came to see that her solution hadn’t been entirely fair. She hadn’t given him clear warning. But not once had she regretted her act; it had to be done. The old dog was suffering and a swift end was a mercy. If that made her hard-hearted, then so be it. And this time, about her trip out west, she felt the same way. She would go with Doro, who wouldn’t cross her, or at least not much, and leave the others behind. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut.

  But years of inhabiting her own character had done their work, and at the first lull in the dinner table conversation she heard herself saying brightly, “I’ve just had a lovely idea for a day trip.”

  As they rarely did during family dinners when Abel held court, his changing moods determining the tone, all eyes turned toward her. She faltered, but then forged on, laying out her desire. “I’ve been wanting to go out west for a while, to the place I grew up, and I was thinking it could be a…”

  A what? Her stomach felt queasy. Spots faded in and out before her eyes. Beside her Abel sat as stony and disapproving as his dratted Ebenezer, and she wondered if her trip into the past was partly to have a break from him, from his rules and requirements and his everlasting opinions. “A lot of fun,” she finished.

  ClairBell dolloped cauliflower onto her plate so violently that the serving spoon clanged against the china. “So I’m left out of the loop again?” She aimed a withering glance Hattie’s way.

  Passing the tomatoes, Doro laughed nervously, a nervous laugh being her habitual response to conflict. This wasn’t the first time ClairBell had accused them of leaving her out. Her sister could construe conspiracy where there was none, and whether or not her jealousy was warranted had ceased to matter; the trait had taken on the strength of family fact.

  There was indeed a basis for ClairBell’s charge, and in fairly recent history, also involving a road trip, specifically a drive to Albuquerque in Leo’s Lexus the morning after his and Billy’s wedding. Hattie, Doro, and ClairBell were to follow Billy and Leo in the Skylark, stay a night or two in their beautiful house, and see Acoma Pueblo. ClairBell, arguing for the prosecution, accused Hattie and Doro of sneaking off without her. She didn’t care how it happened or what their excuse was, they had abandoned her. Left her at home and gone merrily off to
gamble at Sky City Casino without her when everyone knew she loved casinos more than almost life.

  The defense maintained that on the morning of departure, when Hattie and Doro pulled up to ClairBell’s rental house, they found her car in the driveway, the doors locked, the blinds down. Her children had already gone to their father’s for the weekend. The only movement they could detect behind the blinds turned out to be a cat—or cats—toying with the window shade cords. Doro called ClairBell’s cell phone. No answer. They called the house phone. Many times. They knocked, loudly, at the front and back doors, but they couldn’t raise ClairBell. They tried to peek through the windows but both women were too short. Finally, after half an hour of trying to rouse her, they gave up. “She must be sleeping hard,” Hattie said. “She must have changed her mind and doesn’t want to come. That’s like her, you know.”

  Doro nodded and did not give her opinion, which was that after the big event of Billy’s wedding, ClairBell had taken enough painkillers to send a grizzly into hibernation. Hattie didn’t know about it, but ClairBell had done this before. Once, when ClairBell had spent the night at the Amicus house after one of Abel’s birthday dinners so she and Doro could have what ClairBell called a slumber party, Doro had awakened in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Before she could turn on a light, she tripped over something soft. ClairBell lying belly up on the tile floor, a pool of bright red vomit beside her head and matting her hair.

  Doro had tried to wake her. “ClairBell,” she whispered. “Claire.” She shook her sister’s shoulder.

  ClairBell opened her eyes. “Muh?” she muttered. “So sick. Just leave me here. I’m gup in a minute.”

  Doro sat on the toilet to pee, feeling profane and surreal with the heap of pink nylon nightgown that was her sister at her feet. After she finished, she went for a blanket and pillow and covered ClairBell and then stayed a while beside her, wondering what she should do.

  The bathroom door opened and Billy entered, gripping the doorjamb, unsteady on his feet. He’d spent the night as well because it had gotten too late for anyone to drive him back uptown.

  Doro asked, “Should we call an ambulance?”

  Billy laughed. “She’ll come out of it, sister-love. She just has a spot of the residue flu.”

  “But all that blood?”

  Billy sniffed the floor. “Red hots. Last night after you went to bed SisterBell and I had a little shall-we-say potluck. A sharing of the wealth, as it were. She got into the red hots.” He cackled wildly at his own wit-to-come and said in a scandalized voice, “She was scarfing them down like candy! The girl was RED HOT!”

  Doro had looked at him closely. His pupils were pinpoints. He was talking fast.

  “Now, if you don’t mind, ma chère soeur,” he said, snorting at his rhyme, “I must ask the lizard the time of day.”

  He stepped over ClairBell’s body and lifted the commode’s lid, preparing to relieve himself. “Or, no, do I mean bleed the lizard? Yes … why, yes, I do! Hurry up, please, it’s time!” Doro had hurried out.

  On the morning after Billy’s wedding, as she and her mother stood on ClairBell’s slab porch, Doro asked Hattie if they should go on without her.

  “What choice do we have?” Hattie said. “Oh, this is just like her! And she’s going to blame it on us!”

  They had gone and had a wonderful time but ClairBell had not let them forget it, and this was the source of her accusation at the dinner table when Hattie announced her desire to see her homeland.

  Now that the subject had been floated and ClairBell had made her comment about the loop, Doro cast about for a way past her sister’s suspicions, a way to steer the blame from herself without shifting it toward her mother. She took a long sip of her iced tea and spoke what she realized with a start was the truth. “This is the first I’m hearing of any trip,” she said mildly, conversationally, “but it sounds like a nice idea.” This was why coming home was such a trial. With ClairBell you had to watch what you said and whom you said it to. You had to be on your toes at all times and you couldn’t slack off or there’d be tinder for a feud. The eggshell walk was one she’d taken more times than she cared to admit.

  ClairBell sat back and narrowed her cat-like eyes. “I suppose he’ll be coming along for the ride.” She meant Billy. She continued, snickering. “Or maybe I should say ‘to take you for a ride.’”

  “Just us,” Hattie said, refusing to take the bait. “The girls.”

  ClairBell’s keen gaze traveled from Hattie to Doro and back. “Hmmph,” she said, and tucked into her laden plate.

  Abel cleared his throat. He felt left out. Because pouting was weak and unseemly, he had found other ways to register his feelings. His mainstay was to remind his family of his power to protect and provide, but on occasion he changed his tack and staged a minor passion play to show them how sorely he’d been abused. Usually this involved food, most often salt. At hearing his wife’s plan, he had at first made a show of scanning the table in an aggrieved manner for the saltshaker, planning to ask, “Where’d you hide the salt this time, Hattie?” but there they were, two shakers obediently flanking his plate. As a fallback he tapped into the genial tone he kept at the ready to say, “You girls shouldn’t go all that way alone. I’ll be happy to drive you.” Grandly, he pulled out his pocket watch and snapped it open. “Be ready tomorrow at oh-nine-hundred hours, Zulu Time, Central Daylight.”

  Hattie’s heart sank. Doro moved peas around on her plate. ClairBell took a sip of iced tea, and then said, “Daddy, we’re grown women. I’m fifty-four and Doro will be”—she cut a simpering look her sister’s way—“what? sixty-five, sixty-six?”

  “Sixty-one,” Doro corrected. “I’ll be sixty-one.” She gave out a hesitant laugh.

  ClairBell deadpanned, “Is that your final answer? Do you need to phone a friend?”

  Doro made herself busy quartering a tomato slice, and there was uneasy silence at the table until Hattie said, “I don’t really have to go. It was just an idea.”

  A stranger might have concluded that the subject was closed, but Hattie’s demurral was merely the opening maneuver. Not that Hattie was all that aware of her strategy, but it had played out so consistently over the years that everyone around the table understood it, except for Abel, who labored under the illusion that he had prevailed.

  As she served cherry cobbler, Hattie said to Abel, as though the thought had just occurred to her, “Maybe we should go on Tuesday, when you and Big Bill are taking out that old cottonwood.” Abel’s kid brother, a hearty specimen in his early eighties who still went on Volunteer Fire Squad runs, came over on Tuesdays and the two men spent the day in mechanical pursuits, happiest when broken equipment required the presence of elder heads beneath an open hood.

  “I can’t go that day,” ClairBell put in. “Business down in Oklahoma.”

  Hattie allowed hope to rise. ClairBell was often obstructive for no reason other than a contrary nature. Maybe this meant she wouldn’t come after all.

  Jesse looked up from his plate, his eyes shadowed by the graduated lenses of his aviator glasses. “Where in Oklahoma?” He smirked. “Your memorial booster chair at Kaw Tribal Bingo?”

  Doro choked on a pea and had a coughing fit. It was well known that ClairBell & Co.—never mind that neither she nor her grown sons held regular jobs and that they depended on the largesse of Randy Billups—frequented the gaming palace run by the Kaw tribe over the Oklahoma line in Newkirk. But it was also well known that the bingo palace was closed Monday through Wednesday, and so ClairBell was caught in her lie. When her word was challenged she usually doubled down, taking an arrow from her father’s quiver, but in this case she knew she was caught and so she floated a new fib altogether.

  “We have an appointment with a relator to look at a farm.” Doro winced at her sister’s pronunciation of realtor, but the excuse was unimpeachable. ClairBell shared the family habit of driving around the countryside to inspect ramshackle farmhouses that w
ould never be purchased. She smiled fetchingly, obligingly. “But of course I could always cancel it.” She turned to Randy as if for affirmation, but he only looked perplexed. “Sure,” he said.

  And just like that, Hattie was going! Things would work out after all with only minor changes. That night at the hour she usually sent her worries upward, she felt no cares, no fears, only the welling of praise that led to poetry, and in her mind so many psalms collided—O who can utter the mighty acts of the Lord? Who can shew forth all His praise? Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands—that they ran together. Not once in her many years of prayer had she laughed aloud during the act, but now at her jumble of words she did, and best of all, she felt in her deepest, most joyous heart that the Heavenly Father, too, was laughing to see His servant Hattie, who always and earnestly tried to be good, filled with a spirit so giddy it couldn’t help being holy.

  * * *

  From then on it seemed that everything went right. The day of the trip dawned fair and warm. An early riser, Hattie dressed in navy blue slacks and a white cotton blouse and her bone-colored Clarks even before she prepared Abel’s breakfast. She stationed her sun hat and scarf on the foyer table. As the others awakened and breakfasted she went about the kitchen preparing a lunch for Abel and Big Bill. Meatloaf that would stay warm in the oven, two well-scrubbed russet potatoes in the microwave, and in the refrigerator a pretty strawberry Jell-O mold. The table was set for the two men. She’d replenished the cookie jar with a batch of Abel’s favorite molasses crisps.

  ClairBell was known for backing out at the last minute, or at least stalling departures, but she arrived on time and in high spirits. Up the driveway toward the house her white Cadillac surged, ClairBell at the wheel honking the horn and waving gaily. Into the house she came, toting her signature blue train case—this stocked with pills and unguents, Ace wrap, a snakebite kit, bandages, a tube of Lidocaine in case of beesting or what-have-you, an outsized orange plastic vial filled with other more private necessities—and a giant economy-sized bag of red hots she’d stopped to buy at Costco.