The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  Everyone fell silent. From the bedroom wing came the sound of Billy clattering around, rummaging, it was later revealed, in Abel’s shoebox collection for his cache of oxycodone, but otherwise quiet. A sense of shock hung heavily in the room.

  “Where you can get the care you need,” Doro interjected, moving past her surprise at her mother’s statement and hoping to salvage the moment, to redirect.

  Abel looked around the room, at his children arrayed against him. “Are you all of this opinion? That I’m a burden to your mother? So say you all?”

  Gideon, seated on the stone ledge, said, “Dad, yes. Just until you get squared away.”

  Abel turned to Jesse. “I’m aware of your opinion, Jesse. Do you have anything to add?”

  Of all the moments he most hated, the times his father looked him in the eye were worst. Jesse slammed on his hat, got up, and stalked outside.

  Abel moved on to Doro, seated on the armrest of the Eliot chair. “Theodora? What about you? I can usually depend on you for good sense. What do you think of this?”

  His eyes seemed to beseech her and it was all she could do to say, “I think it’s best for both of you. Just until—”

  “To be separated from each other? What about our vows? Your mother and I promised to stand by each other. I took it seriously. Had this damn tube cut into my gut. Til death do us part, we promised. I wish you kids understood that this is the goddamn death part.”

  Suddenly ClairBell’s witchy powers kicked in, and she saw which way the wind blew. She saw clearly her title to the chair, the very chair where Doro perched, and she saw how to make it hers. “Daddy,” she said, widening her eyes and making his favorite face, “Daddy, I tried to talk them out of it. I think you should stay right here. Where you’re comfortable. Where you’re needed.”

  Doro gaped at her sister. She got up and went outside. Gideon followed. They found Jesse on the deck built over the ravine and they joined him, lowering themselves onto the benches. “God!” Doro said. “That was awful.”

  Jesse had stopped at Gid’s cooler and lifted out a tallboy. He hadn’t opened it yet but was savoring the moments before he went over the edge. Now he popped the top, tilted the can, and angrily poured the golden glory down his throat.

  Gid smirked. “I thought that went rather well.” He, too, popped a tallboy.

  Doro got up and went to fish out one for herself.

  Inside the house, Hattie had gone to the kitchen, where she could think best. She decided to keep the ground beef left over from the cookout from going to waste, and so she took out a pan and began browning it to make spaghetti sauce. She gave the meat a few jabs, and then took out an onion to chop.

  Billy wandered into the kitchen. “Mother, what’s wrong? Let me do that for you.”

  She looked at him closely. Her eyes stung, but she could see enough to tell that he was bright-eyed and alert.

  He took the knife from her and with a chef’s ease chopped the onion finely. “You’re crying, Mother. What’s the matter?”

  “Oh,” she said, gathering a breath to have out with all of it, how weary she was, how worried she was about him, about his father, but the words wouldn’t follow. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Just this onion. How are you, honey? Are you feeling better?”

  “Much better. I had a good nap.”

  “You do look rested.” She smiled. There was her boy of old.

  “Oh, I am. But I find myself in need of funds. Could you lend me a hundred?”

  “Dollars? I just gave you”—she lowered her voice so she couldn’t be overheard—“two hundred. Where did that go?”

  Billy began an elaborate tale of need, false starts, a near miss, a past-due deadline involving a certain item he needed for his massage practice and with so many twists and turns that Hattie lost sight of what he was saying. “Massage oils are really that expensive?”

  “They’re cheap at twice the price. I know a supplier and he’ll let me have them for next to nothing. A friend is coming by to pick me up in a few minutes and…”

  “Not that Haskell fellow.”

  “Oh, Mother. I’m fine. It was all a big misunderstanding with him. We’re fine now.”

  Hattie gave up and went for her pocketbook to fish out bills. She had four twenties. When she handed them to Billy, he said, “That’s all you have?”

  “I’m afraid so. You’ll have to wait until I can get to the bank.”

  He slipped the bills out of her fingers and kissed her on the cheek. “Merci, Maman. You can owe me the rest.”

  * * *

  In the living room Abel had stayed in his seat to contemplate the development that had just taken place. He was furious. He reviewed in his memory the laws on involuntary committal. His children could never do it. Not only were they not determined enough—wishy-washy the lot—it simply couldn’t be done. He knew the ins and outs too well. He hadn’t gone to law school for nothing.

  ClairBell, who had remained behind, took the opportunity to sit in the Eliot chair, caressing the wide arms. “You know,” she said wistfully, “I always felt so comfortable in this chair. It makes me feel protected. Like my Daddy’s arms around me.”

  Even in his diminished state, Abel knew soft-soap when he heard it. ClairBell was a stinker of the first water, a shameless knob-gobbler, and she was laying it on thick. He knew what she wanted, and suddenly he saw a way to punish the others. “Then by all means it should be yours.”

  ClairBell made a show of surprise and delight. This had been easier than she’d thought. “Really?” She jumped up and went to him and wrapped her arms around his head and delivered a loud kiss. “Oh, thank you, Daddy! I’ll take good care of it. You always knew how much it means to me, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, no,” he said wryly. “That comes as a complete surprise.”

  She didn’t know how to take his tone, as it was at odds with her picture of the moment she’d waited for. Hoping to be told he was only being facetious, she made her fatal mistake. “So you forgive me for calling that mean old ambulance?”

  The reminder sent a jolt of anger straight to Abel’s carotid, and he growled, “Beat it before I take the damned thing back.”

  ClairBell left quickly, avoiding the others, and went to her car. She backed down the driveway all the way to the street, weeping in gratitude, grinning in elation.

  Abel sat for a long time alone. He closed his eyes. From the kitchen came the smell of browning beef and onions. His mouth watered. But was that odor a hint of the garlic he had forbidden? He heard the back door open and close and the sounds of his grown children seating themselves at the dining room table, their low voices. The rasp of an aluminum can being opened.

  Jesse saying, “I’ll have another, too.”

  Gid saying, “You sure?”

  Then another rasp. Jesse’s voice. “Oh, shit, that’s good.”

  “Well,” he heard his wife say in a breezy manner, as though nothing out of the ordinary had taken place, “supper will be ready in a half hour. You children wash your hands. Doro, will you set the table?” She sounded bright, alive, no trace in her voice of the betrayal she’d just committed.

  He rose from the sofa and shuffled outside to roam the property. Slowly he made his way to his barn. Here, among the smells of machine oil and rust, diesel fuel and solder, the souvenirs and collections and fruit of his long lifetime stored in antique hardware store bins, in drawers and pigeonholes, he busied himself by sorting gaskets and washers, screws and nails, trying with all that was in him to remember the use for any of it.

  Eleven

  A cannonade thundering from the History Channel’s morning bill of fare, his back room darkened by drawn draperies, Abel stretched out in the Eliot chair. After much struggle he’d dragged the massive thing from the living room to the place his recliner, now shoved to the side, had held. He had decided to keep an eye on it. You never knew when ClairBell might strike, now that she had the go-ahead. As sure as he took his gaze away she’d be o
ut in the driveway loading it into a U-Haul, along with some of the other items she’d put her name on. An antique cast-iron wash pot, a limestone relief of a Roman soldier he’d carved. No. He’d let it go, and he’d let it go to her, but he would decide when. She wasn’t going to get away with it that fast. She’d called the damned ambulance on him.

  His swollen feet in their compression socks propped on the raised footrest, hearing aid removed, head back on his sheepskin, he had withdrawn. He would not speak. Even when they had come to him, one by one, to apologize. For two days since their attack he had punished them, but by this day, the third one since their thwarted overthrow, the specifics of his grudge had begun to fade and he remembered mostly that he felt alone and bruised and tossed aside. But he would keep up his boycott.

  Elsewhere the morning was sunny and warm. In the kitchen Hattie prepared breakfast, filling the house with the smell of frying bacon, a habit she couldn’t break even though Abel could no longer eat it. She hoped the aroma alone would please him. Doro sat at the counter, spooning blueberry yogurt from the cottage cheese container Hattie stored it in while she glanced over the two-week-old Amicus Friend, paying special attention to the police blotter to see if the call on the night of the guns had made the paper. So far there had been no news of any disturbance, and she hoped enough time had passed that there would be none. She planned to keep an eye on things and to conceal from her father’s eye, if the need arose, the public notice of the episode.

  A few miles away at his place on the river, Jesse poked a pitchfork into sodden straw. He was cleaning out the chicken house and thinking that he might drive over to his parents’ house to check on things. His fall off the wagon on the night of the confrontation had been hard. He’d left his parents’ house and driven straight to Amicus Spirits and bought two six-packs of liquor-store Budweiser, his standby, and he hadn’t stopped drinking until he fell asleep in his truck at the end of his lane. He’d been awakened by one of his horse boarders. The whole thing left him chastened and sick. He hadn’t taken another drink since then and he’d been to three meetings in three days, but he still felt wobbly. Easy does it, he kept telling himself. Easy does it. But it was anything but easy. With each jab of the pitchfork into the hay he tried to forget how fricking tough it was.

  Another ten miles away, in her bedroom at her Flint Hills house, ClairBell tried to shake off a drugged sleep. She’d gotten up in the middle of the night with a busy head. Sunday was the big birthday party—now back on the docket by popular demand—and she had only a few days to get everything ready. She had taken three Lortabs that took forever to kick in. In a cinder-block house on the outskirts of Amicus, Gideon was seated in his undershorts in the kitchenette of Tina, the VFW bartender, trying to coffee up enough to get going. All of them, sleeping or waking, were troubled by what had gone on in their botched family council, and all of them, except for Billy, who was oblivious to the upheaval, hoped to get back on Abel’s good side. They had jumped on ClairBell’s birthday party plan, and Doro had proposed moving it up a few weeks. “Dad isn’t looking very good,” she’d said, and they all agreed.

  Four boxes of photographs and memorabilia waited on Hattie’s kitchen table. The task was to sort the family photographs so ClairBell could make a collage to set up on an easel at the party. A wonderful idea, everyone said. He would love it, especially the pictures of him on his BSA 650, of him standing in the bucket of Big Brutus, posing at Waimea Falls, on the roof of the barn on the day he’d completed it, the hunting photos, the fishing photos, him on the bench, oh so many of his glory days. These would surely help to build him back up.

  The night before, ClairBell had said to Doro and Hattie, “Be ready to work. I’ll be there tomorrow at the butt-crack of dawn. Is seven too early?” But on this morning when Hattie’s phone rang and Doro answered it was ClairBell on the other end, her voice a croak, saying, “Don’t wait for me.”

  Hattie stood at alert, a dishtowel in her hand. It was well known that ClairBell rarely rose before noon. Hattie had had an idea that this might happen and to tell the truth, it suited her just fine. A day with ClairBell in the house, even with their common purpose, could be a trial, especially when Doro was home. The competition. The vying for the best-daughter award. Her big, bustling personality and crass remarks just didn’t jibe with their quieter demeanor.

  “You’re not sick, are you?” Doro asked her sister. How many more times would the euphemism serve? How long would everyone pretend ClairBell’s problems had nothing to do with drugs?

  “No.” ClairBell coughed feebly, unconvincingly. “But I think I might be coming down with something. You do the pictures without me. Just get them sorted and I’ll make the collage. We’ve got five days before we need it done.” She summoned another cough. “Has Billy called yet?”

  “We haven’t heard word one.”

  “You will. And then you’ll be off on the royal runaround.”

  Doro ignored her sister’s sourness. Given ClairBell’s mood, the change of plans was for the best. “You rest. We’ll get the pictures done another time.”

  “Well,” said Hattie, cheerfully wiping the counter. “I guess this means we’ll have to think of something else.”

  “How about shopping?” Doro suggested. “All we’ve done is nursing and kitchen duty. Maybe we could go to town and get something nice for”—she lowered her voice in case her father was listening—“the party.” This was an appeal to her mother’s vanity. Hattie was still a trim little clothes-pony.

  Hattie laughed. “Well, why not? What’s to stop us? We can both buy something nice.” A shopping excursion meant a trip uptown and this reminded her of Billy, never far from thought. Often on Tuesdays—and this was a Tuesday—he needed to be driven around.

  “Maybe I’ll just check in with your brother,” she said. She reached for the phone but thought twice before dialing. Should she? Was she opening herself up for trouble? Especially with Abel in the fret he was in. Did this go against her resolve to put her husband above her son? On the other hand, it was probably safe to leave Abel for a few hours. Mostly what he did was sleep. He could shoot formula into his feeding tube as well as she could. She needed the outing, a break. And the thought of a day with her two most tractable children … While Hattie’s finger was still on the button, the phone rang, startling her.

  She supposed it was ClairBell with a postscript, and so she summoned a disappointed voice, preparing to commiserate. But on the other end was Billy, talking excitedly, and so loud she had to hold the receiver away from her ear.

  Never one for conversational throat-clearing, he almost always went straight for the sustained monologue, sometimes going on a full five minutes before she could interrupt him to say she was dressing, that her blouse was half on and she couldn’t put her arm through the other sleeve so she was standing there with a folded wing, would he please hold on while she put down the phone?

  “There’s wonderful news!” he was saying, “I’ve found a spectacular apartment straight out of Gloria Swanson’s Hollywood! Wrought-iron sconces over a stucco fireplace. Balconies. An architectural gem, Mother. You’ll love it. When you see it you’ll know it’s meant to be mine. It could change my life, I can feel it! And the best news of all is that the rent is only a hundred dollars more than I’m paying now. I can make up for it by scheduling more massage clients so it’s no problem at all. And the even better part is that the landlord will be on hand to show it to us this very afternoon. You will love it!” In French, he added, “Vous l’adorerez vraiment.”

  “Whatever that means,” Hattie said, but she laughed, and she heard her voice taking on the same excitement. Her youngest and his enthusiasms always lifted her, no matter how harebrained his arrangements. And his present energy was a welcome relief from the night he’d been dumped in the driveway.

  “Does this mean you want to move?” she asked hopefully, thinking that if he had a better, brighter place to live …

  “Yes,” he said. “I�
�ve been feeling low and I couldn’t figure out what the trouble was and then it hit me that I need something to lift me out of the doldrums. I have the distinct feeling that this will turn me around. This is just the place!”

  Eagerly, Hattie began to plan aloud. “How about if we pick you up close to noon and go to lunch, then we’ll take you for your prescriptions. You need them, don’t you? Then we’ll take you to pay your gas and electric and then stop by the pharmacy and then after that we can tour the new place. We’ll make a day of it. How does that sound?”

  When he answered, “Like you read my mind,” she smiled and hung up.

  * * *

  In the past, Doro had tried to encourage solving Billy’s problems in a way that didn’t require so much of her mother, pointing out that Billy could take the bus to his appointments to save her from driving the twenty miles to town. That he could use the postal system rather than being driven around to various bill-pay sites. That he could use money orders from the Reddi Mart near his apartment rather than being driven to a bank for cash. But she’d learned after many attempts that Hattie didn’t care about her carbon footprint or expediency or the waste of a day spent careening about to the point of exhaustion; she wanted to spend time with Billy and she didn’t care under what circumstances. Enough, Doro thought. Enough was enough. Today she would make it her mission to straighten things out. Get Billy settled once and for all and set up new guidelines for her mother’s involvement. This would take money, she knew. But she determined to spend it. The benefits would be worth the expense.

  “Well.” Hattie turned to Doro. “I suppose you heard. Of course he can’t afford that place and this is just another wild goose chase.” But she smiled. As she scrubbed at the bacon pan she went on about how a day with Billy wore her out, running from one thing to the next and always with nonstop chatter and always, predictable as dawn, a midstream change of plans. “But he’s so upbeat. And he never complains.”