The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Page 22

  Hattie flitted around the kitchen, closing drawers, tidying. “He’s so excited. And he does need his medicine. Maybe if we get his business done first we can find a little time for ourselves.”

  “That sounds good.” Doro smiled, but she could tell Hattie’s heart wasn’t in a shopping trip. She looked at her mother. Something was off. Hattie seemed more distracted than usual, almost hectic in her flitting. Doro couldn’t figure out what was up, but she knew it was something.

  Hattie indeed had a plan. It had come to her in the night, when she lay thinking of how to solve Billy’s problems. She had a little money but not quite enough. She’d tossed and turned, trying to figure out how to stretch the five thousand dollars in her private account into enough to provide for him. What he needed was a nice room in a nice family house in a nice neighborhood, maybe one close by in Amicus. Maybe within walking distance. She’d prayed a little about the problem. She didn’t want to ask God to solve a financial dilemma or send money through some kind of miracle—this seemed wrong—but suddenly He had sent her the solution, and it was so perfectly right that she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. It had been in front of her nose the whole time. An antique dealer had once appraised the Eliot chair for between four and six thousand dollars. She would sell it. The children had fought over it for years, and even though he’d dragged it into his den, Abel didn’t really like it. He was just making some kind of point. She would call that appraiser and offer it on the market. Spirit it out of the house when no one was looking. Give Billy a year’s worth of rent so he could change his life. And who knew, maybe after that things would have settled down and he could move home. It was settled. Forgetting that where Billy was concerned, any plan she conceived was guaranteed to go awry, she hurried off to dress for the day, leaving Doro at the counter with the Friend, a cup of coffee, and a plate of bacon she didn’t want.

  * * *

  As Doro sat at the kitchen counter waiting for Hattie to dress, the back door opened with its familiar squawk and thump, the displacement of the rubber gasket Abel had mis-installed in what now seemed another life. Jesse entered the mudroom, stamping his barn boots to knock off the dirt and hay. He came into the kitchen. By habit he lifted the electric skillet lid only to see the newly cleaned pan, balanced perfectly on its foil-wrapped, rock-filled tuna can, the electric cord folded neatly inside.

  Hattie emerged from her bedroom to greet him. “Jesse! How nice.” She was torn. She didn’t want to give him the hurry-up treatment. It would be good if he’d eat a little something. He didn’t eat well, always fast food. And he was as sensitive as ClairBell about getting the bum’s rush. But Billy was expecting them. Quickly she made her decision. “Let me fry you a few eggs. It won’t take a minute. And then we’re off to town.”

  “Had a doughnut, but thanks.” This was a lie. Patsy had made him a bowl of oatmeal, cutting up an apple to put on top and brown sugaring it just right. It had melted his heart all over again. To divert attention from his fib, he lifted the cake safe lid and spied banana bread. “What have we here?” He carved off a hunk, splashed some coffee into his Reddi Mart mug to top it off and then took a stool at the counter. ClairBell maintained that he was a moocher, intimating that he staged his visits to their parents’ house at mealtimes. Doro saw things differently, having noticed that behind her brother’s gruff, nonchalant manner was a careful observation of Hattie and Abel, and that in his way he was keeping an eye on them.

  “We’re headed up to town,” Hattie said happily.

  When she told him their agenda, Jesse nodded. “Off to do the Prodigal’s bidding?”

  Doro laughed. “Filet of fatted calf for dinner. Fresh.”

  Jesse made a comic grimace. “Just hold on to your pocketbooks.”

  Hattie scowled. She didn’t like it when they mocked her dealings with Billy. Their mockery held truth, she knew that, but she still didn’t like it. But she was glad Jesse’d reminded her about her pocketbook. She would have to stop at the bank to make sure she had cash on hand. In case.

  Jesse nodded toward the newspaper. “Anything new in the Enemy?”

  Doro thought to mention her plan to keep the police blotter from their father, but she decided against it. Instead she said, “Nothing new. We were supposed to sort those boxes for ClairBell’s party project but…”

  Jesse said, “She bailed, right?”

  Doro nodded. “Coming down with something.”

  “Wonder how many milligrams of something.” They shared the wry downward look that was family code, a silent commentary on the inscrutable but predictable ways of ClairBell.

  “I think she’s cutting down, though,” Doro said. “Seriously. She’s been different lately.”

  “Nah,” he said. “It’s the same old leopard and her same old spots. She wants that chair and she’s in Olympic training, that’s what I think. Got to keep her wits about her. Now that Dad’s mad at all of us she’s got to find a different way to get it.”

  Doro folded the newspaper. “Dad moved it into his room so he could keep an eye on it.”

  Jesse shook his head. He finished his banana bread. “Guess you need to go about your morning.” He patted Doro on the shoulder, pushed himself up, and headed toward the back room to sit with his father.

  Always he dreaded the encounter, but since the mutiny he’d made up his mind to try to repair the injury. His sister’s words about their father being old and sick had struck home. As well, after his fall off the wagon and how easy it had been he’d figured that if he was serious about working a program, he ought to practice what he preached. And when we were wrong promptly admitted it. But he still dreaded it. He planned to open the proceedings by mentioning the Large Hadron Collider, a guaranteed gambit and fail-safe Judge-softener. If that didn’t work, he’d start talking about dark matter and the God particle, and that should open the floodgates.

  But when Jesse joined him in the back room, taking a seat in the recliner that flanked the Eliot chair, his father merely lifted a hand, apparently thought better of it, and trained his gaze on the footage of WWII bombers. Jesse waited for him to tell him he’d piloted them, or start in on tales he only half believed, but his father was silent. There seemed no opportunity to mention the collider. Once or twice he composed a bit of conversation, but no talk issued forth. Then, suddenly, his father said, “It’s a terrible thing, to get old, son. A terrible thing. You remember I told you this when your time comes. You remember.”

  Hattie and Doro came in to make their good-byes. Shaken, Jesse got up and left the house with them, and when they parted ways at the end of the driveway, the women headed north in the green Camry and he in his truck headed south, driving straight to a meeting.

  * * *

  Up Seneca Street the women went, Doro at the wheel, past trailer parks and salvage yards, year-round yard sales, a Kmart, two Walmarts, fast-food joints, smoke shops, and liquor stores, a Reddi Mart on almost every mile section corner. Year by year the road between the city and the small towns that ringed it got seedier, the run-down businesses that flanked it evidence of hard times. The whole area, Doro thought, had gone to pot. Or maybe she’d just begun to notice. But it seemed to her that there had been a time when things had looked better, more alive, less shabby. In the 1940s Boeing had drawn thousands of wartime factory workers from Great Plains towns. In its heyday Superfortresses and Stratofortresses rolled off the lines, but in recent years the company had pulled up stakes. Outsourcing to China and Indonesia had done its damage. Still, everywhere, studded along the road margins, waving defiantly in the wind from tire stores and La Petite day-care centers and Pentecostal Holiness churches, from the easement at the turn-in to Walmart, were thousands of cheap American flags, made in China.

  Once they reached the city a different vista opened, with grassy riverbanks and bicycle paths, tall cottonwoods, benches and running trails. They followed this route until it took them down Waco Street to Riverside Park and Billy’s basement apartment.
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  He was waiting in the iron-gated courtyard of the crumbling beaux arts building. From a balcony above him and across the way, Haskell, in a red bandanna head wrap and a T-shirt, glowered.

  When Billy saw Doro getting out of the car he called in his swooping stage voice, “The most beautiful women in the world, my mother and my long-lost sister!”

  He grabbed his cane, shouldered his backpack, and lurched forward, crossing the courtyard in fits and starts, hitches and hobbles. Though she’d seen him only days before, his appearance was a shock, and Doro drew in a breath at how small and thin he was. He had the sunken-eyed look of a chemotherapy patient, made more noticeable by the canted eye that came down to him from their mother’s side, and the fact that the skin around this eye, his blind one, had been scarred by shingles. Boysie, she thought. She felt a prickling behind her own eyes and then an involuntary welling of tears, which she blinked away.

  “Why isn’t he using his walker?” Hattie whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Doro whispered back. “He’s having a good day?”

  He fitted his gear and himself into the Camry’s backseat, complaining that the car was stuffy. “It’s a lovely day. Let’s get some air in here!” Once settled, he glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t look now, but there’s Gog Magog. The Family Man.”

  “I thought Haskell was your roommate,” Doro said.

  “Not anymore. He moved out and moved his family in. Right across the courtyard. So he can look down on me.” He laughed gaily and then made a pouf sound.

  Doro waited for details—neither she nor Hattie could keep track of his alliances—but Billy had turned his attention to rooting in his backpack.

  “Well, just don’t provoke him, honey,” Hattie said. She hadn’t forgotten the sight of her son on the night he’d been thrown from the car. She would never forget.

  Billy laughed darkly.

  Doro shifted in her seat to look at him. She would find a way to hurt anyone who hurt him. “Has he done something to you?”

  Billy shrugged. “No. Mostly he yells at me if I’m outside trying to talk on the phone. Or if I happen to come home late and I make the slightest bit of noise. Or if I come within … he doesn’t want me near his children.”

  “Can you steer clear of him?” Doro asked.

  “Oh, I do,” Billy assured her. “I only rented him a room to … oh, enough about me. Tell me everything that’s new.” Suddenly he seemed to have recovered his bright mood.

  Hattie smiled. “Let’s just have a nice day. Let’s not let anybody else’s bad temper get in our way.”

  The day would be arrayed around his needs, but neither Hattie nor Doro felt resentment, only that an old bond had been restored. They enjoyed each other’s company. They liked the selves they were when they were together, selves that squared with who they wanted to be. Hattie dropped her reserve and became warm and spontaneous. Doro could be herself, no walking on eggshells. Billy was sweet, expansive, funny, the life of the party.

  Having lived over half his life under the shadow of death, Billy had had many occasions to look back on his best times—a spun-gold evening on Prague’s Charles Bridge or the green New Zealand coast or the heart-wrecking view from Machu Picchu. At the top would not be when he and Leo stood before the officiant and made their vows or any number of the beautiful meals he’d prepared for people he loved. His best time was when he was Boysie, when his brothers and sisters blanket-tossed him, giggling, into the air, when they bore him aloft through the house and everyone kissed him and kissed him. When he and his mother and sister were together, it felt almost that good.

  * * *

  The Copper Kettle was a down-home diner favored by Hattie for its low prices, generous use of salt, and absence of frills. At the noon hour the place was packed. They tried to find a table in the rush but had no luck. In healthier days Billy had waited tables in five-star restaurants and country clubs, and he was proud of his knowledge of the restaurant world. To hasten their progress, he snapped his fingers like an imperious maître d’, commanding the attention of the other diners, who stared. His voice, bullhorn-loud in its nasality, the result of his snorting cocaine and methadone, was startling. “Table, please!”

  When he tilted his head back to look over the now-quiet house, Doro spotted a white fleck in his nostril, a groove of dried blood. Although he was often flying high and garrulous and sometimes lewd and embarrassing in public, he was also funny and sweet and smart and loving. On this day it was clear that he’d taken something, but so far his behavior was within limits. She had no idea as to which way the day would turn out.

  In one respect Doro was like her father in that she couldn’t tolerate a spectacle. Her instinct was to flee. And so when Billy again snapped his fingers over his head and directed his voice toward the manager, shouting “Garcon!” she pretended an urgent need for the ladies’ room and hurried away. She dallied in the stall, waiting what she thought was enough time for Billy’s clamor to calm and the other diners to turn their attention elsewhere.

  When she returned, feeling like the coward she’d been, her mother and brother were settled at a corner table by the kitchen doors, menus in hand. Hattie studied the choices while Billy chatted about his apartment find. “It is simply fabulous,” he enthused. He seemed to be having trouble modulating his voice, which was blaring. The people at the next table—a farm couple and their teenage daughters—stared openly. His diction was slurred, and his elaborate vocabulary and his ability to speak in complex compound sentences drew looks.

  He settled down to order, loudly asking the waitress about the provenance of various offerings, how they were prepared. “Does the chef julienne or chiffonade?”

  “Is the oil first cold-pressed? Extra virgin? Or is it that nastiferous crankcase concoction?” At last he made an unlikely choice, given his refined tastes, a Philly cheesesteak, but only after the waitress trotted twice to the chef to be sure the prep method was one Billy approved. Hattie and Doro ordered cups of minestrone and chicken salad sandwiches.

  “So”—he turned his high beams on Doro—“tell me all about your life. How are my dear nieces? How are your artistic endeavors? How is your work?”

  Trying to ignore the wanderings of his good eye and its dilating pupil, Doro filled him in on the goings-on with her family. During one of the better times in his life, during the nineties when AZT had kept his system strong, he’d come to Virginia, where she’d lived for a time before moving up the coast. They reminisced about their adventures—a summer beach house on the Outer Banks, cooking together, candlelit family dinners on the wraparound porch—skirting the eventual unpleasantness, leaving out the part where he’d had to be carried from the walk-up apartment he’d rented, an apartment that in just a few months he’d made unspeakably filthy with roach-ridden food, needles and pills, piles of soiled clothing, to Doro’s house where he sat through a Tidewater August lolled and incoherent on her porch in a wicker chair. Later he admitted that he’d taken a drug holiday, feeling so good in his new life that he decided to go off his meds. Once Doro got him to the doctor, he was diagnosed with brain lesions. When he was stable enough to travel, though forgetful and clumsy and out of it, she packed him up and Hattie came to fetch him home to die. That had been fifteen years before. The lesions resolved and brain function was restored, and little by little he began to improve. Protease inhibitors proved better treatment. Still, he had wide swings. After every good time, for whatever reason, either that life was so glorious and good that he sought even greater glory and goodness or that he was overtaken by a feeling of invincibility that allowed him to believe that this time he would not go all the way down but could put on the brakes before the brink, he went down. He looked almost as bad as he had in Virginia.

  When their plates arrived he wanted to say a prayer. He reached for his mother’s and sister’s hands. Doro squirmed. “Not today, okay, Boyz?”

  Hattie said, “Let’s just say silent prayers.” She, too, disliked the prac
tice; it made her think of the warning against the Pharisees. And Billy’s voice was truly loud today.

  “Creator God,” Billy began, ignoring them, “we come to You in wonder at the plenty You bestow on us, Your servants past deserving. In gratitude we ask for Your forgiveness. In Your peace”—he squeezed their hands—“amen.”

  His prayer was mercifully brief, but people had shot them looks anyway. “You used the formula,” Doro said, eager to start conversation again and move past the embarrassment. “Adoration, contrition…”

  “Thanksgiving, supplication,” Hattie finished. While he was praying she’d thought again of her long-ago hopes for him. She’d wanted at least one of her children to go into the ministry. But as they grew up and became themselves, she realized that not one of them had the temperament or the spiritual gifts. She’d been disappointed. Until Billy. He would have made a fine minister. For enjoyment he read Meister Eckhart and William James and Thomas Merton. His faith stayed strong through trouble. Ad astra per aspera, she sometimes mused, the Kansas state motto. Her son embodied it. To the stars through hardship. Oh, all the boxes checked off, except for the single unspoken, unmentionable one. She looked at her children and smiled again. “This is nice, isn’t it?”

  Billy set to picking apart his sandwich, enumerating the ways the creation was at odds with his orders. “One, the bread isn’t griddle-toasted. Two, the beef is sliced too thickly. Three, the onions are too thin. Four, the cheese is wrong.” He began to put the sandwich back together, meticulously arranging onions and sliced beef, turning the talk to his new apartment. “It’s perfect for my massage practice. It has a dear little anteroom that can be a waiting room. A beautiful arabesque window.” He clapped the sides of his sandwich together and took a bite. Around a mouthful, he said, “And leaded-glass mullions!”

  The busboy passed by the table with a tub of dishes. Billy put out a hand and halted him to ask, “And from whence do you come, young sir? O golden youth!”