The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  The busboy, who appeared to be a shy country kid and mortified by the attention, said diffidently, “Park City.”

  “Oh,” said Billy, alert to possible connection. “Oh, the world is vraiment small! Perhaps you know my uncle who lives there. I’m named after him, you know. Bill Campbell?”

  The busboy shook his head, shifted the weight of his full tub. “Done with them plates?” he asked. Hattie and Doro handed theirs over.

  “What a cutie,” Billy said, looking after the boy as he made haste toward the kitchen.

  Hattie picked up the tab and they were on their way across town for Billy’s prescriptions. He was given a script for certain of his medications in three installments rather than only once a week, experience having taught his physician that if a week’s supply was given, a week’s supply would be gone by the second day. They parked close to the entrance, Hattie and Doro planning to wait in the car while Billy went inside. The weather was so warm that they rolled down the windows. Just as Billy was about to enter the building, he gave a sharp yelp and then collapsed on his hands and knees. On the concrete step he writhed in pain. Doro opened her door to go after him, but Hattie said, “He’ll get up. He does that sometimes, when the pain is bad. Your sister thinks he’s putting on a show, but she doesn’t understand. She’s so hard on him.” Billy maneuvered to a stand, saluted them, and then lurched into the clinic.

  He was out within ten minutes. “I forgot to tell you that I have a massage client at two o’clock. So why don’t we do this—you ladies take these scripts to the pharmacy and then drop me at my apartment and then go back to the pharmacy and wait to pick them up.”

  Doro shook her head. She was eager to see his new apartment, eager to solve the lingering problem of Billy. “All right,” she said, knowing there was no point in arguing.

  Hattie sighed. She’d known the midstream change of plans would come, but she was frazzled by it nonetheless. She’d left Abel to his own devices and he couldn’t be counted on to feed himself. He would be rooting in the kitchen for a club cracker or a handful of peanuts and when they got home she would be treated to rebuke or a pout. When she remembered his feeding tube, a sense of freedom overtook her and the day once again opened wide. “How long do you think that will take?”

  “Oh, forty-five minutes. It’s just a half-hour massage. And then we’ll go pay the bills and see my new pleasure dome.”

  When they returned to his apartment complex, Doro needed to go to the bathroom and it was not, this time, a pretense. She disliked going into Billy’s place—subterranean, dirty, dark, the air thick with cigarette smoke—but she followed him down the dark stairway. The chairs were shabby and stained. Spent tubes of Androgel cluttered his table. Dirty clothes and porn magazines shared space with his set of fine German knives and his stainless-steel restaurant gear. In the bathroom she made a quick business of things, and headed to the door, which he’d left open for his client. From the back room where he’d gone to light candles and make ready, he called out, “Call before you come back!”

  At that moment, a large man appeared at the doorway, dressed in business clothes, a well-cut suit, wingtips, an expensive tie. He reeked of Fahrenheit and appeared startled to see her.

  “I’m just his sister,” she blurted stupidly as she hurried past him to take the stairs to the ground floor and the waiting car.

  Hattie had taken advantage of her absence to clean her glasses and sort the items in her purse. When Doro took the driver’s seat beside her, she said, “I don’t see how he has the strength to give a massage. How can he stand there for thirty minutes on those legs? Imagine the pain he must be in.”

  Doro had wondered about his stamina as well, and had once asked him. “I pace myself,” he’d said blithely, and then confided, “THC.” At her uncomprehending look, he stage-whispered, “Medical marijuana.”

  “I can’t imagine, Mom.” Doro put the car in gear and pulled onto the street. She hoped her mother had missed seeing the well-dressed man. She remembered something her daughters had told her. One summer when they were teenagers they’d gone to visit their grandparents. Billy happened to be living there, high most of the time. “It was like little birds were tweeting around his head, all cuckoo.” He’d become lascivious in his conversation, his social filters gone. He’d raved about someone’s gargantuan dick and pretended to swoon over a big English cucumber he’d taken from the basket on the kitchen counter. “Where was Grandma?” Doro had asked. “At the ironing board. Ironing his waiter’s shirt,” the girls told her.

  Hattie put on her glasses. “Was that man his client?”

  Doro braked the car at the Waco light. “I don’t know. He was at the door when I came out.”

  Hattie clasped her pocketbook hasp together and then folded her hands primly over the bag. “He looked nice enough. But I don’t see how Billy can give a massage to such a big man.”

  As they pulled out onto Waco to make the turn into the strip mall pharmacy, Hattie grew thoughtful. “Do you think,” she asked hesitantly, unsure that she wanted the truth, “that he’s really giving massages?”

  Doro fiddled with the air-conditioning controls and vents, deciding how to answer. It had occurred to her to wonder why clients would seek out an unlicensed, self-taught masseur in a dark, cluttered walk-down apartment. But right there in his studio were a massage table, towels, a water feature played over a pyramid of smooth black stones, a CD player, oils and emollients, candles. She decided to let this evidence overtake her doubts and assuage her mother’s fears, and she said, “Yes, I think he is.”

  Hattie was quiet, looking out the window as they steered into a parking spot at the pharmacy. She thought of the way he’d been dumped in the driveway, other signs she’d told no one. “Sometimes I’m not so sure.”

  * * *

  “What would be so wrong,” Hattie asked as they sat in the car outside his apartment, waiting for him to finish with his client and come out so they could be on their way to see the new place, “with Billy coming to live at home? He could help me with your father. He’s good company. Have you ever had him give you a massage? He’s just wonderful. I don’t see what would be so wrong.”

  Doro looked at her mother. If she disagreed, Hattie would blame her. If she agreed, her mother would use her as a stalking horse, telling her father that Doro thought it was a good idea. She had to be careful. “How has it been when he’s lived there before?”

  “It’s been just fine with me. He can be such a help. Of course your father doesn’t like it but I think this time will be different.” Hattie gave Doro a sudden, surprised look, at the edges of which Doro saw guile. “Why, I’ve just had an idea! What if you were to talk to your father!”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” Doro said. “Maybe it’s not the best timing.”

  Hattie pounced. She’d caught Doro on a technicality. “So you don’t see why not. You agree with the idea. It’s just the timing?”

  Billy appeared at the Camry’s back door. “All finished.”

  “Hop in,” Doro told him.

  “Perfect,” he said as he struggled into the car, letting out a great sigh. “We’re right on time. You won’t believe this beautiful place.”

  * * *

  Stewart Court was a fake-half-timbered landmark on the worst corner in the city. Druggies with backpacks, burned-out cases shambling behind loaded grocery carts and talking to themselves, toughs smoking in the alley. As Doro parked the car in the weedy parking lot, they heard, “What is this shit?” from behind a Dumpster. A man in motorcycle pants and jacket yanked the arm of a bosomy girl in a tight blue miniskirt and fishnet stockings, a child in a Cinderella nightgown crying beside them. Billy got out of the car and Hattie and Doro did the same. They headed toward the steps that led to the office when a thick-set man appeared. He wore low-riding jeans and a torn yellow T-shirt that read PARALLAX. Leading with his immense belly, he approached.

  “This is Mike,” Billy said, introducing them.

 
Without a word, Mike turned to lead them toward the apartment. Billy hurried to keep up with him, leaning on his cane. “You won’t mind if I paint a mural on the brick wall in that adorable passageway, will you? I’ll be establishing my massage practice and I’ll want clients to know where to go. It will be tasteful, I promise.”

  Over his shoulder Mike said, “Not gonna happen.”

  Billy was unfazed. “I’ve told my family all about the place. Gone on and on, in fact.”

  Mike led them through a dank arcade piled with rags and papers, old plastic toys, a crib. A pair of city property sawhorses supported an ancient refrigerator that had been laid on its back, its door propped open like a casket. Rodent traps had been placed in corners, and over all hung the smell of dead rat. As they crossed a courtyard, things began to look up. Mike unlocked a thick oaken door to let them into the apartment.

  Billy went in first and stood in the center of the main room, pointing out its features. Two-story coffered ceilings and mullioned windows. A stucco fireplace that soared to exposed rafters. Copper sconces, dark hardwood floors, a two-tiered stairway with carved balusters. “The influences,” Billy instructed them, “are part Moorish, part Teutonic. Isn’t it paradise?”

  The kitchen was hideous. Roach droppings and mouse turds and dead flies in the windowsills. “All this will be cleaned up, of course,” chirped Billy, moving quickly out of the room toward the stairway. Mike shrugged.

  While Hattie waited downstairs, Billy and Doro went upstairs. The balcony railing wobbled like a rotten tooth. Doro had an awful vision of Billy either falling or being thrown from the height. In the bedroom the rachitic blinds were felted with dust, the light-switch plates black with grime. The floors were gouged and scarred, as if someone had taken an ax to them.

  Back downstairs in the main room, a narrow bricked-in passageway, perfect for muggings, drug deals, and assault, lay directly outside the big window, a view giving onto trash, Colt 45 bottles, and the mildewed lid to a child’s green turtle pool.

  Billy took Hattie’s hand. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Hattie had reached the point in the dwindling afternoon at which she could no longer think. All she knew was that she needed to be home.

  Doro hurried to her rescue. “We need to get going, Boyz. Dad will be wondering where we are.”

  Billy turned to Mike. “I’ll come by tomorrow with the deposit.” To his mother and sister, he said, “If you’d give me a minute to transact some business?”

  When they were out of earshot Hattie elbowed Doro. “You know what this means.”

  Doro knew. It meant that between now and Billy’s place one or both of them would be hit up for the deposit.

  “I’m not going to do it,” Hattie said. “Stop me if I try to. I know he wants it but I think there’s a better plan.” She looked meaningfully at her daughter, hoping to pave the way. She had sped right over her plan to sell the chair and use the proceeds to fund his expenses. There was an even better way.

  Doro held up a fist. “Fight the power,” she whispered. As she opened the driver’s side door, she made a mental note to research cheap, clean housing. She’d help with that, but not with the sorry dump Billy had his heart set on, carved balusters notwithstanding. Anyone could see that a move to this place would end badly.

  Across the car’s roof Hattie looked levelly at her daughter. She rapped once to get Doro’s attention, and said, defiantly, “Because I’ve decided to bring him home. You watch me. I’m going to march myself into your father’s room and tell him what’s going to happen.”

  Billy joined them at the car before Doro could respond. “Listen, my dears, I just remembered I have to be somewhere. It completely slipped my mind.”

  Hattie fretted. “But your bills…”

  “We can wait a few days to pay the bills. We’re nowhere near the cutoff dates.”

  “We can drop you where you want to go,” Doro offered. She opened her wallet and took out four twenties and slipped them to him outside the window, taking care that Hattie didn’t see.

  “I’ll cab it,” he said, sliding the bills into his pocket. “Merci, ma belle.”

  He gathered his backpack, cane, and the Styrofoam dessert box from lunch. To Hattie he said, “You have my prescriptions?”

  Hattie drew the pharmacy bag from her pocketbook and handed it to him. Into the bag, when Doro hadn’t been looking, she’d tucked three twenty-dollar bills.

  “Au revoir, ma mère et ma soeur!” He blew two kisses and then hobbled away. It would be the last time they would see him upright.

  * * *

  When Doro and Hattie arrived home they found ClairBell and Abel sitting at the kitchen counter, ClairBell helping to inject Boost into his tunnel.

  “Daddy called me,” she said. She smiled her kitty-cat smile and Doro immediately suspected mischief. She hadn’t spoken to her sister since her defection at the intervention and to see her now, currying favor with their father, set off alarms. Jesse had told her that ClairBell was working the Eliot chair angle hot and heavy, but Doro didn’t want to believe her sister would stoop that low.

  “I believe I’d like some chocolate ice cream, ClairBell, dear,” Abel said. “Just a taste.”

  Doro walked straight past her sister. “I need to make a call.” She went outside where cell reception was good and called Jesse. “We have to do something about Billy. He’s killing himself and Mom’s in huge denial.”

  “So it’s standard operating procedure? Business as usual?”

  Doro allowed herself to speak an uncharitable thought. “When will this ever end?”

  Jesse knew the answer. Never. It would never end. The Big Book talked about lost causes. He didn’t want to think it, but from what he could see, their brother was at end stage. There wasn’t much behind his eyes anymore, or at least Jesse couldn’t see any sign, and he knew what to look for.

  “Rehab again,” she was saying. “I don’t see a choice. But we should wait until after Dad’s party.”

  “Makes sense,” Jesse said, thinking that for all the two of them could do to change their brother’s fate, Doro might as well be talking to herself.

  Twelve

  Party morning dawned hot and overcast, the sky thick and white with humidity. At the kitchen sink Hattie peeled boiled eggs for potato salad. Doro sat at the counter, reading the Friend and finishing a bowl of Grape-Nuts. ClairBell had decreed that the party was to be a surprise, and she’d put them in charge of getting Abel to her place without revealing the reason.

  “Billy hasn’t called,” Hattie worried. “It’s been almost a week since we were up there and we haven’t heard from him.” In the flurry of preparations there’d been no time for a run uptown to check. “You don’t think he found the money for a deposit on that apartment, do you?”

  “I doubt it. It was seven hundred, I heard that Mike person say. Where would he get that kind of money?”

  “I worry.” What she was truly worried about was that he’d used the money she’d sneaked to him on the day they’d gone to see his apartment to buy street drugs and was on some kind of spree.

  Doro, too, had had that thought, wondering how complicit she was in his activities. “You’ve tried to reach him?”

  “His phone must be out of minutes. Or else he lost it again. I don’t know if he’ll want a ride or if he plans to be there at all. Oh, I wish that just for once he’d think of others.”

  To calm her mother, Doro said, “You know Billy. He loves a get-together. He’s probably planning to make a big entrance.”

  Hattie plopped the last peeled egg into the bowl. “We did tell him about the party, didn’t we?”

  Doro walked her empty cereal bowl to the sink and rinsed it. “Twice. You told him twice.”

  Hattie dumped the eggshells into the Hills Bros. coffee can she kept to make garden compost. “He forgets things. I just wish he’d call.”

  Doro opened the dishwasher and started to load her cereal bowl. Hattie put out a hand to
stop her. “Not that way.” She took the bowl from Doro, deliberated for a moment, then made a space for it on the lower rack and fitted it snugly. “There, that’s better.”

  Doro turned away and allowed herself an eye roll. Another week and she would board a plane for Logan, leaving the prairie behind. She was ready. Past ready. She loved her parents and she knew they wouldn’t last forever, but it was time for her to go. After the party was finished she would arrange for rehab for Billy, even if she had to put it on a credit card, and then she was done. She turned around and picked up a dishtowel, preparing to dry the silverware. “Have you talked to Dad about Billy coming home?”

  “I was waiting until after today. I didn’t want to ruin ClairBell’s party. You know how your sister gets, especially when it’s something to do with your brother.”

  Doro was going to say, “No need to stir up a hornet’s nest,” but she stopped herself. What her mother had said was true. ClairBell took it badly when anyone else got attention, especially Billy. But it was also true that the pleasure Doro took in hearing her sister’s shortcomings spoken of was a habit just as bad. She wanted to break herself of it, to rid herself of the need to be better than everyone else. It was hard-enough work just trying to be better than she knew herself to be.

  From the hall the women heard Abel making his way to the kitchen, tapping his cane along the baseboard in the Morse code pattern for SOS. Dit dit dit-dah dah dah—dit dit dit.

  “What stinks?” he said by way of greeting.

  “Good morning, Dad,” Doro said.

  “Eggs,” said Hattie. “I’m making potato salad. We’re invited to ClairBell’s for barbecue.”

  “Today? This is news to me. Nobody told me.”

  Doro put in with a quick lie, “It’s spur of the moment, Dad.”

  “If that’s the case, that same nobody shouldn’t mind if I stay home.” He grinned at his verbal turn. Enough time had passed that he’d either grown tired of maintaining his grudge or he’d forgotten the reason for it.

  “She wants us to see Randy’s new tractor,” Doro hurried to add, though this lure was a lie. But it was true that Randy had a vintage tractor and that her father loved to keep up with the restoration work on it.