The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Page 27

  “I know,” Hattie told her. “I’m just playing.”

  Doro moved closer and put an arm around her mother, who looked at her, eyes glittering. “But wasn’t it something? All of us?”

  They went to work taking away place settings. Neither of them said, though both of them thought, how empty the table looked.

  Hattie wound up at the head, in Abel’s place, for no one else wanted to take it. Jesse kept his seat at the table’s foot. Gid and ClairBell took one side and Doro the other. ClairBell cupped her hands around her mouth and called across the table. “Yoo-hoo. Anybody out there?” No one laughed.

  The dinner went beautifully, Hattie thought, with Jesse even taking off his hat and everyone on good behavior until about midway through the meal, and then something happened out of the blue, sudden as a thunderclap, a ball of lightning, something.

  ClairBell pushed back her chair and slapped her palms on the table. The china and silver rattled. Iced water in the crystal goblets sloshed. “That’s it!” ClairBell shouted, her voice breaking into a sob. “I can’t take it anymore!”

  Hattie flinched. Jesse was dumbfounded. Gid made a dubious face. Only Doro knew what the uproar was about.

  She had been true to her word—she’d hardly spoken to her sister, not through Billy’s or Abel’s funerals. Just the necessaries—yes, no, maybe, I don’t know—and nothing more. She’d been cool and distant. It hadn’t been difficult, as she’d distanced herself long before. Because of her sister’s capricious moods, her jealousy, her general crackpottery, her temper. Doro wasn’t proud of this, but there it was. She loved her sister, but she didn’t like her very much. The chair had clinched it.

  “Look,” ClairBell was saying, her face pink and inflamed, “you can have it! Take it! I don’t care about it anymore. Just please be my sister again!” She slid her plate to the side and put her face on the table and cried.

  Gid, beside her, patted her on the back. “What’s the matter, Bell? Nobody knows what’s going on.”

  Doro said, “I do. It’s the goddamn chair.”

  Hattie said, “Doro, don’t swear at the dinner table.” She thought a while, testing the application of the law, then shook her head. “Or anywhere.”

  “Just take it,” ClairBell blubbered.

  Everyone looked at Doro, who had been surprised at her sister’s reaction to her snubbing. She wouldn’t have guessed that anything mattered to ClairBell but getting her way. She knew she should be moved by her sister’s pain, but instead she felt a kind of cold, sick hardness.

  “Will you take it?” ClairBell asked. “I’m giving it to you.”

  Hattie geared up to put in, “Well, it’s not really yours to give, ClairBell,” but Doro, who suddenly saw that she couldn’t take the Eliot chair now, not in good conscience—because the gain would have come from her own pettiness—and not after such a heart-rending public drama, whether or not the display was genuine, said, “Nobody should take it. Mom should do what she wants with it.”

  ClairBell peered at Doro. Her powers, like a cartoon alarm clock shrilling, alerted her that this could be a ploy for Doro to actually end up with the chair. What she’d been counting on was for her older sister to see her misery and then tell her it was just a chair—just a thing—and there was no way a chair would come between blood sisters. She would have bet next week’s Bingo money as well as her yard sale allowance that old Dorcas Do-Right would have said those exact words. She, ClairBell, was screwed. “Okay, all right. Now can we just go back to normal?”

  Doro forced a smile. “This is normal.”

  “No, really,” ClairBell insisted. She sniffed. She pushed out her lower lip and made a petulant face.

  Doro knew what her sister wanted, and so before ClairBell could utter the dread sentiment about needing a hug she got up from her chair and went around the table and embraced her sister, whose face was wet with tears, whose soft flesh was hot and clingy.

  Something in the hug undid Doro, who had intended to be firm and matter-of-fact. It was her sister’s need and their shared griefs, how soft she was, how short, how good she smelled—like grapefruit—maybe because for the first time since ClairBell had started on the painkiller road Doro felt she actually might have a sister and not merely the shell of one.

  Over the course of their long embrace, Doro’s mixed feelings sorted themselves out, at least as much as they could be sorted out. There was wariness still, both sisters felt it, but somehow this was a tension that had become tangled in their history and there would be no changing it. The moment lasted briefly, until ClairBell gritted her teeth and hissed into Doro’s ear, “I’ll never forgive you for this.”

  “Well, at least that’s settled,” Hattie said happily, wiping her mouth and placing her napkin beside her plate. “I never liked that chair. Not from the first. And I know just what to do with the dratted thing. We’ll donate it to the church library in honor of Billy. We can have a plaque made with his name on it.”

  Gid and Jesse grumbled assent. Doro busied herself heaping her mashed potatoes into a nest in order to keep from showing disappointment that the chair was truly lost to her and that once again ClairBell had seized the upper hand. She nodded.

  Thinking already of ways the chair’s eventual destiny might be recharted in her favor, ClairBell wiped her eyes with her napkin, shrugged, and said, “Whatever.”

  Now that the upheaval was over, Hattie announced that she’d called them together to get a few things straight.

  Everyone looked toward her with worried expressions. Thinking his mother planned to speak of wills and inheritances and eager, to tell the truth, to see if what lay in store for him would provide him with another start, Gid asked, perhaps a bit sharply, “What things?”

  Under her son’s sudden and hostile interrogation everything flew from Hattie’s mind. He sounded like his father. Oh, why hadn’t she made a list? Flustered, she felt the way she had when cross-examined by Abel.

  But then suddenly she blurted, having discovered, like a gift bequeathed by him through his beloved mysteries of time and matter, a reservoir of quickness from which to draw, “From now on I’ll be the jerk.”

  She hadn’t meant to be funny. She had meant to say “head of the family” instead of “jerk.” She probably said “jerk” because Gid was sitting there with his mouth cockeyed, looking like a tinhorn despot, being one. But her children laughed. They imitated the way she’d slammed down her fist beside her plate, they imitated the words she’d said and the way she’d said them, cracking themselves up again and again.

  “You children stop this!” she said, but they didn’t, or couldn’t, and they went on hooting and snorting. She feigned a show of exasperation, pursing her lips, but she discovered, through the offices of a rapid message from her deepest heart, that she was pleased.

  For the rest of her life she would stay in the old house, big and empty and going to seed though it was. Abel and Billy were there, not as ghosts but as living memory. Sitting at the kitchen counter spooning up ice cream, drawing plans, tinkering out in the barn, in twin recliners in the den, each in his place at the big table, in the gloomy and maddening visage of Ebenezer, in the bed of tulips Billy had planted on the day he’d told her of his diagnosis, bulbs so long in the ground now that the once-red blooms had blown white. Oh, everywhere. Nick had been gone such a long time—could it be forty years?—that he was no longer present in material things, and so she had to look harder to find him, but he, too, was here.

  Of all the fates she’d imagined for herself, loneliness had not been among them, and yet here it was, her daily companion, like a little follow-dog. Ruefully she remembered that once she’d dreamed of time and quiet enough to hear herself think. She’d finally gotten what she wanted, she supposed, but it turned out there wasn’t that much left to think about. She tried to reflect on her life, on what she’d done and hadn’t done, on those she’d loved and those maybe she hadn’t loved enough. Marriage, she decided, was not a pairing of tw
o people but a sum of all the ups and downs and ins and outs. She wondered if it was possible that what people called true love was seen only through time, and backward, when you couldn’t change a thing you’d done or try to be someone you weren’t, when what was done was done and you understood, when all was gone and still and quiet, you’d been living in it all along.

  Her eyes had gone bad and she could no longer see to read or sew, but her fingers could still find the notes of simple hymns, a little Schubert, some minuets and marches, and so she entertained herself this way throughout the winter. And there was Free Cell. And Dr. Phil and Oprah and Ellen and reruns of Little House. Long visits from Doro, who had finally retired and seemed less on edge than she’d been in the past. Every now and then her daughter would mention “a friend,” but Hattie didn’t pry. Jesse stopped by on his trips through town. He’d brought a new woman friend to meet her, a florist she halfway knew through a friend of a friend. They’d had several pleasant visits. The woman knew her flowers. Jesse seemed happy. ClairBell buzzed by once in a blue moon, but mostly kept to herself. Hattie would have liked a few more visits, but she knew that if she called her daughter would be there. Gideon would drop in, smelling of beer, to borrow small amounts of cash, saying he was strapped. What he did for a living she had no idea. She had decided not to ask. Her children had their own lives. In the summer she gardened, slower at her tasks than before, but at least she could be outside. The seasons passed serenely. Her health held.

  A curious thing had happened to her heart—a small miracle, she thought it was, though her doctor told her such a thing was fairly common. Still, she considered it a wonder that in all the turmoil of the past years, in all the worries and loss, when she hadn’t been thinking about it or trying to heal and not even taking vitamins as regularly as she pretended to Doro she was or even aware that such a thing could occur, her heart had grown another pathway around the blockage, quietly fixing itself.

  She was happiest when morning broke, when the earth felt newly born and her spirit rose to meet the coming day the way it always had and she could almost think she had the strength to live another lifetime. When this notion overtook her she would shake her head and stop herself before she went too far. Oh, Hattie, no, she would say to herself. For all its trials, hers had been a fine life, but once would be the greatest plenty.

  Evenings were most difficult. When shadows fell and darkness took her too deeply into the past—where there were moments she could not unlive—or too close to the mysteries of the world ahead. Sometimes, eager for what was to come, she willed herself not to wake up come morning, to hold herself adrift in sleep until she was no more. But of course she couldn’t keep her mind from springing back to life, at least so far. Still, to pave the way and reassure the One who had heard every prayer she’d uttered since she was a child and knew already, she believed with all her heart, what would become of her, she sent up the all clear, I’m ready, and as an afterword she put in, Anytime, should there be doubt.

  ALSO BY JANET PEERY

  What the Thunder Said

  The River Beyond the World

  Alligator Dance

  About the Author

  JANET PEERY’s books include Alligator Dance (stories), What the Thunder Said (a novella and stories), and her first novel, The River Beyond the World, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has received numerous honors for her fiction, including the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Whiting Writers’ Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She lives in Cape Charles, Virginia. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Also by Janet Peery

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE EXACT NATURE OF OUR WRONGS. Copyright © 2017 by Janet Peery. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Selections from this work have appeared in different form in StoryQuarterly, Idaho Review, and Image: Art, Faith, Mystery.

  Cover design by Jonathan Bush

  Cover illustrations: house by Jonathan Bush; strawflower © Florilegius/Getty Images; hawkweed © mashuk/Getty Images; blue Victorian © bauhaus1000/Getty Images; stains © Nik Merkulov/Shutterstock.com

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-12508-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-12509-5 (ebook)

  e-ISBN 9781250125095

  Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact your local bookseller or the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: September 2017