Bag of Bones (30 page)

“Right.”

“Why? You don't even know us.”

“Because . . .” I trailed off. I seem to remember wanting Jo to step in at that point, asking my mind to supply her voice, which I could then pass on to Mattie in my own. But Jo didn't come. I was flying solo.

“Because now I do nothing that makes a difference,” I said at last, and once again the words astonished me. “And I
do
know you. I've eaten your food, I've read Ki a story and had her fall asleep in my lap . . . and maybe I saved her life the other day when I grabbed her out of the road. We'll never know for sure, but maybe I did. You know what the Chinese say about something like that?”

I didn't expect an answer, the question was more rhetorical than real, but she surprised me. Not for the last time, either. “That if you save someone's life, you're responsible for them.”

“Yes. It's also about what's fair and what's right, but I think mostly it's about wanting to be part of something where I make a difference. I look back on the four years since my wife died, and there's nothing there. Not even a book where Marjorie the shy typist meets a handsome stranger.”

She sat thinking this over, watching as a fully loaded pulptruck snored past on the highway, its headlights glaring and its load of logs swaying from
side to side like the hips of an overweight woman. “Don't you
root
for us,” she said at last. She spoke in a low, unexpectedly fierce voice. “Don't you root for us like he roots for his team-of-the-week down at the softball field. I need help and I know it, but I won't have that. I
can't
have it. We're not a game, Ki and me. You understand?”

“Perfectly.”

“You know what people in town will say, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“I'm a lucky girl, don't you think? First I marry the son of an extremely rich man, and after
he
dies, I fall under the protective wing of another rich guy. Next I'll probably move in with Donald Trump.”

“Cut it out.”

“I'd probably believe it myself, if I were on the other side. But I wonder if anyone notices that lucky Mattie is still living in a Modair trailer and can't afford health insurance. Or that her kid got most of her vaccinations from the County Nurse. My parents died when I was fifteen. I have a brother and a sister, but they're both a lot older and both out of state. My parents were drunks—not physically abusive, but there was plenty of the other kinds. It was like growing up in a . . . a roach motel. My dad was a pulper, my mom was a bourbon beautician whose one ambition was to own a Mary Kay pink Cadillac. He drowned in Kewadin Pond. She drowned in her own vomit about six months later. How do you like it so far?”

“Not very much. I'm sorry.”

“After Mom's funeral my brother, Hugh, offered to
take me back to Rhode Island, but I could tell his wife wasn't exactly nuts about having a fifteen-year-old join the family, and I can't say that I blamed her. Also, I'd just made the jv cheering squad. That seems like supreme diddlyshit now, but it was a very big deal then.”

Of course it had been a big deal, especially to the child of alcoholics. The only one still living at home. Being that last child, watching as the disease really digs its claws in, can be one of the world's loneliest jobs. Last one out of the sacred ginmill please turn off the lights.

“I ended up going to live with my aunt Florence, just two miles down the road. It took us about three weeks to discover we didn't like each other very much, but we made it work for two years. Then, between my junior and senior years, I got a summer job at Warrington's and met Lance. When he asked me to marry him, Aunt Flo refused to give permission. When I told her I was pregnant, she emancipated me so I didn't need it.”

“You dropped out of school?”

She grimaced, nodded. “I didn't want to spend six months having people watch me swell up like a balloon. Lance supported me. He said I could take the equivalency test. I did last year. It was easy. And now Ki and I are on our own. Even if my aunt agreed to help me, what could she do? She works in the Castle Rock Gore-Tex factory and makes about sixteen thousand dollars a year.”

I nodded again, thinking that my last check for French royalties had been about that. My last
quarterly
check. Then I remembered something Ki had told me on the day I met her.

“When I was carrying Kyra out of the road, she said that if you were mad, she'd go to her white nana. If your folks are dead, who did she—” Except I didn't really have to ask; I only had to make one or two simple connections. “Rogette Whitmore's the white nana? Devore's assistant? But that means . . .”

“That Ki's been with them. Yes, you bet. Until late last month, I allowed her to visit her grandpa—and Rogette by association, of course—quite often. Once or twice a week, and sometimes for an overnight. She likes her ‘white poppa'—at least she did at first—and she absolutely adores that creepy woman.” I thought Mattie shivered in the gloom, although the night was still very warm.

“Devore called to say he was coming east for Lance's funeral and to ask if he could see his granddaughter while he was here. Nice as pie, he was, just as if he'd never tried to buy me off when Lance told him we were going to get married.”

“Did he?”

“Uh-huh. The first offer was a hundred thousand. That was in August of 1994, after Lance called him to say we were getting married in mid-September. I kept quiet about it. A week later, the offer went up to two hundred thousand.”

“For what, precisely?”

“To remove my bitch-hooks and relocate with no forwarding address. This time I did tell Lance, and he hit the roof. Called his old man and said we were going to be married whether he liked it or not. Told him that if he ever wanted to see his grandchild, he had better cut the shit and behave.”

With another parent, I thought, that was probably
the most reasonable response Lance Devore could have made. I respected him for it. The only problem was that he wasn't dealing with a reasonable man; he was dealing with the fellow who, as a child, had stolen Scooter Larribee's new sled.

“These offers were made by Devore himself, over the telephone. Both when Lance wasn't around. Then, about ten days before the wedding, I had a visit from Dickie Osgood. I was to make a call to a number in Delaware, and when I did . . .” Mattie shook her head. “You wouldn't believe it. It's like something out of one of your books.”

“May I guess?”

“If you want.”

“He tried to buy the child. He tried to buy Kyra.”

Her eyes widened. A scantling moon had come up and I could see that look of surprise well enough.

“How much?” I asked. “I'm curious. How much for you to give birth, leave Devore's grandchild with Lance, then scat?”

“Two million dollars,” she whispered. “Deposited in the bank of my choice, as long as it was west of the Mississippi and I signed an agreement to stay away from her—and from Lance—until at least April twentieth, 2016.”

“The year Ki turns twenty-one.”

“Yes.”

“And Osgood doesn't know any of the details, so Devore's skirts remain clean here in town.”

“Uh-huh. And the two million was only the start. There was to be an additional million on Ki's fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twentieth birthdays.” She shook her head in a disbelieving way. “The linoleum keeps
bubbling up in the kitchen, the showerhead keeps falling into the tub, and the whole damn rig cants to the east these days, but I could have been the six-million-dollar woman.”

Did you ever consider taking the offer, Mattie?
I wondered . . . but that was a question I'd never ask, a sign of curiosity so unseemly it deserved no satisfaction.

“Did you tell Lance?”

“I tried not to. He was already furious with his father, and I didn't want to make it worse. I didn't want that much hate at the start of our marriage, no matter how good the reasons for hating might be . . . and I didn't want Lance to . . . later on with me, you know . . .” She raised her hands, then dropped them back on her thighs. The gesture was both weary and oddly endearing.

“You didn't want Lance turning on you ten years later and saying ‘You came between me and my father, you bitch.' ”

“Something like that. But in the end, I couldn't keep it to myself. I was just this kid from the sticks, didn't own a pair of pantyhose until I was eleven, wore my hair in nothing but braids or a ponytail until I was thirteen, thought the whole state of New York was New York City . . . and this guy . . . this
phantom father
 . . . had offered me
six million bucks.
It terrified me. I had dreams about him coming in the night like a troll and stealing my baby out of her crib. He'd come wriggling through the window like a snake . . .”

“Dragging his oxygen tank behind him, no doubt.”

She smiled. “I didn't know about the oxygen then. Or Rogette Whitmore, either. All I'm trying to say is
that I was only seventeen and not good at keeping secrets.” I had to restrain my own smile at the way she said this—as if decades of experience now lay between that naive, frightened child and this mature woman with the mail-order diploma.

“Lance was angry.”

“So angry he replied to his father by e-mail instead of calling. He stuttered, you see, and the more upset he was, the worse his stutter became. A phone conversation would have been impossible.”

Now, at last, I thought I had a clear picture. Lance Devore had written his father an unthinkable letter—unthinkable, that was, if you happened to be Max Devore. The letter said that Lance didn't want to hear from his father again, and Mattie didn't, either. He wouldn't be welcome in their home (the Modair trailer wasn't quite the humble woodcutter's cottage of a Brothers Grimm tale, but it was close enough for kissing). He wouldn't be welcome to visit following the birth of their baby, and if he had the gall to send the child a present then or later, it would be returned. Stay out of my life, Dad. This time you've gone too far to forgive.

There are undoubtedly diplomatic ways of handling an offended child, some wise and some crafty . . . but ask yourself this: would a diplomatic father have gotten himself into such a situation to begin with? Would a man with even minimal insight into human nature have offered his son's fiancée a bounty (one so enormous it probably had little real sense or meaning to her) to give up her firstborn child? And he'd offered this devil's bargain to a girl-woman of seventeen, an age when the romantic view of life is at
absolute high tide. If nothing else, Devore should have waited awhile before making his final offer. You could argue that he didn't know if he
had
awhile, but it wouldn't be a persuasive argument. I thought Mattie was right—deep in that wrinkled old prune which served him as a heart, Max Devore thought he was going to live forever.

In the end, he hadn't been able to restrain himself. There was the sled he wanted, the sled he just had to have, on the other side of the window. All he had to do was break the glass and take it. He'd been doing it all his life, and so he had reacted to his son's e-mail not craftily, as a man of his years and abilities should have done, but furiously, as the child would have done if the glass in the shed window had proved immune to his hammering fists. Lance didn't want him meddling? Fine! Lance could live with his backwoods Daisy Mae in a tent or a trailer or a goddamned cowbarn. He could give up the cushy surveying job, as well, and find real employment. See how the other half lived!

In other words, you can't quit on me, son. You're fired.

“We didn't fall into each other's arms at the funeral,” Mattie said, “don't get that idea. But he was decent to me—which I didn't expect—and I tried to be decent to him. He offered me a stipend, which I refused. I was afraid there might be legal ramifications.”

“I doubt it, but I like your caution. What happened when he saw Kyra for the first time, Mattie? Do you remember?”

“I'll never forget it.” She reached into the pocket of
her dress, found a battered pack of cigarettes, and shook one out. She looked at it with a mixture of greed and disgust. “I quit these because Lance said we couldn't really afford them, and I knew he was right. But the habit creeps back. I only smoke a pack a week, and I know damned well even that's too much, but sometimes I need the comfort. Do you want one?”

I shook my head. She lit up, and in the momentary flare of the match, her face was way past pretty. What had the old man made of
her
? I wondered.

“He met his granddaughter for the first time beside a hearse,” Mattie said. “We were at Dakin's Funeral Home in Motton. It was the ‘viewing.' Do you know about that?”

“Oh yes,” I said, thinking of Jo.

“The casket was closed but they still call it a viewing. Weird. I came out to have a cigarette. I told Ki to sit on the funeral parlor steps so she wouldn't get the smoke, and I went a little way down the walk. This big gray limo pulled up. I'd never seen anything like it before, except on TV. I knew who it was right away. I put my cigarettes back in my purse and told Ki to come. She toddled down the walk and took hold of my hand. The limo door opened, and Rogette Whitmore got out. She had an oxygen mask in one hand, but he didn't need it, at least not then. He got out after her. A tall man—not as tall as you, Mike, but tall—wearing a gray suit and black shoes as shiny as mirrors.”

She paused, thinking. Her cigarette rose briefly to her mouth, then went back down to the arm of her chair, a red firefly in the weak moonlight.

“At first he didn't say anything. The woman tried
to take his arm and help him climb the three or four steps from the road to the walk, but he shook her off. He got to where we were standing under his own power, although I could hear him wheezing way down deep in his chest. It was the sound a machine makes when it needs oil. I don't know how much he can walk now, but it's probably not much. Those few steps pretty well did him in, and that was almost a year ago. He looked at me for a second or two, then bent forward with his big, bony old hands on his knees. He looked at Kyra and she looked up at him.”