Shame (18 page)

I hoped he was making the right decision about spending his life out among the trees.

The rest of the practice was uneventful. Bill meshed all right with the offensive setup we'd been running, although I noticed that he didn't speak to Phillip and was reminded that there was another of our old tensions come back to visit us twenty years on.

After practice, I hobbled out to B. W.'s truck, him following close to make sure I didn't get knocked over by the gusting wind or slip on the ice patching the parking lot.

“Thanks,” I said after I'd clambered inside the cab and pulled my crutches in after me like a turtle retracting his limbs.

“Jeez, it's cold,” he said as he slammed his door and shivered, his shoulders jerking involuntarily toward his neck.

“Sneak preview of Montana,” I said. “It's not too late to reconsider.”

“Dad,” he said, turning and giving me the disapproving look I deserved.

The truck started on the third try. We'd have to work on this one before much longer—certainly before I trusted him to drive it north to Montana.

“How do you feel about playing this weekend?” I asked. “Think we'll do okay?”

B. W. made the face he used to make when we gave him medicine. “I'm not really excited about it,” he said. Then he shrugged. “But maybe it'll be fun.”

“Thanks for sticking with it,” I said. “I don't know what we'd do without you.”

B. W. inclined his head slightly toward me as if to say,
Yeah, you would be in a mess of trouble.
He drove across the road where we should have turned left toward the highway, and I must have raised an eyebrow, because he looked at me and then cleared his throat.

“I thought we might just drive around a little,” he said. “It's too cold to sit down by the pond and talk in your secret place.”

“Used to be secret,” I corrected. “I hear they published its location in the
Daily Oklahoman
.”

We drove for a bit, the radio playing low, the tune unrecognizable although I could feel the bass, which buzzed the cones of the cheap speakers I had helped B. W. install in the doors. We seemed to be drifting aimlessly around the west side of town, past tiny houses with particle or wood siding. The affluent families in this part of town had aluminum or even vinyl siding.

Phillip's grandmother lived in this part of town.

Gloria—and now Michael—also lived in this part of town. Michelle was still pushing me to visit them. I hadn't knocked on the door since my last abortive try, although on a couple of occasions I had coasted past on my way home like an adolescent cruising neighborhoods to see if Michael might be outside doing lawn work.

Of course, these were forlorn hopes. I knew my son. First, he would not willingly do lawn work in any season; second, if he were outside for some reason and I pulled up, he still would have nothing to say to me.

We passed ever-shabbier houses, their wooden siding peeling or unpainted, approaching the end of 8th Street. “Dad, what's wrong?” B. W. asked, and he threw the truck into park. “You seem—distant—lately. Lauren has noticed it too. Are you mad at me? Are you upset about Michael?”

“Family meeting,” I muttered. We sat for a moment in silence before I looked over at him. “I hadn't realized it was that noticeable.”

“Well, you're not exactly Robert De Niro,” he said. “You can't pretend you're feeling something you're not. You're just not that good an actor.”

“No,” I said. “I guess I'm not.” I shifted uncomfortably and looked out the window. We were parked in front of the shell of a burned-out house. Boards were nailed diagonally across the smoke-darkened windows. I could understand the impulse to try and protect what is yours; I could understand the impulse to try and keep people out; what I could not understand was why you would nail up your windows after your house had burned down.

“I've got a lot on my mind,” I said.

“So it's more than just me and Michael,” B. W. said. He seemed relieved. “That's what Lauren thought.”

I nodded. “It's more than you two. It's more than Lauren. It's more than your mom. But it's also all of you.”

“Lauren is afraid you're going to leave us,” B. W. said, and his voice caught, and I could tell that Lauren was not the only person who feared that possibility. I didn't ask what made them think that, didn't try to plead innocence.

I wondered suddenly how much they knew about me and my sad history, how much they had always known.

“I don't think I could do that,” I said finally, and I looked across to catch his gaze. My equivocal wording didn't go unnoticed, but it was as close to a promise as I could make. “I don't want to.”

“Then don't,” he said, and he tried to be gruff but couldn't quite manage it. “Please don't,” he amended.

We sat, both of us looking down at our respective floor mats. There was too much here, too many years, too many lost opportunities. How could I even begin to explain?

“Your mother's going to wonder about us,” I said. He nodded, and throwing the truck in gear he executed a U-turn that took us through the burned-out house's yard and into the opposite ditch before putting us in the direction of home.

“How was your day?” Michelle asked me that night after we'd fed the kids. We were rinsing dishes, and I was standing at the sink without my crutches with only a little discomfort and only a few grimaces of disapproval from family members who noticed. The kitchen was beginning to fill with wonderful smells from the pumpkin and peach pies Michelle had put in the oven earlier.

“Not bad,” I said. “Practice was not quite a total disaster. My old men were panting like Frank.”

“What was it like being with Bill?” She bent to put bowls in the dishwasher. I took a moment to see what she might be asking, but it seemed like a straight enough question.

“I didn't like it,” I said. “He took over, the way he always does. He bought warm-ups and jerseys for the team. And those old-fashioned shorts we used to wear. Like I want my flabby middle-aged butt hanging out for the town to see.”

“John,” she scolded, and looked around to see if the kids could hear, although I knew they couldn't or I wouldn't have said it. “How is he doing?”

“Not so well. He put on a good front. But it was probably a mistake to come up here over the holiday.”

“That's what I was telling Samantha,” she said, again bending to load the washer, although that was a little like shooting someone with a .357 Magnum then politely turning your head so as not to embarrass your victim by seeing the gaping hole.

“Urhmn,” I volunteered.

“I ran into her in the store,” she said. “We got to talking. She said it wasn't much fun being home. Said she was really feeling judged. Said her folks were determined to get them back together. That they were supposed to have Thanksgiving dinner with Bill and his family so that the girls could be with both their parents.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“I told her she ought to come out and have dinner with us,” she said. “Said that since we were having such a big group already she'd be welcome.” And this time she didn't load the washer but ran warm water over her hands before wiping them dry with the dishtowel.

What I wanted to ask was “Are you crazy?” but of course, to state things quite so baldly was not our way. “Uhmm,” I said.

“She's bringing candied yams,” Michelle said. “And a pecan pie.”

“I like pecan pie,” I said, and pulled the stopper out to let the rinse water drain.

“That's what I told her.”

“How was school today?” I asked.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” she said, and her enthusiasm pushed for a moment past other thoughts and spread across her face. “
Othello
with my seniors,
Gatsby
with Mrs. Edmondson's juniors. She was out sick again.”

“What part of
Gatsby?
”

“The big garden party. All the strange names of the party guests. And Gatsby alone in the house while everybody enjoys themselves at his expense.”

“Not the shirts?” I knew that was always her favorite part, that and the ending.

“Not yet,” she said, and she placed the back of her hand against her forehead in a highly dramatic way prior to declaiming, “‘I'm just crying because I've never seen such beautiful shirts.'”

“Is she crying about shirts?” Lauren asked, popping into the kitchen and sniffing the wondrously spiced air. “Mom, have you popped your cork?”

“It's
literature,
my dear,” I said, pronouncing the second “t” in a way I fancied was British and high-toned. “Perhaps someday you'll understand.”

She looked at me intently. “I don't think I'll ever understand crying over shirts.”

B. W. entered at the end of this exchange. “If someone took your favorite Mo Betta shirt I bet you'd be bawling your eyes out,” he said. He nudged her away from the refrigerator door with his hip and opened it, although you could see that his attention was not on the food in the fridge but rather somewhere else.

“Didn't I just feed you two?” I asked.

“I want something sweet,” Lauren said, and B. W. said, “I'm still hungry.”

“There's more cookies,” Michelle said. “Everything else is for Thanksgiving. Hands off the pies.”

Their faces fell—hope springs eternal—but they settled, if you can call it that, for a handful of Michelle's carob chip health cookies, baked with applesauce instead of butter and still pretty good.

“I hope it was okay to invite Samantha,” Michelle said after the kids had left. “You don't mind, do you?”

“No,” I said, and filled my mouth with cookie.

“I thought it would be good to spend a little time with her,” she said on her way out. She didn't say how she thought it would be good or for whom, and although I sat there for awhile longer, I still didn't have a clue.

I spent Wednesday making noodles from scratch, boiling chickens to go along with them, and getting things ready for Michelle to make her stuffing when she got home. Our bird was a good-sized tom I had shot the previous fall over on the Old Place; he had spent the year filling the top of one of our freezers, and to be honest, I was going to be glad to see him out of there, even though I hadn't been able to replace him this fall. I took him out in the morning and stuck him in the sink to thaw all day.

Very early on Thanksgiving morning we wrestled the turkey—stuffed full of bread crumbs, diced apples, walnuts, sage, and other things in Michelle's secret recipe—into a pan and then into the oven, where it would spend the rest of its useful life in metal-walled safety before emerging golden brown to be dissected for the joy of holiday eaters. I drained the chicken broth from the chickens and began to cook my egg noodles in it while I picked morsels of meat from the bones to add to the huge pot later. Potatoes boiled in another large pot, ready for mashing; flowerets of broccoli and cauliflower steamed in a third. Although the world outside was cold and dark and dead, the kitchen was filled with light and steam and wonderful smells. It was almost enough to make me forget that my wife had invited Samantha Mathis Cobb to my house for Thanksgiving dinner, that a dozen people would be watching every move we made and listening intently to every word that passed between us.

As if a houseful of people weren't pressure enough.

I still wasn't sleeping much, and when I slept I was having dreams that struck me as portentous, although they were also simply painful. In the one I had had just before waking, I found myself sitting in a corner office, looking out onto some mythical sky-scrapered city—Metropolis, maybe. My desk was big, the size of an old Buick, bare mahogany except for the picture of Samantha in the corner, her lips pursed, an inscription reading,

To the only man
I've ever loved,
Sam

It was the pounding that finally got my attention. Outside my office door stood my kids—Michael, B. W., Lauren—banging their fists on a thick wall of glass. I realized it was the final scene from
The Graduate
, when Elaine is getting ready to marry that schmuck and instead makes another bad decision—to run away with Benjamin.

They were pounding on the glass, and from the shapes of their mouths, what they were shouting was “Dad!”

I wanted to let them in. And I wanted to hide under my desk.

What I did, at last, was wake up.

I believe in dreams. I don't know that they're necessarily signs, although I am open to that possibility. But I definitely think that they're windows to the soul, a direct line to the unconscious, and it didn't take a whole lot of thought to see that this
Graduate
dream was about choice, about making a painful decision that would hurt someone.

But what about Elaine's last words to her mother, who told her, “It's too late!”?

She said, “Not for me.”

And then she ran from one disaster to another.

I knew it wasn't too late for me—but when every choice is going to hurt someone, when every choice is going to end in regret, what are you supposed to do?

Gradually the kids followed the smells into the kitchen for breakfast, noses twitching like rabbits as they got down bowls and cereal, poured milk. B. W. and Lauren even joined me for a cup of coffee while Michelle broke out the silver and inspected my parents' old china for smudges and spots.

“What time are Grandpa and Grandma getting here?” Lauren asked. I deferred to Michelle, since they were her parents.

“When they get around to it, I guess,” she said. “Most likely whenever your grandma decides that she's happy with her lemon meringue.”

“I hope she makes chocolate, too,” B. W. said. “I don't like lemon.”

“She knows that,” Lauren said. “She always brings both.” Then she turned to me and announced, “I'm not eating any turkey. Mrs. Anderson told us that they're raised on huge farms under inhumane conditions and that they pollute the water something awful.”