Shining Sea (11 page)

Patty Ann waves her glass, creating an explosion of tinkling ice. “You see, that's just so typical. First you give a treat. Then you spoil it by nagging.”

She takes a long drink. The air is soft and dry at this hour. Back in Phoenix, Ronnie will have his feet up on the footrest of the leather recliner, the remnants of dinner on a tray, a napkin neatly folded in his lap. Ronnie likes to eat in front of the television, a habit sprung probably from years as a bachelor. Sissy will be in her room, nose in a book or one of her journals.

Kenny looks up at her. A trembling Technicolor drop of liquid courses down a finger. “What did you say, Grandma?”

Patty Ann jingles her glass again. “You just can't let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Okay, Patty Ann. That's enough.”

She sets her glass down and goes into the kitchen for a paper towel. Kids have to learn to do stuff like this for themselves, but if Kenny comes in now, he's sure to leave a sticky-sweet trail of melted Popsicle across the kitchen floor she washed yesterday. God knows when it will get washed again.

Patty Ann stands in the doorway. “When are you going to visit Luke?”

She tears a sheet from the roll of Scott Towels. She bought a double pack for the house on her way back from the cemetery this morning, along with the playing cards, a bunch of bananas, some sandwich fixings, the pork chops they just had for dinner, a few steaks, potatoes, frozen succotash, frozen lemonade, four sticks of butter, and two gallons of milk. Plus a box of Bisquick and bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup for pancakes. The boys gobbled that breakfast up like they'd never eaten before. She had to mix a second batch of batter.

“I already have.”

“Mom!” In the obscurity of dusk, the hostility dropped briefly from her expression, her older daughter looks for a moment like the woman Patty Ann might have become—maybe trained as a nurse, married to a nice doctor, living in a nice house with two cars in the driveway—if not for Lee. If not for everything. “I would have come with you.”

“You said you were done going with me to cemeteries.”

But Patty Ann isn't that woman. Patty Ann's a wreck of a young woman, dangling in the ramshackle doorway like a loose tooth in a swollen mouth after a brawl. Her husband has run off, who knows for how long or doing what, leaving her behind with no job and no money but three children.

“I don't know why you left him to be all alone in Los Angeles,” Patty Ann says, her expression closing up again.

“Luke is not alone. He's with your father.”

Is that what this trip is about? Did Patty Ann bring her all this way to argue about Luke yet again? She turns away to pour more lemonade. If Luke hadn't run off with those hippies instead of going to college, he would have gotten a student deferment. He'd still have gotten called up—with number 013 in the lottery, that was for certain—but at a different time.
Everything
could have been different. She would have supported him in requesting a deferment: she's a mother; she knows her kids. Francis would have done better than Luke over there.
Patty Ann
is better cut out for the army. And getting a deferment isn't cheating. Just like it wasn't cheating that Francis didn't get sent over at all because he drew a high number. But Luke disappeared into the desert, and the army dragged him back out before she could. It's awful, but that's what happened.

She puts the pitcher of lemonade back in the fridge. “Also,” she says, “Luke has his big sister here. And Francis.”

“Francis is gone.”

Patty Ann steps back into the night. She follows her out and hands the boys each a paper towel. “What do you mean he's gone? When'll he be back?”

Patty Ann shrugs. “He split. After Eugene committed suicide.”

“After
what?
Eugene
what?”

“Labor Day weekend. Eugene took a shotgun to his head.”

“What?”
She puts a finger to her lips and nods meaningfully at the boys.

Patty Ann shrugs. “I don't lie to my kids. They should know what war does to people.”

The boys don't seem to be listening anyway, intent on the army of ants drawn by the sweet juice of the Popsicles spilling over the cracked cement. She says, in a lowered voice, “But why didn't anyone tell me? Why didn't you tell me?”

Patty Ann stares at her and again shrugs.

“Oh, for God's sake. Why didn't Francis tell me, then? That's awful.
Awful.
” Eugene? The story seems too strange to be possible. Granted, she hasn't seen him in five—no, maybe six years; by Luke's funeral, Eugene'd already been called up. There was a time he was almost her fourth son. But when kids move outside their family's sphere, their friends move even further.

Still, Eugene was always the very spirit of optimism. What could possibly make a person change that much? “Maybe it was an accident. It must have been an accident. Was he drinking? Was he hunting? People said his dad used to go into the hills with a shotgun when they didn't have anything for dinner.”

“He was sitting in his parents' backyard. Maybe he used his father's old gun. I don't think anyone knows exactly why, except maybe Francis. But Francis isn't telling anyone anything. After the funeral, he took off.”

She's been trying to reach Francis ever since she got Patty Ann's phone call, without success. This explains why. It hadn't seemed strange; frustrating but not unusual. Francis is often difficult to get hold of. “You went to the funeral?”

“Yeah. Eugene's father called me.”

“Eugene's father? Not Francis?”

Eugene's parents! His hapless father with the missing finger. His worried, bedraggled mother. How could Eugene do such a thing to them? And not just to them—to Francis?

Could
this
be why Patty Ann asked her to come?

She sits down and stares at her two grandsons, so young, so innocent, bent over the swarm of ants, oblivious to the grown-ups, to the world around them.

“I don't get it,” she says softly. “Eugene makes it safely all the way through Vietnam, and then he comes back and kills himself? It just doesn't make sense.”

“Maybe he
didn't
make it safe through Vietnam.”

She sets her lemonade down. “Kenny, go in and change your pajamas. It's your bedtime.”

“We don't have a bedtime,” he says, looking up.

“That's ridiculous. All little boys have bedtimes.”

“We don't. Mommy says they aren't natural. Mommy says when we are tired we will sleep.”

“That's not exactly what I said, Kenny.” Patty Ann extends her hands toward her sons. “Both of you. Come on. I'll read you a story.”

Soon the sound of Patty Ann's voice, low and rhythmic, wafts out from the boys' bedroom. With a wet paper towel, she wipes up any trace of the Popsicles. Then she extracts the hidden vodka from its cabinet and sprinkles it over the ants. She splashes some vodka into her lemonade, too.

Michael. Luke. Now Eugene.

“So, boys,” she says the next morning, shaking off the night's restlessness, once they've finished their second round of pancakes. She'll pay her respects to Eugene's parents this evening or tomorrow. They'll tell her where Eugene has been laid to rest so she can visit him before she heads back to Phoenix.

But right now, her job is her grandsons. “What shall we do on my last day here?”

“Are you leaving?” Kenny says. “Don't go yet.”

His little brother shakes his head in agreement, rattling the G.I. Joe he still hasn't let go of. The kid doesn't talk. Before, he was small enough to pass for a late bloomer. Or for someone who is just very quiet, like Francis. But really, something is wrong. Something is very wrong.

“Why are you leaving already, Mom?” While she feels somewhat worse for wear this morning, Patty Ann looks better: her shoulder-length hair freshly washed and tied up in a high ponytail like a teenager's, her jeans switched for a rumpled but clean sundress.

“Well, it's been nice to visit,” she says. “But I'm not sure why I'm here.”

“Isn't visiting enough?”

“Visiting is great, Patty Ann. But I have my own home to look after.”

In fact, with Sissy almost eerily self-sufficient, plus the hired girl in to help, there's nothing keeping her from staying a little longer. Francis clearly hasn't headed back to Phoenix and there's no use trying to track down
where
he's gone, not if he doesn't want to be found. She isn't due at the library until next Wednesday, and that's the only volunteer work she's involved in other than the odd cake or costume to be made for Sissy's school. She hasn't been able to step back into their church—or any church—since Luke's funeral mass.

Still, if Patty Ann doesn't want to come out and say what's on her mind, she knows how to call her bluff.

“I think the zoo today,” she tells the boys.

“I'm staying home with the baby,” Patty Ann says, making a vain effort to hide her irritation. The zoo must be another thing Patty Ann doesn't approve of. No wonder the boys were so fascinated by the ants last night—probably the only wildlife, other than terns and seagulls, they've ever seen. “I have work.”

“Work?”

“I've been making jewelry.” Patty Ann leaves the room for a moment, then comes back with a big wooden box in her hands. “I comb the beach for shells, paint them, then string them alongside beads on necklaces. The boys help me. When I can get the car from Lee, we drive down to Laguna Beach and look for the shells together, and sometimes they paint them.”

She lifts a knobby twist of macramé and shell up to the light. It spins in space like unspoken memories of summer days at the beach. The kind she spent with the kids when they were still small and living together in Los Angeles, everyone still alive, everything still ahead of them. She drops the necklace back into the box. “That's pretty, Patty Ann. Do people buy them?”

“Some. Sometimes.”

The two boys pour into the front passenger seat of her car. “You're fun, Grandma,” Kenny says. “It's fun when you visit.”

She flips on her sunglasses. A tire drops into a pothole, jerking the little boys forward. “Hold on to your hats, boys,” she says gaily. Even the streets are disintegrating in this hellhole. Was Eugene living in poverty like this? Did he, like his parents, feel doomed to a life of scraping by? Boys can't marry their way out of their pasts so easily. Still, Eugene was bursting with ideas and energy. And he had an honorable discharge from the army. Last time Francis mentioned him he had a job somewhere—a lumberyard?

“Daddy says the zoo reminds him of high school,” Kenny remarks.

Her grandkids. This is her last day with them. “Right,” she says. “And your dad and his friends were the monkey exhibit.”

Kenny hesitates, unsure whether he should laugh. “No—because of the cages. Mommy says the animals are all stolen from their mothers and sad.”

Patty Ann thinks
she
spoils every treat? “There aren't real cages at this zoo, Kenny. The animals are lucky to be here. They always have food, and they live much longer than if they were out in the wild.” He's such a sweet boy, so naturally diplomatic. She doesn't want to push him to betray his parents. “Anyhow, they are living here now. So we might as well enjoy them.”

And they do. Once they've arrived, the boys run from exhibit to exhibit. They want to see everything. The big cats, the bears, the reptiles. They spend an especially long time in front of the enclosure of Methuselah, the alligator.

“I have a purse that looks just like his backside,” she tells the boys, and Kenny makes a face. “It's true. Step-grandpa Ronnie brought it back for me from one of his business trips.”

“Grandma.”

They munch on the bologna sandwiches she packed for them, and then, with the sun heating the day up, she buys them all slushes. Slurping happily on their straws, they move on to the zebras when the G.I. Joe somehow manages to fall inside the animals' enclosure.

The panic in Sean's eyes is something terrible to see. He grabs onto her arm.

“Wah!” he says, almost moved to speech.

The old man standing beside her sees and intervenes. “Don't worry!”

He stretches his cane between the bars and deftly hooks the doll under its arm. Slowly, gently, the old man lifts G.I. Joe out.

Everyone around them claps.

“No big deal,” the old man says. “I'm a lifetime fisherman.”

“You and my father,” she tells him, and then tells the boys: “Your great-grandpa would take you fishing if you went up to see him.” Even when no one had anything, when whole families appeared on street corners in San Francisco, their faces caved in with hunger and despair, her mother kept the family larder stacked with mason jars of tomatoes and beans and peppers grown in window boxes, and her father would take her and her brother down to the new pier every day before school and not leave until they caught something. To this day, she can't stand the smell of walleye or sole or perch. Actually, the only fish she can bear is canned tuna.

But Patty Ann has never taken the boys up to San Francisco to see their great-grandfather and never will. In truth, he probably couldn't take the boys fishing now, anyhow. With his emphysema, he's not likely to last much longer. After her mom died, she and Ronnie invited him to stay in Phoenix with them, but he has his group of fellow Czechs, the same ones he's worked alongside, played fiddle with, and drunk beer with for the last three-quarters of a century. Why would he leave it now to live in a strange place, with virtual strangers, at the end of his life?

“Let's go see Twinkletoes,” she says. “And then we'll have seen everything there is to see, I think.”

“Who's Twinkletoes?”

“A black rhinoceros. They are rare.”