Thank You for All Things (34 page)

I pop the last bite of my pizza into my mouth and stand so Mrs. Olinger can get out. “Thank you for treating me to lunch,” I say, and Mrs. Olinger smiles and says it was her and Barry’s pleasure—that they’d treat Sam McGowan’s granddaughter to lunch anytime. Maude Tuttle looks over at us, her eyes pausing to examine me. Mrs. Olinger notices and leans down to whisper, “You ignore that wretched woman, you hear me? In fact, maybe you should just go on home now, dear. It doesn’t look like your mother’s going to show up.” I nod, but of course that’s the last thing I intend to do.

I look at Barry, then down at the third of the pizza that’s left, and I know he’ll sit right here until every stray olive is plucked from the tray. I don’t expect Barry to pay one iota of attention to me after his mother is gone, and he almost doesn’t. Not until he sees me heading toward Maude Tuttle’s table. I glance back when I hear the wooden seat groan, and, sure enough, Barry is leaning out of the booth to watch me.

I’m inches away from taking the seat facing Maude when the cowbell attached to the door clinks and jingles and I hear my name.

It’s Mom and Mitzy. Mom has dark smudges under her eyes from lack of sleep, and she’s pale. Mitzy doesn’t look much better. “What on earth are you doing here?” Mom calls.

“Waiting for you,” I say, loudly enough for Barry to hear me. I hurry to Mom and glance back toward Barry. I can see his squinty eyes peeking above the top of the booth, but when he sees me watching him, he dips his head down until all I can see is his orange orangutan hair.

Mom’s confused, of course, and more than a little pissed, so I drop my voice. “I was out riding my bike and I had to pee, so I came here.” I try hard to keep every ounce of snippiness out of my voice, but I’m not sure I’m doing such a good job, because Mom is giving me that look again. The one that says if I’m not careful, I may be ninety before I ride my bike again. I can’t help it, though. I’m still furious at her for ruining things with Peter—again!

“Who said you could ride your bike to town?”

“Milo rides to town all the time. Do you yell at him for it?”

“Does Ma know this?”

“I don’t know. But Milo does it, so why can’t I?”

“I never said you kids could—”

“You hungry?” Mitzy cuts in.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell them I was freeloading off the Olingers, so I just say, “No. Not yet. I’ll head home and have lunch there. Oma’s making a chef salad.”

Mom looks distressed. “We’ll discuss this when I get home. All four of us. You have your helmet with you?” She digs in her purse as she talks, then she pulls out her cell phone. “If you have any problems, you call Oma or Mitzy’s cell. Their numbers are in my contact list. You ride carefully, Lucy. Watch for cars, and if anyone stops, don’t—”

“Geez, Mom, it’s not like we’re in Chicago anymore. I got here safely, didn’t I?”

“I’ll be home as soon as Mitzy and I finish lunch.”

Mitzy gives me a kiss on the cheek, and I scoot to the door.

“Use your hand signals,” Mom calls after me, and Mitzy tells her I’ll be fine; I take note of the fact that Mitzy only fusses over Milo’s safety, not mine. I don’t take it personally, though. Milo is a boy, like Dylan.

I pedal my bike hard so I can get home in plenty of time before Mom does, for two reasons. One, so I can get some of the anger worked out of me and not get grounded again, and two, so I can lift some things off Mom’s computer. I wasn’t going to read any more, but I know that the more frazzled Mom is—and she is about as frazzled as I’ve ever seen her—the more likely it is that she’s made some new entries in her digital journal.

W
HEN
I get home, Oma is on the floor, her back arched over her exercise ball, rolling back and forth and grunting, her face as red as the giant poppy on her workout shirt. “Oh, thank goodness you’re here!” she says. “Give me a hand, will you? I never tried this position before and, oh, my, I can’t get myself up, and Milo’s in the shower. I was just going to spill over the sides, but a gal from my Pilates class tried that and cracked her tailbone.”

I have to skirt around a big metal contraption so I can reach her. “That’s your grandpa’s hoist,” Oma says. “It was just delivered. We’ll have an easier time getting him in and out of bed now.” I stand with both feet on either side of the
ball to keep it steady, then brace my arms tight as Oma holds my hands and pulls herself up to sitting.

“At least I didn’t have to use Grandpa Sam’s hoist to get you up,” I say, and once Oma’s on her feet, she laughs until her eyes get drippy.

“Speaking of your grandpa, I’d better check on him. Want to join me?” she asks.

“No. I’ve got things to do.”

Oma pauses, wiping her eyes, though the humor is gone from her mouth. “Honey, you haven’t been spending much time with your grandpa lately. I’ll bet he misses your company.”

“He’s asleep most of the time now, anyway,” I say.

“But his spirit knows you’re there.” She watches me closely for a moment.

“I’m fine, Persephone,” I say, using her new name so I can stay on her good side. I know Mom is going to tell her I rode all the way to town.

Oma pauses. “Oh, you don’t have to call me that anymore. I’m not sure it feels right. I’ll just be until the right name finds me.”

The second she slips into Grandpa Sam’s room, I hurry upstairs to get my memory stick. I don’t run on the way back, though, because I don’t want to make Oma suspicious by sounding like I’m in a rush.

I wait for Milo, since the shower’s stopped. And after what seems like forever, he emerges from the bathroom, his hair sopping wet and dripping on his lenses, comb ruts separating the strands into tiny, uniform columns. “I did ten miles today. In record time too.” Milo looks over at Feynman, who’s sleeping so soundly that his tongue is lying out on the floor.

I wrinkle my nose. “You’re such a bragger.”

I say this to offend him, of course, so he’ll get lost. “Geesh. I was just telling you,” he says. He pats his thigh for Feynman to wake and follow, and Feynman does, though his head is low and his eyes are half shut.

The second Milo’s door closes, I grab Mom’s computer off the counter and plug the memory stick in. I’m just yanking it out when the county nurse’s car pulls into the drive. “Oh, Barbara’s going to show me how to use that hoist,” Oma says as she hurries to get the door.

I don’t want to learn how to do that, even though Oma wants me to so I can help her. Instead, I hurry upstairs and plug the memory stick into my computer and search for Mom’s latest journal entry. It was written just last night!

He’s gone. This time, I fear, for good.

I tried so hard to let what I was feeling on the inside come out, but it was like my body wouldn’t cooperate. He pried until he got the story of Howard out of me. If only he had pried equally hard to get the words “I love you” out of me. I tried to wrench them out of myself, but the weight on my chest wouldn’t let them rise. And because my body wouldn’t cooperate, he’s gone.

Everyone’s asleep and I’m at the kitchen table now, trying not to listen to Dad in the next room. He’s gone, for all intents and purposes. His mind has drifted off to wherever it is the mind goes before death comes. Now he only waits for his body to cooperate and release him. I can’t look at him, and apparently Lucy can’t anymore either. It’s ironic that once again, Dad and I are alike. Both of us waiting to be set free.

I tried calling Clay again tonight. He never picked up. I guess this means I’m grouped with Ma now, because he doesn’t take my calls either. Ma still leaves him messages. Sweet messages,
telling him what’s new with her, me, the kids, and now Dad. Occasionally he leaves her one back—dialing her around midnight, once he knows she’s sound asleep, pretending it’s the first chance he’s had to call all day and stiffly making one or two comments before promising to catch her soon. Ma misses him, but unlike me, she has hopes that he’ll let us in his life again.

I feel bad for Ma that Clay has shut her out of his life. She carries the school photos that Clay’s wife, Judy, sends in her “Grandmother’s brag book,” photos of kids she’s seen only once, even though Clay’s oldest, his daughter, is almost as old as the twins—and she saves the thank-you notes they write her for the Christmas gifts and the few bucks she sends them on their birthdays. And what? Pretends that it’s not Judy’s hand that writes the notes from the boys, and that those nice granddaughterly words Brit writes weren’t dictated to her by her mother? That can’t make her feel all that special, can it?

I’m not as nice as Ma. The last time I bothered to call Clay and he actually picked up—just two weeks after we got here (picked up, I’m sure, only because he thought I was bringing him the “good news” that Dad was dead)—I confronted him. I told him that Ma doesn’t deserve this. That she didn’t do anything.

He told me I was right. She didn’t do a goddamn thing.

I pretended I didn’t get his point. I told him how she cried for him every day after he left, and I asked if he knew that. All he had to say about that was that she always cried when she was drunk.

I sighed and reminded him that she wasn’t the same person anymore. Then it was his turn to sigh. “I’m just not one for visiting graveyards,” he told me.

There was an awkward pause, and then I said, “Speaking of graveyards … are you coming home for Dad’s funeral?”

He told me that he’d see what his schedule looked like. God, that burned me. I reminded him that I didn’t want to do that freak show either, but I had to. I suggested that maybe he could come for Ma’s sake, and mine, and I got snippy when I suggested that maybe his clients could wait a couple days to have their boobs perked and their asses lifted.

“That’s not the kind of surgery I do anymore,” he said flatly. “I do reconstructive surgery. Kids with deformities. Accident victims who got their faces rearranged. Those sorts of things.”

I paused. I wanted to tell him that I was proud of him for making something out of himself. For having an honest career. Instead, I sniped that I would have known about his career shift if he ever bothered to talk to us. He said good-bye shortly after that, leaving me loathing myself for my knack for fucking it up with every male I ever had in my life, be it lover or brother, father or what have you.

It’s hard to believe that Clay was only seventeen when he walked out of this house—this family—for the last time.

I never did know what started the argument. It could have been anything: Clay not dumping the garbage the way Dad wanted it dumped—the burnables in the burning barrel, the slop taken out to the trees behind the shed to rot or be eaten by wild animals, the cans tossed in the heap in the woods until the heap got high enough for Dad to bury. Or maybe it was just because Dad didn’t like the look of Clay that day.

I was upstairs when I heard their voices rise, seemingly in unison. My ears perked instantly, my intestines cramping involuntarily.

I opened my bedroom door and stood frozen. Listening. Willing Ma to hurry home from Marie’s, where she’d gone to have a new zipper put into a pair of Dad’s work pants. Not that it would have mattered if she’d been home, of course. She’d only have done the same as me: stood frozen until things got totally out of control, then hovered at the edge of the scene, pleading with them to stop, her pleas not any more effective than mine in penetrating Dad’s rage-reddened ears.

“You worthless little prick!” Dad bellowed “When I tell you to do something, why in the hell can’t you do it right? You aren’t worth the bucks it costs to keep you fed.”

I heard the sound of breaking glass and Dad telling Clay he could clean that up too. Clay yelled back that he wasn’t the one who threw it, his voice low and level. Challenging.

Dad’s words weren’t unusual, of course. I’d heard them all before. But what was different on this particular day was that his rage seemed to be starting at the same pitch it normally ended on.

Ma had warned us about this. How Dad was under a lot of stress. “Just try to do as you’re told, and don’t argue. We have to show him a little more patience right now. The bank turned down his loan application, saying that it’s too risky to give him a loan that size and suggesting he find some investors, then come back. You know your father won’t do that. I think it’s finally sinking in to him that he’s never going to have that sawmill and that he’ll be working at the paper mill the rest of his life. He’s losing his dream, kids.”

I assured Ma we’d be good, but all Clay had to say was, “Fuck him and his sawmill.”

Clay was even more defiant after Ma’s warning. Not because he didn’t believe that Dad was more volatile than ever, but maybe because he knew what was coming and he just
wanted to get it over with. Nothing was worse than the calm before Dad’s storms.

I hurried down to the kitchen and stood in the doorway. “Where’s Ma?” I asked, as though I didn’t know, and as if I didn’t notice that they were standing with their chests a foot apart, jaws as tight as their fists.

Neither of them acknowledged that I’d spoken.

“Don’t you get lippy with me, boy,” Dad said. “I’ll fuckin’ deck you. Don’t think I won’t.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so stupid to think you wouldn’t,” Clay said.

Dad slowly, deliberately, moved in until his chest was butted up against Clay’s, the pocket of his T-shirt level with the pocket on Clay’s. “I don’t know about that. You’re pretty fucking stupid.”

It hurt me, hearing Dad talk to Clay like that. When we were little, Dad let him walk on his boots, and sometimes he even got down on his hands and knees to be Clay’s bucking bronco. Cuddled him once, when Clay was thrown into the coffee table and split his cheek open. And on weekends, Dad even took him fishing at Clement’s Creek. I resented the special treatment Clay got back then, but I didn’t have to hate him long, because it all stopped about the time Clay started school. In time, I had to wonder if maybe it didn’t hurt Clay more than me, when things got so bad. After all, you can’t miss what you never had. But Clay had it all once.