The Late Child (47 page)

“I wish we could stop thinking about her,” Laurie said. “I think it's unhealthy, that we can't stop, but the fact is we can't. I was thinking this morning that I shouldn't have come with you.”

“Why, Laurie?” Harmony said—she was shocked.

“Because if we're together how are we ever going to stop thinking about her?” Laurie asked.

“Mom, come eat the fish—I caught it,” Eddie said, from somewhere near the yard. “Mom, you have to come and Laurie has to come.”

“The voice of our leader,” Laurie said. “We better stop moping and go eat those fish.”

Somehow Harmony caught herself before the million eggshells cracked. It was close, though. One more sad tone from Laurie and they might have cracked, all million of them at once.

But Eddie's tone wasn't sad. He was proud that he had caught a fish.

“I have a question for you,” Laurie said, as they were walking back up the lane. From time to time Eddie yelled a command. He was getting impatient.

Harmony was hoping the question wasn't about Pepper; she didn't feel up to any more questions about Pepper, not right then.

“How did you stand your mother?” Laurie asked. They were almost to the yard.

“I didn't, I left,” Harmony reminded her.

“Do you think that's why your brother makes obscene phone calls? To get back at her?” Laurie asked.

“Laurie, it's probably because he can't find a girlfriend,” Harmony said.

Eddie insisted that his mother eat the first of the three perch he caught—he ate the other two. Then, as soon as supper was over, he fell asleep on the purple couch on the back porch, just as Harmony had, several hours earlier. As he slept he clutched a pocketknife that his grandfather had given him. It was a knife Sty had used for many years, and had sharpened many times—he used it to cut twine, or clean fish, or pare his toenails. The main blade of the pocketknife had worn thin, from many sharpenings. Eddie was very proud of the knife. Despite his grandmother's frequent injunctions about cutting his finger off, he kept opening and closing the knife until he went to sleep.

Iggy, exhausted from a day of following Eddie around, slept at his feet; the turtle was in his shoebox beside the couch, but on the side near the screen, where his grandmother, with her poor eyesight, would be unlikely to find it and release it.

“Don't let that child sleep on the porch,” Ethel said. “The night air's bad for children—he'll wake up with pneumonia and if he don't get pneumonia a spider might bite him.”

“She's cracked,” Sty said. “There's no spiders on that porch.”

“You don't know, you're blind as a bat,” Ethel said.

“I'm blind as a bat?” Sty said, in surprise.

“Blind as a bat,” Ethel repeated. “If there was a tarantula spider crawling right on this table I doubt you'd even see it.”

“Mom, the night air's the same air that's out there in the daytime,” Harmony pointed out. Neddie and Pat had gone home while she was napping—now she missed them. Even though they bickered, she had gotten so used to having them around that
not
having them around made her feel strange. Anyway, arguing with her mother was a full-time job for three people; it was a good bit more than any one person could manage.

Laurie offered to do the dishes. She started clearing the table,
but she made the mistake of yawning while she was carrying a couple of plates—Ethel, bad eyesight or not, saw the yawn.

“You're sleepy, young lady, just leave them dishes, Harmony can clear the table,” Ethel said. “She hasn't turned a hand in this kitchen in Lord knows how long.”

“Momma, that's rude, Laurie just wanted to help,” Harmony said. “It's only a few dishes.”

“Well, that girl's sleepy, she might drop five or six plates,” Ethel said. “I can't take the chance. Your father steals all my money, you know—he just takes my social security check right out of the mailbox and cashes it. I wouldn't be able to replace this crockery if that girl broke it.”

“If I
didn't
take your social security check out of the mailbox it'd sit there and never get cashed,” Sty said. “You haven't been to the mailbox in years, and when you do go you won't stick your hand in because you're afraid of black widow spiders.”

“Black widow spiders make their home in mailboxes, everybody knows that,” Ethel said.

Laurie quietly cleared the table; Ethel didn't notice.

“Ethel, that was excellent gravy,” Laurie said, referring to the cream gravy Ethel made with every meal. “I'm a little sleepy. If no one minds I'll go to bed.”

“Don't open your window no more than a crack, there might be bats flying around outside,” Ethel said. “Besides that, snakes climb walls.”

“Ethel, there's a screen on the window,” Sty reminded her. “There's screens on all our windows. Even if Laurie opened her window all the way to the top a bat couldn't get in, much less a snake.”

“You don't know everything, Sty,” Ethel said. “In fact, if you even still know anything, I don't know what it is.”

Laurie kissed Harmony and then went up to bed.

“Is that girl adopted?” Ethel asked, once Laurie had gone.

“No, Momma, she's not adopted,” Harmony said. “Why do you ask so many rude questions?”

“What's rude about the truth?” Ethel asked. “There's something funny about that girl, I thought she might be adopted. What's she doing kissing you?—you're not her mother.”

“It was just a goodnight kiss,” Harmony said. Her urge to be somewhere else was getting stronger. Ever since she woke up from her nap she had been thinking how nice it would be to be in a motel room, alone, just to piddle, or watch TV. She wanted to be someplace where her mother wouldn't always be there to ask rude questions, or make rude statements, or just look at her rudely and think suspicious thoughts.

“Momma, would you mind if I went to a motel? I feel like being alone,” she said.

Ethel looked shocked.

“Drive all this way after being gone for years and then not even spend the night?” her mother asked. “What kind of behavior is that?”

“Which motel?” she asked, before Harmony could even reply. “Have you got some man stashed away here that we don't know about?”

“I don't have a man anywhere, Mom,” Harmony said. “I've been under a lot of strain and think I'd sleep better if I could be alone.”

“Go in your room and shut the door, that's alone enough,” Ethel said. “Why would anybody want to be alone when they could be with their own mother? That's awful. Drive all this way to be with your mother and then go off to a motel to see some man?”

“Ethel, Harmony's grown,” Sty said. “She's middle-aged, and this is a free country. If a middle-aged woman wants to be alone that's her business.”

“She's my daughter, I don't care how old she is,” Ethel said. “I didn't want to be alone when I was middle-aged. Why should Harmony be any different from me?”

“Momma, I
am
different from you,” Harmony pointed out, feeling tired. Even when she was sixteen, arguing with her mother had made her feel tired.

“It's middle-aged women who usually have some old boy stashed away,” Ethel said. “Look at Pat. It's a disgrace, how she behaves. They've had to send her away to those old sex doctors I don't know how many times. I thought it was a waste of money. If that's her thing, whose business is it but hers?”

Sty looked exasperated. “That's just what I said to you about Harmony,” he said. “If being alone in a motel is her thing, let her do it.”

He handed her the keys to his pickup.

“There's a Best Western about six miles down the highway,” he said. “They have a nice clean coffee shop. I expect it's the best Tarwater's got to offer.”

Ethel picked up the sponge and began to sponge the smoky wall again.

“I doubt she knows how to drive a pickup,” she said. “If she don't, too bad—my Buick is unavailable. You let the oil get dirty and now I'm afraid to drive it for fear it will burst into flames while I'm on the way to town.

“I got no friends left anyway, I don't need to go to town,” she added, still sponging the wall. “What if there's a nuclear attack while she's off in the pickup—what'll we do, Sty?”

“Ethel, the cold war's over, there won't be a nuclear attack,” Sty said. “Just watch CNN.”

“I don't believe everything I hear on the radio,” Ethel said.

“CNN ain't radio, it's TV,” Sty reminded her. “I guess it don't matter, you can't see well enough to tell the difference.”

“If we could get all the way to Texas we might survive,” Ethel said, still working on the premise of a nuclear attack. “I don't know that that fallout would fall all the way to Texas.”

“She's cracked,” Sty said. “Go on, honey. Get a good night's sleep. Me and Eddie will do the milking in the morning. Once we get the chores done we might fish a little more. Sleep late if you feel the need.”

“Why would she need to sleep late?” Ethel asked. “She hasn't done anything but sleep since she got here. I thought she might want to talk to me, but so far we ain't talked five minutes. I've
got funny daughters, none of them care about talking to their mother.”

Sty stood up and walked Harmony to the door.

“Don't stand around waiting for the last word to come out,” he said. “If you do that you'll never leave. There's no such thing as a last word, with your mother. I've been waiting over fifty years for the last word, and so far I've waited in vain.”

Harmony kissed her father, and made sure Eddie's blanket was tucked close around him before she let herself out the screen door.

“How do we know she's even got a driver's license?” she heard her mother say, while she was still on the step.

The seat of the pickup was just about worn through—Harmony could feel the springs, when she sat on it. The highway was visible, about two miles away. She could see the lights of big trucks purring along it. There was a glow to the south, where Tulsa was.

Harmony took it slow, going over the dirt road—she wasn't used to pickups. She knew if she had a wreck her mother would complain forever, mainly to her father, since it was her father who gave her the keys.

She had only been on the highway about two miles when she came to the Tarwater exit. The town was just a sprinkle of lights, a mile off the interstate. She had been looking forward to being in the motel alone, but she had a sudden urge to see her brother; it was odd that they had seen so little of one another, over the years, because they had always been close. When Harmony was in high school she thought Billy was the best-looking man in Oklahoma, if not the world. He quarterbacked the high school football team and took them to the state championships twice, winning both times. There was even a commemorative cannon on the courthouse lawn, with the dates of the victories printed on the barrel.

In high school, Billy had all the girls in love with him. He dated the most beautiful girl in the school, Tammy Dawson; it was assumed they would marry, but to everyone's surprise Tammy married a lawyer and moved to Dallas.

It was about then that Billy began to let success slip through his fingers. He was a sophomore at the University of Tulsa, and had been on the dean's list four straight semesters, when he got arrested with some friends of his for stealing oil field equipment. Since it was a first offense, Billy didn't have to go to jail, but definitely the slipping began about that time. He came back home and tried to farm with his father, but that effort didn't last long; Sty had his own way of doing things, and that was that. Pretty soon Billy left and went to New Mexico, where he got in some trouble that everyone had always been sort of vague about. Neddie thought there might be a child born out of wedlock, out in New Mexico, but that was just her guess. Billy never said anything to anyone about a child. Then he got caught coming out of Mexico with some kind of ore in his trunk; some people thought the ore was gold and some people thought it was uranium, but in either case it was a little bit illegal. Billy had to go to jail for six months as a result. When he got out of jail he didn't do much of anything for a few years, except gamble on sports and play dominoes with the brothers who owned the Conoco station in Tarwater. Billy was the best domino player in the state; he had always been exceptional at anything he did; but it was still a limited life. Of course the very fact that Billy had even been in Mexico caused Ethel to fret for years; she had worried while he was in prison, but even that worry paled beside the worries she had about all the diseases Billy probably was infected with as a result of being south of the border.

Harmony had been south of the border quite a few times herself; she had even had a boyfriend named Enrique, from somewhere south of the border; of all her boyfriends, many of whom had been pretty hard to shake, Enrique ranked as probably the most obsessed. Specifically he had been obsessed with her clitoris, why she could never figure out. Most men, once they reached the state of being obsessed, fixed on her breasts but Enrique got obsessed with her clitoris and stayed obsessed with it until she finally managed to shake him, which was quite a few months after the obsession began. Never again had her clitoris
come in for quite so much attention as it got while Enrique was obsessed with it.

Of course the fact that Enrique had been obsessed with her clitoris was way off the track from wondering what had caused success to slip away from Billy; it was just a memory that came back to her once in a while when she was low—at least with Enrique around she had always known she was wanted.

One reason she drove so slowly as she entered Tarwater was because her mother's last-minute intuition had been right on the nose: she didn't have a driver's license. Somehow, the last time her license came up for renewal, she had never got around to sending it in. It was one of those times when her bank account had eight dollars in it, exactly the amount that it cost to renew her driver's license. She didn't think it made sense to spend her last eight dollars on a driver's license when she didn't have a car anyway.