The Sleeping and the Dead (17 page)

It occured to me how similar were my father and Michi Mori. It was frightening to think I had never noticed before.

My phone started to ring. It was Adam, but the call dropped before I had a chance to answer. My battery was dead.

Dad returned as I was flicking my butt out the window. It stuck like a dart in a drift of snow. He climbed in and set a paper bag on the seat between us. “It is Thanksgiving, after all,” he said.

I opened it and lifted out a jug of Wild Turkey 101. He started the truck and spun the tires. “Nice,” I said. My father was a bootlegger, too.

 

21

A
FTER LUNCH,
D
AD AND
I headed back out in the snow. “I'm just going to grab a couple of beers,” he said. He had a little fridge in the garage. He may have been a lush, but he was never a lush before four o'clock, except on holidays.

We opened our beers in the garage and watched the icicles drip. I thought about Cole Ritter's frozen body thawing on an outdoor stage in Memphis. I wondered if his ghost was still hanging around the wings, waiting for someone to applaud. I almost told Dad about the Playhouse murders, then decided against it. It was too close to home. He'd want to know why I was involved. He'd remind me that I couldn't make it right again. He'd tell me to let the dead lie.

But the dead don't lie. They stay with you. I hadn't talked about ghosts in his presence since I was a little girl. The one time I did mention my special friends, he looked at me as though he didn't know who I was.

Dad gave me a bag of corn cobs. “We're feeding squirrels now,” he said as he loaded up a bucket with bird seed. Though the clouds hadn't lifted, the snow had mostly melted away already, leaving the backyard a slippery sloping hell of mud. He showed me how to set a corn cob on the wooden feeder so the squirrels couldn't steal the whole thing. “They take it eventually, but it feels better to make them work for it. I ain't running no welfare office!” he shouted at the trees, which were full of chickadees and snowbirds. “We mostly get grackles,” he said. He rehung the last of the feeders and spread some seed on the ground for the little birds who couldn't compete. He stood at the edge of my mother's dead garden, sucking his beer, looking down the slope of the backyard toward the neighbors' house barely visible through the woods.

“This spring, that whole slope will come up in field corn,” he said.

I smoked a cigarette, trying to imagine the hillside covered with tall green stalks rustling in the wind. “Squirrels bury most of the corn we put out. Sometimes I wonder if this is how people first discovered agriculture—watching squirrels. When a squirrel buries a nut or an acorn or a corn kernel, he's ensuring he has food in the future, whether he digs it up and eats it, or forgets it and it sprouts into a new oak or pecan tree or corn plant.”

“He's not ensuring anything,” I said. “It's instinct.”

“Is it? Or does a squirrel plan for the future?” He shrugged and folded up the top of the seed bag. “Squirrels are pretty smart. Man has yet to invent a bird feeder they can't crack. It's like an arms race between bird feeders and squirrels. That's why we put out corn—to keep them off the bird feeders, because they wreck them.”

“Does the corn work?”

“Not really. I think they get tired of the same thing every day.”

“I don't think squirrels are smart enough to grow their own food,” I said.

“Does it matter?” He gazed at me with a strange earnestness. “At the end of the day, does it matter whether they plan for it or it just happens? The result is the same. The squirrel is providing for his future and the future of his children and grandchildren.”

I got the feeling he was trying to tell me something, but I didn't know what the hell it was. I didn't have the energy to try to puzzle it out. If I played dense about his parable, he'd eventually tell me straight up what it was he wanted me to know.

My parents were both being too mysterious for my comfort. Mom hardly spoke during lunch. I suspected they were setting me up. I wondered if I should cut out and head back to Memphis before they sprung their trap, but when I found Mom in the kitchen preparing Thanksgiving dinner all over again, I knew I couldn't leave. I stopped to appreciate the smells, which made her smile, but then she gazed at me sadly as though I were already a memory.

I went upstairs to change out of my wet jeans. Our family photos hung across the length of the upstairs hall. I stopped in front of the photo of my second wedding.

There hadn't been any photos of my first wedding. There
had
been a photographer, but none of the photos were ever developed. The groom, Dr. Richard Bruce of New South Wales, Australia, was my photography professor at Arkansas State, the man who photographed me nude with his Leica MP and showed me how beautiful I could be. He was the first man I had ever truly loved, who said I was the first person he ever truly loved, too. He never showed up at the church. Two handsome young Arkansas state troopers were waiting in the church parking lot to arrest him for bigamy. I never thought I'd see that bastard again, until he showed up at Michi Mori's kiddie-porn trial and took the stand as a witness for the defense.

Mom slipped up behind me, silent as a ghost, and put her arm around my shoulder. She was still so tall, she made me feel like a little girl. I barely came up to her chin. We looked at the picture of me in my second wedding gown and Reed Lyons in his powder-blue tuxedo. Mom wore a lemon-yellow dress with an enormous hat. She looked like she had stepped off the set of
Steel Magnolias
. The wedding ceremony was held in Overton Park, the reception at Brooks Museum, just around the corner from the Shell, where they found Cole Ritter's body yesterday morning.

I asked her, “Do you know what a caul is?”

“No.”

“It's the amniotic sack. Sometimes a baby is born inside it.” I looked it up in my dad's old Webster's dictionary that morning.

“Oh, that.” She smiled and hugged me. “I still have a piece of yours in your baby book. The nurse said it was good luck. Do you want to see it?”

“Not really.”

“Why do you ask?” I could hear the anxious, unspoken question in her voice—was I pregnant? I was happy to let her keep thinking that, rather than tell her I'd been seeing ghosts again.

She squeezed my shoulder and said, “Have you tried talking to Reed recently?”

“We talked Thursday night.”

“Maybe you two can patch things up. Reed is a good man, you know, and he loves you. And he makes good money. You ought to know by now how important money is, especially if…”

“Reed is stalking me,” I said before she could finish. “He hired someone to follow me around.” I twisted out of her grasp, went in my old bedroom and slammed the door. It really was just like old times again.

 

22

D
INNER WAS SOLEMN, AS WERE
all Thanksgiving dinners at the Pastor home. Dad was well into his fifth Wild Turkey by the time the rolls were ready. Mom stared out the window the whole time we ate. I often wondered why they seemed so put out by my habitual holiday tardiness, as if any amount of turkey and dressing could ever make this day what it used to be and could never be again.

After the pie, I went out on the front porch to smoke. Dad followed me, drink in hand. The yard still showed a few patches of white where the snow hadn't quite melted. The porch swing's plastic cover smelled like a school bus.

Dad stood in the dark, the ice cubes in his glass tinkling, saying nothing, while I smoked and flicked my ashes over the rail into the azaleas. I was seriously considering driving home tonight. Whatever it was, they either needed to tell me or stop acting like somebody was about announce they had cancer.

“So what's up?” I asked. It wasn't a casual, conversational question. It was a demand.

He sucked at his drink, drained the glass and spit out an ice cube. “It's your mother,” he said. Breast cancer. I thought,
She's got breast cancer
. “She worries about you.”

“Is that all?”

“That's her job. She worries about you, and I worry about her. That's my job. She's scared to death something is going to happen to you.”

“Why?”

“Hell if I know. You know I don't worry about you. Anybody who can make it through Coast Guard rescue training can take care of herself. But a mother never really stops worrying. Your mother puts a lot of store in her faith in God. She believes her Gift of the Spirit is prophecy, but she just worries more than most. Can you blame her?”

“No.” Other than her habit of saying grace over a meal, my mother had never struck me as being particularly religious. Then again I hadn't been to church with her in almost twenty years. Maybe things had changed. Maybe she had found Jesus, as old women often do.

“She just wants you to be happy,” Dad said in the dark. He tinkled the cubes in his glass. “You're always…” I heard him try to take another drink, but all he had left were ice cubes. “… not very happy,” he finished clumsily.

“She thinks being married is the road to happiness. That was her road, not mine.” I didn't need her judging me. I didn't judge her. Most of the time, anyway. Someone drove by and I saw my father's face in the glare from the lights. He looked sad, resigned, staring into his empty glass.

“You think you know her pretty good, don't you?” he stated.

“She
is
my mother.”

“What if I told you she had an affair?”

“I'd say you're lying.” He didn't respond, just swirled the ice cubes in his glass. “When?” I asked.

He was quiet for a long time. “Jeez, it must be eighteen, nineteen years now. After you left the second time, I think.”

I didn't know what to say.

“She confessed, of course,” he continued. “Couldn't live with the guilt. She's still upset with me because I didn't ask for a divorce. She thinks I don't love her.”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do. Jesus, I thought you were smarter than that.” I couldn't imagine my mother with anyone other than my father. My father I could imagine with just about anybody you care to name.

“Did you tell her about your affairs?”

“Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because I really do still love her.”

“If you loved her, you'd tell her,” I said. “You wouldn't sit there and let her think she's the bad guy.”

“The
bad guy
!” he laughed. “How old are you again?”

“I'd tell, if it were me.” I said. As a matter of fact, it was me, and I did tell. And just like my father, Reed hadn't asked for a divorce. I wondered if my father was also tormenting my mother with her sin, never letting her forget how she had betrayed him.

Dad said, “If you really love somebody, you shut your mouth and live with the guilt, even if it kills you. Sin is compounded by confession. Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls. Confession may comfort the soul, but only because it forces other people to bear the burden of your guilt, and that's hardly fair to them. Ignorance is bliss, and half of communicating is knowing when to shut your cake hole.”

“What a selfless martyr you've become,” I said.

“If I didn't love your mother, do you think I'd have gone to so much trouble to hide what I've done?”

“What about me? You never seemed to care that I knew.”

“That was an accident,” he said. “I never meant for you to find out.”

“My finding out didn't stop you.”

“You didn't try to stop me either, did you? If you had asked…” His voice got louder. He was almost yelling.

“Would you have stopped?”

He thought about that for a minute. “Probably not. An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but too many apples will kill you. Monogamy isn't natural for a man.”

“But it's fine for women? Is that what you're telling me,
Daddy
?”

“I never said that,” he said, quiet again, in control once more. I could almost see him smiling. “If women were naturally monogamous, I wouldn't have been nearly so tempted. I've always preferred married women. The happier her marriage, the better she is in bed.”

“What am I, your therapist?” I flicked my butt into the yard. “You should be paying me for this.”

“How about I buy you a drink,” he said.

“I think you should.”

I followed him to the kitchen. Mom leaned against the sink, staring out into the dark backyard. As we entered, she jerked and picked up a dirty plate. Dad had bought her a brand-new Whirlpool dishwasher for their anniversary, but she only used it for pans and mixing bowls. She still washed all her tableware by hand.

Dad filled two crystal tumblers with ice and poured a stiff shot of Turkey into each, followed by a splash of 7-Up for mine. He drank his undiluted and strong enough to straighten your pubes. Even with the 7-Up, mine made me suck in my cheeks. While we sat at the kitchen table drinking our health, Mom stacked the last plate in the drying rack, wiped her hands on a dish towel, and disappeared into their bedroom.

Dad was pouring us another round when she returned. She had a manila folder pinched in her hand. She laid the folder on the table and rested her fingers on it. I looked at Dad and he shrugged.

“So how did your date go?” she asked pleasantly.

“It was OK,” I lied. I had begun to dread what she had hidden in that folder. I imagined cut-out copies of dresses from wedding magazines. I couldn't go through that with her, see the disappointment on her face.

“What's his name again?”

“James St. Michael.”

“And he's a pilot?”

“Yeah.”

“Friday morning, before I went shopping, I stopped by the library,” she said. “Your father designed that library.” I nodded. I had spent many a Saturday afternoon there my junior and senior years of high school, throwing together last-minute term papers and research projects.