Where the Broken Lie (22 page)

When it is my turn, I hold Grandma’s hand and kiss her one last time. I tell her that I love her.

“I love you, too,” she says back to me. “And, Tucker?”

“Yeah?”

“Go back and look at the barn again, would ya? See if you don’t see something on the other side of that hole.”

“Okay, Grandma. I will.”

“And if you still don’t see nothin’, keep going back until you do.”

I smiled down at her and told her again that I loved her, wanting those to be the last words I ever said to her.

I went to bed that night and waited for her to die. I wrapped myself in the afghan she had made for me years ago when I went away to college and I tried to feel the life she had knit inside of it. It was Tory’s napping blanket now and she wouldn’t sleep without it, which was more than okay with me.

It smelled like simpler times and it warmed me as it always had. Grandma had made the blanket large enough to cover all 6’4 of me, so that I could cocoon myself from the cold of my freshman year dorm room. She also put a name tag on it because she didn’t want anybody stealing it, which was sweet but silly. Guys in dorms might steal your music, your beer, or your girlfriend, but never your afghan. Especially the afghan that your Grandma made for you. But especially the afghan that your Grandma made for you that has your name on it, which was why she did it I suppose.

There are a few loose strands of yarn and one small hole the size of my big toe, but it’s still in good condition overall. I wrap it around me and think about how Grandma’s fingers touched every square inch of it.

I want to believe that I can feel her. That I can smell her, that I can hear that laugh of hers. And I could, sort of, but not really. Really, all I could do was remember. But when I remembered and I touched that blanket I felt the love and the warmth. So much love, like every hug she’d ever given me. So much warmth that it made me thankful for cold times and cold places.

It would be right for Grandma to die on this night. In this way, in this house. On a Sunday. And later on that night, Grandma did what was right. After the last of us left her that evening, the last of her left us. But when she passed, a light was still on in that window. And forever a light will be on in that window.

Gavin, Heather, and I are going through a box of old photos to select some for the collage to be displayed at Grandma’s wake.

“Oh, wow.” Gavin says muffling a frightened laugh with his free hand.

“What?” I ask.

He holds up a black and white photo of an old woman wearing a black dress, white bonnet and a scowl that would have kept any cornfield free of crows for three generations. She is holding a broom at such an angle as to suggest she has been caught in the middle of sweeping something away, like all things bright and beautiful.

“That’s Grandma’s Aunt Elsie,” I say. “She was a Quaker.”

“Does she … does she have a goatee?” Gavin asks incredulously.

“She sure does. I recall how Grandma had told me how Elsie refused to do anything about her abundance of sideshow facial hair. “According to Grandma, Elsie always said, 
The good Lord put it there and the good Lord can take it away if that’s what he wants.

“If that was the Quaker in her speaking, it’s no wonder the modern world has left that religion behind,” says Heather.

“I guess nobody ever reminded her that God helps those who help themselves and then handed her a razor,” I add.

“That must have been the good Lord’s way of ensuring that she never married and reproduced,” Heather says. “That’s a whole lot of ugly to carry around.”

A suppressed laugh chortles from my nose.

“What?” Gavin asks. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking about Dad.”

“How do you mean?”

“For some reason, I imagined Dad having to tell us Aunt Elsie has died.”

When he had something serious to discuss, Dad would always affect a solemn sort of tone. He would sit down, lean forward on his knees, clasp his hands loosely together, and look up at you with one eyebrow raised higher than the other.

I struck the Dad pose and act out a never-happened conversation of Dad breaking the news to me about Aunt Elsie.

“Tuck, I’ve got some bad news,” I say in a sober Dad-like tone.

“What is it, Dad? What’s going on?”

“Well, Tuck, Aunt Elsie died today.”

“Aunt Elsie died? How? What happened?”

“It was the ugly, Tuck. It was the ugly that killed her. Her old body just couldn’t take it anymore. It couldn’t carry around all that ugly.”

Then, with a final big sigh and a shake of the head, “She was just too god-damn-ugly.”

After the laughter subsides, Heather passes me another photo.

“Look at this,” she says. “I guess Grandpa wasn’t always bald.”

It was a picture of Grandpa when he looks to be about fourteen or fifteen years old. He is shirtless, shoeless, and smiling in the photograph. His left arm is slung around the neck of a boy holding a rake upright like the old man in American Gothic.

“Who’s this with him?” I ask, handing the picture to Gavin. “He looks familiar.”

“Let me see,” Gavin says, taking the picture. “Oh, I know who this is. It’s Old Man Keller.”

“Old Man Keller? I didn’t know he and Grandpa were friends.”

Gavin flips over the picture over.

“Not only friends,” he says, pointing to the words written on the back. “
Best buds forever
.”

“Let me see that.” I grab the picture back from him.

There it is, written on the back of the photo in faded pencil: 
Best buds forever!

I toss it all around in my head—Katie, Slim Jim, Keller, Grandpa, the anonymous tipster, Mr. Innocent,—trying to write an alternative ending to a story that has already been written. Trying to find understanding where none was to be found.

Old Man Keller hadn’t been protecting Edie. He had been protecting Grandpa. His
best bud.

But that would Grandpa …

My mind does a fast rewind through all of the memories of Grandpa I can process, trying to remember ever feeling afraid of him, but there is no such memory. I’ve always suspected he probably drinks too much. And then there was his strange distant behavior during Grandma’s illness. But there’s nothing that could lead me to think he’s capable of something so hideous. I have nothing but good memories, which makes me feel guilty and foolish. All of those memories are now tainted. Picking wild raspberries in the forest together. Him teaching me to drive his riding lawnmower. Playing checkers. All of it tainted. The chubby, laughing, gentle old man of my memories was morphing into an evil-eyed, sharp-toothed predator masquerading as protector. A lascivious lurking evil disguised as anything but.

A dragon monster.

I thought back to our late night talk in the kitchen.

“Here’s the thing, Tuck. One way or the other, demons will change you. They could change you for the worse or they could change you for the better. You could look at the bad that’s happened and try to make some good out of it. Or you could look at it and start thinking that the world owes you something, like you’ve got some sort of free pass.”

What had he been telling me there? Had this been some hint of confession?

“No, Tuck, I’ve never been able to drown those demons. Joe’s death did not change me for the better.”

It’s strange how easy it is for me to believe something so unbelievable. A something that is so inconsistent with everything I thought I knew, but I can just feel the truth in it. It has been rolled in gritty, sticky certainty and presented to me. Not evidence. Not proof. Something deeper than that.

Certainty.

Grandpa had killed Katie.

“You lied to me, Alvin.”

“Lied, Tuck? Lied about what?”

“It wasn’t Andrew Dales, was it, Alvin?”

Gloom falls over the Old Man’s face like the final curtain. Even through the screen on his front door, I can see there is no more fight in him. He is tired. Tired from a life spent on top of a lawn mower and under the unforgiving sun. Tired from lies.

The Old Man steps outside to join me, the coils on the screen door squealing a long, witchy cackle as it closes behind him. We settle into the two rocking chairs on the Keller’s front porch. “Alvin” is painted in red across the top of his seatback and “Myrna” across the back of mine. I’d almost forgotten there was an Old Woman Keller.

We rock in our chairs and they creak in protest. I allow the moments to pass by peacefully, in part because I know that it will be some time before I feel peace again.

The sun is high in the sky and its stare makes me hot. Sweat trickles down my face and I wipe it dry against my shoulder.

“Hot, ain’t it?” says the Old Man.

I nod.

“You know I’ve been riding that same damn mower for more than thirty years now? Think I’ll probably stop running before it does. Damn good machine. Oh sure, I’ve had to make some repairs over the years, but nothing I couldn’t handle myself. For the most part, I take care of it—change the oil and the plugs, sharpen the blade—you know.”

“Alvin…”

“Yes sir, that machine has done me well over the years. Dependable. Predictable. Just take care of it, replace the broken parts when need be. Yes sir, predictable.”

Taking a deep breath, he sits back in his chair and looks off somewhere far to the west. The horn of a train can be heard in the distance. It’s making its way toward us. That’s the thing about a locomotive—only one way to go, really—straight. Straight forward and fast.

Beads of sweat dot my forehead and nose, drip down the sides of my face. The sun is brighter, hotter.

“Alvin, did my Grandpa have something to do with Katie Cooper’s death?”

Refusing to look at me, he says, “People aren’t machines, Tuck.”

The blare of the train’s horn is louder now. It’s almost here.

“No, sir. I’ve yet to meet the man as reliable as that old lawn mower. And you can’t just replace the broken parts.”

“Tell me what you know, Alvin.”

And he does.

The day that Katie was killed, Grandpa told Keller that he had been watching Heather while Grandma was shopping with Gavin and me. Grandpa told Keller that he’d been there drinking alone, but ran out of Scotch and went to Glidden for another bottle while Heather was napping. It was when he got back to town that he saw Slim Jim and Katie walking toward the tracks together.

“Your grandfather said that he’d be in some serious trouble if your grandmother or your mother ever caught wind he’d left your sister napping alone in the house like that. Especially for a bottle of whiskey in the middle of the afternoon. That made sense to me. Your sister was what—two, three years old? Anyway, when he found out later that Katie had gone missing, he came to me ‘cause he didn’t know what else to do. That’s when we come up with that anonymous tipster thing. I called Sheriff Buck, told ‘em what I seen. He figured out it was me, of course, but promised to keep me out of it. You know the rest.”

“Alvin,” I say with one eye on the memory, “I remember that day. Heather came with us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that she went into town with me, Gavin, and Grandma.”

“No,” he protests. “Are you sure, Tucker? That was a long time ago, now. Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Alvin. Unfortunately, I have a pretty clear memory of everything that happened that day.”

Grandpa had lied to Keller. Why would he lie unless it was him who had killed Katie? The misty certainty rolled in.

“He did it…”

I say it quietly, but Keller jumps as if I had screamed the words out of me and thrashed him with them.

“Now, you listen to me, Tuck. Your grandfather … he’s a good man. Known him a long time. A long, long time.”

“Just some broken parts, right, Alvin?”

“Yeah. Broken parts, right. But not that bad, Tuck. Not as bad as you’re thinking. Just, you know, he drinks too much sometimes and he gets a little sideways. That’s all, see?”

He winces and exhales through his nose. It is the sound of surrender.

Best buds forever.

“Alvin?” I ask, staring back out at the vacant world. “Was it you who paid for Slim Jim to be buried here?”