Where the Broken Lie (4 page)

“Sweetie, can I talk to Mommy?”

“Okay. Love you, Daddy. Bye.”

“Love you, too, Sweetie.”

She hands the phone to her mother.

“Hello.” Neither warm nor cool.

“Hi, Tam.”

“Hi.”

“How are you doing?” I ask. “Miss me yet?”

“I was missing you before you left.”

“I can believe that. But I think maybe you were looking forward to missing me a little more.”

“Maybe a little,” she says, and I hear the smile that her words passed through.

“Are you doing okay?”

“We’re doing fine. Tory’s been asking lots of questions about both you and Ethan.”

“What do you tell her?”

“I tell her that we’ll see you soon and Ethan someday.”

She asks how I am and what I had been doing, if I was still drinking. My answers were short like she knew they would be. Some truth, some lies. “You’re still planning on coming over for Mother’s Day, right?” I ask.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Good. I can’t wait to see you guys. I’ll call you again tomorrow, okay?”

I wait for Tammy to hang up first and then sit there and listen to the dial tone.
That should be the official sound of “Death,”
I think to myself. But there had been life on the other end of that phone just a minute ago.
“And Tory should be the official sound of “Life.”
Even when mundane, there is so much power in life. Sometimes
especially
when mundane. The normal thoughts of a four year-old could be so life affirming. That little girl makes me happy.

“So? How are you doing?” Grandma asks.

We’re in the car, returning from Glidden where we had been grocery shopping. She wants me to bring up Ethan. I’m not going to.

“Fine,” I say. “Thanks again for letting me stay with you guys for a few nights.”

“Oh, that’s no problem. It’s nice having some company. Your grandfather and I don’t get many visitors anymore, you know.”

At forty miles-per-hour, the six-mile trip from Glidden to Willow Grove can be excruciating, which is exactly what the drivers in the line of cars behind Grandma are thinking, I’m sure. That stretch of route 38 has just enough curves and hills to make passing a near impossibility. When we come upon the one straight and flat stretch of that part highway, three cars whiz past, each with horns a-honking.

“Oh, those must be friends of yours,” Grandma says. “They were waving.”

“Yeah, and they think I’m number one, too,” I mumble.

As we approach my old high school, Grandma slows even more and points at the small farmhouse across the road from it.

“You see that there? Ain’t that something?”

She’s pointing at a great big red hay barn that has been around as long as I can remember. Except now it has a hole right through its center.

“Wow, what the heck happened there?”

“Them tornadoes we had a few weeks back. Two touched down. One got the best of that barn.”

What a strange sight to behold. Like a freight train had driven right through it.

“It looks like God tipped that tornado on its side and drilled a hole through its center,” I say.

“I believe God does things like that sometimes.”

“I believe God can be random and cruel, if that’s what you mean.”

“There’s always a purpose, Tucker,” she says with the kind of look that only the elderly can offer. Her eyes are as blue with promise as they must have been the day she was born. Those eyes have not aged at all, but the lids above them are heavy with years and the skin below them sags.

“Really? And what’s the purpose of putting a hole through the middle of that barn, Grandma?”

“Maybe to show us that it survived,” Grandma says. “That barn will come down some day, but it won’t be because of that tornado or the hole that it left. It still stands, even with the hole right through its center. And besides, now you can see what’s on the other side of it. You never could before.”

“I looked, Grandma. I didn’t see anything on the other side.”

“I know, Tucker. That’s what bothers me. People who don’t see nothing on the other side of something like that, well, that’s about what they live for—nothin’.”

When we get back, I send Grandma inside and carry the groceries in myself. Howard Cooper, in his garden once again, smiles and waves at me. Seems like he spends all his time these days tending to those plants and flowers. No radio playing. No headphones. Just Howard Cooper and the tools he needs to help things grow. I didn’t remember him being such an avid gardener. As a kid, I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed one way or the other. He could have been a gardener all along. Or he could have started after Katie died.

I feel an overwhelming urge to have something to take care of. I want to fix the hole in that barn, but know that’s beyond my capabilities. I will have to find something else that needs repair.

I almost fell out of love with Katie once.

It happened about a week after her arrival in Willow Grove. I was on my way uptown to buy a root beer when I spotted her and Son Settles walking along the railroad tracks together. They were walking toward town, so they must have been returning from what I could only assume had been a long romantic walk.

They were holding hands. Gross. Then Son said something that made Katie laugh which was even grosser.

I put my head down and turned back around toward home.

“Tucker!” she yelled.

I kept walking.

“TUCKER GAINES!”

I turned around to see Katie let go of Son’s hand and wave at me. The smile on Son’s face faded.

“Tucker, wait up.”

She said something to Son that I couldn’t hear. He shrugged and smiled sweetly. Then he gave me a nasty scowl as soon as Katie turned her back to him and ran toward me.

“Hey, where are you going?” she asked.

“Home. I was going to Ike’s to get a root beer, but I’m not thirsty anymore.”

“Tucker, why are you walking so fast? Slow down. What’s the rush?”

She grabbed my hand, but I yanked it away.

“Tucker, what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothin’s wrong with me. I just happen to know where that hand of yours has been.”

She raced out front of me and stopped me, putting her hands on my chest.

“Why, Tucker Gaines, are you jealous?”

“Jealous? Of Son? Hell, no. Son Settles doesn’t have anything for me to be jealous of.”

“That’s true, Tucker. He doesn’t.”

This time when she grabbed my hand, I let her hold on to it.

“Son grabbed hold of my hand and it surprised me. I didn’t pull away because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

I shrugged, but my heart was lifted.

“The only reason I even went with him in the first place is because I was bored. You were off doing something with Charlie and Son saw me jumping rope in my driveway by myself. He asked if I wanted to go for a walk down the tracks. Said he had something he wanted to show me.”

“What did he show you?”

“Nothing really. He showed me that he’s got a little crush on me, I suppose. Kind of gave me the creeps to tell you the truth.”

We walked back to Katie’s house and talked until her mom called her in for dinner. As I was leaving, I saw Son Settles leaning up against a tree across the street. He spit on the ground in front of him and gave me a smile that was an insult to smiles everywhere.

He walked across the street so slowly that it confused me into not running away.

“I sure hope you ain’t got designs on Katie. You see, I kinda set my sights on her.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Son. But it seems to me that Katie can make up her own mind about things.”

He slugged me in the gut. I doubled over and fell to the ground as quietly as I could, not wanting Katie to see me getting my ass kicked.

“Reckon you’re right, Pecker. We can all make up our own minds. You made up your mind to smart mouth me and I made up my mind to punch ya for it.”

Walking away, he said, “I surely hope that Katie is better at making up her mind about things than you are, Pecker. Bad decisions have consequences, don’t they?”

I would have given him a smart-ass answer in reply, but I hadn’t caught my breath yet. Which was an answer unto itself.

I spend the better part of the day painting those sun porch stairs. Chipping away old dead flakes, brushing everything clean, and applying a thick first coat of barn-red. It’s a full day’s work, but with my choking dream looming, I’m not anxious to sleep again. So after dinner I walk down to Mustang’s Bar & Grill for a nightcap.

Tonight, there are three patrons inside Mustang’s. Two sit next to each other on the far right side and one sits alone in the center—the seat closest to the taps. There are small flickering TVs at either end of the bar and a third one above a booth in the far corner of the room. I settle into the barstool that’s closest to the door.

“So what are we drinking tonight, Pecker?”

I don’t recognize the voice, but I recognize the “pecker.” I lift my eyes to see an older version of a face I once knew. A sparse, light-colored handlebar mustache frames the small, pursed mouth. Chewing tobacco packed tight under the lower lip, a tattered LA Dodgers baseball cap on his head. Part Yankee, all rebel, both shining bright in those intense gray-blue eyes of Son Settles.

I offer my best olive-branch smile and say, “Hey, Son. That’s not the same cap, is it?”

This gets a laugh out of him. At least I think it’s a laugh. It sounds a little like “Shut your white-collared, book-learning mouth, Pecker.”

“No. Not the same hat.”

A big fat silence follows, during which Son stands tall behind the bar, hands on hips and looks at me hard. I look back at him even harder, though I can see where to Son it might look as though I’m just staring at my feet and squirming on my stool.

“Well,” I say, lifting my head again, “I am sorry about that hat, Son. Probably should have said that a long time ago.”

“No worries,” he says. “Pecker.”

“Vodka tonic, please.”

If Son Settles had ever been a friend of mine, it was just barely. I carry some of the fault for that. Things might have been different with Son and me had I not thrown his LA Dodger cap in the toilet the first time we met. Charlie Skinner had brought Son over to my house that summer afternoon, and despite the fact that he was two years older than me, I was not intimidated by Son in the least. We talked baseball, and when we started debating—“my team can beat up your team”—I told him I was going to take his Dodger cap off his head and flush it down the toilet. When he dared me to do it, do it I did.

Looking back on this, I see something in myself that has always been there: I hated the notion that someone might find me predictable.

When Son pulled his Dodger’s cap out of the toilet and shook it dry, he had a look of utter astonishment on his sun-browned face. Beneath that was another look, a sort of calm-before-the-storm expression that I would come to see time and again in the years to follow—usually right before a random ass-kicking. I guess being unpredictable was important to Son, too.

We talk a little bit that night, Son and I. It isn’t a bygones-be-bygones conversation, but it’s nostalgic and it’s nice and we laugh a time or two. It occurs to me that Son and I had indeed been friends. Just friends who didn’t like each other much. It’s hard to have enemies in a town like Willow Grove. You couldn’t afford to.