You Don't Love This Man (33 page)

“It's nothing. Nonsense.”

It was a lie. I actually had been thinking about how Miranda and I had, only a few years before, attended a funeral together in a room not unlike the one in which I sat. My mother's husband,
Eddie, had called one afternoon to tell me Carrie had tripped over a wooden planter box and, falling backward, hit her head against the surface of their concrete patio. She didn't lose consciousness, he said in amazement—he seemed still in shock himself as he spoke to me—but sat there with her hands on her head, complaining of pain throughout her skull that was so bad she didn't even want to open her eyes. When she hadn't been able to stand up, though, Eddie had called an ambulance. Carrie continued trading lucid conversation with him as they waited for the paramedics, he told me, and also as they rode in the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital. By the time they made it there, though, he said, she had begun to fade. “She must have passed out while they were wheeling her inside,” he said, “and they rushed her off into some room and then came back to tell me she had a cracked skull and her brain was bleeding, or there was bleeding on her brain—however they say it. And then not much later they said she wasn't doing well. No, they actually said she wasn't ‘responding well.' And then I guess her body started shutting down, just kind of one system after another, and they couldn't do anything about it. And by the time I saw her again, she was already gone.” I had for some reason thought Eddie was telling me a story of events that had occurred a day or two before. It wasn't until he was finished that I realized this had all happened within the last hour and a half, and that my mother had died only minutes before Eddie had called.

I told Miranda she had no obligation to attend the funeral of a grandmother who had visited her in person no more than once every four or five years, and who, because she lived thousands of miles away in the Florida Panhandle, may as well as have been on the moon, as far as I was concerned. But Miranda said she wanted to go, and so together we made the long trip to the small town my
mother had called home for thirty years, and which I had never before bothered to visit. When we arrived at Carrie and Eddie's address, however, I was surprised by the appearance of the man who met us. I remembered Eddie as tall and gruff, but the man I shook hands with was at least two inches shorter than me, and seemed almost shy. Carrie had married Eddie when I was sixteen, after dating him for only six months, and I recalled him as someone who often told stories about the construction work he did for a living, though eventually I decided he probably liked that line of work because it allowed him to quit any job at any point, disappear for an indefinite period of time—hunting or fishing, supposedly—and then come back and either join up with a new job, or sometimes just rejoin the one he'd left. He was in his mid-sixties by the time of Carrie's death, though. The few times over the years that she had come to visit me, Eddie had stayed behind, so I hadn't seen him in person since he and Carrie had moved to Florida while I was in college. The only words I had traded with him in that quarter century had been the minimal pleasantries required to fill the interval between Eddie picking up the phone and his handing it to Carrie—never more than a minute or two of chitchat, rarely about anything other than the weather. Over the years, of course, I recognized that Carrie's decision to take a stab at marital happiness made perfect sense. She had been only thirty-three at the time she married Eddie—still young, and at what is now a perfectly normal age for a first marriage. And neither have I ever questioned my own decision to use college as an escape route from the dusty, barren town Carrie and I were stuck in. I found a university in the Pacific Northwest whose application packet featured photos of lush greenery and aesthetically pleasing mists—imagery I associated with tropical islands, really—and headed there with
no intention of returning. And when Carrie told me a couple years later that she and Eddie were moving to Florida for what seemed to me an odd job opportunity—he was going to fix motorcycles in a shop where she could cover the reception desk, a situation that ended up lasting no more than six months for either of them—it bothered me not at all. Carrie and I went in different directions, probably for reasons no more substantial than that boys move away, and women remarry. We were both young, and went off to become new people. The place we had lived, the way we had lived: neither of us wanted that. It was just circumstance. I've always considered our escape from it a tremendous success for both of us.

When Miranda and I sat down in the small living room of the patio home Eddie and Carrie had been living in for the last decade, though—a side table held a photo of Miranda that was at least five years out of date—Eddie surprised me by claiming that he still worked construction. I don't possess the most voluble phone presence in the world, so Carrie and I spoke to each other only a couple times a year, for no more than half an hour each time, but I couldn't remember Carrie ever referring to Eddie's work life at all. I had assumed that hard labor wasn't something a man still did in his sixties, but although Eddie wore bifocals and had only a few wisps of hair left to comb across his scalp, his dark tan and the overdeveloped muscles in his forearms supported his claim. We spent a polite, formal day going through some of Carrie's things, but the only item I took—the only thing there that seemed to have any connection to me at all—was a box of old photos of Carrie and me in New Mexico, from when I was a child. The photos were almost comically devoid of content. We were often small within the frame, and behind us lay the flat, empty New Mexico landscape that I remembered stretching in every direction. The best example
was probably a photo of the two of us on a dry winter day, standing on a dirt road outside of town. I looked no more than six years old, and the identity of the photographer was a mystery to me, as was any reason Carrie and I might have been outside of town. Had she been looking at houses? Had we been visiting someone? I had no memory of that day. And yet there we were.

The next surprise came when Carrie's casket was lowered into the ground the following day. Miranda and I—the granddaughter and the son—were both dry-eyed. Eddie, however, wept openly and unashamedly, and even leaned on women friends of Carrie's for support. At some point I recalled—out of nowhere, it seemed—that once, in an uncharacteristic or maybe just uncertain attempt at stepfatherhood, Eddie had asked if I wanted to go on a hunting trip with him. There was nothing less interesting to me at sixteen than stumbling through the cold woods with a gun, so I turned him down without a second thought. I probably also wanted to make clear my intention to shrug off the idea that Eddie was supposedly going to be a more permanent presence than the other boyfriends Carrie had had over the years, many of whom had been perfectly normal male representatives of our town, which meant that after dating Carrie for three to six months and realizing that anything longer-term would also involve the awkward, unathletic, science-fiction-reading boy that belonged to her—well, they moved on. After getting rejected, Eddie never invited me hunting again, and though at the time I felt this confirmed his dislike of me, I imagine it was actually my contempt for him that was perfectly clear. I may even have hurt his feelings. And there at my mother's funeral, as Eddie wept, I realized that my memories of him were either distortions or irrelevant, that I didn't know him at all, and that people and their lives are a mystery.

The next morning, Miranda and I stopped by the house before heading out of town, and Eddie hugged each of us tightly. He told us to take care of ourselves, that we would always be welcome in his home, and then continued to wave even as we pulled away in our rental car. When Miranda and I were settled in on our plane ride home a few hours later, she asked if I thought I would ever take Eddie up on his offer, and I told her I couldn't for the life of me think of any reason I would ever see him again. “How about because he was married to Grandma for almost thirty years?” she said. She was just out of college then, and had clearly picked up—from her professors, I assumed—the habit of phrasing her suggestions as if they were questions.

“But I don't really know him,” I said. “He wasn't really a stepfather, and we're not friends.”

“You could become friends,” she suggested.

“I don't think I'm looking to be friends with old men in Florida. Are you?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “I guess not.”

“It's just you and me, kid,” I had told her. And it had felt, in a way, just like the end of high school. Except that this time I wouldn't be going off alone to become someone new, but would be in the company of my daughter.

But where was Miranda at that moment, while I stood in the dim ballroom that was supposed to serve as her reception site, waiting for the detective to come in and ask whatever questions he intended to ask? She was on her way to Gina's gallery, they had told me, from where she would be delivered by Gina to Sandra. She was being passed along.

“So what's going on?” Catherine asked. “Why are you in this room, waiting to speak to the police again? Why is John acting so
weird?” She was looking at me with an intensity that made it clear these were not rhetorical questions. She felt I was holding out on her.

“I guess they're upset I didn't tell them the guy who robbed you this morning robbed me once. But twenty-five years ago.”

She looked confused. “And this is something you knew?”

“Pretty much. I was as sure of it as a person can be from looking at some photos.”

“Why didn't you say so?”

“Because it's Saturday. It's my daughter's wedding day. Why doesn't anyone understand this? I'm completely baffled by the fact that everyone seems to think I owe it to the bank to sit around chatting with them on my daughter's wedding day. You know, if the bank wasn't open on Saturday, it wouldn't have been robbed today. Did they ever think of that?”

“You're angry about the fact that we're open on Saturdays?”

“I'm angry about how fucking insane it is that I cannot be left alone. I'm trying to find my daughter and talk to her on her wedding day. I want to talk to her. But the fact that I'm a branch manager, and I'm a branch manager Monday through Friday, and also on Saturday, even though I
took today off
, and I'm probably a branch manager on Sundays, too, so apparently I'm a branch manager all of the time—this allows the insane and stupid bank to stalk me every minute of every day, if it wants. This is exactly the can of worms I didn't want to open today. So yes, I didn't tell them. I thought maybe I would be left alone for one day. For one day of my life.”

“I'm sorry. I wish we'd never been robbed. I wish there was some way I could have stopped it—”

“That's it,” I said. “Right there. It's not your fault. You didn't
do it. But you're starting to feel personally responsible for it. That's the trick that gets pulled on you. And what I have tried to say to them today is that we are not personally responsible for this robbery, we are not on the clock right now, so they can wait. They can wait until Monday. And do you see how it hasn't worked? Do you see how incredibly rude that kid out there is? He was hired by the bank. This is the person they chose to handle situations like this—that kid. And he does not deserve access to my life. He does not deserve to go through my finances and question me about the way I've handled my life. I hate the entire enterprise. And now you're not going to be working with me anymore, so I'm just going be coming in to a job I hate, and then going home. What's the point? You know who they're going to send to replace you, right? A kid. Someone getting ready to make exactly the same mistake I made with my life. Because nobody likes banks, and nobody likes the branch managers of banks. And they sure as hell don't trust them. So I'm sorry, but I don't know why you want to become one. It's stupid.”

She smiled. “You're upset.”

“Why are you smiling?”

“I'm sorry. I've just never seen you this way. I mean, it's not as bad as all that, is it?”

“I think it is.”

“Well, it's true that you probably made things worse for yourself by not talking. But did you find Miranda?”

“No. Someone else did.”

“Who?”

“I'm not sure.” Realizing how true that statement was—how little I knew about any of what was going on—made me laugh, briefly. “Maybe everyone. But Gina and Sandra say they have everything under control now.”

Catherine nodded. “So that can't be making you too happy, either.”

“I wanted to talk to her. And what I've discovered is that she shares her life with them, but she doesn't share it with me.”

“There are a lot of things going on for her today. I'm sure that if she needed you, she would have told you. You two are close.”

Were we? I tried, inwardly, to summon a sense of our closeness. What came to mind were flashes—or maybe just impressions, really—of the time Miranda used to spend with me at the townhouse while she was still in high school. Those were quiet evenings of homework, or of the two of us sitting in the little townhouse living room, watching movies and eating popcorn. When it was Miranda's turn to pick the movie, she always chose similarly inane college romantic comedies, in which a dorky boy managed to impress a sorority girl, or a self-conscious girl ended up broadening the horizons of a blinkered nice guy. The movies weren't good—Miranda knew that as well as I did—and yet I remembered us laughing a lot. Laughing with and at those movies had felt like laughing with and at ourselves, and I may never have felt more comfortable laughing at myself at any other time or place in my life. I hadn't bought that townhouse until Miranda was halfway through her junior year, though, which meant that this mood I was summoning, this sense of closeness, was a situation that had existed only until Miranda went to college—no more than a year and a half. “You know,” I told Catherine, “after we split up, Sandra used to complain that Miranda acted like she was on vacation when she was with me. The two of them fought constantly, and once Sandra actually said, ‘We're throwing things at each other now.' She said she knew Miranda liked staying at my place mostly because it gave her a chance to get away from Sandra.”