It Needs to Look Like We Tried

by Todd Robert Petersen

  He recoiled and looked back at the few relatives left in the room. They were crying on one another’s shoulders. Doyle felt that there was something wrong with sewing up a dead woman’s lips, so he fished in his pocket for his Swiss Army knife, folded out the scissors, and snipped the thread away. As he did, the flesh relaxed a little, and Doyle pursed the lips together by squeezing at the sides as his mother had often done to him. When he did, he noticed a gap in her teeth. Doyle stopped, wiped his hand against his suit pants and then shifted his position a little in order to hide his actions. Then, glancing briefly again over his shoulder, he thrust his forefinger into his mother’s mouth, pried the jaw down, and looked into the gap. His mother’s gold tooth was gone.

  Doyle pulled his finger back out and closed the mouth by pressing upward on the underside of her jaw. Slowly, he turned around, and in the far corner of the room he spotted the mortician’s assistant, standing pale and skinny with his back to the wall.

  The relatives kept crying and hugging his dad and little brother. Doyle took three or four deep breaths to control himself while trying to think of some way to break this news to his father.

  DOYLE WHAPPED THE DIRT WITH the backside of the shovel to make sure Princess at least looked like she was covered. It was five thirty, and the sun was tangled in the cottonwoods. He’d be late, but he would still have enough time to find where he was going, get some sleep and a shower before Kenny found him and the rehearsal started up. His father was marrying a motor-mouthed real estate agent from Santa Barbara who was in her late forties at best. Her name was Bonnie Jo, and she wouldn’t let you call her by anything but both names.

  The whole situation was upsetting, but not in an exceptional way. It was just generally upsetting. Doyle turned around and stared into the windows of the house and found nothing. It didn’t seem right to just leave, so Doyle walked around to the side of the house and peered up to the front yard, finding nothing. He wondered if he should holler but decided against it and tried the other side of the house. He felt like a kid again, looking for his mother down the aisles of a supermarket. After a minute or so of searching, Doyle crossed the yard to one of the scroungy trees near the place he’d been working, and he leaned the shovel against it. Behind a clump of higher grass, Doyle spotted what seemed to be a headstone. Good Lord, he thought, then looking nervously over his shoulder, he stared harder, wiping his wrist along his upper lip. It was. Some person was buried out there. The dirt was loose, fresh, recently worked.

  “Oh, no, she didn’t,” Doyle muttered, twisting back toward the house. His pulse was at full throttle. “Nope,” he said out loud, and then turned back to face the headstone. “No, no, no, no, no,” he said, stepping forward. The stone was waist-high and read:

  ROSCOE “DOC” JASPER

  1953–2016

  LOVED BY MANY

  REST IN PEACE

  Doyle stood up quickly and fell back a few steps, then looked over at the fresh grave that held the dog’s corpse. He turned to the left side of the house, and then, as if trying to come to his senses, he stopped and turned back to the grave, then stopped again, trying to choose a course of action.

  “Doyle,” CJ called out of nowhere.

  He jumped and clutched his chest to keep his heart from squirming onto the ground.

  “You look like you seen a ghost,” she said.

  He bent over with his hands on his knees, sucking air and shaking his head.

  “Is Princess all safe and buried?” she said.

  “What? No. Safe?” Doyle said, glancing back at the grave. “It’s done. She’s all … right there. Your shovel’s against that tree. I’ve got to get—”

  “Doyle, I’ve set you back on your schedule, haven’t I?” She smiled and peeled her lips apart. “I thought that after all this work you must be starving, so I fixed you a little something—”

  “No, really, I need to get to Santa Barbara.” Doyle stopped trying to hide the alarm on his face. “I sidetracked myself on my big adventure, and I really need to get back on the freeway and make up for some lost time.”

  “Well, you need to eat, honey, and I’ve got all these leftovers from the wake just waiting to go bad. It’s chicken and dumplings, and I can’t eat it all before it spoils.”

  Doyle shut his mouth and surrendered with a weak, fluttering gesture of consent.

  CJ HAD THE ANTIQUE OAK table decked out in linens. It was candlelit and full of food: a bowl of peas and pearl onions, steaming-hot biscuits, a cherry pie, German potato salad with dill and hard-boiled eggs, a casserole dish full of baked chicken, and more than a dozen dumplings the size of limes in a thick, tan gravy flecked with black pepper. A boat of even more gravy was on the side, bobbing with bits of heart meat and giblet. There was also a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses of rich, white whole milk that looked like cream. CJ snatched a dish towel from the counter and walked over to the casserole dish, picked it up, and waved it right underneath Doyle’s nose.

  “Now, I know it might be a little heavy, but Doc’s family is Southern folks, and that’s how they do a spread.” She smiled coyly, then blinked twice.

  Doyle stroked the bridge of his nose and asked if there was someplace he could wash his hands. CJ smiled and pointed him down the hall.

  “Hurry up, so it doesn’t get cold,” she called after him.

  Doyle dragged himself through the archway into the hall and to the first open door he came to. He muttered as he went inside and leaned over the sink. He turned on the faucet and splashed cold water onto his face. He checked his watch again: five fifty. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered. “I’m a better driver than this.” Doyle stretched the back of his legs by leaning over as far as he could while clutching the edge of the sink with both hands like he’d been struck suddenly with a fever. He tried to figure a graceful way out, and had none.

  He stood and turned off the faucet, dried his face and hands, and prepared himself to survive this meal so he could head off to his old man’s wedding. Kenny’s company would seem almost normal after the outright insanity of this afternoon, he thought, rehanging the towel. Finally, he thought he’d have a story that would keep up with the lies his brother’s army buddies would tell.

  A story like this one would make him one of the boys for a few hours, not Kenny’s cautious, super-lame older brother. Six hours of driving. Six hours and he’d see the coast, have all this behind him, rolling itself up into a tidy little story like something out of The Twilight Zone, good for a laugh, good for showing everyone that he wasn’t just a kid anymore.

  Doyle closed the bathroom door, mentally preparing himself to swallow the food whole and wipe his face firmly in a single pass before taking to the open road. Down the hall, he could hear CJ singing to herself, the faint din of dishes and utensils clattering in counterpoint.

  Time to get this project moving, he thought, trying to fortify himself. You just eat and dismiss yourself, Doyle. You’ve got manners and charm. Use ’em.

  He took one step toward the kitchen, then another, and in five strides he covered half the distance. Pausing to get himself together, he noticed a flickering—low and orange—that emanated from the dark living room.

  He leaned through a pair of open pocket doors into a giant room, almost completely bare but filled with electric tea lights at every point. He crept across the room toward the far end where there were more tea lights, most set in clusters on the brick mantel in shot glasses, sat flickering. He reached out and pressed his hand across a collage of photographs that ran along the mantel. In each snapshot was a man wearing a black Snap-on tools cap, who was involved in some kind of physical or mechanical task: gutting or presenting a fish, replacing a carburetor, welding. The mantel itself was littered with knickknacks, beaded Indian change purses, an autographed baseball, two or three trophies, a pair of dark metal work spurs, bowie knives, and a fist-sized chunk of dark-gray basalt. On the brick above the mantel, a series of five leather belts with steak-sized brass buckles were moun
ted like runover rattlesnakes.

  Above them and between two wrought-iron sconces with oil-burning lamps hung a large, professional photographic portrait of the man against a background of aspens in their fall colors. The man’s mustache was full and black, his eyebrows heavy as the creases alongside his eyes. He was staring off into the distance past Doyle’s head. Doyle stepped back, flushed and disoriented, and below this strange altar he saw that the firebox was backlit somehow and full of boots, which had been arranged precisely against the back wall. A few pairs of wing tips, loafers, and brogans had been lined up in front of the boots like pawns.

  The man in the photograph looked across the room exactly the same way that Doyle’s old man would stare off over Doyle’s head. It reminded him that he was always looking for something so far away that only he knew exactly what it was. He certainly never shared it with Doyle or his brother. There in that strange room in that strange house, Doyle understood that there could be no devotion without love. He wondered about the woman who would memorialize a man in this way. It was crazy and somehow beautiful, unrefined, and real. It showed Doyle that true love, like cheap jewelry, was available to everyone. As he considered this tawdry memorial, Doyle struggled less against the idea that his old man never loved anyone or anything and allowed himself one tiny grain of a thought. Perhaps his father could actually be devoted to this real estate agent from California, maybe even in love.

  “Doyle, your supper’s getting cold!” CJ called out.

  Doyle looked around at the rest of the room. His eyes had adjusted to the dimness and he could see a rocking chair covered in a knit afghan. A single overhead lamp hung down from the ceiling, and the glass shade was full of black specks that looked like they had once been insects. There was no other furniture in the room, but heavy drapes covered the windows.

  When CJ called again, Doyle turned and rubbed his eyes. “I’ll be right there!” he called out. He went back into the kitchen and sat quietly at the table. His plate was already dished up. He stared down at the fork for a long time before he finally slid it into the dumpling and lifted it from the table. As the delicious gravy-soaked dumpling dissolved in his mouth, Doyle noticed that CJ was beginning to remove her jewelry, unscrewing her rings one at a time and setting them into a saucer next to her plate. Doyle shoveled some peas onto his fork with a slice of bread.

  CJ unclasped her watch and set it in the saucer as well.

  Doyle forked more potatoes into his mouth.

  CJ removed her necklace.

  He took up a chicken thigh with his fingers.

  She removed her earrings.

  A gulp of milk.

  And one by one, she undid the buttons of her blouse.

  DOYLE ALWAYS GUESSED THAT THINGS like this never really happened, not like anyone tells it. Not like the lies Kenny’s friends would one-up each other with. These stories were part of the great sham American Dream of eighties porno magazines. Everyone knew it was fake but hoped otherwise. You had to believe these things, because if you didn’t, you were voting against yourself. Some very organized and normal guy goes off the beaten track, kills a dog, then buries the dog next to the dead husband. The wife throws him a feast and then starts a strip show. There couldn’t be a more normal fantasy in the world. It was like flying out the window of an office building, or finding a bag of money in the snow, or swirling gold dust from a riverbed.

  As everything unfolded, Doyle knew no one would believe him, not in a million years. This story would be less credible than somebody’s Canadian girlfriend. But the truth is that this woman did come across the table at him, and together they did, in fact, push food to the floor. Not all of it, however, not the pie. They carefully set that aside for later. But it all happened.

  When the impracticality of doing it on the table became obvious, they moved themselves to the linoleum, which was frigid and dotted with little black ants. When they were back on their feet, kissing with clumsy abandon, CJ pulled Doyle by the hand and guided him to a couch in the front room. After a few minutes’ struggle, they left a pile of clothes on the coffee table and fled naked to the bedroom, where the whirlwind ceased as abruptly as it had started.

  “It’s okay, Doyle,” CJ said, resting a hand on his chest. “Once we get some pie in you, you can try it again.”

  And they did try, a couple of times. By the morning, Doyle lay awake in this woman’s bed, watching a spider trundle across the ceiling. He looked over at CJ, not expecting her to be awake, but she was watching him without blinking. “Take me with you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Take me to California.”

  During the night, Doyle told her everything about his mom and dad, but mostly about Kenny. She listened, with a hand on his arm. She encouraged him to keep talking, and he did. He told her that he’d never done anything like this before. She said it was okay to break the rules when you had to.

  “Take me to California,” she said again. “You need a date for this wedding, right?”

  “They’re going to kill me,” he said, then lost himself in thought. “And I don’t know that I need a date,” he said. “But it probably wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Take me,” she said. “I am good at this kind of thing. And you need to show those people you’ve got a little outlaw inside you they didn’t know about.”

  Doyle sat up and leaned forward, the morning light was cool and blue and filled the room with ghosts. He reached over and dug his phone out of his pants; it was dead.

  “The thing is, I’m not an outlaw,” Doyle said.

  “I am,” CJ said, smiling, “and I got enough to spare.”

  “Can you just up and leave like that?” Doyle asked.

  “I’m done with this place,” CJ said.

  Doyle studied her. Without makeup, she was only about half as pretty as he remembered. Her eyes were the saddest ones he’d ever seen. “You got a dress?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a dress that’s so hot, I can’t wear it on Sundays.”

  Doyle stroked his chin, and clenched his whole face.

  “Don’t think about it, Doyle,” she said. “Don’t think at all. You don’t need to. You already know what you’re going to do.”

  “I do?” Doyle asked.

  CJ looked at Doyle without an expression, until he eventually said, “Okay. Let’s give them something to talk about.”

  2

  Cape Cod Fear

  WHEN I SAY THAT THE events surrounding the purchase of our first house were a literal horror show, I am not misusing the term. In order to tell the story right, I must begin with mundane details that seem unimportant at first, really these moments seem ridiculous to say out loud. What I mean is that I would not believe this story if I were hearing it. I apologize for that now. It will make sense in the end. I promise.

  I am a millennial, and, like most of my generation born in the eighties, I was not interested in owning a home, not at first. We had good reasons for it, mostly centered around watching our boomer parents go weird in front of our eyes. I have read the think pieces, so I know you are thinking this shows how my generation has walked away from our responsibilities to carry the torch along and take our place in the order of things. I know you think I pooh-poohed buying a home because I was broke/single/lazy/living in my parent’s basement/making a statement, but that is not true. To be fair, I did spend the first summer after graduation living with my parents and working at the aquatic center, but not in the basement. And I actually had a job teaching history at a Catholic high school in Santa Barbara, my hometown. My contract did not start for three months, and my mother begged me to come home. My little brother had started a legislative internship in Sacramento, and the house was empty. She said with just my father around, the place would be too lonely.

  Living at home after college was a kind of regression. I got through it by understanding that it was short-term and by thinking about how I was making my mother happy. The silver lining to everything was my job at the aquatic
center, which is where I met my wife, Annie, who came to swim laps at eleven o’clock every morning. By July, I had learned that she was also a teacher at St. Jude’s, where I would be working in a month. By September, we both knew that this was not a temporary arrangement, but like many of our generation, we did not see marriage as a necessary part of being “together.” Behind it all were the wicked questions we would never discuss with each other: What if we were wrong about this relationship? What if this is just a good person I am with and not the right one? What if we end up unhappy like our parents?

  In public we would talk about how we did not need some contract to support our commitment to each other. We would talk about how we learned in our anthropology classes that marriage is just more patriarchy, blah, blah, blah. We would nosh our tapas and quaff our craft beers and agree with each other in a way that sounded like arguing.

  When Annie became pregnant with our first child, we started thinking that a little tradition and stability and legal agreement was probably okay, for the baby. We would need health insurance, and a better way to file our taxes. A couple months after the wedding, my father died of a stroke on the golf course, leaving me a rather large inheritance and instructions to use it for a down payment on a house.

  Why do I mention all of this? Because it sets the stage for how carefully we moved forward with things. We were not casual or cavalier or slackers in any way. We were not like those young people in slasher films who sort of have it coming. We were thoughtful, methodical, and prepared. Well, we thought we were prepared.