by Jake Hinkson
Penny glances in my direction, but she turns back to Mary and tells her, “What’s the cat’s name again?”
“Jolene.”
“After the Dolly Parton song?”
“Yeah,” Mary says with a smile. “Anyway, I thought getting off campus would be cool, you know. And Jolene’s fun to have around. Really. For a cat, she’s pretty sweet. But no matter how much I sweep and dust, there’re always these little dirty tumbleweeds of hair blowing across the hardwood floors. Drives me insane. If the Lord wanted to break Pharaoh sooner, he could have just sent a plague of cat hair.”
I never let the children have animals. My father always owned two Labrador retrievers, replacing each one as soon as it died, and I grew up in a house filthy with dog hair. As a result, none of my kids have the usual attachment to animals.
“Maybe this plague is a sign,” I say with a wry smile.
Mary nods. “First cat hair, then Trump.”
“Ugh, I know,” Penny says.
“I can’t believe he’s winning . . .”
Matthew looks up from the game he’s playing and tells his sister, “I don’t know. I like Cruz, too, but the primary voters are flocking to Trump. If he gets the nomination, I think we need to start reconciling ourselves to voting for him.”
Mary says, “He’s just so gross.”
Matthew nods, but I can tell he wants to argue the point. He can’t help himself. Matthew is like me in this way. Neither of us can resist saying something when we know we’re in the right. Of the children, he’s the most pragmatic, the most political.
He tells her, “Well, unfortunately, the electorate are the ones who get to vote. And if we’re going to stop the Dems from putting another activist judge on the Supreme Court, then we’re going to have to pull the lever for Trump. For me, it comes down to the realpolitik of the situation. I think he’ll gather some good people around him. Plus, I think he makes sense on a lot of stuff, actually. If you really listen to him, not just listen to what people on TV say about him, but listen to him, crude as he is, he makes a pretty good case for himself.”
Mary shakes her head at this but says nothing.
Johnny looks up at me. “Why do people like Trump, Dad?”
Everyone looks at me to hear what I’ll say, even though they already know what I think. We do this as a family; we turn these things over and discuss them. My children’s friends have always been amazed to find how close we are as a family, how much we talk and share. We’ve always discussed things—political, social, personal—as a family. It’s not so much that we debate them as much as we examine them and refine our thinking about them. I suppose some outside observer might argue that the children mostly parrot what I say, but Scripture says to train up a child in the way that he should go. I’ve done just that. And I’ve done it well.
I say, “It’s largely a failure of the Obama administration. There’s been a vacuum of leadership at the top so long, and the liberals have stoked so many resentments to stay in power, that it’s given room for someone Trump to rise.”
The children nod at this, except for Mary. Ever since she went off to college, I’ve felt her conviction wavering a bit. She hasn’t really said anything, but I wonder about her sometimes. I seem to feel her holding back.
Penny folds her arms over her chest and says, “Well, personally, it worries me.”
“Why?” Matthew asks her.
“I just don’t like him. I think he’s using us. A casino owner on his third wife is not my idea of a rock-solid Christian, and I think we need a real Christian in the White House. Now more than ever. That’s why I like Cruz.”
Matthew says, “Well, sure, I agree, but if comes down to Trump or Hillary?”
Penny shrugs. “Then I’ll hold my nose and vote for Trump.”
“Really?” Mary asks. “You just said you thought he was using us.”
Penny sighs and says, “You don’t always get the option of a clean choice, dear.”
“I have to go,” I say. It comes out a little blunter than I would have liked. I try to be more casual when I follow it up with, “I need to run back up to the church and work on some stuff. I still need to write my sermon for tomorrow.”
This announcement barely registers, which is what I want. Everyone nods and goes back to what they were doing. Matthew and Mark return to their game. Penny says something to Mary about Easter dinner. Only Mary smiles at me and says, “Okay, Dad.”
For a moment so brief that I barely recognize it, I’m disappointed. do i want to lie do i want to deceive— I nod and pat Johnny, who is still at my side, on the head. “Okay, then. I’ll be back in a bit.”
No one pays me much attention, but Johnny follows me into the darkened living room where I take my coat from the coatrack by the front door.
Standing in the doorway, with the warm light of the kitchen behind him, he asks, “Can I come, Dad?”
“I don’t think so, son.”
“Please.”
“Why do you want to come?”
“I saw a cricket in the baptismal pool the other day. I want to see if it’s still there.”
I smile. I know, of course, that he just wants to spend some time with me. In a family with five children, face time with the old man is at a premium. “Probably not,” I tell him. “I drained the pool myself. No cricket.”
“Can I still come with you?”
“It’s getting late, son. I don’t know how long I’ll be up at the church.”
Behind him, Penny steps into the doorway. “Johnny, you need to get ready for bed.”
He looks back at her. “What time is it?”
She glares at him. “It’s time for you to listen to me, that’s what time it is.”
He lowers his head. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Go get ready,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
As he starts to leave, I say, “I’ll double-check on that cricket for you, Johnny.”
He makes a show of nodding morosely and leaves us. I notice that instead of heading upstairs to get ready for bed, though, he goes into the kitchen to join his older siblings.
“Gotta go,” I tell Penny.
She nods.
I open the front door and walk outside. Beyond the trees, the dying sunlight has dulled to a dusky blue and chilled the air.
Penny follows me to the car, her arms tight to her chest and her shoulders bunched up. In any weather below sweltering, she is always cold, my wife.
“You coming back?” she asks.
I glance around. All our neighbors are indoors, but I feel exposed.
Penny says, “No one’s listening to us.”
In a low voice, I tell her, “Of course I’m coming back. Stop being ridiculous. You sound utterly ridiculous.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. You’re the one who was talking about leaving.”
“I never said I was leaving.”
I sigh and gesture at the open air between our home and the homes of all our neighbors. “This really the best time and place to discuss it?”
She twists her mouth, chewing at the inside of her cheek. It’s a nervous habit she’s had since childhood, though it has come and gone over the years. “I’ll go with you,” she says.
“What?”
“Wait for me to get my coat, and I’ll go with you to the church.”
“Why do you want to come with me to the church?”
“I thought this wasn’t the best time and place to discuss it. So, let’s go up to the church, which is empty, and let’s sit down and discuss it.”
My mouth is dry when I say, “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
She stares at me. She stops chewing her cheek. “That’s what I thought,” she says, and turns and walks back into the house.
As I drive to the car wash, I pass two people I know. One is a man named Fred Stiverson. He attended our church for a while. Fred’s been married eight times, and wife number six was a member of our church. After they brok
e up—when Fred left her for the woman who would become wife number seven—he stopped coming to church. The other person I see is a teenager named Darcy Pruitt. She’s a senior this year and plays on the basketball team. Mary played on the same team before she graduated, and she and Darcy were friendly. Darcy’s family are Methodists.
Fred is driving his current wife’s car, which looks new. Darcy is driving her father’s truck, an old junker spitting black clouds of exhaust.
Two people. Two people in the five minutes it takes me to get from my house to the car wash. Two people who know me.
It makes me wonder if anyone else knows about my relationship with Gary. People see things. People talk. If Gary told one person, that would be enough. I’m protected by the fact that he doesn’t really have friends left in town. But still, people see things. What if someone else knows? I could never pay off everyone who might know. But I can’t think about such things now, can’t think about who might know and who might find out. I have to get Gary away from here; then everything will be fine.
And as for Penny . . .
I don’t know. did i waste your life did i make you waste your life on a man who could never love you— I will deal with her tomorrow. I will recommit to her. I can be the husband she wants, the husband she deserves. I have been that man before. I can be him again. Just as soon as I do this.
Harten is waiting for me under the single lamp at the car wash on the hill. I pull up and leave my lights on when I get out of the car. He’s dressed differently from this morning, but he looks somehow more disheveled, as if he took off dirty clothes and put on even dirtier ones.
He holds out a messy block of tape and plastic and, I assume, money.
“I got it,” he says.
My heart pounds in my ears, and there is a pain starting just behind my right eye. “Good,” I say. I lift my hand to take the money, but he pulls it back.
“Couple of things, first,” he says. “One thing is, I could only get nineteen thousand.”
It’s as if there is a swelling behind my eye. I rub it, but doing so makes the pain worse.
“I need thirty.”
“Well, you got nineteen.”
“That’s not what we discussed.”
He shrugs. “Tough shit, man. I have nineteen grand in my hand. You can have it, or you can leave with nothing. I can’t pull another eleven thousand bucks out of my ass.”
I nod. I can make nineteen thousand dollars work. I can issue Gary essentially the same ultimatum that Brian Harten has issued me.
“Okay,” I say.
“Good. Second thing is I got this money through illegal means.”
“Brian, I don’t want to—”
“Yeah, but I want you to know, man. I stole this money from Tommy Weller. Okay? And the cops are gonna come talk to me about it. I can guaran-fucking-tee you that. And when they do, I’m gonna say that I don’t know a fucking thing about it. And I’m gonna say I was with you.”
“Wait, Brian—”
“No, that’s the deal, man. You put me up to this, so you’re gonna be my alibi. Me and you were at your church discussing the dry vote.”
“Don’t you think drawing attention to the two of us is a bad idea?”
“No, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. If I thought it was a bad idea, I wouldn’t have fucking suggested it, would I? It’s like you said: you’re respectable, and I’m a low-class piece of shit. Well, I’m gonna borrow some of your respectableness.”
“If the police already suspect it was you who stole the money, Brian, and then you tell them that we were together, it will make the final part, the part you want—the part where I swing the drinking vote your way—it will make that part almost impossible.”
Brian nods, but not as if he’s agreeing with me; he nods as if he was right about something. “Yeah, well,” he says, “here’s the thing: at some point either tonight or tomorrow, the cops are gonna come to my door and ask me where I was when Tommy’s money got swiped. And I’m gonna tell them I was with you. Now, when they go to you and ask you if you was with me, if you say, ‘No,’ they’re gonna come back to me. And at that point, my friend, I am gonna start telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“I see.”
“Yeah, you see.”
“Will they believe it?”
“Don’t know. And I don’t really care. I’m just gonna tell the truth and see what happens. At that point, I won’t have shit to lose by telling the truth.”
What can I say? I know he’s right. I nod my consent.
“That’s what I thought,” he says. He holds out the money. “You and me were together tonight from six to seven. Hung out for a while talking about the vote.”
I rub my face. My skin is wet with perspiration, yet my flesh is cold to the touch.
“Okay,” I say, reaching for the money.
SEVENTEEN PENNY WEATHERFORD
My mother was not a beautiful woman. Clothes, hair, and makeup couldn’t change that fact, either. She wasn’t ugly, just unremarkable, and I think that’s what hurt her the most. The destiny of mediocrity. To make matters worse, she seemed to regard beauty as if it were a moral accomplishment. That made her a harsh judge of unattractive women, and it made her wholly unforgiving of beautiful women who lost their beauty. I remember seeing Elizabeth Taylor on television when the faded star was older and overweight, and my mother saying, “Ugh, turn the channel. She used to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and now look at her.” My mother believed in surfaces. She taught me how to keep a home and stay in shape. She taught me that a wife and mother should always look like a wife and mother. She taught me that surfaces matter.
She never liked Richard. They never fought, of course. They stayed polite. But she regarded him as insubstantial, one of the few people who ever regarded him as such. Mother was raised Primitive Baptist, and though she became a Southern Baptist when she married my father, deep down she held on to some of those old hard-shell beliefs. Primitive Baptists believe in the doctrine of irresistible grace, the belief that God predetermines whom he will save, and they believe that you know the saved by the clear righteousness of their actions. Primitive Baptists believe in surfaces, too, I guess.
So why didn’t she like Richard? He’s better at presenting himself to people than almost anyone I’ve ever met. She should have loved him. He was attractive, smart, and he held all the correct religious, political, and personal views. Yet she stayed cool toward him until the day she died.
I always told myself she was just jealous, that she resented Richard for taking away her only daughter. For his part, Richard simply wrote it off as the old mother-in-law cliché, and once we were married and Matthew was born, he stopped caring what she thought about him one way or another. In his mind, I became his wife rather than her daughter. And, in fairness, I thought of it the same way. I thought of being a wife the way she taught me to think of being a wife. I sided with my husband, and I chalked up her dislike of him to jealousy and snobbery. No son-in-law would have been good enough for her, I told myself.
But now I wonder.
What would you say if you were here? What did you see in him that worried you?
I go upstairs to my room. Before I’ve even reached my bed, Mary knocks on my door. “Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Can I come in?”
I check my face in the mirror above my dresser. “Yes.”
She opens the door and closes it behind her.
“Is everything okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“You seem upset.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. You and Dad have both seemed upset today. Is everything okay?”
“I’m not upset,” I tell her.
Mary nods, leaning against the door. She’s a smart girl. And she’s got a good heart. I’m proud of her for being sensitive enough to intuit that her father and I are in a bad way. The rest of my brood downstairs is, I’m sure, oblivious.
But it’s none of her business.
“It’s nothing you need to worry about, sweetie.”
“So there is something wrong.”
“Don’t take that tone with me, Mary.”
“What tone?”
“The ‘ah ah, I caught you’ tone, like you just tripped me up. If I’m having an issue with your father, then I’ll take it up with him when he gets home. It doesn’t concern you.”
She frowns. “Okay, excuse me for asking. I was just trying to help.”
“If I ever need your help with my marriage, Mary, I’ll let you know.”
Her face flushes as pink as if I’d slapped her. “Okay,” she says, almost starting to cry. “I’m sorry. I was just worried when Dad had that attack this morning.”
I take a breath. I nod. Of course. I hadn’t thought about what this day must have looked like through her eyes. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
“Well, yes, partly.”
“He’s fine, dear. He’ll see the doctor on Monday just to be sure, but I really think he’s okay.”
“Okay.”
I walk over and give her a hug. She doesn’t hug me back. “Hey, I’m sorry I snapped at you. I didn’t realize that’s what you were talking about.”
“Everything else is okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I just noticed you stayed in your room a lot today.”
“Have I?”
“Seems like it.”
“I’m fine. Just a little tired. Okay?”
“Okay,” she says. She’s still stunned by my earlier curtness, and I realize I must have given her the look my children long ago dubbed “The Harbinger of Doom.” She turns to leave. “Daddy’s working late tonight?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, as naturally as if I still thought it was the truth.
Have I been hiding in my room today? Maybe. It’s true I don’t want to see any of the children right now. Since my fight with Richard this afternoon, I feel like we’re both lying to the kids. Every word out of my mouth feels like a lie.
Mary saw through me. But what did she see? Problems between her father and me? That could mean anything. Despite the fact we’ve tried to keep our fights out of the living room and the kitchen, the kids are not strangers to tension between us. This is not the first time I’ve taken to my room while Richard took to his car.