Just off the living room was a small room that faced the street. Sunlight streamed in the window, highlighting a fine film of dust on the furniture. There was a comfortable-looking chair in one corner, which seemed like a nice spot for a cozy read, but it was the upright piano against the inside wall that I sought. It wasn’t new, but it had been well-cared for. The surface gleamed with polish underneath the dust. A nice little Yamaha. What were the odds it was in tune?
I opened the bench and glanced at the old sheet music, the pages yellow and curling. Huh. If this belonged to John, as I suspected it did, then he’d played the piano for years as a child. I would have expected to find something along the lines of Scott Joplin, but instead I was looking at a copy of Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in G Minor.” I was half tempted to sit down and try it, to see if I could play it from memory. I wanted to give in to the drama and passion of the piece. Pointless, as long as I was wearing the cast, though. Instead, I sat and played the famous chords of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” The piece didn’t require much from my left hand, but the cast prevented me from moving my fingers easily. I concentrated on the melody, trying not to merely play the notes but to actually feel the music… something my childhood piano teacher said I lacked the ability to do.
“Technically perfect,” Mrs. Grundy had told my mother. I could picture her, standing in the doorway with her music book in hand, her gray hair in pin curls, and smelling of lemon drops. “Never misses a note. Never forgets a tune that he’s learned. But he has the passion of a robot—unless he’s seen someone else play the same piece. Then he can imitate that performer down to the last note, to the degree with which the keys are struck. But he’s just copying it. He’s soulless, he is.”
The piano lessons had stopped then. My mother hadn’t seen the need to pay for lessons if I could just watch someone and imitate the fingering. It was about that time, she’d decided my memory wasn’t a gift, but evidence of the devil in me—which I only proved too well by turning out to be gay. I’d kept playing, though. Just to spite them all. Mr. Thomas, the director of the high school music department, didn’t care that my skills were only technical. Some of my happiest days had been during theater rehearsals. No one cared that I was gay in the theater club. And I never forgot a line.
I got a sudden mental flash of John playing the piano in my—our—apartment in San Francisco. He was painfully picking out “Heart and Soul” on my small electronic keyboard, when suddenly he segued into a rousing rendition of the song Schroeder played in A Charlie Brown Christmas. The clarity of the memory was startling. It was as though I were watching a movie. I could see John’s hands flashing authoritatively over the keys during the major riff, and I vividly remembered imagining what it would be like for his fingers to play me in the same manner. Well, apparently some things never change. I tried to recall what had happened next, but I hit the wrong key with my left hand and the discordant result made me close the lid on the piano.
A tap at the window caused me to jump. I winced at the sudden movement and turned in stages so I could look over my shoulder. A young woman was standing in the middle of Jean’s azalea bushes. She shrugged and mouthed “I’m sorry” when I glowered at her. Casting a glance behind her at the street, she turned back to the window, gave me what had to be her most winning smile and motioned that she was going to the door and that I should meet her there.
I went to the front door.
“Hello. I am so sorry to bother you, but I wonder if I could trouble you to use your phone? My car broke down, and I need to call a tow truck.”
She was young and pretty, with light brown hair pulled back in a careless ponytail, and wearing a bright yellow T-shirt and jean shorts. She wore coral nail polish on the toes peeping out of her heeled sandals and clutched her purse tightly to her side as she took a step forward, obviously expecting me to let her in the house.
“Nice try.” I blocked her entrance with one arm holding the door. “Not buying it, though.”
“Excuse me?” She blinked at me innocently.
“Come on, seriously? Do you expect me to believe your story? Your car broke down? I don’t think so. What do you really want? And don’t say you’re selling Girl Scout cookies because I’m not buying that either.”
The sorority-girl friendliness was replaced with something harder, more cynical. I revised her age upward by five years. “No. I never claim to be selling anything. That’s the kiss of death. People will shut the door right in your face. What gave me away?”
I tilted my head to one side. “Let me count the ways. First, you want in this house pretty badly. No sensible woman would enter the house of a strange man, even if she was stranded. You’d have asked me to make the call for you if you needed a tow truck. Second, it’s hard to believe, in this day and age, that someone like you would be without a cell phone.”
“The battery could be dead.” She gave me a narrow-eyed glare.
“You’d have mentioned it right off. So what do you really want?”
She sighed. “Just don’t slam the door in my face, okay? You’re Agent Jerry Parker, correct?” The very fact I hadn’t yet shut the door seemed to make her hopeful.
“Special Agent.” Yes. I was being a dick.
She looked questioningly at me.
“The correct title is Special Agent. What can I do for you?”
“Ah.” Comprehension dawned, and then her smile grew almost sly. “Well, I’m Christy Wells, reporter for WWBT 12. I’d like to ask you a few questions about the Paul Cunningham case. If I may…?”
She made as if to come into the house again. I didn’t move, and she stopped just short of bumping into me. The standard response came easily to me. “I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to discuss an ongoing investigation.”
“Oh, come on.” She pouted. “Be a pal, okay? Can’t you give me just a little sound bite? Maybe something about your injuries?” She nodded at my cast.
“No comment,” I said, closing the door.
She wedged one of her pretty little feet in the door before I could shut it all the way. “Is it true you have amnesia?” She practically barked out the question. “That you don’t remember anything from the night your partner shot and killed Coach Cunningham?”
“If I have amnesia,” I said, trying not to lose my temper, “then there’s no point asking me any questions, is there?” I stepped on her foot like I was squashing a cockroach.
She yelped and pulled it back, cursing. “You’ll regret treating the media this way, Agent Parker.” She leaned down to rub her instep and then huffed her way off the porch as I closed the door.
There was no way I could take a nap now. How the hell had a reporter from a local television station found out about the amnesia? That wasn’t public knowledge. I wasn’t even being 100 percent honest with my own boss about the extent of it. Had someone at the Bureau talked? Unlikely. The hospital? That was possible. Oh sure, no one was supposed to talk about their patients, but the irony of the man with the perfect memory having amnesia would be hard not to share. They wouldn’t even have to have used my name for someone to investigate and put two and two together. Still, the whole thing was unsettling. I went downstairs to curl up on the couch with the cats and read some more Bradbury. At least that way, no one else could spot me and try to pump me for information I didn’t have.
“WHEN WERE you going to tell me about the mugging incident?”
I started out of my doze. Oliver growled grumpily when I joggled him with my cast. I blinked at John stupidly, trying to make sense of where I was and what I’d been doing. The book I’d been reading slid off my abdomen and I picked it up, frowning. Oh, right. Bradbury. Head trauma. Jean’s basement. Pissed-off boyfriend.
“I was going to tell you.” I rubbed the corner of one eye and yawned uncontrollably. “I was just picking my time. Besides, I had other things on my mind last night.” Telling him about the attempted mugging would have completely spoiled the image I’d been aiming for. I would h
ave become, once again, Jerry Parker, victim. I’d had different plans for the evening. I thought I’d made the right call.
His expression was softer when I looked up at him. “You could have been hurt.”
“Your mother had things under control.”
“I was referring to my mother.”
I couldn’t help it. I smiled. Though I doubted Jean had told him all the details. As a matter of fact…. “Jean told you about it?”
Now it was his turn to blink. “She, ah, mentioned it, yes.” He quickly went on the attack again. “How I found out is beside the point. I can’t believe you’d keep something like that from me.”
I looked at him and let the irony of his words sink in. “Oh, that’s rich coming from you, Special Agent Pot.”
“I’m not keeping anything important from you, Special Agent Kettle,” he snapped, only to widen his eyes and drop his mouth open, as though he’d just thought of something. He caught me watching him and closed his lips tightly. He hesitated and continued. “Not anything that I can’t deal with. I mean, that you shouldn’t have to… you know, while you’re….” He made a swirling motion with his hand that encompassed my broken arm and my head.
“Ah,” I said, letting the dryness of the Mojave into my voice. “Now that we have that settled, why don’t I get started on dinner?”
He led the way upstairs. Once we entered the kitchen, I was disturbed by the way he lost his expression at the sight of Charles calmly sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper. Jean maintained the quaint habit of getting the news in print form. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a paper. I suspected she got it mostly for Charles. The bleak look on John’s face seeing Charles firmly ensconced as master of the house was hard to bear.
I felt both grateful and guilty that I’d missed out on the fun of golf that afternoon. I guessed that Charles had been an asshole, as usual. I was surprised that Jean, puttering around by the coffeemaker, didn’t look particularly happy either. She excused herself to wash up almost as soon as we came into the room.
It was unseasonably warm—too hot for anything heavy—so I’d planned a light dinner of chicken with an orange sauce, served over couscous and green beans. My granny would have disapproved of microwaving the beans in their bag instead of slow cooking them all day on the stove with some onion and a bit of fatback, but I’d come to prefer the crisper taste, as well as the ease of nuking them. Maybe come Thanksgiving, when I had more time, I could prepare a meal just like she would have made.
Jean came back to the kitchen. I turned down her offer to help, and she took a seat at the table across from Charles and stared into space over the cup of coffee cradled in her hands. Surprisingly, since he usually left me to my own devices in the kitchen, John rummaged around in the cabinets and came up with the glass dish I needed to bake the chicken. I wondered why he was hanging around. It felt like he was there to act as a buffer, but for whom? Me and Charles, or Charles and Jean?
Curiouser and curiouser.
Jean waited for Charles to hand her a section of paper he wasn’t interested in, like a lioness who’d made the kill but was letting the pride leader take his fill first. I tried not to let it bother me. She was from a different generation, and after all, she wasn’t my mother. Thank God. Not that I wouldn’t want her as my mother. It was the idea of Charles as a stepfather that rankled.
John handed me the marmalade before I asked for it, then crossed to the fridge and got the orange juice. I wondered if I’d ever made this dinner for the two of us, because he certainly seemed to be anticipating my moves. I was pouring out a quarter cup of juice for the sauce when Jean made a startled noise behind me. I looked over my shoulder. She was staring intently at the paper. It crackled in her hands as she laid it flat on the table. She smoothed it out carefully and looked up at me.
“Lee, dear. Didn’t you say you had family in Halifax?” This wasn’t just idle curiosity on her part. Her voice had the careful, measured cadence of someone weighing their words.
John was by her side before she finished her sentence, leaning over her shoulder to read the paper. When he met my eye, his face mirrored Jean’s concern.
I felt a curious sinking in my chest, as though my heart had taken an elevator ride down to my stomach and then had free-fallen to my feet before rebounding back to thud in my chest.
“Yes.”
I knew what was coming. I’m not prescient by any means. I just… knew.
John glanced down at the paper and then back at my face again, his expression tense and pained.
I held my breath and waited for the blow.
John’s mouth tightened, and he pushed the paper across the table.
“What is it?” Charles asked.
I rinsed my hands and wiped them, delaying the inevitable for as long as possible.
John spread his fingers on the open Richmond Times-Dispatch and spun it on the table so it was facing me, even as Charles lowered his paper to repeat his question. Jean gave him a little negative shake of her head, and he laid down the business pages.
When I came to the table, the section was open to the obituaries. There were quite a few. It was the regional newspaper. No big surprises. The usual octogenarians, much loved by all and to be dearly missed by their families. A high school student, seventeen. No doubt a car accident. A woman who was only thirty-eight, donations to be made to breast cancer research. I scanned the names, glossing right over the one that should have leapt out at me.
I was startled when John touched my arm.
“Will someone please tell me what is going on?” Charles was decidedly testy.
That’s when I saw it. My mother’s name. Juleen Iris Parker, sixty-seven, called home by Jesus when she died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Survived by her son, William Henry Parker, her daughter-in-law Marybeth, and their two children, Robert Lee, and Cynthia Anne. She had died one week before, and the funeral service had already been held.
There was no mention of my name.
“Are you okay?” John asked, his voice quiet, as though only the two of us were there.
“What?” I felt as though I was underwater and John was the light at the surface, telling me which way to swim. I gave myself a little shake, like a dog coming out of the river. “Yeah. Sure. Just surprised me, that’s all.”
“That’s a relative, then?” Jean’s voice was a caress, and for some reason, it made me want to cry. I didn’t, though. It was her concern that twisted inside of me, not the loss itself.
“Who’s a relative? What are we talking about? Someone you know in jail, Parker?”
The glare I shot Charles should have sandblasted his skin from his skull. I pictured that for an instant—his skin peeling away to show the underlying muscle, his eyes rolling uncontrollably like white golf balls without the lids to hold them in place. “No,” I said, lips stretched thinly over a tight smile, “in a coffin.”
“Oh.” Charles reddened, shifting in his seat as though it had suddenly gotten hot. “I am sorry for your loss. Was it someone close to you?”
“Not at all. It was my mother.”
I could feel John tense at my side, could sense that he wanted to intervene, to shield, to comfort, to do something. And yet he did none of these things. Because Charles was there? Because he was emotionally crippled himself? I didn’t know. I couldn’t even drum up the ability to care. I felt like I’d been anesthetized. I bet I could have placed my hand palm down on a red-hot burner, and I wouldn’t have felt a thing.
I looked down dumbly at the grip on my elbow.
“Sit down,” John said, with more briskness than kindness. That, at least, felt right. Familiar. I allowed him to guide me into the chair he’d pulled out for me, where I sat down heavily. The next thing I knew, there was a cup of coffee sitting in front of me. I watched as John poured at least a quarter cup of sugar into the mug, stirred it, and placed it in my hands. “Drink that.”
I was surprised at how cold
I was and how good the hot cup felt as I wrapped my fingers around it as best I could with the cast. Jean reached across the table and caught my good hand. It must have felt like icicles in her grip.
“Oh, Lee. I am so sorry.” The sympathy in her voice nearly broke me.
I managed a smile. “It’s just a shock, that’s all. I haven’t spoken to her since I left home as a teenager. I had no idea she wasn’t in good health.”
It was hard to believe. She’d always been a volcano of strong opinions and spite—the kind of woman whose Christian charity came with a price, and who’d shared the latest gossip about her neighbors with a sad smile and a “bless her heart” to absolve her of any sin. Women like her didn’t die of heart attacks. They bullied the local Women’s Committee, ran the PTA with an iron fist, lived to be ninety, and still struck fear into the hearts of men, simply by calling out their name on the street.
“Your mother,” Charles exclaimed, only to catch his breath sharply as he jolted in his seat. Ah, the Flynn Family Trait—kicking your loved ones under the table to make them shut up.
“Yes. My mother. I’ll spare you the asking. She tossed me out of the house when I was seventeen. We haven’t spoken since.”
“Ah.” Charles struggled to look more sympathetic, I’ll give him that much. “I’m sorry to hear that. Sorry too, that you did not have an opportunity to reconcile before her death.”
“Yeah.” The image of the signpost for Hell, Michigan, completely covered in ice, came to mind.
Jean pulled the paper back toward her and turned it so she could read it again. “But there is no mention of you. And this William… he’s your brother?”
I nodded. “Younger by two years. No doubt he heard all about my evil ways. I went to live with my grandmother, after I left the house, but I seldom saw him, even at school.” Billy had cut me dead, as though I hadn’t existed. And while I’d gotten a scholarship and a ticket out of town, Billy had barely graduated high school. I guessed he was still working at the feed mill. Two kids, though. I was an uncle and I hadn’t even known it.
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