“She’s over twenty-one, we both are.”
“But you still live with your mama, don’t you? Over in shantytown? I hear that’s where you and Grace have been playing house.”
“Only until our apartment’s ready.” Jarrett kept his expression immobile.
“She’s accustomed to a higher standard, but you know that, don’t you, boy?” Tilley contemplated the glowing ash of his cigar. Jarrett had the sense that he’d stockpiled an endless round of insults and he’d keep firing until Jarrett exploded. That might have happened once, but Jarrett was a new man now, changed, because of Grace. Let Tilley rattle until hell froze.
Jarrett studied the wall of mahogany floor-to-ceiling shelving behind Tilley’s desk. Supposedly there was a door hidden there and a flight of steps that led down to what Grace said was her dad’s bunker. Tilley’d had the room built adjacent to the restaurant’s wine cellar back in the 1950’s, and like the wine cellar, the bunker had concrete walls a foot thick. Tilley kept his collection of South American artifacts stashed inside, where he could precisely control the temperature, lighting and humidity. The collection, Grace said, was worth several million. She’d shown Jarrett pictures. He hadn’t seen the value. The statuary and pottery was so primitive, it looked as if it had been molded by kindergarteners. He hadn’t said much to Grace one way or another, but inside he’d been thinking give him some clay, he could do better and he didn’t have one artsy bone in his body.
Jarrett lifted his chin at Tilley. “Isn’t there a door in that wall?”
“Grace been talking out of school again?” Tilley shook his head and fell silent, pushing out his lower lip as if he were considering what should come next. “I’ve got a proposition for you,” he said after a bit. He stubbed out his smoke and tugging a business-size check from beneath his desk blotter, he pushed it, face down, across the polished oak expanse. “How about you let my daughter go and take this instead.”
Jarrett picked it up and studied the amount. His heart fishtailed in astonishment, a hotter inkling of fury. “You want me to beat it and this is what it’s worth to you? What keeping Grace away from me is worth?”
Tilley didn’t answer. He was busy scribbling on a notepad. He tore off the sheet. “This guy, Rafe Salazar? He works for me. He’s got his own plane. You call the number there, he’ll fly you anywhere you want to go. He’s a young hustler like you; he’ll know the right place. I’m thinking maybe Rio or Veracruz. Just take care you don’t get the clap, huh?” Tilley smirked.
“If you had such a problem with me, why let your daughter plan a wedding? Why take it down to the wire?”
“Plans can be cancelled, like that.” Louis snapped his fingers. “Take me one, two phone calls.”
“You’d do that to your own daughter?” Jarrett got up.
“Sit down.” Louis made out another check and handed it over. “That’s my final offer.”
Jarrett didn’t look at it. He was afraid to. The first one was more money than he’d ever seen; he was afraid of the temptation he felt, faintly shamed by it. He wanted to figure it was normal, but he didn’t want to test himself again. He tore the checks in half and tore them in half a second and a third time and without taking his eyes off Tilley, let the pieces flutter from his hands. “You shouldn’t have bothered. I’m marrying your daughter on Saturday come hell or high water. Seems as if it would make it easier all the way around if you’d just accept it.”
“Name your price.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Every man has a price.”
“So what’s yours? How much would I have to pay you to get the hell out of my life?” Jarrett sat down.
Tilley’s gaze narrowed.
Yeah, get your eyes full, old man, I’m not going anywhere.
“You’ve got nothing I want,” Tilley said.
“Your daughter. I have your daughter,” Jarrett replied.
Tilley snorted, looked off, looked back. “You know I told her what you’re really after, that it isn’t her you want, it’s her money. Her mother’s trust fund.”
“That’s how you got your start, right? The way Grace explained it, her mother was the one with the fortune. You came from nothing like me and she bankrolled you.”
Tilley came forward. “You ever hear this line: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?”
“It’s from The Godfather. A piece of advice Don Corleone gives his son.” Jarrett half grinned, pleased he had the answer. “So, you’re giving me advice now?”
Tilley snorted and then apologized. “Forgive me. I keep forgetting you never went to college. Did you even finish high school?” He flapped his hand before Jarrett could frame a retort. “The original quote is from The Art of War. It’s a book by a Chinese general named Sun Tzu.”
Jarrett widened his smile, showing his teeth, working at it, making it real. “I know I have a lot to learn, sir.”
In retrospect, as he was sitting inside a jail cell facing death, this would seem a laughable understatement. But the flicker in Tilley’s eyes at the time made Jarrett think he’d surprised Tilley, maybe even impressed him, although when Jarrett suggested that to Grace later, she told him he was way off.
“If you think Dad admires you because you didn’t lose your temper or take his money, think again,” she said.
“I don’t care about his money.” It was a flat-out lie, but Jarrett wanted to believe it. He wanted Grace to believe it. He touched her cheek, smoothed her hair behind her ear. “You. I only care about you.”
They were in the country, in Jarrett’s car, parked off a winding dirt road having driven out of Houston to find some privacy. He tilted her chin, brushed her lips with his. “I brought a quilt. What do you say we spread it over there, under those trees.”
He was looking at the wide apron of shade beneath a nearby thicket of live oaks, imagining the freedom of making love somewhere other than his mother’s house, where he’d been raised, where his mom turned up the television every time he and Grace walked through the front door and into his bedroom. No one spoke or made eye contact. Like they could pretend what was happening—the s-e-x—wasn’t. Like he was still some high school kid fooling around with a bad girl under his mother’s nose. It amazed him every time Grace consented. He thought she would do anything for him, but he didn’t know why and it pissed him off.
Even as he wanted her, wanted her lifestyle, wanted to run with her crowd, he wondered what was she thinking? That he could be somebody? Like who? Her old man? Those rich prep school bastards she’d dated before Jarrett, the PhD’s, the MBA’s, who were brokers or doctors or lawyers now? She could have any one of them; she’d dated plenty. What did she see in him, a punk from Crapville with a juvie record? He wanted to believe she saw something good, something worth loving. The man he wished to be, who’d stood up to her dad, stupid as it sounded. Stupid as it would turn out to be.
He brought his gaze back to hers.
She said, “My father is incapable of love, so if you’re looking for that.”
“He seems to think a lot of some guy named Salazar.”
“It isn’t Rafe he cares about. It’s the stuff Rafe brings him. Dad loves having what no one else can have. He loves power and money and his own opinion. He loves having control.”
“My old man’s a jerk, too, but without the bankroll.”
“I’ve had to work, the same as you.”
Grace had worn out this line. He’d tried arguing that it was one thing to work because you needed money to eat and something else entirely to work because your dad wanted you trained from the ground up in his business. The very business that had made him filthy rich and that he expected his daughter to one day inherit. But Grace couldn’t or wouldn’t see Jarrett’s point. It was as if she wanted to have shared in his hard time and it touched him in an odd place in his heart. It became sort of endearing, so he had given up fighting with her about it. “I know,” he said to her now.
Still not satisfied,
she balanced her elbow on the window ledge. “Growing up poor does something to people, it twists them all up inside. I hope it hasn’t done that to you. You aren’t going to be mean to me or to our children, are you? Because you grew up with nothing.”
“I’m not your dad, Gracie.”
“He has weird ideas about work and money. He thinks if you don’t suffer, you won’t grow a backbone. He thinks making me wait tables is building my character.”
“As of right now, you’re done with that.”
She didn’t answer. He shifted away from her. He hated it when she got moody like this. He didn’t know what she wanted from him and if he asked, she’d say nothing. She was so damn frustrating. He could take her home, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to spread the quilt in the dimpled shade beneath the trees and make love to her, but when he tried to take her into his arms again, she didn’t yield. She covered her face with her hands, bent her head to his chest and he realized she was crying.
“I keep praying that somehow Dad will come around, that we can be a family. He can be a decent man, a kind man. I know you don’t believe me.”
Jarrett held her, resting his chin on the crown of her head while her tears dampened his shirt. His own throat ached at the longing in her voice. He imagined it too, that little family, but it was stupid. For shit. Nothing like that existed except in the movies, Jimmy Stewart and all that.
Grace straightened, sniffing. “I think we should leave Texas after we’re married, move somewhere else. Across country. Oregon, maybe, or Wyoming.”
“Wyoming? What would we do there? Punch cattle?” Jarrett made a fist and showed it to her, grinning furiously. “In their teeth?”
“I’m serious. He’s not going to change his mind about us.”
“You’re underestimating my charm,” Jarrett teased.
She groaned.
“Look, Grace, we don’t need his approval. We don’t need him to be a family.”
“He’s my father,” she said to her lap.
“Yeah, and I’m going to be your husband. He knows I’m not somebody he can push around. I made it clear.”
Grace looked up. “That’s what scares me.”
Chapter 11
Monday, September 27, 1999 - 20 days remain
“Jarrett would never admit it,” Grace picks up a thread from their last session, “but when we were first married, he honestly thought Dad would come around.”
“You didn’t share his conviction?” Sophia asks.
“I wanted to.” Grace balances her elbows on the arms of the club chair. She looks battered, gray with fatigue. The result, Sophia thinks, of living hour after hour in full catastrophe mode.
“His own father walked out on his family. Cort was ten, I think, and Jarrett was twelve. It was—” She stops.
Sophia waits. A lot of the practice of psychology is waiting. It is patience. She quells an urge to check her watch. She thinks she is no longer suited to this work. It is a thought she’s having with increasing frequency. She thinks Grace as much as Jarrett needed her father’s acceptance, his attention and respect. Sophia will suggest this at some point and chart Grace’s response.
Sophia will say a father can be physically present but emotionally absent and that the effect can be as devastating as an actual desertion. She will not say that she has had experience of this through her relationship with her own father. Psychologists don’t confide personal information to their patients. That’s what friends are for, but Sophia has never had many friends and none who were close.
“There were whole days when their mother didn’t get out of bed,” Grace says. “Jarrett felt responsible. He wasn’t as old as Thomas is now, but he worked like a demon after school to earn money to support the family. Sometimes, when he couldn’t find legitimate work, he—he figured out other ways to—” Grace stops again.
Sophia waits again.
“I don’t know that I should talk so openly about our private business. I don’t see how this helps me with my children, which is why I’m here. I don’t necessarily want them knowing these things about their dad.”
“You’re concerned with how he appears to them.”
“I feel as if I’m betraying him, our—our life together. I’m not sure I should.”
“You want to preserve the impression of normalcy.”
“Yes, of course. Wouldn’t you?”
Sophia doesn’t answer.
“I don’t know how to do this, Dr. Beckman!”
“Sophia, please.”
“Sophia,” Grace repeats agitatedly. “Some days I wake up and wonder why I’m still breathing. It’s all I can do to get out of bed.”
“But so far you’ve managed.”
“Do you know what a friend said to me once? A former friend, I should say. That everyone has something. I wanted to scream at her, no! Not like this. People die, of course people die, well-loved people. But from terminal illness, from old age and accidents, not from being deliberately strapped down to a gurney and shot full of chemicals.” Grace gives her face a sharp swipe with both palms. “People should not be put down like dogs.”
Sophia is thinking of the murdered men, of how they were put down, when Grace echoes this same thought, when she says, “I know they weren’t given a chance.”
The silence that ensues is frail and somehow hot and lasts the span of one wing beat, then two, before Grace says, “I’ll tell you something terrible,” but then she can only spread her hands.
“It’s all right, Grace. You can say anything here. Truly. That’s the whole point.”
“I’ve wondered—” she clears her throat— “so many times I’ve wondered why couldn’t Jarrett have terminal cancer or—or kidney failure or die in a collision on the freeway? Something awful but ordinary? It would be so much easier. If you think I’m horrible, I don’t blame you. I think I’m pretty horrible myself.” She looks at the ceiling struggling not to cry.
As if when your heart is broken and you are terribly hurt and afraid, it is noble and brave to withhold tears. To conceal any evidence of your emotions, your wounds. As if they are nothing. An inconvenience. “I think you’re human, Grace.”
“I think if we hadn’t married, he wouldn’t be in that place.” She pushes the words through clenched teeth and when she levels her gaze, her eyes are riddled with grief. “I knew that I shouldn’t—that the marriage was—was probably a mistake.”
“You didn’t love him?”
Grace ponders one telling moment before answering that Jarrett was different from anyone she’d ever known before. “He was from a whole other world; he was tough, street-smart; he had a criminal record.” A sudden rueful smile transforms her face. “Did you read Wuthering Heights?”
“Ummm.”
“I used to think Jarrett was like Heathcliff, you know, dark, brooding.”
Sophia holds Grace in her gaze. Why does she feel compelled to save him after he’s murdered her father, even though there’s no love lost there either? The note is jotted on a previous page of Grace’s file. Sophia has yet to ask in hope that an explanation will come voluntarily. She has the sense there is something more troubling Grace’s mind with regard to her marriage, some further source for disturbance other than what she’s told so far. If Grace does love her husband, it’s not a comfortable love. It doesn’t lie easily within her heart. And Sophia doubts it will rest in peace there once he’s gone.
Grace traces her eyebrows with her fingertips and the gesture seems self-conscious, almost defensive, as if she can read the speculation in Sophia’s mind. “Cort told me you lost your husband recently.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry for what I said before. I didn’t mean to suggest that any sort of loss is easy. It can’t be; I’m sure it still isn’t. Were you married a long time?”
“More than thirty years.”
“You must miss him terribly.”
“Yes,” Sophia says, but not until after her own longer than natural moment has
passed. A moment when her answer might as readily have been no or some ambivalent combination of the two. She and Grace share a look between women, the sort of look that contains a wealth of understanding about the complications inherent to love and relationship. It is a look outside the patient/therapist connection. Sophia takes up her pen.
“Jarrett wants me to stop paying the lawyers. He thinks by dying, he’ll save what’s left, but it’s too late now. I’ve hung onto the house as long as I can. I used to pretend that if I just kept everything the same, I’d wake up one day and it would be. We’d be the way we were.” She sounds wistful. “Or the way I thought we were.”
“Have you found another place?”
Grace shakes her head. “After, once the—” She breaks off, closing her eyes tightly, but the tears come anyway; they rim her jaw, fall to speckle the backs of her hands. “I am so sick of crying, of how weak I am.”
“No, Grace.” Sophia passes her a tissue. She says the tears are good, the body’s way of relieving itself of tremendous strain. And even to her own ears her words sound useless. Like little leaf boats launched into the watery eye of a hurricane. She peeks at her watch.
Grace blows her nose. “I’ll be glad when the house is gone,” she says. “People in that neighborhood, people who were once our friends, have said terrible things.”
“What sort of things?”
“That I was involved, that I knew what Dad and Jarrett were doing, that because I worked at the restaurant, I must have known. How could I not? I’ve wondered myself.” Grace shakes her head. “It was there, all those years, what Dad and Rafe dragged Jarrett into. I just didn’t want to know. It’s like the truth that you don’t want to see because once you do, you’ll have to do something about it.”
Grace averts her gaze. “Ignorance is not bliss. It’s weakness.”
“It sounds as if you feel some responsibility...?” Sophia dangles a pause.
But Grace veers in another direction. “There are still rumors circulating that Dad was trafficking in drugs, that the artifacts were a cover for drug smuggling. It’s easier for people to understand, I guess. We’re conditioned to hearing about raids and killings over drugs, but over artifacts?”
The Volunteer Page 9