by Lisa Wingate
“Let’s talk inside,” Uncle Boone whispered. “Paul’s not well.”
I felt a rush of concern that was both unexpected and unwanted. The anger, the bitterness I’d thought I would experience were slow in coming—like armor that wouldn’t fall into place now that I needed it. There was only a suspicion, and a murky uncertainty of what would come next. Now that Barbie and I finally had things on an even keel, was he here to upend our lives again?
Boone guided him into the room. Dad’s steps were unsteady, his legs seeming to drag in slow motion.
“What’s wrong?” I wanted to take the question back as soon as I asked it. Why should I care? He didn’t deserve it.
“Paul had a slight heart attack in Mexico,” Uncle Boone answered.
I watched my father, but he wasn’t looking at me. Instead, he studied Aunt Lute’s painted butterflies as he moved through the room, passing from the dim light by the door into the shadows beyond. I took in my father’s silhouette—stooped, thin, unfamiliar.
“How long ago?” My question sounded clinical, emotionless, just the way I wanted it to be.
“Two weeks. The doctors just cleared him to travel home.” The two of them crossed the room together, Uncle Boone with his hand between my father’s shoulder blades, positioning him like a stick puppet. Dad sank into the armchair and Uncle Boone stood between it and the door.
I turned on a lamp. “You two have been in touch for two weeks, and didn’t tell us?” Suddenly Uncle Boone’s recent business trip made sense. He was in Mexico with my father . . . but the business trips had been going on for longer than two weeks. Uncle Boone had been coming and going since the day after we moved into this house. Fury burned hot in my face, and Boone lifted a hand, glancing down the hall as if he didn’t want me to wake the others yet.
He backed away a step. “I haven’t been in touch with him for very long. His lawyer called me after he had the heart attack, and . . .”
Turning to my father, I cut into Uncle Boone’s explanation. “You can call your lawyer, but you can’t call us? Did it even cross your mind what we were going through? What Barbie and the kids and Aunt Lute were going through?” I didn’t add myself to the list. I couldn’t admit to him that I still cared about him, still needed him. “The boys asked for you every day. What were we supposed to tell them? We didn’t know whether you were alive or dead.”
Uncle Boone laid a hand on my arm, trying to quiet me again, but I pushed him away, my emotions spinning beyond reason, beyond compassion for my father’s medical condition, or the fact that he’d apparently been traveling all night. How dare he think he could drop back into our lives now! He had no right to show up when we were finally moving ahead, when we were finally building a day-today existence that was something other than chaotic.
Sagging forward, he rested his elbows on his knees, looked through the pyramid of his arms, and studied the floor, his face wearily impassive. “I didn’t want you to get caught up in this. I never wanted you and Barbie and the kids involved.” His voice was hoarse, a thin thread floating through the stillness in the room.
“Not involved?” I hissed, the sound ricocheting against the painted butterflies and vines, disappearing down the hall. I swallowed hard, clenched my fists, grabbed a breath, and tried to calm myself. I didn’t want the kids to wake up now. I didn’t want them to see him until I knew what would happen next. “How could we not be involved? Do you have any idea what’s been going on around here? Any clue what we’ve been through?”
“I wanted to keep you out of it.” He straightened in the chair, and for an instant he became the strong, determined man I remembered. The man who had everything under control, who was a competitor in every way, a winner, powerful enough to hold off all threats and dominate the opposing team. He faced me, his steel blue eyes hard and determined, self-righteous. “I didn’t want . . . this.” His gaze strafed the room, indicating the house, me, the boxes, the mess our lives had become.
Air solidified in my throat, as if I were choking on his explanation. “What did you think was going to happen? You’ve been lying to us for months—about our house, the bank accounts, everything. How could you do that? What were you going to do when they came to take our home—barricade the door and fight off the constable?”
“I thought . . .” The gaunt-faced man in the chair cratered, sinking inward, shaking his head, and coughing softly into his hand. “I thought I had it . . . worked out.”
Uncle Boone touched my arm. “He’s not supposed to do this now. He’s not up to it. He just came out of the hospital.” Despite everything, Boone regarded my father with compassion, the long ties of friendship still strong between them. How could he feel that way? How could he find the forgiveness to bring my father back here, to guide him tenderly across the room, protect him even now? Was it habit, a sense of duty, grace of a sort I couldn’t find within myself?
I looked at my father—pale and shrunken, broken—and all I felt was anger. I wanted payback. I wanted explanations. I wanted him to know how terrible the past weeks had been.
I didn’t want peace. I wanted to win at war.
“Let him rest a bit before everyone else wakes up,” Boone suggested, his voice soft, tender. “There’ll be time for this later.”
“Let him rest?” I protested. “Do the feds know he’s back? Won’t they be coming for him?”
Boone pulled his lips inside his mouth, parted them with a smack. “The lawyers made a deal before he came back from Mexico. He’s cooperating fully, but to be honest with you, the feds are having a tough time building a case against Ross Burten. He’s slick, and he’s got good lawyers. With a little luck, this whole thing’ll go away.”
This whole thing’ll go away. I should have been grateful. Life for us could continue on in some form, although it was hard to imagine what the picture would look like. “What about all the people Rosburten cheated? They’re just out of luck, and we go on with our lives? Ross Burten goes on with his, because his slimy lawyers help him slide out of a conviction? Is that how it works?”
“One issue at a time.” Boone rubbed his forehead, his fingers stroking back and forth over a bright patch where the lamp reflected off his dark skin in a tiny orb of light. “Let’s take it one issue at a time, all right? Let him rest. I’ll come back in a while.”
“I’m fine.” My father lifted his body, chin first, as if he were being pulled upright in sections like a Jacob’s ladder.
Both of us watched Boone open the door, step through, and close it. Boone’s shadow grew smaller and smaller against the window sheet, receding until it melted into the noise of his footsteps descending from the porch, then his vehicle starting.
The room felt smaller once we were alone in it. Emotion filled the corners like carbon monoxide, traveling along the ceiling, moving inward. Dad sank in the chair, wheezed out a sigh, feeling the heaviness in the air. I watched him for a moment, compared him to the man who’d sat in the living room of our big house in Highland Park, still wearing his Superman disguise, still convinced he could stop the speeding bullet before it destroyed us.
He couldn’t. The bullet had hit its mark.
I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the sofa, trying to decide how this should play out. At some point, Barbie would awaken and find him here. “You shouldn’t lie to Barbie. You shouldn’t lie to her about what’s going to happen next.”
His chest rose, shuddered, lowered in a rhythmic motion, as if his heart were visible, thrumming beneath the surface. “I don’t know what happens next. Even if the case falls through, I come out looking like a con man. Nobody wants to do business with a failure, with someone they can’t trust. I don’t know where we go from here. Barbie doesn’t need to hear that. She doesn’t want to hear that.”
“She’s stronger than you think.” The sentence was out before I had time to consider the fact that I actually believed it. Like the rest of us, Barbie was changing, reinventing herself.
My father blin
ked and drew back, surprised; then he sighed and let his head roll sideways. His jaw twitched, his mouth and cheeks pulling tight. “The legal people will handle it. The feds know that Ross pays good money for lawyers to cover his tracks. If you want my opinion, this whole thing with them turning the case into a media circus is all about politicians getting press ops. There’s an election coming up, after all, and this gives the mayor and the district attorney and even that moron of a senator the chance to shake their fists and rail on about corporate corruption. Bringing my name into it makes it big news. For heaven’s sake, if I’d known Ross’s financial guys were jockeying the accounting and paying off city councilmen, I wouldn’t have sunk my own money into Rosburten, would I? I wouldn’t have put my name and my face on it, especially on this last deal with the athletic park. If I’d known Ross was funneling money out of it, I never would have talked everyone I knew into investing.”
“But you did.”
He winced again. “If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. But you get to the point where you need to gamble big, and you don’t really analyze it the way you should. You need the money. You want it to be true, so you let it be. I’d seen investors come and go, and I’d seen them come out with big gains. How was I supposed to know the money wasn’t really coming from profits? How was I supposed to know Ross was using the money from new investors to pay gains to old investors, and to line his own pockets? I took Ross at his word. I did my job, and my job was to sell his ideas to people. In a time when the economics aren’t good, the moneymen are looking for a sure thing. It’s easy to get them to buy into an investment that looks like it’s going to pay off big. Ross knew that. He made this athletic park deal look like a gold mine. He needed big money to make it go, and he needed city councilmen on his side. The quickest way to get city councilmen is to give them something they want, and the quickest way to bring in the big moneymen is to make it look like you’ve already got big money on the books. Ross is a risk taker. He lives by his own rules. Deep down, I think I knew that the projects we had out there couldn’t possibly be paying the kinds of returns Ross was claiming, and he promised even bigger returns once the athletic park came online. I knew the fundamentals weren’t there.”
“If you knew, then why did you keep working for him? Why didn’t you quit?”
He focused on me, his eyes a narrow slice between lowered lashes, his expression patronizing. “The economy’s not what it used to be, Tam. Investments fail; endorsement opportunities dry up. I needed this athletic park deal as much as anybody. I couldn’t just sit there and watch us go down the tubes—lose the house, the cars. Everything.”
“We lost the house. We’re still here.” The truth of that struck me. Despite all that I’d thought and felt a few weeks ago, it wasn’t the house that mattered. “We’re still a family.”
A soft, rueful laugh pressed past his lips. “In this place?”
His answer heated my anger again. How could he still believe that the house, the business, his reputation were all that mattered? Was what he’d lost worth more than what remained? “Yes. Here. In this dinky house with Aunt Lute’s stupid paintings on the walls and boxes everywhere. We’re a family here. We don’t have any choice. The kids can’t shuffle off to some playroom with the nanny and Barbie can’t hang out at the spa and the country club all day. We have to actually live here together.”
He answered with a tolerant smile. “You’re young and idealistic, Tam. I’ve done my years in places like this. It’s no picnic.”
The conversation fell mute. I sank into the sofa, feeling as if he’d slapped me without lifting a hand. We didn’t matter to him. Even after everything that had happened, we were just a line item in his life—a box on a spreadsheet of necessary possessions.
A noise—a small, strangled gasp—bisected the thought. Both my father and I swiveled toward the sound. Barbie stood at the hallway entrance in shorts and a cutoff T-shirt, her mouth hanging slack, her arms loose at her sides. She blinked. Her lips moved but produced no sound.
I felt as if the room were in suspended animation, as still as the painted butterflies on the wall. Barbie stared at my father, her hand rising slowly, her fingertips touching her lips as if to move them. The tiny rhinestones from her last manicure glittered in the lamplight. Her eyes welled, then spilled over, crystal blue pools of emotion. I wondered at the thoughts behind them—was she glad he was here, shocked, relieved? Was she angry for what he’d done, or would she simply forgive and slip back into the usual pattern?
Wasn’t this what she’d been waiting for all along—for him to come back and save the day? To take care of everything?
“You’re h . . .” she whispered, stretching a hand behind herself and touching the corner of the wall, as if she needed to confirm vertical and horizontal. “You came home.” She stepped forward, stopped again, scanned his body from head to toe, seeming to notice the changes in him—the gray hair, the gaunt cheeks, the absence of his mustache. For a moment, I thought she’d say something, but then she only crossed the room, leaned over the chair, and took my father’s face in her hands. Fingers trembling against his cheeks, she studied him, then finally slid her arms around his neck and collapsed against him, weeping. I stood up and left the room, uncertain of how I felt about their reunion.
In the boys’ room, I curled up in the bed next to Landon and wrapped my arms around his tiny body, felt his heart beating against my forearm and tried to imagine our future. The boys were just getting comfortable here, just settling into a pattern with Shasta’s kids, and story time, and life in this little house. Now my father was back, and things would change again. He would never be content with the quiet, uneventful life here. He would feel the need for more. More space, more money, more deals. More . . . everything.
More than just us.
He’d be mortified at the idea of our spending time at the Summer Kitchen and the reading class. Show some sense, he’d say. Anything can happen in a place like that, around those kinds of people. I didn’t give you the best education so you could hang around derelicts. . . .
He would never understand life here. He’d never be willing to try.
I closed my eyes and listened to the boys’ breathing, and tried not to think about it—tried to pretend today was just another day, an ordinary day on Red Bird Lane. . . .
When I awoke, the kids were gone. The bedroom door hung ajar, and I could hear my father in the living room. He was on the phone, but his voice was hushed, as if he didn’t want anyone to listen in.
The floor creaked as I stood up and started toward the door. In the living room, the conversation stopped abruptly. When I stepped into the hall, my father was on the sofa, looking my way. He watched me while he listened to someone on the phone; then he stood up and started toward the front door. “That’s fine,” he said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
As Dad hung up, Barbie announced that breakfast was ready, her voice fluttering through the house in a joyous singsong. “C’mon, Tam,” she chirped when she saw me in the hall. “Sleepyhead. We made pancakes.” I stopped, and she focused on me with a hopeful half smile that said, Please don’t mess this up. He’s back.
I headed for the bathroom. “Just a minute.” Locking them outside the door, I splashed water on my face, took a deep breath, and tried to get my head together. I swallowed the urge to storm out and tell my father how I felt about his leaving, and his coming back, and the idea of Ross Burten potentially emerging from this scandal unscathed.
When I reached the dining room, the scene was surreal, like a domestic ad from an old magazine—overly colorized, unreasonably bright. My father sat at the head of the table, and the sibs were lined up along one side, waiting expectantly with forks in their hands. Barbie whirled from the kitchen like a short-order waitress, holding a platter of bacon and toast in the air. My father was sitting close to Jewel, feeding her bits of a pancake he must have stolen from the kitchen early. For an instant I watched, caught off guard. Jewel’s
face was alive with light, and my father laughed as she navigated the difficult task of pinching tiny bits of dough between her fingers.
“Paul, don’t give her that,” Barbie admonished, playfully batting a hand at him.
He returned an indulgent look as Barbie set down the platter. “It won’t hurt her. I gave pancakes to Tam when she was even smaller than this.” Glancing up at me, he smiled. “Remember that, Tam? Remember all those times we ended up at the Waffle House at midnight after a game?”
I stood staring at him, at Barbie. What was the matter with them? Didn’t anything about this day bother them? How could they sit at the breakfast table chatting about pancakes as if nothing were wrong?
Aunt Lute emerged from the kitchen carrying a plate stacked high with pancakes. She was wearing a wide sun hat, flip-flops, and a long, loose cotton dress, as if she were prepared for combing the beach. A tiny carved dolphin dangled from her neck on a leather thong. “Why, of course she doesn’t remember. She was only a wee one. Just a sprite. How could she remember such a thing?” She waved the platter toward Jewel. “This one won’t remember the pancakes, either.” Right now, Aunt Lute seemed to be the most lucid person in the room. “She won’t remember the butterflies, or the Lady of the Water. The big boys, my princes, they might remember, but the wee one won’t recall this tiny castle. She’ll pass right by it and never know the difference.”
I slid into a chair as Aunt Lute dealt out pancakes, Barbie poured milk into sippy cups, and Mark and Daniel started a fight over the butter tub. “What’s she talking about?” I asked, watching Aunt Lute load up my father’s plate while Barbie handed out the cups. “What does she mean, Jewel won’t remember this house?”
Barbie’s lips lifted into a wide smile that looked glamorous again with a fresh application of makeup. “Paul thinks he’s found a place for us.” Slipping into the chair next to him, she laid a hand on his knee, her face filled with a trust and adoration that made me feel betrayed. Apparently, the fact that he’d run out on us didn’t matter, as long as he could fix everything now. “He’s taking care of it.”