by Lora Roberts
As I got closer to Denver the traffic thickened. At one point I thought I saw the same panel van pass me. Once more I glimpsed the dark, springy hair and arrogant nose that had reminded me of my ex-husband. The van sped away, and I slowed a bit, content to let it get ahead and carry my ridiculous fears with it.
The closer I got to the city, the more changed everything was. Where I remembered dusty plains and rolling hills, now there were acres of tract houses, their lights twinkling in the dusk, their shopping malls and discount strips blaring from the roadsides. Denver itself appeared as a vast hazy luminosity, blotting out the emerging stars, paling the deep blue of the twilight. Already the crisp mountain air was replaced with the acrid cloud of civilization.
I drove on into it, into my past, my hands in a damp death-grip on the steering wheel.
The street my parents lived on looked narrower than I remembered. I was used to the lush shrubbery and carefully tended gardens of Palo Alto; the bare lawns and shabby house fronts seemed to signal a corresponding bareness of spirit.
My parents’ house was no longer white with dark red shutters. The asbestos siding had been painted brown, with black shutters. There was a six-or seven-year-old Chevy in the driveway. The living room curtains were closed, as were those in the front bedroom—the room that had been mine. Paint was peeling off the iron railings that imprisoned the small porch.
I drove on. I had decided to stop at my brother Andy’s house first. He and Renee could be said to owe me hospitality, since I’d put Amy up for the summer—and Renee herself had been an uninvited guest.
Andy’s house was half a mile from my parents’ place. Mom and Dad had moved across town when I was a junior in high school, to be closer to Andy after his hasty marriage. Andy and Renee still lived in the same house, but Andy had tinkered with it over the years. In place of the little tract house I remembered was a big one, with an addition on one side and a big garage growing out of the other side. It crowded the lot. The small trees I’d helped plant years ago were tall and shady, overhanging the little front yard.
Barker jumped down from the front passenger seat and burst out of the door as soon as I opened it. He was wildly curious, sniffing around the yard and whining. He ran up the sidewalk and gave one sharp, peremptory bark at the door.
Amy popped out a moment later. “Barker,” she cried. He leaped up at her—which was strictly forbidden—and she knelt on the mat to receive his embraces, glancing guiltily at me.
“I forgot to tell him ‘down,’” she said. “Hi, Aunt Liz. I’ve been waiting and waiting for you.”
“Barker’s been longing to see you, too.” I stopped at the foot of the steps up to the front porch, to give them time for their greeting. “Actually, so have I.”
“Well.” Renee spoke from the open door, scowling at Barker and giving me a half-hearted smile. “So you did come. Amy was sure you would.”
“She said Mom wants to see me.”
“She seems to.” Renee spoke reluctantly. “I don’t know why. It’s not like she’s at death’s door or anything. She just has a bad case of the flu.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to wait until she’s dying.” I decided to leave my valise on the backseat of my bus. I might prefer my own hospitality to Renee’s that night.
“You might as well come in.” Renee stood aside. “Amy! Stop wrestling with that dog and get in and finish your dinner.”
“Am I interrupting you?” I had an impulse to turn around and leave, wondering why I was there and how bad this was going to be.
“Not at all.” Barker, never doubting his welcome for a moment, had followed Amy inside, and Renee seemed to remember a “Miss Manners” column she’d once read.
“Maybe you’d like to join us. Just roast beef, mashed potatoes, a salad.” She glanced at me when I walked past her into the hall. “Or maybe you don’t eat meat. I seem to remember a lot of vegetables—”
“I’m only an economic vegetarian.” The dinner smelled wonderful. I was, I realized, very hungry after not eating my chicken sandwich. “If I’m not putting you out—”
“No, no.” Renee led the way through the kitchen. It glistened with sleek formica cabinets, tiled counters, black glass-fronted appliances. We turned right at the breakfast bar and went into the dining room.
A small chandelier dangled from the low ceiling. The table, chairs, and buffet were a matched set, heavily carved in mock-Spanish style. A tablecloth, candles, nice dishes made a gracious picture, marred by my brother Andy, who occupied what was no doubt the head of the table, since he was there. He had a knife in one hand, a fork in the other, a full plate in front of him. He looked at me suspiciously, as if I might be impersonating myself.
The silence felt awkward. Uneasily, I broke it. “Hey, Andy.”
“Liz.” His gaze softened. “You look pretty much the same.” He would be seeing a short, ordinary-looking woman in her mid-thirties, with badly cut dark hair, wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and a tentative smile. “Just a little—”
“Older?” I noticed the gray in his hair, the way the lower part of his face had acquired jowls.
“Weathered, I was going to say.” He put down his fork and pulled out the chair next to him. “Where’d Amy get to?”
“She’s in the backyard with the dog.” Renee shot me an accusing look. “I didn’t think you’d bring that fool animal. You’re not dumping him here, Liz. I’m not having any dogs getting hair all over my rugs.”
“Barker’s just visiting, like me.” I put the linen napkin in my lap—one of my grandmother’s, by the monogram. Renee appeared to live with a lot of style. “He’ll sleep in the bus at night. He’s housebroken.”
Andy passed me the platter of meat, and Renee offered me mashed potatoes. The aromas were distracting.
“So Amy told you Mom’s asking about you.” Andy’s face tightened again. “We bust our butts trying to help out, take care of her, give her whatever she needs. And our thanks is that she wants you, the one who never gave her anything but trouble.”
I held my fork suspended on its way to my mouth. “Andy, I don’t intend to impose. I’ll see her, I’ll set her mind at rest if I can, and then I’ll leave.”
“You’ll have to stay here,” Renee said mournfully. “Dad won’t let you into the house. He’s very bitter against you.”
I put down my fork. “Look, we all have reason for bad feelings, don’t you think? I’ve paid for my mistake, and I paid alone. I never got an instant’s support or encouragement from any of you the whole time Tony was regularly beating me to a pulp. I might have been able to leave him, if I’d just had someplace to go—”
Aghast, I shut up. After just a few minutes around Andy and Renee, I was whining. I had made my bed. So my mother had said when I first admitted that Tony wasn’t the man I’d thought. Marriage was a sacrament, and I had brought it on myself.
Those true words, that certainty, kept me from ever again approaching her. I had been wrong to marry Tony; I was wrong to try to kill him. I had, evidently, been wrong to expect my family to be on my side.
Being wrong was not on my agenda anymore. For the past five years, I had managed to dodge any emotional entanglements. Lately it had been getting harder and harder.
As if my train of thought had conjured it, the telephone rang and Renee said, “Oh, that’ll probably be your ‘friend’ in Palo Alto.” Her emphasis put a salacious spin on friendship. “He called earlier to see if you got here okay.”
“I’ll get it,” Amy called in the distance. We sat around the table, all chewing suspended.
“For Aunt Liz,” she said when she finally appeared in the doorway. Barker walked beside her, tongue lolling in a pleased doggy smile. “It’s Paul Drake.”
Self-consciously I went past her down the hall.
“I’ve got an extension in my room you can use,” Amy said, pointing past an open door to a wild tangle of frothy pillows, shaggy stuffed animals, and more sophisticated decor like Roman shades and
a poster for Hole showing Courtney Love screaming.
Amy gave me the phone and vanished, taking Barker with her.
“So you finally got there.” Drake didn’t sound so far away. I could picture him, standing in his kitchen chopping up something exotic for dinner, the phone cradled on his shoulder.
“The bus is a flatlander. It doesn’t like mountains.” I sat amid the pillows on Amy’s bed. “I blew the oil pressure regulator today.”
“And did you just pull over and fix it?” He laughed. “It’s good to hear your voice, Liz. I was getting kind of worried.”
“Why?” The sound of his laugh did strange things to me, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to lie in any more beds of my own making.
“Well, that ex-husband you were so afraid of—doesn’t he live in Denver?”
“It’s a big city. He’ll never know I’m here.”
“You sound funny. Are you alone?”
“Probably.” There was a phone in the kitchen, and Renee was the world’s biggest snoop.
“Oh.” Drake was a detective, after all. “Well, listen, if you run into trouble, I know someone on the Denver force. Just try to keep your nose clean this time, okay?”
“I don’t run into trouble. It runs into me.” I knew I sounded curt, but it was either that or start pouring my insecurities all over him. “Look, Drake, I’ve got to go.”
“Call me if you need to,” he said after a pause. “Call collect.”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll be fine. Bye.”
I hung up and wiped my palm on the side of my jeans. I didn’t want to be lumping Drake in with Tony or Andy or any of the men who’d let me down. But something about being back in Denver made it seem unavoidable.
Chapter 3
I parked the bus in the shade of a big sycamore, across the street from my parents’ house. It was after eight, full dark. Even nosy Mrs. Beamish, if she still lived next door, would have trouble seeing us. Amy sat beside me; Barker was curled up on the back seat, my personal car alarm. Andy had driven his own car over to pick up my dad for his jaunt to the Legion Hall. The front door of my parents’ house opened, and Andy walked out beside my father.
Dad looked small next to his son. He was bent—the legacy of so many construction jobs—and his hair had progressed from iron-gray to white, combed back carefully as always.
I felt shocked. I remembered him as he had looked the day I brought Tony home after our hasty marriage. He had risen out of his big chair when my mother started crying at my announcement. Leaving the Sunday afternoon game blaring on the TV, he had escorted us to the door. Standing there, tall and broad and forbidding, he’d told me I was never to come back, since I’d hurt my mother so much. That wouldn’t have kept me away, if it hadn’t been for the grim satisfaction behind his words. He’d always said that letting me go to college would end in disaster; once again, he was proved right.
Now I looked at his shrunken form, the thinning hair, and wondered why we were tiptoeing around this man, what fire he could possibly still possess that made Andy reluctantly agree to get him out of the house for me, as if the old man could physically bar the door to his errant daughter.
Andy scowled over at us after shutting the passenger door, before he climbed into his side of the car and drove away.
“That’s Daddy,” Amy said blithely. “He doesn’t want us to think he likes doing us a favor. But he’s not so bad, really.”
“That’s not what you said last summer.”
Her brow wrinkled. “Well, he was different when I got home. Like—I don’t know, like he almost respected me or something.” She giggled. “Fat chance, huh. Well, they’re gone. Let’s go in.”
She led the way across the street and used her key to open the door. “Hi, Gramma, it’s me!”
I stopped in the doorway, overcome by the familiar smells of lemon oil and my dad’s pipe tobacco and the faint, musty scent of old house. The couch was the same, its striped upholstery faded now into a soft haze of blue and gray, its cushions saggier. My dad’s armchair still stood in front of the TV, but the TV was bigger, dominating the room. Through the archway I could see the chrome dinette set in the dining nook. The curtains looked new—not the faded draperies of nubby polyester I remembered, but some cheerful, homemade ones with sunflowers. The rooms seemed much smaller, cramped and crammed with doilies and plastic flowers and my mother’s collections of silver state teaspoons and china leprechauns.
“Come on,” Amy hissed from the hallway. “I’ve told her you’re here. She wants to see you.”
I followed her into the short hall. On the left was my parents’ bedroom, on the right my old room; the one bathroom was at the end of the hall.
“Amy?” It was my mother’s voice. “Lizzie?”
“She’s right here, Gramma.” Amy pushed me through the doorway. “I’ll make us some tea.”
I hesitated, feeling awkward, just inside the room. The woman in the bed had changed. She had always been short, like me, but she was no longer pleasingly plump, as she had called herself; now her face looked thin, and the hand she held out to me trembled.
“Well, come here then.” Her voice was the same, unexpectedly steely. “You’ve come all this way. Sit down here.” She patted the bed, beside her.
“You don’t look good, Mom. Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?”
“No.” Her hand closed around mine, hot and dry but still with enough strength to pull me down beside her. “I’m getting over it now. There were a couple of days when I thought I would die, and that’s when I knew we’d have to talk.”
I looked at her carefully, while she fumbled on the bedside table for her glasses. Her hair had gone from the gray I remembered to snowy white. My dad would be in his eighties, my mother pushing seventy-five, and neither had led the easy lives that keep a person young-looking. My mother’s hands were lumpy with arthritis, and I wondered if she could still hold a crochet hook or embroidery needle. Her blue eyes were filmed, her eyebrows sparser. Beneath the covers, her outline was insubstantial.
“Well, you’ve changed a great deal,” she announced after examining me. Her hand moved restlessly, picking at the chenille bedspread, and I took it before I realized I was going to. After a moment, she squeezed my hand gently. “I’m sorry, Lizzie. I was sorry right after I wrote you last summer, but I didn’t know how to make things better. He wouldn’t let me.”
“Dad? Is he still so bitter?”
She shook her head slowly, side to side. “You know your father.” Her eyelids drifted closed, and she spoke with a kind of detachment. “Although he probably doesn’t really care. He just goes through the motions these days, you know. I can tell. He acts the same and says the same old things, but he’s not really here.” She opened her eyes and fixed a painful gaze on me. “It’s not your father that’s worrying me so much. It’s Tony.”
I couldn’t speak; my throat was closed with fear.
“Tony,” she said again, helpfully. “You know. Your husband.”
“Ex-husband,” I managed to whisper.
“Divorce is not sanctioned by the Church.” For a moment the stern disciplinarian of my youth was there before me. I almost expected her to ask me to say the Act of Contrition. Then she closed her eyes again and let her head sink back into the pillow. “You should never have married him. He’s a very bad man.”
“How—how do you …”
“He came here a few weeks ago.” Her eyes were still closed, and her voice was becoming thready. “His car had broken down nearby, and he wanted to use the phone—that’s what he said. After he made a phone call, we talked. At first I had sympathy for him. He said he’d never gotten over you, that he’d spent a lot of money to try and find you and was broke.” Her eyes flicked open. “I gave him some money.’’
I tightened my grip on her hand. “Mom—”
“Let me finish. I felt sorry for him, like I said. It stirred up all that upset, all the disappointment I felt in you.” She was watching me n
ow. “He was back in a couple of weeks. I told him I didn’t have any more money, and he suggested that I get some. He said—he said you’d told him that—” She drew in a deep breath. “That your father had—that there had been—episodes—when you were little.”
I couldn’t be silent any longer. “He lied, Mom. I wouldn’t have told him anything like that, because it wasn’t true.”
Something in her face relaxed. She was quiet for a moment. “I wondered,” she said at last. “You think you know a man, but you never do, really.” She pressed my hand again. “Thank you.”
“So Tony was trying to blackmail you.” I started to get angry. “All you had to do was tell me. You could have written again, asked me about it. You could have gotten Drake’s phone number from Amy.”
“I—couldn’t.” She turned her head away, nestling it into the pillow as if seeking refuge. “I didn’t want to think about it or deal with it. I got some money and gave it to him, and he said he wouldn’t be back.”
“But of course he didn’t mean it.” I felt hot rage. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
She didn’t answer, her head turned away. Then she said, “No. Not really.” She must have felt my anger. She put her other hand over our joined ones. “He was sorry, right away. He said he wouldn’t be back.” She fought for a deep breath, and I held my own, sensing she wasn’t ready to yield the floor.
“Your dad came in then, with Byron.” She looked at me. “Your nephew—Molly’s youngest boy.”
“I know.” I didn’t know, really. All I remembered about my sister Molly’s kids was that they were all boys—maybe two, maybe three of them. “What did Dad do?”
She sighed. “He went into a rage, of course. If it hadn’t been for young Byron, it could have been bad. Byron—Biff, they call him—is a good-sized boy. He was ready to fight. Then your dad got his gun out, and Tony left.”
“Dad has a gun?” That sounded like a recipe for disaster. “So did Tony come back?”