He felt he was past the point of no return in this plundering swoop through the supermarket, and to wash it all down, he added jug wine and a twelve-pack of Stroh’s beer, fifths of bourbon and Scotch, then threw in Gilbey’s gin and bottles of house brand tonic water – in case a cousin from South Beach should drop in. He liked to drink, unlike his father, who had confined himself to the occasional beer; or his mother, who was really pushing the boat out when she allowed herself a weak highball.
Potatoes came next: a big bag of Idahos, then a string sack of onions, boxed garlic, and he was just eyeing a bag of frozen French fries, thin and particularly adept at grease absorption, when a voice said, ‘Hello neighbour.’
He looked into the thin, pinched face of an old lady, neatly dressed in an old calico dress with patterned roses. This old-fashioned modesty was punctured by a pair of spanking white gym shoes. For the briefest moment, he thought that Mrs Decatur had risen from the dead, then realized he was face-to-face with Mrs Jenkins, his father’s neighbour on the other side of the cedar hedge.
‘How nice to see you,’ he said automatically – be polite, his father’s stricture since he was four years old. He had been standing stock still by the freezers, so he courteously did not move on, though he yearned to. The Jenkinses were polite and pleasant people (she was smiling now), who had retired to Stillriver from Lansing, where Mr Jenkins had worked for a large insurance company. They’d seemed almost excessively grateful to move to Stillriver, vocal to the point of absurdity in their appreciation of the merits of small town life (they’d been among the first to put a plaque on their porch). Stillriver was their Pleasantville, that Disney creation of picket fence and homemade lemonade served in Grandma’s favourite pitcher.
So it had taken a while to realize how unbelievably nosy the Jenkinses were, how relentlessly they interfered in other peoples’ business, how tenaciously they worked to ensure their neighbours lived up to the Jenkinses own high standards. Even the Bogle boys found themselves being pushed around by these elderly new arrivals: for the first time the boys actually used the green plastic boxes provided by the town authorities for newspaper collection, started parking their many cars neatly parallel to the street, and made unprecedented efforts to rein in Ralph, their half-blind mutt, who was long accustomed to claiming all the local backyards as his own.
Mrs Jenkins was looking with interest at the contents of Michael’s shopping basket and her eyes lingered on the booze. ‘Saw you’d come back,’ she proclaimed. ‘It’s nice to have a neighbour there again.’ She seemed to sense her tactlessness, adding, ‘We do miss your father, you know. God bless him.’
It was a sincere smile Michael could give to this, since he knew that if his father were enjoying one emotion at the moment, wherever he might be, it was relief to be out of range of the obtrusive neighbourliness of the Jenkinses. ‘I am sure he has you in his thoughts.’
‘May they find the man who did that to him, soon.’
Amen, he almost responded.
Mrs Jenkins said, ‘That detective seems awfully young.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Maguire is the name, I believe. He said he’d spoken to you.’
Don’t say a word, he told himself, or it would be halfway round town before he went to bed that night. He could hear her hushed account: I have to say Michael Wolf didn’t seem very impressed with the efforts of the police. Or would she say ‘constabulary’? He looked down at his purchases, feeling childlike again, caught with both hands in the cookie jar. ‘I thought I’d better stock up,’ he said weakly.
‘I didn’t know you had a family,’ she said pointedly, then her face brightened again. ‘I take it you’ll be staying a while. It will be good to have the place tended again. Goodness knows what your father would have said about the yard. He was such a tidy man.’
Better than Gary, he thought, that’s for sure. He stared at a large, frozen blueberry pie while Mrs Jenkins kept talking.
‘Like us, your father was very disappointed when they let Benny open up the B & B. But you know, it hasn’t been that bad. And at least he got those two girls out of there.’
Benny had two girls? Then he realized she meant the twins. So they were gone after all. Shit. ‘Ethel and Daisy aren’t so bad, Mrs Jenkins.’
‘Never noisy, that’s true. But hard to control. You’ve been away a long time, young man. I think they drive the people in that home crazy, if you ask me.’
‘What makes you say that, Mrs Jenkins?’ He was trying to stay polite but also trying to understand what had happened to the twins.
‘Why, because they keep running away. Benny takes them back, then they run away again. Especially that Ethel.’
That explained why he had seen Ethel at the Homecoming Parade. ‘Maybe they don’t like it there.’
This was obviously not what she wanted to hear. ‘I’ll let you get on with your shopping. We’ll be seeing you, I’m sure.’
He lifted the pie with relief and put it in his cart, then added a half-gallon carton of vanilla ice-cream from the vast freezer section in the centre aisles. He moved to the aisle of ancillary condiments – A-1 sauce, ketchup, dill pickles and a jar of relish took care of that. He finished at the bakery counter with a tray of fresh dinner rolls, a bag each of hotdog and hamburger buns, two loaves of still-warm bread and a pecan coffee cake. His trolley was overflowing, and he wheeled it with cautious dispatch to the checkout counter.
‘Having a party?’ asked the woman behind the till, ‘or just got growing kids?’
Not you too, he wanted to say, but only smiled noncommittally as his English credit card went through and he found himself signing a screen with a graphic pencil. Steering his overloaded cart out on to the baking, softened macadam of the vast parking lot, he found that his emergence into the sudden envelope of heat triggered the memory of a two-month consultancy in Riyadh, the single hottest place he had ever been. He dismissed the memory as best he could, but wondered if his reimmersion in America, and return to Stillriver, were why he was acting like a kid in a candy store.
He was unpacking his groceries in the kitchen and wondering who on earth was going to eat all the food he’d bought when a slow wail began to fill the air and he almost jumped out of his skin. The town’s daily siren, what the inhabitants called the Noon Whistle. As he confirmed this with a glance at his watch and relaxed, he heard footsteps on the porch and a little boy’s complaining voice. He went to the screen door and opened it just as a hand was starting to knock.
‘Sorry,’ he said for the small collision, then looked into Cassie’s big blue eyes.
‘Hi,’ she said a little shyly. ‘I heard you were back. I missed you last time. I wanted to say how sorry I was.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, moving his eyes away from hers, feeling unprepared for the almost banal actuality of meeting once again what he had assumed was gone for good, the slight unreality of seeing in the flesh what he had seen only in his head for more than six years. Eager for distraction, he looked at the little boy holding Cassie’s hand. ‘You must be Jack,’ he said, and got a toothy grin in reply. ‘And you’re Sally, right?’ he called out to the girl in the background. The girl nodded solemnly.
‘Coffee?’ he asked Cassie.
She hesitated, then Jack piped up. ‘Can we play outside, mister?’
‘Sure you can.’
‘You stay right around here,’ Cassie commanded. ‘I’ll be in the kitchen.’
Inside he spooned coffee into the percolator while she stood by the sink looking out the window at her children. ‘This room’s just the same,’ she said, turning and looking around.
‘The whole house is just the same,’ said Michael. ‘It’s like a museum; I should charge admission. Pop didn’t redecorate anything.’
‘I always liked this house,’ said Cassie. ‘It has a lot of character. Big rooms. And high windows.’
‘It’s mine now.’
She didn’t seem surprised. ‘What are you going to
do with it? Sell it?’
‘Maybe. I thought it was going to be Gary’s problem and I’d just get left with the debts.’
‘Are there many of those?’
‘None at all. I was surprised. His pension couldn’t have been very much.’
‘How’s Gary taking the business with the house?’
‘Badly.’ When Cassie nodded, he said, ‘I was thinking of asking him to live here. No point paying rent when a house this big is going empty.’
‘You going back soon?’ He could detect nothing from her tone; she might have been making polite conversation with a visiting tourist.
He shrugged. ‘That depends.’
‘On what?’ When he didn’t reply she said, ‘Oh, on how soon they catch whoever did it. They must have some ideas.’
His tongue clucked like a cricket against the roof of his mouth. ‘I’ve been cleared, apparently. Even high technology wouldn’t let me bash my father’s head in from Scotland.’
Cassie shuddered. ‘Don’t.’
‘Sorry. Frankly, I don’t think they have any idea who killed my father. And neither do I.’ He wanted to change the subject. ‘Anyway, what about you?’ he asked, moving next to her and looking out the window. The girl Sally was sitting in the director’s chair, reading, while her little brother ran round and round the spruce tree, whooping noisily.
‘What about me?’
‘You here for good?’
‘I’m not going back to Texas, if that’s what you mean.’
He kept looking at Sally. ‘They’re going to let him out some time.’
‘That’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Does he know that?’ he asked, still unwilling to look at Cassie.
‘He does. I told him to his face, in case you’re going to start feeling sorry for him.’
‘Cassie, I’m not likely to feel sorry for him.’ He smiled sourly. ‘How did he take it?’
When she didn’t reply, he said, ‘I thought so.’
Outside the boy suddenly slipped on the grass by the spruce and fell hard, scraping his knee on a paving stone. He started to cry and his sister came out of her chair, dropping her book. Cassie started, then put both hands down on the edge of the sink as her daughter comforted her son.
Michael stared at the boy. ‘He looks just like Ronald, doesn’t he?’ She nodded, compressing her lips, and he added, ‘Why did he ever think he could be anything but his?’
Cassie sighed. ‘Maybe he knew I wished it were that way. But please, let’s not talk about it.’
He poured the coffee into dark blue mugs and got the milk out of the icebox. He walked over to the door and called out through the screen, ‘Jack, there’s a wagon in the shed over there you might like to play with.’
The boy stopped crying. Michael came back and stood by Cassie, and together they watched as Jack pulled the old PF Flyer out of the shed. After a moment Michael said, ‘Jesus, that was a grim place.’
‘What was?’
‘That motel.’ He remembered the room’s sterility, the depressing certainty he’d had that its bright colours and fabrics were endlessly repeated in thousands of identical, loveless cells across thousands of the motel chain’s bedrooms across America. They had been able to see the runway of LaGuardia, barely more than a mile away, and feel the shudder as airplanes took off, then watch them disappear into the smoky cloud that had hung like a bad mood over the New York area.
‘We didn’t have much time as I recall. Sorry.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. I wasn’t thinking of blame.’
‘Really?’ She looked at him and he saw how little she’d aged since he’d last seen her, waving goodbye as she got into a taxi and he’d held back the curtain of the bleak hotel room and stared down at her, certain he would never see her again.
‘I never blamed you for any of it.’
She laughed, but not happily – there was a mixed note of weariness and cynicism in it. ‘That’s a relief. Pity my husband never saw it that way.’
‘I hate it when you say that.’
‘What?’
‘“My husband”.’
This time she reached down and took his hand in hers. She interlocked her fingers with his and squeezed hard. ‘I am so glad to see you.’
She came back the next day for lunch with the children, having agreed to help Michael make a dent in his mountain of groceries. He felt peculiar all morning waiting for her, then realized that what he felt was simple happiness. Which made him wary, for he was gun-shy. She only squeezed my hand, he told himself, like a teenager debating the signs in a first provisional courtship. He was leery of his sudden, bubbling hope, the tingling anticipation he felt knowing he was about to see her again. There had been a time not so very long ago when his life seemed to have meaning only because of Cassie; he knew that because when he’d had to live without her his life had seemed meaningless. Seemed? he thought cynically; it’s still that way.
When she and the kids showed up just after the Noon Whistle, they all sat outside next to the wooden fence at the picnic table, which his father, when first retired, had spent an entire summer sanding down and varnishing. They ate cube steaks on buns with tomato slices and lettuce, and he and Cassie drank white jug wine while the kids drank milk.
‘You know, I saw you at the parade,’ he said. ‘But when all the floats had gone by you weren’t there any more.’
‘Dairy Queen,’ she said and laughed. ‘I promised Jack an ice-cream.’
‘Butterscotch dip?’
‘They don’t sell them any more.’
He put his hand on his heart. ‘Too much change. I barely recognize the place. A tourist trap now, pure and simple.’
She picked up a piece of lettuce. ‘It’s still a pretty town, Michael. Whatever you say. And the money helps everybody. The school’s a lot better than when we went there.’
Feeling slightly chastened he changed the subject. ‘Tell me, was I imagining things or did I see Ethel at the parade, too?’
‘You might have.’ She smiled slyly. ‘But how do you know it wasn’t Daisy?’
‘Ethel has the five o’clock shadow.’
‘Don’t be mean.’
He gestured with his head towards the cedar hedge. ‘Mrs Jenkins said they’re in a home.’
‘Haven’t you seen Benny?’ He shook his head and she went on. ‘He put them in the home at Fennville last year, after he started up the B&B.’
‘Which place are they in? They’re too young for a nursing home.’
‘They’re in Fennville Acres. You know, the one on the side road by Happy Valley.’
‘You mean they’re in the poorhouse?’ The county place for indigents, a Victorian relic he had assumed had long been put to bed, replaced by modern if equally horrible places for the homeless or chronically drunk or mad – anyone with a bad enough complaint would do, provided the complainant had not even a nickel to rub between their hands. When he was a boy, his father had joked about Fennville Acres: ‘Mind you don’t put me there when I’m old and grey.’ Back then there wasn’t even indoor plumbing in the place.
Cassie said wearily, ‘I know. I’ve been to see them. It’s terrible.’
‘Are they mean to them?’
Cassie shrugged. ‘Hard to say. Mainly I think they just ignore them both.’
‘Do you visit them very often?’
‘I’ve only been twice. It’s hard for me to get there because of the kids; I wouldn’t want to take them with me. That place is grim. Benny goes. Once in a while.’
‘Jesus Christ, Cassie. Can’t we do something?’ He looked at her, then realized the fatuity of his words. ‘I know, I know,’ he said, ‘it’s none of our business.’
But most of their conversation, over lunch and then on into the afternoon, as Sally read her book and Jack played in the old iris bed, was unremarkable: Stillriver – how it had changed, how it had stayed the same; the kids; her search for a job. ‘I think I may have something now,’ she said.
‘Miss Summers retired. Remember her?’
‘How could I forget her?’ The second-grade teacher. Prim, even in her younger days, teaching Michael almost thirty years before. In her spare time, a gifted creator of dried flower arrangements – ‘How fitting,’ he’d once heard his father say to his mother, ‘seeing as she’s dry as dust herself.’
‘They had a replacement lined up from Lansing, a young woman.’
‘Oh, and you’re so old?’ He was glad to see she still blushed when teased.
‘You know what I mean. Anyhow, she’s decided to get married and stay at Lansing.’
‘And they’ve offered you the job,’ he said, happy for her but somehow discomfited too. She’s not going anywhere then, he thought gloomily.
She was shaking her head. ‘Not yet. They’re going to advertise again. But the principal says I’ve got a good chance.’
‘Fingers crossed,’ he said, trying hard to smile.
Without ever really discussing it, they managed to see each other every day that week. The amount of food he’d bought provided a standing excuse to invite her over, and they ate hotdogs or sandwiches for lunch at the picnic table, or ate early supper inside at the dining room table, which hadn’t been used in years. Although usually awkward with children, he liked her two kids, and with the easy grace of their young age they were soon no longer shy of him. He especially liked Sally, who was a sombre-faced girl, much given to reading – with a little encouragement she would tell him about her favourite books and show him two of her ‘special’ dolls. Jack was easier on the surface – all little boy, running around, playing cops and robbers by himself. He also loved the PF Flyer wagon, and would cajole his sister into pulling him round and round the big spruce tree in Michael’s backyard, then recruit Cassie when his sister got bored, even pressing Michael into service until he too flagged, his arm heavy as lead. But there was something less innocent in the boy as well, something a little meaner than you usually found (at least in Michael’s limited experience) in the average child. When his sister teased him Jack would go quiet, a sure preface to going for her, and when he made his run it was with a steely, murderous anger that chilled Michael. For he knew just where Jack had got that from.
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