“Can we go upstairs?” she asked then, her voice small.
“Sure.” Tucker set the dirty dishes in the sink and reached for her hand. In his bedroom, he undressed her tenderly and climbed into bed naked beside her. She tucked herself snug against his side with her face burrowed into the hollow of his neck and went to sleep almost immediately.
“Ah, Red,” he whispered, soothing tresses of her long auburn hair back from her face, “I wish I could make it all better for you, baby.” He pressed a kiss onto her smooth brow. “I promise you it’ll get better, though. You’ll see.”
He rested his cheek on the soft crown of her hair and, closing his eyes, sent a silent prayer to heaven that he would be right.
* * * *
“I feel badly that Tucker’s here,” Joyce said the next morning, as she scraped baked ziti into a casserole dish. “He should be at home. I know he has his own work to keep him busy.”
“He wants to be here, Mom,” Becky assured her, sneaking a piece of pasta, as it settled into the pan. She nudged her mother aside and sprinkled generous amounts of shredded mozzarella cheese on top of the casserole. “He knows you need help going through Mark’s things.”
Joyce sighed. “Well, I surely don’t relish the thought of doing it myself.” She looked away quickly, and Becky knew she was hiding the fact that she was close to tears. A lump wedged itself in Becky’s throat. “Well, he’s a good friend to me,” her mother said, when a few minutes had passed and she had composed herself by means of concentrating on another dish of food. “And he’s always been very good to you.”
Becky knew a hint when she heard it. “Mom, please don’t go there.”
“I’m just saying, honey, that a girl could do much worse than that boy. He’s handsome and smart, and he’s got his own money. He’s loyal, and he truly loves you. What’s wrong with all that?”
Becky sighed and shook her head, turning away with the casserole, now wrapped in aluminum foil, to put it in the oven. “Nothing’s wrong with any of it, Mama. I just haven’t made up my mind yet what I’m going to do.”
“Do?” Joyce echoed. “I don’t understand what you mean by that. You teach school. You can do that anywhere.”
Becky shook her head. “I want to make a difference. I want to teach kids who have special needs.”
“Becky, there are kids like that everywhere, not just in New York.”
“I know that! Look, I just don’t want to make my decision based solely on the one simple fact that Tucker lives here, so I’ll move back here. If I want to stay in New York, if I decide to do that…”
“You’d be a fool…” her mother insisted quietly, angrily spooning macaroni salad into a decorative bowl.
“I need to have the freedom to make that decision.” Becky said through gritted teeth. She slanted a searching glance at her mother. “You know, Tucker says he’d come with me. To New York. If I go back. Well, when I go, since I’ll have to at some point, even if just to finish out the rest of this school year.”
Joyce arched one eyebrow. “Are you really surprised by that?”
Becky shrugged. “Aren’t you?”
Her mother gave out a sigh of exasperation. She slammed the spoon she’d been used against the bowl to get the last bits of macaroni into the pile and gave Becky a withering look. “No, I’m not. That boy loves you. I imagine he would follow you to the ends of the earth, if it meant he wouldn’t have to be apart from you again. You don’t know what it did to him the first time you two split up, Becky! Is that what this is all about, your reluctance to leave New York in the future? Are you testing his love for you? Trying to see how far he really will go? Because I’m sure he’ll pass your test with flying colors, Rebecca Atlee, but there will be a cost to his soul! You know he’s not cut out to live in a big city like that!”
Becky wiped her hands on a damp dishtowel and dried them on the front of her jeans. She flopped into one of the kitchen chairs and folded her arms. “Yeah, I know that, Mom. That’s why I broke things off with him before I left the last time. I knew he’d be miserable, if he went with me. And I knew he’d insist on going with me when he couldn’t talk me out of going.”
Joyce took a visible, deep breath and pointedly ignored her daughter’s reference to her original move to New York, which she had to see as an abandonment. “You need to figure out what you really want, Becky. Independent of your feelings for Tucker, what do you want to do? And you need to figure it out soon. You need to really examine your reasons for wanting to stay in New York when you could just as easily reach a lot of children here, without making the man you love miserable in the process. Plus – and I hate to throw this out there, but here it is all the same – your old ma ain’t as young as she used to be, and time isn’t suddenly going to start going in reverse. I’m only going to need you more, as the years go by. There, now I’ve said my piece. You can add all that food to your feast for thought.” Joyce spread plastic wrap over the top of the bowl of macaroni salad and put it into the refrigerator, closing the door with a practiced motion of one hip. “And, for now, I guess I better get started on that fruit salad.”
And without another word, Joyce disappeared into the laundry room where she had stocked the spare refrigerator with the ingredients needed to prepare the dishes she wanted to make for the luncheon that would follow tomorrow’s funeral.
Becky raised her eyes to the ceiling and made a bid to heaven for patience and the restraint not to throttle her mother when she breezed back into the room. As if it wasn’t already hard enough dealing with the unexpected good memories she was having of Mark since his death, her head was now spinning from everything Joyce had just said.
She was not testing Tucker’s love by wanting to return to New York, just to see if he really would move out there with her. Was she...?
* * * *
The next day dawned gray and drizzly. The sky roiled with rain clouds that opened long before the funeral service had begun. Becky sat beside her mother, holding her left hand, with Tucker on her mother’s other side, holding her right hand. She listened to Joyce sobbing while the minister gave a quiet sermon about Jesus and forgiveness and heaven. She dutifully handed her mother clean tissues and discreetly hid away the used ones in a plastic bag inside a zippered compartment of her handbag.
The gravesite was muddy, despite the cemetery’s efforts to protect the site with a tent. It was a sloppy business, a burial in the rain. Joyce leaned heavily on Tucker’s arm and cried loud, ragged tears when they lowered the casket into the earth. Becky heard Tucker murmuring to her mother, saying words of comfort and solace that sounded like they were coming from a long ways away, like they were traveling from a distance, and through a tunnel.
The mourners filed away one by one, even her mother and Tucker, though they hung back longer than anyone else. Becky found herself the last one standing beside the burial plot, other than the people who worked for the cemetery, who waited, shifting from foot to foot, to start filling in the fresh grave. They watched her curiously, not sure what she was going to do, what she was waiting for.
Anger burned in Becky’s stomach from hearing the sorrow of her mother’s tears all morning long and thinking of the years of tears and sadness that her brother’s actions had brought her parents before this day. Despite the new memories she had of Mark, the good memories, her eyes were ablaze with heated, angry tears, not tears of sadness. Her mouth worked for a moment as if she might fling a string of curses upon the fresh grave.
To her shock, as well as to that of the cemetery men, Becky’s mouth settled into a pucker, and instead of curses, she spit on the grave of the brother who had brought so much pain to her family.
A strong hand appeared a moment later, grasping her around her upper arm, and holding her up from sinking to her knees. When she looked back over her shoulder, Tucker stood behind her. Though her face flamed with heat at what she’d just done, she raised her head high in the face of his disapproval. To his credit, he didn’t say
a word, though his fingers bit into her arm firmly enough that she understood his displeasure with her actions. She wisely chose to follow him away from the site of the grave, without a word.
“Well,” he drawled, shooting her a dark glare, as they neared her mother’s car, “that was ladylike.”
Somehow resisting the urge to pull her arm from his grip, Becky tossed her head defiantly. “Oh, and Mark’s behavior towards my parents over the years has been so gentlemanly.”
Tucker pulled her to an abrupt stop, facing him. With a glance of nervous awareness toward the cars that still remained behind, he spoke in a fierce whisper. “That’s just it, Red. What you did just now has no affect on him. The only affect it can possibly have is on the people that are here now, to witness it. Your mom. Me. Anyone else who might have seen you. You, yourself…” He shook his head at her. “Don’t you see that?”
“Stop looking at me like that.” She did wrest her arm from his grip this time, and with one last deadly look, she started towards the car.
“We’ll finish talking about this later,” he called after her, “don’t you think that we won’t. Obviously, I shouldn’t have gone so easy on you the other night.”
With one last exasperated huff, Becky paused for a split second just before opening the car door. “Sit in the back seat with your mother,” Tucker bossed, in low volume, over the roof of the car just before opening the driver’s door and sliding in behind the wheel with a false calm. Becky rolled her eyes to the gray, stormy heavens. As if she wanted to be stuck up front with him.
To her credit, Joyce acted like she had missed the entire show, from Becky’s graveside loogie to the fight she and Tucker had just had practically right in front of the car. Though the way she was sitting in the back seat staring at her hands knitted together in her lap, she very well might not have known that Becky had entered the car and was now sitting beside her, had her daughter not taken one of those hands into her own and given it a warm squeeze.
Tucker led the few remaining cars to Joyce’s home by the shortest route possible. They had arranged for a friend to ride ahead, open the house, and see to it that food and drink were ready and waiting for their guests when they arrived, but they knew that everyone would be waiting to speak to Joyce, and by a smaller degree, to Becky and Tucker, personally. There had not been much opportunity for this at the funeral service or the burial.
“I hope that awful Robbie Michaels doesn’t show up,” Joyce said in a choked voice, her eyes weary, as she gazed out the window at the passing wet roadside. “All the pain and trouble he brought to Mark when he was alive… I don’t want to see that boy’s face today.”
Tucker’s eyes met Becky’s in the rear view mirror, and she swallowed down a lump of words that leapt into her throat, words that would have contradicted her mother’s colored view of the past. Becky remembered things a little differently; she remembered Mark and Robbie finding trouble together, bringing it to each other’s doorsteps in turns.
“Don’t worry, Joyce,” Tucker assured her mother from the front seat. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t come inside, if he shows up.”
“Thank you, Tuck…” A small smile broke over Joyce’s face. “I don’t know what I would have done without you both today.” She patted Becky’s hand absently. “Thank you…”
It was a relief to Becky to find that not as many mourners had congregated at the house as had gone to the burial or even to the funeral. The day was slowly draining away her ability to deal with all the horseshit. She was increasingly afraid of saying the wrong thing to someone, of blowing up at someone who insisted on recounting some stupid tale about Mark at age ten and what a treasure he’d been. Didn’t any of these people remember what he’d been like the past twenty years? Hadn’t they seen what he’d put his family through? What her mother had gone through? What Becky had left town to get away from?
Once inside the house, their coats put away in the back bedroom, Becky made a beeline for the kitchen, under the cover of checking on the reserves of food, but really just to get away from everything. Her mother was in the good care of aunts and uncles, cousins and the like, anyway. They were all swapping their younger Mark stories, so, frankly, it was just safer for her to be apart from them for a while. She made herself a huge roast beef sandwich, added a mound of potato salad and a pickle and sat down at one end of the kitchen table to eat.
One of the storm clouds from outside entered the room in the form of Tucker Rhodes. He sent her a scalding glance before straddling a chair beside her at the table.
“You are about this close to going over my knee, Red,” he said by way of starting a conversation, showing her a miniscule distance between his thumb and forefinger.
“Right here, right now?” she said, egging him on.
His eyes flared. “Don’t. Test. Me.”
Becky took a big bite of her sandwich. “Is that all you came in here to say, Tuck? Because I’m starving, and you’re ruining my lunch.”
He looked for a minute like he was going to dump the whole plate of food over her head. But he didn’t. He just stared at her. After a few heartbeats, he pointed at her once, with one lean, tan forefinger. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Get your act together. Don’t embarrass yourself, or your mother, or me.”
Abruptly, he stood up from the table, spun the chair back around to its rightful position and walked coolly away from her.
It was only after he left that Becky’s stomach slowly released itself from its knots.
* * * *
The afternoon dragged on ceaselessly. Relatives and friends Becky hadn’t seen in years came up to her, teary-eyed, recounting memories of when she and Mark were children and had gotten into some mischief or other together. Her mother sat on the sofa, with wide, wet, doe-eyes, as dark-robed family members offered condolences and weak offers of “if there’s anything that I can do, don’t hesitate to call…” Becky felt like if she heard the phrase, “he’s in a better place now,” just one more time, she was going to happily throttle whoever had been unlucky enough to have said it.
She didn’t feel like he deserved to be somewhere “better.” It had been a long damn time since he had done anything remotely deserving of earning him a spot in Heaven. Why were all these damn people telling her mother that was where he was now? She sat in a corner of the room, her eyes flitting from person to person, listening to what seemed to her like lie after lie about her brother fall from their lips. Why did people feel like they had to speak well of the dead? Mark had been a jerk… why were they all sitting here singing his praises… or, since there essentially were none, why were they making them up?
Tucker caught her eye from across the room, where someone was talking to him and another guest. He gave her a meaningful look of reproach, and she wondered at how he could read her so easily. Ever so slightly, he shook his head no.
Becky swallowed down on the lump of words that burned in her throat, just waiting to be said to contradict what everyone else had been saying about Mark all day long. She glanced down at her hands in her lap and sighed, willing the day to be over.
Then the oddest thing happened.
Her Aunt Blanche, her least favorite of all her mother’s sisters, stood up from where she had parked her considerable girth alongside Joyce for the past hour. And she turned in Becky’s direction and fixed her beady little black gaze on her niece. And then she said, “Becky, dear, don’t you have some words you would like to share with us all about your brother?”
Tucker and Joyce were both so surprised by Blanche’s presumption that they couldn’t even get out a response that would get Becky out of having to come through with a speech. Just about everyone else in the room sat watching her with bated breath, waiting to see what type of speech she would give, whether it would be made up of fabricated good or honest bad memories.
Becky looked around the room for a long moment, as she came to her feet. She met a lot of people’s eyes. She took a couple of deep breaths. Then she s
poke the truth.
“My brother was a drug addict. He hurt my parents on a daily basis. He was a thief. He was violent. He frightened me. I was afraid he was going to hurt my mother after my father died and was no longer here to protect her from him. I wanted her to make Mark move out, but he was her son, and she would not put him out on the street. Before he died and I came back here to see her, I had not talked to her in over a year because I could not be here anymore, so close to her, and watch what he continually put her through.” Becky glanced at her mother and saw that her head was lowered. She glanced at Tucker, and he motioned just once with his hand across the front of his neck, in a cutting motion, obviously wanting her to stop. But she opened her mouth again and made herself look away from him, as she spoke again. “I have sat here today and listened to you all describe to me a brother that I don’t remember. I remember a scary, drunk, drugged, violent man who wanted only one thing – more drugs. He would hurt or use whoever he had to, to get what he wanted…”
“That’s enough, Red,” Tucker warned her gruffly, his voice low.
“No, let her finish,” Joyce wearily argued. Her face lifted, tear-stained, and nodded once in Becky’s direction. “I guess you need to say these things. Go on, finish.”
Becky took another deep breath. “And I’m sorry to tell you all. But all those things in a person, they don’t add up to him going to a better place when he dies. Mark is not in a better place. He is not in Heaven…”
“He’s still your brother, little girl,” Aunt Blanche lectured, sniffing in disdain, her spine stiffening. “So you better pray that he is.”
Becky snorted. “Don’t you think I know that, you old biddie?” There was a rush of gasps in the room, but she thought she saw her mother repressing a smile. Aunt Blanche was gaping. “Don’t you think I’m confused and conflicted as it is, knowing he’s my brother, seeing those pictures of us when we were little kids and remembering him way back then before he got all screwed up? Don’t you think I wonder why he had to get so messed up? And if maybe there’s a way he could be saved still? But talking about five good things he did as a kid don’t make the forty bad things he did as an adult disappear. He still has to answer for them. And my mother is better off now that he’s gone. At least, he can’t hurt her now. And he can’t take her money from her now and waste it on his addictions.”
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