“There’s probably some money that was hers. That would go to us, not Stan, right? I’m pissing you off.”
“During your time in rehab, did anybody ever introduce the concept of enabling?”
“I shouldn’t have brought up the money thing. My bad.”
“Mom always liked you best.”
Bonnie had meant it sarcastically, or rather, as bitterness taking sarcastic form, but Charlie surprised her by saying, “Yes, she did, but she always liked boys—men—better. She was just built that way. She was always, not flirting, not exactly, but always so tuned into them. What they were doing, what they were saying, what they wanted. You know how she was with Stan. The sun shone out of his ass, as far as she was concerned. Yeah, my ass too, I guess. Funniest thing. Pretty sure nobody else ever will.”
Charlie’s voice wobbled. Bonnie didn’t speak. She kept her eyes on the road in case he started crying, but when she did look, he had sagged against the car door, his mouth hanging open in unlovely sleep.
She didn’t want to feel any sorrier for her miserable brother than she already did. She wished he had not told her about the money. She wished he had not said any of it. Now she had to wrestle with this new, bruising knowledge (or rather, confirmation of what she already knew or guessed), on top of her already complicated feelings about Claudia. That mix of exasperation, guilt, loss, a child’s need, all the difficult love that had never managed to thrive in her. The last time she’d spoken to Claudia, more than two weeks ago, Claudia had told Bonnie that Stan’s work was going to be featured in yet another advertisement-heavy publication devoted to expensively gracious living. Claudia was disappointed that Bonnie had not expressed more excitement about this. Bonnie hated that their last conversation had been about Stan.
She woke Charlie up as they approached the house. There were times when the homestead and its collection of oversized structures looked grand or austere or at least whimsical. At other times, like today, it brought to mind an abandoned junkyard. Maybe she was seeing it through some dense refraction of unhappiness. Maybe with Claudia gone, some part of it would now always seem diminished.
Charlie sat up and began to tug at his clothes and try to set himself to rights and look around. It wasn’t yet high season for fall color, only a few tarnished softwoods and yellow maples. The house came into view. A lone Toyota sedan with the look of a rental was parked out front. Bonnie pulled in next to it and she and Charlie got out and stretched and tried to work out their kinks. Neither of them noticed the boy and the girl until they started up the path to the front door.
They were perched in the circular cutouts of the long, barrel-shaped entryway. These were not designed for sitting and the children had to maintain their balance by bracing themselves with their feet. When Bonnie and Charlie approached, they let their feet skid away from the wall and stood, as if they had been caught at something.
“Hi, you must be Leah. And Benjamin. I’m your Aunt Bonnie! I bet you don’t remember me. I haven’t seen you since you were, what, five?”
“And I’m your Crazy Uncle Charlie. The one you’ve heard so much about.”
The children only stared at them. They were both freckled and taffy-haired, dressed in jeans and sneakers and T-shirts. Bonnie said, “How old are you now? Let me guess. You must be nine.”
“Yes ma’am,” the boy said. “Her too.” The girl didn’t speak, only scratched a spot on her bare ankle.
“Your grandma was always talking about you. How smart you are. All the books you’ve read.”
The children did not acknowledge this, perhaps because it did not involve a direct question. They studied the ground at their feet with interest.
“Well,” Bonnie said again. They did not seem like the sort of children who could be successfully chatted up. “It’s nice to see you again. Is your mother inside?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“We’re going to go look for her. We’ll see you kids a little later.”
“Yes ma’am.”
When they were inside, Charlie said, “I forgot, they’ve grown up in a cult, haven’t they.”
“Quiet.” The great room was empty. Firewood was piled in a tidy stack in a brick recess, but the fireplace itself had been swept clean for summer. On the dining room table, a number of florists’ arrangements were lined up, sympathy cards tucked among them. Some of them were autumn-themed, with orange lilies, chrysanthemums, sunflowers. Others were more unconventional, with bird of paradise and protea. There was one fruit basket encased in green-tinted cellophane.
“Stan? Haley?” Bonnie passed into the kitchen, also empty. This was Claudia’s domain, with its ceramic pots of herbs on the windowsills and pretty dishtowels and the display cabinet with the ornate porcelain hot chocolate pot set in its ring of cups. It made the idea of her death into something impossibly sad.
“Bonnie!” Haley came in from the bedroom wing then, and they hugged, and both of them cried and patted each other’s backs, separated, shared a box of Kleenex, sniffed some more. “I didn’t hear you drive up. Where’s Charlie?”
“I think he’s in the bathroom,” Bonnie said, thinking that he had probably already found his way to the bar cabinet. “We said hello to the kids. They’re huge! I mean, they’ve grown so much, they used to be little peanuts.”
“Yeah, that’s what happens when you feed them. Are you hungry? I know it’s early, but we might as well eat. People keep bringing food. Hot dishes. It’s a Wisconsin thing. There’s three potato and cheese casseroles. Venison. Pea salad. Half a ham. Apple cake. It goes on and on.”
Bonnie looked into the refrigerator. It was crowded with plastic ware, and serving dishes stacked one on top of the other. “Maybe a sandwich.”
“Go sit down, I’ll bring everything out. I thought that’s what we could do for dinner. Just kind of graze. It wouldn’t seem right to start cooking in her kitchen. Though I guess sooner or later . . .” Bonnie took a 7UP from the fridge and went back into the dining room. She found a chair between two of the flower arrangements and removed the cards to read them. One appeared to be from somebody in Claudia’s yoga class. The other was a name she recognized as one of Stan’s old collaborators from the early days. When Haley came back in with the food, Bonnie asked where Stan was.
“Out in the studio. I wouldn’t say he’s doing so good. There’s been some alcohol involved. I guess it’s hardest on him. Not that we need to have a contest.”
“I’m glad you’ve been here,” Bonnie told her. “Now tell me what needs to be done. With the service and all.”
“Not that much. It’s coming together.” The funeral would be in two days, at a Lutheran chapel that would allow Claudia’s spiritual advisor to conduct the service. Bonnie said she did not know that Claudia had a spiritual advisor and Haley said it was the woman who ran the yoga studio and gave mindfulness seminars. Close enough.
“There’s going to be music, old Judy Collins songs, Leonard Cohen songs, things she enjoyed. There’s some great pictures of her we can set out. It’s going to be nice. It’ll be something she would have liked.”
“It’s not fair,” Bonnie said. “She was way too young.” She guessed she meant, she felt too young to have lost her mother. She found herself going back and forth between tears and anger. Both made her feel stupid and ineffectual.
“She didn’t suffer. She didn’t see it coming. That’s the best way to go.”
“That’s the horseshit second prize for having to go at all. Sorry. I forget, you have the consolations of religion.”
“Maybe I’m not all that consoled anymore.”
Bonnie filled her plate with ham and macaroni salad and cherry cobbler. She was suddenly very hungry. She thought that people who brought food when there was a death were onto something.
The dining room window had a view of the side yard. Charlie and the two children were engaged in some game
that involved the throwing of stones. Charlie had a thermos of the sort used for coffee, although it was doubtful that it held coffee, and with his free hand he was pitching stones at one of Stan’s smaller constructions, a ten-foot-high tower made of hubcaps. Every time his throw connected it made a shimmering, metallic sound. With Charlie’s encouragement, the boy and then the girl also heaved their own stones and landed them.
Bonnie said, “I don’t suppose Stan would be entirely happy to see that.”
“Let them. The kids need some distractions. It’s hard on them, being here. They’re scared of Stan, he cries and rages and drinks and slobbers over them, all in about the space of ten minutes. I’m going to enroll them in school here,” Haley added, as if this was an ordinary thing to say.
“Really.”
“We could be around for a while. Stan needs looking after. Him and the kids will get used to each other.”
Bonnie supposed this was at least possible. She said, “What about Scott?”
“He has the whole Fellowship to look after him.”
“What happened?”
“I guess I gradually fell off the belief bus. Oh, not entirely, I mean, I still pretty much go along with God. With Jesus. But all the day-to-day, exalted, pray every time you can’t find your shoes? After a while it didn’t seem to make any difference, and everybody kept saying it did. Well, everybody in the Fellowship. You’re supposed to keep burning with this white-hot intensity, and if you don’t, if you’re just having an ordinary, so-so day, that’s a lapse, and you have to pray about that too. It’s this constant hectoring to be filled with the spirit. It’s like cheerleading camp. Or the way I imagine cheerleading camp is. It took so much damned effort. I started to resent it. And Scott.” She brooded, darkly. “I don’t think he’s ever had an original thought in his life. He’s like a vending machine. Drop a quarter in, Scripture comes out.”
“Does he know you’re not coming back? I mean, the kids . . .”
“We didn’t talk about it. We don’t exactly have a lot of deep conversations. Or much of anything else. Ever wonder why we don’t have more kids? Uh huh. He can see Ben and Leah whenever he wants. But they’re not going back there.”
Bonnie thought that Haley might have a fight on her hands with that, but she kept her mouth shut. Haley went on, “I want to start over. I was so young and stupid and full of it. I want to finish college. I’m not that old. Thirty. I could take classes at Eau Claire or Menomonie.”
“Sure you could.”
“Like you mean it, please.”
“I absolutely mean it. I think it’s great.”
“I know it looks like, Mom died and so I’m going to turn it into some big opportunity for me, but I need this. I need to turn things around. For the kids too. Big changes. People can change.”
“Absolutely,” Bonnie said. Haley was wearing a flowing, hippie-style top in an ethnic print. Her blond hair, the same color as Claudia’s before it went gray and was chemically revived, had been cut in bangs straight across her forehead, like a child’s. She’d never lost the baby weight and her face was going soft at the jawline.
“Don’t worry,” Haley said. “I’m planning on dieting.”
Bonnie shook her head and looked out the window to the hubcap tower. She could no longer see Charlie or the kids. She hoped he hadn’t led them into the woods to track bears or something else stupidly dangerous.
“Tell me about you,” Haley said. “Tell me what’s going on with you.”
“Oh . . . work, mostly. Same old.”
She’d called Jane to tell her about Claudia. Jane would want to know. The conversation went all right, in a somber sort of way. A mother’s death, after all, trumped whatever transgressions had gone on with a husband. It reconnected them, at least for a moment, a sad, sentimental moment, and reminded them of how far they went back. Jane said she would come to the funeral if Bonnie wanted and Bonnie said no, she didn’t have to. It was bound to be a bloodbath.
“She was always nice to me. Your mom,” Jane said.
“Yeah, she wasn’t always that nice to me.”
“She fussed a lot. It was just her way of caring. Not the easiest way, I know. I’ll sure be thinking about you, hang in there,” Jane told her. They hadn’t said anything about Eric. Maybe they could keep on not talking about him.
Haley said she’d gone through Claudia’s address book and called everybody. “I found a number for your father.”
“My who? BioDad? You’re kidding.”
“Rizzi, that’s him, right? Like somebody in The Godfather?”
“Carl Rizzi. In New Mexico?”
“No, someplace in Ohio. Claudia had three or four addresses for him, old ones she’d scratched out.”
“Huh,” Bonnie said. “Double huh. I had no idea she kept up with the guy.”
“She was sentimental, you know that. She saved all our report cards. Our artwork from grade school.”
“That’s different.” Bonnie was still trying to get her mind around the idea of her father as an actual real person, someone her mother might have had some secret contact with over the years. “It’s not like she ever talked about him. He was, you know, a closed chapter.” Their father was only invoked when she or Charlie did something wrong or disappointing, and their paternal genetic heritage was said to be at fault, because God knows they did not get that from her. He was a drunk, they were given to understand, a drunk and a loser. Well, Stan was a drunk too, just a successful one. It was something of a pattern.
“They kept in touch? Wow, the mysteries of Claudia.” It was almost as much of a shock as her death. “So what did Pop have to say?”
“I didn’t talk to him, I had to leave a message. That’s what I did with a lot of people. I had a little speech about how sorry I was to be calling with the news, and when the service was going to be, and the contact for the funeral home. Do you think he’ll show up?”
“No clue. I don’t think I’ve seen him since I was four years old.” Bonnie remembered a game they might have played, a loud game that involved chasing. He might have carried her on his shoulders. Fragments, memories of memories. She said, “Maybe it’s best not to mention any of this to Stan.”
“Stan’s not exactly being a good sport right now,” Haley said. “Just so you know what to expect.”
Stan came in from the studio at dusk. He moved slowly and his eyes were a smeared red. He hugged Bonnie but seemed to forget about her midway through. Haley asked him if he was hungry and he lifted one hand in a leave me alone gesture. Haley ignored this and brought him a plate of beef with noodles. She put a tray of rolls with butter next to him. “Here, try some of this.”
“Where’d it come from?” Stan glowered at the food. “Who the hell brought it? One of the yoga witches?”
“A perfectly nice lady from Mom’s book group. Eat it.”
“She wasn’t in any book group.”
“Yes she was. They read a lot of mysteries with female sleuths.”
“Female whats?”
“Detectives,” Bonnie said. “Crime solvers.”
Stan gave her a bleary look that might have been menacing or maybe he was just unable to keep his eyebrows raised. He picked up his fork but before he got it to his plate he was distracted by Benjamin and Leah, who had finished eating and were sitting next to each other, not fidgeting, technically, but poking at each other under the table and lifting up from their chairs with a kind of stealthy delicacy. Of course, it was how they got away with fidgeting in church. “Aren’t they supposed to be in school?” Stan asked.
“We don’t go to school,” Benjamin said.
“While you’re here you go to school,” their mother said. “It doesn’t start until next week.”
No one said anything to this. Benjamin asked if they could be excused. Haley told them yes, and to clear their plates. “Do we
say blessings while we’re here?” Benjamin asked, and Haley said yes, of course. Benjamin and Leah bowed their heads and mumbled something in unison that could not be deciphered. Then they got up and took their plates to the kitchen.
Stan watched them go. “There’s something not right about those kids,” he said.
“They’re perfectly fine, Dad. You’re just not used to children with good manners.”
Stan surveyed the table around him. “What did you do with my drink?”
“You didn’t have one. You don’t need one. Come on, eat something.”
Stan got up and went to the bar cabinet in the corner of the great room. He came back with a fifth of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. He dumped the contents of his water glass into one of the floral arrangements and poured out three fingers. “Want any ice?” Bonnie asked him.
“You’re a good girl,” he told her.
“Thank you.”
“Even if you can’t find yourself a man.”
“Drat. I forgot to get married.”
Stan took a pull of his drink. “Go ahead, make fun. You’re missing out on the most important . . . most, I tell you your mother was the most . . .”
They heard feet ascending the stairs from the basement, where Charlie had been taking a nap.
The refrigerator door opened, closed, and Charlie came into the dining room with a piece of cold fried chicken in one hand.
He and Stan stared at each other. Charlie pointed to the Jameson’s. “Can I have some of that?” His mouth was full of fried chicken.
“Get your own. Better yet, get a job so you can afford your own.”
Charlie went back to the refrigerator and returned with a beer. “You can put this on my tab,” he said. He surveyed the food on the table, lifted the top from a baking dish. “Is this Tater Tot casserole? Awesome.”
Haley said, “Get a plate, don’t stand there and pick at things.”
“No, that’s OK, I’ll just eat some scraps off the garage floor.”
“Sit down,” Stan said. “And stop being an asshole.”
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