by Judy Troy
He sat with Mike on the small patio outside the kitchen door. It was not quite dark. Mike’s mother was sitting inside at the kitchen table with two of her friends, both female teachers. Mike only had to look to his right, through the window, to see her distressed, anxious face. And so when the special agent asked Mike if he loved his father, Mike glanced at her and said uneasily, “I guess I do. What difference does it make?”
“I’m trying to get a picture of your father. I want to understand him.”
“Why?”
“So I can think like him.” Tom DeWitt crossed his legs, his left ankle resting on his right knee. His intelligence made Mike nervous. He wasn’t expecting it. He’d grown up seeing movies in which even smart policemen were foolish in some ways. He wasn’t sure that he could fool this person, which made him wonder why he would think about trying. Fool him about what?
“Am I your enemy or your friend?” he asked Mike.
“Neither.”
“If your father contacted you, would you tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
The agent stood up to take off his suit jacket. He had brown, thinning hair, narrow eyes, and a wide, relaxed-looking face. Under his jacket he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. He worked out, Mike saw. He had large biceps and strong forearms. He was big-chested for his height. He lay his jacket across his lap. “I’ve seen you wrestle,” he said. “Are you going to wrestle in college?”
“Not if it gets in the way of school.”
“Is that you talking, or your parents?”
“I don’t want to be some dumb-ass jock.”
He laughed in such a friendly way that for a second Mike was confused about what the agent was there for, why he was talking to Mike. Mike looked through the window at his mother.
“Did your father watch you wrestle?” Tom DeWitt asked.
“Yes. He just didn’t come every time.”
“Why not?”
“Why should he?”
“I don’t know. Some fathers would.”
“I didn’t expect him to,” Mike said.
“Some fathers would go regardless.”
“Well, he wasn’t one of them.”
“What kind was he, then?”
“Why should I describe him to you?” Mike said.
“Why shouldn’t you?”
“Because you don’t give a shit about him.”
“He killed a twenty-four-year-old woman,” the agent said.
“He called an ambulance,” Mike said. “He wished he hadn’t done it. He didn’t want her to die.”
“But she did die.”
In the silence that followed, Mike could hear the cicadas, which sounded to him too harsh and too loud. He wasn’t perceiving things right. The backyard seemed larger than it was; his mother, in the kitchen, seemed smaller and older. He had changed, too. He felt that he was looking at himself through unfocused binoculars. Yet the agent remained solid and whole. He seemed casual, even, until he said, “Do you think he’s being blamed for something he didn’t do?”
“Do you?”
“I’m not his son. I don’t know what I’d think if I were.”
“Because you know your father could never have done it.”
“No. Anybody could do it.”
“I couldn’t,” Mike said, and knew right away that he’d made a mistake. “That’s not true,” he said then. “I don’t know what I could or couldn’t do.” He moved his hair out of his eyes. His hands were shaking. “I’m tired,” he said. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”
Tom DeWitt stood up slowly, as if he were the tired one. He walked into the kitchen behind Mike, said good night to Mike’s mother—one of her friends was leaving as well—and said good-bye to Mike. He looked once more at the pile of survival books before disappearing into the front part of the house. Mike didn’t hear the door close, although from his room upstairs, which faced the street, he saw him cross the yard and get into a light-colored car.
Mike wasn’t alone for more than a minute before his mother was standing in the doorway in her brown dress. That summer she was teaching part-time at the community college, and she was still in her teaching clothes.
“Ms. Watkins is spending the night with us,” she told Mike. Noleen Watkins, who dated Mike’s wrestling coach, had been Mike’s seventh-grade social studies teacher; she’d taken his class on a field trip to Badlands National Park. His mother sometimes referred to her friends at school by their last names, even younger women like Noleen. “You’ve spent too much time in school, Carolyn,” Mike’s father used to tell her. “Everybody is Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So.”
“Mr. or Ms.,” his mother would say sharply, ignoring the point his father had been making. She was good at that, Mike knew. She never thought that people’s responses had anything to do with her, with how she acted or what she said. Mike had seen her do that at school, too. For four years he’d had to see her there in addition to at home. While she’d kept track of his behavior, his grades, and his friends, he’d kept track of her, too—of how she could ignore an unhappy student or snub an entire class that didn’t like her. In the end that changed the way Mike felt about her. Before that, she’d been his friend. She’d helped him with his homework. She’d driven him and Josh to Rapid City for baseball games.
Now she shut Mike’s door behind her, crossed the room, and stood with him at the open window. “Did Tom DeWitt tell you anything?” she asked. “Do you think they know where he is?”
“He just asked questions,” Mike said. The night had grown windy. Mike could hear it in the chimes that hung from the front porch, below his room. His father had bought them for his mother a long time ago. His father had paid for them, but Mike had picked them out.
“You should eat something,” his mother said. “There’s meat loaf, and macaroni and cheese.” When Mike didn’t respond, she touched his arm. “Even if you don’t feel hungry.”
“I don’t.”
“Sit down with me.” She sat on the bed and waited for Mike to sit next to her. “Your father and Mary Hise were having an affair,” she told him. “It started last fall, or in the winter. I’m not sure. I didn’t know until three weeks ago.” Her voice had become unsteady, and she began to cry. Mike looked down at the brown carpeting, then at the closed door. Finally, he put his arms around her—something he’d never done before unless he was hugging her hello or good-bye. He felt how thin she was, thinner than she looked.
After a few moments she sat up straight and dried her face. “I’m all right,” she said. “You know that. I’m not the kind of person who falls apart.”
Like Dad, Mike thought. He moved over a little, so that there was a few inches of space between them.
“Mary Hise told Dad she was quitting,” his mother said. “That was toward the end of May, when you weren’t home much.”
“I wanted to make money for college.”
“I know. I’m not criticizing you.” She took a deep breath. She looked at Mike’s closet and so did he—the door to it open, his jeans and work shirts stacked neatly on the shelves. “Dad was distraught,” she said. “He would hardly talk. He couldn’t sleep. Finally I called Mary Hise and asked her to meet me for coffee, and she said yes. We met at Shoney’s. I said, ‘You and Glenn are having an affair,’ as if I already knew, because I was sure. And she said, ‘We were having an affair, but that’s in the past. That’s why I’m leaving. He still wants—’ ” Carolyn stopped and turned her head at a noise in the hallway—Noleen Watkins closing the bathroom door. Mike had already forgotten that she was there, that she was staying overnight. Then his mother said, “I hate telling you these things. I hate for you to know them.”
“Well, you know them,” Mike said.
“I’m not eighteen. I’m not his child.” When Mike started to protest, she said, “You’re not a child anymore. I know that.” She seemed to focus on the Grateful Dead poster taped to the wall above his bed. Donetta had bought it for him a year ago—what seemed to M
ike now like a hundred years ago.
“Dad didn’t want Mary Hise to leave,” his mother said. “I told her, ‘Just stay in the job a little longer, until he gets used to the idea of your leaving. Wait until he calms down.’ ” She turned toward Mike as if he’d spoken. “What would you expect me to say? I was afraid your father was going to kill himself.”
She didn’t have to explain why; Mike already knew. His father had tried to kill himself once before, twenty-some years before, during his freshman year at the University of South Dakota. He’d been dating Mike’s mother’s roommate, and when she had broken up with him he’d taken an overdose of pills—tranquilizers of some kind. “Things were different then,” Mike’s mother had told Mike once. “Vietnam was going on. People talked about death and suicide. I felt compassionate toward your father. He was more sensitive than the other boys I knew.”
Mike had seen an old picture of his parents: the two of them sitting on the grass in front of a classroom building, his mother’s hair waist-length and his father’s almost to his shoulders. It had been taken the spring of their sophomore year, by which time they were a couple—his father the handsome one and his mother the smart one. It seemed to Mike that they’d stayed the same in that way, except that his father’s expression had changed, had become bewildered, Mike thought, or hopeless.
“You know as much as I do about the rest,” his mother said. “Mary stayed on. Your father seemed calmer. I didn’t know they were still involved. I didn’t know she’d lied to me. I thought that she’d quit before long, and then your dad and I would—I don’t know. Talk about it.” She looked down at her hands. The only ring she wore was her wedding band.
“Did Dad know you knew?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Did you tell the police you knew?”
“Of course. I had to.” She got up and closed Mike’s curtains. “When you’re married a long time …” she said. Then, “Dad and I weren’t …” She turned toward him. “Marriages are complicated. All of them are.” Her eyes were teary. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you think you can sleep?”
Mike nodded. She stood next to the door for a moment, before opening it, and Mike thought about how many nights she’d done that during his life—not nights like this but ordinary ones, when she’d come in to say good night, then stand there as if she couldn’t bring herself to leave. He used to count the seconds to himself until he could be free of her. Although there was a time, when he was much younger, when he hadn’t minded it; sometimes he had liked it. That was hard for him to remember now.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” she said. “Things will seem clearer when we’ve gotten some sleep.”
She opened the door, and he listened to her footsteps in the hall, his heart beating fast. He knew too many private things, and now he knew more. He’d known that his parents weren’t happy with each other. He’d known that his father was never going to be happy with anyone. He’d known, even, that there had been something wrong with his father lately, but that hadn’t been the only time he’d felt that. If you felt something often enough, you hardly felt it anymore. You were so used to certain things being wrong that you didn’t ask questions. You stopped wondering. You just told yourself that everything was the way it always was.
He could hear thunder in the west, over the Black Hills, or even farther away, in Wyoming. He turned off the light, sat on his bed, and thought about Mary Hise. She had been his father’s receptionist for a year and a half; she’d had red hair and dark eyes. Mike hadn’t known her well. One afternoon in December, at his father’s office, he had spoken to her for just a few minutes. They’d talked about her dog, Harrison. “In warm weather I take him out to Little Falls Park after dinner,” she’d said. “I ride my bike, and he runs behind me.” She showed Mike a picture of herself with the tan dog at her feet. Part cocker spaniel, she had said. She’d put the picture back in her desk drawer. She’d stopped talking when Mike’s father walked over.
Mike had seen her once, the previous summer, at the public pool. In a bikini, she’d looked sexier than he would have imagined. She’d had bigger breasts than he would have thought. Mike had been at the pool with Donetta; he’d not spoken to Mary Hise, but he remembered how she looked. He was uncomfortable now—ashamed, even, of recalling so clearly what her body was like. It didn’t seem believable that she was dead.
Lightning lit up his room, and rain began to fall. When he looked out the window there was only a minute before the Hylers’ house across the street became impossible to see. Their place was a disaster, anyway—an old frame house with peeling paint and a second-floor porch in danger of caving in. In the front yard was an oak tree over a hundred years old. The Hylers were almost that old themselves. It was Donetta’s favorite house in Wheatley, and not for its potential to be fixed up, either. She liked it the way it was—almost condemned. “If you lived in it,” she’d say, “you’d feel that your life was part of history.”
Mike went downstairs and opened the kitchen door. It was after midnight. It was raining so hard that he couldn’t see beyond the patio to the neatly mown lawn, which was his job to keep up, or to the garbage cans in the alley, which were his responsibility, too—to take out the garbage and move the cans back up the driveway between pickup days. His mother kept things clean inside, as he did outside. What were his father’s jobs? Mike wondered now. There was a workbench in the carport, which Mike had seen him use only a few times. Did something happen to people who didn’t have routine, everyday things to do?
Mike hadn’t eaten since noon. He closed the back door, opened the refrigerator, and took out the meat loaf, which he ate cold, standing up. Then he put it back and climbed the stairs. The rooms were dark. His mother’s door was closed; the door to the guest room wasn’t shut completely. He could see the shape of Noleen Watkins in bed. He stood there until his eyes adjusted to the darkness; then he could see that the bedsheet was thrown back, and that she had on a sleeveless nightgown. He wasn’t attracted to her; she was a teacher he’d liked but never had a crush on, yet in the dark hallway he couldn’t stop looking at her. Because he was a bad person, he thought—capable of any terrible thing.
Back in his room, he sat at his desk. In front of him was a stack of notebooks from his senior year that he hadn’t gotten rid of yet; a pencil sketch of himself that Donetta had drawn, which said, on the back, “I love you forever;” and his acceptance letter to the honors program at South Dakota State University. That was all from the life he used to have, which now seemed shallow and unimportant. He hadn’t been serious enough. He hadn’t been paying enough attention to what was going on around him. He hadn’t realized how much of your life could just come apart.
He lay down and tried to sleep. The rain outside hadn’t let up. When he did fall asleep he woke twice from dreams in which his father, stranded in a storm, with the police after him, felt desperate enough to kill himself—this time for real. After the second dream Mike sat up and turned on his lamp. All right, he told himself. That’s how I would feel. But how would Dad feel?
Misunderstood, Mike thought. He was able to sleep a little then. Years later he would realize how ironic that was, to find that comforting.
FOUR
IN the morning there was an unmarked police car parked across the street. The sky was overcast, and the storm had torn things up. Mike would have to pick up the fallen oak branches and the pieces of his mother’s ceramic bird feeder, which he’d heard break in the night. Next door, Clyde Pate, old as he was, was up on his roof with a push broom.
Mike was standing at the window, watching him, when Donetta drove up. She walked across the yard to the back of the house, barefoot, wearing her blue uniform from Andell’s Diner. Seeing her, Mike felt more able to go down to the kitchen and face his mother and Noleen Watkins. What ruined it was that when he walked into the kitchen, Donetta said, “Honey”—as if they were married, he thought, as if what his father had done had given her some kind of ri
ght to him.
She jumped up and hugged him; then she got him a glass of juice and brought it to where he stood, leaning stiffly against the farthest counter. He knew he was being a jerk; he felt that he was entitled to be anything he wanted to be today.
“Don’t you have to be at work in a few minutes?” he asked her. He saw his mother frown at him.
“I am going to work,” Donetta said. “I tried to get off, but Mr. Andell said no, he couldn’t replace me.”
Mr. Asshole, Mike thought, correcting her in his head. That was what Donetta would have called him any other day, even in front of his mother. Andell’s Diner was just outside Wheatley, off the interstate—a truck stop, really, though no one in town called it that.
“I even have to work an extra shift,” Donetta said in an offended way. She went back to the table and stood behind his mother and Noleen Watkins.
Mike stayed where he was, looking down at his juice glass, knowing that he’d become the center of attention. He couldn’t tell if they expected him to do something crazy, or to do some take-control, you’re-the-man-now kind of thing.
“I cancelled my classes for today and tomorrow,” his mother said to him. She was in her nightgown and robe. “I’ll go back Monday. Can Neil Schofield do without you for a few days?”
“I don’t think so,” Mike said. “I might have to help him out today or tomorrow.” He tried to look right at her as he spoke, but it was hard. He was more used to telling half-truths and leaving things out than he was to lying outright. But he had to see Lee-Ann sooner than Monday. Monday was too far away. If he could just see her, he thought, then he could keep her inside his head and keep what was happening outside.
“All right,” his mother said. He could see how tired she was then, probably even more tired than he was, and he almost gave in to the impulse to be nicer. What stopped him were his mother, Noleen Watkins, and Donetta lined up there like that at the table—against him, he felt, treating him like all of a sudden he might be a different person.