by Judy Troy
“Yes, ma’am,” Mike said.
The timer went off, and Margo rose to get the brownies out of the oven. She had on a short, silky robe that brushed Mike’s arm as she walked past.
“Mrs. Newlin is teaching at the community college this summer,” Donetta told her mother.
“I admire someone that educated,” Mrs. Rush said to Mike. “A lot of people take that for granted, but I don’t.”
“High school was enough for me,” Cory said.
“Is that why you couldn’t be bothered to finish?” Mrs. Rush asked.
“That’s a past-history question,” Margo told her mother. “Pastor Kelly said we can only talk about things that happen now.”
“It would help if certain people were actually doing something now,” Mrs. Rush said.
There was a moment of silence. Cory looked at Mike, then up at the ceiling, and Donetta’s cat, Sophie, appeared from the hallway and jumped up on Margo’s lap.
“Maybe Cory and I can’t live here under these circumstances,” Margo said. “Maybe we can’t even stay here in the same town.”
“All I did was ask a question,” Mrs. Rush said. “Don’t make a federal case out of it.”
Donetta took Mike’s hand. “Do you want a brownie?” she asked him gently.
Mrs. Rush looked at him. “My goodness,” she said. “Take all you want. Wrap them up and take them with you. They’ll only make us fatter.”
“No, thanks,” Mike said. “But I should get going.”
He carried his chair back to the dining room, said good night, and walked outside with Donetta. They stood in the driveway and looked at the sprinkling of lights in the houses behind them. “Mom doesn’t think about what she says,” Donetta told him. “That ‘federal case’ thing was just an accident.”
“I know.”
Donetta put her arms around Mike. “You’re the only good part of my life,” she whispered. “You’re the only happy thing I have.”
He held her. Across Flat Rock Road was a field that in the darkness looked like water, except that it didn’t reflect the stars.
“Me, too,” Mike said. He put on his helmet, got on his motorcycle, and rode down the driveway toward Wheatley, and home.
SEVEN
MIKE and his mother went back to work on Monday, though nothing about their lives felt the same. To Mike it was as if they’d woken up in a different house, in another town—almost as if they’d woken up as different people. They were both moodier now, and when Mike heard his mother crying late Monday night, in her room, he didn’t know what to do. He felt too awkward and unsettled by it to go in and talk to her; instead, he turned on the radio and listened through his headphones to the all-night rock-and-roll station from Rapid City. He listened to the disc jockey announce who was sending what love song out to whom.
Mike didn’t eat breakfast with the Schofields anymore—he felt too guilty now that his mother was alone. She got up early and made him scrambled eggs or waffles, neither of which she would eat. She’d have only cereal or toast, then come outside with her coffee as he got his motorcycle out of the carport.
“Make sure you drink enough water on these hot days,” she’d tell him; she didn’t seem to want him to leave. She wasn’t anxious to go to work herself. “People at the college are being kind,” she told Mike one night at supper. “But that just makes me more uncomfortable.”
Mike knew what she meant. Neil went out of his way to be nice to him. He paid Mike more per hour than he had been, and when Mike objected Neil said, “We can afford it. And we were underpaying you before.” That second part wasn’t true.
Ed gave Mike a present for his mother, a large yellow bowl he’d made, which Mike knew would sell for something like sixty or seventy dollars.
The hardest thing for Mike—the change in his life that felt the worst—was that Lee-Ann was never sexy with him anymore. She was friendly and kind, the way that Neil was, and she avoided being alone with him. The only time he saw even a hint of who she used to be with him was one morning when he was working outside the barn without his shirt on. She walked past, holding Janna, and when he caught her watching him she seemed embarrassed to have been caught.
The only people at the ranch who treated him normally were Janna, of course, and Arthur Strong and Louis Ivy. Mike wasn’t sure if they knew about his father—although it seemed unlikely that they didn’t. “I’m not sure they know your last name,” Neil had said to Mike. But Neil underestimated people, the same way he underestimated the importance of money to people who didn’t have much. Lately Mike had noticed more negative things about Neil than he had before. He found himself thinking words like “spoiled” and “egotistical”—words Mike’s father had used that Mike had objected to. Then he felt guilty. Neil had always been a friend to him, whereas what kind of friend was Mike when it came to the way he felt about Lee-Ann? He’d hate himself for a moment, after which he’d think, I’m only eighteen. She doesn’t take me seriously. And we really haven’t done anything.
All the time, though, every day since June 18, these thoughts and others were dwarfed by fears about his father: where he might be and what might happen to him. One evening, riding home from the Schofields’, he almost ran into a pickup that braked in front of him. His reactions weren’t quick anymore. He wasn’t focused on what was happening. He was always preoccupied.
ON Friday a rainstorm blew up, and Mike came home from the Schofields’ early. He sat in his room, looking through his college brochures at pictures of the campus and of the dorm where he would be living. He had a letter saying who his roommate would be and what his interests were: Raymond Nelson, an honors student from Aberdeen. A computer nerd, he sounded like to Mike. But college seemed too far in the future, and unrealistically carefree. College was where people went before their real lives began, Mike thought; his own life had gotten an early start on real.
From downstairs now, he could hear NPR on the radio, and he went down to the kitchen and cut up potatoes as his mother made pork chops. In her dark skirt and blouse, her short hair combed back from her face, she looked to him like a spinsterish school teacher.
“Slice them thinner,” she told Mike, and then, “Would you set the table, please?” It was a relief when the phone rang, until Mike, listening to his mother talk, knew that it was Tom DeWitt. He was calling with the first news about Mike’s father: Mary Hise’s car, an older-model Chevy Cavalier, had been found in the parking lot of an all-night supermarket in Salt Lake City. Tom DeWitt asked if he could stop over after supper, to talk in person.
THEY had just finished eating when Tom came, too early, and to the kitchen door instead of the front door—as if he wanted to be thought of as a friend, Mike thought, somebody who thought about their interests instead of his own. He stood in the kitchen in a wet windbreaker, saying, “I wonder why Glenn chose Salt Lake City. Why not Denver or Omaha?” He spoke as if he were talking to himself, Mike saw; he was watching for their reactions while pretending not to.
“Isn’t that where Dad’s friend lives?” Mike said to his mother. “Didn’t Dad say he’d hide Dad if he ever killed anybody?”
His mother stared at him.
“I guess that means you don’t know,” Tom said.
“Nothing about this is funny,” Carolyn said to Mike, and he noticed how quickly she moved their plates out of the way and how politely she asked Tom to sit down. Tom was removing his windbreaker already and putting it over the back of the chair. Under it he had on workout clothes—nylon pants and a stretched-out T-shirt too small for him. He was a gym rat, Mike realized, which was Josh’s name for guys they saw in gyms who seemed either shy or dangerous, not usually anything in between.
“We don’t know anyone in Salt Lake City,” Carolyn told Tom. “We have some friends here, of course. But we’re not very social people.” She stood at the screen door and looked outside. The sky was gray with rain. “What else have you learned?” she asked. “What was found inside the car?”
“A dress in a dry cleaner’s bag” was all Tom DeWitt listed. There must have been more in the car than that, Mike thought. “A short dress,” Tom told them. “Denim, I think it was. I can’t figure out why Glenn didn’t get rid of it. I don’t suppose it has any significance for either of you.”
“No,” Carolyn said.
Mike shook his head, although he was almost sure that that day in December, when they’d talked, Mary Hise had been wearing that dress. He remembered because of the way she’d buttoned and unbuttoned the top two buttons as he was standing there—it was sexy, the way she hadn’t seemed to know she was doing it. But he wasn’t about to say that he remembered it. That would make him guilty of paying Mary Hise too much attention.
“Why should we know anything about her dress?” Carolyn asked.
“No reason. I just thought I’d ask.” Tom crossed his legs and turned to Mike. “Girls and their dresses,” he said. “It’s a mystery to us, isn’t it? Why they put on one and not another.”
I thought she wasn’t wearing any, Mike almost said.
It was thundering outside, and rain was pouring out of the gutters and pounding the concrete patio outside the screen door. Mike’s mother was sitting up very straight, very stiffly. “Mary Hise’s parents must know by now,” she said. “Do you know when the funeral was?” she asked Tom.
“Three days ago.”
“I didn’t have the courage to ask. I don’t suppose there’s anything I could do, by way of apology.”
“Apology for what?” Tom said. “What did you do?”
She hesitated. “You know what I did,” she said. “I told Mary not to quit yet. I told her to give Glenn some time to get used to …” She didn’t finish. She got up, filled the sink with soapy water, and stood at the counter with her back to them. She didn’t seem able to speak.
Mike stood up quickly and said, “I’ll do the dishes, Mom. Go in the other room if you want. I’ll make coffee, too.” He couldn’t normalize his voice, even though he tried, because he could see the way that Tom, and his mother, too, were looking at him.
“All right,” his mother said. “Thank you.”
After she left, Mike scraped the dishes and put them in the sink, making more noise than he needed to.
“Do you have a dish towel?” Tom asked. “I’ll dry.”
“I’ll do it.”
“I’m an old hand at doing dishes.”
“So am I,” Mike said.
Tom leaned casually against the counter, as if he didn’t notice that Mike didn’t want him there. “I eat at my brother’s house a lot,” he said. “Too much, probably. I do the dishes with Kyle, or his sister. My sister-in-law has to rest after dinner.”
There was something wrong with Kyle’s mother—Mike knew that but couldn’t remember what it was. It was one of those background facts you knew about someone. Now he had one of his own: Mike Newlin’s father killed somebody. Mike Newlin’s father killed a woman he was having an affair with.
“She’s in a wheelchair,” Tom said. “She has ataxia. It’s a disease that affects the nervous system.”
“That’s too bad,” Mike said, sounding friendlier than he meant to.
“She’s all right in every other way. Her family compensates for what she can’t do. You know. They cover for her.”
Mike put down the plate he was washing and looked at him. “Is this out of a psychology textbook?” he asked.
“Are you this suspicious of everything people say to you?”
“No,” Mike said. “I’m not. Not with everybody.” He got out two coffee mugs, ones his mother liked. They said: KISS THE TEACHER WHO HELPED YOU READ THIS.
“What’s going to happen if you meet somebody smarter than you?” Tom asked.
“There are plenty of people smarter than I am.”
“I’m not so sure about ‘plenty.’ ”
“Don’t bullshit me,” Mike said. “That’s what I hate. That’s what makes me suspicious.”
“So you’d be less suspicious if I said you weren’t smart.”
“You’d be too smart to say that,” Mike said.
They stood less than two feet apart, not speaking. Mike poured water into the coffeemaker. Until the coffee began to brew, the only sound in the room was the rain falling outside.
“Mary Hise was smart, too,” Tom said then. “Mostly A’s in grade school, middle school, and the first two years of high school.” He folded the wet dish towel and laid it on the counter. “Because,” he said, “she got pregnant at sixteen. And the boyfriend didn’t want anything to do with it. Or with her. That’s what Mary’s mother said.”
“So things like that happen sometimes,” Mike said.
Tom looked at him with his narrow eyes. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“No,” Mike said. “Or yes. Whatever.” He was flustered; he’d been caught off guard. “I don’t know. Whatever it is you expect me to say.”
“I don’t expect you to say anything in particular,” Tom said calmly. “Anyway, she put it up for adoption.” He shook his head, correcting himself. “I say ‘it.’ It was a girl, perfectly healthy.”
He picked up the coffeepot. “You don’t want any?” he asked Mike, and without waiting for an answer, he poured coffee into the two mugs Mike had set out. “You know what makes it so sad?” Tom said then to Mike. “That she’ll never get a second chance. She’ll never have a child she can keep as her own. That’s what changes everything.”
He went into the living room, and Mike was left in the kitchen alone, standing with his back against the counter. He felt terrible suddenly—not just terrible in the way that he imagined Tom wanted him to feel, but terrible beyond that, as if he had played a part in every bad thing that ever had happened to Mary Hise.
“Mike?” his mother called out from the next room. “Could you bring the milk and sugar?”
He carried those in and saw that Tom was sitting on the couch, next to her. She’d turned on only the standing lamp in the corner, which threw ghostly shadows onto the ceiling.
“This coffee smells good,” Tom said. “I’m usually lazy and make myself instant.”
Mike started to go upstairs, but his mother said, “Sit down for a minute.”
“I have things to do.”
“You can do them later.”
He sat on the piano bench, next to a photograph of himself on Halloween. He’d been seven or so. He could remember his father taking it.
“I want to say what I started to say,” his mother said, and he then could see how tense she still was. “I shouldn’t have asked Mary Hise not to quit. I was afraid that Glenn might hurt himself. I never thought he would hurt Mary Hise. I could see that he loved her.” Her voice had become high and distressed-sounding. She put her hands up to her face.
Mike was looking down at the piano keys. He was counting the black ones, hardly aware that he was doing it.
“Glenn had never hurt anyone before,” Tom said.
“Everything about this was different from the way he was before,” Carolyn said. “Maybe he’d never been in love before.”
Mike felt shaky, even dizzy. Next to him was the photograph of himself, at seven, dressed in jeans and boots, with a metal star on his shirt: a sheriff, like in a Western movie. He’d wanted a holster and gun, but his mother had said no. Why not? his father had said. What’s wrong with a gun if it’s used to help people?
His mother was sitting still, her hands in her lap. She didn’t seem to have more to say. Tom had his arm over the back of the couch, close to but not touching her. Outside, rain was still falling.
“I’m going to bed,” Mike said, and left the room without looking again at either of them.
• • •
UPSTAIRS, he closed the door and sat on his bed in the dark. He used to do that after losing a wrestling match—just sit, not feeling sorry for himself but trying to believe that losing didn’t matter. He wanted to call Donetta but knew that she’d gone to Keystone with h
er mother and sister. She liked the small shops and the tourists. She liked to drive past Mount Rushmore.
Finally Mike turned on his desk lamp and got out the road atlas his mother had bought him after he was accepted into South Dakota State. He looked up Salt Lake City. There were interstates leading away from it in four directions, but his father would have to be on one of those highways a long time before he’d get anywhere big. The bordering states were Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Arizona, and New Mexico. He remembered a classmate who had moved to Wheatley from Phoenix. He remembered her saying, “Arizona’s got a lot of old people and a lot of criminals.”
Outside the thunder grew more distant. Mike’s windows were open, and his brown curtains were being sucked in and pushed out by the wind. He turned off his lamp. After a while he heard the front door close and then a car door open and close: Tom DeWitt leaving.
So long, asshole, he thought, though a moment later he just felt sad. It seemed as if every man he knew was like his father—looking for a way to not be alone. It just wiped out whatever bad things men did. Then the next minute he thought about Mary Hise, and about himself not thinking about Donetta even when she was going down on him, and he saw everything from the opposite side—if men were alone, then they shouldn’t fuck up so much. They shouldn’t be such selfish assholes.
Mike heard his mother come up the stairs and stop outside his door. Don’t even think about it, he said silently. He heard her walk down the hall and go into her room. It was after ten.
Mike undressed and got into bed. He used to sleep naked, but he didn’t do that anymore. He wore underwear in case his mother should come into his room, or in case something happened and he’d have to get up suddenly. A lot of things were his responsibility now. Also, with underwear on he seemed to dream less about sex. He was too sexual, he thought. It was on his mind all the time, and he wondered about things he’d read, connections there were between male hormones and violence. He didn’t feel like a violent person. He’d never done anything violent, except wrestling. He’d never even gone out for football.