Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  Libby motioned him to sit down in the now-empty chair. “I was hoping you’d come,” she said.

  He sat there, not knowing what to say or do.

  “Here,” she said, reaching out. She took his hand, smoothed it flat, turned it over. “I remember this hand. Your yellowish skin. Long fingers.” She clasped it between her hands. “Red would always say to me, the two men he loved the most were you and Frank.”

  “He saved my life,” Lewis said. “He knew I wanted to get sober even before I did. He saw that far inside me.”

  “He saw inside a lot of people. But he got a kick out of you. He wanted me to lighten up toward you.” With hair matted against her head, Libby looked like her own ghost. “He asked me to cut you some slack, to stop being so mad.” She put the back of one hand to her mouth, holding Lewis’s hand fast with the other. “I was mad, but mostly I was playing around.” Libby bit her hand, trying not to sob. Tears coursed from her eyes. “I … I … I …” She kept trying to speak until the effort became spasmodic, like hiccups. Frightened, Lewis stood up, but she held on to him. It took every ounce of self-control for Lewis not to cry, too. He thought his throat and chest would split open from the effort. Not crying felt like swallowing a dagger sideways.

  He took some deep breaths and Libby followed suit. Somehow, they both calmed down.

  She managed to speak, finally, in a half-whisper. “He wanted you to come over for dinner, and I wouldn’t invite you. He wanted to spend more time with you. He wanted the three of us to pal around again. If I’d known this was going to happen, I would’ve had you over for dinner every night.” She put her hands over her face.

  Lewis found a washcloth, wet it with cool water, and squeezed it out. Sponging Libby’s face, he said, “Don’t worry. Besides, I couldn’t have come every night. I had to cook dinner at the Blue House.” Warmth rose from her body. Her skin smelled familiar. Before he could stop them, his tears fell onto Libby’s chest. Then he got ahold of himself and again they calmed down.

  In a normal, factual tone, Libby said she and Julie Swaggart were working on funeral arrangements. “We only want three people to speak. Otherwise, it could go on for a year. But we want you to speak, Lewis. You have to speak.” Her voice tightened again. “I wanted Billie to speak, too. She’s known him since he came here. But Julie called and Billie said no.” Libby put her hands over her face. “I called her yesterday—she was the first person I called after I found out, even before Joe. I got her machine. Mom called her again last night, but she won’t pick up the phone. She hasn’t come to see me. Do you have any idea why she’s doing this?”

  “Libby, Libby,” Lewis murmured. “Please don’t worry about all that now. Billie will come through, I’m sure she will.”

  Libby curled up in obvious physical pain. Lewis went looking for her mother, for a nurse, for anyone who might know what to do.

  THE FUNERAL that took place the following Saturday was well organized, simple, and short. Too short. The drunks were stiff and awkward and restrained in St. Catherine’s sanctuary—or maybe numbness had set in. A lot of people looked as if they’d been crying for days. The room seemed to dwarf them, with its forty-foot ceiling and wide wooden beams. Statues of the saints lined the walls, interspersed with dark, clumsy oil paintings depicting the fourteen stations of the cross. Except for a gruesome, life-sized crucifix, the altar was spare.

  Libby was still in the hospital. The doctors were going to let her attend the service, but when she got up to get dressed that morning, the bleeding started again. David stayed with her, and her parents arrived alone at the church. They sat in the front-right pew with Ernie Tola and Frank, who had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Lewis sat in the left-front pew between Doc Perrin and Joe, who was dry-eyed but trembling. On Joe’s other side was Yvette, a regal-looking woman with white hair.

  Julie Swaggart sang “The Lord Is My Shepherd” in a rich, roomy voice. George, the former Round Rock chaplain, who had officiated at Red and Libby’s wedding, led everyone in the Lord’s Prayer and then read a passage from Meister Eckhart:

  Hold fast to God and he will add every good thing. Seek God and you shall find him and all good with him. To the man who cleaves to God, God cleaves and adds virtue. Thus, what you have sought before, now seeks you; what once you pursued, now pursues you; what once you fled, now flees you. Everything comes to him who truly comes to God, bringing all divinity with it, while all that is strange and alien flies away.

  Doc Perrin spoke the main eulogy, and kept it clean and short for the lay audience: a list of awards and accomplishments. Luis Salazar gave a formal speech filled with hyperbole: “My great friend … the most God-loving man….” Lewis told how he and Red used to drive all over Ventura picking up supplies, and how long it took because Red fell into conversations at every stop. From the pulpit, Lewis spotted Billie Fitzgerald in a black suit sitting in the back bracketed by the Bills.

  Libby’s father got up and said how happy Red had made his daughter, and conveyed Libby’s thanks to all their friends for coming as well as her request that any contributions be made to Round Rock’s residential financial aid fund.

  All the speakers were so afraid of taking too long, they didn’t speak long enough. The funeral was over in thirty-five minutes.

  Afterward, a lunch was held in the town park. Lewis stayed for a few minutes; then he and Barbara drove back to the Blue House and started making lasagna for dinner. It felt good to be doing something, anything, even browning meat and stirring a big vat of spattering sauce. Lewis couldn’t stop thinking or talking about Red. “I got a lift every time I saw him. He was so comfortable to be around. More comfortable than anyone, ever, in my family. He was always so even-tempered, so amused by life.”

  Barbara let him talk. “Grief seems to be a form of obsession,” she said when he apologized for going on so. “You have to go over and over everything, if only to fully discover what you’ve lost.”

  As soon as the men were served, Lewis and Barbara drove back to the hospital. Libby was sleeping, her mother said, and sedated. So far, there was no miscarriage. They were going to stitch her shut and she would have to spend the rest of her pregnancy in bed. “She’ll come home with us,” said Evelyn. “That’s best.”

  Lewis and Barbara stayed with Libby so her parents could get some dinner. Lewis liked sitting in the dim, quiet room. At one point, when Barbara went out to call her boyfriend, he cried a little. He rinsed out another washcloth and held it to his own face until Libby spoke. “Lewis? Are you all right?”

  He told her his version of the funeral. “The ceremony was a little short.”

  She closed her eyes. Let out a long breath.

  “I’m going to be okay, I think,” she said. “I’m going to carry this baby full-term and all of us are somehow going to be okay.”

  Hearing this, Lewis’s chest started to jump. He couldn’t stop it. First, he made a high, soaring whine, then began to sob. He held the washcloth against his mouth as a kind of muffler—he didn’t want the whole hospital staff running in to see what all the racket was about. Libby looked on, tears streaming from her bright eyes. Lewis bent over, bellowed into his lap, and she touched his hair, his forehead, the edges of his arms, whatever part of him she could reach.

  LIBBY’S refusal to go home with her parents caused some bad feeling, especially between mother and daughter.

  Initially, she wanted to go back to her house on her property, but David and Lewis suggested she move into Red’s bungalow on the farm so they could keep an eye on her. After some consideration, she agreed. This caused further ill will: Evelyn was convinced that staying at Red’s place would be gratuitously distressing, while David and Lewis argued that Libby wouldn’t feel so isolated, and also she could work there, from the bed, once she felt up to it.

  Lewis spent Monday afternoon at Libby’s bungalow catching her two young cats, then set up a bedside desk at Red’s with her computer and telephone. The next afternoon, Libby came home from
the hospital. When Lewis stopped in to see her, Evelyn was in the kitchen unpacking groceries. “It almost killed her to walk in here,” she told him in a harsh whisper.

  Hot with shame, Lewis tapped on the bedroom door.

  Libby smiled, though her eyes and nose were red and her cheeks were wet. The cats curled like round pillows on the bed, one black, one calico. “Great desk setup,” she said. “And these monsters …” She scratched the calico’s head. “You haven’t seen Billie, have you?”

  Lewis gave a short laugh. “Billie and I don’t exactly hang out much.”

  “Not even in town or driving around? I’m just curious to know if she’s here or gone.”

  “Here, I guess, unless someone else is driving her truck.”

  Libby pulled the sheets over her face and he could see her body quaking.

  Evelyn came in behind him. “Oh, honey, you can’t keep this up….” She sighed and turned to Lewis. “I told her it would be too emotional for her to be here.”

  Every time Libby collapsed, Evelyn blamed it on her being in Red’s house, and spoke in sharp, hurried tones, as if a week of grief were already excessive. After three or four days, there was a scene and Libby asked her mother to leave. Barbara came up for the next ten days and Libby still cried frequently, but was less prone to wild bouts of self-reproach.

  Together, everyone at Round Rock moved slowly out of a stunned lethargy. In retrospect, the first week following Red’s death—the huge nightly AA meetings, the funeral—seemed lit in rich, somber tones and executed in slow motion. Bit by bit, Lewis felt himself jerked back into the harsh glare of daily life with all its demands and the awful knowledge that Red would not be joining the staff for coffee in the mornings. He would not be telling stories while painting at the new house. He would not walk by on his morning rounds or clatter past in his old Ford truck.

  The truck was at Harry Zeno’s junkyard, and Libby asked Lewis to decide whether it should be repaired, sold, or junked. The sheriff had brought in the groceries and new luggage that were strewn in the ditch at the accident, but nobody had gone through the cab.

  The junkyard was a small field of wrecked cars sunk in weeds, with a teardrop trailer for an office. Red’s truck was right by the front gate, its toothy grille snarled as if still frozen in the anticipation of impact. The accident itself wasn’t much more than a fender bender—the fan wasn’t even smashed into the radiator. There was not nearly enough damage to kill anyone.

  The heated-up cab smelled strongly of old oil, hot dust, and decomposing rubber, the smells Lewis remembered from that first ride he took with Red Ray from detox. His fingers went numb around the glove-compartment clasp, his vision suddenly darkened. A cardboard coffee cup lolled on the floorboards. The glove compartment contained maps, a half-full bottle of Excedrin. Lewis’s lips tingled, as if charged with electrical current: the smears on the steering wheel and floor that looked like dried chocolate ice cream were Red’s blood.

  Lewis curled up on the front seat. It seemed unfair, cruelly ironic, and unspeakably sad that Red, who devoted so much of his life to chiseling away at human desperation and loneliness, was alone when his heart exploded, when his truck sprang for the trees.

  Lewis had the Ford towed to a body shop in Rito. Once it was repaired, he and David caravaned south and sold it to a prop house in Burbank.

  CLEO BARKIN, as president of Round Rock’s board of directors, served as the temporary director; that is, she signed the checks. Lewis took over the supply runs and helped Libby with the secretarial tasks. David coordinated the staff and volunteers and split the intake and exit interviews with the psychologist. By each taking a few of Red’s duties, they kept the place operating, but any long-range planning was put on hold. For Red, Round Rock had been an ongoing, dynamic picture in his head, and he knew instinctively and absolutely what should come into that picture and what should go out. Countless small decisions were made against his sense of the larger whole: when to call a repairman, arborist, or psychiatrist, when to just fix the problem himself. Nobody else had Red’s overview, not yet, and slowly a sprung or fractured quality crept into farm life. No single thing faltered, but on some days it felt as if a good gust of wind could sweep the entire enterprise off the map.

  LIBBY was confined to bed. She stretched this to mean sitting on pillows on the back stoop, sunning her legs. Barbara and Lewis moved bookshelves and a large bow-front dresser out of the bedroom to make way for a white wicker bassinet. The top of a small, low dresser became a padded changing table. Red’s closet was emptied and refurnished with Formica shelves filled with cloth diapers, receiving blankets, and stacks of doll-sized clothes. Red’s wardrobe was heaped in the living room in languorous bales of lightly starched dress shirts, plastic-wrapped, custom-made suits. Given his choice, Lewis took two cashmere sweaters and three silk ties.

  When Barbara left, David arranged for his aunt Gloria to come in mornings and evenings, prepare meals, and sit with Libby. During the days Libby read books, tried to do office work. She called Lewis at all hours, at his bungalow or in the kitchen. “I hate to bother you,” she said. “Can you talk?”

  “Sure.” Holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder, Lewis would chop onions, flip turkey burgers.

  “I was thinking,” Libby said. “Maybe Billie really was in love with Red all these years. She showed up for his funeral, after all. Have you heard anything about her moving?”

  “Maybe you should write about this in your journal,” said Lewis.

  “I wouldn’t know where to start,” she said.

  “Pretend it’s a letter. Pretend you’re talking.”

  Sometimes, after Gloria went home at night, Lewis came over, and they read or discussed farm business. She didn’t know what to do about the new house on the hill, which was being painted, tiled, and carpeted according to schedule. “I say I want to stay in this valley, because that’s where my friends are, but when I actually look at what I mean by that, I see that Red is dead and Billie won’t talk to me, and you’re going away to teach soon and David I’m just getting to know. … Do I want to ramble around the new house all alone with a baby? Should I move back to Los Angeles? I don’t have any friends there, either.”

  “Maybe now isn’t the time to make any big decisions,” Lewis said. “Let’s concentrate on having a healthy baby first.”

  “Since when do you sound like a shrink, Lewis?” Libby laughed, then began to cry. “Oh, I know Billie’s not your favorite person. I wish I knew what happened. Do you have any idea?”

  “She has a mean streak,” he said.

  A few days later, Libby handed him a letter to read.

  Dearest Billie,

  I love you and miss you desperately, and yearn to talk to you, to hear your voice, to see your beautiful face.

  I’m afraid I hurt your feelings in a way I’m too dense to see—I feel helplessly, damningly oblivious. I’ll do whatever I can to make it up to you.

  I can’t live in this valley without your friendship. Please come see me or call, or at least write and tell me what I can do to clear the way for our friendship to resume. If this is not possible, at least let me know why not, and where my insensitivity lies.

  Love,

  Libby

  “Should I mail it?” she asked Lewis.

  “I don’t see why not,” he said.

  LIBBY sometimes played the violin when she couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t loud enough to keep anyone else awake; Lewis was already an insomniac. She played Bach cello suites, transposed for the violin—dry, vigorous workouts designed, it seemed, to carry the listener down some endlessly branching path deep into the soul. Or she’d take up a fiddle tune—“Sweet Georgia Brown,” “The Maiden’s Prayer,” or “I Don’t Love Nobody”—then break it down into variation after variation, complicating, tangling, slurring, sometimes deconstructing the melody into a few coughy, unrecognizable phrases sawed this way and that; and then, gathering energy, she’d slowly tool her way back home.


  One night, prodded by the violin’s restless meanderings as if by an insistent finger of smoke, Lewis hauled himself to the kitchen table. The last chapter of his dissertation was the one place where, after citing some two hundred secondary sources in the preceding pages, he could actually express his own opinions. Without looking at any notes, Lewis wrote the first sentence in longhand: “Fondness and abiding mutual interest characterize the friendship of Flaubert and Turgenev….”

  LIBBY dug out her journal: First time I’ve written since you died, Red. I couldn’t face the page. Lewis has been after me. He’s only being nice, though. He never did like my journal. Pretend it’s a letter, he says. And I thought, I could write to you, which filled me with relief. Am I refusing to let you go? Who cares? I’m as entitled to denial as to the other four stages of grief. And you do seem close by. I suspect you are seeing and hearing everything.

  It was odd to keep a journal where the big events were lacunae. Red’s death was missing, and—Libby counted—the four weeks that followed. A month. Is this how life was going to be, she wondered, a dreary accumulation of time without Red?

  I’m housebound in bed. How nineteenth century. The invalid—what a strange, accurate word. One does feel so marginalized, so out-of-life’s-flow, so stumped by sadness here in this bed. It makes me cry to write to you, Red. Who could cry this much?

  THE THOUGHT of writing to Red woke Libby up each morning. She couldn’t wait. So she went batty for a few months, nobody would blame her. There was something deliciously dotty in writing to her dead husband while wearing his pajamas. She had new empathy for her mother’s friend Betty. When her husband died, Betty wore his clothes every day for over a year—pants cuffed broadly, the sleeves of his shirts rolled up around her wrists in thick doughnuts—as if to reanimate them. Such visible, guileless grief had made Libby’s mother frantic, of course. But Libby now understood the quaint and harmless charm of Betty’s actions; and who could’ve guessed Red’s cotton pj’s would be such perfect maternity wear?