by Lynne Hugo
“Takin’ the back way, avoidin’ town. Thought you might like the scenery.”
Instantly on guard. “What’s going on?”
“Relax. Jesus. You’d think I was the one that shot you.” He chuckled with a sheesh mixed into it under his breath. “Look, there’s a bunch of horses out to pasture over there.”
“Yeah, Eddie, this is Kentucky. The Bluegrass Region. That’s what we do here.” She shifted from one hip to the other.
“You used to ride and, ah, see to the horses, right?”
“What’re you getting at?”
“Man, you are as paranoid as your mother. I’m just makin’ conversation.”
“You’re full of shit.”
Eddie was quiet for a good two minutes, then tried again. “So, you used to ride and stuff? Take care of … I mean, your mom said you did.”
Carley turned and eyed him. Outside the car, pastures passed like squares of a quilt stitched with Kentucky board fences. Of course, it was Jewel who had noticed this and mentioned it, long ago, but the thought had stuck because Eddie’s grandmother used to make quilts. The heads of Thoroughbreds were down, grazing. Grass shone silvery in the slant morning light. “And you’re just making conversation, right?” she interrupted. She cracked her knuckles with one hand, then the other. Then she flicked her thumb up and down like the cocking mechanism of a gun. There was a small sore on it that looked like a sunset.
“Sure,” he said.
“Well, let’s talk about baseball, then. Who do you like for the World Series?”
“Way too early for that,” Eddie said uneasily.
“Well, not really. Your Reds are out. Of course, they’ve been out since opening day, as usual.” She was taunting him. “I like Boston, myself. Want to put a little money on anybody to make it to the series? I’ll take Boston.” Carley watched Eddie’s face through narrowed eyes.
“Nah, not against Boston. That’s like payin’ you to be right,” he greased the skids, having learned from Jewel how much women like to be told they’re right. “So did you ever get into horseracing? The Derby and the Triple Crown stuff? Your grandfather was quite a horseman in his day, and, of course, your mother is …”
“Cut the shit, Eddie. I’m not stupid. What do you want?”
With great effort, Eddie resisted the temptation to respond to Carley’s I’m not stupid comment by making reference to her shirt. Instead, he sighed deeply. He’d obviously gotten off on the wrong foot and then put the damn thing in his mouth.
“Goddammit,” he said softly, shaking his head in a slow small way, sighing deeply.
“Spit it out, Eddie. And open your eyes!” She said the last loudly, grabbing the wheel and correcting the truck’s trajectory as it drifted toward the right shoulder where a deep runoff ditch had been cut the year before last. Cornflowers and Queen Anne’s Lace edged it now.
He controlled the wheel. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Do you want something at Dunkin’ Donuts?”
“Sure. But I can’t be late to day treatment or they can kick me out, which would be a true heartbreak, and you’ll be late to work. Don’t want you blamin’ me for either one.”
“Pfft. I’m late every day.” It wasn’t true, not even close.
Carley shot him a look. “Why would you be late every day? That makes no sense. This is the first day you’ve driven me, and you only offered because Mom got overtime.”
Eddie shut up. He was plain out of options. “We’re five minutes to Dunkin’ Donuts. We’ll sit down in there, and I’ll lay it out,” he said.
Carley had black coffee and a chocolate-frosted donut. Eddie had two custard-filled and coffee with cream and sugar. They’d carried it all to a small booth in the back corner, and Eddie sat facing the window so he could keep an eye on his truck. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust people, but he preferred to be careful.
As he ate, Carley eyed him warily, waiting.
He took his time answering. “Okay,” he said, licking custard from his top lip after the first donut. “Here’s the deal. You want out of day treatment, is that right?”
Carley was canny. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, took a bite of donut, and hid her eyes from Eddie while she looked for her napkin, wiped her lips, inspected the napkin for lip gloss, and spread it out in her lap with elaborate care. “Depends on the circumstances. I’m listening.”
“Uh, can I ask you not to tell your mother something? I wouldn’t normally do that, but this here’s, uh, different.” The idea of trusting Carley made Eddie sweat in the air conditioning. He laid his cap on the battered red vinyl seat of his side of the booth and used his forearm to wipe his forehead. Grinning donuts danced on posters above his head; for the next act, he figured he’d be out in the barn, and the damn horses would be singing opera to him. That’s how far gone he was, making devil’s pacts with Cal and Carley.
“Wouldn’t be the first time I didn’t tell her something,” Carley said, and he was so desperate he took that for yes. Eddie hated that she knew he wanted something; she was playing it so cool now, she might as well have slept on cucumbers.
“I just bet,” Eddie said bitterly, quietly, then reined himself in. He rubbed his forehead and eyes as if he had a headache, which he did. “Look,” he said. “I have a deal to offer you. I need help. You want out of day treatment. Can you stay straight?”
“Do I look high?”
“Carley, anyone who has seventeen holes in her face pretty much always looks high to me.” He gave his shrug and waited until she met his eyes before he put his hands down. “I’m not going to turn you in, so just give me an answer.”
“Not seventeen,” Carley said sullenly. Her hair was maybe three inches grown out now, a single bizarre light stripe over the faded black-dyed bottom. She’d taken out the eyebrow ring thanks to Jewel’s nagging. “I’m straight right now. They do random pee tests in day treatment,” she said finally.
“Could you stay straight? Without being locked up during the day, I mean?” Eddie studied Carley’s face, and he imagined she was trying to figure his angle. It was almost funny. Now he had maybe two fingers of an upper hand. She sure had her mother’s eyes, that big sky color, but her features were finer. Maybe it was that the cheekbones were higher, the skin was drawn tighter over her features, but she just had a more delicate look. When she let her hair out of the ponytail, it waved around her shoulders the way Jewel’s used to at night, except for that weird two-tone thing Carley had going on.
“I just want to get back with Roland. Then I’ll be outta your hair, whatever you’re up to. You can tell Mom I gave you the slip, and I took money out of your wallet. She’ll believe that, easy. I’ll stay gone and keep quiet …” She looked at him, spinning it out wordlessly, offering an alternative deal.
“Not one of the options on the table. It’s day treatment and the evenings chained to your mama ’n’ yours truly. Or you stay one-hundred percent sober without going to rehab, and I find something else to keep you busy during the daytime instead. I drive you back and forth, and you still gotta spend the nights with us. That’s the two choices. So how much do you hate day treatment, and will you keep it a secret? I mean, if I get you out of it?”
Disgust came over her face, and she started to slide out of the booth. “Gross, Eddie, if you think … God, you are a pig, you are …”
He grabbed her wrist, remembering just in time to avoid the wound on her hand, only lightly bandaged now. “Sit down. For God’s sake, Carley, I don’t even want to know what’s in your twisted little brain. This has to do with taking care of your grandparents. Well, not just them, really. This also has to do with the damn horses. Remember ‘the beauties’?” He put quotation marks in the air with his fingers as he said the last two words with a bitter sadness.
“Oh,” she said, settling back. “What’s the deal?” Eddie noted she was decent enough to be flushed.
Forty minutes later, Eddie pulled the truck into his in-laws’ driveway, the tires crunching on
gravel and the first browning leaves of the great shade oak, ones that had lost the battle with drought. Soon enough the acorns and Osage oranges would compete for space with the gravel, and walking to the house would be a hazard.
He’d underestimated how long this all was going to take, and now he’d had to call himself off work. He’d spun a story about losing a filling, how he had to go to the dentist and would get there as soon as he could. It had been Carley’s idea. It would come out of his sick time, no big loss, but it still made him uneasy. He could only do that so many times. It looked bad on a personnel record, and he was a foreman, for God’s sake.
“Come on, Carley,” he said. “Let’s get crackin’. Fair warning. It’s not pretty in there. Might not pass sanitation inspection, shall we say.” He chuckled wanly as he got out of the driver’s side.
Carley hesitated on her side of the truck, still holding the handle of the door. “Grandpa hates me, y’know. This isn’t just coming by for an hour.” Her voice was almost a whisper. She cracked her knuckles again.
“Quit doin’ that, will you?” He nodded with his whole head at her hands. “Long time ago, girl. Let it go. Lotta water under the dam.” He put his hand on her shoulder.
Eddie walked by Carley’s side on the dirt path to the house. Hack had lined it with flagstones when he was young, but the comings and goings of years had sunk them. The grass on either side was a patchy, weedy mess, as it was in front of the house. Eddie and Cal had relied on the heat to keep it from growing, though Cal had mowed the front once, two weeks ago.
Eddie took the two steps one at a time to the back door and opened it. A finger to his lips. “Cal!” A stage whisper into the kitchen, cave-like from the brightness of the morning.
Carley peered around his shoulder. The jagged outline of dishes and boxes, like a small city on the kitchen table. Suburbs on every counter. An open loaf of bread spilling its contents. A peanut butter jar, lid off. “Holy crap,” she breathed. “Has Grandma been in here?”
Eddie motioned Carley to follow him inside, again making the finger-to-lips signal for quiet. Cal lumbered into view just as they got inside the door, Carley still taking in the mess.
“They’re sleepin’. Keep it down,” Cal offered. He glanced at Carley. “Hey,” he said in her direction. Then, to Eddie, “She doin’ her thing?”
“Whatever that means,” Carley said.
“Carley will take care of the horses,” Eddie said slowly and deliberately to Cal, a subtext there that Carley wasn’t sure of. “She’s gonna see about the black one that might have a little problem, too. And help out in the house. I got something to say to both of you, and I’ll just say it once so you both can hear. Carley, I’m not your mother, I’m not blind, and I’ll figure it out if you’re using. The first time—not the second, but the first—the deal’s off, you’re busted, and the truck heads back to rehab—not here—the next morning.” He paused and narrowed his eyes at his brother-in-law. “Cal, you give her one joint, one beer, one anything, or you use anything when she’s here, and you’re outta here. And I’m meaning not one step out of line in any direction. I’ve got a very long memory, if you get my meaning.” Eddie searched out the scar on Cal’s hand and stared at it long enough to make clear that he knew its history. He was gratified to see Cal move the hand behind him, ostensibly to hook it on his waistband, as he made a show of shifting positions. Satisfied, Eddie continued. “Carley and I can handle this by ourselves. You’re an extra, remember that. Don’t think I can’t get you gone, because I can.”
Cal made a stop sign with his unscarred hand. “Whoa there. What’s this? Shootout at the O-fucking-K Corral? Who died and made you God?”
“Jewel. Only she didn’t die, she quit, and I’m the one that’s come up with a plan that gives everybody what they want.” He took a step in Cal’s direction, a finger jabbing toward Cal’s chest. “You got a better one?”
Cal’s hand went down, but he took a step forward, glaring, though they were still a good five feet apart in the kitchen.
“Oh my God. What is this? The Middle-Aged Testosterone Showdown?” Carley drawled in a bored voice. “Why don’t you cowboys either kill each other quick or back off? You’re both assholes.” She moved languidly to position herself between them. “Managing the horses is a piece of cake. I didn’t sign on to deal with horses’ asses. I can just stay in rehab if I want to be in a group with crazies. Are we doing this or not?”
It really put Eddie’s boxers in a twist that his druggie stepdaughter with black nail polish, striped hair, and seventeen holes in her face was right. It made him want to get rip-roaring drunk and then pass out and sleep off this whole clusterfuck for at least two or three days. Maybe then he’d wake up and poof! Jewel’s psychotic break would be over, Carley and Cal would be gone. He’d know life made sense again because the hair around Jewel’s face wouldn’t look like the fringe on his great-grandmother’s parlor curtains.
“Yeah,” Eddie said, “we’re doing this. Right, Cal?” He did stick an ominous undertone like a piece of log hidden in the river of his voice to float past Carley.
Cal got his drift. “Yeah,” he said. “We’re doin’ it. I’m in.”
The three of us are hungry flies in the kitchen. Eddie and Carley are crawling the cabinets for snacks while I fry burgers on the stove rather than take the time to light the grill outside.
“Mom,” Carley says, “it makes no sense for Eddie to take me back and forth to rehab. Just let me have my car back.”
“There’s some potato salad in the fridge, if you could grab it for me,” I say, and she ignores me in favor of potato chips, so I get it myself, along with lettuce and tomatoes I bought at a farm stand I pass on the way home from work. “I got us tomatoes and oops, beans too, at the stand, but the best of the season are gone. So where’s Chassie again?” I ask Eddie, an effort to divert Carley with bright patter, a smattering of flowers on a tired brown landscape.
Carley’s using her “start out reasonable, sound like an adult” approach. When I say no, she’ll get petulant and whiny first, then she’ll throw herself down Tantrum Alley. But she’s not going to get to me. Eddie’s offer last night to start handling Carley’s transportation to and from rehab made me feel like I’d been taking some of Roland’s better drugs, or Eddie had. At first, I tried to figure his angle, and then I was ashamed. Eddie was trying, and I resolved to match it; I’ll be picking Rocky up at football practice for him. He’s right that the timing works out better all around.
“A car would add temptation while you’re in rehab. I’m proud of you, honey. Let’s not make it hard for you to stick with the program,” I say in my best encouraging-mother voice. Eddie transported her both ways today, and there weren’t any problems. No blood on either one, for starters.
Carley’s not diverted. “Temptation for what?”
I nod at the T-shirt she’s wearing, a lovely job that says, I’m With Stupid. The shirt is the one piece of truth Roland’s introduced into her life. “You can’t be with him and stay sober, Carley. You know that,” I say slowly, as if she’s a little slow-witted.
I can almost stand back and watch the eruption coming. This must be how seismologists feel because I know what’s going to happen, and yet there’s nothing to be done. I busy myself turning burgers. When she doesn’t say anything, I use the flat of the spatula to press the meat into the pan. It hisses and spits.
I can only stare at hamburger so long. Just as I turn around, dredging for another bit of fake cheer, Carley speaks but to Eddie instead of me.
“Don’t you think it would be fine for me to have my car back, Eddie?” she says. I catch the face she’s giving him, which is dark and narrow as a cave. Eddie looks uncomfortable.
“Hey,” he says with a false-sounding half laugh. He leans over to scratch Copper’s back and head, which lets him duck down below the line of fire. “My dog ain’t in this fight. Right, Copper?”
“Right, Eddie,” she says in a tone that’s almost
menacing. “When did you ever stay out of anything that’s not your business? Should I have my car or not?”
“Hey, hey,” I say. “Let’s not have an uproar and just say we did. Carley, sorry, but Eddie’s got no pull in this. Your contract is with me. I’m keeping the keys to that car.”
“You’re the one who would be in jail.”
“And you were underage, drunk, and high. Anyway, our agreement is a done deal.”
Eddie crosses the kitchen in three steps and sidles up next to me. He puts his arm around me, which is something he used to do in another life. “Carley,” he says, and his voice is much kinder than usual, as if he’s put it through a strainer to remove anger and disgust. “Give it some time. Things’ll work out for you.” Again, he takes me as much by surprise as if a different movie started playing in the middle of a reel. It makes me think he’s accepting her living with us now.
Then he squeezes my shoulder. I kiss his cheek where the length of the day has roughened it, and he smiles.
“Sure they will, Eddie. And I know you’re gonna help them work out, aren’t you?” Vintage Carley.
But Eddie’s gestures have drained the swamp of my cynicism and refilled it with hope. Carley stomps off with her dinner plate and plunks it in front of the TV in the family room. On a whim, because he squeezed my shoulder, instead of heading for the TV, I hold out Eddie’s plate, raise my eyebrows as a question, and point to the dining room where we never eat except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. He shrugs and nods okay.
“We’re going in the other room, Carley, to get away from the TV.”
“Sounds excellent to me.”
I put out the flowered place mats and light candles, not really for light but to show him I am meeting nice with nice, and while we eat he tells me about the production halt at the plant that made the shift manager rabid and how they’d fixed the problem in just over a half hour, which he thought was pretty good, but Crosseyed Jim was still frothing at the mouth.
We are more relaxed together than we’ve been in weeks. “I went out and checked on the horses the other day. That’s actually how I caught Carley out of rehab. I’m usually a little late to pick her up, but since I’d taken off work to see the horses, I was early. Anyway, I had to see them, y’know? Make sure they’re okay. I mean, they should be, they’re pastured, but I miss them so much.” I surprise myself by telling him this.