“Give that to me,” Beth says, startling Jeanette so badly she pokes her eye with the pencil, tearing up. When Beth takes the eyeliner from her, she realizes she’s still holding the TV remote.
“I was just trying it out,” Jeanette says simply.
“You can wear makeup when you’re in high school,” Beth says.
“What, are you going to cut my eyelashes off, too?”
“Go to your room,” Beth says. “And hand over your cellphone.” As Jeanette slaps her phone into her mother’s hand and huffs past, Beth says, “I don’t want to hear your stereo, either.” Beth waits for her door to slam, but of course it doesn’t. Jeanette is too reserved for that.
“Leave my daughter alone,” Beth says.
“She’s been left alone plenty.”
“You sure have all the answers, don’t you?”
“Your daughter is lonely, Beth. I was just trying to cheer her up.”
“Jeanette has lots of friends,” Beth says, but the look Linda gives says she knows it’s a lie as much as Beth does.
“She had friends,” Linda says, “back in Charlotte. She feels isolated here. And she hates what you did to her hair.”
Beth can’t help but wonder how much time Linda has been spending with Jeanette. More than grocery shopping, it seems.
“Her hair is none of your business,” Beth says.
“And her history teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, has been giving her a hard time again.”
“We don’t need you here,” Beth says. “You can go back to your family.”
“Ernest invited me to move in here. If anyone leaves, it should be you.”
The TV on the nightstand turns on. Beth looks at her fist, still clenched around the remote. The same news story is playing, although on a different station. They show Gilmer and his sister being led out of the courthouse. A shot of their home, stock footage from last spring: a little blue box of a house, green trim, gingerbread up by the roof painted pink. Beth remembers him inside this house. Inside the laundry room. Staring at his belly, too close to her face.
Beth needs to sit down.
Linda pales. She’s rubbing her belly down low, holding on to it like it might fall off her. “Stuff like this just doesn’t happen in River Bend,” she says.
And Beth really looks at her now. Linda’s only seven years Beth’s junior, but she seems a lot younger. Her face is untroubled, even as her eyes fill with tears. Beth remembers Linda as a child, out on her family’s farm, remembers Linda on crutches, her foot in a cast because her horse had thrown her. Her hands and neck were always torn up with corn rash during the fall harvest. Beth almost wants to protect her, until she reminds herself that Linda is the enemy.
“Get your head out of your ass,” Beth says.
“Excuse me?”
“This kind of thing happens all the time. No, I’m not buying it, your naive act. You know damn well how this town works. And it’s people like you, people who turn a blind eye. You make me sick, all of you.”
“The fuck’s your problem?” Linda gets up to leave, but Beth blocks the door.
“No, you’re going to listen to me. You need to stay away from my daughter. Go back to your own family. Such as it is.” Beth can hear herself, can hear her voice getting higher, louder. From the dark well in her mind, Eliza yells at her, tells her to stop, that she’s being cruel, but Beth won’t listen.
“You think just because you opened your legs, you’re a part of this family? I know you. I know where you come from, what you come from. Stay away from my daughter.”
“Mom,” Dan calls up the stairs. His voice sounds so distant, small enough to brush away.
“You don’t believe that,” Eliza says, splashing her arms and legs, making waves. “You’re being nasty.”
“Shut up. Will you just shut up a second?” Beth says.
“I didn’t say anything,” Linda says, her face pinched in grief.
“You think you can just sit on your ass here, that because you’re having a baby we’ll take care of you? We’ll pay for your fancy coffee? And that’s another thing. You know you’re not supposed to have caffeine, right? You’re not even growing a baby right. You’re a mess.”
“I’m a mess? Your own children can’t stand to be in the same room with you.”
“She’s right, you know,” Eliza says.
“Oh, hell no,” Beth says.
“There’s like this cloud of funk that follows you around,” Linda says. “You can smell it.”
“I’m not above smacking a pregnant woman.”
“Mom,” Dan calls again. His voice sounds urgent now. When he appears in the doorway, he looks so small, so young. “Granddad fell.”
Linda is out of the room and down the stairs in half the time it takes Beth to turn inward to Eliza and ask her to take this one. But Eliza only splashes harder. “I thought you didn’t need me.”
In the dining room, Beth finds the scene she doesn’t want to face: Dan kneeling by his granddad, trying to shake him awake, Linda staring with a hand over her open mouth, and Ernest on the floor, not crumpled like Beth had imagined, but sprawled on his side like a child in sleep, one arm pinned under him. If it weren’t for his quick shallow breathing, and his glasses crushed beneath his face, Beth could have told herself he was sleeping.
* * *
• • •
The third stroke leaves Ernest DeWitt speechless, vacant, hobbled, unable to go to the bathroom on his own. He can’t get out of bed without assistance. If Linda has had an easy life, that’s done for now.
Beth looks into a hospice facility but can’t afford it. Instead, they rent a hospital bed and set it up in the dining room. A nurse comes and hooks Ernest to IVs. Nurses visit twice a day to administer his meds, monitor his vitals. Linda is at first reluctant to help, at least with the messier jobs. She’ll feed him, bathe him, brush his hair, help him walk from one room to the next, but she doesn’t want to change him when he’s soiled himself. She can’t go there, can’t fully move her heart into the role of caregiver. This she leaves to Beth.
Today, Beth bathes Ernest, changes his clothes, and brings him out to a rocking chair she’s gotten for the back porch. If she doesn’t think of him as her father, she finds that she doesn’t mind too terribly that she has to care for him, has to step into the role of mother or nurse. Her own children’s infancies had been the moments of motherhood in which she felt most comfortable. Those years in which her children’s lives were entirely hers. There was no reason to believe they had thoughts or experiences beyond their small worlds: the nursery with its blue bunny wallpaper, the kitchen, the shady sparse grass of the backyard, the car, the stroller. There was no way yet for her to have screwed them up too badly.
Ernest was like that now, his blue eyes showing no signs that he knew Beth, that there were irrevocable moments between them. Yet he is her father, and how weird to be changing his diapers. She wonders how often he changed hers, and how often he left it up to her mother. In her mind, Beth has an estimate and is keeping a tally, a kind of score, who has been better to whom. Beth feels like she’s winning. And she holds on to this tally, because to address the way she really feels—the devastating knowledge she’s never had a real relationship with her father, and now she never will—to look this grief in the eye would surely break her.
* * *
• • •
For the times Beth is at work, Linda calls her stepbrother, Derek, and Derek comes immediately, changing his schedule to work nights at the hospital. The first time Beth meets him, she thinks, This poor fool’s in love with Linda. He’d do anything for her, and she’d let him do it.
After the third time, Beth tells Linda, “You need to let Derek be,” and to her great surprise, Linda doesn’t argue. Derek goes back to working days, and Linda takes over Ernest’s care. Beth tells herself it’s good practice f
or when the baby comes in six months, but she knows it’s different. She can see it in Linda’s eyes. Linda now walks around the house in a daze, her eyes set a hundred feet ahead of her.
When Beth is home, Linda uses the time to get out of the house, to go bother her silly sucker of a stepbrother at his own house. Good riddance, Beth thinks.
She, too, turns outside of herself for comfort. Her chosen diversion is Steve, and she grows reckless in her need. She calls him at home, talks to his kids like she’s a telemarketer. She drives by his house to see if his truck is parked outside. Eliza shakes her head, but Beth ignores her.
When they leave the motel room, Steve always goes out before her, and she usually waits for his truck to clear the parking lot before she exits, but not tonight. Tonight, she walks out at the same time, hugging herself against the early November chill.
“I know it was you who called my landline the other night. What happened to being careful?” he asks.
“Fuck it,” she says.
“Someone will see us,” he says, and while his voice is even, his eyes hold the warning of real anger.
“Nobody’s here,” Beth says.
“I’m here,” Paula says. She’s such a tiny woman, neither Beth nor Steve noticed her in the doorway to the room next door. “Then again, I’ve seen you two coming and going from here all month. You’ve never been discreet.”
Steve stops on the sidewalk. He towers over Paula, but the woman doesn’t flinch. For the first time, Beth realizes how imposing Steve is, how threatening. She’s never seen this before. When she was younger, when she and Steve were first together, she’d thought him quite dashing, romantic even, when he held doors for her, when he wrote her love letters in French. Only recently has she begun to see him clearly. Steve the redneck. Steve the drunk. Just another violent Brody. The magic was all in her head; Steve is a man incapable of magic.
“What do you want to keep your mouth shut?” Steve says. He’s seen Paula skulking around the bar lately, no doubt looking for Jared. He knows his wife’s sister-in-law well enough to know there’s a price, and it isn’t likely to be monetary.
“You sure Deb doesn’t already know?”
Beth watches Steve’s eyes, those round hamster eyes, grow even wider. How had she never noticed it before, that rodent quality to him? She used to think he was smart, because that’s how he thought of himself. But he isn’t, not exceptionally so. Or at least, he isn’t anymore. Perhaps he never was, or perhaps alcohol has taken his brain down a few pegs. Either way, she realizes it had never before occurred to him that he might get caught.
And how arrogant! She supposes he thought himself safe before, too, decades ago when he was cheating on her. His arrogance makes her want to carry on until they are caught; she wants to ruin him, even if she has to ruin herself in the process.
“Of course she doesn’t know,” Beth says, “or I’d have heard from her.”
Paula appraises Steve. She doesn’t even look at Beth. She sees more than enough of the woman at work.
“I want a divorce,” she says. “Talk to Jared. Convince him. It’s more than time he moved on.”
“You yeasty little asshole,” Beth says. “You’re blackmailing us?” Part of Beth panics, lashes out, but part of her welcomes this interloper. Let her run to Deb, let her tell on them. Burn it all down.
“Beth,” Steve warns.
“Yes, control your woman,” Paula says.
“I’ll do it,” Steve says.
Paula nods, and without a glance at either of them, goes back in her room.
* * *
• • •
November settles in with pewter gray skies and brown leaves shushed on the ground. When the oak tree in the front yard is bare, its branches a tangle of black against the sky, Beth feels herself settling in for the winter, her body heavy and slow. Ernest sits on the back porch, watching everything and nothing. It’s been almost two weeks since his stroke, and the family has settled into a new normal, a rhythm revolving around his care. Beth is keeping an eye on him while raking leaves into waist-high piles when Steve’s truck pulls through the alley. Dan is in the passenger’s seat.
“I thought you were at band rehearsal,” Beth says when Dan gets out, lugging his backpack.
“He came home with my daughter,” Steve says. He shuts off the truck, hops out, and walks toward Beth.
“Thanks for the ride,” Dan says. He already has his phone out and is texting on his way into the house.
“Yes, thank you,” Beth says to Steve. “You can go now.” She won’t look at him. She hasn’t seen him since they ran into Paula at the motel three days ago, and she’s weak with wanting, dizzy as she wrestles leaves into a bag. Most of them end up back on the ground at her feet.
“I’m sorry to hear about your father,” Steve says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She looks over at Ernest. She knows she should dismiss Steve again, but she’s too tired. She wants nothing more than to let Eliza take over. In her twenties, it took everything she had to pull herself up and out of his life, to leave him alone with Deb. She doesn’t have it in her to do it again. He takes the rake from her, lets her hold the bag. When he bends down to scoop leaves, she notices his sunburnt skin.
“I always knew you were a redneck,” she says, touching him there. In a moment of panic, she checks on Ernest again, who still hasn’t moved.
“You’re going to do this here, in front of Father?” Eliza says.
Steve straightens, his face serious, and he kisses Beth gently, so gently, and Eliza whispers to Beth, “This is your fault, all your fault.”
Elizabeth DeWitt
18
I have a secret boyfriend. Steve and I meet in an empty field behind my apartment, out of sight of my mom’s bedroom window. When I get there, he’s already sitting in the grass, his back against the fence. We’ve been meeting every night for a week, like something from a romance novel. Now, sleep deprived, I worry he’s a fiction I’ve created. He turns to look at me, his features redefined by a moon bright enough to cast shadows. I touch his face to prove he’s really there. My hand, dark, so close to his skin.
He’s the only boy who has ever loved me, the only boy, I’m sure, who will ever love me. I’m dark and I’m sullied, but Steve takes my hand and kisses it.
We watch the moon roll across the sky. Eventually, he gets up and brushes the grass from his jeans. He wants to get home before the world wakes up, but I grab his hand, pull him back down.
“Let them wake up,” I say. “Let them know you’ve been in a field all night.”
He sits down with me for a few more minutes.
SETTLING
1998
Steve tried to steady his hand to shave. He didn’t know why he was so nervous—maybe because he had a soft spot for Deb? She’d always reminded him of a small wounded animal. Like the baby bird he’d seen hit by a car, its head split open like a ripe tomato, or the raccoon his dad shot in the barn, not quite killing it. His dad couldn’t be bothered to put another bullet in the poor thing. Steve tried to nurse the raccoon back to health. When he failed, he made himself end its suffering.
He kept nicking himself as he shaved, had to blot his face with toilet paper. By the time he left the house, he was already ten minutes late. He stepped outside to a cold, bright Thanksgiving morning. The night before saw the first snow of the season. Just a dusting, but the world was new and white, and when he pulled up at the Williamses’ farm—the crumbling barn, the broken tractor parked off in the field, the horses whinnying in the paddock, the scrawny chickens pecking at dried corn sprinkled on the snow—he almost lost his nerve. He’d dropped Deb off here dozens of times, but he’d never been invited in to meet her family, not until today. He loved Deb, he really did. He was excited about the child growing inside her. Part of him wanted to step up, to be the man of this farm, to help
make the repairs that required a little brawn.
The other part of him frantically needed to be with Beth.
He wouldn’t see Beth today. She was up in Kalamazoo at school and wouldn’t come home for Thanksgiving this year. She was fighting with her mother. He was to spend the entire day with Deb’s cobbled-together family—her mother, who didn’t approve of him and made no bones about it; her brother, Jared; his wife, Paula; and their collected kids. He and Deb hung out a lot with Jared and Paula, who were both a few years older. Steve always felt like he had to catch up with them. Jared was good people, chill, quiet, loved fishing as much as Steve did. Paula, though. He didn’t trust her. When she looked at him, he had the unsettling feeling she saw right through him.
He took a deep breath before getting out of the car. To be honest, he didn’t feel like he belonged here, in this family, on this farm. He’d been thinking about breaking up with Deb for about a year now, and Beth had decided today was the day. He knew it was what Deb’s family expected of him. But he didn’t like doing what was expected. Plus, there was the baby. So when Deb invited him to spend Thanksgiving with her family, he accepted.
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