by Lee Thompson
Geneva’s father had been a war hero. Raul had met him once, a stalwart, heavy-drinking man, he was not impressed at all by Raul, and he had said, quite plainly about Raul’s father: Men in his line of work were sick. Geneva had never apologized for his gruffness, how could she align her husband or her father, both so different it was as if they had come from different planets? Her older brother was a career soldier, too. Some kind of officer. Raul had never met him and didn’t care to. Of course, they weren’t the only ones to call his father sick for running a funeral home; Raul had taken plenty of jabs in school about that. He’d learned to make fun of it, teased himself before other kids got more than a word in. It wasn’t hard to see it coming, their ribbing. They always got a certain look in their eyes, as if they were somehow superior (this, he believed, the other kids had learned from their parents). But it was funny how, some of those kids, who ended up losing someone they loved, had come to their mother or father or aunt or uncle or older brother’s wake and they saw how tender and compassionate his father was, and what delicacy and detail he’d put into his work, how he made their family feel comfortable upon viewing the deceased in the highly polished box. Those kids would stand near their family with their fingers interlaced in front of their stomachs, their heads bowed. Raul had always approached them and put a gentle hand on their shoulders and there was a silent exchange in that touch and in his eyes, and in theirs. All is forgiven…
Raul and his father exchanged good-mornings. And then his father, Styrofoam cup in hand, sat at the table in the lounge and sipped his drink, his face momentarily reddening beneath his deep tan. Raul knew that look well. He said, “What is it?”
His father had been staring at his hands. They were large and soft. He studied his fingernails and flicked his middle finger off his thumb. His voice was deep and he spoke slowly, always, as far back as Raul could remember. “Have you noticed a change here at work?”
Raul quickly ran through a list of possible changes. The most recent had been six months ago when they’d hired an assistant to perform the more mundane tasks so they, he and his father, could do what they did best. Raul said, “Is this about Luther? What has he done that I’m unaware of?”
“No,” his father said, shaking his head. “Luther is fine. We’re fine, all of us, for the most part.”
“What happened?”
His dad shrugged and sipped more coffee. When he set the cup down, he said, “There has been a lag of people passing on this past month. Normally we have eight funerals a month. How many for February? Three.”
“Maybe death is on a holiday,” Raul said.
His dad gave him a chastising look. He’d never liked any kind of humor when it came to the deceased. Raul believed humor, no matter how black, and as long as it wasn’t in front of the unfortunate’s family, a wonderful release valve. You couldn’t see lifeless people day after day and not have it affect you, unless you could poke fun at that which terrified you.
He said, “What are you saying?”
“I’m going to have to lay someone off.”
Raul nodded. Luther would be heartbroken. He loved working with them, and he was exceptionally good at it, not to mention they both trusted him. “Do you want me to tell him?”
“Luther is staying. I need him, Raul. I can’t say for certain how long you’ll be laid off, but you’ll be back as soon as the work justifies your wages.”
“I’m unemployed?”
“Only temporarily,” his father said. He crushed his cup and stood and threw the cup in the trash can next to the counter where Raul had seen many, many family members look blankly into space, many times through him. He looked through his father now. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, just talking seemed incredibly important. But he couldn’t hold a conversation, couldn’t even begin one.
His father left the lounge. That was his way. A short, sharp jab to the solar plexus, and then walk away as if the wounded were unharmed. He rubbed his lips and then his forehead. It made no sense why Luther would get to keep his job. Didn’t seniority matter? Didn’t family?
He’d have to tell Geneva—that was at the top of his list—but how could she understand his father’s decision any more than he did? Raul was tempted to find him and demand he explain his reasoning, yet to what end? He didn’t really want to know why his father had chosen the kid over his own son. It was obvious why anyway. Raul did not have his heart in the work, and he sometimes slacked off, only to his father’s frustration. Luther had his act together; Raul had had him assist in many aspects of their field, and the boy was always waiting around because he somehow had the capability to know what you’d need next, and he’d have it there for you before you even had to ask him. There was a calmness and confidence about him. That was all. As much as Raul had faked it his whole life, his dad knew the truth. Yet he couldn’t fight the jealousy.
It’s going to be okay, he told himself. I can find somewhere else to work; I have to be good at something…
But what could he try? There were almost too many options—dishwasher (no, he hated washing dishes); carpenter (no, had never swung a hammer or measured and cut a board); bus driver (no, the sound of screaming, restless children would be something he would bring home with him, and he was afraid he’d scream at Dominic and Geneva); it was hopeless, truly, he hadn’t learned any skills outside the profession his father had trained him to depend on since he was a child. But he was only thirty-one, that wasn’t too old, was it, to learn a new trade, even if only temporarily?
If anything else took as long to learn, he would never make it past an apprenticeship before his father called and told him: I need you again, come back… And part of Raul would want to make his father sweat it. He thought: Hey God, how about you just cut a few mortal cords right now, today, make this all go away, this uneasiness, this uncertainty about my place in the workforce? I’m too old to learn anything new.
He went outside. The day was cool and dry; the sun seemed far away, miniscule, like it was dying. Dragging himself to his car—a two-year-old Jeep Wrangler—he reclined in the driver’s seat for an hour and listened to the radio play songs he remembered dominating his childhood.
He was just thinking of Geneva when his cell rang. He wasn’t sure what to say to her yet, so he ended the call. Had to get his head in order, not an easy task when the comfort they’d known was about to be unsettled. She was a survivor, just like her family of soldiers though. Practical and tough. She’d make it through the lean times. He just wasn’t sure that he could. He hadn’t thought about, or realized, how spoiled and sheltered he’d been, until now. As much as his father and mother had protected him, guided him, they had also screwed his chances of making it on his own. It wasn’t their fault really; they had only done what they had felt was right, what was in his best interest, much the same as he planned to do for Dominic.
When he tried to start the Wrangler, he found the battery dead. He wiped his face and sighed. “Great,” he said. He had too much pride to go back inside and ask his father for a jump. He only lived a mile from work. The walk would be good for him. There were sirens roaring somewhere close by, he couldn’t tell from which direction. He loosened up as he walked. It was only faint anxiousness he felt. There was an Indian summer in the works. The last two weeks had warmed considerably, and the sunlight was bright off the remnant of snow from what had proven a mild winter, at least for Saginaw, where the lake effect sometimes caused tremendous downpours of freezing rain and whiteouts. He had forgotten his jacket. The temps were in the low forties, and had he not been walking quickly, he would have returned for his coat. But he didn’t want to return, most of all because he was hurt, and he couldn’t imagine looking at his father right now.
Someone had once told him: You have to do what is uncomfortable to go anywhere worthwhile…
He could not remember who had said it, possibly the counselor at his school, Mr. Nesbit, who had sat Raul down in his office many times to discuss how he was doing. M
r. Nesbit seemed to worry considerably more than anyone else how a young boy on his way to becoming a young man might be influenced by, and what thoughts might play out in the head of a child who spent his weekends in a cemetery, and who heard more crying than laughter.
Raul had not thought of him, or anyone else from school, at least before today, in years. He wondered how the man was faring (he’d been Raul’s age now when Raul had been in the seventh grade). He hoped Mr. Nesbit was happy, that wherever he was, and whatever he was doing, his golden years had been kind to him.
His cell rang again. He pulled it from his pocket and saw it was Geneva and he said to himself, to the wind, to the melting snow and sky and passing cars, “I’ll be home soon. It’s better if we talk in person.”
4
Geneva Spencer was thirty years old when her son Dominic was struck by Officer Hazzard’s car in front of the house she had done her best to make a home. It was two stories and sat on the corner near Saginaw Valley State University. She liked to watch the college kids (she’d been one years ago, although she had never done anything with her degree). The building—from a distance in the winter, with its windows caked in ice and snow, the flagpoles bare—always reminded her of an abandoned mental institution. There was a feeling of vast vacancy, a sense of ruin and abandonment, in the winter at least. It was another world entirely in the spring, summer, and fall, but then all of Michigan was like that, she’d come to find out. Having been an army brat she’d traveled more than most, and she had loved the beaches of San Diego, the little hidden pockets of the Dominican Republic. Texas and Georgia were horrible in the summer. She’d come to Michigan to break away from her family. It was one of the few places she hadn’t lived beforehand, in one of those short stints that had bounced her in and out of schools during her childhood.
She’d met Raul five years ago, at the park where she had been reading a John Irving novel (Last Night in Twisted River), and Raul had sat by her and asked her what she was reading and why she was crying one moment and laughing the next. He’d been watching her a while, he admitted. He had not been well educated in talking to women (once she found out how he’d been raised, she understood why). At the time she wasn’t looking to date anyone, reveling, at least as long as she could, in her newfound independence.
She would discover later—after they’d been dating for a month, usually meeting up three times a week for coffee, or at the Barnes & Noble where she worked—that Raul lacked any desire for the opposite sex. He’d only had one girlfriend before her, the first after he’d graduated college (like her, with a degree he’d never use), and she had learned not to probe him about it, he was too touchy. Geneva had never even learned the other woman’s name. The past was the past, and he refused to pry hers from her, which was a welcome change. In many ways they’d started off as friends, over a shared love of literature (something those thousands she’d known and lost as an army brat had always found great pleasure in teasing her about).
They’d fallen in love quickly, another surprise for both of them. Geneva thought it was due in no small part to Raul’s polar opposite personality to that of her father. Raul was always forthcoming, especially in the beginning of their relationship, on how he felt and why he thought it was this feeling and not that one. He loved her for her mind and her body. He’d been an easy man to please and an easy man to live with. They hit their first obstacle at their wedding, the second when she was giving birth to Dominic, and neither of them had foreseen a chance for a third disaster.
And after Dominic was born they’d settled in; Raul into his job and home life; her into being a wife and a mother.
No one had prepared her for how taxing a child would be (love didn’t fill the tank like so many women had professed, sometimes love only kept you there, kept you trying). Raul helped the best he could, but he worked a lot, and he worked just as hard to keep his parents from trying to raise Dominic the way they’d raised him.
Her parents lived out of state—one small thing to be grateful for, because her father would have bulldozed his way into their home and put them under siege. Part of her was surprised that he hadn’t yet. Lord knew he thought Raul a poor specimen of a man: unambitious, undisciplined, and pretty much useless as the master of the house.
Her dad, she thought, was a fucking riot in his own lunatic way. Her mother, Geneva thought a bore. She had an older brother, three years her senior. He popped out of the blue after years of disappearing. His name was Isaac. He’d sent her a text that morning (she had no idea how he’d found her cell number, her parents still wrote letters; brief, to the point, unemotional). She had a tendency to ramble in her replies and loved imagining her father’s face scrunched up in annoyance and disgust as he waited for her to get to the point. And she was emotional when she replied; it was difficult not to be when week by week, at least those first two years, Dominic seemed to be constantly changing. The past year she’d written her parents less, and vice versa. She hadn’t heard from Isaac in six years. His text could have come from their father:
I’ll be there tomorrow to meet my nephew. Have the guest room ready.
The men in her life, until Raul, had always been like that; giving her orders, expecting obedience, little consideration for her feelings or what she had going on at the moment. They screamed—Make room for me!—but when she did, when she found that she wanted their company, they always ended it too quickly and they were gone. To where, or for what reason, she didn’t know because they weren’t inclined to tell her and she always felt ashamed or guilty anytime she was tempted to ask.
Geneva was reading that morning when her son died. As far as she knew, Dominic was still asleep, not crawling silently across the living room’s carpeted floor behind her and going to the doggy door. When she was reading, she was at ease with herself, with the world, with the uncommunicative family she’d fled yet knew she would never completely extricate herself from. She knew she needed to prepare the guest room for Isaac; he wouldn’t raise his voice at her if it wasn’t ready, but he’d look at her the way their dad had, and that look would say: Get your shit squared away, you’re an adult now.
And it’d be like a slap in the face.
Those looks stung.
Get your shit squared away.
She closed the book despite the pleasure it had been giving her. Her brother’s impending visit made her want a drink, something hard, something that would knock her down. She normally only drank on special occasions or after funerals. It was 9 a.m. She would make Dominic breakfast soon, feed him, clothe him, play a game with him. She believed it was important to start him on some type of intellectual or intuitive activity (best if it was both) as early in the day as he could handle it. His coordination and concentration were exceptional, and she had a mountain of pride expanding the walls of her heart whenever she saw him around other children. It was easy to believe your child was the most gifted in the room, but she knew he was.
She took a few more minutes for herself and stretched the stiffness out of her muscles and joints. Once she was limber, she took another minute to perform controlled breathing, sitting on the floor, her eyes closed, the light dancing, flitting against her eyelids. It was going to be a good day despite the fog outside; it’d burn away. Even the weather had to get its shit together.
She stood and turned toward the back of the house and she froze when she saw one of Dominic’s socks on the floor near the foot of the stairs. Normally such a sight wouldn’t have raised such trepidation, but Dominic was at the age where he was striving for independence, his curiosity causing her constant headaches. She had nightmares sometimes after catching her son in the bathroom, the water running full blast into the tub, Dominic teetering on the rim, on his stomach, about to spill into it headfirst.
He was a headfirst kind of boy.
She thought Isaac, if anyone, would love that about him.
Car tires squealed on the damp pavement. Her stomach clenched and she told herself to relax; tires squealing we
re nothing. It was the gunshots, the rapes, the other brutalities, you had to worry about in Saginaw. When she had first moved there, Isaac had laughed at her and called her a moron. He told her Saginaw was about as sweet of a place as Detroit.
Standing by the steps she could see out the living room window. The light bar of a police car was dimly visible through the fog. Her heart pounded so hard it hurt. She knew something was wrong: The single sock, the fog, the roar of sliding tires, the police car. If it wasn’t wrong for her and Dominic, it was wrong for someone else, or someone’s pet that had gotten loose.
She ran to Dominic’s room and it felt as if she’d had to uproot herself, her feet and ankles and legs ached so badly. She’d find him, she believed, still asleep in his crib. But the bed was empty. She moaned his name, then she yelled it so loudly she startled herself.
The front door was locked, but she opened it, craning her head to check the porch, the shrubbery, the wet front yard, the fog obscuring the bottom half of the police car and most of the road. Then she saw him, just a glimpse through her tears. Barefoot. A splotch of blood on an instep. Pajama pants riding up a fragile, pale, scraped leg. Too still. His hair had grown too long, she’d been meaning to get it cut, but he liked it, her son liked it, and now his hair was fanned out around his unmoving head, and his hair was wet, like the lawn, the road, her face.