Every Last One (5 page)

“Mom, let us handle this.”

“Make her leave,” Rachel cried from the other room. “I don’t
want her to see me.” I could hear Sarah’s quiet murmur. Sarah will be a good nurse. Even I felt a little calmer at the sound of her voice, until Ruby suddenly leaned toward me and closed her eyes. We swayed together like slow dancers at a high school mixer.

“Oh, Mommy, she’s so messed up,” she whispered.

“How bad? Do we need the police?”

The moment had shattered. “What?” Ruby said. “Oh, God, no. God. She just makes … bad decisions. Really bad decisions.” She’d shivered then. “Please go back to bed. Let us take care of this. I promise I’ll call you if we need you.” Back upstairs, I lay awake until the sky lightened. By morning Ruby was asleep in her own bed, and Sarah and Rachel were gone, the mug on the counter and the blanket on the floor the only signs that I hadn’t had a nightmare. If they had made coffee instead of tea, if I had not been awakened by the whistle of the kettle, I might never have known that anything had happened.

I lean back in the car and will myself to stay awake. Perhaps tonight I will take a sleeping pill, just to catch up. “Boxwood,” I write on the plans. Main Street is almost deserted because of the weather and the time of day. It’s just after 6
P.M.
, and while the city fathers have done what they can, with the historically accurate streetlamps and the free parking, no one stays in town once evening comes. The small Middle Eastern restaurant that opened two years ago, run by an immigrant couple with two sons who are already poised to be the valedictorians of their respective classes, gets a couple of tables of diners on weekday nights.

I see a woman in a glistening yellow macintosh pass in front of my car. Her hood is up, she’s holding an umbrella, she looks like an altogether generic person hurrying to an errand in a heavy rain, but I’m certain that it is Kiernan’s mother, Deborah. There is a particular lilting motion to her walk, as though her toes were turned out and she were on the balls of her feet even in rubber rain boots.
Deborah was once a dancer. We were once the closest of friends. I’m fairly certain that in the downpour she has not noticed or recognized my car, which is a dark heavy hatchback like those belonging to half the mothers in town. But it may be that she has and is refusing to look my way. This happens with some regularity Deborah pretending to see nothing but air where I’m standing. It always makes me feel a little sick to my stomach. Last year I was at a backyard party for the Lawrences’ twentieth anniversary and Deborah came through the patio doors, and there I was, facing her. Without a word she was gone, as though she had been a hologram of herself, projected for an instant and then dissolved.

“Give my love to your mother,” I used to say to Kiernan, and then “Give my best to your mother,” followed by “Say hi to your mother,” until one day Ruby said, “Mom, that’s beyond pathetic. Just stop.”

I wonder what Deborah will think if Ruby breaks up with Kiernan. I wonder if it’s even possible for Ruby to break up with Kiernan. It’s not just that Kiernan is in love with Ruby, although I know he is; sometimes he looks as though his eyes are going to begin to spin in his head as she moves around the room, picking up the phone, picking up a magazine. He would like it best if Ruby stayed still and talked to him, but since that’s not how Ruby is, especially these days, he takes second best, asking Alex about soccer and Max about some animated movie he’s seen, Glen about the local minor league baseball team, me about whatever I have cooking on the stove. Kiernan is not just in love with Ruby; he’s in love with our family.

It’s twenty-five after six when Max opens the car door. Despite my best efforts, I’ve fallen into a doze. “You scared me,” I say. Max doesn’t answer. He passes me a note with his drum teacher’s strange crabbed handwriting.

“Please call me,” the teacher has written.

“Is everything all right?” I ask.

“Is that Kiernan’s mom?” Max asks.

The rain has slowed to a gray drizzle, and Deborah has hurried past, a bag in one hand. I catch a glimpse of her big eyes, so like her son’s. She wears her dark hair very short now, a ruffly inch or two all over, as though she is daring you to avoid those eyes. Her face looks like a room with no drapes or shades. She angles her umbrella sharply. There’s something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existence.

“I can’t wait until camp starts,” Max says, playing imaginary drums in the air.

We are standing outside a house on Winding Way, Rickie and I, and John, and Tony, who runs the backhoe.

“This is so bad,” says Rickie. He’s chewing hard on his bottom lip. John is shaking his head. Tony is walking back and forth, swearing under his breath. I try not to cry. The boss shouldn’t cry.

It is the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Two days earlier, we finished a big job: six tiers of shrubs, a small copse of flowering plum and pear, a long hedge of weigela. Almost all of it is gone. The property is pocked with holes. A few of the shrubs have been tossed down a steep slope behind the house and are lying in the creek below, their roots raised to the sky like fingers. Please, please, save us, they seem to plead. Rickie says some may be salvageable. The fruit trees and the bigger bushes are gone, nowhere to be found.

Rickie has already called the police. A patrol car pulls up as I stand there, arms folded across my chest. I know the officer who gets out. His daughter plays peewee league soccer on the field after
Alex and his team are finished, and we have exchanged polite remarks about footing. Somehow this makes it worse. Whatever community impulse those soccer games stand for, this is its opposite.

“There were really plants in all those holes?” the cop asks. His nameplate says his last name is Jackson. We shake hands. The men nod.

“Plants, hell,” Rickie says. “Thousands of dollars’ worth of trees, too. This is more than vandalism. I’d say we’re looking at twenty thousand dollars’ worth of plantings in all. That’s not even counting the labor.”

“I have invoices back at the office,” I say. “Where are the guys?”

The guys are the Mexicans who work for me from spring through fall. They live in an old decommissioned motel out on a back road that was once the best way to drive through this part of the state. When the interstate was finished, the motels along the old road died. My guys live a shabby, makeshift life in a cinder-block rectangle with windows so small they barely let in light and air. They make coffee on a hot plate, eat fast food. Rickie says they live better here than do their families in Mexico, where they send money each month. I’ve decided to believe it. The wages we pay them shame me. That, and the fact that the only one who really registers as an individual with me is a short thick man named José. Or that’s what he has told me his name is. Nancy says they all use names they think white people can recall and pronounce. José, Manuel, Juan. José is a soccer maniac and first spoke to me when Alex, in uniform, was dropped off at a job site. He has shown me pictures of his children, two little girls photographed in white dresses holding pink carnations.

“All our people are doing that big sod job at the club,” Rickie says to me. “Why?”

“I want to get this fixed right away. These people will be back by the end of next week. I know it sounds crazy but I’m going to feel better if by next week this place looks like nothing happened.” I look up at the house. It is a large place, not pretty but impressive. It might as well have a sign at the end of the drive:
COSTASMALLFORTUNE.
The owners are new to the area, one of those couples who confuse me: prosperous disproportionate to their ages, which I guess to be early thirties. They are away in the south of France and so decided that this was the perfect time to have their place landscaped. Now it looks as though it has been savaged by a storm. What sort of people steal trees? “I don’t mean to sound hysterical, but I am really freaked out by this,” I say.

“It doesn’t sound hysterical at all,” says the police officer. “This is pretty horrible.”

“I think they have lights with motion detectors at the corners of the house,” said Rickie. “If we put those on, maybe it will help keep anyone from coming back and doing it again.”

“We might put everything back in and have this happen again?” I ask.

Rickie shrugs. Officer Jackson says, “I can have a car go by once or twice a night.” He makes some notes. “Your insurance will cover the cost of the plants, right?”

“Is that all anybody thinks about nowadays?” Rickie says, his voice verging on a shout. “Somebody comes in here—or somebodies, because this was a lot of goddamn work—and steals all this stuff that we spent days putting in, and I’m betting just junked it. I’m betting every one of these plants was tossed in a field somewhere and is lying there dying in this heat.” It’s unseasonably warm for May, in the high eighties, and the policeman has big rings of black beneath the sleeves of his dark-blue uniform shirt.

“Hey I’m with you,” he says. “This is really sick and sad. If one
of my kids did something like this, he’d be on lockdown for a year. I just asked because if the insurance will cover it, I’d like to get this lady a police report fast so she can file what she needs to file and recover some of her losses.”

“You think it’s kids?” I ask.

All of us look back at the holes in the ground. The teenagers in town traditionally go a little crazy as the weather warms. When Ruby and the twins were younger and my business hadn’t yet taken shape, I was entranced by the notion of long, formless summer days, hiking the hills, going to the county fair, putting up tents so they could spend the nights in the yard peeking out at the stars. But the tales of older kids racing their cars on the outlying roads or smoking pot in the woods scared me off, and by the time the twins were six they had joined Ruby in day camp, making mosaic ashtrays and playing badminton. Max would throw his long arms around my pelvis and bury his face in my side as though he were longing to return to the womb. “Come on,” Alex would say in the soothing voice he had once used with his brother. “We can paint.” That was before Alex began to understand that Max’s behavior reflected on him with the other kids. It was strange that it never went the other way, that Alex’s ease and prowess never cast a sliver of sunshine over his twin.

“I don’t have a clue,” says the officer. “I mean, we do get some vandalism, but this seems pretty over the top. Not to mention a lot of work. Maybe you could see if you can get something out of your kids?”

“It’s not them,” I say, then sigh. “I bet you hear that all the time—‘It’s not my kids.’” I know he does. The big end-of-the-school-year debacle in town was two years ago, when half the baseball team played too much beer pong and set fire to a ramshackle barn at the edge of what had once been a dairy farm. All
the parents spent days denying that their kids had been involved, although two of the boys had bad burns on their hands. There were two fallback explanations: the legendarily destructive and vindictive kids from the next town (who, when we played them in athletic contests, looked and behaved exactly like our own children); and the Mexicans, who were always being suspected of petty theft but, as far as I could tell, never did anything worthy of official notice except fight among themselves.

Then a construction company building houses across the road produced a security-camera video that showed eight boys siphoning gas out of the SUV that one of them had gotten as a graduation gift and pouring it around the barn doors. The parents divided into three groups: the ones whose boys just stood there and watched, which made them innocent; the ones whose boys did the siphoning and the lighting, which made them “misguided,” according to the attorney representing the wildest one; and the two decent sets of parents who made their sons perform hours of community service, picking up trash along the road, even before the court said they had to do it.

“My kids aren’t angels,” I say, “but their friends are all pretty attached to me.” I point to the sign we’d posted:
ANOTHER LOVELY LANDSCAPE BY LATHAM.
“That’s a whole lot of alliteration,” Ruby had said when I first came up with it.

“I hear you,” the cop says. “But maybe the word’ll be going around, you know? Ha ha, guess what me and Jason did—that kind of thing.”

“I’m going to kick somebody’s ass,” says Rickie. “Kids or adults or whoever. I’m going to kick somebody’s ass to hell and back.”

I’m not sure the kids would tell me if they knew. They were good about informing when there were little things involved: which eighth-grade boy carried condoms, which girl had had a
summer-camp boyfriend that her boyfriend at home didn’t know about. But they kept the big things to themselves. Sarah and Rachel had kept Ruby’s secret for six months of freshman year, until I walked into her room one morning and saw her bare back, a xylophone of spine and ribs with not a bit of fat for buffer.

“It took you a long time to figure things out,” Rachel had said to me accusingly when Ruby started eating again.

Just this morning, I had run into Rachel’s mother while picking up coffee. Sandy was wearing a sundress and platform sandals, her toes lacquered a dried-blood red. I knew she thought we were friends, but I had never liked her. When Rachel was twelve, a stocky girl tortured by bad skin and full-on orthodonture, her mother sent her to fat camp. Worse, that’s what Sandy had called it—to the girls, the mothers, everyone: fat camp. “As you can tell, she doesn’t get it from my side,” she’d said.