Everybody Loves Somebody (27 page)

“You’ve always kept yourself busy.”

“Collecting soda cans and hot dog wraps, newspaper, old socks, and lost hats. I wish you could have seen me.”

“I can imagine.”

“I was missing you like crazy, Nora. Believe me, I never wanted to stop being your father. You know, I wrote to you. More
than once.”
How come you never answered me?
he would say next. “How come you never—forget it.” He gave a dull shrug. “Your mother forwarded the bills. Of course she
did. I’m not complaining. And wouldn’t you know, she sent along the certificate confirming our plots at White Oak Cemetery.”

“Where?”

“Crazy business, eh? We bought our little patch of land on sale. And she’d sent a copy of the certificate to remind me of
our commitment.”

“Where did you say?”

At first he’d thought it was a nasty joke designed to remind him that his life would add up to no more than dates carved in
stone. But the more he’d thought about it, the more he’d studied the paper and traced his fingers across the numbers, the
more he’d been comforted by the idea. He and Bev would be together in the end.

Where?

She’d heard correctly.
Cemetery,
he’d said. And
White Oak
. It had to be White Oak. He’d never mentioned this before, and neither had Bev.

“I can’t believe it.”

“A pact made long ago,” he said, his irony tinged with pride, though he admitted it must be disturbing for Nora to imagine
her parents, given their years of estrangement, together in the end, planted side by side.

O
R THE TIME
Nora stepped on the spiny husk of a chestnut, and to stop her from crying Bev split open the nut and showed her the shadow
of the seed leaf inside. Then they went inside and Nora dressed up in Bev’s old belted blue dress with padded shoulders. Bev
painted Nora’s eyelids blue and dusted her cheeks with cyclamen rouge, and Nora went clacking around the house in her mother’s
high heels. Hey, gorgeous!

Or the time, the last time, Lou came to dinner. Asking for Bev’s forgiveness. Begging for Bev’s forgiveness. Demanding Bev’s
forgiveness. Don’t you dare threaten me, Lou! Get out! No. Yes. And snap, she’s an old woman pulling out a maple sapling by
its roots and trying to recall a song she once knew about mandrakes. Her back aching, her head throbbing, only wisps of hair
left after the chemo, her ears ringing, and Nora’s at the kitchen door calling—

Bev! Bev! Telephone.

Did someone say something, or is that sound the dry leaves moving in the breeze? Sky darkening. All the work she wants to
finish before the rain.

I
T DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY
, he reminded Nora. She thought he meant it didn’t have to be White Oak Cemetery—he and Bev could have chosen a different
place. But he meant that Bev didn’t have to refuse him. She could have forgiven him and taken him back. That they were never
a family again was her decision.

He spent that whole summer hanging out in Niagara, having decided that he could never love anyone else but the woman he’d
betrayed. What a mess he’d made of his life. Had he ever told Nora about the bar in Niagara? That dingy saloon, where he could
drink away his sorrows. A white man adrift. The linoleum floor was sticky with beer. Cigarette smoke hung so thick that he
could hold it in fistfuls. Two men were singing with the jukebox. A drunk old woman laughed in delight, her wrinkles like
a fine net pressed against her face. Her joy was infectious.

“Did I ever tell you about that woman in the bar?”

“No,” Nora said, though she was thinking
yes.

O
R THIS SAME DREAM
that returns to her when she’s ill: she is in a waiting room. There are strangers sitting in seats against the opposite wall.
They are reading books they had the foresight to bring with them. Bev brought nothing with her, so she sits there bored with
her thoughts. Idly, she scratches her shoulder and feels an odd patch like hardened syrup stuck to her skin. She touches her
elbow and feels the same. She is spotted with this hard, transparent substance—tiny crystals, she sees upon examination. They
are on her arms, her legs, and at the base of her throat.

Beverly Diamond Owen Knox is becoming the woman she’d been named to be. At first she’s not sure whether to resist or give
in. There are patches on the back of her hands. Brilliant crystals picking up the buttery tint from the surface of her skin.
The ache in her joints is worse than arthritis. The discomforting bristle of crystals between her toes and behind her ears.
The sensation of being buried alive inside precious stone. Help me, Nora. I’m not ready yet. Her lips tearing at the corners.
Help me. The taste of blood. Help me.

“Bev!”

“She said something. What did she say?”

“Bev, it’s me, Nora. Lou’s here as well. Can you open your eyes? Do you think she can hear us? Bev? Maybe we should call the
nurse. Bev, are you okay?”

The nurse, summoned by Lou, listened with a stethoscope to Bev’s chest and checked fluid levels in the IV bag. Any sounds
she made, the nurse explained, were the body’s normal effort to clear the lungs of mucus. Bev wasn’t in any pain, and she
wouldn’t wake up from sedation any time soon. But it would be best not to disturb her.

After the nurse left the room, Lou needed to be reminded: “Where were we?”

H
E’D FINISHED ONE BOURBON
. Two. Three. And then he’d realized he didn’t have enough money to pay for his drinks. A new crisis to follow the last. What
could he do? Stiff the bartender? Admit that he had only spare change in his pocket? His gaze had settled on the drunk old
lady with the fishnet face. She represented life and hope, and she would surely have compassion on a man who had no family
anymore.

“What did I know? I was an idiot.”

There was so much he didn’t know. For instance, Nora considered telling him right then and there about what happened in White
Oak Cemetery when she was a girl. But now the thought of all the necessary explanation she’d have to offer Lou exhausted her,
like the work that would go into renovating an old house that had been shut up for years.

Lou was talking about the old lady in the bar in Niagara Falls: her head tipped back in laughter, skin a toffee brown, darker
in the creases, with lips painted a fiery red, and dark, leathery pouches beneath the rims of her eyeglasses. She wore a red
saucer hat to match her red shoes, and her summery dress was a loose black-and-white polka-dot wrap. She looked like a charitable
person who would lend a few dollars to a man in need.

“I called to her—Ma’am!—but she couldn’t hear me above the music. I called louder. Excuse me, ma’am, pardon—but she still
didn’t hear me. So I went ahead and tapped her on the shoulder. She tipped her head to look at me over the top of her spectacles.
She switched off her smile. And at the same time, the music stopped. I don’t know whether someone pulled the jukebox plug
or by coincidence the song had ended.”

This was the scene in the story that Lou liked to label
a situation.
An old woman who happened to be the mother of one of the singing men. And it sure looked like the bartender was her grandson,
while Louis Owen was a white nobody who stupidly decided to call attention to himself.

He spoke in the direction of the window facing the hospital parking lot, as though his intended audience were the ghost of
his reflection. He didn’t seem to care anymore whether Nora was paying attention. And he might as well have forgotten about
Bev. He was talking to himself, refining the patterns of experience that had made him who he was. His tendency, as he would
say, to put his foot in it. His many attempts to run. His regrets.

“Next thing I knew, one man was holding me by the collar, and another had a knife at my neck.”

Nearly had his throat sliced because he’d been bold enough to tap an old woman on the shoulder. And yet he was alive because
of that same old woman’s dispensation. All she had to do was give a slight, severe nod in the direction of the door, and the
two men threw Lou out on the sidewalk.

That was Nora’s father: savvy only in the aftermath of his mistakes.

His conclusion, always the same, invited dramatic comment. Nora imagined Bev sitting up and uttering a good, verifying insult.
She thought of the fight they’d had in the kitchen when she was thirteen years old, the night Lou returned to apologize. She
remembered lying in her bed pretending to sleep and listening for the shrill explosions in Lou’s voice when his pleading turned
into threats. She thought about how wrong it was that Bev and Lou should be buried side by side in White Oak Cemetery, though
she didn’t say this. The truth was, though she sometimes needled him, she never meant to say anything that would cause her
father pain.

“Sometimes,” she said to Lou, who sat waiting for her response, “it’s better just to keep your mouth shut.”

O
R JUST THE OTHER DAY
, wasn’t it, when a storm blew in. The smell of fresh-cut grass. Screeching of red-winged blackbirds in the marsh. The first
syrupy drops of rain. Growl of thunder. Flicker of lightning. On again, off again.
Crash, bang,
run for cover in the shed!

Dripping beneath the cloth hat she uses to hide her thinning hair. The chill of damp clothes. It’s not the same kind of chill
as the chill in her bones. This despite the doctor’s optimism. But she can still notice things. In the corner, for instance,
a nest made of dry grass and shredded paper from a fertilizer bag, crowded with four baby mice. And there’s the mama retreating
with the fifth baby in her mouth to the safe shelter behind an old wheelbarrow that had been overturned and left to rust by
the previous owner. Back again, to fetch the rest of her offspring, carrying them one by one while Bev watches.

Nora, come see!

Bev, you’re soaked.

Or the time Gus and Bev threw a party for themselves one year after they’d gone off to City Hall to get married. The two of
them dancing to “This Year’s Kisses” in the center of the crowd of guests while Nora watched from the ballroom’s balcony.

Or the day after Lou left for good and Bev hired a locksmith to change the locks. She sipped her coffee and chatted with the
man while he worked on the kitchen door. Nora came into the kitchen to pour herself some milk and overfilled the glass.

Nora!

Or watching Nora watching
Jeopardy!,
leg thrown over the back of the couch. Bev gave her big toe a tug.

You okay?

Yeah.

Want to talk?

Nope.

The one thing they needed to talk about kept Nora from wanting to talk at all. She couldn’t be budged. Bev had better luck
guessing the questions for the answers on
Jeopardy!:
Dale Carnegie’s number-one best seller. What is
How to Win Friends and Influence People?

X shaped stigma, reflexed yellow sepals. What is an evening primrose? What are ragged robins and corn cockles? Did you know
that a fly must beat its wings two hundred times a second to stay airborne? Look: you can tell from the white dots and the
red-barred forewings that it’s a red admiral butterfly. Nora, take out the garbage, please! Nora, did you hear me? Listen.

T
HROWN OUT ON MY ASS
,” Lou was saying. “First by your mother. And then by two toughs in a bar.” His tone was wryer than earlier, his eyes narrowed
in a slightly mischievous squint.

“It’s true I learned from you,” Nora said, “how to get into trouble. But also how to get out of it.”

“And remember that there’s rest at the end.” He leaned forward and patted Bev’s hand, the same hand he’d kissed. “The peace
of our eternal sleep together on some shady slope in White Oak Cemetery.”

“You did say White Oak Cemetery.”

Their own private property in White Oak Cemetery. Two names, two stones. They didn’t even have to let on that they’d once
been married. Just as long as they were together in the end.

“Lou”

“The only home I’ll never lose to foreclosure.”

“Lou”

“Thirty years I’ve been waiting to hold her in my arms again.”

“Lou!”

“What? You think I’m not sincere?”

“If you’d be quiet and listen, for once.”

“You have something you want to tell me?”

He looked at her with a smile she interpreted as smug, as if he were satisfied that the setup had worked and he’d trapped
her, making it impossible for her not to match his disclosures with some of her own—and yet because of this expression of
expectation he made it necessary for her to resist. This was an unfamiliar predicament. Usually she was adept at closing the
conversation with a decisive comment. But she thought she’d had something else she’d wanted to say. What? She wasn’t sure.

There was no way she’d tell Lou about what happened thirty years ago in White Oak Cemetery. That place where she and her girlfriends
would go to smoke in secret. The same place where strange Johnny Baggley—a boy they understood to be
disturbed
—found refuge from the taunting of his schoolmates. He’d hunt for frogs and birds’ eggs, and one day he either fell or jumped
from a high perch in a tree. It was Nora who discovered the body. Climbing the hill after she’d said good-bye to her friends,
she had seen a boy’s sneaker turned at an odd angle. Then she noticed that the fingers of his left hand, curled against his
knee, were caked with mud.

Lou had been out of the country at the time, and as far as Nora knew, Bev never told him about Nora finding Johnny. It was
important to Nora not to tell him. She hadn’t wanted to tell anyone, except her mother—she’d told her mother right away, as
soon as she’d raced home from the cemetery. When Bev called the police, Nora couldn’t help but feel betrayed. She felt tainted
and newly vulnerable in a way her mother didn’t understand. She had cooperated with the police and led them up the cemetery
hill, but only out of necessity. And afterward, she’d shut up. Even when her friends gathered around her and demanded to know
what she’d seen, she’d kept her mouth closed.