Faithful Unto Death (7 page)

We don’t take the Lord’s name in vain in this house, and I wasn’t going to stand for that one minute. I was going after her but Annie Laurie barred my way and pushed me back toward the kitchen.

“Sit down, Bear. Well, now, I think dinner went unusually well tonight, don’t you? Everybody’s going to go to bed with a full stomach and a peaceful heart.”

“I sure hope you aren’t going to blame her hissy fit on me because—”

“No, Bear, I’m not. I’m not, because I’m biting my tongue in two to keep from it, but we won’t go into that right now. What I want right now is for you to clean the kitchen, and please don’t throw the leftovers away just because that’s easier than sticking them in Tupperware. Don’t give them to Baby Bear, either, or you’ll be cleaning up dog mess, from whichever end he expels it, before the evening is over. I’m going to walk Baby Bear and give Jo some time to cool off and then I’m going to have that talk with Jo that you and I had planned to do together. We’re going to change plans and make it a mother-daughter talk.”

“She’s probably got her period, flying off the handle like that.”

Annie Laurie shut her eyes for a minute. Then she got the leash off the hook, grabbed a dishcloth for drool emissions, and called to Baby Bear.

“Come on, Baby Bear, let’s get out of here before I say something to my husband that I’ll have to pretend to be sorry for.”

It isn’t easy living in a house full of women. Fortunately, God made me a patient man. I went ahead and ate the leftovers myself. Saves time.

I was propped up in bed, reading a Minette Walters thriller—I’d recently discovered her and she’s great; doesn’t describe everything to death—when Annie Laurie came in after talking to Jo. I said, “Well?”

“Let me get my shower, it’s been a long day.”

Annie Laurie slipped into our clean white sheets fifteen minutes later. No Waverly prints on the beds in our house. White sheets only. That’s another thing Annie picked up from her mom, and one she refuses to turn loose of. Not that I care. I think it’s interesting, is all.

She smelled of oranges and lavender and peppermint, a combination of shampoo and lotion and toothpaste. Her lips were still stained pink from the lipstick she’d worn during the day; her hair was wet and slicked back. I was kind of thinking we should have some private time with each other before Annie told me what Jo had to say for herself, but Annie Laurie gave my hand a squeeze and pushed it away.

“I’m going to tell you what I’ve learned. Then, if you still want to get close, at least we’ll both be starting from the same place. Otherwise, I’ll be playing catch-up the whole time and probably never get there. You want the light on or off?” She looked at me, hand on the switch.

“Is it going to be easier with the light on or off?”

“If we segue into private time, that’ll be easier with the lights off.” She switched the lamp off and eased into the curve of my arm, her damp shoulder fitting in my armpit. “Do you want to pray before we start this?”

“I’ve already said my prayers.”

“You don’t want to say a prayer with me?”

“Okay. Please, God, would you help Annie Laurie go ahead and give me the information she is so uneager to give me. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

“You know, Bear, even when you’re flip, God still hears you.”

“I know He does. Are you going to tell me, or what?”

I heard Baby Bear nose open Jo’s door, thump down the stairs, pad to the kitchen, his toenails clicking on the wood floor, and drink noisily from his water dish. There was the return pad, pad, pad, Baby Bear snuffling to be let back in, and Jo’s decisive click of the door as she shut him in with her for the night.

“All right, I’ll tell you what I know, the first thing being that I don’t know everything; there’s something she’s not telling me, and short of hauling the thumbscrews down from the attic, I don’t know any way to get it out of her.”

“I’ll go up in the attic and search them out if you want me to.”

She sighed. Her wet hair was cold on my arm. “She says a friend caught up to her in the cafeteria right before her lunch period, and asked her to have lunch with him; there was something he needed to talk about. He said he’d get her a McDonald’s salad and they could picnic at Oyster Creek Park and he would have her back at Clements before algebra. She has a study hall right after lunch, so they’d have an hour and a half or so, if she missed study hall, which she clearly didn’t mind doing. Only he got to talking and was pretty upset and they stayed there until school was nearly out. She barely got back in time for Rebecca to pick her up.”

I asked the obvious question. “Who was the boy?”

“That’s one of the things she won’t tell.”

“And why not?”

“She says it’s private.”

“Oh. It’s private, huh? So what was this young man so upset about that he had to haul my daughter off from school?” I heard Annie snap open a bottle cap and smelled lavender. The bottle made a raspberry noise as she squirted the lotion into her hand.

“That’s another thing she won’t tell.” Annie was smoothing lotion on her long legs. It was distracting.

“Well, you got masses of information, then, didn’t you? You know she went off with somebody, something we already knew, but you don’t know who or why. What exactly did you find out?”

Annie Laurie pulled away and turned to face me, rubbing her hands together to absorb the last of the lotion. She sat on her heels with her hands on her hips. Nice hips. We should have had our private time first, just the way I’d said.

“One thing I learned is that our daughter can keep a secret. That’s a quality I value in a person, don’t you? Another thing I learned is that she’s willing to give her time and attention to a friend in need; compassion is another quality I value.”

“I’d be interested in what exactly this fellow’s ‘need’ was, Annie Laurie, and how ‘compassionate’ Jo was. For all you know, he was looking for a piece of sugar candy and Jo looked sweetest!”

“Bear, don’t be vulgar.”

I thought I had been pretty restrained in my phrasing.

“Look, Annie, you weren’t ever a teenage—”

“Boy,” she finished for me. “I know it, Bear; you’ve pointed out half a million times how not having a penis has made me completely unsuited to ever understanding the male psyche—”

“Well, I’m glad you don’t.”

“Don’t understand?”

“Don’t have a penis.” I grabbed her just above the knee and pulled her onto my lap. She resisted a second, trying to decide if she was mad or not, then relaxed in my arms and put her cold wet head against my chest.

“I asked Jo flat out was the problem anything to do with drugs or sex, and she said no. I hope I can still tell when my child is lying.”

I felt somewhat relieved, though Annie is naïve if she thinks she can tell when her girls are lying. The CIA can’t tell when a teenage girl is lying. Homeland Security can’t tell.

But assuming the problem wasn’t sex or drugs, that crossed off the big two as far as I was concerned. Who knows why the boy was in a tizzy. Teenagers get crazy over every little thing nowadays. He might have felt the need to have a shoulder to cry on if he got chewed out by a coach. And right now, I had Annie on my lap and she was warm and cool at the same time and her legs were silky with lotion. There was a creamy smear of unabsorbed lotion on Annie’s calf. With the flat of my hand, I rubbed it in.

I said, “I didn’t even know she had someone special, did you?”

“No, and I don’t know that this boy is special. She called him a friend. Maybe they really are only friends, not romantic.”

I gave a snort. I lifted Annie’s wet hair off the back of her neck and kissed her nape. That gives her goose bumps. I love that.

“Just because
you
can’t have a conversation with a woman between the ages of twenty and sixty and not think about sex, doesn’t mean every man is that way,” Annie said into the hollow of my shoulder.

It did, too, but I wasn’t going to argue about it.

Annie went on. “What with cell phones and with instant messaging and what all, she could easily have relationships with people we’ve never met.”

Even if we’d met them, it didn’t mean we knew them. Look at the Garcias. I pushed Annie back so I could look into her face.

“Annie, did you have any idea how bad things were between Honey and Graham?”

“Oh, my gosh. No, I did not, but I’ll tell you what, while you were visiting alone with Honey, and I went in to help Cruz, I said I would change the sheets on the master bed and Cruz said she’d already done that and I said, ‘Oh Cruz, don’t wash them or anything because, just think, those will be the last sheets they lay in together and Honey might want, you know, she might want to keep them just the way they are because those sheets will have their, like, smell on them.’ You won’t understand, Bear, but smells are important to women.”

Annie Laurie can be very narrow-minded on gender issues. I’m trying to help her with that.

“So Cruz smiles kind of tight-like and she says, ‘Oh, the last sheets they shared together, those would have been washed a long time ago, more than a year ago.’ And then she tells me how Honey and Graham haven’t slept in the same bed for she didn’t know how long, but she knew for sure it had been longer than a year. Just think, Bear, a whole year with no sex!”

I said, remembering my conversation with Graham, “Could be someone was having sex with someone else.”

“You think Honey was having an affair?”

That hadn’t at all occurred to me; it was Graham who was on my mind, of course.

“You think Honey would be capable of having an affair?” I asked.

“Oh sure,” she said without a moment’s thought. “I mean, I’m not saying she would or anything, but a whole year without sex? Shoot. Lead me not into temptation. I’d be walking around with my teeth on edge, snapping everybody’s head off.”

I had an alarming picture of my wife roaming the streets of Houston if some calamity were to prevent me from providing the necessary aid and comfort. It put a slight check in the thoughts that had risen there in the dark with my arm around her, one hand cupping her warm breast. Then the thought of an appetite that healthy brought me surging back, and we finished the evening with some mutually satisfying private time.

Ten

T
uesday morning Rebecca was in the office before me, as always, but I had an excuse—I’d driven straight to the Garcias’ that morning to see about funeral arrangements. I guess I’d assumed I’d do the funeral service, that it would be held at our church, but I was wrong. Graham was a parishioner of St. Laurence, after all, and Father Fontana would be presiding over the service. All the other arrangements would be made tomorrow at the Settegast-Koph Funeral Home, and Honey would be grateful for my assistance then. I learned all this from Cruz. Honey was awake but still in bed, and Alex had driven off in his mother’s car before Cruz could get him to eat any breakfast.

Rebecca wasn’t the only person to beat me to the office. “Honey’s father-in-law is waiting for you—Dr. Alejandro Garcia.” Rebecca pronounced his name carefully. “He said he didn’t have an appointment, which I already knew as I keep your appointment book, but could you see him anyway and I said probably so and for him to go on in and have a seat. He’s been here fifteen minutes. I didn’t tell him you were going to be late. Evidently you didn’t think to call me and let me know.”

Not having anything constructive to answer back to that, I opened the door to my office.

Dr. Garcia is something of a philanthropist in our small community, so I had occasionally seen his picture in the neighborhood weekly paper, the
Fort Bend Sun
. He was sitting on the love seat in the corner, holding a copy of my first book. He wasn’t reading it; it wasn’t open. He held it in his hands as if it was keeping him steady. He looked like his pictures, a slim, spare man, five-ten or thereabouts, his gray hair cut close to his head, large, dark eyes, dark skin. At eighty or so, he was distinctive without being handsome. None of his adopted son’s
GQ
looks, but a likeness in the way they held themselves. Still, quiet.

My hand was out as I crossed to greet him, and he stood and shook it gravely. He had large hands with long fingers. They were the kind of hands you associate with a pianist or surgeon.

“Thank you for seeing me; I know you’re a busy man.”

We both knew my day wouldn’t be as busy as his was. He sat back down and I took the easy chair across from him.

“I’m so sorry, Dr. Garcia. I can’t imagine the pain you’re going through right now. You’re in my prayers. I didn’t know your son well, but I’ve played golf with him a few times. Graham was a . . . an impressive man.” The word I had almost spoken, “good,” hung in the air a second. Dr. Garcia didn’t miss it. His eyes never left mine. He was missing nothing.

“Honey tells me you saw Graham on Friday.” His voice was low and even, like his son’s, a cultured voice.

I nodded.

“I want you to tell me what Graham said at that meeting.”

I did not want to tell this sad, grieving man what I had learned from his son. I couldn’t see what purpose it would serve.

“Dr. Garcia, I don’t think Graham would want me to discuss that conversation with you, or with anyone.”

He nodded; that was the answer he had expected.

“He wouldn’t. I’m sure you are right. But Graham is dead, and my sixteen-year-old grandson is a suspect in his murder. The police took his truck away yesterday, did you know that?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t known, and it wasn’t good news, but I wasn’t all that surprised.

He nodded. “To have it tested. Forensics. He was out all that night; he won’t say where he was. Driving around, he says. Any intelligent person can see that the boy is concealing something terribly painful. Naturally, the police think he is guilty of his father’s murder; I don’t blame them. He won’t be convicted, because he isn’t guilty, and I have enough faith in the system to believe that it works, most of the time.

“I also have enough experience with the system to know that the longer my grandson is caught up in it, the more damage will be done to him.”

He put my book down on the coffee table and passed a hand across his face, held his chin and mouth, then dropped both hands to his knees.

“I will not allow more injury to that boy. I should have stepped in before, when I realized things were no longer good between Graham and his wife. But a parent hesitates to interfere. You are hoping the couple will work it out on their own. You are afraid of making things worse.”

His mouth twisted. “Alex has been suffering. I didn’t know how to stop it.”

He turned his hands palm up on his knees, demonstrating his helplessness.

“We couldn’t speak of it, Graham and I. Alex and I, either.”

I shook my head. “Graham didn’t talk about Alex when he was with me. I’m not sure if he even mentioned his name.”

“We won’t pretend, I hope, that because Alex was not specifically referred to, that what was discussed did not affect him.”

“Dr. Garcia, I’m not trying to be difficult.”

He stood up abruptly, walked to the window, and leaned against it, his hands white-knuckled on the sill. It was so like Graham it was uncanny.

“My good friend, Father Nat Fontana, knows you quite well. He tells me that in your religious tradition, a minister is not bound by the same laws of confidentiality that he is.”

He wasn’t asking me, he was telling me.

“Yes . . .”

“He tells me that you are a good man, a ‘well-meaning’ man, when you can be made to see reason.”

That was a backhanded compliment at best. Dr. Garcia turned and faced me.

“He says you have two daughters, and that the youngest is keenly intelligent, very sensitive.”

I didn’t know how Father Fontana could have known Jo. And Merrie was the smart one; we’d always had trouble with Jo’s school performance, but she certainly was touchy, if that’s what he meant by “sensitive.”

“So I am asking you, Mr. Wells, if you and your wife were destroying each other, quietly, politely, would that affect your daughters?”

I had a sudden memory of me and Annie Laurie, quarreling in our bedroom over some foolish matter, when in came Jo, couldn’t have been more than three at the time. She stood between us, holding a nickel for us to see, and when she had our attention, she put it in her mouth and swallowed it. It didn’t go all the way down and she started choking, her big brown eyes wide open, staring at us, and Annie was screaming, diving for the phone, and I picked my baby up by the ankles, one-handed, hung her upside down, and whacked her on the back. The nickel went flying across the room.

I spent the rest of the night holding Jo, all wrapped up in the comforter from our bed, holding her and rocking her in the big recliner my granddad left me. That tiny, fairy face. She never once cried, the whole night. Wouldn’t tell us why she’d done it, though she was already a good talker. Only looked at me as if I ought to know why. And I did.

“Graham wanted me to get Honey to divorce him.”

Dr. Garcia nodded hard as if he already knew that. As if I was again only confirming what he was already sure of. He walked back to the sofa and sat across from me, leaning forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped.

I kept talking. “He was unhappy. He wanted out of the marriage. There may have been love between Graham and Honey at one time—he never referred to it, never talked about the ‘good days’—there didn’t seem to be any love now. Not on Graham’s part. For whatever reason, it was important to him that Honey end the marriage. He didn’t want to be the one to do it. That’s what I picked up,” I said.

Dr. Garcia’s eyes were intent, his face calm; he nodded encouragingly every few seconds.

I went on. “I couldn’t understand why he didn’t leave Honey, why it had to be Honey who divorced him.”

More nods, looking at me, his eyes filling brimful with tears. Dr. Garcia raised his face up and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to keep them in. Then he whipped out a white handkerchief and buried his face in it. His shoulders were heaving with sobs. Hardly any noise escaped his cupped hands. He wasn’t the sort of man you could go clap on the back, or fling an arm around. I cracked the door open and asked Rebecca could she please bring us some coffee. By the time she came in with a tray, the coffee in this fancy vacuum carafe the Morgans had given me, he had composed himself. His eyes were red-rimmed, his mouth not as firm, but Dr. Garcia had himself back together.

“Do you know the story of how Graham’s mother and I met?”

“No, it didn’t come up.” It’s not a guy thing to talk about. Come to think of it, I don’t know how my own parents met. I’d have to ask Dad.

“Three days a month I volunteer at one of the free clinics downtown. It’s something I’ve been doing for decades. When I met Victoria, I was a widower. I had a son in graduate school, one in college, Notre Dame. My first wife died when she was just forty. Cancer. She was ill for the three longest years of my life. It was . . . hard, on all of us. So I had been alone in my house for five years. I had been happily married and I was only beginning to heal after the ordeal of Gloria’s death. I was in no hurry to fill her place.”

I served him coffee with some trepidation. Rebecca’s coffee is so strong it can take the enamel off your teeth. He poured milk into his cup and took a sip. He put the cup back down and poured milk right to the rim of the cup, stirred, and drank again. He didn’t spill a drop. When he put the cup back in the saucer, he’d drunk half of it.

He smiled at me. “Delicious. My compliments. So. I am working in the clinic and I call for the next patient. Into my examination room comes a fair-haired boy, twelve years old, I guessed, and I was right. He is clean and neat, and if his clothes are inexpensive and unfashionable, they do fit him, a long-sleeved T-shirt and those crisp, dark jeans the discount stores sell. He is leading his weeping mother, not by the hand—he has his arm around her, like this.”

Dr. Garcia mimed the gesture, arm around waist, hand holding her forearm.

“The way a husband would. He was supporting her. She is not much taller than he is. She has on a bathrobe and flip-flops and nothing on under the robe. That’s because there wasn’t time for anything else. Victoria was running for her life.

“She is crying, sobbing. She has her hands over her face as if she is trying to hold a broken bowl together. All I can see at first is a tangle of blond curls. She hangs her head down to hide her face. She is wearing dark glasses and I know right away what I’m dealing with. Of course, I see it all the time.” Dr. Garcia sighed. He drank from his cup and put it carefully in its saucer.

“Not only in the free clinics, you know that, don’t you? Being a minister?”

I told Dr. Garcia I knew. Wife beating is not just a poor man’s crime.

“That’s right, it’s not. I see plenty of it in my regular office. In my regular office, though, the women deny it. I can count on one hand the number of women who have told me in my own office that an injury came from their husband. No, it’s always, ‘Oh, Dr. Garcia, I fell in aerobics,’ ‘Oh, Dr. Garcia, it was a car accident.’ Hands-down favorite from battered women? ‘I fell down the stairs.’”

He shook his head, a wry smile on his mouth.

“Such clumsy women we have walking around Fort Bend County, hm? You hear the same things, I’m sure.”

I had heard exactly those words from women in my own congregation, and I had almost always taken them at face value. Evidently, I needed to be more attuned to what was going on behind the words.

Dr. Garcia took another careful sip and crossed his legs.

“Back to my story. Graham guides his mother to the chair, not the examination table, and she sits down. Neither of them is saying a word. He smoothes her hair back off her face, and with a gesture so gentle, so achingly tender, he pulls off her sunglasses. Then he looks at me, this child, this young man, and his blue eyes say to me clearly, ‘Can you fix this? Can you make her the way she was?’

“Of course, she has been beaten, badly. Her eyes are so swollen she can’t open them at all. I learned later that Graham had himself driven her to the clinic. Twelve years old. Can you imagine?

“Except for cleaning the wounds, giving her some painkillers, there wasn’t anything I could do. Her husband had beaten her so that the bones of her face, the supra-orbital margin, the frontal process . . .” He was touching his own face as he named the bones, caught my eye, and amended, “These bones that surround the eyes, they were crushed. They are like honeycomb, you know? Delicate. Victoria was extremely lucky she didn’t lose an eye. But anyway. She had to have a plastic surgeon. I am not a plastic surgeon. I’m an orthopedic surgeon. I had her admitted into Hermann. A friend of mine, she did the work as a favor to me. I’ve repaid her many times; her sons played soccer and all of them were accident prone.” He smiled again, remembering.

“So I told her son, I told Graham, ‘Can you get me a picture of your mother? A good one so that the doctor will know what she looked like before the accident.’ We both knew it was no accident but that’s what we called it. And he nods and I say, ‘You have a grown-up with you? An auntie?’ And again, he nods and tells me the auntie is waiting in the car. I write down my contact information and give it to the boy to give to his auntie.

“I don’t know there is no auntie. That the boy gets into the car and drives back home, sneaks past his drunken, snoring father to snatch the picture I asked for, and to gather some clothes for his mother. And then gets back in the car, and using the directions I have written out for an adult, navigates the labyrinthine mysteries of the Houston Medical Center, delivers the picture, and is in the waiting room when his mother emerges from the surgery hours later.

“I have come to check on her, something I wouldn’t usually do, since she is no longer my patient, and I see Graham, a Randall’s plastic grocery bag at his feet, waiting as if he will wait forever. I ask, where is his auntie? He tells me she has run home to check on her children, she will be right back. This story is taking too long?”

I shake my head, no, it’s not.

“You don’t mind?” he says and pours himself more of Rebecca’s horrible coffee. I had poured a cup for myself, to be social, but I never touch the stuff. Not when Rebecca makes it. It eats a hole in my stomach.