Family Honor - Robert B Parker

Now she was carefully bubble-wrapping her paintings
and leaning them carefully against the wall where the movers could pick
them up when they came. Each painting had a FRAGILE sticker on it. Her
paints and brushes were boxed and taped and stood beside the paintings.
The house was silent. The sound of the ocean only made it seem more silent.
The sun was streaming in through the east windows.

Tiny dust motes glinted in it. The sun off the water
made a kind of backlighting, diffusing the sunlight, and filling in where
there would have been shadows. Her dog sat on her tail watching the packing,
looking a little nervous. Or was that projection?

When she had married Richie, her mother had said, "Marriage
is a trap. It stifles the potential of womanhood. You know what they say,
'a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle'. " Sunny had said, "I
don't think they say that too much anymore, Mother. "But her mother, the
queen of doesn't-get-it, paid no attention. 'A woman needs a man like a
fish needs a bicycle'," she had said.

When Sunny had announced nine years later that she
and Richie were divorcing, her mother had said, "I'm very disappointed.
Marriage is too hard to be left to men. It is your job to make it work."
That was her mother. She could disapprove of the marriage and disapprove
of the divorce that ended it. Her father had been simpler about both. "You
should do what you want," he had said of her marriage and of her divorce
and of everything else in her life. "You need help, I'll help you."

Her parents were so strangely unsuitable for each other.
Her mother was a vocal feminist who had married a policeman at the end
of her junior year in college. Her mother had never held a paying job,
and had never, as far as her daughter could tell, ever written a check,
or changed a tire. Her husband had taken care of her as he had taken care
of his two daughters, completely and without comment, which probably gave
her the time to be a feminist. He was straight ahead and calm. He said
little. What he did say, he meant.

He rarely talked about his job. But he would often
come home and eat supper in his shirtsleeves with his gun still on his
belt. Her mother would always remind him to take it off. The gun seemed
to Sunny the visible symbol of him, of his power, as her therapist had
pointed out during her attempt to save the marriage, of his potency. If
that were true Sunny had often wondered what it meant that her mother wouldn't
let him wear it to table. But it was never clear what her mother meant.
It was clear what she wanted to mean. Her mother was verbal, combative,
theoretical, filled with passion over every new idea, and, Sunny smiled
to herself, sad to say, most ideas were pretty new to her mother. Her mother
wanted to be a new woman, abreast of every trend, in touch with the range
of experience from supermodels to theoretical physics. But she never penetrated
any of the ideas she embraced very deeply. Probably, Sunny thought, because
she was so desperately shouting, "See me, look at me." If her father noticed
any of his wife's contradictions, he didn't comment. He appeared to love
her thoroughly. And whether she loved him, or simply needed him completely,
Sunny's mother seemed as committed to him as he was to her. They had been
married for thirty-seven years. It was probably what Sunny had had in mind
when she and Richie had talked about 'forever'.

Christ, didn't we fight over Daddy, Sunny thought,
all three of us.

She leaned the last painting against the living room
wall. She leaned the folded easel against the wall beside them. The furniture
was gone. The rugs were up. The red oak floor gleamed. Without anything
in the empty rooms to buffer sound, the dog's claws rattled loudly as she
trotted behind Sunny.

Sunny's sister was four years older than she was. God,
she must have hated me when I was born, Sunny thought. It doubled the competition
for Daddy. To win him, they had devised different methods as they had grown
up. Her mother, impregnably married to him, persisted serenely in her noisy
self-contradictions. Elizabeth, apparently convinced that nothing succeeded
like success, tried to be like her. By default Sunny was left to emulate
her father. Their mother dressed them both in pinafores and Mary Janes.
Their father had built them a large dollhouse, and Elqabeth, with her long
curls, had spent hours with it, manpiulating her dollies. Sunny had worn
her pinafores to the pistol range with Daddy, and while she was too female
to be butch, she reveled in the androgyny of her nickname. And she learned
to shoot. If one approach worked better than another, it was never evident.
Her father persisted in loving his daughters as unyieldingly as he loved
their mother. There was something frustrating in it. What you did didn't
matter, he loved you whatever you did.

In the echoing kitchen, there were only the plates
and glasses to pack. Sunny took them down, one at a time, and wrapped them
in newspaper and put them in the cartons. The movers would have done it,
but she wanted to do it herself'. Somehow it seemed the right transition
from one life to another. She was hungry. In the refrigerator, there was
a halfempty jug of white wine, some Syrian bread, and a jar of all-natural
peanut butter. She had some bread and peanut butter, and poured herself
a glass of jug wine. Beyond the window over the sink she could see the
rust-colored rocks stoically accepting the waves that broke in upon them
and foamed and slid away. The dog pushed at Sunny's ankle with her nose.
Sunny gave her some bread. Way out along the horizon a fishing boat moved
silently. The dog ate her bread and went to her water dish and drank noisily
for a long time. Sunny poured another glass of wine.

She had become a cop, the year before her marriage.
Two years after her father was promoted to Area D commander. Her mother
had asked if she were a lesbian. Sunny had said no. Her mother had seemed
both relieved and disappointed. Disappointed, Sunny thought, that she couldn't
martyr herself to her daughter's preference for women. Relieved that she
didn't have to. Her mother had said, what about painting? Sunny had said
she could do both. What about marriage and children? Sunny wasn't ready.
The clock is ticking. Mother, I'm twenty-two. She remembered wondering
if women needed children like fish needed bicycles, but she kept it to
herself. The fishing boat had moved maybe an inch across the horizon. She
took her wine and went and sat on the floor beside the dog with her knees
up and gazed out through the French doors while she drank.

Richie was like her father; she'd known that even before
she went to the therapist. He didn't say much. He was inward and calm and
somehow a little frightening. And like her father, he was very much straight
ahead, going about his business, doing what he did, without paying much
attention to what other people thought or did about it. It was what he
did that was one of the issues. He worked in the family business, and the
family business was crime. He didn't do crime. She believed that when he
told her. He ran some saloons that the family owned. But ... she poured
some more wine from the jug into her glass. There was a sort of ravine
behind the house that ran down to the ocean, and the waves as they rolled
into it sent up a harsh spray. Sitting on the floor she could see only
the spray, disembodied from the ocean, appearing rhythmically above the
slipping lawn.... It wasn't really that he was from a crime family any
more than it was that she was from a cop family. It had to do with much
tougher stuff than that and she'd learned early in their separation not
to pretend that it was just cops versus robbers. A gull with a white chest
and gray wings settled down past her line of vision and disappeared into
the ravine and came back up with something in its mouth and flew away.
Richie loved her, she knew he did. The fact that her father had spent a
lifetime trying to jail his father didn't help, but that wasn't what felt
so sharp and sore in her soul. Richie was so closed, so interior, so certain
of how things were supposed to go, so too much like her father that she
felt as if she was dwindling every year they were together, smaller and
smaller.

"Dwindle, " she said aloud.

The dog turned her head and cocked it slightly and
pricked her big ears a little forward. Sunny drank some wine.

"Dwindle, dwindle, dwindle. "

Her friend Julie had said once to her that she was
too stubborn to dwindle. That herself was so unquenchable, her autonomy
needs so sharp, that no one could finally break her to a marriage. Julie
was a therapist herself, though not by any means Sunny's, and maybe she
knew something. Whatever had happened they had been forced to admit it
didn't work, after a nine year struggle. Sitting across from one another
in the restaurant of' a suburban hotel, they had begun the dissolution.

"What do you want?" Richie had said.

"Nothing."

Richie had smiled a little bit.

"Hell," he'd said. "I'll give you twice that."

She had smiled an even smaller smile than Richie's.

"I can't strike out on my own at your expense," she
had said. "What about the dog?"

She had been silent, trying to assess what she could
stand. "I want the dog, " she had said. "You can visit. " He had smiled
the small smile again.

"Okay, " he had said. "But she's not used to squalor.
You keep the house. "

"I can't live in the house."

"Sell it. Buy one you can live in. "

Sunny had been quiet for a long time, she remembered,
wanting to put out her hand to Richie, wanting to say, I don't mean it,
let's go home. Knowing she could not.

"This is awful, " she said finally.

"Yes. "

And it was done.

Out through the French doors the fishing boat had finally
inched out of sight and the horizon was empty. Sunny pulled the dog onto
her lap. And sang to her.

"Two drifters, off to see the world/ There's such a
lot of world to see. "

She couldn't remember the words right. Maybe it was
two dreamers. Too much wine. The dog lapped the back of Sunny's hand industriously,
her tail thumping. Sunny sipped a little more of her wine. Got to go slow
here. She sang again to the dog.

She wanted to be alone, now she was alone. And she
didn't want to be alone. Of course, she wasn't really alone exactly. She
had a husband-ex-husband--she could call on. She had friends. She
had parents, even her revolting sister. But whatever this thing was, this
as yet unarticulated need that clenched her soul like some sort of psychic
cramp, required her to put aside the people who would compromise her aloneness.
You lose, you lose; you win, you lose.

"You and me," she said to the dog. "You and me against
the world."

She hugged the dog against her chest, the dog wriggling
to lap at her ear. Sunny's eyes blurred a little with tears. She rocked
the dog gently, sitting on the floor with the jug of wine beside her and
her feet outstretched.

"Probably enough wine, " she said out loud, and continued
to rock.
 

At the gun store, the clerk wanted to show me a LadySmith.
I declined on principle, and bought a Smith & Wesson .38 Special with
a two-inch barrel. With a barrel that short you could probably miss a hippopotamus
at thirty feet. But any serious shooting I knew anything about took place
at a range of about three feet, and at that range the two-inch barrel was
fine. I wore my .38 Special on a wider-than-usual leather belt in a speed
holster at the small of my back under a jacket.