Home Song (25 page)

He had no answer so he kissed her hair, set her from him, and left.

In the kitchen Claire was standing beside the table, making sure a chair stood between him and her. Did she have to guard herself that way? As if he were a wife-beater, he thought. He still loved her, didn't she really understand that? Didn't she know he was dying here, walking away from all that was dear?

“They shouldn't be left alone so much now. What about play practice? You want me to come over in the evenings when I don't have meetings?”

“Since when don't you have evening meetings?”

“Look. I'm not going to stand here and argue anymore. You want me out, I'm going. Just pay attention to them.
They're going to be vulnerable to a hundred new problems, and I don't want them hurt any more than they've already been.”

“You talk as if I don't love them anymore.”

“You know, Claire, I'm beginning to wonder.”

He left her with that stinging rebuke and went out through the family room and garage. Robby was leaning against the front fender of Tom's car, his arms crossed, scuffing at the surface of the blacktop driveway with the rubber toe of his sneaker.

Tom got his keys out and studied them on his palm awhile, then studied his son's downcast head. “You help your mom now whenever you can. This is hard for her too, you know.”

Robby nodded, still scuffing.

Autumn, uncaring, shimmered around them. The late morning sun reflected off the windshield. The shadows from the trees grew thinner every day. It wasn't too long ago he and Robby had leaned against a car and talked like this about moral dilemmas that formed a man's character. The irony of that day stung them both as they remembered.

“Listen, son.” Tom shifted his stance and placed himself squarely before Robby with both hands on Robby's shoulders. “I'm going to be worried about you and your sister. If you see any fallout from this threatening her in any way, you'll tell me, won't you? I mean, if she should start smoking, or drinking, or running around with different friends, or staying out late—anything, okay?”

Robby nodded.

“And I'm going to ask her the same thing about you.”

Robby gave up scuffing and let his mournfulness show. Big jiggly tears blurred the outline of his Nikes. His nostrils
worked like bellows and he simply could not lift his head and face his dad.

Tom grabbed him and hugged him hard.

“And don't ever think it's not okay to cry. I've cried plenty myself lately. Sometimes it makes you feel better.” He stepped back. “I gotta go. Call me at Grandpa's if you need me.”

Only when he'd slammed himself into the car and was rolling down his window did Robby pull away from the fender and look at him.

Where will he go? Tom wondered. Who will he talk to? What will it be like in this house after I'm gone? Don't let him fall prey to depression and retaliation like the hundreds of kids who've come through my office over the years, destroyed by their parents' divorce. Don't let this ruin him or Chelsea.

“Hey, heads up,” Tom said, summoning some false cheer. “I'm not done with her yet.”

But he received no smile from his son as he started the engine and backed away.

A
T
the lake, autumn was even more resplendent, adding torment to this already tormented day. The water, at rest, reflected the shoreline like glass. The sound of a distant motor carried from a full mile away, while a small fishing boat marred the perfection of the surface, curling it back like blue rose petals. The summer birds had left the yard in the keeping of a flock of cedar waxwings who were dining on cotoneaster berries around the edge of the porch.

Tom climbed the two wide wooden steps and opened the screen door. It had an old-fashioned spring, the kind you can pinch your fingers in if you're a boy with nothing better to do than open and close, open and close it until your mother comes to see what in the world you're doing. The
twin-n-ng
of that spring brought a nostalgic ache to a heart already sore.

Tom stepped into the cool, woody dimness of his dad's front room.

“Dad?” he called, stopping, listening. Bird chitter, a falling pinecone clattering on the roof, and nothing more. The room hadn't changed much in thirty years: an old sagging
sofa covered with an Indian rug and some square green-and-orange pillows for his dad's afternoon naps; a couple of stuffed large-mouth bass hanging on the log walls that had aged to the color of maple syrup; overstuffed rockers with overstuffed magazine racks beside them; a round hassock of taffy-colored Naugahyde with a removable lid, filled with his mother's old piano music; the piano itself, an ancient and venerable upright giant with a crazed black finish and a hundred water rings to the right of the music rack where his mother used to set her lemonade glass; at one side of the great room, a deplorable yellowed gas range that always seemed to give off fumes, the same stove his mother had fried fish on and baked bread in and made all of her boys' favorite dishes on.

Tom paused to take in the room while at his back the east door opened to the shaded porch light that forever kept the room dim.

“Dad?” he called again, getting no answer.

Behind him he heard the soft chuckle of the boat motor nearing and went out, leaving the spring serenading after the screen door clacked, across the snake-length grass through which a path had been trampled toward the lake. The cabin sat on high ground; he saw the V in the water before catching sight of the dock below, where his dad was tying up.

Wesley heard footsteps on the bleached wooden steps and straightened, pushing back his fishing cap.

“Fish aren't bitin' worth a damn. Alls I got is three little pan fish, but it's enough for two. You come to help me eat 'em up?”

“Sure, why not,” Tom replied, though food hadn't the dimmest appeal.

He walked out on the dock that shuddered with every
footfall, and shuffled to a stop, looking down on his dad's dirty blue cap and wrinkled neck. The old man carefully removed a hook from his rod and reel, wiped it on his pants, and stored it in his tackle box.

“How come Uncle Clyde isn't fishing with you today?”

“He had to go into town and get his prescription renewed for his blood pressure pills. He told me he was going to visit the whorehouse, but I says to him, ‘Clyde, what the Sam Hill you gonna do there? Your blood pressure's high everywhere 'cept where you want it to be.' Anyway, I know he was going to the drugstore.” Wesley chuckled to himself and rose to his feet, holding a stringer of three large sunfish. “Come on, I'll clean these.”

Tom followed him to the north side of the tipsy boathouse, where Wesley handed him a blue plastic bucket. “Here, dip me some lake water, will you, son?”

While Wesley scaled and gutted fish on a chunky table made of weather-beaten wood, Tom stood by watching.

“Well, you might as well spit it out,” his dad said. “Stand-in' there with your hands in your pockets like when you were little and all the kids went out catching frogs and forgot to ask you along.”

Tom's eyes suddenly began stinging. He spun to face the lake. The fish scales stopped flying, and Wesley lifted his head to study his son's broad shoulders, slumped as they so seldom were, his hands buried in his trouser pockets.

“Claire and I are separating.”

Wesley's old heart did a flop like the fish waiting on the tabletop.

“Oh, son . . .” He abandoned his work and dipped his hands in the bucket, keeping an eye on Tom. He dried his hands on his trousers, then put one on Tom's shoulder.
“That's a shame. That's just a gol-dang shame. This just happen?”

Tom nodded. “Just this morning. We told the kids about an hour ago, and I packed up the car and left.”

Wesley gripped the sturdy shoulder and hung on as much for himself as to offer support. Boy-oh-boy, how he loved Claire. She'd been the best wife and mother Tom could've had.

“I suppose this is about that other woman and your boy Kent.”

Tom nodded—barely—still staring at the lake. “She just can't forgive me.”

“That's a shame. How are the kids taking it?”

“Not good. Chelsea was crying. Robby was trying not to.”

“Well, that's understandable. This all happened mighty fast.”

“You're telling me. One month ago I'd never even heard of Kent Arens, and I had absolutely forgotten his mother.”

Wesley heaved a great big sigh. “Well, hell . . .” He stood there hurting for his son, for all of them, and after a while, added, “It's a damned sad thing, breaking up a family.”

Tom said nothing.

“I suppose you'll be needing a place to stay. Might as well get you settled into your old room.”

“You don't mind?”

“Mind? Why, what's a dad for? For the good times only? Come on, I'll have to see if I can scout up some sheets for the bed in there.”

“But what about your fish?”

“I'll get to 'em later.”

“Why make the trip up the steps twice? Come on, I'll help you finish.”

Wesley finished cleaning the fish while Tom rinsed them
in the bucket, then buried the entrails. They walked up to the cabin together, Tom with the bucket, Wesley with his rod and reel and tackle box. The situation seemed to call for reverent quiet, so Tom spoke softly as they trudged along.

“I was hoping you'd let me stay. Actually, I brought sheets and pillowcases from home.”

When the car was unloaded and the bed made, they sat down to a lunch of beer-battered fish, sliced tomatoes sprinkled with sugar, and thick, tart slabs of vinegar-soaked cucumbers and onion rings, which they piled onto slices of rye bread spread with butter. Though Tom had imagined himself too overwrought to eat, he did so with surprising relish. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the food, or eating it with his dad, who had no pretensions. Perhaps it was the need to draw himself back to a safer time when he was a boy here in this cabin and the cares of life had not yet affected him. The simple foods like his mother used to serve seemed to do just that.

In the middle of the meal his uncle Clyde came in. He was eighty if he was a day.

Without glancing at the door, Wesley asked, “So how was things at the whorehouse?”

“Whores ain't what they used to be.” Clyde sat down at the table without being asked.

“Not hardly. They used to be twenty years old and pretty as the dickens. Nowadays the only ones who'll look at old geezers like us are sixty and look like the underside of mushrooms. You sure you was at the whorehouse?”

“You accusing me of lying?”

“Never said you was lying. I said I agree with you, whores ain't what they used to be.”

“And how would you know? You was never in a whorehouse in your life.”

“Was never in a doctor's office either, except for that once when that bullhead stung me and I got an infection in my finger. You ever been in a doctor's office, Clyde?”

“I
have not
!”

“Then how do you know your blood pressure's high, and how'd you get that prescription for those blood pressure pills you went in town to get more of?”

“I didn't say my blood pressure was high. You did.”

“Oh, so your blood pressure's low?”

“Ain't low, ain't high. It's just right. Everything about me's just right, and that little whore in the whorehouse said so no more'n an hour ago.”

“Was that before or after she quit laughin'?”

“Wesley, my boy, let me tell you somethin' ”—Clyde pointed at his brother with his fork tines, smiling slyly—“that wasn't laughin', that was grinnin', and I'll tell you what put that grin on her face. A man of experience, that's what.”

Wesley never lifted his eyes. “You ever hear so much bullshit in your life?” he asked his plate while he mopped up tomato juice with a last crust of bread, then pushed it in his mouth. “Comes in here and sits down and eats my fish and the last of the tomatoes and cukes from my garden and tries to tell me his sap still runs.”

“It don't just run, it spurts!” the old geezer boasted. “That's what's got those little gals grinnin'.”

And so it went, on and on for Tom's benefit. They never changed, Wesley and Clyde. They'd been carrying on this trumped-up pettifoggery for as long as Tom could remember, though where they got the material, he couldn't guess.

Finally Tom said, “It's okay, Dad, you can tell Uncle Clyde.”

Everyone hushed. The silence felt harsh in the echo of the brothers' outlandish palaver.

“I guess you're right. I might as well tell him.” Wesley sat back in his chair, looking somber. “Tom left Claire,” he said. “He's moving in with me for a while.”

Clyde looked poleaxed. “No.”

“Not by choice,” Tom put in. He told the two old men everything, and before he finished he was trying to ward off some sharp stabs of pain that knifed through his stomach.

He spent the day doing little, going to the bathroom more often than natural, otherwise trapped by an overwhelming lassitude such as he'd never suffered before. He lay on his bed, sleepless though exhausted, hands beneath his head, staring at the ceiling, memorizing the pattern of the dead flies in the light fixture. He sat on a lawn chair on the dock with his outstretched ankles crossed, fingers knit across his belly, staring at the water for so long that Wesley came out to see if he was all right. When his father asked if he wanted to eat supper, Tom replied no. When Wesley asked if he wanted to watch TV, play a little cribbage, start a jigsaw puzzle, the reply was always the same. Energy was something Tom had taken for granted. Feeling it prized away by depression brought him to wonder how he would be able to face a workday and function normally.

His father's cabin proved additionally depressing. When Tom had first come in, nostalgia had beckoned, but upon settling into the room with its sunken mattress and scarred furniture and the faint smell of bat shit funneling through the cracks from the attic above, he couldn't help comparing it to the house he'd just left, and he felt the full measure of what he would lose if he and Claire parted permanently: all they had built, bought, and banked—halved, sold, or both; their comfortable home with all its conveniences, favorite chairs, the screened porch they'd added on five years ago, the yard he'd mowed so many times, his garage with all his
tools hanging on the wall; the sound system, records, tapes, and CDs representing a lifetime of favorites they'd bought together.

If they parted they would have to divide it all—not just the property and bank accounts but maybe even their children's loyalties. His eyelids sank closed at the repulsive thought. It shouldn't happen, ever, not to anyone who'd worked at a marriage as hard as he and Claire had. Oh God, he didn't want to be single, adrift, alone. He wanted commitment to both his wife and his family.

At 9:15 he called home. Robby answered.

“How's everything there?” Tom asked.

“It sucks.”

Tom was unprepared for the answer. Somehow he'd expected Robby to remain the blithe one who downplayed the gloomy aspects and cracked jokes.

“I know,” Tom replied throatily. And after a while, “How's Chelsea?”

“Incommunicado.”

“How's Mom?”

“She's crazy, as far as I'm concerned. What did she do this for?”

“Could I talk to her?”

“She's over at Ruth's.”

“At Ruth's.” Probably heaping aspersions on her husband and getting applause for dumping him. Tom sighed. “Well, tell her I called, will you? Just to check and see if everything's okay.”

“Yeah, I'll tell her.”

“You going out tonight?”

“Naw.”

“On a Saturday night?”

“I just don't feel like it, Dad.”

Tom understood fully. “Yeah, I know. Well, you get some sleep. You didn't get much last night.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“All right then, see you tomorrow at church.”

“Yeah, right.”

“And tell Chelsea I love her. And I love you too.”

“I will. Love you too, Dad.”

“Well, good night then.”

“ 'Ni—” Robby's voice cracked into a falsetto. He cleared his throat and tried again. “ 'Night, Dad.”

After he'd hung up, Tom stared at the phone. How pathetic, wishing his kids good night by telephone. A barrage of anger hit him, refreshing after the dead calm that had held him prisoner much of the day. What the hell was Claire thinking, doing this to them? Damn her anyway!

As the evening wore on, his emotions swung from high to low, low to high, lassitude and anger, then pain and guilt followed by frustration and helplessness. Sometimes he'd rise to his feet as if Claire were in the room, and in his imagination he'd fire a salvo of blame on her while reassuring himself that he'd done nothing wrong since he'd spoken his vows—nothing!—and she should have been willing to forgive him for his one grave sin before that.

Damn you, Claire, you can't do this!