Thank You for All Things (35 page)

I silently begged Clay to do what he’d always done. Put as much distance between Dad and himself as he could, and do it as quickly as possible. But Clay—six inches taller in the last eight months, with arms bulky from using the weight room after school—didn’t flee this time. Instead, Clay told him, “Go ahead. Deck me. And I’ll fucking deck you back.”

Clay swayed slightly, then thrust himself against Dad. Dad, not expecting any physical force from Clay, had to step back on one boot to keep his balance.

“Clay!” I shouted.

Shock stiffened Dad’s face, but only for a moment; then the corner of his mouth curled up sardonically. “What? You put on five pounds and you think you can take your old man now? That it?” Dad moved so close that Clay had to tip his head back a notch to keep his gaze locked with Dad’s. “You couldn’t take down a goddamn pussy, you little punk.”

Blotchy patches of red burned over Clay’s cheeks. Not out of shame this time, but out of rage. “Oh,” he said, mimicking Dad’s mocking tone. “Is that what makes you such a big man? The fact that you’ve taken down a few pussies? Guess it’s gotta be, since you aren’t getting that big fancy mill that you were so sure was gonna make you a somebody.” Clay shook his head and laughed. “You know what, old man? YOU’RE the fucking joke, not me. YOU’RE the fucking loser!”

In a split second, Dad grabbed the front of Clay’s shirt, twisting it and yanking so that the armholes strained against Clay’s underarms and exposed his belly. “You fucking little bastard. I should kill you!”

I was standing no more than a foot from the phone.
I could dial Marie’s,
I thought in my panic.
Marie would hear the trouble and come. She’d know what to do. She’d be here in—

But there was no time, of course. Already, Clay was in the process of doing the unthinkable, cranking back his arm. I shouted at him not to do it, but he did it anyway. His fist met Dad’s jaw with a crack.

Dad’s head jolted back, then cocked forward, his eyes bulging first with shock, then fury.

He let go of Clay’s shirt, leaving the cotton twisted and
bunched over Clay’s heart like a crushed white rose. Then, in a blur of movement, his fist rammed into Clay’s face with double the force Clay had used. Vomit rose and soured my throat while blood gushed from Clay’s nose.

For a split second, I expected Dad to recoil at what he’d done. Even though he’d slapped Clay around plenty in the last couple of years, he had never outright punched him, the way a man slugs another man. Even then, when it was only a cuff, Dad apologized at some point, pleading with him (as he did with Ma) to not push him so hard. “God damn it, boy,” he’d always end up saying, “you know I’m a hothead like my old man was. Don’t make me act like him. For God’s sakes, I don’t want to act like him.”

But Dad didn’t look sorry at all. And when he finally found his words, it wasn’t to apologize. “You gonna call me a fucking loser now, boy? Huh? You had enough from this ‘loser,’ or do you want some more?”

Clay didn’t bother trying to catch the blood that spilled down over his mouth. “Go ahead. Beat me until you kill me. You think I give a fuck?” Blood-tainted spittle showered from Clay’s mouth. “You’d do me a fucking favor by getting me out of this hellhole.”

Clay pulled his shoulders back, fists clenched, blood oozing down over the wadded white of his T-shirt. “Go on. Show me what a big man you are. I dare you!”

“Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God,” I could hear Ma say. But it wasn’t Ma’s voice saying those words. It was mine.

Dad looked confused. He stepped back and turned around, as though he was going to walk away. But he didn’t walk away. Instead, he cocked his arm and bunched his fist. Then he spun back and, in one movement, delivered his fist like a cannonball into Clay’s stomach.

I don’t know how many times he hit Clay. I closed my
eyes and clamped my hands over my ears, but I could still hear the thuds and the grunts that accompanied each blow. I cried out for Ma, for Marie, for anybody who could make Dad stop.

It took me a few moments to realize that my pleas and Clay’s gasps were the only sounds left in the room. I opened my eyes and Dad was gone. Outside, I heard his truck start and saw a smear of black pass the window.

I hurried to Clay, who was bent over, one hand gripping the edge of the counter and the other clutching his ribs as he struggled to get to his feet.

I grabbed him to help him up, his skin damp and hot beneath his shirt. There was blood splattered on the linoleum and drops falling on the tops of my sandal straps, oozing between my toes. “Oh, God, Clay, you’re bleeding all over the place.”

Clay unfolded himself with a groan. His eyes were as red as the blood that drained from his nose.

“I’ll call Ma!” I said.

Clay lifted the hem of his shirt and swabbed his face. “What the fuck good would that do?” he said between broken teeth.

I was babbling, and I couldn’t stop. “I’ll call Marie. She’ll come and take you to the hospital. Al will come too, and—”

“Shut the fuck up,” he said.

I stood silent, shaking, as he headed toward the door, groaning as he fished in his pocket for the keys to the beat-up Chevy he’d bought from Henry Bickett. Out the door he went, leaving me standing there in his blood.

Clay never came home again. Not once.

Mr. Walker called me into his office the first day Clay returned to school, asking if I knew what had happened to
Clay’s face—which was badly swollen and bluish-purple, the bulges under his eyes tinged yellow. His nose was cocked and lumped.

There was no question in my mind about what to say. “He got into a fight with some boys from Larkston,” I said. “They beat him up because one of them thought he was hitting on his girlfriend.” It was the story Clay had told me to tell, when he grabbed my arm in the hallway while we changed classes, just seconds after my name was called over the loudspeaker, summoning me to the principal’s office.

“You sure about that, Tess?” Walker said, scrutinizing me behind thick glasses.

“That’s what he told me.”

I packed his things in trash bags and moved them around the back of the shed, just like he asked me to do when he stopped me in the hall to ask how it went with Walker. He must have come for them in the middle of the night, because they were gone on the fifth morning.

If the school ever caught on that Clay wasn’t living at home, they didn’t question Ma or me. Clay’s car was in the parking lot each morning when I got to school, and it was there when I boarded the bus each night.

Nobody seemed to know where Clay slept. Rumors circulated that he’d moved in with his girlfriend, Heather, and her family, but when Ma called there to check, Heather’s father assured her that they hadn’t seen Clay since “the incident,” and it was better that way: Heather didn’t need to be running around with “trash.”

A couple weeks later, word trickled to Mitzy that one of the starters on the basketball team, Colin Blake, was convinced that Clay was living in his car. He’d caught Clay in the boys’ bathroom at six o’clock in the morning when he came in
for an early practice, and Clay had the sink stopped up with a sock and was washing his armpits with soap from the dispenser.

Clay got a job at the Piggly Wiggly after school, stocking shelves and bagging groceries. It must have afforded him enough money to make it, because every time I chased him down in the hall and tried to give him the small wad of bills Mom siphoned from the grocery fund, he shoved my hand away, saying he didn’t want a thing from “those fuckers.” I kept the money hidden in my room because I couldn’t tell Ma that he refused her help.

“Ma didn’t do anything. She wasn’t even there,” I told him. “And she’s bawling her eyes out every day, worrying about you. At least give her a call so she can hear that you’re all right.”

But he never did.

Clay talked to me less and less in school in that last half of our senior year, until he wasn’t speaking to me at all. Or anyone else, for that matter. He dropped Heather and his friends right after the big blowout, which was probably a good thing, since all they did was party—and his name appeared on the high honor roll that last semester. He didn’t show up at graduation, even though he’d won scholarship money. And a week after graduation, somebody told Dad that they saw Clay boarding the Greyhound.

For the last hour or so—since I wrote the scene above—I’ve been sitting here, my body feeling too heavy to make it up the stairs to go to bed, even though sitting here means listening to Dad gasping for breaths. Breaths that sound like he was punched in the guts. It is a sickening sound, this sound of Ma’s karma.

When I finish reading Mom’s journal entry, I wrench the memory stick out of my laptop. I wrap it in a wad of Kleenex and throw it in the trash, promising myself that I’ll never read it again. Even if that means never learning about my father.

W
HEN
I get downstairs on Saturday morning, Oma is in the kitchen, talking to someone on the phone. As I’m sitting down to pour milk into my already filled cereal bowl—not filled with something good like Cap’n Crunch or Lucky Charms but some whole-grain stuff that tastes like leaves, with dried strips of fruit that chew like shoelaces—I realize that she’s talking about Grandpa Sam and that the voice at the other end is the county nurse, Barbara. She’s been making increasingly frequent stops at our house over the last two weeks. I glance in the driveway and Roger’s car is gone, which means Mom left before I woke up again.

“I did take it,” Oma is saying. “It was one-oh-three last
night. This morning he feels clammy and downright cold. I don’t know if he has a virus, or … Oh, uh-huh … Yes, I did that last night too. The top number was almost one-fifty, and this morning it’s at about forty-five. His blood pressure’s all over the place.”

I wag my spoon in my bowl, clearing the flakes to the side until I form a little pool of milk, then scoop at it with my spoon. The little pool doesn’t empty though, of course.

No longer hungry, I let my spoon rest against the side of the bowl and start paging through Oma’s
Tibetan Book of the Dead
, which is sitting on the table.

“Okay. I’d appreciate that,” Oma finally says, then hangs up.

Oma tugs the hem of her sky-blue tunic—as if it’s not already in place—and forces a smile. “Good morning, honey,” she says. She glances down at the page I’m reading and slips the book out from under my hand, as though she’s merely straightening up, and then she suggests that maybe I’d like to join Milo on his bike ride.

I look up at her and see a worried half smile. She reaches down and puts her hand on my arm. “Your grandpa isn’t doing so well this morning, so Barbara is going to stop by and take a look at him. She’ll … Well, they know what signs to watch for.”

So do I. From page five of the pamphlet from Ministry Home Care that the hospice volunteer gave us, underneath the heading: “One to Two Weeks Prior to Death.” Second paragraph:
There are changes which show the physical body is losing its ability to maintain itself.

“I think I’ll go for a ride too,” I say.

I pee, and Oma gives me Ma’s cell phone, which Milo had forgotten to take with him. “You want to stop in and say good morning to your grandpa before you go riding?”

I shake my head. I don’t tell her that when I see him, it’s too hard to pretend that he’s not dying.

Milo and Feynman always go west, where there are more-challenging hills, but I’m going east, toward town.

As I pedal, I try to think of what strategy I’ll use to get Maude Tuttle to talk. I try to think of anything but Grandpa Sam, because I don’t want to think of him anymore. I don’t want to see him either. Yesterday afternoon, while I pretended to study, Oma and Barbara wheeled the hoist out of Grandpa’s room. The contraption had him tethered around his waist and groin. His head lolled to the side, his arms hanging limply. He looked like Sammy, with no one manning the strings. As they made a wide circle around the couch, he lifted his head some, but I looked away. Mom says it’s okay if I don’t want to sit with him anymore, but it doesn’t feel okay to me.

I find Maude Tuttle’s house easily, and I’m only a little nervous when I rap on her door. Hard, in case she’s half deaf, because she’s old enough to need a hoist too.

It seems to take forever, but finally the curtain stretched tight over the long glass portion of her door slips to the side, and her wrinkled eye appears.

She opens the door about six inches, as far as the chain hook will allow. Not enough for me to slip through, but wide enough that I can see that she’s not wearing any makeup. Her whole face looks like the wadded knot of Clay’s T-shirt that Mom helped me vividly see with her words.

“I don’t want any Girl Scout cookies, and, no, I’m not buying any chocolate bars so your band can go to Tim
fuck
tu to march in some ball game, so go away.”

I put up my hand to keep the door from shutting. “No, no. That’s not why I’m here.”

She peers closer, her faded eye studying me. “I’m Lucy
McGowan,” I tell her. “Sam McGowan’s granddaughter. I saw you in Coffee Beans, remember?”

“What do you want?”

The plan I came up with just four blocks ago to woo her into talking suddenly seems lame, so I toss it out and just say it like it is—I’m convinced this is the best approach to take with someone like Maude Tuttle. “I want to ask you some things about my family, because when you’re a kid, nobody tells you anything, even if it’s stuff you have a right to know. I figure you might know something and that anybody bold enough to flip off Connie Olinger is probably bold enough to tell me.”

Her wrinkly lids squint as she studies me.

“Please, Miss Tuttle. I’m trying to learn something about my father. You’ve been in this town forever, so you probably know my family’s history. And no disrespect, but I figure that someone who once ran a house of ill repute is probably not going to worry much about telling the truth to a girl who’s already getting cramps because she’s old enough to get her period any day now.”