The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (42 page)

My father wasn’t made for such a thing. As we went on down the blacktop in the El Camino, I took note again of that Timex watch he was wearing—the face so big on that delicate wrist—and I found myself thinking,
He doesn’t have the heart.
I’m ashamed of that thought now, considering everything that was about to happen that day, things I still can’t get straight enough to suit me.

Bill and my father owned eighty acres in Lukin Township just off the County Line Road. The farm had belonged to my grandparents, but that summer my grandfather was dead, and my grandmother was living in a nursing home. She’d deeded the place to Bill and my father, and they leased it out to a tenant farmer. Often on Sunday afternoons they came down to give the place a look-see. The home place, they always called it. Sometimes, like the day I’m recalling, they brought their shotguns.

We uncased our guns and started out. We skirted the old chicken house and the clump of horseweeds taller than the roof.

“Should’ve brought a hoe to cut those down,” Bill said.

“Next time,” said my father.

We walked single file along the edge of the field that came up to the chicken house and the patch of ground my grandparents had always used for their vegetable garden. The tenant farmer had plowed up the field and sowed it in soybeans once he’d cut the wheat. The bean plants were already reaching toward knee-high. We had to crowd up into the foxtail growing along the wire fence to keep from tromping the beans. The leaves on the plants in that outer row brushed against my legs.

“Sowing fencerow to fencerow, ain’t he?” Bill said.

He was in the lead, and my father was right behind him. “Using all he can,” he said. “Getting everything he can get.”

A little air stirred the bean plants. A covey of quail got up from the fencerow, their wings a loud whirring and clacking that startled me. Bill got his twelve-gauge to his shoulder, but already the covey was banking over the tree line.

“Damn, I should have been ready,” Bill said.

“Out of season,” my father reminded him.

“Who would’ve known?” Bill lowered the twelve-gauge and cradled it. “Just you and me and Roger out here. Far as I can see, there’s no one else around.”

The sky didn’t have a cloud in it, just the contrail from an invisible jet stretching out little by little. I thought about Connie—wondered what she was doing, wondered if she’d really meant it when she told me we were through. Some nights that summer we’d driven down to the farm so we could be alone and out of sight. I had a ’63 Impala I’d bought with the money I’d saved working hay crews since I was thirteen and the last two summers on a Christmas tree farm west of Goldengate. Connie sat close on the bench seat when she rode with me, her hand on my thigh. Our routine was she’d go for a walk in the evening. I’d hear her screen door slap shut, and I’d see her going on up the sidewalk. She’d have on a pair of Levis and one of the halter tops she favored that summer, her breasts loose beneath it, a blue or red or white bow tied under her hair at her neck and another sash tied at the small of her back, the tails of that bow trailing down over the waist of her jeans and bouncing with the roll of her hips. She’d walk out Locust Street to the city park at the edge of town and wait for me in one of the dugouts at the baseball field. I always gave my horn a honk when I took the last curve out of town, and when I pulled in behind the concession stand, she’d be there, ready to open the passenger side door and slide across that bench seat and kiss me.

I had a blanket in the trunk of the Impala, and at the farm we spread it out on the grass and lay next to each other and waited for the stars to come out. It got so dark out there in the country, and under all those stars we said the things that were most on our minds, the things we could barely stand to face when they were right there in front of us in the daylight.

Connie said she missed her mother, and sometimes she cried a little, and I held her hand and didn’t say a word.

One night she said, “Why doesn’t your mother love your father?”

I told her I didn’t know, which was the truth. I’ve had years to think about what the trouble between them might have been, but I’ve never been able to say it was this or that. Maybe it was my father’s caution. Maybe my mother grew tired of the careful way he lived his life. One evening when they were hosting a pinochle party for a few couples they knew from church, my father kept underbidding his hands. Finally my mother said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, R.T. Live a little.” Little things like that have come back to me as time has gone on, but I can’t say for certain they mean anything.

But one thing I remember keeps me up at night, and that’s the moment I told Connie about on the Saturday night before that Sunday when she told me she couldn’t see me anymore, and later Bill and my father and I were moving into the woods with our shotguns. It may have been the story that spooked her, that made her believe what we were doing was ill-fated and could never come to a good end.

I said to her, “Last night I heard him beg her to stop.”

My mother’s and father’s talking stirred me from sleep in the middle of the night. I don’t know how long they’d been at it, trying to keep their voices low so I wouldn’t hear, but by the time I was awake, they were beyond that point. They weren’t thinking about anything except what had brought them to where they stood—in the midst of an ugliness they could no longer deny or ignore.

My father said, “Please, Annie. I’ve always tried my best to give you a good life, to give
us
a good life . . .” His voice trailed off, and then I heard a noise I couldn’t at first identify as anything that might come from a human being. A groan, a growl, a whimper at the end. In the silence that followed, I remember thinking,
That’s my father.
“Annie,” he finally said. “You’ve got to stop this. If you don’t . . .”

His voice left him then—swallowed up, I imagine, by the terror he felt over the prospect of a life lived without her.

“You want a divorce,” my mother said after a time. “Is that it?”

My father was weeping now. I could hear that. “Annie,” he said in a breathless, shaking voice that could barely make the words come out of his mouth. “I want you to love me.”

For a good while there was only the sound of him trying to choke down his sobs and get his breath.

Then my mother said in a gentle voice I’ve always tried to remember for what it was, the voice of a woman who’d found her way to trouble and didn’t know how to get out, “I’m here,” she said. “R.T., shh. Listen to me.” I like to think that she touched him then—touched his face or his hand, maybe even put her arms around his neck and pressed him to her. “I’m right here,” she said again. “That’s the most you should wish.”

Connie hadn’t asked for this piece of information. We’d only been lying on the blanket, looking up at the stars, not saying much of anything, just enjoying being close to each other in the dark, and I’d felt safe telling her that story. I was sixteen. She was my first love. She was the only person I could tell. What did I know then about the ties that bind one person to another?

I had to live through what was waiting for me that Sunday to know anything about love at all.

“My father’s the cause of that.” Connie sat up on the blanket. She crossed her arms over her stomach and started rocking back and forth. “He should have left your mother alone.”

“She made a choice,” I said. “It wasn’t just him.”

For a good while Connie didn’t say anything. Then in a whisper she said, “Yes, they both made their choices.”

Just then a set of headlights came down the lane. They lit up the gravel roadbed and spread out over the fencerows. They came so far that they shined on the wire fencing around the farmhouse yard. I could hear the engine idling and the faint sound of the car radio. The tires crunched over the gravel as the car rolled forward an inch or two. Then it stopped.

I knew whoever was in that car was looking at the grille of my Impala. Those headlights had caught the chrome. Whoever was in that car knew now they weren’t the only ones who’d come down that lane, and they were trying to decide what to do.

Connie was still sitting up on the blanket. We were on the grass to the left of the Impala, about even with the trunk, and just barely out of the glare of the headlights in the lane.

“Roger,” she said, and I could tell she was scared.

I reached up and put my hand on the small of her back, felt the heat of her skin. “It’s okay,” I said. “Everything’s okay.”

It seemed like the car in the lane would sit there forever, the driver unable to decide whether to keep coming. A drop of sweat slid down Connie’s back and onto my hand. Then somewhere nearby a screech owl started its trill, the call that seemed to come from the other side of the living, and I felt my heart pounding in my chest.

“Oh, God,” said Connie.

Then the car in the lane started backing up. It backed all the way to the end, where it swung out and pointed itself north. I watched the red taillights, and what I didn’t tell Connie, though maybe she knew this on her own, was that those long vertical rows of lights, set wide apart, were the taillights of an Olds ’98 like her father’s.

“Whoever that was, they’re gone,” I said.

I let my hand fall to the bow of her halter top. I started to untie it, but she slapped my hand away.

“That was spooky,” she said. “That car. C’mon. Let’s go.”

So in my mind now, the image of the two of us walking toward my Impala and getting in and driving back to town is forever tied up with the picture of me stepping into the woods that Sunday with Bill and my father.

We waited and waited around a stand of hickory trees where we’d seen pieces of husks on the ground, and though from time to time we heard a squirrel chattering in the tree mast high above us, we could never get a clear shot, and after too much time keeping quiet, Bill finally said, “Fuck it. I’m done.”

He was all for heading back to town, but my father said, “Let’s walk on over to the end of the next field and see if there’s any better hunting in Kepper’s Woods. We’re here. We might as well see what’s what over there.”

Jean Timms had been a Kepper before she married Mr. Timms, and those woods had been in her family longer than I could imagine. I didn’t know any of that on that Sunday—Kepper’s Woods was just a name to me, the way Higgins Corner or McVeigh Bottoms was, places marked by the names of families, the history of whom I had no reason to know.

Surely my father knew that about Jean Timms and Kepper’s Woods. I wonder now whether he had any thought at all of what he might find there.

“Might as well,” Bill said, and off we went.

Marathon Oil had a lease road running through those woods, and that’s where we came upon the car—Mr. Timms’s Olds ’98—nosed deep into the shade offered by the hickories and oaks and ash trees and sweet gums.

A flash of my mother’s red sundress caught my eye first—just a quick glimpse of red as she came around the front of the Olds—and then, just like that, the whole picture came into view: the dark green Olds with road dust coating the top of the rear bumper, the gold of Mr. Timms’s Ban-Lon pullover shirt, the bright red of my mother’s sundress. She walked a few steps behind the car, back down the oil lease road, and that’s where Mr. Timms caught up to her. He took her by her arm and turned her around to face him. He put his arms around her, and she put her arms around him, and they held each other there in the woods on that road where they thought no one could see.

“There’s Mom,” I said, and as soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t.

When I saw her with Mr. Timms, I found the sight to be so strange and yet somehow familiar, mixed up as it was with what I felt about Connie, that I couldn’t help but say what I did.

I imagine my father would have eventually spotted them, and what took place next would have still been the thing that happened, but even now I can’t stop myself from believing that if I’d kept my mouth shut, perhaps we would have veered away from that oil lease road, and Bill and my father never would have seen my mother and Mr. Timms. I can’t keep myself from thinking that maybe there was that one chance that we would have gone on, maybe found some squirrels, maybe not, and then driven back into town, and our lives would have gone on the way they’d been moving all that summer. Maybe there was that one possibility of grace that I cost us because I spoke.
There’s Mom
, I said, and Bill and my father stopped.

We were hidden in the woods, maybe fifty yards or so away, and my mother and Mr. Timms had no idea we were there.

My father said to me, in a very quiet, very calm voice, “Go back to the car, Roger.”

But I didn’t move. I was afraid that if I did, my mother and Mr. Timms would hear my footsteps over the twigs and hickory nut husks on the floor of the woods. The thought of my mother’s face turning in my direction, her eyes meeting mine, was more than I could stand to imagine, because what Bill and my father didn’t know was that one day that summer my mother said to me, “You like Connie, don’t you?”

We were alone in the house. My father was at the courthouse in Phillipsport. It was a hot, still afternoon with storm clouds gathering in the west. Soon there’d be a little breeze kicking up—enough to stir the wind chimes my mother had hanging outside the back door, the ones I’d brought her from my class trip to McCormick’s Creek State Park.
They’re pine cones
, she said when she saw the chimes.
Little gold pine cones
, she said, and even now, whenever I want to feel kindly toward her, all I have to do is call up the memory of how she held the chimes up and blew on them to set those pine cones to tinkling, how she looked at them, amazed.

I’d just come in from mowing the yard, and when my mother asked me that question about Connie, I was about to take a drink of grape Kool-Aid from the glass I’d poured. I stopped with the glass halfway to my mouth, and then I set it down on the kitchen counter.

Soon the thunder would start, at first a low rumble in the distance, and eventually the lightning would come and the sky would open up, but for the time being it was as if there wasn’t a breath of air to be found. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table writing out a grocery list on one of my father’s notepads that had his name stamped at the top—
Roger Thomas Jordan, Phillips County Tax Assessor.
She hadn’t made much progress.
Eggs
, she’d written.
Milk.
Then she’d stopped and the rest of the note page was covered with her name, written in her beautiful hand again and again.
Annie, Annie, Annie.