The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (43 page)

“I mean you really like her,” she said. “It’s all right to like someone that way, Roger.” She looked up at me then, and there was such a sadness in her eyes. I’ve never been able to get the memory of that moment out of my head. “It’s the way I felt about your father,” she said, and then she ripped the sheet of paper from the pad and wadded it up in her hand.

Somehow I knew that what she was telling me with all that talk about Connie was that she and Mr. Timms didn’t like each other in quite the same way, that what they had going on between them was very different from what had brought her and my father together. I think that she was telling me that if she’d had her druthers, she would have felt that way about Mr. Timms—she would have
liked
him, and he would have
liked
her—but what they had between them was something very different from liking someone. It was something born out of loneliness and desperation. I want to believe that she was trying to tell me that what Connie and I had was special and that she wished it would last.

“You know I’m an old woman, don’t you?” she finally said to me.

She was forty-one that summer. If she were alive today, she’d be seventy-nine. I like to think she’d have become an elegant woman, well suited to her age, happy with what she had left in her life, but that Sunday when she clung to Mr. Timms in the woods, no one knew she’d only live ten more years, or that my father, who divorced her, would come to the hospital and sit by her bed and hold her hand as she was dying.

“You’re not that old,” I told her that day in the kitchen.

She looked at me, shaking her head, her lips turned up in a sad grin. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You just wait.”

So there we were that Sunday, Bill and my father and me, and my father said again, “Roger, go back to the car.”

When I still wouldn’t move, he said, “We should all go back. We should go home.”

That’s when Bill said, “Jesus Christ.”

And then he was tromping through the woods toward that lease road where my mother raised her head and pushed away from Mr. Timms and saw that they weren’t alone.

“I don’t know who you think you are,” Bill said when he got to where they were standing. “How can you live with yourself? And you, Annie.” Here Bill shook his head, took a long breath and let it out. “I thought you were better than this.”

There comes a moment when all that’s been denied rises up and leaves you raw and trembling. That’s what I was learning that day as I stood there—my father and I hadn’t moved—listening to Bill’s loud voice ringing with accusation and judgment.

Now I find myself wishing again and again that it would have been possible for me to tell him something that would have made a difference. Something about how broken we were. Something about how a time comes when it’s best to just walk away, even if it means leaving behind someone you swore you’d love the rest of your life. Maybe we thought we could save ourselves, but it was too late.

Although I felt all this inside me, I couldn’t find anything to say that would matter. Even now I can’t put it into words. I can only remember the way it felt in the woods in the moments after Bill shouldered his twelve-gauge, and I knew that all of us were about to move from this world into another one that would hold us the rest of our days.

Bill said to Mr. Timms, “Get into your car. Go home.” He motioned to the Olds ’98 with the barrel of his twelve-gauge. “You’ve got a daughter,” he said. “Can’t you try to be a decent man for her sake? Go on now. This is over. Annie’s coming with us.”

“Bill, calm down,” my mother said. “You should take care.”

“Don’t tell me that,” said Bill. “Not you. Not the way you’ve been whoring around. R.T. might not know how to handle you, but by God I think I do.”

My father was moving then, his long legs striding quickly through the woods to the lease road. I remembered that winter night when he’d put his hand on my shoulder and we’d watched the snow come down. The beauty of it all amazed him.
It’s like we’re in a picture
, he said. I knew he wasn’t made for such ugliness as was upon him now, and I couldn’t bear to see him walking toward it. I didn’t know anything to do but to follow him.

“Bill, let’s go.” He rested his hand on my uncle’s shoulder just the way he had mine that winter night. “Put that shotgun down.” He was talking in a quiet voice, but I could hear the fear in it. “I mean it, Bill. We need to go.”

My mother looked at me then, and she was ashamed. “Oh, Roger,” she said. “You hadn’t ought to be here.”

I thought my father would tell me again to go back to the car, but he was intent on dealing with Bill, who still had that twelve-gauge trained on Mr. Timms.

“Bill,” my father said, “listen to me.”

“Better do what he says, Jordan.” Mr. Timms had his hands in the pockets of his blue-and-red-plaid golf pants, standing there in a way that told me he felt positive my uncle was bluffing. “I can make things plenty rough for you,” he said. “I can see to it you lose your job.”

“I’ve put up with enough shit from you, Harold.” Bill shook free from my father’s hand. “I’m not going to put up with any more of it.”

That’s when Mr. Timms said to my mother, “Annie, tell him. Tell R.T. what’s what.”

My mother couldn’t speak. She looked at Mr. Timms, and then at my father. From where I stood beside him, I could see that she was afraid. Her eyes were wet, and there was just the slightest tremor at the corner of her mouth.

“Annie?” my father said.

“Go on, Annie,” said Mr. Timms. “Tell him what we’ve decided.”

Bill stepped up closer to him. He pressed the barrel of the twelve-gauge into the soft spot beneath his chin, and Mr. Timms tilted his head, trying to get free from the nick of the raised bead sight.

“You’re not deciding anything.” Bill kept up the pressure with that gun barrel, and he walked Mr. Timms backward, away from my mother along the driver’s side of the Olds until they were out of the lease road and off in the woods opposite us. “If anyone’s running this show, it’s me.”

I should tell you that Bill was a violent man, but I can’t, because the truth was, prior to that moment in the woods, he wasn’t. He was my uncle, my father’s younger brother, who had done his stint as a grunt in Vietnam and come home, seemingly no worse for the experience. He had his job with the railroad and that little box house on South Street not far from the Uptown Cafe, where he ate breakfast every morning before heading out to work. He kept a pot of wave petunias on each side of the front steps of his house. Some evenings I’d go driving by, and he’d be outside with his watering can. He’d have on a pair of khaki shorts and his old army shirt with the sleeves cut out. He’d throw up his arm, his fingers in the
V
of a peace sign, and I’d think,
There he is, the happiest man alive.

What did I know about him except that? Whatever he carried inside him was a secret to me.

“I don’t know what got into him,” my father would say time and time again as the years went on. “I guess it was like he said. He’d just had enough.”

Enough of Harold Timms and the way he shoved him around on the job. Enough of the fact that Mr. Timms thought he could take another man’s wife and not have to answer for it. Enough of his gold Ban-Lon shirt that Sunday in the woods, and his flashy plaid golf pants, and that Olds ’98. Enough of things we had no way of knowing about as he tried his best to live a regular life in the aftermath of whatever he’d gone through in Vietnam. Enough.

So when Mr. Timms said what he did—“I’m going to tell you something, Jordan. And R.T., I want you to listen to this too”—Bill pulled back on the hammer of that twelve-gauge.

“Don’t talk,” he said to Mr. Timms. “Don’t say another word.”

The squirrels were chattering high up in the hickory trees, the sun was splintering through the branches, a mourning dove was off in the distance calling for rain. A little wind had come up, and it was cooler there in the woods. I thought for a moment that everything would be all right. Bill backed away from Mr. Timms, and he let his arms relax, the twelve-gauge now held crosswise at his waist. He came back to the lease road, walking backward until he cleared the Olds and was standing a couple of feet away from its rear end.

Mr. Timms followed him, stopping finally about midway down the side of the car. I could see his head and shoulders above the roof. He said, “R.T., Annie doesn’t love you. She loves me, and we aim to have a life together.”

“I told you to shut up.” Bill’s voice was loud and shaking. “I gave you fair warning.”

But Mr. Timms went on. “She hasn’t loved you in a long time. She’s just stayed with you for the sake of the boy.” Here he pointed his finger at me. “And I know what you’ve been doing with my Connie. I saw you . . .
we
saw you, your mother and me . . . Saturday night, two lovebirds on a blanket over there at your grandparents’ farm. I want you to leave Connie alone. She’s told you, hasn’t she? She’s only fifteen, for Christ’s sake. She’s too young to be laying in the dark with a boy.”

“I love her,” I said, and though I said it in a quiet voice, I could tell right away I’d spoken with force.

I knew that because for a good while no one said a thing. They were stunned—struck dumb because in the midst of all this ugliness, a boy had spoken his heart and reminded them all of what it was to be young and smitten with the first stirrings of something sweet and pure.

Then my mother said, “Oh, honey.”

And my father said, “We should all just leave now before this gets out of hand.”

“Hell,” said Mr. Timms. He laughed, throwing back his head, his mouth open so wide I could see a single gold molar. “You love her?” he said to me. “You don’t know what love is. You just love your pecker.”

He took a few steps toward us, and Bill shouldered that twelve-gauge again and said, “You better stop. I swear, Harold. I won’t let you drag Roger into this.”

“Oh, he’s in it all right.” Mr. Timms took two more steps—he was at the rear of the Olds now, about to step out into the open. He stopped walking and rested his hand on the trunk. “Well, at least there’s one man in your family.” He laughed again, only this time there was no joy in it. “Ha, ha,” he said. “Ha, ha.” Then his eyes narrowed, and he said, “Son, you must have inherited your mother’s hot blood.”

The blast from the twelve-gauge was sudden and explosive. The back glass of the Olds shattered, blown backward onto the bench seat. For a moment that’s all I could take in—how there was a loud crack and then the glass came apart in more little pieces than anyone would ever be able to count.

Then my mother called Mr. Timms’s name. “Harold.” She was moving past me, toward the Olds. “Harold. Oh, God.”

It all came into focus for me then, the entire picture. Mr. Timms was on the ground, his torso hidden alongside the Olds. I could see his shoes—a pair of white leather loafers with gold buckles—and I understood that Bill had shot him.

My father was running after my mother. He caught up to her just as she got to the rear of the Olds. She looked down at Mr. Timms and then put her hands to her face. Her shoulders heaved. My father took her by those shoulders as if to hold them still.

He turned back toward me and his eyes were wild. “Don’t come over here.” He was shouting, though I was only a few feet away from him. “Whatever you do, don’t.”

My mother twisted around and pressed her face into the collar of his shirt. She beat against his chest with her fists, and he let her do that until she was all wrung out. Then he wrapped her up in his arms, and as I watched him holding her, I understood that Mr. Timms was dead, that Bill had killed him, and now the world would be a different place for all of us.

My father wanted to pass it off as a hunting accident, but Bill said no, we’d call it exactly what it was.

“I’m not going to ask Roger to carry a lie,” he said. “I may not be much, but I know what’s right and what’s not.”

“You?” my mother said. “You don’t know anything.”

“At least I’ll own up to what I’ve done.”

A hickory nut dropped from a tree and hit the top of the Olds with a bang. Then everything was quiet. Just the mourning doves somewhere in the distance and a squirrel chattering and the leaves stirring in the wind.

My father said, “And what did you do, Bill? Do you intend to tell me that you meant to kill him?”

Said Bill, “I just wanted him to shut up.”

My mother pushed away from my father and went running off into the woods, trying to get away, I imagine, from what we were all going to have to face. Bill had shot her lover and killed him, and all of this had happened while Connie was listening to the radio at her house, and soon she would have to know about it.

My mother stumbled over a fallen branch and went down on her hands and knees. She fell over onto her side and lay there in the dead leaves and the dirt, and she pulled her knees up toward her chest, as if she were going to sleep—as if she’d never get up from that spot.

“I used to know you,” my father said to Bill.

Bill nodded. Then he set his jaw and looked off into the distance for an instant. He swallowed hard. “Well, I’m not that person now.” There was a crack in his voice. “And I won’t be ever again.” He looked at my father again, and his voice got steady. “It wasn’t your fault, R.T. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. My life got taken to hell a long time ago, but I’m by God not about to ruin Roger’s.”

After that, there was nothing left to do but to pick my mother up from the ground.

“My purse,” she said.

She said it was still on the front seat of the Olds, and before my father had a chance to stop me, I went to the car and I opened the passenger side door. The purse, that woven straw box purse with the strawberries and the white blooms on it. I picked it up by its thin handle. I resisted the urge to peer out the driver’s side window to see what a man who’d been shot with a twelve-gauge might look like. I didn’t want that picture in my head. I was just a kid, but I knew enough about the future to know I didn’t need that. So I concentrated on the purse. I carried it to my mother, and then the four of us started back through the woods so we could drive into town and call the sheriff. I rode in the bed of the El Camino, so whatever got said in the cab was outside my hearing. I wasn’t concerned with it anyway. I was thinking about Connie, and how she was an orphan now, and how unfair it was for me to know that before she did.