The Favor (17 page)

“He talked Mom into giving him money. A lot of money. He talked her into taking out a second mortgage on the house to start some record producing business. He took things, too. From the house. To sell them.” Her uncle paused as though to give her time to reply, but her stomach was too sour for her to speak. “He stole from Mom, Janelle. Right out from under her.”

She hadn’t known, but she wasn’t surprised. “I’m not my dad. And you all asked me to come here, did you forget that? Because apparently none of the rest of you want this responsibility. Did you forget that, too?”

“Let me talk with everyone else about the repairs. About seeing you get a little more of a budget....”

Janelle shook her head, though of course, he couldn’t see her. “No. No budget. When you asked me to come out here, it wasn’t just to take care of Nan, it was to take care of the house. While she’s still here, and after. You told me that you wanted someone who’d make sure it was in the best condition to be sold, someone you could trust with it. Either you trust me...or you don’t.”

“I can’t just give you free rein! It’s not up to me!”

Janelle didn’t want to argue about it anymore. “Fine. Talk to them. Get back to me. But I need to be able to do things around this house, and I can’t if my hands are tied. If you’re really worried that I’m going to run off with something, or...I don’t even know what, then maybe you’d be better off hiring a nurse.”

“You’d leave Mom?” He sounded astonished.

“I don’t have to leave St. Marys,” Janelle told him. “Even if I don’t live in this house. I can still love my grandmother even if I’m not the one changing her sheets. After all...you all do.”

With that, it seemed obvious he had nothing more to say, so she disconnected.

Nan called her name from the bedroom. Tapping her phone against her palm, Janelle went to the door. “Hi. Can I get you something?”

“I’m going to get up, honey.” Nan yawned and set her book aside. “Who were you talking to? Is Benny home from school?”

“No. He will be soon, though. I was talking to Uncle Joey.”

“About the house.” Nan sighed. “He doesn’t want you to change things.”

“How’d you know?”

Nan laughed. “Because I know my son. Getting him to come around here to do anything has been a trial for years. You’d think this place was a national monument or something. I’m the one who had to live here all these years, it was my house, but Joey...oh, Joey, he likes to hold on to things tight. Your dad, now, if he were here and in charge of things, he’d never have argued. Your dad...he was never one to hang on to things.”

As a victim of her dad’s lack of sentimentality, Janelle understood that very well. “I don’t really want to change anything, either, Nan. I like your house the way it is.”

Nan smiled. “Me, too, honey. I’ve lived in this house for most of my life. I had five children in this house. And I’ll die in it, too.”

“Oh, Nan.” Janelle shook her head. “Don’t say that.”

“Don’t you start,” Nan scolded. “Nobody wants to talk about it, but that’s the truth. It won’t be long now. I’ve been hearing them calling.”

Janelle didn’t understand. “Who? The phone hasn’t—”

“No, no, not the phone.” Nan paused. “I hear them calling my name.”

“Who, Nan?”

She shrugged slightly. “I’m not sure, but I think it must be...angels.”

Janelle didn’t laugh. She didn’t even bite the inside of her cheek. Somehow the idea of angels calling out to her Nan seemed...right. “What do they say?”

“The first time it happened was just before I fell down the stairs. I’d taken a little nap, and I heard someone calling my name. ‘Maureen,’ they said. ‘Maureen!’” Nan lifted one finger. “Well, I thought it must be Helen, maybe coming by to pick me up for card club, but it was too early.”

Intent, Janelle leaned forward. “Who was it?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I got up out of bed and went to the living room. I thought for sure someone had come in.” Nan leaned forward a little bit, too, to whisper, “But there was nobody.”

“Maybe you...dreamed it?”

She sagged back onto the pillows and tossed her hands up. “Maybe I did! But it happened more than once.”

“Have you heard them lately?” This story intrigued Janelle. She didn’t discount it. She had never believed in ghosts, exactly, but she’d never
not
believed. It was a cliché to say that she’d met her share of New Age spiritualists while living in California, but it was true.

“Oh, yes,” Nan said quietly. “I still hear them. They say my name.”

“And that’s all?”

Nan hesitated. “Yes. Just my name.”

Janelle had experienced that sudden jerking feeling before falling asleep before. She tried to think if she’d ever heard someone calling her name. She thought of waking, heart pounding, sweating, ears straining for whatever it was that had torn her from sleep—Bennett’s cry, the snick of a locked door opening, an alarm. “Does it scare you?”

“Oh, no,” Nan said. “Why would it?”

“It would scare me,” Janelle admitted.

“It wouldn’t, if you knew it was someone who loved you.”

Janelle laughed lightly. “But...how would I know if it was someone who loved me?”

“You’d know.” Nan patted the bedspread again, then made motions of getting up. “Now help me up, Janelle, it’s time for my program.”

TWENTY

Then

GABE HAS A new blaze-orange hunting vest, an early Christmas present, his dad says. That means there won’t be anything else under the tree, but that’s okay. The new rifle that he can use now makes up for not having any presents on Christmas Day.

This is the first time he’s been invited along to camp. Four days and three nights, a half-dozen guys in the cabin, all of them his dad’s friends and none with sons of their own. Gabe’s known these guys his entire life. Not one has a second’s hesitation in cuffing him upside the head when he gets a smart mouth on him, but all of them make sure he’s fully equipped and prepared for the hunt.

Archie Miller gives him a bottle of deer pee to rub all over himself. Eddie Smith offers advice on packing toilet paper in his backpack, “just in case.” These men are like brothers, his dad included. And he’s different at camp, Gabe’s dad. Gabe’s never seen his dad smile so freely, much less burst out in knee-slapping laughter. The jokes are dirty, some of them going over Gabe’s head, and he knows better than to laugh or else face good-natured ridicule from the men asking him if he knows what he’s laughing at. Good-natured maybe even from his dad, who’s nothing like he is at home with his sour face and ready fists, but Gabe’s not taking a chance. He keeps quiet, drawing no attention to himself.

For dinner they eat pork ’n’ beans with franks cooked right in the pan. Hamburgers. Deer sausage, the last from the previous year’s hunting, and supposedly a good omen for bagging a buck this time around. Gabe’s never seen his dad so much as brown a piece of toast, but here he puts on a silly chef’s cap and a fake French accent as he whips up a meat loaf that rivals anything Mrs. Moser has ever left for them. After dinner, Gabe does the dishes in the sink, which doesn’t have running water, just buckets drawn from the pump outside and heated on the wood stove. The men play cards and drink beer and smoke cigars until the smoke’s so thick it turns them into ghosts. They lift their legs and fart. More dirty jokes, more stories that get louder and more graphic as the night wears on, until Archie, who Gabe’s dad has always said is half a moron, says, “Talking about whores, I seen your old lady over in Dubois last week. Damn, the titties on her....”

The sudden silence is thicker than the cigar smoke fog.

Then Gabe’s dad says quietly, significantly, “Little pitchers, Archie. Little fucking pitchers.”

Gabe acts as if he didn’t hear what Archie said, or at least didn’t understand it, and in another half a minute the men are back to their laughter and jokes. Money’s tossed on the table along with a watch, a pocketknife, a slip of paper scrawled with an IOU. It’s become serious business, and Gabe’s not invited to play.

He sneaks away upstairs, where the gables are so steep you can stand upright only in the center of the room, and if you’re on top of one of the six sets of bunk beds you’d better watch your head if you sit up too fast. He has a top bunk, of course, away from the rest of them. The room’s cold enough to show his breath, but he’s warm in his sleeping bag. His eyes droop. He sleeps.

He’s woken by the sound of shouting from outside. Blinking, Gabe sits, forgetting the slope of the ceiling. Stars explode in his vision when his forehead connects with the slatted wood. Something that might be a spider, please Jesus, not a spider, skitters across his lips and he swipes at it frantically. The pain’s so fierce, so bright, he thinks it has made him blind.

Of course, it’s just the darkness. Gabe twists in his sleeping bag to look out the window. The glass is rimed around the edges, but the center’s clear. Everything’s so cold in the room, even his breath, it hardly frosts the rest of the glass.

Outside is a lot brighter than in, because of the fire in the pit and the single spotlight. The snow around the pit has melted, the dirt beneath churned to mud. Benches made from split logs ring the fire, and one of them’s been knocked over. Mud streaks the snow, which even farther from the pit has been gouged down to bare ground in places. That’s because of the men who are fighting, Gabe thinks, his brain still a little blurry from the whack he gave his bean on the ceiling.

It’s his dad; he knows that at once. Ralph Tierney fights when he drinks. His friends know it, though it never stops them from offering that next beer.

“You stupid bastard!” Ralph shouts, fists raised. Fluid that must be blood, but looks black, leaks from his nose. His thinning hair stands on end. His red-and-black-checked flannel shirt flaps open to reveal the stained white T-shirt beneath it. Gabe’s dad is muscular and lean most everywhere but his belly, which sticks out now. “You stupid, loud-mouthed, lousy son of a bitch!”

“Jesus, Ralph, simmer down!” That’s Archie, whose friends all know he does have a loud mouth, the way they know Ralph gets fisty after his sixth or seventh Straub’s greenie. “How was I supposed to know?”

“You should’ve thought about it, you stupid...” Ralph seems to lose steam at that. He staggers.

Gabe turns away, feeling sick. The floorboards creak. It’s Eddie with a palm-size flashlight, hand cupped over the light to keep it from blinding anyone.

“Go back to sleep, kid.”

“I am.” Gabe scoots down into the sleeping bag, though he’s pretty sure it will be a long time before he can sleep.

Eddie moves closer. He’s the youngest of Ralph’s friends, part of the group because his older brother, Frank, went to school with them all, plus Eddie married Archie’s younger sister, Denita. Eddie wears wire-rimmed glasses that always slip down his nose, and he pushes them up now as he looks out the window.

“It’s just Archie,” he says supercasually. “Running off his mouth. He should know better than to piss off your dad.”

Gabe says nothing. Archie ran his mouth about a lot of things; that wasn’t new. But what he ran his mouth about...
that
had been different.

“He doesn’t know when to shut up, that’s all.”

Gabe doesn’t look at Eddie. “He was talking about my dad’s...girlfriend.”

The word tastes funny. Men Ralph’s age oughtn’t to have girlfriends. They should have wives, or old-maid sisters who did for them. Or housekeepers like Mrs. Moser, who’d been with them since Gabe was little. But
girlfriend
is a nicer word than
whore,
which is what Archie had called her.

Eddie snorts softly. The light from outside flashes on his glasses when he turns. “Your dad has a girlfriend?”

“I thought that’s what Archie meant.”

“No. It was shitty of him to say it like that, but he meant your dad’s old lady. His wife. Your mom.”

Gabe’s throat closes. His body goes stiff, like stone. He can’t move anything but his mouth, and he wishes he couldn’t move that because then he couldn’t answer. “I guess Archie’s an idiot then, because it couldn’t have been my mom. My mom’s dead.”

A slow, awkward hiss of air slips from Eddie’s mouth. He moves closer. “Jesus, kid. I’m sorry.... I think it’s rotten your dad has been lying to you. But it’s gonna come out sometime or other.”

Gabe manages to turn his head on the pillow and prop himself up to look at the man. “My mom’s dead.”

Eddie shakes his head slowly. He smells like wood smoke and beer, and he’s clearly drunker than Gabe thought he was, because he wobbles a little when he bends to unlace his boot. He pushes it off with the toe of the other, then takes a break with a sigh. Eddie scratches at his face, then his hair. His face is nothing but shadow except for the twin bright disks of his glasses, reflecting the firelight coming in the window. It makes his eyes look as if they’re on fire.

“I’m sorry to tell you, kid. But she’s not.”

TWENTY-ONE

GETTING BENNETT TO take a shower was not yet monumentally difficult, but it was a whole lot harder than it had been even a year ago.

“It’s cold!” he complained, hopping from foot to foot, already in his pajamas.

Compared to California, it
was
cold. Still, that was no excuse. “You can’t go to school looking like a hobo. I’m sure your friends’ mothers don’t let them go to school in ripped clothes with knots in their hair, either.”

“Who cares?” he cried, suddenly vehement. “Who cares what anyone there thinks about anything, anyway?”

“I care,” she said.

“It’s my hair! My clothes! I should be able to decide what I want.”

Without thinking, Janelle ran her fingers through her own hair, which was sleek and without tangles. How many times had she fought the hairbrush? How often had she been allowed to face the world with a dirty face and clothes because her dad had been more concerned about being fun than firm?

“It’s my job as your mother to make sure you are taken care of and that you learn to take care of yourself,” Janelle told him. “No arguments. This is not a negotiation. Get in there and shower. Wash and comb your hair.”