“Sure, Jeffie,” Bobby said.
“Dad’s dying.”
“The sooner the better.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“The hell I don’t.”
“He wants to see you before he crosses over.”
Bobby snorted. “I could give a shit what that bastard wants, dead or alive.”
“You have to forgive him, Bobby, the way he’s forgiven you.”
Uh-oh, Dinah thought, almost sorry for Jeffie.
Almost. She kneaded bread and wondered where Kate was. For some reason Kate was the only one among them who didn’t send Jeffrey Clark into pontifical orbit. Maybe he’d fallen into passionate, unreasoning, uncaring love with her. Maybe he’d marry her and whisk her home in lieu of his brother.
Maybe Kate would find whoever burned her cabin down and not hurt him.
Meanwhile, back at the front.
“Is he in pain?” Bobby said.
“Yes,” Jeffrey said.
“Good,” Bobby said, with a grim kind of relish.
“You don’t mean that.”
“The hell I don’t!”
Katya, used to Daddy’s bellows, was unacquainted with the tenor of this one. Her face puckered. Bobby plucked her from the middle of her toys and cuddled her. He dropped his voice but from fifteen feet Dinah could still hear the venom in it. “Lynnie is dead because of him.”
Jeffrey’s voice sharpened. “Lynnette Adams is dead because she committed a mortal sin, and when she was called to account for it, tried to wipe it out by committing another, and then the worst one of all. She was damned from the beginning.”
Dinah froze, wrist-deep in dough. Where was the first-aid kit, exactly? Bathroom, that’s right, above the sink.
After a moment of silence that positively sizzled, Bobby spoke in a tone that was a mixture of silk and razor wire that Dinah had never heard before. “Don’t let me hear you say anything like that again, Jeffie. Not ever. Lynnie was a sweetheart, my sweetheart. We had plans, Lynnie and me. Because we got ahead of ourselves and she had an abortion doesn’t make her a sinner.”
“Dad didn’t hold the razor to her wrists in that bathtub, Robert.”
“And it wasn’t Dad calling her a whore from the pulpit, either, I suppose?”
Dinah, chilled to the bone by the menacing purr issuing forth from the man previously known as her husband, found herself holding her breath. She looked over her shoulder at the gun case standing in one corner of the room. Still locked. Good.
The silence was broken by a tiny whimper. Dinah risked a look over her shoulder and saw her daughter hugging as much of her father’s neck as she could get her arms around. “Daddy mad,” she said in a tiny voice. “Daddy mad. Don’t be mad, Daddy. Please.”
Both men, glaring at each other, were recalled to the present. “It’s okay, baby. Daddy’s not mad at you. Daddy’s never mad at you.” Bobby rocked his chair back and forth with a hand on the wheel. Her arms relaxed and her head drooped to his shoulder. Dinah noticed she didn’t let go of her father’s neck.
In a more civil tone, Jeffrey said, “Mom needs you.”
“Yeah, well, I needed her when I was sixteen and she was nowhere to be found.”
A brief pause. “She gave you life.”
“I didn’t have a vote in that, Jeffie. That was their choice. This is mine.”
“Robert-”
Dinah gave up the pretence of blissful ignorance and came around the corner, hands cupped so she wouldn’t dribble flour all over the floor. “Give it a rest, Jeffrey, why don’t you. Go on back to Auntie Vi’s. Take a drive, see something of the Park while you’re here.” And give my man a break, she thought.
He turned his head and stared at a point somewhere above her left shoulder. In three days he had yet to look her in the face. She would never forget the shock in his when Bobby had introduced them, and the repugnance in his voice. “You married a white woman?”
“All right,” he said now, still staring straight past her. “I’ll be back this evening.”
“Don’t bother,” Bobby said.
Jeffrey left without replying.
There was a whole lot of quiet going on following the muted slam of the door behind him. Everyone listened intently to the footsteps going down the steps, over the grass, the opening of the door to the battered blue Nissan truck Auntie Vi had rented to Jeffrey at a more extortionate rate than usual, the starting of the engine, the sound of it receding over the creek and down the road.
“So.” Dinah blew out a breath. “That could have gone better.”
Bobby cracked out a laugh. “You’ve said that every day since he came.”
“I’ve meant it every day since he came.”
He gave her an incredulous look. “For chrissake, woman! The man has yet to call you by name! Don’t fucking tell me you’re on his side!”
She went back to the kitchen and started kneading dough.
She heard the squeak of rubber on wood as he followed. “Dinah?”
“Jeffrey’s right about one thing.”
“Oh? And that would be what, exactly?”
Dinah took a deep breath and prepared for the storm. “He is your father. He gave you life. He wants to see you. You owe him.”
She closed her eyes and braced herself. When he said nothing, she looked around.
He was weeping.
Katya raised her head from his shoulder and stared. She touched the track of one of his tears with a pudgy little finger. “Daddy sad?” she said. Her voice broke. “Daddy sad,” she wailed, and started to sob, a horrible, heartbroken sound that struck both parents to the core.
Dinah gave her hands a quick wash, made up a bottle, and stashed Katya in her crib where, thankfully, for once Katya subsided without complaint and fell asleep with a milky face. Dinah marched back to her husband, shoved his chair into the living room, ordered him onto the couch, and curled up half in and half out of his lap. She put her arms around him and she hung on and that was all she did for about an hour, listening to the beat of his heart against her ear, feeling the intermittent shudder in his body when his breath caught. She hung on and she wouldn’t let go and she wouldn’t move. Slowly, steadily, he began to relax, one muscle group at a time. He rested his forehead against her shoulder. “I can’t go back, Dinah.”
She burrowed closer. “A day’s travel, a day there, another day to get home. Three days you’ll be gone, tops.”
“I don’t want to.”
“He’s your father.” She raised her head and searched his face. “Bobby, don’t you have one good memory of your father? Did he take you fishing, or hold you on your first bicycle, or cheer you on during a baseball game? Did he read you a story over and over again, or hold you when you were sick, or let you crawl in with him and your mother when you had a nightmare?”
He let his head fall back against the head of the couch and closed his eyes. “Maybe. One or two of those.” He opened his eyes. “Maybe all. But Lynnie’s dead because this supposedly good man called her a whore in front of her parents and her family and her friends. And me.”
Dinah chose her words carefully. “They called you a fornicator, and a sinner.”
He said nothing.
“And you didn’t kill yourself.”
His laugh was brief and bitter. “No, I let the Cong take care of that for me.”
She straddled his lap and took his face between her hands. Never before had she noticed how white they were against the black of his face, and she could and would curse his brother loud and long for that. “Bobby, what if he dies? What if he dies and you don’t say good-bye?”
“I said good-bye a long time ago, Dinah.”
“What about your mother?”
He shook his head. “I always came second to Jeffie. He was the oldest, the smartest, the most gendemanly. If she has Jeffie, she won’t want me.” He looked at her with a ghost of his old twinkle. “Jeffie got a full scholarship to MIT, did you know?”
“I think I heard him mention it twelve or fourteen times.”
They both laughed a little.
Kate walked in, followed by Johnny with a full daypack over his shoulder. “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” she said. “The evil brother strikes again.”