She turned her face away from him. Her shoulders heaved, and she held her head down. Her hands were clenched in fists shoved hard against her legs.
“I’m sorry,” Wade repeated. “Please don’t cry. Please, honey, don’t cry.”
“What are you sorry for?” she asked. She had gained control of herself, had managed to stop crying, and she wiped her cheeks with her sleeve and looked grimly ahead.
“I don’t know. For the food business, I guess. I just thought, you know, we’d sneak a Big Mac on Mommy, like we used to.”
“I don’t like doing that anymore,” she said.
“Okay. So we won’t.” He tried to sound cheerful. “Whatever Jillie wants,” he said, using her baby name, “Jillie gets.”
She was silent for a few seconds, and then she said, “I want to go home.”
“You can’t,” Wade snapped back. His face stiffened, and he clenched the wheel with both hands, as they came to the Hopkinton interchange and drove up onto the turnpike. Soon he had the truck up to its top speed of fifty miles per hour, shaking and shuddering in protest. The wind blew in under the floorboards and fought the puffs of heat from the heater, chilling the air inside the truck. Jill curled up on the seat as far from her father as she could get and dropped into sleep, waking only when they stopped in West Lebanon for gas and for Wade to pee, and at the Catamount exit, where Wade picked up a six-pack of beer and a Coke at a roadside grocery. Jill declined the Coke with a shake of her head and watched while Wade, heading back up the ramp onto the interstate, cracked open a can of beer and took a long slug from it and stuck the can between his legs.
“That’s illegal, you know,” Jill said quietly.
“I know.” Wade glanced over at her, saw that she was looking out the side window at the snow-covered fields and woods, and took a second pull from the beer.
“You’re a policeman,” she said without turning.
“Nope. Not anymore. I’m not nothing anymore.”
“Oh,” she said.
By the time they reached the Lawford exit, Wade had finished two cans of beer and was halfway through a third. The empties rolled back and forth on the floor, banging lightly against one another as the truck followed the curving ramp down to Route 29, turned left and chugged alongside the river into Lawford.
23
“WADE COME IN HERE LOOKING STRANGE, sort of like he always does — you know, with that kind of distracted nervous face he wears all the time, only worse this time, like he was a little drunk, maybe. Which was not unusual, even though it was only a little after lunchtime. The place was still pretty busy, it being the next to last day of deer season and all these Massachusetts assholes who hadn’t got their deer yet up for one last crack at shooting a goddamned cow or a paperboy on a bike and hoping it was a deer — that happened, you know: couple years ago, some individual shot a kid on a bike delivering papers over near Catamount. Astounding.
“Anyhow, Wade was looking peculiar, you might say, like he hadn’t gotten any sleep for a few nights, big humongous circles under his eyes; only he was all dressed up, like he was going to a funeral, coat and tie and all; and he had his kid with him, this nice little kid, I seen her lots of times, what’s-her-name, Jillie: he goes, ‘Jillie, you want a cheese grilled sandwich? You want a cheese grilled sandwich?’ he says. He always says it that way, ‘cheese grilled sandwich,’ and normally I just leave the guy alone — what the hell, everybody talks funny sometimes. Only this time I have to correct him, I guess as a kind of joke. ‘It’s grilled cheese sandwich, you dub,’ I tell him, because I was pissed he made such a big deal out of my sign a few weeks before just when I was putting the damned thing up. The sonofabitch cost me a hundred and fifty bucks and it come out wrong and Wade seen it and pointed it out to me in what you might say was an aggressive way.
“So I go, ‘It’s grilled cheese sandwich, you dub,’ friendly, sort of, but like I said, pissed a little — probably mostly because we were busy as hell right then and Margie, as you know, had taken the day off at my suggestion for very good reasons, which you can use my story to illustrate the wisdom of my recommendation, because the sonofabitch reaches across the counter and grabs me by the shirtfront. He’s sitting there on a stool, you know, right where you are, or a few stools down — I don’t recall that exactly; and his kid is sitting next to him, looking bored like kids do — until this happens, of course, which is when all hell breaks loose. Wade looks up at me with his face suddenly gone red, and he just grabs my shirt, like this.”
And here Nick Wickham reached across the counter and grasped my shirtfront and yanked, hard. Slowly, he let go and went on. I sat back, my legs suddenly watery.
“Everybody in the place goes silent. What the hell, this is unusual, right? This is really un-usual. And the little kid — I mean, she’s just a kid, you know, a goddamned urchin, and she’s naturally terrified. Her face goes all white, and she starts to cry, so Wade lets go of me — and listen, I was plenty scared myself, not to mention ticked off. I figure, the place is full of guys, so Wade can’t do too much damage, but just the same, I’m a goddamned marshmallow; I don’t need that kind of stuff, especially not in my restaurant. Guys come in drunk and start trouble, I sweet-talk them right out the door: let them settle it in the parking lot. Wade, though, there was no sweet-talking that guy that day. It’s like he had this glaze over his eyes, like he couldn’t see out right, and you couldn’t see in at all; when the kid starts to cry, he looks over at her, surprised and puzzled, like he’s this gorilla, some kind of King Kong who hears a strange musical sound off to his side just as he’s about to bite off the head of some guy; he lets go of me, acts like he was only hanging up his coat or something instead of physically attacking a fellow human being. Very strange. Very strange and weird. Of course I knew already about LaRiviere firing him, and I knew about Jack replacing him as town cop and all — everybody knew about it by then — but just the same, it was very strange, the way he was acting.
“He makes like he’s comforting his kid: wipes her nose with a napkin, that sort of thing — like a regular loving father and nothing’s happened; and she says she wants to go home. He got up, stiff — like she slapped him and he’s holding back his impulse to slap her back because she’s a kid — and he goes, ‘Okay, let’s go home, then.’ Now this worries me more than a little, because I happen to know that Margie’s out there at the house this very minute packing up and moving the hell out, like I told her to do. I mean, I know the individuals we’re talking about here are your father and your brother, but — no offense — I was plenty worried about Margie living up there on the hill with those two acting the way they were. You can understand that. You would have done the same thing, probably: told her to move the hell out, I mean.
“So I say to him, ‘Wade, I got a message for you.’ He goes, ‘A message.’ Like it’s in a foreign language. I say, ‘Jack Hewitt, he’s looking for you. Wants you to clear your stuff out of his office down to the town hall.’ I do this real careful, standing back there, way the hell over by the coffee machine, so he can’t reach me. Like I say, I’m a real marshmallow, and this guy is a hand grenade with the goddamned pin pulled; but I figure Jack can handle him all right, and most importantly, I don’t want Wade to catch Margie moving out on him. She’s a hell of a sweet woman, as you no doubt know by now. Heart as big as a house. So I tell Wade about Jack wanting him to clear his stuff out — which happened to be true. Jack was in that morning early. He had his license back, and there was only one more day for him to get his deer, so he was heading out; and Jack, he says to me, ‘If you see Wade, tell him to get his shit out of my office,’ was how he put it. I put it to Wade somewhat more politely, let us say. Although I did make the mistake of calling it ‘his’ office. Jack’s.