Ken Nevins stood in front of a chair upholstered in plaid wool. On the TV was a preseason exhibition baseball game with the sound off. A cooler sat next to the chair, a bottle of beer on the side table.
“Hi, Doc,” Ken said. He looked fine, rosy-cheeked, well rested. Nothing like he had last year before the suicide attempt. The woman Dave had brought him was not only a fake, she was a cruel fake.
“Want a beer?” Ken asked. He was shortish with very regular features, wide brown eyes, and straight, thick, dark hair. He was good-looking, almost pretty, on the verge of effeminate. But a year’s worth of delving had convinced Bunner that Ken Nevins had not tried to kill himself because he was a repressed homosexual. Bunner didn’t think he was, though it was next to impossible to be sure. Everything in his work was next to impossible, he thought suddenly. He should have taken his family’s advice and become a surgeon or an airplane mechanic, he thought wryly. Dangerous work, with a terrible responsibility he couldn’t imagine shouldering because, as Dave had observed once, if you fucked up, you could kill someone. But this was the same too, wasn’t it? He’d fucked up once, and Nevins had almost died. If he fucked up again...
Goddamn that woman, he thought fiercely.
Bunner said no to the beer, and Ken sat back down in the plaid chair.
“Need an invitation?” Ken asked pleasantly.
Bunner shook his head and sat on a matching couch. On the TV a bat cracked a ball and the crowd roared in silence.
“Just like to watch?” he asked Ken.
“I figured you’d come to talk about something,” Ken said, “not see the game.”
“Yeah...” He hesitated, feeling as foolish as he ever had in his life, and then he lied to Ken Nevins, something he almost never did to his patients.
“Just decided to see you, Ken.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Try to visit all my patients at home at least a few times.” Another lie.
“First I’ve heard of it,” Ken said suspiciously.
“Do you mind?”
Ken shrugged and looked at the silent game in progress on the twenty-one-inch screen.
“Well, you’ve come and seen. I guess you can go,” he said coldly. “Unless you’d like the house tour. The girls are at a kiddy birthday party and they had a sleepover last night. But Jenny’s a good housekeeper, the beds’re probably all made by now... and the rest of the debris taken care of.” His voice got colder with every word until debris sounded like ice cracking, and Bunner realized he was tampering with trust he’d spent a year building.
He wasn’t going to let this happen and he said quickly, “I’m sorry, Ken. That’s a load of shit I just gave you. I never visit my patients unless they ask me to for some reason. I’m not a social worker.”
“I thought as much,” Ken said quietly. The icy edge left his voice. “So... what’s going on, Bunny?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s too nuts. But... Ken... can I see the palms of your hands?”
Ken Nevins’s normally rosy, almost girlish complexion went white, then gray.
“Why?” he choked.
Bunner was startled at his reaction. “It’s... it’s...” he stammered. “More of the same silliness. At least I thought it was. Ken,” he said, forcing himself to speak slowly, clearly, “Ken, show me your hands.”
Ken clenched his fists reflexively. “You’ve seen those scars, Doctor. Everyone’s fucking seen those scars.”
“Your palms, Ken, not your arms.”
“Fuck you.”
With all the gentle, confident command he could muster, Bunner said, “Ken, show me,” and he held his hands open and out to Ken Nevins. Ken hesitated, and Bunner knew he’d played out all his line. If Ken wouldn’t do it, he couldn’t ask him again. At least not now. But then slowly, barely an inch at a time, Ken Nevins raised his clenched fists off the arms of the chair and laid them in Bunner’s waiting hands.
Then he opened them, and Bunner choked down a gasp that rose like a flash fire in his throat.
The skin of Ken Nevins’s palms was riled, ridged, runneled, and twisted, and in a few places stretched taut and shiny. It looked like he’d taken a meat grinder to his palms a long time ago, and they’d healed into these writhing scars. But you wouldn’t try to kill yourself by grinding up the palms of your hands, no matter how crazy you were. Besides, the scars were at least twenty years old. And then Bunner realized they were burn scars. When Ken Nevins was a kid, he’d burned the palms of his hands horribly. He’d put his hands, palms down, on a hot stove, or turned over the skillet of french fries his mother had left unattended on the stove—only his mother had never made french fries. She’d been an invalid, he’d known that from Ken... that woman had known it, too, God knows how. And God knows how she’d known about these poor scarred palms.
Both men were quiet for a long time. There was a break in the game, and out of the corner of his eye Bunner saw a clump of rugged-looking male models toasting each other with beer bottles. The advertisers must think only pansies used glasses.
More time passed while Ken let him hold his hands, excoriated palms up.
Bunner said, quietly, “I should’ve seen them before.”
“Naw, you shouldn’t. It’s easy to keep your palms hidden, Bunny. You put ’em face down on your thighs... like this.” He demonstrated. “Or keep your hands folded and everyone thinks you look sort of prim. Or nervous if you clench them. It’s easy.”
“What about in the hospital?” Bunner was asking easy questions, building to the hard one.
“You weren’t in the ER that night, Bunny, and trust me, no one gave a shit about my palms.”
Now for the big one, Bunner thought.
“How’d it happen, Ken?”
He looked up and saw tears swimming in Ken’s eyes. He’d never seen Ken cry before, even the morning after a suicide attempt had left his arms slashed almost to the bone. But he was crying now. Silent tears streamed down his face and dripped off his jaw and he pressed the runneled palms to his eyes.
After a moment, Bunner said, “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I killed my mother,” Ken said.
Bunner got back into the car without saying anything and started the motor. Latovsky looked questioningly at him, but Bunner shook his head and drove away from the Nevins house. The woman sat silently in the back seat.
He didn’t know where to go. Stopping at Ray’s or Tony’s or any of the town coffee shops or restaurants or one of the dim little smokey bars that would also have the rushing-the-season baseball game on a huge screen and trying to talk about... what he had to talk about... was ludicrous.
He couldn’t take them back to his chilly kitchen that might pay for itself with savings on air-conditioning—except you almost never needed air-conditioning up here—because he did not want her near Mary and the kid, who’d be home from the school soccer game by now, because she might see things about them. The thought actually made him queasy, and he kept driving.
Glenvale was a large town, almost a small city. There was a proper business district—the usual dirty stone buildings with old signs painted on the windows for lawyers, dentists, and so on. His office was in one of the few new buildings in town, but most of the rest of the professionals had to put up with musty carpeting, cracked granite floors, and walls that bulged under greasy-looking enamel in drab colors. But they could open their windows, didn’t have to have hot or cold air blowing out of registers all the time.