For the rest of the day, I did my duties mechanically. I tried to fixate again on Randy, as usual glancing over at him as he sat on his stool, but my fascination fell flat. Like a favorite song you’ve heard so many times it begins to annoy you, or like when you scratch an itch so hard it begins to bleed, Randy’s face now seemed common, his lips childishly plump, almost feminine, his hair silly and pretentious. There was nothing mesmerizing about his crotch, nor did his arms seem at all special — the magic of his muscles had vanished. I even felt a bit sick when I imagined him coming toward me in the dark, his breath smelling of sausage, burnt coffee, cigarettes. The heart is a moody, greedy thing, I suppose. He really was special, though. I wish I’d just told Randy I loved him when I had the chance, before Rebecca came along. He had captivated me. It’s rare to meet someone who can do that to you. Randy, wherever you may be, I saw you, and you were beautiful. I loved you.
• • •
I left Moorehead for the last time that afternoon, though I couldn’t have predicted that. I left my desk a mess. The vermouth and chocolates sat in my locker, a library book in my drawer. I don’t recall my last moments in that prison, and I occasionally wondered what became of my belongings, or what the office ladies had to say about me when I didn’t show up for work after the holidays. Mrs. Stephens was probably put back in charge of visitation, Mrs. Murray intake. I doubt much fuss was made. If Rebecca went back there, maybe she tried to cover for me. “She’s visiting family,” she might have lied. I don’t care. I haven’t lost any sleep thinking about what I left behind at Moorehead.
I was exhausted on the drive home that evening, and already suffering from the powerful wrenching pain that usually accompanied my period on the third day. I was too tired to stop by Lardner’s on my way home that night. If my father needed something, that was his problem. It wouldn’t kill him to drink a glass of milk, spend a single night sober, I thought. Or perhaps it would kill him. Either way, I didn’t care. I suppose it was at that moment, with the weight of the gun in my purse on my lap, turning into the dark and icy driveway between the tall walls of piled up snow, that I thought of trying to put him out of his misery. I could have shot him, but that would have been messy and might get me in trouble. My mother’s pills were a better idea, but there were only a few left in the bottle. She had taken them to alleviate the pain of dying, as the doctor had prescribed. She said, however, that she took them to protect her daughter, poor me, from having to hear her moan and yelp and gripe and complain all day. I took one, too, from time to time as I waited for her to finally “kick the bucket.” This was how I described what had happened when I called Joanie on the phone the morning after she died. I’d spent the night before in the blackness those good pills provided, then woke up to a cold dead body in the bed beside me, my mother’s angry corpse.
The gun was heavy in my purse on my shoulder as I walked up the front steps that night. I let myself in through the front door, careful under the dripping daggers of ice. Even through the dimness, it was apparent that the foyer had been cleared of old newspapers and bottles, even swept. The cool shape of a white circular tablecloth on the kitchen table told me that someone had been cleaning. Perhaps the station had sent over a rookie after word got around that my esteemed father had been living in a pigsty. Or maybe my father had cleaned up on his own — boiled a strong pot of coffee, got industrious, sober for a day. He had undertaken projects to improve the home in the past — building a shelf to organize the basement, insulating the attic — projects he always abandoned as soon as the coffee got cold and he figured he deserved a beer. None of his pledges to get off the bottle lasted more than an afternoon. When I left, there were still bright pink rolls of insulation stuffed in the slanted corners of the attic. I’d stared at them for years every night as I fell asleep.
My father’s coat was hanging on the hook by the front door. When I turned the light on in the kitchen, I found his chair empty. I pulled out two slices of bread from the refrigerator, slathered some mayonnaise on one, slapped the two pieces together, and let each bite melt on my tongue. That was my dinner. It took me years to learn how to feed myself properly, or rather it took years to develop the desire to feed myself properly. Back there in X-ville, I desperately hoped I could avoid ever having to resemble a grown woman. I didn’t see that any good could come of that.
When I went upstairs, I saw there was a light on in my mother’s bedroom, the door closed. Through it I heard the loud, irregular breathing of my sleeping father. My mother’s old pills were in a drawer of the bedside table, but I dared not go in there and risk waking him. A half-empty bottle of gin lay at the top of the stairs. I took it up to the attic with me. The previous summer, my father had fallen down the attic stairs one morning on his way up to wake me, yelling that there were mobsters in the cellar planning to kill us. I was barely awake when I heard him trip and thunder down the steps, splinters cracking like lightning until his body hit the landing with a low thud. I had to get dressed and help him limp to the car. I drove him to the emergency room, where they pumped him full of liquids, measured his liver, and a doctor told me the bad news, which was that if he stopped drinking he might die, and if he continued, it would surely kill him. “It’s quite a quandary,” the doctor told me, looking down at my bruised knees. “Eat a can of spinach, young lady,” he said. I went home. I did the laundry. I took a bath. The house without my father in it felt as though it belonged to strangers. All my belongings were there, but the rooms all felt so empty, unfamiliar. It irked me. Eventually my father was sent home with a cane and a bandage on his ankle, a stitch on his chin. He wore his wound proudly, cleaning it meticulously at first, then excessively, with rubbing alcohol, of which he demanded more and more. I liked the smell of it, too, and when my father wasn’t looking, I took a sip of it and nearly choked.
That night I took the gin and my purse to the attic, changed into pajamas, and slipped the gun under my pillow. Doing that felt like a prayer, or like when my first tooth fell out as a child and I placed it there before I went to sleep. I recall waking up to two shiny nickels under my pillow once. What shocked me was not the transformation from tooth to silver, but the idea that I had slept through the disturbance of my mother or father sneaking in during the night, that I had been unconscious, completely unaware, vulnerable. I remember my question that morning — what else had they done to me in my sleep? I’ve often wondered about everything I may have slept through, what arguments, what secrets. When I think back on my childhood, not much appears but the house itself, the furniture and its arrangements, the change of seasons in the backyard. There are no faces on people, only their shadows slipping out of sight as they leave the room. What I remember most about my mother is the slight weight of her in the bed the morning she died, her cold hands when I held them, perhaps for the first time since I’d been a child, the give of her shoulder when I leaned into it and cried.
I drank for a while that night, remembering. Then I put down the bottle, pulled out my reading materials. I must confess that amidst my stack of National Geographics were hidden several issues of my father’s pornographic magazines. I pulled one of them out and leafed blithely through its pages until I fell asleep.