“Why was Billy so angry with his family?” I asked.
“He wasn’t angry with them,” April said earnestly. “Worried, he was worried by what he saw at the plant.”
“And what was that?”
She hunched a shoulder. “You know, everybody works hard for not enough money. Like Ma. Even Daddy, he made more driving a truck, but Billy said it wasn’t right, people’s lives being so hard.”
“Nothing more specific than that?” I was disappointed.
She shook her head. “I never listened that hard, mostly he would be talking to Josie, you know, off in one corner, but Nicaragua came in somehow, and Fly the Flag, I think-”
“What are you doing in here, bothering my girl?” Sandra appeared in the doorway, her tears gone, her face set in its usual hard lines.
“We’re making you a cup of tea, Ma. Coach says I can still suit up and be with the team, chart plays maybe.” April handed her mother and me each one of the mugs. “And maybe my academics will get me into college.”
“But they won’t pay your medical bills. You want to do something for April, don’t go putting ideas in her head about academics. Prove Bron was driving for the company when he died.”
I was startled. “Is By-Smart saying he wasn’t? Do they know where he was when he was jumped?”
“They won’t tell me anything. I went to see Mr. Grobian this morning over at the warehouse, I told him I was filing a claim, and he said, ‘Lots of luck.’ He said Bron was violating company rules when he was working, having that bitch in his cab, and they’d fight the claim.”
“You need a lawyer,” I said. “Someone who can take them to court for you.”
“You are so-so ignorant,” Sandra shrilled. “If I could afford a lawyer, Miss Iffy-genius, I wouldn’t need the money to begin with. I need proof. You’re a detective, go get me proof he was working for the company, and that the English whore wasn’t in his truck. It’s your fault she was there. Now you go make it up to me.”
“Bron’s behavior was not my fault, Sandra. And screaming about it won’t solve any of your problems now. I’ve got way more to do than take abuse from you. If you can’t calm down enough to talk sensibly, then I’m taking off.”
Sandra wavered, torn between the anger that consumed her and the wish to know about Bron’s death. In the end, the three of us sat at the kitchen table, drinking the weak tea, while I told them about Mitch leading me across the swamp to Bron and Marcena.
Sandra knew that Billy had lent his cell phone to Bron (“He told me he took it so he could stay in touch with April”), but she didn’t know about the Miata. This led to a little skirmish between her and April (“Ma, I didn’t tell you because you’d just do like you’re doing now, yelling about him, and I can’t take it.”).
Their priest had warned them that Bron was so badly disfigured that Sandra shouldn’t look at his body; did I think that was true?
“He looks terrible,” I agreed. “But if it was me, my husband, I mean, I would want to see him. Otherwise, it would always haunt me that I hadn’t said that last good-bye.”
“If you’d been married to that prick, you wouldn’t be so sappy, ‘that last good-bye’ and all that movie crap,” Sandra snapped.
She stopped at an outcry from her daughter, but the two began quarreling again over whether Bron really had a plan to find the money they needed for April’s health care.
“He called Mr. Grobian, and Mr. Grobian said he could come in and discuss it, Daddy told me that himself,” April said to her mother, scarlet-faced.
“You never understood that your father told people what they wanted to hear, not what the truth was. How do you think I ended up marrying him, anyway?” She bit the words off angrily.
“When did your dad tell you about Grobian?” I asked April. “Monday morning?”
“He was making me lunch when we got back from the hospital.” April blinked back tears. “Tuna fish sandwiches. He cut the crust off the bread like he used to when I was a baby. He wrapped me in a blanket and tucked me in his recliner and fed me, me and Big Bear. He said not to worry, he was going to talk to Mr. Grobian, it would be all right. Then Billy came, and he said if I could wait eight years until he got his trust fund he’d pay for the surgery, but Daddy said we couldn’t take charity, even if we could wait so long, and he was going to see Mr. Grobian.”
Sandra slapped the tabletop so hard her weak tea slopped out of the mug. “That is so damn typical! Him talking to you and not his own wife!”
April’s lower lip quivered, and she hugged Big Bear tightly to herself. Patrick Grobian hadn’t exactly struck me as the warmhearted Santa of the South Side. If Bron had been going to see him, it must have been to put the bite on him in some way, but when I suggested this April sat up again.
“No! Why are you taking her side against Daddy? He said he had a document from Mr. Grobian, it was all businesslike, shipshape.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Sandra cried. “I could have asked Grobian when I saw him this morning.”
“Because you kept saying like you’re saying now, how his ideas were dumb and wouldn’t work.”
“So neither of you know whether he actually did talk to Grobian, or what this document might be? Sandra, when did you actually talk to Bron for the last time?”
Her response, stripped of all its emotional outbursts, boiled down to Monday morning, when they brought April home from the hospital. They’d borrowed a car from a neighbor-their own car had been totaled in a hit-and-run last month and they hadn’t had the money to get another yet (because, of course, Bron had let the insurance payments lapse, and the other driver hadn’t been insured, either). Bron had dropped Sandra off at work in the borrowed car and then gone home to stay with April until he had to leave for work.
“He’s on the four-to-midnight shift this week. I have to be at the store at eight-fifteen, so lots of weeks we don’t see each other much. He gets up, has a cup of coffee with me in the morning. When April leaves for school, he goes back to bed and I catch the bus, and that’s the story for the week. Only when we brought April home, we didn’t want her climbing those stairs, they’re so steep, the doctor said no major exertion right now, so she’s sleeping with me down here in the big bed. Bron, he’s upstairs, or he was, when he got off shift Monday night he was going to go up and sleep in her bed.
“Tuesday, I made April her breakfast, even if I don’t cut the crust off the bread I make her breakfast every morning, but I had to go to work; you never know how long you have to wait for the bus, I couldn’t hang around for Mr. High-and-” She broke off, remembering the object of her bitterness was dead. “I just thought he was sleeping late,” she finished quietly. “I didn’t think anything about it at all.”
What document could Grobian possibly have signed that would make Bron think that By-Smart would ante up a hundred thousand dollars for April’s medical care? Nothing made any sense to me, but when I tried to push April to see if she could remember anything else, any hint Bron might have dropped, Sandra erupted. Didn’t I see April was tired? What was I trying to do, kill her daughter? The doctors said April couldn’t have any stress and me barging in and harassing her was stress, stress, stress.
“Ma,” April shrieked. “Don’t talk to Coach like that. That’s way more stress than I want.”
I could see fertile new ground for mother and daughter to fight on here, but I left without trying to say anything else. Sandra stayed in the kitchen, staring at the kitchen table, but April followed me back to the living room where I’d left my parka. She was gray around the mouth, and I urged her to go to bed, but she lingered, nuzzling her head against Big Bear, until I asked her what she wanted.
“Coach, I’m sorry Ma is upset and everything, but-can I still come to practice, like you said earlier?”