He said, “A marriage often dies when a child does.”
“You were good enough to share that insight with me before.”
“It’s why you pay me,” he said, squeezing my face and letting his hands drop.
“I wanted you to know,” I said. “You’ve been good, helping me. Talking to me the way you have.”
“I haven’t helped,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s help for this.”
I nodded.
“Something else,” I said.
“Jack, there can’t be anything else.”
I said, “Tell me one more time you were the one wanted me worrying at the Tanner girl thing.”
“You’re still pissed about that?”
“No. But you were the one, and because it might help me.”
He said, “Yeah. But of course that was when I thought all you were coping with was this unbearable, shattering loss. I didn’t know it was some kind of a Greek goddamned play.”
I made myself look at him again. “Whatever happens,” I said, “I want to thank you.”
“What’s that mean, Jack? The ‘whatever’ part?”
“Thank you,” I said.
“What’s that ‘whatever’ mean?”
“I think I’ll be in touch with you later, Archie. Maybe you can think of something you could do for Fanny?”
“When you get the boulder to the top of the hill, don’t let it roll back.”
“What boulder?”
“That’s about all I can think of,” he said. “Make sure I hear from you soon.”
I knew that I wasn’t going to work when I dropped him off at the Blue Bird. He got out without talking because I think we’d run out of words. Instead of driving onto the campus, I stopped across from the Blue Bird at the public phone and called the dispatcher. I didn’t tell her I was sick. I told her I wasn’t coming in and then I hung up. I drove out of town to the south and east and I went to the Tanners’.
She was in the same chair and wearing the same clothing and blanket. He was at the little woodstove, putting in a thick log that might smolder most of the morning. I liked the smell of the smoke but not the heat. My ribs and fingers were hurting and my headache was worse. The brightness of the sun behind the cloud cover moving in seemed to make my eyes throb.
I didn’t sit with her because I was afraid I’d end up with my head in her lap.
They said good morning, and I said it. They waited. The reverend, on his knees at the stove, sat on the three-inch brick fire floor like a little kid on the sidewalk, knees up near his face, his arms around his legs.
He finally said, “Oh dear.”
I said, “Did you know your daughter was having an affair? I don’t know if that’s the right word. I’m sorry for this. I think she was let’s say seeing someone. I figure she wouldn’t have bought expensive lacy underwear for a boy her age, right? They don’t do that. I figure the boys are so grateful, they don’t require anything like what I saw upstairs. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m going on one fact, one nonfact, one guess, and one lie. I’m figuring, to start, that a perfect girl who isn’t like any of the other girls in America wouldn’t get involved with seductive underwear unless it was something to do with sex and an older man. I’m sorry.”
“Whose lie?” Mrs. Tanner said. She had the blanket around her now, so I could hardly see her face. Her voice came out of the shadows it made, hooding her.
“Don’t you want to know the fact?” I was angry at them for not knowing, and I must have sounded it. “Wouldn’t a mom and dad want the fact first?”
She said, “All right, Jack. Please.”
“The sexy underwear in her bureau. Why didn’t you know about it?”
“I don’t pry,” she said. “We don’t.”
I said, “Why not? I thought you took care of her. Couldn’t you have looked? And let’s one of these days ask someone in law enforcement why they could look, and see the underwear and not read the receipt and know she had two pairs of it. That meant she was seeing this person a lot, maybe. Or maybe thinking about it. Figuring, knowing her, she’d need to wash and dry the one while she wore the other. Right?”
Mrs. Tanner took the upper part of the blanket down. Her hair looked like it was made of something artificial. Her complexion was changing, from the orange with a darkness underneath it to something like the skin of a lemon going bad. Her husband had his face down on his knees.
“The nonfact,” I said, and I almost whispered it. My voice didn’t want to come. My throat didn’t want to let the air out. I said, “The nonfact is what you don’t know. Or the diary you saw and burned or hid or made yourselves forget about. Or the diary she didn’t write because she was too smart. Or the underwear you didn’t know about. It’s something like that. It’s what this family didn’t ever talk about. That could be a guess, too.
“Except I’m guessing about who the man is. So it can’t count as a guess and it has to be a nonfact.”
She said, “I know you’re as upset as we are, Jack.”
“Could be,” I said. “And just because I sound like I hate you, or me, or everybody, I don’t want you thinking that’s all of it that I feel. Understand? Can we have a deal on that?”
The reverend looked at her.
I said, “I want a deal on that.”
The reverend nodded. His wife said, very low, “Yes. Thank you, Jack.”
“You wanted to know the lie?”
They waited.
“I’m going to come back in here in a minute or two. Will you wait for me?”
I turned. I left the car where it was. I walked in the road because they didn’t have a sidewalk in that town, and I had the gun in my left hand. I couldn’t have held it in my right. I went up Strodemaster’s drive and I opened his back door. He was in the bathrobe, frying bacon. I smelled the sausage and onions from the night before. Under it, I smelled what had rotted in the room.
I put the pistol into my right hand, though it didn’t want to hold it. I didn’t feel very much about the power of it this time. I wasn’t howling inside about my primitive strength. I couldn’t have been happy for a price. Maybe if someone gave me back my life with Fanny and Hannah. But that wasn’t in the small, smelly kitchen that was crowded with two big men breathing like cross-country runners, one of them in unlaced boots and a bathrobe. I simply wanted to be sure I fired it with some accuracy. But I couldn’t. It seems I closed my eyes.
I stuck my hand out and cupped the bottom of my fist where it met with the bottom of the pistol grip. My eyes were shut. I squeezed the rounds off slowly. It felt like every shot was a word or as close as I could come to words.
After four of them, I opened my eyes. I had put a gray-blue puckering hole in the enamel of the stove. I had placed a round in the wall behind the stove. I’d heard a ricochet off the frying pan. And the last one had disappeared. I wondered if it had gone into the cork rim of the chalkboard or into Strodemaster. He was crouched in front of his burning breakfast, with his hands on his ears. We could line him up with me and Rosalie, our hands in front of our eyes, I thought, and make that joke about monkeys not doing something. I smelled the cordite as well as the garbage now, and of course the burnt bacon in the greasy pan. I smelled the stink of my sweat. He wasn’t moving, and I was still in the firing stance.
We’d been taught in the MPs to startle people in rooms we broke into by shouting in those up-from-the-navel sergeant voices to stand still, put your hands on your head, et cetera. I didn’t have any strength today. I needed the audiovisual effects, I told myself. I hadn’t known, walking through his door, what I would do. I think maybe I was trying to kill him. I pretended to myself it was all a part of my plan — the door kicked in, the shots fired, the attention he would give me now.