“She backed out of the promise.”
“Of course, she backed out. I’d been her lapdog for weeks, afraid that at any moment she’d change her mind.” Bree mimicked Olivia’s voice, “ ‘Bree, could you be a dear and call the florist for me?’ ‘Bree, honey, could you wait for the delivery man to drop off our washer and dryer on Thursday. He’ll be there between eight and five?’ And ‘Could you spend the week in Ohio with me to prepare for the wedding? I really need your help.’ I did everything she asked me. I even drove her to see your brother. She begged me to go with her. She wasn’t afraid of Mark, but she said that it would be easier for her if I was along. So of course, I went.”
I bit the inside of my lip and tasted blood.
“We were walking across campus when I asked her about the loan. I didn’t want to pressure her, and I’d already asked her the day before. She’d planned to talk it over with Kirk, as soon as she could.” Bree’s tears were gone, replaced by cold anger. “That’s when she said that she didn’t think it was going to work out.” She spoke more quickly. “I asked what she meant, and she said that she’d talked it over with Kirk, and they’d decided that it wasn’t a good idea when they’re starting out. I asked her how she could do this to me. To my mother. I reminded her of everything I’d done for her, for the wedding. And she thanked me. She thanked me, but said no.”
I held my breath.
Bree ran her left hand through her tangled curls. “I was so angry, I pushed her into the ugly fountain. She wasn’t expecting it and lost her balance. She fell and hit her head. She didn’t move; I thought she’d died right there.” Bree stopped pacing and began to cry, her bare feet firmly planted on the Navajo rug.
As she spoke, I slowly bent down.
“I didn’t know she was still alive.” Bree continued to speak but her words were unintelligible through her sobs.
I grabbed the end of the rug and yanked. Bree flew into the air and landed flat on her back. Her skull hit Bobby’s tiled entryway with a dull crack.
The gun went off.
Oh God! I’ve been shot, I thought. But, I didn’t feel anything. I looked behind me and saw Bobby’s shattered coffee mug.
The sound of sirens penetrated the walls. Bree moaned. I sprang from the couch. I found the gun under an end table. The sirens became louder, just outside. I leapt over Bree and out the door. Police cruisers crowded the street. One by one they trained their spotlights on me. I was blinded.
“Drop your weapon,” the voice of God commanded.
Weapon? What weapon?
“Drop your weapon!”
I realized the gun was in my right hand and threw it onto the lawn. Two police officers materialized out of the bushes and rushed me. They threw me onto the grass and handcuffed me behind my back. The grounds smelled like earthworms and fertilizer. A sharp pebble dug into my right cheek.
“Let her go,” someone ordered.
I felt male hands remove the cuffs from my wrists and the weight off my back. A hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up. I felt dirt in my teeth, and grass stains covered my sweatshirt, shorts, and legs.
“Are you all right?” Mains asked.
“Fine, I think.” I spat a piece of grass out of my mouth. Officer Knute stood behind Mains, his uniform conspicuously grass stained. Figured. Then, I remembered, “Ohmigod, Bobby’s still in there. She hit him. Bree’s the—”
“I know. O.M. called me.”
A pair of paramedics hurried into the house. “Knute,” Mains said. “Call the station and tell the desk sergeant to stop Lana and Alden Hayes from posting bond to free their son. He’ll be out on his own accord very shortly.”
I picked a stray blade of grass from my front teeth and beamed at Mains.
Epilogue
The steaming humidity of July had translated into the weighty air and heavy clouds of August that settled into the hovels and creases of Stripling and the surrounding Cuyahoga Valley. The summer term ended, and the library closed for a few blessed days to recuperate and prepare for the fall semester.
I sat on the vinyl glider on my half of the duplex’s front porch. With one foot folded under me, the other kicked a soft rhythm on the damp cement with bare toe tips. My sketchbook lay in my lap, but the etchings were frail. I idly doodled, accomplishing nothing of worth.
That morning, I had visited the Blocken home one last time. When I arrived, there was a moving van in the driveway, and O.M. sat on the curb. I set the package I brought with me on the devil strip—a truly Akron term that described the area of grass between the street and the sidewalk. Without a word, I sat beside her.
“My dad’s moving out,” O.M. whispered.
“I’m sorry, O.M.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“It’s okay. They haven’t really gotten along since Olivia went to college.”
For lack of anything better, I nodded.
“What’s that?” she asked, gesturing toward the package.
“It’s for you.”
I handed it to her, and she ripped off the brown paper. It was Olivia’s portrait inside a simple black frame. I had been able to mend the tear in the canvas as if it had never happened.
“Did you paint this?”
“Yes.”
“It’s good,” she said, and I knew she meant it.
Her comment was one of the most cherished critiques I ever received.
“Thank you. You know, she looked a lot like you,” I told her.
She cocked her head, looking at the painting, looking for herself inside of it. “I hope so,” she whispered.
A crack from the street jolted me off the glider and out of the memory. A massive off-white and faux wood paneled camper backfired. It rumbled to a jerky stop in front of the duplex. I stood on the porch waiting for someone to exit the vehicle, believing it was one of Ina’s eccentric cronies. Maybe Juliet—I could imagine her behind the wheel of a camper. To my astonishment, Mark, with Theodore on a leash, exited the side door. I walked across the lawn and around the perpetually cheerful leprechauns to meet him.
Mark walked toward me. He wore baggy carpenter pants, much like our father’s, and an outrageous Hawaiian shirt. Theodore sat docilely on the unruly grass and began to eat it.
“What do you think?” Mark asked happily and gestured to the camper.
“Yours?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yup. I bought it at a nice price too.”
“Because?”
“I saw the ad in the Akron paper. Couldn’t pass it up.”
Not really the answer I was looking for. “Why did you buy the camper, Mark? Are you going camping?”
“In a manner of speaking,” he remarked.
He stuck his free hand in his back jeans pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of white office paper. He handed it to me; it was a photocopy of a letter. Dated the day before and addressed to Samuel Lepcheck, the provost of Martin College, the letter began, “Dear Dr. Lepcheck: I respectfully resign from my position . . .”
“You quit your job? After everything that has happened. After everything we did to get it back?”
Mark shook his head sadly, as if he expected, but pitied, such a reaction. “We didn’t fight to get my job back, India. You did. And Mom and Dad, and maybe Lew. I had nothing to do with it.”
Before I could protest, he continued. “Do you know what my first thought was when you told me I was suspended from Martin, even with everything else that was happening? Thank God. That was my first thought, thank God. Because the next day I knew that I wouldn’t have to go back to the hole in the basement of Dexler or pound equations into apathetic freshman heads or create some useless theorem so I could publish my dissertation. For one brief second, those cares were gone.”
“If you didn’t want to fight the suspension, why did you let us fight it for you?”
Mark laughed. “And deny Mom and Dad a worthwhile crusade?”
“I don’t understand. I thought you liked Martin; you even went to undergrad there.”