Far down at the parkway, lights have just turned into the parking lot, but they immediately pull into a spot and go dark. Clearly not Kevin. Nor is it Kevin at the opening and shutting of doors much closer. Figures from school are emerging there.
“Are you okay?” This is Darla’s voice from just over his shoulder.
He glances at her. “Yes. Thanks. I got a text from Jake. They’re almost here.”
Darla steps up beside him.
Four FSU colleagues, three of Robert’s, one of Darla’s, are heading this way.
She feels Robert fidget a little. “I’ll handle them, if you like,” she says.
“Thanks. Yes.”
And after the commiserations, she does, taking them away to the food and alcohol that make this a wake and not a funeral.
More lights turn in now from the parkway and keep approaching until they angle into the nearest parking spot. Robert goes out into the chill and down the front steps to meet Kevin, who is striding forward, looking young in the dim light, not forty-two, looking like a college boy. He embraces Robert. Grace follows and puts her arms around both of them. A tender woman. Good for Kevin. Robert withdraws one arm from his son to include his daughter-in-law in his embrace.
The death of his father is grieved more simply by these two, who did not know the man, who knew an alternate man. Robert looks beyond this wordless huddle. Molly is on her cellphone; she’s eighteen, after all. Jake is standing nearby watching Robert closely. Their eyes meet and the boy nods to his grandfather.
How has this boy gotten so big? This man. Twenty now. He’s taller than Robert. Maybe not when Robert was twenty, not before his septuagenarian shrinkage. But tall. A man. And Robert wonders how this is now a surprise. As the hug goes wordlessly on, Robert tries to think of the last time he saw his grandson. A year. Maybe two. Jake’s been elsewhere during the family’s last couple of visits. Growth spurts have their limits. The last time, Jake surely was some significant fraction of this man who stands before Robert. But it was long enough ago that the near-man has been composted into this present surprise.
Grace begins the exchange of condolences. “I’m so sorry, Dad,” she says.
The three end the embrace and exchange ardent words as they all gather and turn and move off toward the front door.
Bob cannot distinguish the words but this faint flurry of sound floats down the parking lot to him. He has just stopped abruptly at the foot of the Tillotson driveway. The lights of the marquee have drawn his eyes up from their focus on the sidewalk and have stopped him, and now these distant voices come at him like a past incident that troubles you in the middle of the night but you can’t quite remember what it was. And the lights. This sign. William Quinlan. Quinlan. Bob thrashes in his head to understand. Just recently a Quinlan. A handshake. I’m Quinlan. The Vietnam vet. Vietnam. America’s last chapter. Bang. Done.
Bob’s head snaps back at the sign.
Quinlan’s dead. He only just shook my hand. That was quick. Done. Bang. It doesn’t make sense. So Bob tries to do in his head what he can do with his eyes. He squeezes at these thoughts like they’re the blur of words in a newspaper. He squeezes till they clarify, just a little, just enough to make them out. The Quinlan who shook his hand was Bob. Not William. He’s Bob. A Vietnam vet. In that, too much like the old man. But this one is Bob like me.
And now Bob remembers the rest. The father of the other Bob has died. A blood clot in a hospital. Tillotson Funeral Home. Bob looks again at the sign. Tillotson. And this Quinlan: Husband. Father. Veteran. Another veteran. This makes Bob stir a little. Too many veterans. But the other Bob is okay. They ate together at New Leaf, the two of them. But he put me in a hotel with my father. Did the old man arrange it? Did he get his Vietnam buddy to put me in a room with him?
No.
This is Bob the son of William, who is dead.
Bob looks toward the distant house. Shining.
Dead in this place shining in the dark.
Respects.
Bob can’t just walk up to the front door.
He understands that.
Nearby. Twenty yards away. The woods. Bob knows his way through woods. These run up toward the shining house and then past and around back, surrounding the place. Bob heads off. Laurel oak and water oak and sweet gum, dark and dense, and Bob enters them, moving swiftly, silently.
Hushed, Robert and his son’s family enter the visitation room. Robert is before them. Kevin steps up now beside him, scans the room, sees the casket at the far wall, keeps on looking around. Robert figures he knows why. When Kevin’s gaze arrives at the buffet room, Robert says, “I suspect they’re in there,” meaning Peggy and Darla. When Kevin looks at him, Robert nods back to the partition doorway. “Serving your grandmother’s food.”
Kevin turns to his family and says, softly, “This is a good time to pay our respects.”
Grace steps beside him, takes his arm. Molly has put her cellphone away and takes her mother’s arm. Jake is standing a little apart, and when the others move off toward the casket, he stays put.
“Granddad,” he says in a near-whisper, “can we have a little talk? I need some advice.”
“Of course,” Robert says, reciprocating the whisper. He nods toward his grandson’s retreating family. “Perhaps a little later.”
Jake understands. “Thanks.” He follows the others.
Robert moves off toward the buffet room thinking how Jake has gotten to age twenty without the two of them ever really sitting down to talk about life in the way a grandfather and grandson often can do. Will this be a night full of ironies? Full of people assuming Robert’s unadulterated sorrow, for instance; full of the tender, approving warmth — as one might receive from a loving father — that those assumptions will earn him. And likely this irony as welclass="underline" The old man has reminded Jacob that families can dissolve, so if you ever want a heart-to-heart connection with your grandfather, you better get it while you can. Not that any of this was William Quinlan’s benign intention. He just happened to die.
Robert steps into the partitioned room with his mother’s food unfurled on platters and in pots and stainless warmers and with herself stationed behind the row of tables ladling Irish stew and brightly complaining that Tallahassee is muttonless. “But the lamb is good,” she says, tapping the serving spoon in the air over the filled plate of Darla’s colleague. Peggy turns her face at Robert’s arrival.
“Kevin and Grace and the kids are here,” he says.
And Bob pushes on through the trees. Why does he feel a rushing in him, why is he beating up his legs and lungs and elbows and shoulders trying to get through a thicket of oak in this big fucking rush? As if something is pursuing him here in the woods. No. He’s doing the pursuing. That shifting of the dark up ahead, shaping and shifting and vanishing and shaping again You can shoot, by God Bobby, you can shoot and Bob pulls the Glock from inside his coat, snug in palm and crotch of thumb and forefinger, his fingertip lying easy on the trigger, perfectly fitting its curve, perfectly placed for Bobby to be okay by God, a hell of a shot. The old man was worthless in the woods. He was worthless. Maybe he was worthless in the jungles of Vietnam as well, maybe that’s what pissed him off so bad at Bob, Bob being okay when the old man wasn’t. Maybe Calvin Henry Weber, sergeant — or whatever his rank really was — serial number whatever-the-fuck, was scared of his okay boy Bob. When Bob has a Mossberg or when Bob has a Glock, Calvin Henry Weber is scared. And Bob moves on, dodging the trees, aware, though, that he’s not just chasing, aware that he has a destination, aware of a building being sliced into fragments by the trunks of the oaks, a building passing by and passing by and finally vanishing, replaced by the stretch of a sodium-vapor-lit drive, covered along the back edge of the building by a hanging porch. And Bob changes his bearing, which has been north. He now turns east, and the building is passing again through the trees to his right. He has circled behind it and now there is a wide doorway in its rear facade, bright lights inside.