She found Chuck in the living room, eating chips out of a bag, gazing at cartoons on TV.
“That your breakfast?”
A nod.
“Breakfast of champions. At least sit with me at the table while I eat. Pretend we’re family.”
He shrugged and followed. His baggy pants, designed to make him look like a hoodlum, made him seem to her only a boy in man’s clothes. He wore his cap turned so the bill faced sideways, and he’d left the price tag attached. He looked silly.
“We’ve been reading in current events class about the execution,” he said. “Some of us thought we’d go watch.”
Shelly popped a prison omelet into the microwave. Leftovers from the day before. She punched the buttons on the microwave, playing its one note over and over. “Watch what? You won’t see a thing.”
“We thought we’d carry signs: ‘Bobby Doyle Fan Club.’ It’d be cool.” His face opened a little, and he dropped into a chair. He fiddled with the corner of the kitchen table where the laminate was peeling, picking at it with his fingernails.
“I want you home. We’ve got to be up by five for the tournament.”
“But isn’t that wild? Right after midnight — the Witching Hour — and the dude’s dead. Pffffit. Nada. Our teacher told us they’ll strap him to a table shaped like a cross.” He smiled. “A nurse is going to swab the spot where they’ll give him the IV, like he needs to worry about infection. They paralyze him. That’s how he’ll die. And because he’s paralyzed, his organs and stuff won’t relax, so he won’t shit himself. Nice and clean, no screaming or anything. Like he falls asleep. Lullaby, little Bobby.” He stopped talking and looked at her. “Hey, Mom.”
“Hmm?”
“Microwave’s beeping.”
Shelly opened the oven door to stop the sound, but left her food inside.
“Chuck, you don’t shock me, OK? Do a ‘Bobby Doyle Fan Club.’ I don’t care. Just don’t do a Bobby Doyle.”
“Mom…”
“Look. I’m working tonight. I’m making his last meal. And I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“You’re making his last meal? That’s totally cool.”
“You think it’s cool?”
“Totally. It’s so messed up. I mean, what a waste of food, right?” He plunged a hand into his bag of chips, shoved a few in his mouth. “I bet he won’t get leftovers.”
Shelly parked on the street outside the Hartford Public Library waiting for the doors to open, her worry over Chuck stewing into anger. She checked the Buick’s ashtray for stubs, found only a few wisps of ash, and wanted to blame Chuck for that, too.
Inside the library, her mood worsened with the nausea she got spinning microfilm back to the murders.
BRISTOL — Whoever raped and killed the two Williams sisters earlier this week first bound them with phone cords and stuffed their mouths with aluminum foil, police, said yesterday.
Shelly’s throat tightened, a sympathetic gag.
Bite marks on the foil indicate that the girls — Nancy, 13, and Kim, 11 — were alive when their mouths were stuffed, and probably raped after that, according to Homicide Detective Glenn Falzarrano of the Bristol Police Department. Each girl was then shot through the head with a.38 caliber handgun.
Falzarrano asked that any information that could lead to an arrest be given to his office immediately…
A helpful librarian interrupted to show her a feature article a national magazine ran about the murders. “A lot of people have been asking this week,” the woman said.
The magazine reveled in awful detail. The girls, the prosecutor had told the jury, “writhed like earthworms in their own living room.” The police caught Doyle hiding in the ruin of a stone farmhouse near Litchfield where he had killed a stray dog for food.
But the article also offered Doyle’s history: Cub Scout through his bear badge, a pole vaulter at Bristol Central High, later an exterior detailer in a body shop. Reliable, his boss had said. A good eye for colors. Along with all that, a photograph of Bobby in high school with some friends in a cellar, surrounded by dumbbells and barbells and concrete, the boys skinny in tight T-shirts, each trying to look threatening, trying so much they looked sweet.
And there were school pictures of the girls. Nancy, the older, had dark, feathered hair, braces on her teeth, and spare shoulders that looked too slight to support her neck. Kim, also a brunette but with a lighter tint, squeezed her lips shut as if smiling would be an act of surrender. Shelly looked for a long time.
A whiz at checkers, his mother had said. And he had liked dogs.
The house was quiet, Chuck not yet back from practice, but he had been home for lunch and left a carton of milk on the counter to spoil. She poured the milk down the sink and decided that she needed music during dinner, something to drive away images of Bobby Doyle with those sisters, their mouths packed with aluminum foil, the last taste on their tongues. Country, maybe. Some twangy, seductive voice. She touched the power button on the radio.
Ripping heavy metal guitars and barking voices slammed from the speakers. She panicked, punched the power off. Caught her breath. That damn kid. That little shit.
She reheated chicken fettucine and sautéed vegetables, then let them steam in front of her, and remembered how she and Chuck used to share dinnertime. She’d make meals, even reheated ones from the prison, and mother and son would sit at the table with place mats and napkins and food in serving dishes, everything presented like she learned in cooking school. He’d ask about the prison, but she wanted to hear what happened at school. As he got older and as her exhaustion grew at the end of each day, sometimes she wouldn’t remember place mats. Sometimes she’d heat leftovers and want to watch sitcoms from the couch. Then sometimes became always.
The fettucine and vegetables stopped steaming so she returned them to the fridge, thinking that maybe Chuck would have stayed a gentle kid if she’d kept putting out place mats, if meals had remained special. Food, she thought, should always be an occasion.
On the road to the prison that night, the Buick’s heater blowing loud dry air at her, she squinted at the glare from approaching headlights and kept her left foot at the ready above the brake pedal. It wouldn’t do to die on the way to make the last meal for Doyle, that son of a bitch.
She figured she’d cooked for him before without realizing it. Guards must have brought him trays of her food from the cafeteria where the rest of the population broke bread. Now she pictured Doyle eating that cheeseburger with onion slices, the Jell-O, the french fries. She imagined him wiping his mouth while the corrections officers watched. Maybe some family would be there. A brother, his mother. Certainly his mother, who would wear bright colors — a polka-dot blouse of pink and blue, bangles and bracelets on her arms as if at a family picnic. They’d sit in the brightness of the death-row visiting room, painted white and lit by the bald glare of a 120-watt bulb. He’d have chains around the ankles of his slippered feet. A tattoo of a spider would creep up his neck from out of his shirt, the strands of web like a collar. He’d lean against the wall of cinderblocks, fold a napkin around his fries, wink, and say, “Maybe I’ll save these for tomorrow.”
Cheeseburgers. Jell-O. Fries. Not a green vegetable in the whole damn meal. That outraged her for some reason she couldn’t explain, made her move her foot away from the brake pedal and press harder on the accelerator as if she might catch Doyle crossing the road and run him down. No green vegetable. The bastard.