“He wasn’t always odd?”
“Oh, yes, but I thought it was kind of charming at first. Like the way Lyle was charming—you remember Lyle?”
“The guy with the dogs? The TV writer?”
“Yes. That Lyle.” At least she hadn’t married him.
He had been a very funny guy—he’d made me laugh even when I was still crying over my dad and on the days my whole body ached from dance classes and dieting—and he’d had two ridiculous retrievers he’d called “the labradork twins.” We’d moved in with Lyle and the labradorks about six months after my father died. Normally the dogs had the run of the house, but Mother had put the dogs in the yard when one of them started using the carpet as a toilet, and that, for some reason, had been inexcusable to Lyle—the expulsion, not the piddling. When he’d come home from work and seen the dogs in the yard, he’d hauled back and smacked her hard enough to knock out one of her front teeth. She’d packed both our bags and we were gone within fifteen minutes, me carrying her knocked-out tooth in a glass of water while Lyle ran after us, babbling, “I didn’t mean it, Verry! I’m sorry, Verry!” She’d mailed the glass back in one of my tap shoe boxes two days later. The Lyle incident had cemented her aversion to pets; we never had another dog, cat, bird, or even a fish after that.
It had been the first time we’d lived with a man who wasn’t my father, but it wasn’t the last, though she’d held off on marrying any of them until I was in high school. I’d always been a better judge of their characters than my mother had, which hadn’t made our relationship any easier. But no matter how rough it had gotten or how horrible the man-of-the-moment had been, I’d stuck it out. And to give her credit, she never let any of them physically abuse her or me again.
Then it hit me like a brick that I’d fallen into a similar pattern with boyfriends for a while myself, not drawing the line until one finally belted me. At least I’d stopped putting up with that. Mother didn’t seem to have learned to stand on her own feet and refuse to take that treatment just so she could have someone around. Even as I steamed at her, I felt terrible and even more confused and upset. Was I supposed to feel better or worse at discovering our mutual flaw? Enlightened? I didn’t feel better, that was for sure. I was still angry and I still didn’t like her.
While we’d been staring at each other and remembering the past, the sun had moved higher into the sky. Now its rays hit the glittering white stone of the terrace from a harsher angle, reflecting glare into our eyes and doing unkind things to my mother’s face. She cupped her hands over her brow and glanced around as if searching for shade, pursing her lips in disapproval at the sun’s temerity.
“Let’s go inside,” she said. “I think I have some of your father’s things still, down in the junk room. We can talk while you go through them.”
I glared at her. She ignored me as she flitted out of her chair. I hadn’t come to help her clear out her collection of boxes. I hadn’t come to help her at all, and I wasn’t feeling any more generous now than when I’d arrived—maybe less. I wasn’t just bewildered by this revelation; I was pissed off at being lied to for years. I longed to tell her off, but I was piqued by the thought that there might be clues inside the dusty cartons in the basement—such as it was. Dad committing suicide, while it was shocking and upsetting, didn’t seem like much of a triggering event for what had happened to me. How were they connected, if at all? And what had he been doing in my dream? Suicide couldn’t be the deciding factor—could it? — but what about the motive? Or perhaps some other event associated with it was the key.? Those might be worth discovering, even if it meant a day or two sifting through the accumulation of castoffs. It couldn’t be any worse than the days I spent in the County Recorder’s Office, trolling for information on witnesses or other people’s prospective spouses and employees. Except that I would have to deal with my mother while I did it.
I trailed her inside and down a switchback staircase to a small room at the bottom of the house. It was almost isolated from the rest of the structure, stuck on like an afterthought that had been cobbled up and jammed on at the last minute when someone realized they desperately needed a place to put the construction supplies. It was such an oddly shaped space that I couldn’t imagine it had ever had any other purpose than being a place to stash unused items. Or overworked maids. Mother unlocked the door and groped for the light switch, leaning in through the doorway as if something inside would leap at her if she stepped over the threshold.
The light snapped on with a pop, revealing several dozen heavy-duty cardboard boxes. They were stacked a bit haphazardly from wall to wall, two or three high, taking up most of the room except for a ragged triangle starting at the door.
My mother made a vague wave of her hand at the room. “Your father’s things are in here someplace.”
I sighed with irritation. She acted like he wasn’t a person, like he was nothing but this collection of junk that she’d shoved down here and forgotten. I was being irrational, I knew. Dad had been gone for twenty-two years and this really was just a load of things, not a human being. I told myself to let go and start digging.
I hung my jacket on a hook beside the door and walked deeper into the room, taking mental stock of the piles and labels on the boxes while I scanned for any sign of something Grey and gleaming among the heaps. Mother walked out and returned with a handful of white cloth towels. She used one to dust off a small stepladder, which she then unfolded and perched on, setting the rest of the towels on the top platform beside her. She put her elbows on her knees and rested her chin on her hands like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. All she needed was a long cigarette holder and a little black dress.
I kept turning my head side to side, looking for the telltale gleam from the corner of my eye that would indicate something Grey in one of the boxes. I saw something blink and die out and then blink again. I pushed deeper into the maze until I found a stash of three old boxes shimmering with an edge of Grey. Two of them were marked PHOTOS. The other was marked ROB’S OFFICE. That was my father’s stuff, I thought, and felt a quiver of indecision. There was no guarantee that whatever had winked at me was important—lots of things have a trace of Grey—but I had to start somewhere, and this looked more likely than most of the boxes, if I really wanted to know. And I did, didn’t I? Cary had said I should look.
“You know,” my mother suddenly declared, “your father was an odd duck.”
“Yeah, you said,” I replied, flipping open my pocketknife to cut the tape on the box of office paraphernalia. “If he was so weird, why did you marry him?”
I could almost feel her frown before she dismissed my hostile tone as flippancy.
“Why? Sweetie, I lived in Montana! I wanted out of that place so badly I’d have married a serial killer to get away. Your father—who adored me—had a professional degree and was heading somewhere far away from three hundred acres of cow flop. I have never been one to look gift horses in the mouth.”
“Until they clock you one,” I muttered.
“What was that?” she snapped, narrowing her eyes to glare at me from her perch.
“Seems kind of mercenary. If you thought he was a freak and only saw him as a meal ticket, why’d you stick around?”
“That’s not what I meant. I liked your father. But he had strange ideas sometimes and they got stranger after you were born. That’s when he started being mysterious and sneaking off. And what was I supposed to do with a baby to care for? I had to quit dancing when I got pregnant and I didn’t have a fancy education like he did. I had nothing!”
“Cry me a river.”