Back Roads Page 24

  “Recently.”

  “Are you growing a beard?”

  “Stop it, Mom.”

  I dug my hands into my hair. I thought about ripping it out and presenting it to her along with a prayer like a plea to a stone goddess. Help me, Mom.

  I took a shaky breath and brought my hands back down to my sides. My fingers felt greasy from touching my hair.

  She was watching me, concerned but no longer sympathetic. She shifted in her chair. Sized me up. Squared off.

  We were both thinking the same thing: what happens when someone you love becomes the enemy? Do you destroy him to save yourself? Or do you join him in his hell?

  “Why are you here, Harley?”

  Her voice was cold. I had never heard her talk like that to me. There were times I had made her angry enough to scream, frustrated enough to cry, depressed enough to sit up all night and eat a Sara Lee cheesecake, but I had never made her dislike me.

  What was I doing? I asked myself in a panic. What good was the TRUTH going to do me or anybody else? Was it worth making my mom hate me? Was it worth making me hate my dad?

  I could have walked away right then and there. It wasn’t too late. I could have been one of those people who survived impact holed up in a bomb shelter and lived the rest of my life in the dark, fully armed, eating canned goods, telling myself everything was fine.

  “Did you know Misty took your money?” The words left me before I could stop them. “The thousand dollars you saved up so you could leave Dad? Did you know she was the one who took it?”

  The last traces of softness fled from her face. Her mouth clamped shut. She was ready for me.

  “She’s had it all this time,” I went on, uninvited. “Amber found it last week in her closet. Did you know about it?”

  Mom weighed her options. I knew she was thinking about lying, but she couldn’t deny the actual existence of the cash.

  “I thought your dad took that money,” she said slowly.

  “Well, he didn’t, Misty did.”

  I waited. She started examining her fingernails. She wasn’t going to say anything else. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Mom,” I urged. “The money.”

  She looked up at me. “I suppose it will come in handy,” she said.

  It was a smart-ass response. My mom had never talked to me that way either.

  My absolute aloneness in this world settled over me, and for a moment I was certain I knew what it felt like to die.

  I stood up from my chair and said to her, amazingly sane, “Fine. Don’t talk to me. But then I’m done taking care of your kids.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m done,” I shouted at her. “Done.” I shouted again, hitting my side of the glass with the flat of my hand. “I’m packing my shit and driving the fuck away from here. No one can stop me.”

  Tears burned in my eyes. I tried blinking them away, but they kept coming.

  “You know you won’t leave the girls,” she said, sounding like she was repeating an unremarkable weather forecast.

  “Why not? You did it.”

  “What are you talking about?” she shot back, her own temper starting to flare. “I didn’t leave on purpose. Look around you. This isn’t exactly the Poconos. I’m in prison.”

  “You like it here.”

  “Harley. You’re talking stupid.”

  “I don’t love them,” I suddenly shouted, hoping to see the words in the air so then they’d be true. “I don’t feel any obligation to them. I’m their brother. Not their fucking father. It’s not my job.”

  “You do love them,” she argued with me, “but you can love them from a distance. That’s not why you stay.”

  “Why do I stay?”

  “Because you know where your place is.”

  We stared at each other. I tried to figure out if I had just been gravely insulted or paid the highest compliment a man could receive. I couldn’t read her face, the only one I had always trusted.

  She took a deep breath and blew away her anger. The loss of it seemed to age and cripple her. She lowered herself back into her chair with the trembling delicacy of the very old. She closed her eyes.

  “Okay, Harley. Misty took the money. What more do you want me to tell you? I was saving up to leave your dad. You know that too.”

  She rubbed her face with her hands like she was trying to wash something stubborn off it.

  “I guess it makes sense that Misty was the one who took it. She knew that I was thinking about leaving. I don’t know how, but she came to me and told me she knew I wanted to take her away from him. That was the way she said it. It wasn’t about the rest of the family. It was just about him and her. She talked like I was the other woman.”

  She shut up. I could tell by the caution on her face that she was sure she had said too much.

  A chill ran through me. I saw the filthy, bloody carcass of a white kitten, its dead green eyes like marbles, lying on the bright spring grass. We had it so briefly I couldn’t even remember its name. It had been something preordained. Snowball. Fluffy. Princess.

  Mom glanced up at me. PRECIOUS. I saw it etched in silver in her eyes. That was the kitten’s name.

  I dropped into my chair again. Now I was ready for her. My past had taught me that the strength to face atrocity didn’t come from bravery but from reaching a certain level of numbness.

  “What was going on between Dad and Misty?” I asked her.

  Her eyes turned a sandblasted gray as if she had made them ready for me to carve into them whatever horrible image I chose.

  “You owe me,” I said.

  “Owe you?” Her voice took on a crazy edge; it was almost a laugh. “I don’t owe you anything.”

  “How can you say that? You’re my mom.”

  “So? What does that mean? I owe you love? I owe you myself. You can’t give those things on demand. You can only give them willingly.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked, fear creeping all over me. “You don’t want to give those things anymore?”

  “I did my best, Harley. Can you try and understand? I did my best to be your mom and I failed.”

  She stopped and sucked in a pained breath, doubling over like someone had punched her. When she raised her head again, tears were streaming down her face. She tried to smile through them the way I had seen her do so many times after Dad had hurt me, and I felt the same sick, confusing mix of need and loathing I had always felt for her unconditional love and denial.

  “What was going on between Dad and Misty?” I pushed harder.

  I wanted her to tell me it was true. To tell me she knew about it. To speak the unspeakable. To prove the unbelievable. It would make Dad more deserving of what he got. It would make Mom more justified in what she had done. It would take away some of my own guilt. It would be all Misty’s fault now. Mom hadn’t killed him because he beat me.

  But why would she have kept it a secret? It didn’t make sense. I remembered a hushed conversation between lawyers. If only there had been sexual abuse, they argued, she’d get a lighter sentence and then they had both looked at Mom as if she were a piece of pie they wished was slightly bigger.

  “I never saw anything,” she said in a tear-choked whisper.

  “Did you ask Dad?” I said, my own voice breaking in the middle.

  She wiped at her cheeks with her fingertips and regarded me blankly. “How do you ask that question, Harley?”

  “Did you ask Misty?”

  “How do you ask THAT question, Harley?”

  I stared straight ahead. Her face dissolved into my own transparent reflection in the Plexiglas.

  “Then you never knew anything for sure?”

  She stayed silent.

  “The only one who knew for sure was Misty,” I said.

  GROOVY snaked in front of my eyes in wavy fluorescent green letters.

  “Misty killed Dad,” I said in a flat voice.

  Mom didn’t answer.

  Another ch
ill rippled through me but this time it made me warm. Mom’s face came back to me, peacefully lifeless now that she was done crying and the truth was out. I thought of Snow White in her glass coffin. If I outlived Mom, I was going to bury her under Plexiglas.

  “Misty killed Dad,” I said again.

  It was a huge, colossal, momentous revelation but it was a cruel one, not a kind one. It didn’t solve anything. It didn’t bring back Dad. It didn’t bring back Mom. It didn’t answer any questions; it posed new ones. It opened a door on a whole new set of betrayals. The fact that I wasn’t feeling anything was one of them.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “You didn’t have to take the blame for her. Nothing would have happened to her. She’s just a kid.”

  “Harley, you don’t understand.”

  “Who could blame her for killing him after what he did? The courts wouldn’t have done anything to her. She would have got help. She needs help.”

  “You don’t understand,” Mom repeated forcefully.

  “Were you embarrassed? You didn’t want anyone to know what he did to her?”

  “Harley. Misty didn’t want your father dead. She wanted to be with him.”

  “Is that why you said you did it? So it wouldn’t be on the news?”

  “Harley,” Mom screamed. “She was aiming at me.”

  Mom’s face changed shape, blurred, and fell away from me into a depthless hole of writhing GROOVYs.

  “She was trying to kill me,” I heard her explain. “Your dad accidentally got in the way.”

  I saw the whole thing. Mom at the stove adjusting knobs and stirring pots, talking absentmindedly about us kids. How the girls were driving her crazy after a summer of no school. How she was concerned about me. I didn’t seem to have any direction or ambition. Maybe Dad should talk to me about finding a job.

  Dad sitting at the kitchen table, his sock-feet propped up on the chair across from him, his head tilted back, eyes closed, trace contentment on his lips.

  He gets up suddenly. To go to the refrigerator for a beer? To wash his hands before dinner? To give Mom’s rear end a quick feel?

  Mom glances over at the sound and catches Misty in the living room with a rifle poised on one shoulder. In that flash of an instant, she understands everything. She gets answers to questions she didn’t know needed asking. She suddenly understands all the impossible things Misty is: calm but violent, omniscient but naive, new but ruined, a shadow with substance, a violated child with a mother who missed it.

  Mom had her six seconds all right. Dad wouldn’t have known anything. Poor Misty. The only thing she thought she was any good at was aiming a gun, and she had fucked up the most important shot she would ever take.

  I started laughing. I closed my eyes and saw GROOVY everywhere.

  I couldn’t stop laughing. It felt great and it felt wrong like sex with a screamer.

  A pair of hands clamped down roughly on my shoulders and started to lift me out of my chair. I looked up and saw Mom. She wasn’t crying anymore. She should have been crying. A female guard was escorting her away.

  “I’m going to get you out,” I yelled at her.

  I knew she heard me because she shook her head.

  “You can’t hide from us.”

  I was pulled back from the glass. I wanted to splatter myself against it like a bug on a windshield.

  “Your best wasn’t good enough,” I screamed. “You’re going to have to try again.”

  “Let’s go.”

  I was yanked and shoved but not too hard. I recognized the voice. It belonged to the young guard with the shades.

  “Let’s go,” he said again.

  “My mom didn’t do it,” I told him urgently over my shoulder. “She took the blame for my sister. My sister killed my dad.”

  He looked unimpressed. “It happens sometimes.”

  “I want to get my mom out.”

  We stopped in the hall. I was breathing heavily and sweat blurred my vision. I figured he’d walk away, but he turned his eyes on me like two shiny black coins.

  “Does your mom want out?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Does your sister want in?”

  “She’s a kid.”

  “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “I want my mom back,” I said.

  “If I were you, your mom’s not the one I’d be concerned about,” he offered before turning to leave.

  His rubber heels made a tiny, piercing squeak like a scared baby rabbit. I had never even known they could make noise until a day last spring when I saw Elvis’s teeth snap down on one. It had been no bigger than my fist.

  chapter ( 16 )

  I stopped at every beer distributor I could find and finally, on about the tenth try, I found one that didn’t ask me for ID. I was surprised it took that long. I figured my visit with Mom had aged me at least as much as the first time Callie had fucked me, and I woke up from that feeling a hundred years older.

  I spent all my money except for two bucks and bought a case of the cheapest shit they sold. I opened my first can before I was even out of barking range for the distributor’s dog. After three cans, I let myself think about Misty. After three and a half, I made myself stop thinking about her.

  After five, I headed for Uncle Mike’s house.

  I hadn’t been to his house since Dad’s funeral. We all went there afterward to eat crusty baked ham and avoid talking to each other. Mike Jr. brought a date.

  He lived a forty-minute drive away from our place which was just enough to justify none of us ever seeing each other now, but it had been close enough when Dad was alive for the two of them to hang out together all the time.

  His house was perfect; his lawn too. There wasn’t a speck of dirt on the white siding, not a flake of rust on the wrought-iron railing leading up the front steps to the polished gold door knocker, not an inch of peeling paint on the green shutters, not a single leaf peeking out from a rain gutter, not a single dandelion or patch of clover or pile of dog shit anywhere in his yard.

  When he criticized and advised on the topic of home maintenance, I couldn’t ignore him on the grounds that he didn’t practice what he preached. I could ignore him for lots of other reasons though.

  I took one look at the flawless blacktop driveway and parked my truck on the side of the road. I didn’t want to have to come out here later and mop up tire tracks.

  I got out, finished my latest beer, crumpled the can, and tossed it in the back of my truck.

  I was at a loss trying to decide where I should walk. Which would be worse: getting dirt on their driveway or dirt on their blinding white sidewalk or dirt on their grass? I picked the grass since it grew in dirt, but I wasn’t completely sure about their grass so I got down on my knees and checked. Sure enough, dirt. Fine, rich, uniform dirt. Bank calendar dirt.

  To look at Uncle Mike, I would’ve never thought he lived this way. I had never seen his person looking particularly clean or fit. But he was one of those guys who took more pride in what he owned than who he was.

  I slowly got to my feet and sort of tiptoed across the yard trying not to bend too many blades of grass. I made a stop at their birdbath. It was cleaner than the mug I drank my coffee out of every morning. I dipped my hand in and slurped up some water.

  The mat in front of the door read, WELCOME FRIENDS. I checked my reflection in the knocker and saw a fancy, engraved ALTMYER stamped across my forehead. I remembered Aunt Jan bitching to my mom once about people who actually used the knocker to knock with. I planned to be one of them, but I made sure to wipe my hands off on my coat first. I still left fingerprints.

  Aunt Jan took her good old time getting to the door. Apparently, she didn’t peek through curtains first because she looked totally stunned to see me.

  She put a hand to the collar on her shirt and stared.

  “Aunt Jan?” I said, thinking that might help her out.

  “Harley,” she finally managed to say. “I’m sorry. Yo
u gave me a fright. I never realized how much you look like your dad. Especially dressed just like him.”

  “You thought I was a ghost?”

  She gave an edgy laugh. “I suppose so.”

  She laughed again. I laughed too.

  “Is Uncle Mike around?” I asked, after we stopped laughing.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Do you think I could talk to him?”

  She gave the question some thought. “I don’t see why not,” she said.

  “Me either,” I said.

  She held the door open for me. She always wore a man-style shirt with a pocket over one breast tucked into stiff, inky-blue jeans. Today the shirt was green and yellow checks.

  I wiped my feet on the welcome mat, then apologized in case it was the kind I wasn’t supposed to use like the knocker. She smiled and said, “That’s what welcome mats are for,” but I knew the minute I drove away she was going to hose it down and go at it with a scrub brush.

  “I won’t touch anything or sit on anything,” I told her as I stepped inside. “I realize I’m kind of dirty. I was working in the yard earlier.”

  “That’s considerate of you, Harley, but you can sit down,” she said. “It’s not a museum.”

  She led me past one of the formal living rooms Mom never had. It was decorated like a little girls’ jewelry box in shimmering cream and pink fabrics, frilly lampshades, and fake crystal vases. The reception after Dad’s funeral was the only time I had ever seen her allow anybody in it and nobody went.

  “How do you like your job?” she asked me, as I followed along behind her.

  “Jobs,” I said, emphasizing thes .

  “How do you like them?”

  “I love them. They’re great.”

  I tried to think of something I could ask her about, but I couldn’t remember her ever doing anything except brag about Mike Jr. She didn’t have any hobbies or interests that I knew of. No clubs or groups. She had never worked, but she didn’t need to. Uncle Mike made a good living filling in potholes for PennDOT, and they only had one kid.

  She always said the reason why they didn’t have another one was because it would have been terrible on a younger sibling having someone as perfect as Mike Jr. for an older brother, always trying to live up to the example he set.