Stranger Son

by Jim Nelson

  Twenty-four

  The abbreviated second floor was over the rear of the house, two rooms separated by a short hallway and a bathroom between them. Alice led them to the left-hand door. She knocked. A youthful voice called out, "Yes?"

  Ruby kept tight to Benford's back, almost pushing him through the door so she could see the teen. He sat on the edge of a made bed, back upright and chin level, with his hands behind him on the bedspread. He was fair, almost wan, with few indications of acne and a whispery dark peach fuzz around his jaw. A sharp nose and a pointed V of a chin made him appear whittled-down from a more full-faced boy. He kept his brown hair at an extreme part, with the fringes of his hair uneven. He wore a checked short-sleeve shirt and cowboy jeans with white socks. He stood as they entered. He was thin and not muscular. He almost reached Ruby's height.

  "Henry," Alice said. "This is Dr. Benford and—" She tilted her head at Ruby.

  "Cynthia," Ruby said.

  "My assistant," Benford added. He held an arm out to hold back Ruby. She was pressing against it.

  "They're here to give you a physical," Alice said. "Just do what the doctor asks and it'll be over shortly."

  "He isn't here for my father?" Henry asked.

  "No," Alice said. "They're here to check on you."

  "I don't understand," he said.

  "Henry," Benford said. "This is routine. I'm here to examine you and ask you some questions. It'll take an hour or so."

  Henry reacted lightly, emotions muted, as though a layer of insulation stood between him and the adults. Alice excused herself. "I'll be outside if you need me."

  When the door closed, Benford set his bag on the end of the bed and pulled the handles open. He extracted a stethoscope and a penlight. Ruby had advanced on Henry, who remained standing near the head of the bed. Benford intercepted her.

  "Stand by the door," he murmured to her.

  She retreated, eyes on Henry.

  Benford asked Henry to remove his shirt. He did as asked. He stood before Benford with a bare hairless chest. Benford had him sit on the bed. He pressed the stethoscope on his back and instructed him to breathe in and out.

  "Take notes," he told Ruby. From his medical bag, he gave her a short pad and the pen from his shirt pocket. "Write neatly," he said.

  Benford administered a battery of tests. Henry was as healthy as could be expected, although he noted aloud he was slightly malnourished. Ruby's inexpert eye thought worse. She saw the lean, sinewy boy and wanted to prepare him a huge, rich meal and feed him until he was fat. She should have saved half her hamburger from the night before. She should have told Benford to buy a slice of pie to-go from the saloon and brought it for him. She said nothing, halfheartedly recording his observations and comments while staring at the boy she'd not seen in almost sixteen years.

  "What's this?" Benford's gloved hands encircled a purple bruise on the back of Henry's neck.

  "I fell," Henry said weakly.

  Ruby rushed forward, one hand out. Benford's glare sent her back to the bedroom door.

  "How did you fall?"

  He shrugged. "I fell backwards."

  "Did someone strike you?"

  He shook his head once. "No, sir."

  Benford gave a knowing look at Ruby, who was writing nothing down. Benford told him put his shirt back on. "Henry, I have some questions I need you to answer," he said. "I need you to answer honestly. Do you understand?"

  "Is this about something I did at school?" he asked.

  "Why do you ask that?"

  "Because this is kind of weird," he said. "And why won't she stop staring at me?"

  Benford made an annoyed glare at Ruby. She nodded and looked away.

  The interview opened with general questions about health and illnesses. Other than a bad cold he'd suffered in the winter, he reported he was in good health. He answered negatively about substance abuse, although he admitted he'd smoked a few cigarettes and had drunk beer when his father was not home.

  "Marijuana?"

  "Some guys at school get it from up north," he said. "I tried a puff once. Gave me a headache."

  "Are you getting enough to eat?"

  "Money's tight," Henry said.

  "Do you go to bed hungry?" Benford asked. "Do you skip meals?"

  Henry hesitated. He nodded once. "Sometimes we don't have food in the house."

  Ruby melted inside. She was suppressing every urge to rush to his side and throw her arms around him. To hear him suffer was emptying.

  "I'm going to ask you a delicate question," Benford said. "I will not share your answer with your father. This is between you and me. And my assistant. Do you understand?"

  Henry nodded. Like his father, he was attentive and engaged. All his answers were in earnest.

  "Has your father ever struck you?" Benford asked. "Hit you for doing something wrong?" He put a cupped hand near Henry's neck. "Did he strike you here?"

  "No," Henry said unconvincingly.

  "Never hit you?"

  "He's taken the belt to me," Henry said.

  "When was the last time he struck you?"

  "It was my sixth birthday."

  "Ten years ago?"

  "I was crying," Henry said. "It was about the cake. I don't like coconut."

  Benford suppressed a smile. "Has he hit you at all since?"

  "No," Henry said, and thought again. "No," he said definitely.

  "Does he touch you?"

  "My father?" Henry said, surprised. "No."

  "Has he ever touched you in a way that made you feel uncomfortable?"

  "My father doesn't even hug me," Henry said.

  "Why not?" Ruby asked from the corner.

  "He's my father," Henry said, as though the reason was obvious.

  Benford's questions concluded. He returned his equipment and written material to his medical bag and snapped it shut.

  "Henry, there's one more thing. I need to have tests done on your blood. I've phoned ahead and the hospital is prepared to perform a draw. Is that okay?"

  Henry shrugged a half-hearted agreement. He took a pale blue coat from the closet and pulled it on. Its hanging bulk helped hide his gaunt frame.

  Benford took Ruby aside. "You stay here."

  "What? Why?"

  "You're practically a mother cat over him," he said, annoyed. "It's creeping me out."

  She was still melting inside.

  "When I get back, we'll say our goodbyes."

  "Wait—"

  "This is a professional medical visit." He added under his breath, "What you do after I've left town is your choice. Unless you come back to California with me?"

  Standing on the WELCOME mat before the front door, its sun-dried synthetic rubber cracking and turning to gray powder, she waved goodbye to them. Benford paid no attention to her as he backed the Ford from the house. Henry, youthful and straight-backed, stared back quizzically from the passenger's seat. Just as Benford yanked the steering wheel to turn the car around, Henry raised a hand to her. He didn't wave, just let his narrow hand stand in the air for a moment. With a roar of the engine, the car heaved around and rumbled dustily toward the property's gate.

  Twenty-five

  Although Alice promised to wait outside the bedroom during the examination, she was no longer in the house when they emerged. After Benford drove off with Henry, Ruby returned to the den. Henry's revelations and departure had hollowed her out.

  "I sent Alice home," Kyle explained from the bed. "She's only here four hours a day. Two in the morning and two in the afternoon."

  "It sounds like you're pretty happy with her."

  "It'll be hard to see her go."

  Ruby wandered into the kitchen. Benford promised they'd return in an hour. Ruby considered passing the time with Kyle, but he didn't seem interested in talking when she joined him in the den. Of course, she realized, he thought she was being paid with Abney money. In his mind, she was partly responsible for losing that monthly six-hundred-dollar check. For
losing Alice.

  "I take it Alice doesn't wash dishes?" she called to Kyle in the next room.

  "That's the boy's job. I need to get on him about it."

  In the silence, Ruby heard the light crunching sound of paper rustling. It started and stopped. She looked about to find its source; nothing. She waited. More rustling came and went.

  "Are you hungry?" she called out.

  "No," he said. "Help yourself."

  There was not much to help herself to. Save for a handful of canned vegetables and opened packages of crackers and stale bread, the kitchen offered little. She noted a number of wadded-up fast food bags in the Rubbermaid beside the sink. In addition to the dirty dishes and pots and pans, the garbage needed to be taken out.

  "I imagine Henry doesn't like chores," she called to Kyle.

  "It's not a matter of liking anything," Kyle said. "Since his mother died, we share responsibilities around the house. The past few weeks have turned that on its head, as you might imagine."

  "Oh, sure."

  The rustling crackled again. She stepped lightly across the kitchen, ears perked.

  "He's a good boy," Kyle called out. "He just has a lot on his mind, I'd say."

  A fat lacquer-backed cockroach crawled up and over a wadded-up fast-food sack in the garbage bin. Its antennae wriggled as though receiving instructions from the mother ship. It crawled further around the ball and back into the pile of garbage.

  There was nothing instinctive about what she did next. It was not in Ruby's mien. Hagars weren't bridge daughters—she'd lived by that simple code since she was a teenager. We are not disposable.

  Ruby began running the hot water in the sink. She could not reach the drain with all the dishes piled in the sink. She loaded a scrubbing sponge with soap and began to work on them.

  "You don't have to do that," Kyle called to her.

  "I don't mind," she called back. "I'll just do a few. Put a dent in them."

  The dishes were done in no time. While they drip-dried, she scrubbed the caked-on pans and attacked the burnt food attached to the range top.

  She turned to the refrigerator itself. Soft vegetables in produce bags and moldy bread forgotten in the rear of the shelf. With a damp washcloth, she cleaned out the crumbs and dried spills in the refrigerator shelving. The compartment was sparsely filled, and so it was fairly straightforward to wipe them down.

  The freezer, in contrast, was filled with meat cuts wrapped in plastic. The frosty chunks were the color of dark ochre, hard as rocks, and as irregularly shaped. She held a few up and twisted them around to try and guess their cut. She replaced everything she found there and let it be.

  "When did Henry eat last?" she called out.

  "He had something this morning."

  "What did he eat?"

  A long pause. "I think some toast."

  Ruby had found only one loaf of bread, the one dotted with gray-green freckles and now sitting on top of the other garbage. She did not like his answer at all, not one bit.

  After lugging the garbage outside to the cans, she relined the Rubbermaid and returned it under the sink. She wanted to mop the floor but worried they would return soon. Dr. Benford would be ready to leave, to be sure, and she wanted to make sure Henry had at least one good meal that day.

  "Are you sure you're not hungry?" she called to him. Pushing through the door to the den, she said, "Why don't I whip something up for you?"

  Kyle sat in the bed red-faced and with a miniscule frown. "Thank you, no," he said.

  "I'm going to make Henry lunch. Let me make something for you too."

  He considered his answer. "That would be most appreciated."

  She found in the rear of one cabinet two forgotten cans of tomato soup. She poured both into a pot she'd just cleaned and started a low heat on a front burner. The only starches she could locate were Idaho potatoes in the vegetable crisper and an opened box of generic salted crackers. The potatoes had sprouted. She poured a half-sleeve of the crackers onto a plate. A bulk-sized block of American cheese, still good, weighed heavily on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. She baked a cookie sheet of cheese-and-crackers in the oven for a few minutes. While the cheese was melting, she sliced up a cucumber—not fresh, but not turned—and tossed it with some raisins she found in a carton and a little mayonnaise and a dash of turmeric. It was barely more than bachelor's fare, but it was a real meal.

  On a tray, she brought to Kyle a cup of the soup and a smaller version of the plate she'd prepared for Henry.

  "You really don't have to," he said.

  "I'm happy to." She set the tray on a rolling table kept beside the bed. She swung it around so its cantilevered surface formed a tabletop before him. She poured him ice water from a plastic pitcher Alice kept beside the bed.

  Kyle put his nose to the soup and inhaled deeply. "That sure smells good." A spice rack hung in the kitchen with God Bless This Home painted in cursive across its top. She’d found dried chives and chopped oregano among the dusty, dated jars, which she'd added to the soup.

  "My version of grilled cheese and tomato soup," she said with mock pride.

  She watched with pleasure as he spooned up the steaming soup and swallowed mouthfuls with visible relief. He crushed into the soup a fresh cracker. He used a rugged and tan hand with dried skin on his knuckles and pale pads on each fingertip. They were the hands of a man who worked long hours outdoors.

  "Where's yours?" he asked.

  "Oh, I'll eat later."

  "Have some. I'm tired of eating alone."

  She stood beside him and nibbled on a cheese-and-cracker she'd baked. He ate the entire bowl of soup with great relish. The muscles in his neck and arms worked as he ate. He didn't lean over the table to eat, he held the bowl in one hand and spooned out the soup with the other. He spooned it out as though he was a woodworker carving the bowl itself. The loose gown revealed a wide back of more tanned skin and the musculature of a Da Vinci study. She watched him with her own relish as he scraped the last of the soup out with the spoon, then attacked the cucumber salad and toasted crackers.

  "That was just Campbell's, wasn't it?"

  "Yes," she admitted. She stacked the bare dishes back on the tray.

  "That tasted a lot better than when I make it."

  "That's always true with cooking," she said with a wide smile.

  "I don't know about that. Lea told me she loved her own cooking."

  "She was good?"

  "She wasn't bragging when she said it. It was a fact to her. And I'm not bragging either. She was a great cook." He motioned upwards. "I saw her work some miracles."

  Ruby pointed up with a questioning expression. "Upstairs?" Heaven?

  "No," he said. "We have a cabin in the mountains. No electricity and no gas. She managed to produce feasts up there you wouldn't believe."

  Ruby stood beside him with the tray in both hands. "Henry seems like a good boy."

  "He is. He got handed a raw deal."

  "He doesn't eat with you?"

  He pursed his lips. "We don't talk much since the accident."

  "Your gun accident?"

  "No. My wife. When she died."

  Ruby regretted pressing. She knew they would be back from the hospital any minute. She asked, "Do you mind if I ask why the Abneys didn't take him in?" She was curious how much of Henry's history he was privy to. She wanted to know what had been told to Kyle during the custody hearings.

  "You mean, why was Henry put up for adoption?"

  She nodded.

  "Henry's biological mother was out of her gourd," he said. "She arranged for one of her bridge daughters to be fixed. She made one of her girls a Hagar. Can you imagine that? She made her bridge a filthy Hagar."

  Her arousal at Kyle's physique evaporated. Her skin prickled, although the room was not cold in the slightest. Her awareness of the fecund decaying odor in the room returned.

  "And then this woman was going to get her other bridge daughter fixed as well," he s
aid. "But she gave birth before she could manage it. That bridge gave birth to Henry."

  "I see," Ruby said.

  "Lea, my wife, she's the one related to the Abney fortune. One of them married Lea's grandmother, who was quite the looker back in her day. She did a couple of Hollywood movies in the Fifties. Well, there was a Reno divorce and Lea's family never saw a cent of the Abney money. Which is fine by me and fine by her. But that's how we got involved. The Abneys were on the hook to take care of Henry when he was a newborn and they did some digging and discovered Lea was related in this real distant way. And we were happy to make him our own." He sneered. "Emeril Abney treated Henry like a burden."

  "Henry's your only child?"

  "Lea was barren," he said. "We prayed and prayed. We discussed adoption for a number of years. Henry was God delivering a miracle to our waiting arms."

  Kyle perked his ear. "They're at the gate. They're back."

  Twenty-six

  She sat Henry down before the makeshift hot meal she'd put together. He admitted he was hungry and, like his father, told her how good the soup tasted.

  "Eat up," she said to him, her hand on his back.

  Benford witnessed this from a short distance. While Henry ate, he brought her back to the front room with the hunting photos and old leather-and-hide furniture.

  "I'm sorry it took so long," he said to her in a low voice. "We got held up at the blood draw. The lab will phone me the results in a few days. I doubt they'll find anything. Other than a little lack of nourishment, I think the boy's in fine shape."

  "The bruise?"

  "It could be anything," Benford whispered. "I asked him again in the car. He maintained he'd fallen down."

  "And the money—"

  He shook his head with pinched lips. "Emeril will cut them off."

  "But what if someone tells the state that they need that money?"

  "They'll come to investigate and take Henry away," he said. "We're done here. It's time to leave."

  "I'm staying," she said.

  "Then say your goodbyes and let's go. I'll drop you off in town."

  With careful steps, she returned to the kitchen. Benford stayed behind her. She could feel him silently egging her along to hurry the goodbyes and expedite their exit. She approached Henry seated before his meal. She placed a gentle hand on his back.