by Laura McHugh
Henley picked Pawpaw’s old road atlas up off the floor and arranged herself in the love seat by the window, her bare feet resting on the sill, with a view of what used to be the Pettits’ barn. She would miss the farmhouse and her family and the fields, but none of it was anything she couldn’t live without. Charlie had already left town to attend welding school two hours away, rendering her lonely and bored and slightly hurt that her best friend had gotten out of Blackwater before she had, that she was the one left behind.
Their parting had been uncharacteristically awkward. There’d been an undeniable undercurrent of something more than friendship for a while now, and at times they’d crossed the line without admitting that it meant anything. Or rather, she hadn’t admitted that it meant anything to her. Charlie had let her know how he felt, but he didn’t press her for any sort of declaration or commitment. He had kissed her when he said goodbye, a real kiss, and she hadn’t quite kissed him back, though as soon as he left, she wished that she had. She didn’t know why she’d held back, except that it scared her a little to have something that might tether her close to home. They didn’t talk about it in their late-night phone conversations, which weren’t as frequent now that he was busy with school. Lately they had mostly been talking about Charlie’s classes, and Missy, and she’d told him about her job at the Sullivans’, about walking in on Jason. Charlie had called him a tool and changed the subject.
Charlie was supposed to call her tonight, but he hadn’t yet. She flipped through the atlas to Colorado, tracing the ridges where the mountains were, gauging the elevation. She knew the air got cooler and thinner the higher you went, and that sounded good to her—breath that wasn’t weighted with humidity and heat and the ever-present stink of fertilizer. All her life she had favored the cold, craving a true winter with lingering snow, not the schizophrenic Midwestern version interspersed with seventy-degree days that awakened mosquitoes in December and tricked plants into budding too soon, only to kill them with the next hard freeze. Missy hated cold weather, wishing she could wear sundresses and flip-flops year-round, and she’d once offhandedly remarked that Henley must have gotten her cold-bloodedness from her father, a statement Henley had dissected a dozen different ways in her diary, not sure if Missy was being literal or figurative (her mother had rolled her eyes when she asked).
She had wanted to leave for some time now, to take in the world beyond this stifling, landlocked place known for grain and Jesus and tornadoes, where everyone knew she was a Pettit and what that was supposed to mean. There was no chance that she would end up like Emily Sullivan, unwilling angel, forever trapped in Blackwater; she would rather leave everything behind and be forgotten.
I hated to miss any of my time with Lily, but I could tell how excited she was to be invited to a birthday sleepover with friends from her new school. They’d be going into Kansas City on Saturday, visiting the Nelson-Atkins museum, staying at a fancy hotel on the Plaza. A world away from the sort of sleepovers she’d had in Shade Tree, but a thousand times better than dragging her along with me, Mom, and Becca to help clear out Shane’s house.
I’d been dreading this day, hoping it wouldn’t be as bad as the first time we’d gone up there, to collect Gravy, days after Shane died. Crystle was in a rush to unload the poor dog, who flinched when she tried to pat him on the head. She’d told us on the phone that she simply wasn’t able to care for him on her own. When she saw Becca’s tears, though, the neediness in our mother’s eyes, she had waffled. I don’t know if I can let him go. He’s all I have left of my husband.
She told us that when Shane’s body was lying on the floor, Gravy had climbed into her lap to comfort her, something I didn’t believe because the dog shrank away every time she got near him. That was one of the few details she shared about the night he died, claiming it was too difficult to talk about. We left empty-handed, but she ended up calling us back before we got a mile down the road. She acted as though it was the most charitable thing she had done in her life, giving us an incontinent dog that didn’t seem to like her. When we asked if he had any food to take along, she stared at us blankly. She didn’t know, she said, where Shane kept it, leaving us to wonder if Gravy had eaten in the past two days, though Becca easily located the bag of Gravy Train in the garage on our way out.
Today, Crystle had told us to arrive no earlier than ten, though there were already a slew of cars parked in the grass as Becca turned the van into the driveway at a quarter till. We passed through a stand of post oaks and the house came into view. It was clad in dark wood and resembled a rustic hunting lodge, perfect for Shane. He’d liked how it was set back among the trees, hidden from the road.
As we approached the house, I was surprised to see strangers crisscrossing the yard like industrious insects, carrying boxes to their cars, staring at us like we were trespassing. I assumed they were friends and relatives of Crystle’s but wasn’t sure why they were hauling things out of Shane’s house, or why Crystle was letting them. In the driveway, a teenage boy with a mask of freckles and acne, dressed head to toe in camouflage, dug through my brother’s toolbox with the fervor of a kid tearing into a Christmas stocking. A bearded man in coveralls hustled past us, toting a hydraulic jack and loading it into a hatchback car that was already stuffed with hunting gear and fishing tackle.
Crystle lumbered out of the garage in an off-the-shoulder top and jeans so tight she must have rolled them on like a condom. Shane had always been drawn to tough, sturdy girls, those with the stomach to field dress a deer and the strength to drag the carcass through the woods, and Crystle was the rare example who did those things in full makeup, her long hair aggressively streaked with Clairol highlights and styled to beauty-queen perfection with an arsenal of straightening and curling irons. Practicality prevailed, though, when it came to her nails. She kept them short, telling me once that acrylics got in the way, that fake nails were for prissy bitches who were afraid to get their hands dirty. It wasn’t hard to understand what Shane had seen in her, the grit and the curves and the attitude, though I wished we’d had a chance to get to know her beyond the barbed surface. Becca and I had been excited at the prospect of a sister-in-law, certain we’d like anyone who loved our brother, but Shane had come around less and less often after he started seeing Crystle and hadn’t introduced her to us until they were engaged.
“God, I’m backed up,” Crystle said, by way of greeting. She pressed a palm to her belly. “Everything’s been thrown off, you know? Anyway. There’s some stuff in the back bedroom you might want, stuff I don’t care about. Here.” She thrust a jar of Miracle Whip toward my mom. “You want it? Shane bought it right before he died. I can’t stand this crap.”
Mom, whose face had rarely registered anything other than slack grief since Shane’s death, stared at her, uncomprehending. “It’s not expired or nothing,” Crystle grunted indignantly, and finally Mom’s hand fluttered open to receive the jar. A scrawny, meth-eaten woman with ruined teeth and blood-red hair came up to whisper in Crystle’s ear and they both turned around and went back inside.
“Oh, my word,” Becca murmured, nudging me. Off in the side yard, a bonfire burned, a wide circle of embers pulsing around it. The air shimmered with its heat. A jumble of boxes, maybe empty, maybe not, waited their turn to be tossed into the flames. They had been at it for a while, the crowd of bustling strangers dismantling Shane’s life. I hated to think how much of him had already been reduced to ash.
The front door was propped open, and we stepped inside to find an elderly man in a Kansas City Chiefs cap balanced on a ladder, taking things down off the wall. I had no idea who he was and he didn’t offer any introduction. Three of Shane’s framed drawings hung above the doorway, and my mom stared at them balefully. While Shane had been a below-average student in nearly every subject thanks to a maddening disregard for schoolwork, art class had revealed a natural talent.
“We want those,” I said to the
man, pointing. He eyed the nearest sketch, an assignment outside of Shane’s standard repertoire of muscle cars and machinery: a cluster of bearded irises from Mom’s front garden. I remembered the day Shane brought it home from school, all of us shocked, Mom flushing with quiet pride. The note on the back from the art teacher, next to the only A I could remember my brother receiving: You are full of surprises.
“You sure?” the geezer on the ladder snarked. His canine teeth were missing, giving him a rabbitlike appearance when he spoke. “It ain’t no Picasso.” He pronounced “Picasso” so it rhymed with “lasso.” I wanted to shove the ladder, watch him fall.
“Yes,” I said. “All of them.”
While Mom and Becca put the drawings in the van, I wandered into the house and down the hallway to Shane’s bedroom, passing several of the Pettit clan gathered in the kitchen. The meth-mouthed woman who had whispered to Crystle was in my brother’s closet, rummaging through his clothes, so comfortable doing so that it made me feel as though I was the one who didn’t belong here.
“Who are you?” she said, peeling scabs off her knuckles. Her face was pale, the skin around her nose and mouth flaky and inflamed.
“I’m Shane’s sister.”
“Oh. I never seen you before.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d never seen her before, either, had never expected to find a stranger sorting through my brother’s underwear.
“Them are Levi’s,” she said, pointing at a pile of jeans. “Name-brand. Get maybe five bucks each for ’em.”
The woman burrowed farther into the closet, and Becca appeared, hissing in my ear. “They’re selling his old clothes?”
“Makes you wonder what they’re burning.”
While Meth Mouth was occupied, I surveyed the bathroom. Crystle had used the bigger bath in the hall, leaving this one to Shane, and it was exactly what you’d expect from a bathroom no woman ever set foot in. The pattern on the Formica counter was worn away in places, grime caked around the faucets and drain, a cracked bar of Irish Spring resting in a basin sprinkled with whiskers and toothpaste spatter.
On the floor next to the shower lay a pair of jeans and a blue thermal shirt, crumpled like Shane had just stepped out of them. Were these the clothes he had worn that day? Had he taken them off when he got home from work to take a shower, just before he died? There were no towels in the room, clean or dirty, and the trash can was empty. It felt like anything might be a clue that we were missing, a puzzle piece that would click into place and explain how he’d died so suddenly.
Back in the bedroom, Becca clutched a picture of Shane and Gravy that she’d found on his nightstand. It was an old photo, Shane’s dark hair still thick and combed to the side. Gravy wasn’t nearly as portly in the photo as he was now. He’d shown up at the door one day as though invited, Shane surely not guessing that the stray dog would remain by his side for the rest of his life—that Gravy would outlive him.
Becca and I hauled out a couple of boxes of pictures and other personal items that weren’t of any value to Crystle and went to locate Mom, who had gotten held up in the kitchen. She was trapped against the counter, stiffly holding a glass of murky tea or flat soda, listening to Crystle go on about how she made Shane put the antique pie safe in an unused bedroom because it was so horribly ugly. The cabinet, its double doors ventilated with elaborate panels of punched tin, had belonged to Mom’s mother.
Crystle got distracted by someone else, and as soon as she stepped away, I swooped in to grab Mom’s glass, which was slipping from her fingers, and dump it in the sink. When I turned around, Becca was watching Mom carefully. She leaned in and murmured in my ear. “This isn’t good for her. Maybe we shouldn’t have let her come.”
Our mother looked dazed, her eyes clouded, hand extended like she was still holding the glass. She was in her seventies, but until recently had never looked her age, one small thing she allowed herself to be prideful of. She bristled when Becca tried to coddle her, something my sister had been doing more and more since Dad died—wanting to put a rubber mat in the tub so Mom wouldn’t slip, offering to get her one of those emergency necklaces like you see on commercials, with an oversized button to call for help. I’d found Becca’s concern premature and almost laughable. Compared to the clients I worked with, I wasn’t worried about Mom at all. She was one of the most capable people I knew—she could rewire a lamp, swing an axe, sew her own clothes, kill a spider barehanded. It was disconcerting to see the toll Shane’s death had taken, to watch her shrink inward, her strength visibly waning.
“It’s crowded in here,” Mom said, the first words she’d uttered since we arrived. Becca and I led her down to Shane’s basement workshop to get away from everyone for a minute. The welding tools and supplies had been cleared out, but the two gun safes were still there, each large as a refrigerator. Shane loved his firearms, though he wasn’t the type to keep a pistol on the nightstand; all his weapons were meticulously cleaned and stored when he wasn’t using them. Becca’s husband had ribbed him about it, asking what he’d do if someone broke in and he didn’t have time to run downstairs and open the safe. Shane had laughed, flexing his sizable biceps and asking Jerry if he’d like a demonstration.
A beefy guy with a buzz cut and goatee paced back and forth in the corner, tapping on his phone. His cowboy boots were ostrich skin, the bumpy flesh resembling an eruption of boils, and his belt buckle was large enough that I could read the word RODEO from across the room. One of Crystle’s brothers. He stopped pacing and stared at us unabashedly. Mom picked up a notepad from the workbench and let out a small moan. Shane had doodled in the corners and begun a sketch of Gravy in the center, though it was only half finished and would stay that way. Mom tore the page from the notepad and folded it carefully into her purse.
“Hey, where’s Grandpa’s rifle?” Becca said. The rack where Shane had displayed it was empty.
Crystle’s brother stuffed his phone in his pocket. “All the guns got loaded up this morning,” he said. “Headed to the pawn shop.”
“But that one’s not worth anything to anybody but us,” I said. “You can’t even fire it.”
He shrugged. “So go buy it back.”
“Come on,” I said. “Maybe they haven’t left yet.”
The three of us made our way back upstairs and out to the yard. Crystle had obviously told us to come late so she could haul things away before we arrived. We couldn’t find anyone who knew anything about the guns—or anyone willing to tell us—and Mom excused herself to go wait in the van, saying that she felt a migraine coming on. Becca and I walked up to the garage, where a cluster of Crystle’s cousins were admiring Shane’s ’78 Firebird Trans Am. I recognized them from the funeral.
“Took him years to restore it,” I said.
“That right?” The tallest guy in the group stepped forward. I didn’t know his name, but I’d heard one of the others call him Big Boy. His belly protruded like a massive tumor, and he wore suspenders to hold up his pants. “She’s a looker. Should fetch a fair price.”
“We’re not selling it,” I said.
He snorted. “Well, Crystle is. She done sold the truck and put the car on Craigslist.”
“But it’s not hers to sell.” Becca moved closer to me, so we were standing shoulder to shoulder.
Big Boy fingered his suspenders, his jowls twitching. “Darlin’, everything’s Crystle’s now. That’s how it works.” He spoke slowly, as though explaining to children. The rest of the cousins stood behind him, smirking.
“Where’s the title?” Becca asked. Big Boy shrugged.
I opened the passenger door and ducked inside to dig through the glove box. “Here,” I said, holding up the slip of paper for him. “It’s got a Transfer on Death to our mother.”
“Transfer on Death?”
“It means she gets it when he dies.”
He scanned the form and then flicked it back at me. “It’s stayin’ put for now, anyhow. Ain’t got the key to get it started.”
I didn’t know if that was true, but it didn’t matter. “That’s no problem,” I said, pulling out my phone. “I’ll call AAA and have it towed.”
“I don’t want it,” Mom whispered when Becca and I climbed into the van to tell her.
“We’ll figure something out,” I said. “We can’t leave it here.” The Firebird had been Shane’s most prized possession. He’d loved that car far longer than he’d loved Crystle, and I wouldn’t let her sell it.
Mom’s eyes darted to various points in space, not wanting to look at us directly. She curled up in the seat with her head cradled in her hands, and Becca and I left her alone, heading back out into the cold to wait for the tow truck. The bonfire was still blazing unattended, and we wandered over to peek into the boxes that hadn’t yet been burned.
“They’re all full of papers,” Becca said. “I can’t tell if it’s trash.”
“It’s Shane’s,” I said. “Let’s take whatever we can carry.”
“Vultures,” Becca muttered, eyeing the assorted relatives and strangers milling around the house. The wind kicked up, clacking a bare tree branch against the roof and swirling the smoke from the fire. Ash flitted through the air like a flurry of moths. “Does it not seem wrong that Crystle’s selling or burning or giving away every trace of her husband less than a month after she put him in the ground?”
“Everybody grieves differently,” I said, mocking Kendrick. I knew it was true that some embraced death more easily than others or found unusual ways to heal, but I hated to watch Crystle disassemble her life with Shane and move on before it had fully sunk in for us that he was gone.
