The Done Thing

by Tracy Manaster

  The Done Thing

  Tracy Manaster

  Copyright © 2016 by Tracy Manaster.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

  Published by

  TYRUS BOOKS

  an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

  10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

  Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.

  www.tyrusbooks.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4405-9672-7

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9672-8

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-9673-5

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9673-5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Manaster, Tracy, author.

  The done thing / Tracy Manaster.

  Blue Ash, OH: Tyrus Books, 2016.

  LCCN 2016012028 (print) | LCCN 2016018552 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440596728 (hc) | ISBN 1440596727 (hc) | ISBN 9781440596735 (ebook) | ISBN 1440596735 (ebook)

  LCSH: Murder victims' families--Fiction. | Interpersonal relations--Fiction. | Prisoners--Fiction. | Pen pals--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life.

  LCC PS3613.A527 D66 2016 (print) | LCC PS3613.A527 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012028

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.

  Cover design by Sylvia McArdle.

  Cover images © iStockphoto.com/AlexanderZam; iStockphoto.com/Ken Brown; iStockphoto.com/michaelgzc; iStockphoto.com/raclro; iStockphoto.com/narloch-liberra; iStockphoto.com/Boryan.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  45.

  46.

  47.

  48.

  49.

  50.

  Acknowledgments

  For my parents, Steve and B.J. Manaster, upon whom no characters in this book are based.

  1.

  The State of Arizona conducted its executions at dawn and had for the past several years, a policy change from midnight for which no explanation had been offered. I liked to keep abreast of such things. I had the Daily Star delivered to my St. Louis home, days late and at no small cost. For nearly two decades I’d collected clippings and taken notes on legal pads. I ran calculations and so I knew: forty-eight percent of inmates took breakfast as their final meals. Maybe they sought grounding, one last moment in step with the breakfasting rest of the world. The eggs, though, threw me. Thirty-four percent of prisoners—even some slated for electrocution—demanded fried eggs. Breakfast any mother might serve: the buttery stuff of hurried kitchens, pan to plate in under ten minutes. Kiddie food, and cheap. I’d read the studies. Few inmates in Intensive Supervision Unit-Stemble came from privilege. Maybe they ate and thought of their first eggs and the hands that brought them. Mothering of some persuasion, over- or under-, it was all just rhetoric. I read those articles, too. Every execution had its editorializing. Never mind justice. He grew up hard. Blame the mothers. The mothers will do.

  Or, worse, the alternative: maternal address to camera and court. Rote permutations: I know what my son did, please don’t take my son, my son knows what it is to take, please, my son knows what is to be taken. While inside and over the wall he chewed his eggs, the fear and grease shunting them down to loose bowels. I hoped the cooks couldn’t get an egg right. I hoped shells snuck in and startled, crunching like bones.

  I wanted to see him.

  I wanted to hear him complain about the grub.

  He would, too, if it was nasty stuff. Or he’d explain the eggs. “See here. The food’s so foul a fried egg’s the only thing they can’t screw up.” He used to have this way of speaking, leaning forward, pitch lilting like he was letting the world in on a private joke. “Maybe we just like eggs. It doesn’t have to mean a thing.”

  It didn’t have to be nostalgia. Eggs fry up quick. They’re easy to spice. Fodder for the self-sufficient. Bachelor food.

  I knew my statistics. Clarence Lusk was lucky to be white. Lucky Clarence, to have his mother out there funneling her retirement into his defense. A little darker, a little poorer, and he’d be long buried.

  For eighteen years and four appeals I’d waited. I tried to visit. Each April I petitioned, miserable annual paperwork, right on the heel of taxes. He invariably denied me. “Understand this,” my lawyer said, “few things remain that he has the power to refuse.”

  I wanted to see his face. He’d be older now, too. Everybody was, with certain, notable exceptions. When we put my sister in the ground, her hair had haloed around her face, a cropped, unruly mess of curls. Layered. The fashion of the day, archaic now. She looked like a dandelion gone to seed. Hair grew postmortem. Nails too. In the bitter months between funeral and verdict I remember finding comfort in this. My underground sister continued to change. She grew wild out of sight.

  Clarence appeared at trial with his hair shorn close. This was no longer mandatory—some prisoners’ rights lawsuit—so it had to be strategy. Before, he’d let it go shaggy. Maybe he thought the cut would make him respectable.

  It wouldn’t. Nothing would again. And I hoped it wasn’t strategy. I hoped it was lice.

  My husband Frank, God bless, used to stop me from running away with myself. Lida, he’d say, what good can thinking like that do? Frank was a gentleman, in the sense that the word is the sum of gentle and of man. He knew there was no peace to be had from a certain vein of thought. How I loved him. As he did me, even when I was frayed, even when I loosed the shrill, full honesty: it wasn’t actually peace I wanted. I wanted to be sure Clarence Lusk wouldn’t find any. I could say that sort of thing to Frank, and that was a measure of the soundness of our marriage. And this was as well: I did not often say such things to Frank. I saw how it made him feel helpless.

  Our Pamela had grown up measured and very sweet, like Frank. A confident, lovely girl, except when I mentioned Clarence. Her father, locked far away. Her father, who had put her mother underground. She said I looked absolutely hawkish when I spoke of him. And so I didn’t do it much. The way it knit her face together. Three times a year we let him write Pam. When she was just a little thing and young enough to forget.

  Clarence didn’t have the right to deny me anything.

  And so I
had no one, really, to talk to about the eggs. Thirty-four percent. I’d triple checked. I used a calculator. Why eggs, why fried, I couldn’t figure. Eggs were bizarrely optimistic. Eggs were a beginning. Yellow. Cheerful. Though fried, of course, they’d never grow.

  Someone should conduct a study. Shattered Eggshells: A Comprehensive Analysis of Proteins, Lipids and the Murdering Mind. The data could make a difference. Waitresses could phone a hotline after taking orders. Barbra would have appreciated that line of thought. She always got this impish look when she guessed I was thinking something terrible. Barbra would’ve had her own theory. Everyone knows breakfast’s the most important meal of the day. The condemned have high pressure mornings ahead. Better load up on protein. But my sister never said anything of the sort. She had no reason to. I only learned my statistics after. Almost twenty years gone now. Frank dead, Pammie out of the nest and married. But Clarence. Clarence lingered, unshakable as the phantom weight a watch leaves on a naked wrist. Once he died I could find new thoughts. I wanted that. I wanted it desperately. I wanted to fly to Arizona. I wanted to fry him an egg.

  2.

  Sixty-four years ago, I was born Lida Helen Haas, daughter of Tate and Renate Haas. Like my parents, I’ve passed my life in the orbit of St. Louis, near the cola-colored confluence of two great rivers. The family orchard Barbra and I grew up on was a half hour outside the city. It had been generations in Ma’s family, a rich, black-earthed holding that upon inheriting I—despite the impulse of sentimentality—subdivided at good profit. My earliest memories were orchard ones: me and Ma making do, putting up cherries. Red half-moons built up beneath my fingernails. A splinter pierced my foot as I bore jars into the dank basement, tentative on slatted steps.

  “We’ll be lucky in winter,” Ma said. “The cherries will be a godsend. A little sweetness to do us good.” But we only opened jars when sweetness was redundant. When the war in Europe was done. When the Japanese surrendered. When we learned my father was slated to return. He stepped out of the picture on the mantel, then out of his uniform, then off the orchard and onto the floor of Haas Home & Pharmacy.

  “Fruit trees are small scale, Lidalee. Farm’s fine for living, but the store keeps us all in shoe leather.” A car followed. A refrigerator. A washer. A dryer. One thing and then the next, clicking into place like abacus beads.

  For fifty-four years I have been a sister. Ma called Barbra and me her sandwich girls. Two sturdy children, sound as bread, with the war the meat between us. As a child my parents encouraged me to make do. Barbra, child of peace and plenty, they encouraged to do her best. To my lasting shame, we were not close as children. She was always getting into my things, spoiling them. Barbra Barbarian, I used to call her. The words shared a root. Barbaros: one who isn’t Greek. A stranger.

  At twenty-five I married Francis Stearl. We saved up for a down payment and bought a Dutch Colonial on a broad street with fine trees. We held Memorial Day barbecues and in December I baked our neighbors pfeffernüsse. Just after our twentieth anniversary, well in advance of current fads, my Frank took up running. He was nearing fifty and I accused him of vanity. “I intend to stick around, that’s all,” he said. “For you and Pammie.” He met each dawn with a dedicated hour’s jog. I seldom joined him. I kept trim swimming laps at the club, and, though Frank was invariably patient when I did tag along, I didn’t want the back of his neck to become the patch of skin I knew best. I bought him sweatbands, an erratic pedometer, and, in case he ever ran too far, Nikes with a pocket for a payphone quarter. I began to linger over my morning coffee and the Post-Dispatch. In yellow highlighter I marked headlines my returning husband would find of interest. In the four years since his death I haven’t been able to shake the habit.

  Before my retirement at sixty, I practiced as an orthodontist. The discipline has extraordinary grace, interlacing bands, subtle tugging, and time almost always adding up to perfection. And that was the joy of my long career: with teeth at least, anything wrong I could make right. I enjoyed my job, even in the mid-eighties, when we’d all had to relearn the feel of it. I donned latex gloves a good year before they were compulsory; doctors back then knew so little about transmission and I had Pamela to think about, and Frank. I made a careful study of teeth beneath gloves. Brackets, glue, wire, enamel: everything was so much duller dry, and I finally got the sense of what those boys—that boy, really, Martin Dorsey, singular, the only one before Frank—had gone on about. Plain truth. You don’t feel as much through rubber.

  For twenty-three years I had been an aunt. Pamela Clare came into the world slippery, prune-faced, and squalling, with whorls of fine down on her head. I flew to Arizona to meet her the day she came home from the hospital. Her name surprised me. I had expected some permutation of Barbra; every doll my sister owned she had named after herself. “Clarence talked me out of using a palindrome,” Barbra said. “I wanted Anna, Eve, Nan. A girl who’s the same backwards and forwards. Steady. True like an equation. Do you want to hold her?”

  “Who the hell talks like that?” Clarence asked, before I could answer. Yes, I wanted to hold the baby.

  I laughed though. He was right; my sister was nothing if not loquacious.

  We were all so happy; Barbra was laughing, too. “The next one will be a boy. And I’m calling him Bob.” She stuck out an impish tongue at Clarence.

  “We’re lucky she didn’t want to name this one pi,” he said. Barbra taught high school mathematics.

  “Pamela isn’t a palindrome,” I reminded them. “Now let me meet my niece properly.”

  “No one loves a know-it-all,” said Barbra, and she settled the warm weight of Pam into my arms.

  Clarence chuckled. “And Pam backwards is map. That’s something. Baby’s going places.” He bent low over his daughter. His lips upon her forehead.

  Five years later, that baby was mine.

  It was easier to get through taking it fact after simple fact: At 1:30 P.M. on Monday, October 25th, 1982, Barbra never showed up to teach her fifth-period calculus class. One of her students notified the front office. The vice-principal, who usually served as emergency sub, couldn’t be located either. The receptionist posted a sign directing Barbra’s remaining three classes to the library for study hall and left a message on the Lusks’ answering machine. Midway through the afternoon, a freshman set off the fire alarm. For the balance of the day faculty and staff worked distracted, and no one troubled much over Barbra’s absence or that of vice-principal Lawrence Ring.

  On the morning of Tuesday, October 26th, when neither reported to work, the phone chain began: the receptionist left another message at Barbra’s home and a second at Lawrence Ring’s. Nothing. She found Ring’s Rolodex and in it the number of his cleaning lady. The cleaning lady straightened his place Mondays anyhow. She agreed to stop by sooner rather than later. It was the cleaning lady who dialed 911. Her quick inspection yielded a kitchen, one upturned chair, two crumpled bodies, and a brown and slippery floor.

  The police pieced together the scene with little trouble. The assailant fired first on Barbra’s friend. Lawrence Richard Ring. Barbra fell next, split apart by four bullets, two more than had bored into—the couple’s state left little question—her lover. Chest wounds and stomach. They had been eating Chinese takeout. Pamela’s school reported that her father had picked her up early on the previous afternoon. He had told them she had a dentist appointment. He said his wife must have forgotten to let them know.

  At around six o’clock Tuesday evening, a policeman identified Clarence’s plates and Clarence pulled over. But only briefly. He sped into the approaching uniform, in panic, maybe, or thinking that one more death made little difference, or perhaps as final, wild resistance to whatever future he had left. Georg Ring—no e, no middle name, no relation to Vice-Principal Lawrence R.—died ten and a half hours later, having never regained consciousness. He was a muscular, strong-featured, handsome man, in whose obituary smile I could sense that the praise of his colleagues was well-ea
rned. He had founded an after-school baseball program to keep kids out of trouble. He’d been saving for a Hawaiian vacation, a second honeymoon with his wife of fifteen years, the mother of his three children. I wrote annual checks to the foundation established in his name.

  The arresting officer found Clarence just ten miles down the highway. He’d parked on the road’s shoulder and was waiting, seatbelt buckled, hands on the steering wheel. Pamela sat in the backseat, strapped safe to her plastic chair. Her fist was full of crayons. She asked to take the picture she was working on with her. She said please.

  “Tell me about your drawing,” her social worker said.

  “It’s a chickie-bird. She just invented Popsicles.”

  Bright, her file read, imaginative. Resilient, underlined three times.

  Such are the small things I never expected to be grateful for.

  I had done absolutely right by Pamela. On the days when my retirement didn’t suit me, when I felt as effective and lively as a tin of beef, the thought of her warded off self-pity. I had marshaled to radiant adulthood a woman who knew to never carry a bag that cost more than her shoes or eat oysters in a month spelled without rs. Pamela flossed. She hand-washed bras. Her thank-you notes arrived promptly. She kept receipts and bought the warranty. Applied perfume sparingly, as I did, with an atomizer, spraying in front of her four times and stepping into the mist. She always wore sunscreen, SPF 30 or higher. She drove with her sunshade fully up or fully down. I had warned her and she listened; this world was perilous. Crash with it angled and pay with an eye. Whenever I missed her I brushed my teeth. I knew she brushed as I did. Recite the preamble to the Constitution once for each quadrant, once for the gums, once for the tongue, and once for the roof of the mouth. That’s how to know you’ve made a proper job of it.

  3.

  On the occasion of my sixty-third birthday, Pamela took me computer shopping. The excursion was more for Pam than it was for me; she had been after me about the computer for some time. I went along with it though. It was October of 2001. Everyone was humoring the people they loved. Pamela and I met at the store she had pre-selected. Its doors opened for us with an electronic whoosh and she guided me toward the display.