“Pamela Clare. I don’t flirt.”
“Heaven forefend.” She was an adroit mimic. Her voice sounded like my own. Not as it does to my own ears, but the tinny Lida on the townhouse’s answering machine.
Our hostess wore a square-necked shirt. Her collarbones stood out. Pamela unzipped her windbreaker and folded it over the back of her chair. Chunky, irregular ceramic beads hung from her neck on a leather cord. She worried her fingers over the lowest one.
“I have a bowl that color at home.” I sat, pointing.
“Kath gave it to me.” Pam gave the necklace a brief, affectionate pat.
“Very attractive.” And it was. Kath had a good eye. If I’d been shopping for Pam, I’d have gravitated toward something delicate that would never have looked quite right. Tucked away in my purse, I had a Ziploc bag of twist ties. Pam had mentioned that she used them for Blue, matching his outfits at the turn of each season, banding them together at the hanger’s necks. I’d been squirreling them away for weeks, but I could wait. Give it a few days and the offering wouldn’t suffer by comparison.
Pam ordered a chipotle club sandwich. Everywhere she went, she ordered club sandwiches.
“It’ll be spicy,” I said.
“I know. I know chipotles. Lida.” She said Lida like Frank had when there was something of importance to follow.
Nothing did.
“Of course you know chipotles. My foot’s really in it today. I bet you even know habaneros.” I was relatively sure I’d pronounced habaneros properly.
“It’s fine, Li.” There was laughter in her voice, yes, but also exasperation. Pamela was a forthright girl, but that didn’t mean she was an uncomplicated one.
“How’s Blue?” I asked, knowing that I’d brought him up already, knowing that in all probability I was being a trifle annoying. But it was either that or simply sit there. When she first came into our care, Pam’s social worker said to follow her lead on the hard conversations, the ones that tackled you, tackled Barbra. Barbra, who died nineteen years ago to the day. I stopped myself from yammering. Pamela was the one who arranged this lunch; Pamela had something to say. The best thing I could do was give her the space to say it.
“Blue’s wonderful,” she said, sounding muzzy and entirely besotted. I remembered how it was with Frank. Those first plummy years, the newlywed intoxication of just us. Early on, Frank said we should fake a hobby, something so time-consuming we could decline most invites and so obscure none of our acquaintanceship would take it up. We claimed we were bird watchers. I got him a pair of binoculars for our tenth anniversary, small ones to show I remembered, not the fancy kind for watching real birds.
Our plates arrived. Extra mayonnaise on the side for Pam, who liked it on French fries. I’d be hard pressed to think of something less palatable, but she’d picked up a taste for it visiting Belgium.
“This looks good,” I said, of my own French onion soup.
Pam dipped a fry, raised it as if to toast. “Here’s to days off.”
“Days off?”
She chuckled. “That’s how I know you’re well and truly retired. It’s a workday for us nine-to-fivers.” She popped the French fry in her mouth.
“Yes. It’s Thursday. The twenty-fifth. I know.”
A wide palmed gesture as if to say, ta-da. She’d painted her nails an unexpected orange. A quiet lunch to mark her mother’s passing was no occasion for ta-da, and it wasn’t like Pam to be careless of such things, or cruel. She must have simply forgotten. I hissed without meaning to. Concern scudded across her face. “Hot,” I said, indicating the soup. I tapped my spoon against the thick lid of cheese. The essential person-ness of being a person is that we are capable of assigning meaning. I could choose to label Pam as heartless, sloughing off the heft of today. Or I could opt for hale, whole, happy, to have stepped out from its long shadow. My spoon broke through the cheese. “Center closed today?” I made my voice mild. It may surprise you, Clarence, but I can be very good at that.
Pam pointed at her mouth: wait for me to chew.
“Some kind of holiday?” I guessed. “Helen Keller’s birthday?” A frisson with the two syllables of Keller. Maisie was a Keller too. My letter is on its way to Arizona. Today, tomorrow, soon.
I hadn’t forgotten, Clarence.
Pamela swallowed. “Lida. That’s not funny.”
“What?”
“Do you have any idea how many Helen Keller jokes Blue heard growing up?”
“Yes. No. I mean, I can’t imagine. But I was asking. As in just—actually asking.”
A sigh.
“I’m sorry, Pam. I shouldn’t be let out of the house today.” I’ll admit it. I gave a little extra weight to that today.
“Lida. You should get out of the house more.”
“I walked with Kath just Monday. And I’m here with you. Today.” Again the lean on today. Nineteen years. Three thousand, nine hundred, and thirty-five days.
Pam picked up a fork and jabbed another fry. She put it down again without bringing it to her lips. “I worry,” she said.
“You shouldn’t worry. It’s not your job to worry. I’m the one whose job it is to worry.”
“We’ve just said worry so much it doesn’t even make sense as a word anymore.” A smile from Pam, one that almost reached her eyes. All that time working out of doors meant they’d line earlier than mine had. Her mother’s never really had a chance to pucker. A smear of chipotle lingered in the corner of her mouth, just a speck. I fingered the spot on my own face. She did nothing. I dipped my napkin in the glass and dabbed my lips. Still nothing.
“I’ve joined a bird-watching club,” I said, and continued to daub the spot. “We get up at an ungodly hour.”
“Good. Great. That’s really good. Because, Lida?” She pushed away the plate. She had only managed half the sandwich. That chipotle was a touch too spicy after all.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
I knew my Pam. It wasn’t nothing. Not when her voice shrank like that. I waited.
“I’ve been thinking about him. A lot.”
The human heart is the size of a human fist. Mine clenched. Him, she said, not her. And today of all days. I drew a steadying breath. All of this was roughest on Pam. Credit me with this much, Clarence: I tried not to lose sight of that. She’d lost her mother, yes, but also, she’d lost you. I spoke the only words I could manage: “Oh, Pammie.”
“Kind of, all the time. More even than over the holidays. More than at the wedding. Just about every day, I can’t turn it off. When I’m home at night, with Blue. I just wonder. How he might be today, how much easier things would be on you.”
Again that fist in my chest. Tighter and tighter.
“I don’t need things easy,” I reminded her. “And it’s no burden, it never was.”
“I wish he had a chance to meet Blue. It’s been keeping me awake.” Small hollows appeared beneath her cheekbones. Inside her mouth, I knew, her molars staked down a slick roll of cheek flesh. Pam’s bottling-up expression; whenever she lay open-mouthed in my dental chair I noted the raw patches in her buccal tissue. The smoothness of our relationship and the circumference of the abrasions were inversely proportional. “I miss him,” she said, and she sounded very young.
My heart felt smaller than a fist. Small as a peach pit. The hardest parts of raising her were times like this. When she said she missed you. I remembered seven-year-old Pam at our kitchen table, responding to your end-of-school letter. I miss you more than you would miss recess if they cancelled it, you wrote, I miss you like you would miss your toys. Already she was lost to you, a generic stand-in, half a foot taller than she’d been at her mother’s funeral. You never learned from me that she stood quiet and alone at recess, that she had to be cajoled into games. You’d had no way to know that her favorite plaything was Good Puppy, a stuffed dog with plastic goggle eyes who had come with a certificate thanking Pam for redeeming him from the pound. Good Puppy lay belly up be
neath her chair as she worked on her letter. A jump rope linked Pam and her toy, knotted at his neck and her wrist. “How do you spell miss?” Pam asked.
And I told her, Clarence. I didn’t say, remember that he killed your mother. I didn’t say, Pamela Clare, how could you possibly? M, I said, I, S, S. I didn’t even make her sound it out.
“Lida,” Pam was saying. “Lida, I didn’t mean to—” Her voice cracked. She looked at me. I was Barbra’s sister. I shared her lousy poker face.
Again, I said, “Oh, Pammie,” and then, composing myself, “It’s fine. Of course you do. Really. It’s fine.”
A sniff from Pam. She really did have a cold coming on. “Please don’t oh Pammie it’s fine me. I didn’t mean to bring you down.”
“It’s fine,” I said again. “I’m grand. And you’ve got some sauce right there.”
“Sure you’re fine.” Pam daubed the spot. “I can actually see your face, you know.”
I pulled an elaborate monkey one; crossed eyes and lolling tongue. When she was small, we could sometimes jolly her out of a mood.
Pamela mirrored my monkey face. “Look at us,” she said. “Spaghetti and goofballs.”
“Your uncle used to say that.” Whenever he came upon us being particularly silly.
“I know,” Pam said, and her eyes shone. “I hate that I never asked him who was who.” Another sniff, and then a firecracker of feeling. Frank, Clarence. Pamela missed Frank. Not you. Frank, who was so much the reason she had grown into this extraordinary Pam, for whom today was just another day in a string of autumn days. Oh, Clarence. Things were going to come so easy for Maisie. You’d be hungry. There was no one in the world save me who ever even thought of you.
8.
Every day I checked the post box. Nothing. Nothing. Sunday. Nothing. A mis-delivered issue of Self magazine. Nothing. Nothing. And then. There. Your letter. Its white edge cut apart the dark.
I hesitated. First moment since my birthday. Your hand had touched that envelope. Your hand. You used to have a callus on your ring finger from holding your pencil wrong, and all through your trial that finger still bore its wedding ring. I wondered if Stemble let you keep it. I didn’t know—I had never wanted to—what Ma did with Barbra’s matching one.
I let the post box door snap shut, and then I fled. That’s really the only honest verb for it. Back to the townhouse, where I rooted through drawers. My good winter gloves, leather and lined with rabbit fur, were much too stiff to deal with envelopes. I snapped on a pair of medical gloves, remnants of my practice; encased, my hands looked like my hands again, useful. Useful, but suspect. It wouldn’t do to call attention to myself. I peeled them off and pitched them straight in the trash. I layered paper towels over them, wasteful but even so. They’d held their shape. Before the towels covered them they’d been shocking against the refuse, puffy and plaintive, like actual hands.
A final pair of gloves waited in my bedroom closet, their flat box bound up with twine. Even well-dressed women these days seldom wore such gloves. Wrist length, like I’d had at Easter as a girl, but black where I’d once worn white, banded in matte satin and secured with Tahitian pearl. I struggled with the box strings. My hands had been much nimbler when I first did up this package, double-, no triple-, knotted tight against early use. Tissue crinkled. The department store smell of entirely too many perfumes had nearly faded. I pulled on the gloves. When they last sheathed my hands, my skin had been smooth as milk. I pressed them before me, inspecting. Nothing like lambskin to make me feel expensive. I drew a finger to my lip. Shhhh.
These gloves were meant to go with my execution suit. I’d had to buy three over the years; fashion moves swifter than justice. They hung in zippered garment bags, a sachet in the bottom of each. Together, they made a stylish timeline: here were the bold shoulders of the nineteen eighties purchased—in an impatient burst—on the occasion of your sentencing, here a peplum jacket that marked the early nineties and two appeals down, here the notched neckline of just last year, bought after the execution of Alonzo Nuz bumped yours next in line. All were black; the gloves would go with whichever one I picked. The gloves would keep me dignified. No one would know if my knuckles whitened, involuntarily—because you were the one who taught me a splash of Worcestershire’s was the trick to a perfect burger—or with anger—because Barbra would never study glass-blowing or see Antarctica—or in fear that this wouldn’t come off, that you’d stumble onto a last minute reprieve.
I felt safe in those gloves, and sneaky. A child who’s pinched a drugstore sweet. The whole walk back to the post office, I couldn’t stop peeking at them, my fingers dark and sleek and trim. Thin enough that they didn’t trip me up any, unlocking the box once more, substantial enough to turn your letter back to paper, detritus of some dead tree. Still, I didn’t want to read it in my townhouse. Not in the place I called home. I walked to a nearby bakery, your letter between my finger and my thumb. The bakery was a Kath discovery, thanks to our weekly wanders, warm with that yeasty smell that is supposed to mean solace. I purchased a wedge of zucchini bread and claimed a table. Your penmanship had not improved. You included your inmate number on the return address. The red word inspected was rubber-stamped across the flap.
Dear Maisie,
I thank you kindly for your letter. It made today different than yesterday and the day that came before.
Please, don’t you apologize for your handwriting, not until you’ve seen mine at least. I don’t have a pen to write you, just one of those wobbly cylinders that’s inside a real pen. It’s too skinny to get a good grip on and the ink’s not much good. But a real pen could be just right for soft spots, the eyes or nostrils that no one realizes until it’s too late link up straight to the brain. I don’t say this to disturb you and I am sorry if it does. I am not the kind of man who thinks such things. Or I wasn’t that kind of man before. But when you find out you can’t have a real pen, you get to thinking why.
For a while we got pencils, but not real ones. The mini kind that golfers use in the world. They didn’t say why they changed them up for pens and it didn’t make a difference to me anyhow. Those pencils were the same as pens anyhow. No erasers. They aren’t big on the idea that mistakes can be corrected in here, right? Besides, those pencils got me thinking about golf. I never played it before, but hell, the idea of it now. A whole game that’s based on walking around in the open, and that goes on slow, like a golfer’s got all the time there is.
Anyhow, don’t go saying sorry. If anything, bad handwriting takes longer to read so your words last a while.
I’d guess that happens a lot, a person thinking something about them’s bad when really it’s good. It goes the other way too, if you think about it, and I do think about it (I spend a lot of time thinking). What seems good at first can turn out pretty bad.
At least I know that’s true in my case (and after all these years my case is probably the only thing I really know). For men like me, the state runs tabs on our mitigating and aggravating circumstances. At the end, the judge checks them against one another and decides what’s next. Trouble with me is the same facts that land me on one list land me on the other. I’m a father. After my mistakes, I ran. I took my child with me. Believe you me, I did everything I could to keep her safe. My lawyer says this can make me seem well-meaning, even in my worst moments. When they caught me she was done up safe in her car seat. She wasn’t dehydrated or anything like that. But the prosecution says she was with me in the first place when I was arrested. Car seat and juice boxes be damned. (My language doesn’t offend, right? You probably expect it. Especially considering my note says no religious wackhammers.) We were only twenty minutes from Mexico. That’s abduction. You see how it works. I was (I am) a gentle man. Not one prior. Should be a mitigating circumstance, right? Not unless they point out that to land in here I used a gun that I went out and bought the week before the incidents. They say that’s premeditation.
Another fine way to begin. But maybe mention
ing the rough stuff at the start is the best way to go. And I know I promised to write the truth. If that truth’s going to stop you from writing, I’d rather know it now. I’m not going to cross out a word of this. No erasing. The guards that read this over before sending it along will sure be proud. Those of them that can actually read, that is.
But I’m wandering off into ugliness. Let’s try again. Please write back (you wouldn’t believe all the one or two time onlies I get in here). Chatter on about St. Louis. I swear I’ve spent more time imagining that town than anyone alive. I visited a few times when I was in the world. Your arch was really disappointing. Sorry. It should have at least gone over the Mississippi. My wife’s people are from there and she had this story about convincing a busload of tourists that at sunset the thing sank down into the earth. She could really make you laugh with that story. Or she’d get you feeling sorry for those dumb people who believed her. Whatever she wanted—
The letter puckered in my grip. A territorial flash, or the echo of a long ago one: that story with the arch was mine. Barbra was always stealing. And upgrading. It had only been one elderly couple. No meanness about it. They’d asked when, not if, and I was young; I hadn’t learned to work around my shyness. It had seemed rude not to name an hour. A pulse of longing. I wanted to call my sister. I wanted to call, just to call her on it. Barbra took casually, she lied casually, and for the first half of my life our squabbles came regular as rain clouds. Funny how I missed that. Playing chicken with the telephone. Wanting her to be the one to apologize this time around. I breathed in the brûléed bakery air and forced calm. I turned to a new page. You’d folded down the corner. No staples in Intensive Supervision Unit-Stemble. No tiny, glinting, metal teeth.
—you to buy, you bought. She could make anyone believe anything.
The Done Thing Page 4
