myself about it, that I wasn’t ready to know more.
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* * *
I managed to wait about two hours before running back
to Mrs. Dinsmore’s cabin—mostly to avoid cutting into
Connor’s time with her. I did not manage to stay away
completely.
The dogs ran to greet me, and I was so happy to see
them that I started to cry. Well, I suppose it wasn’t just
the dogs. I had a lot going on to put those tears in me.
The dogs were more like a fuse into all that gunpowder.
But it did strike me that they were the only … well, I
started to say “people,” but they weren’t people. They
were the only beings in my life who loved me and had
no trouble saying so.
Now, if there was one thing I hated as a kid, it was
anybody seeing me cry. Dogs not included. That’s another
thing that’s great about dogs.
I thought I’d just put the tears away again. I wrestled
with them as I stepped up onto the lady’s porch. I figured I would win, because I usually did. But that day they flipped
me and pinned me. Got me in a headlock I knew I could
not escape. This time I’d get my freedom back when the
tears told me I could have it back and not a moment sooner.
I sat on the edge of the porch with the dogs and cried
into Rembrandt’s short silver coat. Every time I lifted my
head Vermeer tried to lick the tears off my face.
I heard a voice from behind, and it startled me.
“This can’t be good. You don’t ever come a second
time unless you’ve got something bad going on.”
I didn’t answer.
She came and sat on the edge of the porch with me.
I kept my face pressed into the boy dog’s coat, so she
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wouldn’t see I was crying. But then a little hiccupy sob
broke through the gates.
“Oh dear,” she said in that signature gravelly voice.
“You’d best tell me what’s on your mind.”
I raised my head. The jig was up anyway.
She was wearing jeans with a big, oversized, un-
tucked blue work shirt over them. Sleeves rolled up to
her elbows. Her hair was down and freshly combed.
It struck me that she had been a pretty woman, once
upon a time. Before she’d decided she didn’t want to
be anymore. Before she’d decided she didn’t want to be
anything to anybody.
“Spill it,” she said.
“It’s too much, though.”
“What’s too much?”
“For you, I mean. First me and then Connor. Both
needing you and leaning on your time like we do. It’s
too much. Isn’t it?”
I was looking off into the woods as I asked it. But I
heard her sigh.
“Well, it’s a lot,” she said. “But I don’t know the magic
boundary on what’s too much.”
We sat for a minute, saying nothing. Vermeer was
still licking my face.
“Now you know why I have dogs,” she said.
“Yeah. They help. Wish I had one.” Another awkward
silence. “I never asked you what kind of dogs they were.”
“Weimaraner and Great Dane.”
“Oh. That explains a lot. That’s how they got so big.”
I paused. Cannonballed into the deep end of the thing.
“My brother’s home from the war.”
She gave me space to say more, but I didn’t use it.
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“And, obviously,” she said, “there’s a reason why that’s
not such a happy thing like it’s supposed to be. How bad
did he get hurt?”
“Lost half his foot. Well. A third of it, anyway.”
“Land mine?”
“No. He says it was a gunshot.”
“Yeah. I guess that makes more sense. Land mine
wouldn’t leave you any foot at all. So, listen. It’s bad, I
know. I’m not saying it’s not bad. But it may turn out
to be a small price to pay. I mean, you get your brother
back, and if he’d stayed over there, maybe not one bit of
him would’ve made it home.”
I didn’t answer. I was staring off into the woods, think-
ing I wouldn’t bother her with the rest of my troubles.
How much of other people’s problems can one poor
woman take?
“There’s more,” she said. “Am I right? It’s written all
over your face.”
“I just don’t understand why my folks are upset with
him. They’re acting like it’s his fault or something.”
“Hmm.”
We sat for the longest time. Minutes. I got the sense
that she had all kinds of things to say but hadn’t decided
whether or not to say them.
“My ex had guns,” she said after a time. “I’m not a fan
of them myself. But he had a deer rifle, and then a pistol
for home protection. That’s what he called it, anyway, but
it always seemed to me that bringing a gun into a house
is more likely to do the opposite of protecting it. Case
in point, he was cleaning it. Thought he’d taken all the
shells out, but he’d left one in the chamber. Shot himself
in the foot. Still walks with a bad limp to this day. Not
that I’ve seen him any too recently.”
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I waited. I was wondering if she was going to tell me
what this had to do with my situation. It did seem like a
weird coincidence that we both knew someone who had
taken a gunshot to the foot. Maybe that was her only point.
“Here’s the reason I’m telling you all this.” She paused.
And I knew that something big was coming. And I knew
I didn’t want it. “Kind of hard to shoot a person in the
foot from some distance. More likely you’ll get them
somewhere between the legs and the head. For that foot
injury, seems like the gun would have to be right above
the foot, pointing down. Now, I can’t say that for an
absolute fact. I’ve never been in combat, and I suppose
weird things happen. I’m just talking likelihoods here.
You understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I wasn’t feeling much. At least, not in the way of
reactions or emotions. The inside of my head seemed to
be stuffed with cotton. The inside of my guts felt like
concrete. My mouth was painfully dry.
“But you don’t want to go there just yet.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Fine. I won’t bring it up again.”
We sat in silence for a time. Then I guess she got tired
of that, because she spoke up.
“Well, if you got nothing else you wanted to say…”
“I need to ask you about something.”
“Okay…” But she sounded skeptical.
“I’ve been working really hard not to ask anything
about Connor. Because I figure what he talks about with
you is none of my business. But I just wanted to know if
he told you this, because it’s one of those life-or-death
things. Did he tell you his father’s gun went missing? And
his mother thinks he
took it?”
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“Yeah. He told me he didn’t take it.”
“Oh. Okay. Good.”
“You think he took it?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “About anything.”
And, with those words, it came over me how tired I
was. Bone tired. It was like a wave that broke over my
head and then took me.
Something came out of me that I wasn’t expecting.
“You still take drugs?” I asked her.
“Excuse me?”
“I heard you drank a lot and took a lot of drugs.
Showed up places around town pretty much out of your
mind, so then maybe a lot of people who wanted to be on
your side, maybe after that they couldn’t be. But I never
saw you out of your mind, so I was thinking maybe that’s
a lie. I guess I was hoping it was a lie.”
“You saw me in a coma from an overdose of pain
meds.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Well don’t I feel stupid now?”
She didn’t say more for a long time. I could feel her
gathering up for something. Maybe to talk to me about
it. Maybe to go back inside the cabin. Maybe she hadn’t
even decided yet herself.
“After the incident,” she said, “I drank and used. And,
yeah. It got pretty bad.” Her voice sounded unusually
quiet. As though she’d lost all her energy. “Then I got
clean and sober. Went to meetings and everything. For
years—over ten years. Then I started needing some pain
meds for an old back injury. From the accident. And then
I got carried away on those. Which leads me to the time
you met me.”
“You could go back to the meetings.”
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“Maybe,” she said. “I’m still kind of on the fence
about that. About whether there’s any point. Now if
you’ll excuse me, that’s more than I usually tell anybody,
even those I’ve known forever. And I think it’s more than
enough for one day.”
She got up stiffly. As though her back was hurting her.
Or at least as though something was. She walked back
into her cabin and closed and locked the door behind her.
I stayed and hugged the dogs for a while longer. But
sooner or later I had to go home, and I knew it.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Picking Up Stuff
Oddly enough, the first outside visitor to come around
and see my brother was Connor. And I hadn’t even told
him Roy was home.
He showed up sometime after breakfast. I wasn’t out
running because, for the first time since I’d picked up the
habit, I didn’t feel like I wanted to. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I heard the knock at the door, but I waited for my
mother to get it. Normally she would get it. This time
she never did.
I trotted downstairs and threw the door wide, and
there he was. It was surprising to see him at my house,
to put it mildly. I’m not sure if that showed on my face.
Probably it did.
I almost said, “What are you doing here?” but I caught
it just in time. Realized how rude it would sound.
Instead I said, “Sorry about yesterday. You know.
How I said I’d come by and all.”
“Well, I wondered,” he said. “But then I found out
about Roy.”
So that’s a small town for you.
“You want to come in?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d like to see him.”
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That was the first I realized he’d come here for Roy
and not me. Which was fine. It just surprised me. Looking
back, I’m not sure why. For all the time he’d spent at
my house over so many years, of course he knew my
brother. Cared about my brother. But somehow I’d got-
ten so wrapped up in what Roy meant to me that I wasn’t including anybody else in the picture.
I waited until we were walking up the stairs to say,
“I’m not sure if he’s awake.” Purposely waited. I didn’t
say it at the door, because I didn’t want him to go away
and come back later. If we had to wait, I wanted him to
wait with me. I wanted him to talk to me. I felt like we
hadn’t talked in ages.
I wanted to know if he was okay.
Bumping into him relatively often outside his own
bedroom seemed to be a good sign, but I wanted to hear
it straight from him.
I knocked on Roy’s door.
“Oh thank goodness,” I heard Roy say from inside.
I didn’t know what that meant, except it meant he
was awake.
I opened the door.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. He sounded disappointed.
“Yeah, me,” I said, talking over my hurt. “Can Connor
come in and say hi?”
We stepped inside without really waiting for an answer.
I pulled up a chair, and Connor sat on the end of
Roy’s bed. Carefully.
“I thought you were Mom with my pain meds.”
“No,” I said. “Just us.”
“Where is Mom?”
“No idea. She might not be home. She usually gets
the door when she’s home.”
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“Do me a favor, buddy.”
My eyes had been gradually adjusting to the dim light,
and I noticed that he was sweaty. As though he had a
fever. Which worried me.
“What?”
“Mom has my pain meds in the downstairs bathroom.
Kind of dumb if you ask me. Run down and get them,
okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
I left Connor and Roy alone to talk and ran down the
stairs. I called for my mom three times, but never got an
answer. So I walked into the downstairs bathroom and
grabbed the only prescription pill bottle with Roy’s name
on it from the medicine cabinet.
I have to admit it: I had a little tickle of doubt, or
dread. Or both. Because my mom may have been many
things, but she was never dumb a day in her life.
But I couldn’t look into Roy’s face and refuse him
something.
I carried it up the stairs and stepped back into his room.
Connor and Roy had been talking, but quietly, so I
couldn’t hear what about. Roy stopped when he saw me
and reached his hand out for the pills.
“I forgot water,” I said.
“I don’t need water.”
“How can you take a pill without water?”
“I do it all the time,” he said. “Learned it over there.”
I watched him shake two of the tablets from the bottle
into his palm. I almost said something. Because I had read
the label coming up the stairs, and it very clearly said to
“take one every four hours as needed.” But I didn’t say
anything. Because it was Roy. Who was I to tell Roy
what to do?
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He popped them into his mouth and chewed them.
“You chew those up?” I asked.
“They hit you faster that way.”
“Don�
�t they taste awful?”
“Pretty damn bad, yeah.”
I walked into his bathroom to get him a cup of water
to wash away the taste. Roy had his own bathroom off
his bedroom. I had to use one down the hall. The perks
of being older, I suppose.
“Thanks,” he said when I handed it to him.
And I noticed again how much he was sweating.
“You want me to open a window or something?”
“No!” he said, all sharp and sudden. “I’m freezing.”
That was when I started worrying he might be sick.
I sat on the edge of his bed, as close to him as I could,
and watched him. He did seem to be shivering some. I
wanted to reach out and put a hand to his forehead the
way our mom would do if she thought we had a fever,
but I could never bring myself to do it.
So I just stared at him, and listened to him talking
to Connor about more or less nothing. Connor’s school,
and his family. I couldn’t help noticing that Connor was
painting a rosy picture of his life while Roy was gone.
Then again, what did it really matter? It was just small
talk and we all three knew it.
After a time I saw Roy’s shivering start to ease, so I
figured the sweating and shaking was more about pain
and maybe not an actual illness. I felt my shoulders loosen
up, and I was shocked by how tightly I’d been holding
every muscle in my body. I made a conscious effort to
let everything soften up.
A few minutes later, as Roy asked questions of Connor,
he began to slur his words. And yet he reached for the
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pill bottle again. I’d left it on his bedside table, not re-
alizing that might have been a mistake. Once he was
under the effect of the drug, he might not understand
that he was taking too much. Maybe that had been the
method behind my mom’s madness in keeping them
downstairs.
I grabbed it up before he could get to it.
“I think you should wait,” I said.
I stood and carried the pill bottle into his bathroom,
where I stashed it in his medicine cabinet. When I got
back out, Connor was talking to Roy, but Roy was clearly
nodding off.
I stood and watched, and Connor paused to see if his
words were getting through. When it seemed we had lost
Roy, he got up off the end of the bed.
“I should go,” he said.
We walked to Roy’s bedroom door together.
“No, stay,” I said. “Stay and talk to me. We haven’t
Stay (ARC) Page 19
