by Allen Eskens
“I trusted you. I actually came down to Buckley because I felt bad. I wanted to spend one night with you before I sit for the bar exam. I was feeling bad about all the stuff you’ve been going through. I wanted you to know that I was there for you. I wanted to surprise you…and I find you with another woman.”
I almost blurted out that all we did was kiss, but I stopped myself. She was right. This wasn’t about a kiss. It didn’t matter if it was a kiss or if it was more. Lila trusted me. She loved me and looked at me in a way that made me feel like I was the center of the world. I wondered now if she would ever look at me that way again.
“I think you should go,” she said.
“Go? But…” I had nothing to say that didn’t sound trite and woefully lacking.
“If you want to stay here at the apartment, I’ll go, but I don’t want to see you for a while. I don’t want to hear from you, so don’t call me.”
“Lila, I’m sorry. I don’t want this.”
“Please,” she said, burying her face in her hands. “Don’t make this harder than it is. I need to be alone. I have to get my mind back on passing the bar before I can think about us. Just go, please.”
I walked to the door to our bedroom and stopped. I wanted to turn and fight for us. I didn’t want to leave. But this was her call; I had no right to deny her request. Besides, I was pretty sure that if I forced the issue right now, it would end things between us. She needed me gone. Sometimes, retreat is the best course if it leaves open a chance to return, even if that chance is a slim one.
So I left.
Part 2
Chapter 38
I’m lying on the hood of my car, my back reclined against my windshield, my knees bent, my fingers laced together on my stomach. It’s a beautiful night, weather-wise. The lateness of the hour and the easy breeze coming from the north is enough to keep the mosquitos at bay, and for now, the throb of pain in my ribs is quiet. In the calm, the ghosts of the day resurrect themselves and move against the backdrop of the starry night. There are so many regrets circling around me, but the thing that haunts me the most is the echo of Lila’s voice saying that all she ever asked of me was to be a decent man—and I couldn’t even do that.
When I left the apartment an hour and a half ago, I was a man adrift. I knew where I was going, yet I pretended that it was not my choice, as though I was being pulled here by a force outside of my own will, drawn to a place I once swore I would never again abide—Austin, Minnesota.
I don’t think I can ever go back to Buckley. It’s unfair, I know, but I want to blame the town for my downfall. I try to blame Vicky too—sheer cowardice on my part. I tell myself that I have to stay far away from her, even though it was I who failed to mention Lila’s name in any of our conversations. I saw Vicky’s flirtations. I knew the smell of her perfume and the lacy outline of her bra long before she leaned down to kiss me. So how could it be her fault? I’m starting to think that I have always been an awful person, and the town of Buckley merely shone a light on it.
The drive to Austin had gone by in a whirl of noise and nausea, and as I got closer to town, I realized that I wasn’t ready to confess to my mother that her golden boy was a fraud, that I had been kicked out of my apartment because of my epic failure as a human being. I couldn’t face that. And then I remembered a little trail where I used to take girls back when I was in high school, a long field approach surrounded by trees where we could make out undisturbed. I drove there and parked between two enormous cottonwoods, their thick leaves stirring the air above me. The field approach is as I remember it, dark, secluded—a good place to spend the night.
Now, as I lay on the hood of my car, I feel more alone than I have ever felt before. I have my car and the clothes on my back, and that is all. I have no home. I am moored to nothing. The chirps and trills of the night critters fill the air around me, seemingly undisturbed by my presence. To drown them out, and to avoid dwelling on my sins, I think back to the first moment when I knew that I loved Lila. I always expected such a moment to come with confetti and music, but for me it came in candlelight.
We hadn’t yet moved in together, and the three of us had planned an evening of watching television and eating popcorn. It was April, and a spring storm came through, knocking out the power. With no TV, a bored Jeremy went to bed early, so Lila and I snuggled up on the couch and talked.
Our conversation that night touched on nothing profound. She told me about her favorite Christmas―she got a puppy named Annie. She told me about a day when she was eight years old, and was plucked from the audience and put on stage at a Shania Twain concert. She told me about visiting her aunt at work, a paralegal at a law firm, and how that lit the fire that would send her to law school.
For my part, I confessed to her how I often felt like a fraud. I was never the kind of guy who was meant to make a living without dirt under my fingernails. I told her how I felt like I didn’t belong in school, and that I was sure someone would figure it out and send me back to Austin.
That’s when she rolled onto my chest, her beautiful face brimming with sincerity. She told me that I was wrong, that I wasn’t a fake. She called me amazing and ingenious, and as I listened to her, I began to believe it. I honestly never thought that I would become a journalist until that night when I saw it in her eyes. And I loved her for that.
She fell asleep before I did, and I remember looking at her soft face and thinking that I would never want for anything more from life than to be with her.
I shift my position on the hood of my car, and the pain in my chest flares to remind me of where I am and what I’ve done. I want the memory of Lila back. I want it all back. I remain on my hood for hours, staring up at the stars and remembering, until sleep finally comes to ease the pain.
Chapter 39
I wake up the next morning still reclined on my windshield, my clothes damp with sweat and dew, my mind pulled from sleep by the call of a mourning dove. I move, and the pain in my rib cage comes alive. I feel like a rusted hinge as I make my way off the hood of my car and into the driver’s seat. I check my phone, knowing that she would not have called me or sent a text. And I am right.
I drive ten minutes to Kathy’s place, pausing before knocking on her door. I’ve never knocked on this door before. This had been my home for more years than not, but it’s not my home any longer. Right as my knuckles tap wood, I hear my mother’s voice coming from inside.
“I can’t believe it. Jeremy, what am I going to do with you?”
Not waiting for an invitation, I open the door and step into the apartment, but I don’t find what I had expected. No argument. No backslide on Kathy’s recovery. Instead, I see my mother and my brother playing cards. Kathy smiles at me, and Jeremy looks my way but then goes back to the game, his eyes studying his cards.
“How’s it going?” I ask.
“Terrible,” Mom says with a melodramatic flare. “Jeremy keeps beating me at Go Fish. He’s a real card shark. He’s won every game so far.”
She’s letting him win—another small change in our mother. I remember when she used to say that letting a child win a game doesn’t teach them anything. “It’s a hard world out there,” she would say. “The sooner you understand that the better.” It’s such a small thing to let Jeremy win at a game, but it is so much at odds with the mother I’ve known my whole life that I can barely reconcile what I’m seeing.
“I made muffins,” she says, pointing to a plate on the counter covered with a towel. “I didn’t make coffee. I don’t drink it anymore, but I have some if you want to make it.”
“You don’t drink coffee?”
“That stuff can be addictive.” She shrugs and gives me a smile. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
I grab two muffins, pour a glass of milk, and take a seat at the table. “How’d you like staying here?” I ask Jeremy. I suspect that Kathy knows that my question isn’t just making small talk. I want a report on our mother’s parenting skills as well as Je
remy’s comfort level, at least to the extent that he can make such a report.
“Maybe I like my bed,” he says.
That tells me all I need to know.
Mom asks, “Are you taking Jeremy home today?” In her voice I can sense a hint of sadness.
“No,” I say. “Not yet.” I am not ready to tell my mother that I’ve been thrown out of my apartment. “In fact, I was wondering if Jeremy could stay here another day or two.” I calculate in my head. The bar exam starts tomorrow. It’s a two-day test. After that, I’ll find out where things stand between Lila and me. My chest starts to hurt just thinking about it.
“I’d love that,” Mom says.
“Jeremy, would that be okay with you?” I ask.
“Yes. Um…do you have any eights?” he asks Kathy.
“Well, doggone it, you got me again.” Kathy pulls an eight from her hand and gives it to Jeremy, who lays down a pair. Kathy gives an exaggerated sigh, and Jeremy laughs. As Jeremy is contemplating his next request, Kathy asks me, “Are you going back to Buckley then?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “I might go up to Mankato.”
“What’s in Mankato?”
“Oh, I didn’t tell you—I have a sister.”
Kathy looks perplexed at that statement.
“Toke married a woman in Buckley named Jeannie Hix. They had a daughter. Her name is Angel. So…that makes her my half-sister.”
Kathy is shaking her head no as she processes the information. I feel bad for blurting it out the way I did. I didn’t stop to remember how Toke treated her when she got pregnant.
“No, he can’t. That’s not possible.” Kathy looks at me with an expression of utter confusion.
“I’ve met her,” I say.
“Jeremy, can we take a break from cards for a little bit?”
Jeremy nods his head. “Maybe I can go watch TV.”
“Would you, honey? I want to talk to Joe for a second.”
After Jeremy leaves the table, Kathy goes to her bedroom and returns with a box. I’d seen that box in her closet going back to my earliest memories, but I never looked inside because it had a lock on it. Kathy opens it by prying the latch sideways with a butter knife. She digs through it, pulling out a few pictures and handing them to me before going back to her search. I recognize my mother in one of the pictures, young and attractive, sitting on a lawn chair with a man who I now know is my father. They are holding up Budweiser cans as if toasting the person taking the picture. In another snapshot, he’s standing with one arm draped across her shoulders, and she’s got both of her arms wrapped around his waist.
“Your father wasn’t always a jerk to me. As you can see, there was a time when I’d say we were happy. But after I got pregnant, he became spiteful and cruel.”
“I found the police report from when he hit you in the stomach,” I say.
Kathy pauses as that memory washes over her, and I can see her embarrassment in the way she presses her lips together and drops her gaze. “I guess you could say that was the night we broke up. I sometimes saw him around town after you were born. I actually thought that he might change his mind about you if he saw you.”
“That’s why you gave me his name?”
She nods. “I’m sorry about that. It was a stupid thing to do. If anything, it backfired. It made him crazy mad. And then, one night when you were only a few months old, I got a letter from Joe. He was furious because the county was going after him for child support. They were going to garnish his wages. He wrote some very hateful things in that letter. One of the things he said was that the child support thing made him so mad that he went and got a vasectomy. He said that he did it so…so that no damn bitch could ever try to trap him into marriage again.”
Mom pauses to take a breath, and I can see a slight tremble in her fingers. “That was Joe’s goodbye letter. He said he was leaving Minnesota. I never heard from him again.”
“Jesus, what a…jerk.”
“Yeah. So you see, Joe can’t have a daughter.”
“Well, even if he was telling the truth about the vasectomy, those things can be undone, can’t they?”
“Probably. But Joe hated the very thought of children. Here…” Kathy digs through the box again and pulls out another letter, handing it to me.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Joe wrote that when he was in jail after they arrested him for punching me. If you want it, you can have it. It’s the closest you’ll ever have to your father saying goodbye. But there’s nothing nice about this letter. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.”
I unfold the letter, scratchy, cursive text on white paper.
Kathy,
You are such a bitch. Did you really think it would work? Did you really think I would stay with you? Well the joke’s on you. I’m not having anything to do with any kid. You will have to make due with the bed you made. And don’t think I’m going to pay you any child support neither. You try that shit and I’ll quit my job and be gone. You’ll never find me. You ain’t getting a dime from me. I’ll live in the woods and eat berries before I pay you anything. I guess you’re little game didn’t have the out come you wanted. Go to hell and take the kid with you.
Fuck you.
Joe
I finish reading the letter and look up to see my mother staring at the table between us. I try to say something to lighten the mood. “He writes like a fifth-grader,” I say. “It’s a good thing he left.”
That makes my mother smile.
Chapter 40
If Mom is right about Toke’s vasectomy, then Kimball’s investigation is being steered by a blind man. This could be nothing, but then again, it could be huge.
Despite my trepidation about returning to Buckley, I want to deliver this news to Sheriff Kimball personally. I want to watch his face as it sinks in, see if it hits him the way it hit me. If there had been a vasectomy, they can prove it with a second autopsy. Angel can only be Toke’s daughter if Toke had the procedure reversed, and from everything that I’d learned about my father, he doesn’t seem like a man who would be willing to go to that length to be a father. But then again, who knows what he might have done to get his hands on the Hix estate.
As I pull into town, another thought strikes me, and I take a turn that leads me to Bob Mullen’s office. When I enter, I find Bob sharply focused on something on his computer. I knock on the wall to get his attention, and he looks up at me, lines of worry tracing across his forehead.
“They charged Moody Lynch with murder,” he says.
“They what? How?”
“Second-degree murder.” Bob waves me into his inner office.
“That’s impossible. They don’t have enough to charge him, do they?”
“They do, and you’re the key witness.”
Bob hands me a document—a criminal complaint—and I begin reading about how they believe that Moody Lynch killed Toke Talbert. They state: Moody Lynch informed a witness, Joe Talbert Junior, that he (Defendant) had an encounter with Joe (Toke)Talbert Senior during which the defendant struck the senior Mr. Talbert in the head with a metal gear.
“They left out where I said it was self-defense. Toke attacked Moody with a rope and beat the crap out of him. Where’s that part? And Toke was alive when Moody left. Hell, Moody was the one who called the cops.”
“Is it true that he hit Toke with a gear?”
“He said he grabbed it off the wall when Toke was hitting him. He wasn’t trying to kill Toke.”
“Your statement is evidence,” Bob says. “They can spin it any way they want to—just like I’ll be spinning it the opposite way.”
“You’re representing Moody?”
“His family just left. I’ll be his attorney.”
“I don’t believe Moody killed Toke.”
“That’s admirable, Joe, but belief isn’t evidence.”
“You can get the evidence,” I say. “You’re his attorney, so you can get all the reports and t
apes and stuff, right?”
“Yes, I’ll get all that in time.”
“How much time?”
“What? Oh, I guess they’ll hand most of the discovery to me at the first appearance tomorrow. Why?”
“Can you get it today?”
“What are you driving at?”
“I have information that might help clear Moody. Can you get the discovery today?”
“If I have a good reason.” Bob points at a chair, and I sit down. “You want to tell me what you’re talking about?”
“I know something that the sheriff doesn’t. I just came from my mother’s house in Austin. We were talking about Toke, and I mentioned that I have a half-sister and…” I stop before I get too far ahead of myself and collect my thoughts, asking the question that I came there to ask. “Mr. Mullen, is it possible that Jeannie Talbert had an affair?”
Bob pulls back as if some foul scent just brushed his nose. “Affair?”
“She worked here. You were close to her.”
“Jeannie was like a daughter to me, which is just one reason in a long list of reasons why this conversation is highly inappropriate.”
“Before he left Austin, Toke told my mother that he had a vasectomy. He was rubbing my mother’s nose in it.”
“Those things can be reversed,” Bob says.
“He treated Angel like he resented her.”
Bob raises his eyebrows at that one. “Like a child he knows isn’t his own.”
“Exactly. If Jeannie had an affair, that would explain a lot. She worked for you. You had to see something.”
Bob tugs at his beard, either concentrating on a memory or deciding whether to tell me what he knows―I can’t tell which. Then he leans forward, his elbows on the desk, his hands clasped together, his face sad. “I think there might have been someone,” he says. “She never told me, and I never asked, but…now that I think about it, I guess it might have been around the time she got pregnant. Toke was hitting the sauce pretty hard, I remember that. She would come to work with bags under her eyes. Her concentration was off. She’d only been working for me for a little while, so I didn’t pry, although I wish I had. She seemed quite sad for a long time. But then she made this swing, a complete one-eighty, happy and cheerful. I’d even catch her singing songs at her desk. She had a pretty voice. I just figured that she’d resolved whatever had been bothering her.”
