by Tawni O'Dell
Isabel has it hidden where he can’t find it. Otherwise, the good stuff would disappear as quickly as the bad stuff he drinks the rest of the time.
I know the hiding place. I leave and come back with the bottle and one shot glass.
I’m feeling pretty confident. A good one occurred to me yesterday after my brawl with Choker.
“Small crowd,” I say.
He smiles slightly and tilts his head a little to one side.
There are two types of Irish faces: a hard, fierce one and a soft, tender one. Jimmy’s is the former but his eyes belong to a shy boy who tends sheep and whistles pointless tunes in a hazy meadow somewhere.
They’re hazel: more green on some days, more gray on others, almost blue on rare occasions. When I was a kid I was convinced they operated on the same principle as a mood ring.
They’re startling in his suspicious, combative face, like finding a fragile pink flower poking out of spring snow.
“Clearly confused,” he counters.
We look at each other over the glass. It’s a stalemate.
“A good beating,” I say and reach confidently for the glass.
He covers my hand with his own.
“Senate Intelligence Committee.”
I smile but shake my head at him.
“Too easy. The day grew shorter.”
“Lovely,” he says. “A stripper’s dressing room.”
I reluctantly pull my hand away.
“Yours,” I tell him.
He throws back the shot and reaches for the bottle to pour another.
Isabel swoops in from out of nowhere, grabs it, and leaves again promising to return with coffee.
“Bring me something to put in it, would you, dear?” he calls after her.
She returns with three mugs on a small wooden tray painted with brightly colored birds.
“And here are two cubes of sugar and a spoon to put in it.”
He takes the cup from her in his scarred, battered hands, trying to conceal their trembling. He just turned sixty but the accident aged him by at least a decade. He almost died from the gangrene in his shattered leg, and his recovery was a slow one.
“That’s not what I meant, love, and you know it.”
“It’s too early for you to start drinking.”
“The time of day has no meaning to a man who has no way to spend any of it.”
“Your philosophizing doesn’t impress me.”
“It’s past noon.”
“Or your ability to tell time.”
Isabel takes a seat on the end of the couch just as E.J. comes walking into the room finishing a call on his cell phone.
He hangs up, sets the phone down on an end table, takes one look at the coffee, leaves, and returns with a beer for himself and his dad.
“There’s a good lad,” Jimmy says.
“Eamon,” his mother scolds him.
I smile broadly.
“Yes, Eamon. You’re a bad boy.”
He starts to say, “Fuck you,” then thinks better of it with his mom in the room.
“Go to hell,” he tells me.
Thirty years ago he would have knocked me flat on my ass for saying his name out loud. Now he has to content himself with verbal abuse.
He opens his beer and stands in front of a wall of books glaring at me.
“Who were you talking to?” Isabel asks him. “The future mother of my grandchildren?”
“Give it a rest, Mom. There aren’t going to be any grandchildren.”
Isabel looks genuinely heartsick.
“Why not?”
“Because no woman will have him,” I tell her.
“Too many women will have him,” Jimmy counters. “That’s the problem.”
He takes a few gulps from his beer and belches softly.
“What about you, Shae-Lynn?” Isabel asks me. “Do you ever think about Clay getting married and starting a family?”
E.J. snorts a laugh.
“Shae-Lynn a grandmother? I’d love to see that. Instead of baking cookies and knitting sweaters, she’ll teach her grandkids how to throw left hooks and pee in a jar while they’re on stakeouts.”
“Those are very practical skills.” Jimmy defends me. “Son, go get me something to warm up this coffee.”
“No,” Isabel says sternly. “Don’t.”
“Fine. Make me grovel and beg. Make a legless man crawl on his belly. The breaking of the spirit. No one knows more about it than the Irish.”
“Oh, for the love of Pete.”
Irritation blazes in Isabel’s bright blue eyes.
“No one is trying to break your spirit, but I might break your neck.”
Jimmy turns his attention to me.
“Did you know, Shae-Lynn, that long before the Catholic and Protestant churches came to Ireland we worshipped the gods and goddesses of nature?”
“Here we go,” E.J. groans as he grabs a copy of Sports Illustrated his mother keeps stocked for him and plunks down on the opposite end of the couch from her. “Irish history time.”
He sticks his stockinged feet in her lap. She swats them away. E.J. has always had mixed feelings about his Irishness. He’s proud of his heritage but he gets tired of his dad constantly harping on the many virtues of the place and the race.
I remember in third grade we had to make leprechaun traps in school for a St. Patrick’s Day project. Kids came up with some truly innovative ideas: devices made from jars and nets and shoeboxes baited with sweets and green foil shamrocks and pieces of counterfeit gold. E.J. came to class with a bottle of his dad’s whiskey and a mallet.
“Long before the English put their stranglehold on our country and took our land and our language and our rights all in the name of civilizing us, we governed ourselves just fine with our chieftains.”
“When those same chieftains weren’t busy slaughtering each other’s tribes over cattle and women,” E.J. interjects from behind his magazine.
“I won’t deny that we had our troubles. There was plenty of bloodshed and squabbling among ourselves. But it was still better.”
“You’re such a pagan, James,” Isabel tells him.
“A pagan who never missed Mass until the good lord saw fit to take my leg.”
“So you’re a confused pagan.”
“Or a confused Catholic,” E.J. mutters.
“The English called us barbaric, but they were the ones who hung men and cut off their heads and stuck them on pikes,” Jimmy continues.
“While the Irish would just quietly hack them to death with swords and battle-axes,” E.J. adds.
“They said we knew nothing about love but they were the ones who regarded unions between men and women to be business contracts, loveless and legally binding, unbreakable except by death. While an Irish woman could get rid of a bad husband just by kicking him out and her kinsmen would make sure he didn’t bother her anymore.”
“By hacking him to death with swords and battle axes.”
“You’re missing my point.” E.J. puts down the magazine.
“Which is?”
“I need a drink.” E.J. and Isabel exchange familiar exasperated smiles, although I’ve noticed recently that Isabel’s smile is becoming more and more strained.
I don’t give it a second thought. I’ve never paid much attention to what I consider their trivial family malfunctions because I’ve always been so overwhelmed by how well their family works.
Even now as an adult, every time I visit them I feel the same surreal awe I did as a child, the same sort of out-of-body experience a lowly peasant girl might have had if she had been invited to sup at the king’s long table.
It’s a combination of feeling happy and privileged to be included but also being full of resentment and shame.
My instinct has always been to hate them, to want to make fun of everything that was good about them so I could feel good about everything bad about me.
Each shared intimacy is like a slap in my face; every laugh
, every affectionate touch, every conversation, every meal that isn’t spent in stony silence and apprehension is a reminder of my own family’s failure and our deprivation.
It wasn’t that they had more money. Jimmy made the same salary as my father. They had something far more valuable than material possessions and they didn’t even know it. I tried not to blame them. They could never understand how precious it is to be able to sit in a room with your family and not be afraid.
I stare at my hands circling my coffee mug. My knuckles are bruised from my fight with Choker.
“Shae-Lynn,” I hear Isabel say. “E.J.’s told us you have some news.”
“You told them?” I snap at him.
“What’s the big deal?” he snaps back. “You said you were going to tell them.”
“It’s wonderful news,” Isabel gushes, and Jimmy nods his agreement but their cheeriness seems forced.
“It is,” I say.
“We should have a toast,” Jimmy suggests.
“All those years of worry and grief,” Isabel goes on, ignoring her husband, “you can put them behind you now.”
“Right,” I concur.
“And have your sister back in your life again.”
“Right.”
“And we hear she’s going to have a baby, too.”
“Right. She is. Except…”
“Except what, dear?”
“I don’t think she’s planning on keeping the baby.”
“You mean she’s giving the baby up for adoption?”
“In exchange for a lot of cash.”
“She’s selling her child?”
“I guess if you’re going to give up your kid you might as well make some money from it.”
I say the words to defend Shannon but as I hear them come out of my mouth, they sicken me.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Jimmy says.
“What do you expect?” E.J. joins the conversation. He sits up on the couch and addresses me directly.
“She found an easy way to make some money so she’s doing it. What does a kid go for on the open market these days?”
“Don’t trivialize this,” Isabel tells him. “This is her child we’re talking about. A woman doesn’t easily give up her own child.”
“Shannon would.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I ask roughly.
“It means she never cared about anybody. Why would she care about her kid?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I respond, knowing full well that he does.
I look toward Isabel for some assistance.
“I always worried about her,” she says instead of helping me to defend her. “Sometimes I wondered if she had a form of attachment disorder. I had a student once who was diagnosed with it. He reminded me a lot of Shannon. It’s when a child can’t develop an emotional bond with anyone.”
“She was attached to me,” I argue.
“Oh, yeah. She was attached all right,” E.J. says. “I never said anything at the time because everyone was so torn up, but hell, it’s been almost twenty years since she left. She wasn’t attached to you, Shae-Lynn. She could’ve cared less about you.”
“How can you say that to me?”
“It’s not an insult to you,” Isabel tries to defuse the situation.
“Oh, no. Of course not. There’s nothing insulting in saying my own sister didn’t care about me.”
“There isn’t.”
“Are you going to tell me my dad didn’t care about me, too?”
“It’s not your fault,” E.J. explains. “They were fucked up.”
“Eamon, stop it,” his mother gasps.
“Shannon was a cold-hearted selfish bitch and your father was a violent prick who got his jollies beating on little girls.”
“I said, stop it,” Isabel cries.
“Enough. Everyone. Calm yourselves,” Jimmy’s voice rings out. “Eamon cares about you, Shae-Lynn. It’s the only reason he says these things.”
People often describe an Irish accent as singsong or lyrical, but I’ve never thought of it that way. There’s more resignation in the cadence than hope. When I listen to Jimmy, I don’t hear a melody of optimism but the individual weary notes of survival.
“You’ve spent your whole life taking care of other people. Why is it so wrong if someone wants to take care of you?” Jimmy asks.
“I don’t want anyone to take care of me.” E.J. jumps up from the couch and gestures toward me with his hand.
“See?” he says looking back and forth between his parents like my presence here has suddenly proved some theory they were recently discussing.
I stand up, too.
So does Isabel. She places a hand on my arm.
“Shae-Lynn. Please don’t go.”
“Stay and have a drink,” Jimmy urges.
Isabel whirls on him.
“Enough, James.”
“Let him have it, Mom. He’s a grown man. He can drink if he wants to.”
“It’s not good for him.”
“His whole life hasn’t been good for him.” E.J. leaves the room and comes back with a bottle of Jim Beam and a juice glass.
Isabel rushes to him and grabs at the bottle.
“Mom, let him have it.”
They engage in a brief, half-hearted tug-of-war.
“Let him have it,” E.J. repeats. “It helps.”
Their eyes meet for an instant. They’re both thinking about the accident, but from absurdly different emotional angles like a yolk and a hen each contemplating the shell of an egg.
Isabel lets go.
We all watch Jimmy take the bottle and fill the small glass with the amber liquid. He takes a grateful sip and sits in silence, staring out the window at the quiet road and the dark hills beyond lumped up against the white sky like a carelessly tossed coat.
Soon he will be poetically drunk, as E.J. calls it, an inebriated state that occurs only in Irishmen where even the most uneducated and illiterate among them begin to quote Yeats and Joyce and Beckett with an occasional limerick thrown in.
This will be followed by more drinking which will lead to him sitting slumped in a chair for hours staring at nothing while blue antics flash by unnoticed on a TV screen in a dark room before he passes out.
I follow Isabel into the kitchen to help get dinner on the table while E.J. disappears outside. He won’t take part in his dad’s descent even though he feels he has no right to stop it. I don’t blame him for cutting out.
My father was a mean drunk. Jimmy is a pathetic drunk, which is easier to endure but harder to bear.
Chapter Fifteen
SOMETIMES I STAY AND VISIT for awhile, but today I leave right after I help Isabel with the dishes.
On my way home I decide to swing by Dusty’s and see how he’s doing.
The restaurant sits all alone about two miles west of town in the middle of an unmarked gravel parking lot. Square, squat, devoid of any exterior adornment, painted an almost sinister shade of purple, the building displays all the architectural ambition of a roadside strip club and gives off all the homey warmth of a fire-ravaged garage.
It’s only been closed for a month, but the windows are already gray with dirt and neglect. The paint on the exterior walls has begun to flake. The neon sign proclaiming “Dusty’s” in cursive script above the front door has been shot out by some kids and all that remains are a few jagged shards of green glass.
He’s here. The black Range Rover he bought with some of the money from the movie deal is parked at the side of the restaurant, giving off a glow like a piece of onyx.
Lib bought a new SUV, too, but his fenders are proudly spattered with mud, the windshield dotted with splattered bugs, and it usually has a twig or two sticking out of the grill.
Ray didn’t buy a vehicle for himself, but his wife went out and bought a neon-yellow Pontiac Sunfire for herself before there was even a hint that any of them had the potential to make money from what th
ey had gone through. I think she believed that the general populace was going to donate money to her because her husband survived a mining disaster the same way people give money to the parents of children with life-threatening illnesses to help pay their medical bills.
At the last minute I change my mind about stopping. Suddenly I don’t feel up to having a heart-to-heart talk with a messed-up kid.
I can’t stop thinking about what E.J. said about Shannon and wondering if he could be right, and if he is right how much of it is my fault.
Shannon could be very distant and downright hostile at times but we also had some good times together. Now I’m wondering if those good times were only because she was in the mood for a good time, or because she wanted something from me.
Did she sit on Mom’s rug with me and look at books because she didn’t have anything better to do? Did she run into my arms only because she wanted protection from Dad? Did she smile at me across a table in Eatn’Park because she was enjoying the moment or only enjoying the pie? Could I have been anybody or nobody at all?
I’m within a couple miles of my house as the crow flies when I spot what appears to be an empty blue Ford with New Jersey plates parked on the side of the road.
I pull up behind it, get out of my car, and walk slowly toward it, keeping a fair distance between myself and its windows until I’m absolutely sure there’s no one inside.
The floor is covered in fast-food wrappers and plastic cups with straws sticking out of the lids. A black leather jacket and a black gym bag with “Good Sports Gym” written in gray across one side sits in the backseat, unzipped, with various items of male clothing stuffed inside.
I walk around to the passenger side and try the door. It’s unlocked.
I open the glove compartment, and a car rental agreement, a Pennsylvania road map, and a photo of my sister fall out.
Next I go through the gym bag and find nothing but men’s clothing: socks, underwear, a couple balled-up T-shirts, and a pair of jeans. I check the pockets of the jacket and only find a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. Nothing incriminating.
The trunk is a different story. It appears to be empty but beneath the spare tire I find a box of bullets.
Pamela Jameson asked me if I carry a gun. I don’t. I don’t keep one in my car either. I have a Colt .45 auto I’ve kept since my Capitol police days that I still take to the range once a month for target practice, and I have my Dad’s old bolt-action hunting rifle that I keep clean but rarely use.
