by Haven Kimmel
Cassie walked across the gravel driveway, past the barking dogs, the doors closed on Billy’s two hydraulic lifts. Around the corner she found an open door; Billy was sitting on the floor organizing and cleaning parts of a dismantled engine, listening to Led Zeppelin so loudly the speakers of his small stereo were rattling. Cassie walked in slowly, trying not to startle him.
“Hey! Cassie!” Billy jumped up, wiping his hands on a dirty shop rag, then turned off the stereo. The buttons were thickened with dust and grease. “I won’t hug you.”
“Hey, Billy.”
“What brings you out here so late? You in trouble?” He was a thin, rangy man with a long face. Cassie hadn’t seen him clean in years.
“Naw, not really. Josh says you’ve got a Ford Ranger for sale.”
“I do. He told you it’s rebuilt? I got it for nothing.”
“A salvage title’s okay with me. Is it out here?”
Billy turned on a floodlight, and they walked back out to the yard where ten, twelve vehicles were parked. Right in the middle was a black truck, tall, shiny, immaculate. “This is it?” Cassie said, surprised.
“That’s it. I got it at auction. A tree fell on it, I did all the body work myself. Engine was fine, untouched. Everything under the hood is original.”
Cassie opened the driver’s door. The inside was tan, the upholstery looked new.
“It’s full size, with an extended cab. Four doors.”
She opened a door on the cab’s extension. There were two jump seats, folded up.
“It’s got air, a CD player, cruise control, five-speed stick. A bed liner.”
“How much?”
Billy scratched his head. He hated to talk money. “The Blue Book is ten. I put four in it, and I’ll sell it for five.”
Cassie nodded. “I’ll give you cash, and you can have the Mazda. The title’s in the glove box.”
She had to admit, driving home, having long been a person to whom vehicles meant nothing, that she was not altogether immune to the charms of being the owner of a big black truck. Every mile of road felt good; this was Information. Billy had lent her a CD, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, and the combination of the early warmth of the night, the air coming through the truck, the music, made her remember how it felt to be high, the bounty of perception. She had once told Laura that pot made her realize she lived in an analogous world; that all the connections had already been made, the architecture was laid bare, the whole plan was shining up in everything, and all she had to do was look, name it if she wanted to. Laura had said those were the world’s riches.
The King’s Crossing was as wide and dark as any road. She passed the Taylors’, the trailers, the pond, and pulled in to her driveway. The house was lit up for her arrival, and Edwin was there, his used Taurus, a dull and institutional blue, sitting in front of the garage where Jimmy used to park the Lincoln. Cassie carried her suitcase and Belle’s book through the screened porch, the front door. From the living room a man’s histrionic voice said, Ivan had seen the woman before, but he couldn’t remember where. Cassie left her bag at the foot of the stairs and went into the kitchen. Belle and Edwin were at the table, side by side, looking at a stack of documents.
“Look who’s here,” Edwin said, standing. He had aged well; his Lovely Face was unlined, his eyes were clear. Maybe his shoulders slumped a bit more, his clothes hung loose, but on the whole he seemed the same to Cassie as he had twenty years before. “Welcome home,” he said.
“Cassie,” Belle said, not standing. And then she burst into tears. She sat straight up, let her head fall back, and wailed.
Cassie sat down across from her sister. “Belle.”
Belle had on one of Laura’s sleeveless shirts, red, and she wore a white sweater around her shoulders. She sobbed, she gasped for air.
Cassie said, “Belle.”
Edwin finally reached out and put his hand on Belle’s back, and she cried even harder. She cried much harder than she had when she was unable to attend Laura’s funeral, harder than when Poppy died. She cried freely, she was liberated from the world of noncryers.
“Cassie!” she wailed. “I have! something! to tell you!”
Edwin said, “Do you want me to—”
Belle nearly shouted, “No! It’s my duty! She’s my sister, my life would be a great deal easier if someone in this house would read the Oresteia.”
Cassie said, “Belle. Is Jimmy dead, are you ill, are we bankrupt? Because all you have to do is tell me.”
Belle looked up, gave a last, brave sob, and said, “Edwin. And I. Are married.”
They were wearing rings. Thin gold bands that Cassie could plainly see, now that she was looking. She sat back against the chair.
“We did it as soon as you left for New Orleans, I was afraid I’d chicken out if I had to tell you ahead of time, a judge came here to the house, we had the ceremony in the backyard.”
Cassie said nothing.
“It was beautiful.”
Belle, a mess, tear-streaked; Cassie could see what she had been afraid of, that the two of them, the sisters—who had so little left!—meant nothing to Belle, that Cassie had been excluded. Cassie saw, too, that all the time she’d been in New Orleans, making her pledge to her sister to stand, Belle and Edwin had been right here, sanctifying their own pact. In this very house. They seemed so precious to her suddenly, like newborn babies, their unscuffed rings, their subtle glances. Edwin was smiling at Cassie, his same sad, small grin, and that was what finally did it, Cassie opened her mouth and began to laugh, and she laughed and laughed and laughed, tears running down her face, and Belle stood up and they danced around the kitchen, Edwin turned on Howlin’ Wolf, and Cassie laughed and laughed.
In the morning Edwin and Cassie left Belle at the kitchen table looking at the Vishniac photographs. She was still crying, had cried all night. Cassie couldn’t begin to unravel what her sister was crying about; she let it lie.
Edwin and Cassie took the documents he and Belle had been studying and headed for Laura’s attorney in Hopwood, an old man named Harold Piper; he preferred to be called Hal, but no one did.
“Let’s take my truck, Edwin,” Cassie said, not giving him the option of saying no. Edwin in a truck. He looked miserable and shy.
“Cassie,” he began, clearing his throat, “is there anything you want to, would you like to ask me—”
“Nope,” Cassie said, shaking her head.
“Because it seems as if maybe you’d have questions about—”
“I don’t.”
“I appreciate that you’re a private person.”
“Thank you.”
They drove the rest of the way in silence.
Harold Piper’s office was in downtown Hopwood, in a building that was probably a bribe away from being condemned. His office was above a restaurant where Cassie had gone a few times with Jimmy, the Top Lunch and Cigar, a broken-down cafeteria where every day they served the same thing, beef and noodles with a slice of white bread and butter and a cup of coffee. Two ninety-five. Only men ate there. Harold Piper ate there every day. In the back room a card game ran indefinitely, had for decades, low-stakes stuff. High enough, though, to make Harold the sworn enemy for life of Jimmy, which is how Laura had chosen him in the first place.
“Sit down,” he said to Cassie and Edwin, gesturing to two moth-eaten armchairs. Harold wanted to look like Mark Twain, or at least like Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, but his white suit, his white hair and mustache, had all gone the yellow of liver failure, dissipation.
“Cassie,” he began, lighting a cigarette, “you know I despise that wastrel of a father of yours.”
“I don’t have a father,” Cassie said, crossing her legs.
“I guess that’s legally true. Your mother, however”—Harold leaned back and studied his filthy light fixture—“was another story. A rare, a wonderful woman.”
Edwin cleared his throat. “About the will, Harold. As you know, I was privy to the contents, but
Cassie—”
“Your mother,” Harold continued, “was not only wonderful, she was surprising, wouldn’t you say? Think about it, Cassie.”
Laura and Milkweed. Laura on the bus chasing Jimmy so long ago, because if you perceive something as holy, you will not let it go, you will not defile it; laughing through her wedding night. Laura pregnant, at the mercy of strangers, Laura chasing a tornado through the geometry of rural Indiana, carrying to her grave the memory of a woman who never quite met the horse walking toward her. Apples in her apron.
“Yes,” Cassie said. “She was.”
“You might be equally surprised by this.” Harold raised a pair of half-glasses, bifocals, and rested them on the beaky bridge of his yellow nose. He lifted his head slightly, focusing. “When your grandfather died, he left your mother the house and land in Roseville and all the contents therein. That house and land have been deeded over to you and Belle, and you have equal shares in it.” He took a long hit off his cigarette, blew it out through his nose. “Additionally, he left an insurance policy. Your mother was the sole beneficiary.”
Cassie uncrossed her legs, crossed them again.
“Your mother took that money and converted half of it into another life-insurance policy, in her name, with you and your sister as the beneficiaries, and she took the other half and invested it in the stock market.”
Cassie raised her eyebrows.
“Some of the investments she undertook on the advice of Edwin here, and they were very safe, and her return was small but guaranteed. But she also bought stocks and bonds under the tutelage of Ernest Pettigrew—”
“Uncle Bud?”
“Yes, whose instincts ran closer to the margin, you might say. The bottom line, Cassie, is that if I liquidated your half of your mother’s portfolio today, along with your half of the payout from the life-insurance policy, you have about three hundred thousand dollars, after taxes.”
Cassie blinked once. “Sell.”
Harold looked at her over his glasses. “Why don’t we—”
Edwin said, “I really think you should consider—”
Cassie stood up, held her hand out to Harold. “Thank you very much for your representation. Please do as I have asked, and sell my shares.” She turned to Edwin, who was looking at her with great concern, a sort of worry he’d perfected over the course of his German life. “Edwin.” Cassie shocked him and surprised herself by resting her hands on his shoulders and leaning close to his face. He smelled dry, like Belle. “You are my brother. I never thought I’d have a brother.” They looked at each other. Edwin’s eyes filled with tears. Then Cassie said, “But I’m leaving this state.”
After she had signed what she needed to sign and everything was in order, Cassie and Edwin turned to leave. Cassie said to Harold, “Please call me as soon as the money is available. I want it in cash.”
When she got home, she called Jacob at the photography gallery in New Orleans; she called Gabe at Epistrophes on Royale. She told them she was looking for real estate, and they agreed on an old building in the Bywater district, the area of town where everything was moving. It had been a jazz club, and then a studio for a glassblower, and Cassie asked them to call the seller, and then she went to see Uncle Bud. She told him to sell everything, to sell it all and bring the Brunswick and the light with the red glass shade, because they were moving to New Orleans. He looked at her steadily, and she thought she could see him picturing the house he’d never finished, Railroad Street sinking further to seed, the glass room without Cassie in it, and then he nodded and called his attorney.
For days Belle sat at the kitchen table and cried, but at lunchtime Edwin came home from the hardware store, and she heated up soup in a pan, and they sat together at the table to eat it. He checked her arms for imaginary thorns and adjusted the dosage of her medicine, and found a special conditioner that made her hair look normal again. At night they slept in the same bed. Cassie drove in to Roseville and said good-bye to Emmy, who seemed irritated and distracted; Dylan had spilled a bowl of Cheerios the day before and hadn’t told anyone. Now they were stuck like barnacles to the dining room floor. She repeatedly asked Cassie, “You’re moving where? to do what?” And then later, “Explain this to me again?” But at the door, as Cassie was leaving, Emmy threw her arms around her and cried some, saying that with Cassie gone, almost nothing of her past would remain. Cassie didn’t say anything but wondered where Emmy had gotten the idea that anything of the past remained for anyone, ever. Then Cassie went to Puck’s mother’s house, and down into Puck’s special finished basement, where she found him lying in bed watching cartoons. His computer was on in one corner of the room, displaying a constantly changing, garish configuration of what appeared to be electrical specs. The floor was covered with comic books and science-fiction novels and the artist’s notebooks in which Puck worked on his own, never-ending “Saucy Little Broadcaster.” Cassie looked around, stunned by the profusion of disemboweled machines, machines connected to other machines, instruction manuals, pill bottles. She told Puck that she was leaving, then sat with him for an hour as he wept like a fool.
She got up very early and snuck down the stairs and made coffee quietly, then took it out to the porch and waited for the sun to come up. Sometimes, when you leave, you never make it home. You never see the place again. She studied the driveway, the yard, the road, the fencerow, the fields, the windbreaks, the power lines; Laura had drained these things of their resonance, or so she believed. It wasn’t so for Cassie. The sight of the hawk circling its prey, the hawk’s flight, the racing heart of the mouse, the vole, the rabbit—these things were perfectly real, they were everything. All. She had stood in the pouring rain that last day in New Orleans, had stood outside Saint Louis Cathedral as the bishop said the mass. He wore a small microphone on his collar, and the homily was broadcast all through the square, to the people with umbrellas who had arrived late and couldn’t get in, to the junkies and the homeless and the tourists and their children. Why did He die? the bishop asked. Where is He now?
Cassie got in her truck. She didn’t own much, but it was all there with her. A vintage Balabushka pool cue won fair and square; a backpack from a Boy Scout packed with Laura’s letters.
A phone number in Biloxi. Her tools, her boots, her clothes, some books; she had a .22 pistol, a Ruger Single-Six, strapped to her ankle. She had three hundred thousand in cash in a metal box behind her seat.
She drove away.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For technical information about pool (particularly the things I wasn’t able to learn in a pool hall), I owe a debt to Jeanette Lee, Ewa Mataya Laurance, and Philip B. Capelle, whose books I consulted daily. Writing about pool and writing a novel are two very different things, and I also learned invaluable lessons from David McCumber (Playing Off the Rail), and the incomparable Walter Tevis (The Hustler, The Color of Money). As Martin Amis once said of Elmore Leonard, Tevis is a writer free of false quantities, and I’m grateful for his fine, clean work.
Thanks to Joshua Mann Pailet, who lent me the perfect table, and Orri Putnam, for his exquisite taste in cars.
For a year I spent many nights in bars and pool halls, a condition my children accepted with their usual sangfroid. Thank you, thank you, to the Amazing Kat and Obadiah. Ben Kimmel was equally and always supportive and, along with Don Kimmel, bought me my own cue. (Sweet.) To the people who read the fledgling first draft and were generous with praise and suggestions, I reserve special gratitude: Jody Leonard and Lisa Kelly, Deb Futter, Ben, Meg Kimmel, and my agent, Bill Clegg, who is a genius of kindness and professionalism. My mother, Delonda Hartmann, read an early draft and wrote me a letter I’ll treasure for the rest of my days. My deepest thanks to the owners of independent bookstores around the country, without whom my books would languish in dank basements (thanks especially to Tom Campbell, John Valentine, Keebe Fitch, and Robert Segedy), and thanks also to the American booksellers, our unsung heroes. Ruth Liebmann, thank you. My deepes
t thanks to the poet Alan Shapiro. Rachel Pace, you were lovely. Thanks to all the bookclubs who read my first two books. Mary Herczog was with me at the genesis of this novel and let me spend weeks with her in New Orleans. For this and many other acts of generosity on her part, I am deeply in debt. Thanks to Katherine Williams, who lost a fight with a turkey buzzard. Thank you to Dominick Anfuso and Martha Levin at Free Press for your faith and vision, and thanks to Chris Litman. Beth Thomas copyedited the final manuscript brilliantly. There aren’t sufficient words of gratitude and respect for Elizabeth Berg. And to my editor, Amy Scheibe: I’d follow you to the end. You are one of my great blessings.
Bud Rains provided me with a model of a really good man.
My nephew, Josh Golliher, first flew a snake kite with me. He is in this book in many ways.
To Bob Jarvis: without you, I’d never know how much a girl could love her father.
Finally, I’d like to thank the people who enliven this daily work: Augusten Burroughs, Lawrence Naumoff, Suzanne Finnamore, Steve Hochman, Patricia Morrison, Matt Piersol, Dorothy and Will Kennedy, Beth Dalton, Jay Alevizon, Susan Naumoff, the beloved Maia Dery and Senga Carroll. I completed the last rewrite of this book at the home of Leslie Staub and Tim Sommer; they traded that week in New Orleans for my heart. And to John Svara, who stood still and studied grace with me.
