You Don't Love This Man

by Dan Deweese

  When Miranda and I sat down in the small living room of the patio home Eddie and Carrie had been living in for the last decade, though—a side table held a photo of Miranda that was at least five years out of date—Eddie surprised me by claiming that he still worked construction. I don’t possess the most voluble phone presence in the world, so Carrie and I spoke to each other only a couple times a year, for no more than half an hour each time, but I couldn’t remember Carrie ever referring to Eddie’s work life at all. I had assumed that hard labor wasn’t something a man still did in his sixties, but although Eddie wore bifocals and had only a few wisps of hair left to comb across his scalp, his dark tan and the overdeveloped muscles in his forearms supported his claim. We spent a polite, formal day going through some of Carrie’s things, but the only item I took—the only thing there that seemed to have any connection to me at all—was a box of old photos of Carrie and me in New Mexico, from when I was a child. The photos were almost comically devoid of content. We were often small within the frame, and behind us lay the flat, empty New Mexico landscape that I remembered stretching in every direction. The best example was probably a photo of the two of us on a dry winter day, standing on a dirt road outside of town. I looked no more than six years old, and the identity of the photographer was a mystery to me, as was any reason Carrie and I might have been outside of town. Had she been looking at houses? Had we been visiting someone? I had no memory of that day. And yet there we were.

  The next surprise came when Carrie’s casket was lowered into the ground the following day. Miranda and I—the granddaughter and the son—were both dry-eyed. Eddie, however, wept openly and unashamedly, and even leaned on women friends of Carrie’s for support. At some point I recalled—out of nowhere, it seemed—that once, in an uncharacteristic or maybe just uncertain attempt at stepfatherhood, Eddie had asked if I wanted to go on a hunting trip with him. There was nothing less interesting to me at sixteen than stumbling through the cold woods with a gun, so I turned him down without a second thought. I probably also wanted to make clear my intention to shrug off the idea that Eddie was supposedly going to be a more permanent presence than the other boyfriends Carrie had had over the years, many of whom had been perfectly normal male representatives of our town, which meant that after dating Carrie for three to six months and realizing that anything longer-term would also involve the awkward, unathletic, science-fiction-reading boy that belonged to her—well, they moved on. After getting rejected, Eddie never invited me hunting again, and though at the time I felt this confirmed his dislike of me, I imagine it was actually my contempt for him that was perfectly clear. I may even have hurt his feelings. And there at my mother’s funeral, as Eddie wept, I realized that my memories of him were either distortions or irrelevant, that I didn’t know him at all, and that people and their lives are a mystery.

  The next morning, Miranda and I stopped by the house before heading out of town, and Eddie hugged each of us tightly. He told us to take care of ourselves, that we would always be welcome in his home, and then continued to wave even as we pulled away in our rental car. When Miranda and I were settled in on our plane ride home a few hours later, she asked if I thought I would ever take Eddie up on his offer, and I told her I couldn’t for the life of me think of any reason I would ever see him again. “How about because he was married to Grandma for almost thirty years?” she said. She was just out of college then, and had clearly picked up—from her professors, I assumed—the habit of phrasing her suggestions as if they were questions.

  “But I don’t really know him,” I said. “He wasn’t really a stepfather, and we’re not friends.”

  “You could become friends,” she suggested.

  “I don’t think I’m looking to be friends with old men in Florida. Are you?”

  “No,” she said, laughing. “I guess not.”

  “It’s just you and me, kid,” I had told her. And it had felt, in a way, just like the end of high school. Except that this time I wouldn’t be going off alone to become someone new, but would be in the company of my daughter.

  But where was Miranda at that moment, while I stood in the dim ballroom that was supposed to serve as her reception site, waiting for the detective to come in and ask whatever questions he intended to ask? She was on her way to Gina’s gallery, they had told me, from where she would be delivered by Gina to Sandra. She was being passed along.

  “So what’s going on?” Catherine asked. “Why are you in this room, waiting to speak to the police again? Why is John acting so weird?” She was looking at me with an intensity that made it clear these were not rhetorical questions. She felt I was holding out on her.

  “I guess they’re upset I didn’t tell them the guy who robbed you this morning robbed me once. But twenty-five years ago.”

  She looked confused. “And this is something you knew?”

  “Pretty much. I was as sure of it as a person can be from looking at some photos.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Because it’s Saturday. It’s my daughter’s wedding day. Why doesn’t anyone understand this? I’m completely baffled by the fact that everyone seems to think I owe it to the bank to sit around chatting with them on my daughter’s wedding day. You know, if the bank wasn’t open on Saturday, it wouldn’t have been robbed today. Did they ever think of that?”

  “You’re angry about the fact that we’re open on Saturdays?”

  “I’m angry about how fucking insane it is that I cannot be left alone. I’m trying to find my daughter and talk to her on her wedding day. I want to talk to her. But the fact that I’m a branch manager, and I’m a branch manager Monday through Friday, and also on Saturday, even though I took today off, and I’m probably a branch manager on Sundays, too, so apparently I’m a branch manager all of the time—this allows the insane and stupid bank to stalk me every minute of every day, if it wants. This is exactly the can of worms I didn’t want to open today. So yes, I didn’t tell them. I thought maybe I would be left alone for one day. For one day of my life.”

  “I’m sorry. I wish we’d never been robbed. I wish there was some way I could have stopped it—”

  “That’s it,” I said. “Right there. It’s not your fault. You didn’t do it. But you’re starting to feel personally responsible for it. That’s the trick that gets pulled on you. And what I have tried to say to them today is that we are not personally responsible for this robbery, we are not on the clock right now, so they can wait. They can wait until Monday. And do you see how it hasn’t worked? Do you see how incredibly rude that kid out there is? He was hired by the bank. This is the person they chose to handle situations like this—that kid. And he does not deserve access to my life. He does not deserve to go through my finances and question me about the way I’ve handled my life. I hate the entire enterprise. And now you’re not going to be working with me anymore, so I’m just going be coming in to a job I hate, and then going home. What’s the point? You know who they’re going to send to replace you, right? A kid. Someone getting ready to make exactly the same mistake I made with my life. Because nobody likes banks, and nobody likes the branch managers of banks. And they sure as hell don’t trust them. So I’m sorry, but I don’t know why you want to become one. It’s stupid.”

  She smiled. “You’re upset.”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve just never seen you this way. I mean, it’s not as bad as all that, is it?”

  “I think it is.”

  “Well, it’s true that you probably made things worse for yourself by not talking. But did you find Miranda?”

  “No. Someone else did.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not sure.” Realizing how true that statement was—how little I knew about any of what was going on—made me laugh, briefly. “Maybe everyone. But Gina and Sandra say they have everything under control now.”

  Catherine nodded. “So that can’t be making you too happy, either.”

&n
bsp; “I wanted to talk to her. And what I’ve discovered is that she shares her life with them, but she doesn’t share it with me.”

  “There are a lot of things going on for her today. I’m sure that if she needed you, she would have told you. You two are close.”

  Were we? I tried, inwardly, to summon a sense of our closeness. What came to mind were flashes—or maybe just impressions, really—of the time Miranda used to spend with me at the townhouse while she was still in high school. Those were quiet evenings of homework, or of the two of us sitting in the little townhouse living room, watching movies and eating popcorn. When it was Miranda’s turn to pick the movie, she always chose similarly inane college romantic comedies, in which a dorky boy managed to impress a sorority girl, or a self-conscious girl ended up broadening the horizons of a blinkered nice guy. The movies weren’t good—Miranda knew that as well as I did—and yet I remembered us laughing a lot. Laughing with and at those movies had felt like laughing with and at ourselves, and I may never have felt more comfortable laughing at myself at any other time or place in my life. I hadn’t bought that townhouse until Miranda was halfway through her junior year, though, which meant that this mood I was summoning, this sense of closeness, was a situation that had existed only until Miranda went to college—no more than a year and a half. “You know,” I told Catherine, “after we split up, Sandra used to complain that Miranda acted like she was on vacation when she was with me. The two of them fought constantly, and once Sandra actually said, ‘We’re throwing things at each other now.’ She said she knew Miranda liked staying at my place mostly because it gave her a chance to get away from Sandra.”

  “I didn’t get along with my mom when I was a teenager, either,” Catherine said. “And I’m sure that was an especially hard time for all of you.”

  “But she never said or did anything like that to me. Maybe she was on vacation. She never talked about arguing with her mom, never complained about any rules, never argued about the custody schedule. You hear about kids struggling when their parents divorce, acting out or being defiant or whatever they call anger these days. But I always thought Miranda was happy.”

  “Maybe she was.”

  The empty tables, the silent dance floor: I did not want to be in that huge, dark room. “So why would she hide from me today?”

  Catherine was peering at me again. “When was the last time you ate anything?”

  “Probably breakfast.”

  “It’s past four. You need to eat. You’ve seen videos of people fainting at weddings, right? You don’t want that to be you. If you even make it that far.”

  I’m sure that by that little addendum, Catherine meant if I didn’t faint from hunger before the wedding even began. My first thought, though, was that she meant if I lived that long.

  The ballroom door opened again, and this time it actually was Detective Buccholz who stepped into the room. He held a thick file folder under his arm, and took a deep breath, as if preparing himself for some new level of conflict. “I’m sorry for the delay, but I think we can take care of this fairly quickly now,” he said. “You must be the service manager, right?”

  “Yes,” Catherine said.

  “Wonderful. You may go.”

  “You don’t want to talk to me?”

  “No.”

  “But I’m the one who was actually there during the robbery.”

  “I understand that. And now you may go.”

  Catherine eyed him with unhidden suspicion. “Do I have to? Can’t I stay to help answer questions?”

  “You are free to go,” he repeated with the same precise courtesy as before. And opening the ballroom door as if to usher her out, he added: “Please.”

  She looked at me. The beige pantsuit she had been wearing all day remained spotless and unwrinkled, but when I realized, meeting her eyes, that the freckles I had noted on her face that morning had disappeared, I thought: When did she stop to put on makeup? And why do I never notice? Or why, today, am I so aware of this? “Give me a call when you’re finished here,” she said.

  She walked out of the room at such a swift pace, and without even a nod in the detective’s direction, that her compliance was clearly intended to insult. The detective, however, nodded politely as she passed, and then closed the door quietly behind her. When he returned to me, he even seemed amused. “She seems like an excellent employee,” he said.

  “Often,” I said.

  “So a few minutes ago, you were amazed at my age,” he said. “But I’m a bit amazed, too. Because at my age, and with my years of experience in the department, I don’t work weekends anymore. I should be at home right now, napping in front of a baseball game. But one guy’s on vacation, and another is pretending to be sick, so here I am. And I’m confused, so what I’m going to ask is this: What the hell is going on? Why is that kid out there ruining my afternoon?”

  By that point, of course, I felt I had figured out the best way to tell my side of the story. “He’s playing junior policeman. And he seems to think it’s his job to make everyone miserable. But the whole thing has nothing to do with me. I wasn’t even there.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I was at my ex-wife’s house, getting ready for our daughter’s wedding. Her wedding today. In a couple hours.”

  “And that’s why you’ve been reluctant to spend time with John today.”

  “I spoke to him. This morning. But he’s convinced that because this guy robbed me a long time ago there’s some kind of deep connection between us, and if I sit down and look at old photos with him, it will result in a big breakthrough. He just will not accept that it has nothing to do with me. So regardless of what else happens, could you write somewhere in my file that I had more important things to worry about today, so I didn’t particularly care about the bank, or its money, or who took it? But that this kid just will not accept that a coincidence isn’t necessarily meaningful?”

  He smiled. “I would be happy to do that for you, but there’s a problem: I don’t have a file on you. I’m not sure why you think I would.”

  “But you’re holding something,” I said. “What are you holding?”

  “This,” he said, raising the folder, “is a file we have on the guy who robbed your bank this morning. We have a file on him, because we keep track of crimes and the people who commit them. I’m not denying that you have better things to do today, or that you have a right to feel harassed. It’s just that there’s no place in the paperwork where we note whether an individual victim felt inconvenienced. Everyone feels inconvenienced.”

  His use of the term victim grated, but I let it pass. “But you must have notes on the first time this guy robbed me, right? You do write down the things people say?”

  “Let’s see,” he said, setting the file on the nearest table and opening it up. There was such a profusion of pages and forms, of typed information and material taken down in various handwritings, and of photos of objects and places, that as the detective flipped through the pages, I could discern almost nothing at all. It wasn’t until he was toward the bottom of the file that he said, “Here. This is my handwriting.”

  “Am I allowed to see this?”

  “Probably not, so just tell people I looked at this in a very secure manner. But here it is.” He paused, apparently reading through something, and then said, “So he asks you to give him money, you don’t respond, he pistol-whips you, takes a bunch of money, and leaves.”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s it. So what are all of the rest of the pages in there?”

  He began paging back through the papers and photos again. “I’m a little reluctant to tell you, because you’re obviously very sensitive about your belief that your relationship to this case is just a coincidence.”

  “What do you mean? Are you saying he targeted me on purpose?”

  He frowned, clearly trying to figure out how to explain something to me in simple terms. “You live in this guy’s area,” he said. “Or he lives in yours,
depending on how you want to think about it. He robbed you twenty-five years ago—we got his prints that day—and then he was quiet for a few years. Then he robbed a bank out in Greenville, then he’s quiet for a couple years before he’s back here, but across town, where he hits a place for two thousand dollars. It’s always the same: he walks in, robs a single teller, and gets out. Seven years later, over in Weaver, we have him hitting a grocery store branch for three thousand. A few years after that, he’s in Clarkston, and it’s a really good day for him, because he actually gets all of five thousand dollars.” The detective flipped though several more pages, but too quickly to actually be reading them. “There are maybe half a dozen more in here, but they’re just variations on the same theme. It looks like he only brought a gun a couple times, back in the beginning, and then after that he’s had no visible weapon. And he left prints early on, but he hasn’t left prints for a number of years now. So maybe he thinks he’s getting away with this stuff.”