I lean in. “Toby’s message missed the point, didn’t it? You were mad, just not at the dog.”
“Bingo. You know that. I know that. But my bonehead husband don’t know that.” She laughs. “Funny, idn’t it? I didn’t put it all together until the little squirt showed up. See, I used to think once you went to heaven, all of a sudden you understand things that never made sense to you on earth. But after what Toby said, now I think that idn’t true.”
I say, “I’m sorry, I’m not following you.”
“Look, you didn’t know him, but John was a man’s man. Which means he was dense as a fence post.
“Dense as a fence post?” Eric says, returning to the conversation. “I can’t leave you girls alone for two minutes.”
She snorts. “Did I say was? Scratch that—he is dense as a fence post. Evidently heaven doesn’t fix that.”
“What do you mean?”
“After Toby came to see me, I ran into this trainee guy at the grocery store. And I don’t know him from Job, but maybe he’s trying to make me feel better; he stands there in the potato-chip aisle and tells me how I can’t blame John for going in after ole Duke. It just showed how much he loved that dog.”
Kay snorts in disgust. “A lot of people said that to me, right after the funeral. They meant well, but it don’t change anything. Widow of a dog lover is still a widow. But I can’t say that to this dumb kid, so I just stand there and sure enough, he’s not done bringing me comfort, so he has to go on about how much he learned from John. Let them tweakers burn, he says to me. They got it coming to ’em for what they did to JJ.”
Her whole face twists like she’s wringing out a dirty mop. “That’s when I dug up the report. There were three bodies in that fire. Two burned up. And John. I cornered his old buddies, but they kept telling me there was nothing he could do about those bodies. He couldn’t go in without backup.”
She continues, “So I asked them why he didn’t have backup. Even I know that idn’t procedure. Why’s he the only one on the scene?”
“You said he got there early,” Eric says.
“Right. Think about it. He got there early enough to know there were people inside.” Kay’s voice is steely, indignant. “And will somebody please tell me why he idn’t in a hazmat suit? If he got there early, he had plenty of time to suit up.”
“So?” Eric asks.
“So if he had any intention of going in after them, he’d have suited up.” She raises her voice. “But he didn’t suit up, did he? No, He didn’t even try. He stood there and let them burn.”
I’m taken aback by the bitterness in her tone, but I know in my gut she’s got it right.
“He wanted revenge,” I whisper.
“And revenge turned his heart black,” Kay snaps. “Killing them idn’t gonna bring JJ back, now, is it?”
“He’s not supposed to go in without backup,” Eric says, with an edge of irritation in his voice.
“Then why’s he going in for his dog? With no backup? Tell me how that makes him a hero. Tell me how a hero cares more about a dog than a human!”
There’s no good answer to that question. I scramble around for something, anything to say. “He was grieving. He got confused, right? It’s … understandable, isn’t it?”
“It’s hateful,” Kay spits. “He’s supposed to save people, not let them burn. It doesn’t make it better to know the only thing he’s sorry about is that his dog got caught in it.”
“Oh, Kay.”
“I can’t unknow what I know. Ever since Toby said that to me, it put me on a path to finding the truth. Worst of all, now I know John still don’t think he did anything wrong.”
I don’t know what to say.
She looks up at the ceiling of the living room and shouts, “Mad at the dog? You know who I’m mad at, you old coot!” Kay keeps looking up, long after she’s stopped talking.
The silence is taut, keen, otherworldly. I half expect the TV will turn itself on all of a sudden. Instead, Eric jerks the patio door open with a grunt.
His motion seems to jolt Kay back to reality. She looks around, almost as if she’s forgotten I’m in the room with her.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me.” She picks up her lemonade glass and takes a big gulp. “I said too much. I don’t tell that story back home. The ones who know what John did, they don’t see nothing wrong with it. He tried to be good, he really did. Anybody back home will tell you we had a good life together.”
“Of course you did.”
She looks past me, her eyes focusing on Eric playing with Toby and the puppy in the backyard. “I haven’t said enough about that. I don’t want you to think poorly of him.”
I say, “I think John doesn’t want you to think poorly of him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
*
BE CRAZY WITH HER
When Eric gets back from his run, he hops in the shower. I hold the shower door open so I can keep my voice down and Kay won’t overhear. “Don’t you think it’s awful that Toby’s message made things worse for her? It feels like we’ve been a party to spoiling her memories. It would be easier for her to grieve, wouldn’t it, if she could just remember the good parts?”
So many people do that; it seems like they forget their loved ones had any flaws at all. That’s how Pa seems to me. Kay’s the opposite.
“Toby didn’t make it worse,” he assures me as he steps out of the shower.
“She’s so bitter. It breaks my heart,” I say. “Thirty years together and then she finds out she’s been married to a self-appointed vigilante. It’s like she didn’t know him at all.”
“You don’t know if he really was a vigilante. Or if she’s telling the truth.” He towels off. “Maybe she just needs to talk. So we let her talk. As long as you’re okay.”
“I’m okay. And you’re right; she said there’s nobody in Branson she can talk to.”
I wonder if she feels everyone thinks she’s crazy when all she’s trying to do is speak the truth. Well, I know how that feels. That must be why she’s here. She’s counting on us being crazy with her.
Pa’s arrival cues Kay to reemerge, all freshened up, like nothing happened. She’s wearing soft khakis, a simple mint green T-shirt, and a cross necklace made of turquoise and silver. She’s reapplied lip gloss, and her newly fluffed hair is neatly tucked behind her ears.
Pa hasn’t gone to quite that much effort, I’m afraid. At least his retirement suit is clean. All he wants to know is what I cooked for dinner. “Pot roast,” I tell him. “Now go out there and be nice to my guest.”
Toby brings his toy F-105 to the dinner table and shows it to Kay before we even get napkins in our laps. “See? Thud.”
“John flew a Thud,” Kay says, surprised.
“I know,” Toby says, unsurprised.
“Her husband was a fighter pilot in ’Nam,” Eric explains to Pa, as if this is news.
Pa whistled. “Fighter pilot, huh? So what’s his story?” He looks at me. “All them pilots have one story they tell over and over.”
“You know it. Crashed his plane,” Kay says. “Some kind of dive-bomb. And he’d go on and on about the bomb not dropping and how smart he was to roll the plane the opposite way.”
My leg starts shaking under the table.
“Does that make any sense to you?” she asks. “It never made any sense to me.”
Eric practically jumps out of his chair. “Yes! Yes! Because that’s the only way it would work.”
“You act like somebody’s about to drop a bomb on you,” Pa chuckles.
Eric sits back down. “It’s simple physics, really.” And then he goes off on a long, complicated explanation. For a while, Pa tries to keep up with him, but Eric is clearly talking only to Kay. Judging by the look on her face, Eric could burp right now and she’d swear it turned into cotton candy.
“But it didn’t work, did it?” Pa asks. “You said he crashed, right?”
“Something went hayw
ire and the cockpit filled up with smoke. He had to eject. Slammed into a tree on the way down and broke his leg.”
“Which leg?” Eric asks.
“That’s it.” I push back my chair, scraping it on the floor. “Everyone ready for coffee?”
As they head to the living room, Eric drops back. He looks at me and winks. “Left leg.” He turns with two cups in his hand. “Like in Toby’s game.”
“What are you doing?” I whisper to his back.
“Playing along, that’s all,” he says and hands Kay her decaf. “No big deal.”
“Really? Because it’s starting to sound like a big deal, Eric.” He doesn’t hear me. I head upstairs to put Toby to bed.
He’s still asking questions of Kay, the two of them ignoring Pa altogether. Eric’s not playing along. He’s mesmerized. After two solid hours of John the Hero Pilot, the fascination factor is way down for me. It’s almost as if the Kay who yelled at her dead husband this afternoon bears no relationship to the Kay entertaining my husband tonight.
And worse, the late-night Eric, who’s now absorbing John Robberson stories like a kid trying to put his mouth over the end of a fire hose, bears little resemblance to this afternoon’s Eric, who seemed on the verge of fact-checking her account of the deaths of her son and husband.
When I return, Kay says, “There she is. Now, let’s talk about something else.”
“We don’t have to,” Eric says.
“No, no. I got carried away, remembering the good times. It’s nice to talk about something other than fires and choirs.”
“Fires and choirs?” I ask.
“That’s what John used to say all the time. He put out fires all day and I sang in the choir at our church, so if we talked about our day, that’s what it would be. Fires and choirs.”
Eric explains to Pa, “He was a fire chief, too.”
Pa says to me, “How ’bout that.”
I pat him on the knee and snuggle up to him on the sofa.
Eric quizzes Kay about John’s training program. They are facing each other in armchairs across the room. Pa begins to slip sideways against my shoulder, so I jostle him and tell him to drive back to his hotel while he’s still awake. I wish he were staying here instead of Kay.
Once he’s gone, Kay says, “Your daddy’s a nice man,” as she settles back into her armchair. Eric turns down the TV volume on a late-night talk show and asks about John’s crew. She tucks her hair behind her ear as she considers where to start. He leans in, unaware that I’ve taken my place on the sofa. I stare at the muted celebrity interview on the screen, observing how the deferential gestures of the host seem to trigger a corresponding laugh track that plays live in my living room.
When the band comes on, I yawn conspicuously and wonder aloud about where the puppy should sleep.
“Let’s take him to our room,” Eric says to me. Turning to Kay, he adds, “Guess we gotta call it a night.”
“John used to turn in first, too. ‘You coming or what?’ ” She giggles. “That’s what he’d say if I was too slow to follow him. ‘You coming or what?’ Used to drive me nuts.”
Eric helps me move the puppy’s crate into our room and heads straight to the bathroom to brush his teeth.
“Are we going to talk about what happened today?”
“It’s late, Shel. We’ve got time.” He spits into the sink. “She’s staying an extra day.”
“What?”
“We decided while you were upstairs with Toby.” He leans down to pacify the puppy whining in his crate. “You were right. The best thing we can do is listen, help her remember the good times.”
“Is that why you kept encouraging her?”
“Of course.”
I take my time brushing my teeth and cleaning my face. The light’s off when I crawl into bed. “Are you asleep? Because I really think we need to talk—”
“Hush, woman.” He binds his arm around my waist and heaves me underneath him. He buries his face in my neck, resolute. He doesn’t even take time to undress. He yanks his boxers halfway down and presses himself on me, insistent and sudden. It’s over within two minutes. He doesn’t say a word or make eye contact with me. He rolls over and is asleep before I can ask what just happened.
My head is spinning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
*
CHARMING KAY
Pa heads back to Tucson, Eric goes to work, and I’ve got to entertain Kay for another day. I call Lakshmi and give her the five-minute recap. It’s all I can manage for now.
“I’ll tell you every single word she said, I promise. But today, swear to me—no direct questions. Not one.”
“Everything okay?”
“Just bring Ms. Pushpa, okay? Meet us in the park. Ten minutes?”
Not only will Ms. Pushpa be a good distraction, I’m curious about how these two will get along.
They’re polite, of course. Just like moms of any age, they find the common ground: their kids. I fall under the familiar spell of Ms. Pushpa’s voice and can’t help smiling at the melodic emphasis on the second syllable of her words, the run-on quality of her sentences.
In her atonal Ozark accent, Kay begins to describe John and JJ’s military service. I brace myself the minute she opens her mouth. I just can’t run two marathons in a row.
I don’t know if Kay has picked up on my story fatigue, but she spares us the details and tells Ms. Pushpa that both men made it through the war but are deceased now.
“Your son, as well?” Ms. Pushpa, a devout pacifist, reaches over and squeezes Kay’s hand. “Such a terrible tragedy. You have sacrificed greatly.”
The two older women sit together in silence, nodding and holding hands. Even Lakshmi seems to take this at face value.
I’m a horrible person sometimes. Why can’t I cut this woman some slack? I have to keep reminding myself of this: Kay is grieving. Somehow, we’re a part of her process.
Eric comes home from work early and plays with the puppy on the front porch with Kay while I make a quick run to the Oasis Verde farmers’ market. When I return, nobody offers to help unload groceries. I hear snorts and snickers coming from the porch. I haven’t seen Eric this animated since Thud died.
When I glance out the window, Kay leans forward and slaps him on the leg. He holds his hand up to the side of his mouth, whispers to her, and sits back with his eyebrow cocked, checking her reaction. I turn back to the groceries and hear another whoop of laughter.
It’s good they’re getting along so well, I tell myself. I look again, in time to see Kay’s awkward attempt to hike up the back of her powder-blue stretch pants, harrumph, and resettle into the patio chair. I have to smile. She’s seventy-something. Let her get comfortable.
I know, without voicing it, that there’s no way I’d leave my husband out on the porch, laughing with another woman while I’m inside cooking their dinner, if she were young and cute. I clang a couple of pans when I don’t really need to and interrupt them a few times, asking Eric to do simple things like put ice in the water glasses and make sure Toby’s washed his hands. I know, even as I’m doing it, that I’m being silly.
Eric helps out, laughing and joking all through dinner. Kay is livelier than she was the night before. While the two of them carry on, oblivious to the rest of us, I spend most of dinner either explaining their comments to Toby or encouraging him to eat instead of play with his food. It seems like all I contribute to the conversation are anecdotes about Toby.
I feel completely boring. There’s that toxic word again.
When Kay asks how we got to Arizona, Eric tells his go-to story. He was twenty-two years old, still a senior in college, with an offer to come to Phoenix for a job interview. He was so nervous, he gulped down three glasses of water and ended up next to this executive at the urinal. Eric is milking the story for all it’s worth, even standing up to demonstrate, as if Kay’s never seen a man pee. Only in the story, Eric’s too paralyzed to pee and lets out a loud fart instead.
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Kay hoots as Eric sits down, hanging his head in mock shame. They are laughing so hard they both have tears sliding down their faces.
It’s funny. The first nine hundred times you hear it. I contribute a little huh-huh noise to the mix. Kay nods, wiping her eyes, and gives a winding-down laugh, hoo-hoo. She takes a big swig of the overly sweetened iced tea I made for her, emptying the glass.
“Let me get you a refill.” I leave the table, return with a full glass of tea, pick up Toby, and carry him upstairs for his bath, all without a word or even a glance from either of them.
When we come back down the stairs, I think we surprise Kay and Eric, who are still sitting at the kitchen table, amid the dirty dishes and empty glasses, engrossed in conversation.
“Well, look at you two! Let me get these nasty leftovers out from under your noses.” I begin clearing the table, and Kay quickly jumps up and helps. Eric keeps Toby occupied in the living room until we start the dishwasher. I bring in a tray with three cups of decaf and four dark chocolate squares.
Toby, all squeaky clean and in his pajamas, jumps up and down for his chocolate, a treat for him. At first, he wants to share it with the puppy, but Kay invites him to climb up in her lap instead. She points to an airplane on his pj’s, and he tells her the right name for it. After he goes through them all twice, she begins to give the airplanes increasingly silly names, like Herbie or Jed or Putter-Poot. He giggles with each one.
She’s charmed every man in my family.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
*
I’M RIGHT HERE
I excuse myself to tuck Toby into bed. Kay and Eric’s voices fade as I settle in to read Toby’s favorite book a second time before he starts to get drowsy. I rub his back and roll the moment around between my thumb and finger, savoring every touch and snuggle. When I hear his breath deepen, I press my lips to his head, inhaling the little-boy scent. My heart is as full as the moon outside Toby’s window.
Eight Minutes Page 21
