by Howard Owen
But when Jack kisses her, she kisses back.
At his suggestion, they order delivery pizza and spend a relatively harmonious night watching the Olympics. They avoid the past and the future with equal determination.
Brady was 9 when Jack and Gina married, old enough that he would never call her Mom. And then, four years later, Shannon came along. With Jack on the road, there wasn’t much time or patience for a stepson who already was getting into junior-high trouble. Jack’s conversations with his son too often consisted of reminders of the serious consequences if he sassed Gina again. Ellen had more power over the boy than his stepmother did.
They’ve never really bonded, and Jack supposes they never will. If he had been home more, he’s sure he could have made it turn out better than it has.
Brady asks about Jack’s book, and he tells all of them that he had a conversation with Gerald Prince that afternoon, not volunteering that he initiated it.
There seems to be genuine enthusiasm. There is, after all, a fair amount of family future at stake.
He tells them that Gerald says it looks good, that he hasn’t finished reading it yet, that he’ll probably hear from him in a couple of weeks.
“Well, I think it’s cool,” Brady says, and Shannon seconds him.
Gina, Jack notices, does not make it unanimous.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gina and Jack drive into Richmond on Saturday morning. She wants to go to her favorite gourmet kitchen shop, and then they’ll kill an hour or so before they meet Mack and Sarah McLamb for lunch.
Jack would just as soon avoid the bustle. Carytown, a district of small, brightly painted shops, bars and restaurants that somehow have managed to outlast the mall chain stores, is near the University of Richmond football stadium. Students and fans in town for the afternoon’s game will make parking and negotiating the narrow sidewalks less pleasurable than usual.
Gina’s been looking forward to this, though. She enjoys the city and would prefer to live here. Jack is sure that, before they are home again, something of import will have been charged to the one card that will stand a large purchase, and he feels relatively lucky when Gina comes away with only a large red hat from a store that seems to focus only on head- and footwear, nothing in-between.
They dine outdoors, under the porch awning of a restaurant that once was a fine old Richmond church, all but Jack sharing a bottle of white wine as they work their way through salads, wraps and cheesecake. It’s turned into a fine day, the calm after the storm. They can look down the steps at passers-by. The football crowd has mostly left for the game by now, and the street below them seems peaceful in the early-autumn sun. A black Labrador retriever is napping on the edge of the sidewalk.
When Sarah and Gina go looking for the restroom, Jack tells his friend and broker he might be needing to sell some stock on Monday morning.
“If you’re talking about the Cisco,” Mack says, “I’d wait a little bit. I don’t think it can keep falling like this. It’s a good time to buy, not sell. The thing to do is not panic.”
“I’m not panicking, but I don’t have much choice. Don’t have any choice.”
Mack waits for more, but Jack only tells him to keep it to himself, that it isn’t something he’d care for Gina to know about right now.
Mack just nods, spearing one last scrap of cheesecake with his fork and savoring it.
“OK, Monday morning,” he says as he wipes his mouth. He looks up and around them, seeming to notice his surroundings for the first time. “You know, my daddy would have whipped my butt if he’d seen me sitting somewhere drinking wine off the front of a church, whether it was still in use or not.”
Mack’s father, like Bobby Witt’s, had been a minister.
“Yeah,” Jack says, reaching for his wallet. “I don’t suppose my folks were all that religious, but it does seem weird.”
“Good thing your first wife isn’t here to see this,” Mack says. He can get away with mentioning Charlotte Hamner Stone, whose last-known name and address were Sister Carlotta and London. “She might’ve thrown the cheesecake-eaters out of the temple.”
Mack bothered to look up her address in London on a trip two years before. He went there, to a place in Brixton that he told Jack later he would only have visited by cab or armored car. He didn’t see Carly/Carlotta, but he did see the building, old and crumbling, where Sister Carlotta and her husband were trying to bring New World evangelism across the Atlantic, like Pilgrims returning.
“They’re probably doing some good,” he says now. “The people there looked like they needed some kind of salvation, or to win the lottery or something.”
Jack grunts. He hopes the former Carly Stone is able to help somebody, even if it’s only herself.
In high school she was Charlotte Hamner.
She was a pretty blonde with blue eyes who stood just over 5 feet tall and exercised the prerogative of a short girl in a chauvinistic world to throw tantrums and pout her way to small victories. She was a cheerleader who made good grades and finished runner-up in the Miss Gladden High pageant her junior year. She was part of their crowd, even if some people did think she was a little stuck on herself. Despite the unsupervised lust-fests at the Edmonds house, she and Jack Stone had never dated.
By the time he came back from his four years in the Navy reinvented, she was Carly. She already had graduated from Mary Washington College and was teaching, against all odds, at their old high school.
In the mid-’70s, Jack Stone’s future would be defined, often by negatives. Chances were not taken, dreams were not fulfilled. Obligations were not ignored.
He’d been through a four-year Navy hitch in which the most challenging time was his first nine weeks of training at Great Lakes. They told him he was lucky to be there in the summer. He spent most of the rest of his time assigned to the USS Lexington, never saw a shot fired in anger, and was a petty officer second class when he got out. He felt somewhat cleansed by his exile and thought he was ready, on the GI Bill, to salvage what he could.
In the fall of 1974, he enrolled as a 22-year-old freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He took an apartment near the campus and made three A’s and two B’s his first semester. His four years in the Navy had made him more serious about his education.
One week before Christmas, his father fell off the back of his pickup truck while trying to lift a bale of hay. He was dead before he hit the ground from his first and only heart attack. He was 56 years old.
None of the three offspring was helping Kenneth and Ellen on the truck farm that had supported all of them. None of them had ever been made to feel guilty for not doing so. Kenneth hired local people who needed back-breaking work badly enough, along with a host of migrants. The farm had made them a good enough living. When Jack Stone was growing up, they wore new clothes, had two televisions and got a new car whenever they needed one. The summer before, Kenneth even offered his youngest son money he didn’t need for his college education; all the disappointment and lost promise seemed to have been forgiven.
After their father’s death, the three siblings met and talked, in Ellen’s absence, about what was to be done. Mike and Sandy were already tied up in their own families. No one else was there to step forward, so Jack did.
He told people he was too damn old to be a college boy anyhow, that he would go back once they got everything sorted out on the farm and decided whether to sell it or keep it going.
He admitted to no one the depth of his disappointment. He would not give his brother and sister the pleasure, or his mother the pain, of letting on that he was such a reluctant volunteer.
In the meantime, he had become reacquainted with Carly.
A semi-famous Southern novelist was making a speech at VCU the only semester of Jack Stone’s college career, and he went, walking over from his Grove Avenue apartment. Jack was astonished to see Charlotte Hamner among the 40 or so people there. She told him straightaway that she was now Carly.
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He asked her out for a beer afterward. He had been sleeping with a wide assortment of women for almost five years, but he had not ever before considered himself in love, not really. Carly was a pretty girl, a shorter version, he was surprised to realize, of Posey Atkinson’s cousin, whom he sometimes thought about, alone in his bunk out at sea.
He did lose his head over Carly. He knew it even as it was happening.
He would sit on one of the benches in Monroe Park while Frisbees flew past him, staring through the trees at nothing like some love-sick 18-year-old. He worried, for the first time in his life, about a girl being faithful to him, and he tried not to scare her away. Carly, who unlike him was drawing a salary, had more disposable income, and he worried about losing out to men older than either of them, who could take her to New York for a weekend or the beach for a week, maybe the two of them going Dutch treat.
But she never dated anyone else that fall, a season that would put its imprint on every other autumn of Jack Stone’s life. She told him she thought she loved him not long after they first slept together. He told her he was sure.
He must have gotten Carly pregnant within a month of their reunion, because Brady Hamner Stone was born the next July, a month premature. He weighed five-and-a-half pounds and cried for most of the first two months of his life, it seems to Jack now.
She told him about it on New Year’s Eve. They had gone out for dinner, and she said she didn’t want any wine. He pressed her about it until she told him she was late, very late, and, yes, if it was anyone, it was him.
She said she didn’t want to burden him with this, so soon after his father’s funeral, but she was nearly out of her mind. Jack told her not to worry, that he would take care of everything.
“I don’t want it taken care of,” she said, tears filling her blue eyes as she raised her voice enough to make the couple at the next table turn around.
“No,” he said, “I mean, I’ll marry you. I want to marry you.”
No one will convince him that he didn’t really love Carly Hamner, from November of 1974 until some time after she left him. Maybe it would have been different without the sense of obligation.
Once they were married and had treated themselves to a quick, chilly off-season weekend at Myrtle Beach, everything seemed to go into a slow downhill slide.
Their two years and five months together at the farmhouse are a sleepless blur in Jack’s memory, full of 16-hour days, an increasingly bored and unhappy wife and a baby boy for whom he never seemed to have enough time while he tried to keep Kenneth Stone’s farm alive.
After the early, C-section birth, Ellen more or less took over, helping Carly with the baby and looking after her son and daughter-in-law. It seems to Jack now that Carly cried every day the first six months of her son’s life, she and Brady often doing a duet. He supposes that she leapt into the marriage with as little thought as he did.
Ellen never minded looking after her grandson. She saw him as a kind of compensation, coming just eight months after the great loss of her life. But she would say later that she should have been harder with him, been a mother instead of a grandmother.
Jack had believed that he would make Carly Hamner happy just by agreeing to take part in a wedding. And it might have worked if Carly hadn’t been what her mother called a searcher, trying religions on like shoes.
It didn’t seem important to Jack when Carly asked him to go with her to a new church she had heard about, one that didn’t carry a denominational name after it and whose place of worship now has sat many years vacant and rusting on the U.S. highway leading to Richmond. It is still possible to read the stenciled, incomplete-seeming letters on the side of the overgrown storage shed of a building: The Church of the Holy.
He went once, but he couldn’t abide the screaming and shouting, the alleged speaking in tongues, the general smug, hardscrabble piety. They argued about it, and then she said that if he wouldn’t go with her, she’d go by herself.
Sunday afternoons, when she returned from the three-and four-hour services, she would be withdrawn, not even responding to Brady.
The man Carly left her family for was also a member of that church, an older man with long, stringy gray hair and beard, they said. The two of them apparently stayed together for some time. Her father found them once living in an abandoned car in a part of South Side Richmond near the factories along I-95. She wouldn’t come home.
She was supposed to have been a Buddhist for a while after she and the man split up, and then she disappeared. Her parents moved to Fredericksburg, and only rumors of Carly existed for some years.
She returned to Speakeasy only once, that anyone knew of.
For months, Brady would sit at the window in the afternoon, if they let him, waiting. Sometimes, Jack would come home early and see him there, see the disappointment in his eyes when he saw that his father was alone.
What Jack regrets about this portion of his life is that he really had no words for his son, and too few hugs.
Jack and Gina spend another couple of hours in Carytown window-shopping with the McLambs, then go to a matinee. The choices at the multiplex are less than might be imagined, with the same movie showing on three screens. They opt to see Tom Hanks evolving on a desert island. It was the only one on the marquee that neither of them vetoed.
After dinner at a place on the VCU campus called Chuggers that was a tea room in Jack Stone’s brief college career, they head home. Jack wants to get back in time to see the second half of the Virginia Tech football game.
They can see the red glow in the near distance even as they turn onto Larkmeadow Lane, and they wonder if it’s their home, or one of their neighbors’. There are no fire trucks, no flashing red lights to augment the throbbing red of the flames that must be just around the next corner. As the car squeals into their cul-de-sac, they see that they have underestimated the fire’s distance. It still glows at them from across the swamp that feeds Sycamore Creek.
“Mom, Dad……” Shannon says, running out of the house, crying. “Where’ve you been? They’ve been trying to reach you.” And she tells them what is burning.
Brady left two hours before, saying he was going into town. Shannon has already called her aunt and uncle.
Back on the main highway, Jack speeds past the diner, whose remaining patrons are standing outside, looking to the northwest. They get as far as Arlene Prince’s home before they have to park.
Jack argues his way through various deputies and firemen. Long before they pass the last line of oaks separating the house from their view, he knows it’s a lost cause.
The place is in full blaze when they first see it, fire leaping from every window, the heat almost unbearable from 100 feet away. Within 10 minutes, the roof collapses and the flames consolidate and roar toward the heavens.
“Well, we almost made it. We almost got the goddamn thing sold before the little sonofabitch burnt it down.”
Mike is directly in front of Jack, blocking his view of their childhood home being reduced to cinders. He has a wild, disheveled look, and his face and clothes are blackened as if he might have tried to rescue something before the fire spread.
Sandy and her husband stand a little to one side. Sandy is crying; Jimmy looks uncomfortable, unsure which way to lean. He and Jack have always gotten along.
“Brady’s not even here,” Jack tells his older brother. “He’s staying with us this weekend.”
He doesn’t tell Mike that he has no idea exactly where Brady is right now.
“Hell, he probably left a burner on or something. That goddamn little fuck-up …”
Jack walks away. To his surprise, he hears Gina defending Brady, but he’s grateful. Shannon joins in, and pretty soon the entire Stone family is giving to onlookers a further dollop of free entertainment.
Jack manages to drag his wife and daughter away, although not before Gina calls her brother-in-law a “hairless, gutless little cocksucker,” to which Shannon, who hates to ever app
ear shocked about anything, exclaims, “Momma!”
“Hey, Mike,” Jack says as he herds his wife toward their car, “it’s insured. If you didn’t burn it down yourself, you’ll get your money.”
“It was my house!” his brother cries, as they recede from him. “I’ll kill whoever did this! I grew up in this house.”
Your house, Jack thinks, that you couldn’t wait to sell to strangers. More than anyone, he feels sorry for the Korean couple. He hopes someone will tell them first thing in the morning, and he hopes it won’t have to be him.
They finally return home, where they sit stunned, talking into the small hours of Sunday. Jack wonders where Brady is, wonders if he did indeed do something stupid, like leave a burner on or toss a smoking cigarette butt into the trash can.
They call anyone who they think might know Brady, usually getting a rude, half-asleep response—when they get any response at all—from some doper who doesn’t really care whose house burned down as long as it isn’t his. Brady’s truck wasn’t there, and there’s no reason to believe there is a body inside the ruins.
But another possibility has wormed its way like an unscratchable itch into Jack’s mind.
He tells Sharon and Gina that he’s got to check on something. Sharon wants to go with him, but he tells her she can’t, he might be gone all night. He takes his jacket and is out the door before Gina can lodge a protest. He thinks maybe she knows it’s about Brady and doesn’t want to know anything else.
The streets of Speakeasy are deserted. Only at the volunteer fire department, whose members, trucks and equipment are littered across the parking lot, is there life. Jack knows he should at least stop by and thank his friends and neighbors for trying so hard. He doesn’t want them to think he’s sulking because they only succeeded in saving the woods surrounding his old home. He imagines those trees, 30 years from now, bearing mute evidence that once, in the middle of the grove of oaks and sycamores, where trash trees have taken over a spot a little higher than the land around it, a farmhouse once stood.
