Tell

by Norah McClintock

  When Jack looked back at me, something changed in his face. He took a quick gulp of beer and stared out at our backyard, which was more weeds than grass. Phil always said that he worked hard all week, so he damn sure wasn’t going to work like a farmer all weekend, trying to grow Astroturf in his backyard the way all the neighbors did. My mother wasn’t interested in gardening either, other than sending me next door to borrow the Taylors’ lawn mower every so often and getting me to run it over what grass was out there.

  “What I meant was,” Jack said again, “it was hard on your mother when she was alone with you and Jamie. She worried all the time. She stopped worrying after she met Phil.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. If you ask me, she just worried about different things. Mostly she worried that Jamie or me or both of us would do something to make Phil think that going out with a woman who already had two kids was a bad idea. Jamie was five years old when Mom started seeing Phil. I was seven. When Phil used to come over, when they were still just going out, she used to bribe us to be good (I’ll rent you some games for your PlayStation) or threaten us (If I have to tell you even once to be quiet or to behave, there’ll be no TV for a week—I mean it, boys). I mostly listened, but not Jamie. Jamie never listened to anyone, ever. When I think about it now, I think maybe he was one of those hyperactive kids, you know, the kind who can’t sit still even if they wanted to.

  Mom married Phil when Jamie was six and I was eight. After that she worried that Phil wouldn’t stay married to her on account of us. She read somewhere that kids from a first marriage sink something like half of all second marriages. She told us, If Phil tells you to do something, do it. She said, He’s your father now. She said, If you mess up this relationship for me, I don’t know what I’ll do. I didn’t want to mess things up for her. I don’t think Jamie did, either. But that didn’t mean he could all of a sudden change into a different person.

  Mom tried threatening him. She tried bribing him. Then she came up with an idea. He could be as wild as he wanted during the week, when Phil was on the road. But on weekends, when Phil was around, he had to be quiet and sit still and not make noise. Plus, he had to pay attention to Phil and do what Phil told him.

  It was a bad plan. If you let a little kid like Jamie act any way he wants five days a week, he’s just naturally going to want to act that way all the time. He got wilder and wilder. It really pissed Phil off on Friday nights when he got home, tired. And on Saturday morning, when he wanted to sleep in. And on Saturday afternoon, when he wanted to relax. And on Saturday night, when he and Jack and his other friends came over to play poker. And on Sunday morning, when he was hungover and wanted to sleep in again. And on Sunday afternoon, when he wanted to relax because first thing Monday morning he had to be on the road again.

  So my mother worried about that. She worried all the time. I think she worried more after she married Phil than she did when she was raising us alone.

  “Sometimes I think about my real dad,” I said to Jack. “I wonder what he was like. I wish I remembered him.”

  Jack looked at me, surprised. “You do?” he said. “You never talk about him?”

  “That’s because Mom never wants to talk about him. But he must have been really smart. And I bet he was way nicer than Phil.”

  “You didn’t like Phil much, did you, David?”

  I looked down at the toes of my shoes. It didn’t seem right to say you didn’t like someone when you had just come from his funeral.

  “Well, no matter what you think of him, Phil loved your mother,” Jack said. “And he stuck around—even if he could be a jerk sometimes.”

  I was surprised to hear him say that. “I thought Phil was your friend,” I said.

  “We played poker,” Jack said with a shrug.

  He made it sound like things hadn’t been the way I thought, like he and Phil weren’t best buddies after all.

  “I’m more a friend of your mom’s than I was of Phil’s,” he said. “I’ve known your mom for a long time. I only met Phil because of her.” That was news to me.“She’s stronger than she thinks, David. She’s going to be okay.”

  “How long have you known Mom?” I said.

  “Since high school.”

  That was news to me too.

  “Did you know my dad?” I said.

  Jack looked at me for a minute. I think he was going to tell me something. But someone started yelling in the house. It was my mother. She was all hysterical again when we got inside.

  “He lied to me,” she was saying. “He told me I would always be looked after, but he lied to me.”

  It took Jack a few minutes to find out what had happened. Phil had told my mother that he had life insurance and that if anything ever happened to him, she would have nothing to worry about. It turned out that wasn’t true. He didn’t have any insurance.

  Chapter Four

  The next day my mother started checking out other stuff about Phil. What she found made her mad at first and then started her crying again. It turned out Phil had a big mortgage on the house that my mother didn’t know about. It was a new one. One of Phil’s poker buddies told her later that Phil had taken out the mortgage because he gambled a lot and lost a lot. It also turned out that there was almost nothing in the bank.

  “We’re not going to be able to stay in this house,” she told me that night. Her eyes were all red and puffy, but she wasn’t crying anymore. “I can’t afford the mortgage payments on what I make at the supermarket. Even if I get more hours, it still won’t be enough for the mortgage and all the bills.”

  “Where will we go?” I said.

  “If we sell the house, we’ll make some money. Not a lot, but some. And we can probably sell some of the furniture and some of Phil’s things. We’ll find an apartment. A nice apartment, not like that one we were in before. I’m going to see about getting more hours and maybe even another job. I think you’re going to have to find an after-school and weekend job, David. We’re going to be on a pretty tight budget.”

  I stared at her.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  I got up and hugged her. “We’re going to be okay, Mom. I know we are.”

  She hugged me back. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. I love you, David.”

  I felt good about that.

  When I got home from school the next day, my mother didn’t act like she loved me. She was too busy freaking out.

  “Where did you get this?” she screamed at me, shoving a hand into my face.

  I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. Where did I get what?

  She opened her hand. In it was a small gold picture frame with a little loop in the corner of the frame. Usually there was a chain through the loop where you could attach it to a key ring. But there was no chain there now. It was broken off. In the frame was a picture of my kid brother.

  “Where did you get this?” my mother screamed at me again.

  I couldn’t believe she had it in her hand. I had to force myself to stay calm. Instead of answering her question, I said, “Where did you get it, Mom?”

  “I was doing the laundry. Your laundry.” Geez, most of the time she was nagging at me to put my dirty clothes in the hamper or was complaining because I was old enough to be doing my own laundry, so why was she still picking up after me and folding my stuff out of the dryer and putting it away? For the past few months, her rule had been that if I didn’t at least make the effort to put it in the hamper, she wasn’t going to make the effort to wash it. Then I could see what it felt like to wake up one morning and have nothing but dirty clothes to put on for school. So why all of a sudden was she picking up after me again and doing my laundry for me?

  “I found this in the dryer,” she said, still holding out the gold-framed picture. “You want to tell me how it got there, David?”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” I said. “It looks like the chain got broken somehow. Maybe that’s w
hy the cops didn’t find it with Phil’s keys. Maybe it got broken and he put it in his pocket.”

  My mother stared at the broken end of the chain.

  “There were some of Phil’s things in the dryer from before,” she said slowly. She didn’t come right out and say before what.

  “There you go,” I said. “You know what probably happened? The chain broke and Phil put the picture in his pocket so he wouldn’t lose it. But he forgot it was there when he put his pants in the wash. And you didn’t notice.” It sounded like something that really could have happened. “When you took Phil’s stuff out of the dryer and put my stuff in—which, by the way, Mom, you didn’t have to do, you know—you probably didn’t see it there. You didn’t see it until you took my stuff out.”

  I could see she was thinking it over.

  “I guess you’re right,” she said at last. I couldn’t tell for sure if she was convinced or not. But what other explanation could she come up with? After all, it wasn’t like my prints were on the frame or the glass or anything.

  Jack rang the doorbell at 6:00 that night. When I opened the door, he was standing on the porch with two big brown paper bags.

  “I brought supper,” he said. “I figured your mother wouldn’t feel much like cooking.”

  When Jack walked into the kitchen with the bags, my mother smiled. I hadn’t seen her do that in days. Then, when she saw what was in the bags, she started to cry. I glanced at Jack. But before I could ask my mother what was wrong, she threw her arms around Jack and hugged him and said, “Thank you.” She looked down at what she was wearing—an old T-shirt and some sweatpants—and said, “Oh my God, I’m a mess.”

  “You look terrific, Melanie,” Jack said. “Like always.”

  He was right. My mother was nice-looking. She was small and slim and she looked after herself. She said that was important. She said a man didn’t want to come home after being away all week and see his wife looking like a hag.

  “Just let me run up and change,” she said. “David, you can set the table.”

  While she was upstairs, I looked in the bags that Jack had brought. The containers told me right away that we were having Chinese food for supper. That explained my mother’s reaction. She loved Chinese food. But we only ever ordered take-out when Phil was home and could pay for it, and Phil didn’t like Chinese food. He didn’t like Indian or Thai or Japanese food either. “I like to know what I’m eating,” he always said. He said he didn’t trust people who served food all chopped up into little pieces and covered with sauce so that you couldn’t tell right away what was on your plate. Needless to say, he never took my mother to a Chinese restaurant. He always went for steak houses or, better yet, bars and pubs where he could drink plenty of beer with his wings or his chicken fingers.

  When my mother came back downstairs, she had taken her hair out of the ponytail she had been wearing. Now it hung down to her shoulders in waves. She had put on some makeup and had changed into a sleeveless top and a pair of tight-fitting black pants. She looked great, even if she was my mother. She opened a couple of beers for Jack and herself, and we ate fried rice and egg rolls, chicken balls and little spareribs, beef with broccoli, and chicken with cashews. It was all great.

  After we finished eating, Jack made coffee for my mother and told her to go and relax. He and I cleaned up the kitchen. While he gathered up all the empty containers, I said, “You never answered my question.”

  “What question?” Jack said.

  “About my dad. I asked you if you knew him, but you never answered.”

  “Why are you so interested in that all of a sudden?” Jack said.

  I shrugged. “I always thought you were Phil’s friend. I didn’t know you’d known Mom for so long. So did you know him too? Did you know my dad?”

  Jack glanced toward the living room, where my mother was sitting with her coffee. We could hear the tv. She was watching Wheel of Fortune, which she loved because she was pretty good at figuring out the puzzles before the contestants did.

  “Yeah,” he said this time. “I knew him.”

  “What was he like?”

  Jack hesitated. He looked around, as if he was checking to see if we were alone.

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, David,” he said. “It’s none of my business. But if someone asks me a question, I’m not going to lie. That’s not the kind of person I am. You understand?”

  I said I did.

  We went out onto the back porch and Jack closed the door. We sat on the steps and he started talking—about my dad. When he was finished, I didn’t know what to say.

  “Listen, David,” Jack said. “I know you’re probably going to want to talk to your mother about this. But maybe this isn’t the right time, what with Phil dying and everything. I think maybe you should wait a while, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, even though I felt like I was bursting.

  Jack stuck around for a while after we finished cleaning up, and we played a couple of rounds of Yahtzee. My mother smiled all night. After he left, I couldn’t stay quiet, no matter what I had promised Jack.

  “I wish my real father was still alive,” I told her. “Things would really have been different for us, wouldn’t they, Mom?”

  My mother looked at me, surprised, I think, that I’d mentioned him.

  “Tell me about him, Mom,” I said.

  One hand went to her hair, which was dyed blond and which she wore down to her shoulders because Phil liked blonds and he loved long hair. She tucked it behind her ear and fiddled with the ends of it. It was the kind of thing a shy kid would do.

  “What’s there to tell, David?” she said. “You already know everything.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just thought—it’s just the two of us now, Mom. I just thought it would be nice to talk about my father.”

  She had told me before she met Phil that my father was in medical school when he and my mother got together, but that he died just before he graduated, when I was two years old and Jamie was just a baby. I didn’t remember him at all. She had told me it was a car accident. She had said that he’d stayed up all night studying and had gone to classes, then to the hospital for a shift. She had said that he’d fallen asleep at the wheel on his way home. She always said, “At least he was the only one. At least he didn’t slam into another car and take someone with him.” She seemed to take comfort in that thought. But after she got together with Phil, she never wanted to talk about my father again. She always said, “That’s all water under the bridge.”

  She was still fiddling with the ends of her hair, twirling them around and around her finger, when she looked at me now and said, “That’s all water under the bridge, David. It’s bad enough having to think that Phil is gone. I don’t want to remember any more deaths.” Tears welled up in her eyes.Oh boy, she was going to cry again. “What are we going to do, David?”

  I couldn’t believe what was happening. And I didn’t have an answer to her question.

  Chapter Five

  Detective Antonelli called the next morning just before I was supposed to leave for school. He asked to speak to my mother. Her hand shook when she took the phone from me. Maybe she thought he was going to tell her that they had caught whoever had shot Phil. By the time she hung up the phone, her hand was shaking even worse and her face was pale.

  “He said they want to talk to you, David.”

  “They?” I said. “The cops?”

  She nodded.

  “What for?” I don’t think I ever worked harder at getting just two words out of my mouth. I tried to sound like I had no idea what the cops would want with me.

  “He didn’t say,” she said. “He just said that they want to talk to you and that it’s about Phil. Give me a minute to find my shoes and we’ll go.”

  “You’re coming with me?” I said.

  “Of course I’m going with you. You’re my son.”

  She found her shoes and her purse and dug out her car keys. We rode in si
lence. My mother was probably wondering why the cops would want to talk to me about what had happened to Phil. So was I. I told myself over and over that I hadn’t done anything. Besides, the cops had told us that no one had seen anything. They had canvassed the whole area. Phil had been killed at a bank machine on a street that had nothing but stores on both sides. They were almost all carpet stores and clothing stores, plus a couple of check-cashing places, a furniture store, a place that sold hats, and a place that sold lamps. All of the stores had been closed at the time. The police hadn’t been able to find anyone who had been on that block when it happened. They told my mother that they found a clerk at a convenience store who thought he heard a bang, but who just assumed it was a car backfiring. No one in any of the houses on the streets nearby had heard or seen anything.

  Detective Antonelli came out to meet us. He escorted us to an interview room. He started right in telling me that he was investigating Phil’s shooting and that he wanted to ask me some questions. He told me that I didn’t have to answer his questions, but that if I did answer, anything that I said could be used as evidence against me. My mouth went dry, but the rest of my body got slick with sweat.

  “Why are you telling him that?” my mother said. Her voice was higher than normal. It always got shrill when she was upset or mad. “What’s going on?”

  Detective Antonelli told my mother that he had reason to believe I knew more than I was telling about what had happened to Phil. He told me that I had the right to a lawyer. He told me I could have a lawyer or my mother or any other adult with me while I answered his questions.

  “I don’t understand,” my mother said. “What’s going on? You don’t think David shot Phil, do you?”

  I said I didn’t want a lawyer, even though I kind of wished I could have one. But I was afraid to ask for one. I was afraid it would make me look like I had done something. Detective Antonelli told me that if I changed my mind, I should tell him and he would stop asking questions until I had a chance to talk to a lawyer.