Mom?
Justin tried not to look down when he walked in, but he couldn’t help himself. His legs stopped moving and his gaze turned toward the floor of the foyer as if it were pulled there by the weight of the past six years. And what did he expect to see? The blood and the bone? The spreading red puddle? Maybe only the outline of her body still marked in the police chalk once the body was carted away by the coroner? Some stains are just too deep to clean. But all he saw were the sparkling marble tiles, the grout a spotless white.
“When was the last time you were here?” said Frank, noticing Justin’s stop and his stare.
“That night.”
“And not since?”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s right. You made the funeral but didn’t have time to visit with the family right after. There must have been a game on TV or something.”
“Something,” said Justin.
At that moment he heard a creak from the stairwell. Cindy, Frank’s wife, was standing on the steps, clutching at her robe. She was a small woman with a sharp, nervous face, prettier than Justin remembered, and she stared at Justin as if he had come bringing some very bad tidings.
“Hello, Cindy,” said Justin. “Long time no see.”
“Justin. I was so glad when Frank told me you were back.”
“You look great.”
“I look a mess,” she said, pushing a strand of blonde hair away from her tense face. Her hair had been dark and mousy the last time he had seen her. “Is anything wrong?” she said. “It’s so late.”
“No, nothing’s wrong. I’m sorry about the time, it’s just I work weird hours and seem to have lost track.”
“It’s all right, Cin,” said Frank. “Go back to bed.” She stood motionless on the stairwell. “Justin, why don’t you head on into the library. I’ll be right with you.”
“Sure,” said Justin. “Sorry to wake you, Cindy.”
“We’re going to see more of you, I hope,” she said. “The kids will want to meet their uncle. We’ve all missed you.”
“Thank you,” said Justin, though something in her voice let him know that the missing hadn’t been all that painful.
From the wood-paneled library, he could hear bits and pieces of their hushed conversation, and something that sounded like a fearful “What does he want?” Well, what did he want? Hell if he knew for sure. And why had Cindy seemed so afraid to see him?
“Do you want a drink?” said Frank after he closed the door behind him.
“No.”
“But you won’t mind if I have one,” said Frank as he went over to the small bar set in the corner and poured himself a half glass of Wild Turkey, their father’s brand.
The library had been their father’s office, and Frank hadn’t changed it a whit. The bar was as it had been, the cut-glass decanters, the silver cocktail tools, the bottles lined up in a neat row. Justin’s father was the first person to teach Justin how to make a drink, pressing him into service stirring up the Martinis for guests while Justin was still in grade school, more a trained monkey to his father than a son. The desk hadn’t moved. The two leather chairs were set just so, as they had always been set just so. The painting of the horse was still hanging above the chair, symbolic of a failure of the lineage, since the Chase family had been ensconced at Radnor Hunt for generations but none of Mackenzie’s brood ever rode. A quick scan of the shelves on the wall proved that the books hadn’t changed much either. The same old leather-bound novels that only his mother had read, the same right-wing tomes placed in plain sight by his father. The whole room, the whole house, reeked, not of his mother’s blood, the scent of which he had tried to catch and had failed, but of his own blighted past.
“How can you still live here?” said Justin.
“Have you priced real estate lately?” said Frank.
“Not for mansions, no.”
“It’s not quite a mansion, but it’s bigger than we could otherwise afford. We moved in with Dad after Mom died, to take care of him. And we stayed on to take care of the house after his arrest. Sort of like triage in the face of tragedy. Then we didn’t want to leave and sell the place before the appeal was resolved, as if that would send a message of some sort. And by then we had Ron, and the house worked for us, and it seemed just easier to stay.”
“Doesn’t it, like…”
“Creep me out every day of my life?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“It used to, I admit,” said Frank, looking at his glass. “But you know, in a strange way, I find it comforting now. I think about her whenever I walk through the door. If we sold the place, the new people would just stride across the foyer without thinking of her at all.”
“Maybe she’d haunt them.”
“Mom wouldn’t be much of a ghost,” said Frank. He took a sip of his drink. “She’d probably just correct their verb tenses or something.”
Justin laughed, because his brother was right. Of all the things haunting Justin, his mother wasn’t one of them. “How was Uncle Timmy’s funeral?”
“Sparsely attended,” said Frank. “Although a cop showed up, which was interesting. The cop who handled Dad’s case.”
“Scott,” said Justin.
“Right. You must have a good memory.”
“Not that good.”
“Dad said your visit ended badly.”
“All the old crap kept coming between us.”
“I know how that is.”
“It comes between you and Dad too?”
“Between me and you.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right.”
“But he appreciated you making the effort. It meant a lot to him.”
“He still says he didn’t kill Mom,” said Justin.
“Maybe because he didn’t.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I want to. I try to. To be honest, I don’t really think I have much of a choice.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s my dad. Mom’s gone. You ran away. Who the hell else do I have?”
“You have a wife and two kids. That should be more than enough.”
“And yet…” He took a gulp from the glass, bit his lip.
“Tell me about the arrangement Dad had with Mom.”
Frank looked up, slightly startled. “What are you talking about?”
“The arrangement, Frank. I was told to ask you, that you would know.”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s not important.”
“The arrangement?”
“Yeah, the one that allowed Dad to sleep around like a pirate.”
“Oh,” said Frank. “That arrangement.”
“Yeah.”
“So that’s what you came for. You might want to take a seat on this, Justin.”
“I’ll stand.”
“Well, then I’ll sit, if that’s okay,” said Frank before draining his glass and filling it halfway again. He walked around to the other side of the desk, dropped down into the chair. He leaned back, like Justin’s father used to lean back, and rested the drink on his belt buckle.
“Mom and Dad’s marriage,” said Frank, looking at the whiskey in his glass so as to avoid Justin’s gaze, “wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be.”
There was something about Justin’s brother, sitting behind his father’s desk, in his father’s pose, talking about his father’s marriage to his mother, that made Justin recoil.
“I know they were never quite the happy couple,” said Justin, “and that he cheated on her.”
“And Mom knew it and accepted it.”
“No she didn’t. She wouldn’t.”
“It’s true.”
“I don’t believe you. Not for a second. You’re trying to sell some crap that Dad must have sold you. Because my mother would not have stayed married to him all along if she knew.”
Frank looked at Justin and smiled calmly. “She was my mother, too.”
“So you know
. She wouldn’t have stood for it. She was too strong to have taken that from him, she would have left him on the spot. In fact, that’s why I didn’t tell Mom about Dad’s affair with that Annie Overmeyer when he shoved it in my face. Because it would have ended her marriage, and I didn’t want to be the one responsible for that. Because I was a coward. So I kept quiet. And she never knew. And then he killed her.”
“And you’ve been beating yourself up about it ever since.”
“I’ve gotten over it.”
“It doesn’t sound like it, Justin. You still sound so angry, so sad. But what if you were wrong, what if the whole scenario that has sent you spinning out of control is all wrong?”
“I’m not out of control.”
“You were the brilliant one, the one with the great future. I got sucked into the family business because it was always assumed it was the best I could do, but you were going to make your own way. Northwestern. Penn Law. You were going to rise like a rocket ship, you were going to end up on the Supreme Court. And now you’re tending bar in a dive.”
“Zenzibar isn’t a dive.”
“But it’s not the Supreme Court either, is it? And the guilt that pushed you off course is all bullshit. Because she knew, Justin. She knew from the first, and nothing you could have told her would have changed anything. Think about it. How could she have not known? She had a sixth sense. She knew what we were up to, always. Remember that time with the ink and the carpet.”
“We moved the table an inch to cover it and she saw through it right away.”
“She knew everything. She was just like that. And she knew what Dad was up to, too.”
“He was more devious than we were.”
“Not too devious for you to learn about his girlfriend.”
“He wanted me to know.”
“Because she knew. And she was happy about it.”
“Don’t be sick.”
“Because they had an arrangement. That was what their marriage had become. He had his affairs, and she had hers.”
“Fuck you, Frank.”
“It’s hard to fathom. Believe me, I know.”
“It’s a lie. From Dad. And I don’t want to hear anymore.”
“I didn’t learn it from Dad. He didn’t mention it at all until I found the letters.”
“What letters?”
“Letters to Mom.”
“From who?”
“We don’t know, but they are worth reading.”
Frank leaned forward and opened a desk drawer. He pulled out a few pages of copy paper and pushed them across the desk. Justin stared at them for a long moment, not wanting to see them, not wanting to know anything about them. And yet at the same time not able to look away. He slumped down into a chair, as if his legs had given out, and kept staring.
“Go ahead,” said Frank as he pushed them a bit farther. “See for yourself.”
25.
MUDSLIDE
Justin could barely read the pages. He shielded his eyes as if the letters burned white-hot and it hurt to even gaze upon them. He wanted to stop reading, but he couldn’t stop. He wanted to throw the pages onto the ground, but he couldn’t let them out of his hands. He felt he was doing something deeply perverse, violating his mother’s privacy and invading her deepest-held emotions, even as he kept reading on and on.
No child ever wants to know the raw details of his parents’ marriage. Whatever lies at that marriage’s heart, whether it be derangement or joy, is best kept far away from the children, like household chemicals or prescribed narcotics. Children live in a world of myth, and fight to hold on to these myths at all costs, not because they are sweet and safe, but precisely because they are myths. Some things, even if beautiful, are better left unseen. Who wouldn’t rather imagine their parents locked together in some silent and bitter misery then to actually see them blissfully fucking?
Especially blissfully fucking someone else.
Dearest E,
I’ve been thinking about you, about all you said, about your kindness and support.
—A
Dearest E,
You know the situation I am in, the vile power she has over me, you know how hard this is. But also, your love almost gives me enough courage. I think of your words, your kindnesses, your touch. If you can make the choices you have, suffer the pains, and come through it so beautiful and giving and perfect—yes, perfect—if you can do that, so can I. You know I love you, you know I need you, now more than ever. I think of you night and day, and each day I get closer.
—A
Dearest E,
Liberated. Empowered. Full of life. I was dead before you gave me your healing touch. Now I know love, and longing, and desire, and pain, and loneliness. Now I know life and I owe it all to you. We’ll be together, I know it.
—A
“Where did you get these?” said Justin, after he stopped himself from reading the rest and slammed them facedown on the desk. The letters were forcing him to confront more facts about his mother that he didn’t want to know. First there was the bile-ridden rant of Aunt Violet, and now the apparent love affair with A.
“They were in Mom’s closet,” said Frank. “Hidden in one of her shoeboxes, underneath the tissue beneath a set of red pumps.”
“Why weren’t they introduced at the trial?”
“Because I hadn’t found them yet. Cindy and I didn’t touch the closet for months, for years. We slept in the guest room. How could we sleep in the master bedroom? It was still their room. I sometimes dreamed that Mom was sweeping back into the house, saying hello and reclaiming everything. So for the longest time, I couldn’t bring myself to do anything about her clothes. But when we decided that we might stay, Cindy said it was time, that Mom would rather the clothes be worn by someone than just sitting there to feed the moths. And she was right. So I packaged everything up for Goodwill myself, as a final gift to Mom. And as I did it, I found the box, and opened it to check that the shoes inside were matched, and there they were, underneath the tissue paper.”
Justin grabbed the letters from the desk, glancing down again at them as he spoke, so his eyes were still hidden from Frank. “Do you have any idea who this ‘A’ is?”
“None.”
“What does Dad say?”
“He doesn’t know either. But he knew there was someone. He had a lover, and she had a lover, and everything was even, and everything was allowed. That was the life they created with each other, that was the arrangement.”
“Yet he didn’t bring it up at the trial?”
“He said he was trying to protect Mom’s reputation.”
“And you believe that?”
“I don’t know. I think the fact that Mom might have been having an affair could have been seen as another motive, and to bring it up could be seen as just another attack on the victim, and so the lawyers decided not to go there. And because the letters hadn’t yet been found, there was no proof.”
“But there’s proof now,” said Justin. “These are copies. Where are the originals?”
“Dad asked me to give them to his lawyer in case they are needed in the hearing for a new trial.”
“I guess there’s been a change in strategy.”
“What would you have him do, Justin? Just keep rotting in there for something he didn’t do?”
“It sounded like a pretty good plan a few days ago.”
“But not anymore?”
“So the theory is that the affair that got Mom murdered was not really Dad’s but was instead Mom’s.”
“I guess so.”
“Could our family be more fucked-up?”
Frank lifted up his glass in salute. “To the Chases. We put the fun in dysfunction.”
Justin grabbed the pages off the table and stood up. “Can I take these?”
“Sure,” said Frank, finishing his drink. “Take anything you want. Look around, it’s all half-yours.”
Justin took a step back and then eyed the oppressive library,
with the old books and the painting of that horse. He hadn’t thought about it, but it was true: this was all half-his, or would be once his father died. The books, the painting, the desk, the decanters, the whole damn house. Along with the business and all the assets that Frank had been living off for the last six years. And suddenly he knew why Cindy’s face was so tense, and understood the hushed “What does he want?”
Not all this, that was for sure.
“Don’t worry, Frank. I’m not throwing you out into the street. I wouldn’t touch a stick of this fucking place.”
Frank lifted up his empty glass, closed one eye, and squinted the other as he stared at Justin through the cut glass.
“What do you see?” said Justin.
“You don’t want to know.”
26.
HURRICANE
“He’s staying at the Parker,” said Cody while Justin whipped up a Hurricane.
“The Parker?” said Justin as he dashed a dose of light and dark rums into his tin. “I never heard of it.”
“It’s the very definition of a fleabag flophouse,” said Cody. “Shared bathrooms. Paper-thin walls. Meth busts. Fleas.”
“I guess our Birdie Grackle isn’t lying about needing the money.”
“I haven’t yet found out what name he’s checked in under; there is no Grackle in the book. But apparently he’s not alone.”
“No?”
“He’s got some muscle with him.”
“That’s disappointing,” said Justin. He threw orange juice into the shaker, along with some simple syrup, a squeeze of lime, and a squirt of passion-fruit nectar. Most barkeeps just used store-bought grenadine in their Hurricanes, but when Justin showed up at Zenzibar he made sure there was always a plentiful supply of passion-fruit nectar behind the bar. Without it, a Hurricane was more like a damp mist in Flint.
“He stays in most of the day,” said Cody, “but he spends his nights out.”
“Where?”
“Dirty Frank’s.”
Justin laughed as he shoveled in the ice. He worked the shaker before pouring the drink and ice together into a Collins glass. “I guess he found a joint where his fleas could stage a family reunion.”
“It’s close enough, which is convenient, because he’s pretty much a falling-down drunk.”
The Barkeep Page 14
