On the walk to the table, escorted by a waitress, I thought to myself, “It’s not my job to make everyone happy. It can’t be done. Where did I ever get an idea it was possible anyway?”
“What do you think of Allen’s girl?” was the first thing I said.
It was our common ground. It was the only thing we liked about each other. I watched her chew a piece of bread slathered in butter and wondered what it was that I ever liked about Samantha Kilborn. She watched me take a sip of water, and I knew from her eyes she felt the same way about me. I was conscious of my lips on the edge of the glass. Too much, not enough. We had moved beyond love, beyond hate, to the land of annoyance. We didn’t even care to purposefully annoy each other anymore, it just happened, and I swear I wouldn’t have touched her naked body if we stood alone in the Garden of Eden, which is saying something.
“Do you want your tools out of the garage?” she asked.
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“I like Allen’s girlfriend. She’s different than I expected.”
“How?” I asked.
“It’s hard to explain. Just different, that’s all. Not like I expected.”
It was at least her second glass of wine. She kept staring out the window at nothing in particular.
“You can have the house,” I said. It was the same house she had when we met. Every year was a new renovation project. Guest room. Island in the kitchen. Always something new and expensive, but I didn’t care. I never wanted to go back there. I never wanted to set eyes on the island again.
After the first sip of her third glass of wine, Samantha said, “Let’s make this the last true conversation we ever have. After this, let’s just be cordial when we run into each other at the grocery store, or end up in the same place with grandchildren, but let’s not talk about anything important.”
She was distant and serious.
“Okay,” I said. “Can I get some copies of the pictures in our photo album?”
And then she looked at me and said, “Early, did you kill my husband?”
I wasn’t ready for the question. If I’d been ready, the answer would’ve flowed. But I wasn’t ready, and maybe she planned it that way. Other than Frank Rush, no one had ever asked me point blank.
She wasn’t staring out the window anymore. She was staring directly across the table at me. Maybe it was overdue.
Then I grasped the wording of the question. “Did you kill my husband?” Allen Kilborn Sr. wasn’t her husband when I shot him in the head at the top of the stairway. They were long since divorced.
“No,” I finally said, the word coming out a little too quickly.
She held the stem of the wine glass between her index finger and thumb, twisting it slowly as the base rested on the white tablecloth. I looked down at the golden liquid, and then back up to Samantha’s face.
“Did you cheat on me?” she asked.
It was amazing the woman would consider the questions equal in her mind. Executing a man in his own home and bending the neighbor lady over the hood of the BMW. It was amazing I was capable of a moral transgression at the level of murder and then concerned with finding a loophole in the wording of a question in order to tell a lie.
“No,” I said, less quickly than before.
Her eyes drifted back out the window.
“Do you want your golf clubs?” she asked, her words flat.
My answer was yes. I really did want my golf clubs. I hadn’t played in five years, but I wanted them anyway.
That night, when I was alone in bed at my rental house, I thought of something I’d completely forgotten. It came back to me like a brand-new memory, alive and sharp, as if it happened the morning before.
Gretchen was about six years old. I looked forward to our time together like a man in prison looks forward to seeing the sun. Not just pleasant, but life-giving, like water.
We went to the ice cream parlor. It was next to the movie theater and we had tickets to the matinee. Gretchen was shy, whispering in my ear the flavor of ice cream she wanted instead of telling the lady herself.
It was early spring, cool but not cold, and we sat outside on a glassy blue day at a table under a big white umbrella. Gretchen had birthday cake ice cream in a cup made of white chocolate with colorful sprinkles covering the top of the ice cream.
She took her first bite and a smile came across her little face. A real smile, the opposite of the one I gave Samantha from the other side of the restaurant. Gretchen’s smile was so genuine, so pure, I remember I started to cry. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything as important.
I sat there and started to cry. I had to look away from her. Put the napkin to my eyes. Pretend to cough. The girl was so perfect and so happy, and so far out of my life. That little smile over something so small as colored sprinkles left me unbearably alone, like the day my mother died.
She looked up from her ice cream.
“Daddy,” she said, “how much does the sky weigh?”
“I don’t know, baby,” I said.
She took another bite of ice cream covered in tiny bits of color.
Gretchen said, “I think it weighs a million miles.”
I wanted to hold it forever. The ice cream, the smile, the sky, the day. All of it. Just hold it close to me. The weight of a million miles.
I sat in the church at my daughter’s wedding. Two hours earlier I met the man she’d marry for the first time, and I didn’t like him much. He was plain and hard, a face like stone. He’d never know the Gretchen who sat with me outside the ice cream parlor, and I’d never know the woman he was about to marry. All I had was snapshots of her life. Little pieces that didn’t fit together.
Russell Enslow gave her away. I guess she was his to give, but it left me sad anyway. Kate was aloof. I watched her at the reception. She never looked my way. Never smiled to acknowledge Kansas City, or the letters we once wrote to each other, or the night we’d conceived the child who just walked down the aisle and exchanged vows with the stone-faced man with big hands.
I wasn’t sure what I expected. Maybe I hoped something miraculous would happen, or maybe I just hoped the sight of Kate would change everything. For the most part, that’s what happened. Seeing her made her real again, if just for a few hours, and there’s nothing quite like reality to douse the fire of fantasy. She was looking older. I didn’t like her hair. It was too short. And she was skinnier than I remembered.
It was deflating. I wanted to feel that feeling again, if only for a few minutes. The way she always made me feel in her presence. Just to know such a thing still existed. But she wouldn’t look at me, at least not while I was watching, and I stood alone by the big plate of shrimp, not knowing a single soul at the wedding reception for my only daughter. Not able to muster the energy to cause a scene, or maneuver Kate into a conversation, or do much of anything. I felt listless and average.
Less than a year later, I stood at the window of the nursery at the local hospital with Allen. His wife had just given birth to a fat, healthy boy, and the nurse held up the baby for us to see.
“Jesus, Allen, he’s beautiful.”
Allen touched his hand to the glass, fingers outstretched, finding himself in the middle of a miracle.
“He is, isn’t he. Guess what we named him?”
“What?” I asked.
“Early James Kilborn.”
I couldn’t really say anything back to him. The boy named his son after me. It was even better than a white chocolate bowl of ice cream covered with sprinkles, and I smiled like Gretchen smiled, like all was good with the world, and might be forever, but I knew better.
eight
I slid gently into the disillusionment of my career. My job simply was not capable of providing any permanent identity. It helped temporarily, sometimes for stretches of years, but ultimately it was only a job, even when I loved it. Just a means to survive, refined and diluted by civilization. The cavemen may have loved the hunt and loved the meat from the hunt, but
the purpose was much higher. The purpose was to feed the children, keep the mate, survive another day. Those purposes really no longer existed for me. Going to work every morning was just part of the routine. A diversion from imagining strange ways to kill myself or obsessing over my lack of sexual opportunities.
Nearly a year and a half since I’d seen Kate at the wedding, she called one night out of the blue. I knew immediately from her voice it wouldn’t be good. There was no lazy, sexy cadence of too much wine on a lonely night, no nervous introduction before strolling down memory lane. It was business. Something was the matter.
“It’s Gretchen,” she said. “He beat her up. It’s the second time, and this time it’s bad, Early. Real bad.”
It was the first time I’d heard her speak my name in many, many years, but the feeling was overshadowed.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Mike, her husband, the asshole, hit her in the face. Her eye is black. He’s a drunk. He stays drunk.”
“Jesus Christ, Kate. Why haven’t you called me before?”
“For what? What could you do halfway across the country? We put him in jail, and he got out. We got a restraining order, but she went back to the asshole. She’s here now with me, but he knows where to find her. A piece of paper won’t stop him.”
“What can I do?” I asked. “Do you want me to come out there?”
“No,” she said quickly. “I want Gretchen to come stay with you. At least for a little while. She’ll be safe there. Talk to her. Tell her to leave him. Tell her it’ll never end. He won’t change. Nobody changes, Early. We all know that.”
I thought of Kate’s father, the man in the chair with the rotten foot propped up. Sitting in the dark. A bottle of vodka in his hand. I remembered the smell. Old cigarette smoke, the odor of dog. Gretchen had probably never met the old man, but somehow, deep inside her, she carried the pain of her mother, and probably the pain of her mother’s mother. It would never end.
“I think that’s a good idea,” I said, and as the words came out of my mouth I felt an old familiar feeling. My mind began to form the beginnings of a plan. Just a seed. A seed of redemption, freedom, and just a little bit of revenge.
Maybe that’s what Kate wanted. Maybe she knew, she always knew I was capable of such a thing, and now, after so many years of not needing me for anything, raising Gretchen with Russell Enslow, now she needed me for something. And maybe it was my purpose on this earth to kill people like Mike Stockton, and Allen Kilborn Sr., in order to set other people free.
I lay in bed almost the entire night thinking. It was more complicated than the time before. Mike Stockton lived far away in California. Unfamiliar territory, both geographically and otherwise. No built-in murder weapon or alibi witness. No hazy motive. If I was anywhere in the vicinity I’d be the first suspect.
When I fell asleep, the dream of the black circle came back. It was there on the floor between my bed and the door. Bigger than before. Even blacker somehow, with a gray ring around the edge.
In the dream I heard a noise and sat up in bed. The only light in the room came from the streetlight out the window. I could barely see the doorknob turn slowly, and the door began to open. In the crack I saw something. At first it was just a form, near the knob between the crack. Then I could see Gretchen’s face. She was a little girl again, around five or six.
The door opened wide and we could see each other. She was wearing the same little shirt and pants she wore the day at the ice cream parlor. And then she smiled. The same smile I remembered.
“Daddy?” she whispered.
I couldn’t speak. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t speak. I saw her lean forward. I saw her take the first step running toward me, but I couldn’t yell. I couldn’t tell her about the black circle on the floor between us. And then it was too late.
I woke up angry. What kind of man hits a woman? What kind of man chooses alcohol over his family again and again? Such a man deserves no respect. In my mind I could see the back of his hand come down against my little girl’s face. I could hear her crying, balled up on the floor, wondering what existed inside of her to create such a situation, to deserve such a choice.
The dream led me to the next step, a blank piece of paper, a pen, a plan written out, a first draft. Written on the hard desk instead of a pad of paper, to be sure the sentences didn’t bleed through to the pages below. Written left-handed, and mostly in words that reminded me of other words, so the plan only really existed inside my head.
Gretchen arrived at the airport. She was skinny, like her mother. Her bones seemed to be held together by only her clothes. Underneath the makeup I could see the blueness around her right eye down to the edge of her nose.
I took a deep breath and smiled. We were mostly strangers, but maybe we wouldn’t be anymore. Maybe there was an opportunity to find out about each other, without judges, or Kate, or even Samantha, in the way.
I cooked supper. When she was a kid her favorite was spaghetti and meat sauce. No meatballs. They were gross. And the meat sauce couldn’t have onions, or peppers, or anything weird.
At the dinner table she asked, “Who’s the child in the picture on the bookshelf?”
“It’s Allen’s little boy.”
“He’s cute,” she said quietly.
“I made you spaghetti and meat sauce. No meatballs. No onions. Just the way you like it.”
She started to say something and changed her mind. Maybe she started to say “I’m not a little girl anymore. I have other favorite foods now. Adult foods. And I’ve smoked cocaine, and given blow jobs, and lied intentionally to hurt people, and married a man who treats me like a possession. All because you were a shitty father.”
But she didn’t say anything like that, and I was glad. We talked about good things we remembered about each other. We talked about the weather, and her mother, and then ran out of things to say in a short period of time. I locked the doors, checked the windows, and pulled the curtains closed.
I took a vacation from work. Gretchen slept the first night in the guest room. The next morning, when she was in the shower, I went to make her bed. Under the pillow I found a gun. It was small and loaded. I put it back under the pillow and left the bed unmade.
Gretchen and I spent the next three days together. We found things to talk and laugh about. We ate lunch in restaurants and visited Allen and his family. There wasn’t much left of the child I’d once known, my little girl, but I liked the person she’d become. She was smart and fragile like her mother, but without as much outward defense. There were shimmers of vulnerability and silence, but I chose just to watch and learn for awhile.
After our third day together, I decided to start a conversation about her predicament. “Why don’t you move here? You can stay with me until you get on your feet.”
She seemed displeased I would talk about anything unpleasant.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Yes, you can. It doesn’t have to be forever. The guest room is yours. You can stay as long as you want. I’ll help you find a job. Maybe you could even work at my office.”
Gretchen looked down at her hands. She was still wearing a wedding ring. She wanted all the badness to just go away magically. She wanted everything to fix itself without confrontation.
She said, “There’s a picture of a man next to the picture of Allen’s little boy. Who is that?”
She didn’t even know what my father looked like. She didn’t know anything about him, or what he meant to me.
“Stay here,” I said, and I went to my bedroom closet for the box my mother had left me.
Sitting down across from Gretchen at the table, I said, “It’s my father. He died when I was eleven. I still miss him every day. I still think about things we did together, places we went. I remember words he used.”
I handed her the photographs of me with my parents at the beach. I had no actual memory of the day, but the pictures were like their own memory. Gretchen loo
ked through the pictures slowly, smiling back at the smiles. She loved my mother. They were important to each other. But just like my mother, Gretchen seemed to hold some resentment over my interruptions in their relationship, warranted or not.
“Is this your dog?” she asked.
It was the picture of the unidentified dog.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Whose dog was it?”
“I don’t know.”
Gretchen looked at me for an explanation.
“I’m not gonna throw it away,” I said. “It’s in the box. It needs to stay in the box.”
I handed her a picture of my father holding me in his arms. I wasn’t more than a few months old. She looked at the photograph a long time before she said, “I like his face. He’s got a good face.”
That night, Gretchen went to bed early. I stayed up late at my desk thinking about Mike Stockton. Almost anybody is easy to kill if you don’t mind getting caught. It’s the loose ends. Gretchen couldn’t know. Kate couldn’t know. I had to pinpoint a location. A time. A way to be two places at once. What else could I do? Sit back and watch my girl crawl home to the man who’d eventually beat her down like a dog? The man who’d find a way to keep her from leaving him again, through babies, guilt, sympathy, promises. Lots and lots of broken promises.
“I’ll never do it again.”
“I swear there won’t be any more drinking.”
“I love you.”
“Just this one last time.”
“I’ll be home at five o’clock.”
A sea of broken promises and days strung together by lies. What kind of a father can wait around and watch it happen?
I closed my eyes and thought about what had to be done. In the silence, the very clear silence, came a pounding on my front door. BAM, BAM, BAM. Hard, strong, crazy, and purposeful.
I looked at the clock. It was two-thirty in the morning. There was only one person it could be. Mike Stockton. He found her. He came a very long way and found the right house.
I ran to the guest room. In the dark I whispered, “Gretchen, Gretchen.”
The Wait Page 19
