Yes, despite everything, on the sodden roads that afternoon, Cecil could still see how that would make sense to someone. It required no great effort to see how you could allow yourself to believe that it would happen in just such a way.
30
GRIFF HAD JUST LET RAINBOW OUT INTO THE BACKYARD when his mother returned from her second trip to the store that day. She’d been gone longer than he’d expected. Since he and his father had come home from the Teepee, he’d been zoning out in front of the television, absentmindedly petting Rainbow. He would have been there still had the dog not jumped off the couch, given a long shake that began at her head and ended at the tip of her tail, and trotted to the back door. Both Justin and his father were in their rooms, and though he expected them to emerge, neither did. As his mother came into the kitchen and placed a bottle of laundry detergent on the counter, Griff tried to remember what he’d been watching for the last hour. He couldn’t. His memory was so wiped that he wondered if he’d fallen asleep. An indistinct, viscous disappointment coated his thoughts.
“Need help?” Griff asked, thinking his mother had been gone so long that it might have turned into a bigger haul than she’d originally planned.
“Yes,” she said, handing him a jug of laundry detergent.
“Is there more in the car?”
She pulled a loaf of potato bread out of a plastic bag and put it beside the other loaf in the cabinet. She wadded the bag into a ball, then chucked it in the garbage under the sink. She seemed rushed, like someone was coming over and she wanted to have everything put up before the doorbell rang. “Mom?”
“Yes, Lobster?”
“Is there more in the car?”
“No,” she said.
“Then what can I help with?”
“Do what?”
“You said you needed my help.”
“Did I?” she said. “Is that something I said just now?”
A LITTLE LATER, GRIFF LET HIMSELF INTO JUSTIN’S ROOM—doing this felt bold and new, like a skill he’d only recently mastered—and said, “Mom bought laundry detergent and potato bread.”
“Stop the presses,” Justin said. He was leaning over Sasha’s tank, rearranging her rocks.
“She said she’d forgotten those things, but there are two other loaves of bread in the cabinet and there’s plenty of detergent in the garage. I just checked. And she called me Lobster for the first time in a while.”
Justin was combing through Sasha’s gravel. His fingers made long furrows along the bottom of the tank, then he smoothed them with his palm.
Griff said, “And earlier, when Dad took me to the Teepee, he said the Shrimporee used to make him sad.”
“So our parents are weird. This is only occurring to you now?”
Griff was sitting on his brother’s bed, looking at his shoes. He swiveled his ankles, feeling the joints click from all the times he’d sprained them, and then he was thinking of Justin trying to ollie the marina hedge and rolling his own ankle and Dwight Buford finding him that way.
“They’re probably just nervous,” Griff said. “They’ll probably get back to normal after tomorrow.”
Justin finished in Sasha’s cage and then lifted her out. She wrapped herself around his hand, reminding Griff of a gray baseball mitt. Justin held her up, close to his face, and rotated his wrist to examine her from different angles. He squinted, moved around to find better light, squinted again and gently touched her skin with his fingers. Griff couldn’t see what he was studying—Sasha looked the same as always—but then he noticed: The snake’s eyes, normally black, had turned a cloudy, opaque blue.
“Is she sick?” Griff asked.
“Is who sick?”
“Sasha,” Griff said. “Why are her eyes like that?”
“It’s old skin. She’s getting ready to shed. She can hardly see through it. Right now, she’s really scared.”
“That sucks.”
“It really does,” Justin said. “She can’t see that I’m the one holding her. She doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t think she’s anywhere close to safe.”
31
WHEN ERIC STEPPED OUT OF THE BEDROOM, THE HOUSE was still. Vacant was the word that scrolled through his thoughts. Laura had taken Justin to his session with Letty, and according to the note on the kitchen table, Griff was helping Fiona and her mother set up the Junior League’s face-painting booth at the Shrimporee.
Midafternoon light poured in through the windows, heating the house. The air smelled stale. Eric considered brewing coffee, but the day was too hot for it. His skin was still tight with dried sweat from visiting the Teepee with Griff. He dragged his hand over his face, and walked from room to room, making sure he was alone. Rainbow followed him for a time, but then splayed herself on the cool bathroom tile and stayed there. Eric walked on. It was like touring a house he was considering for purchase. He tried to imagine how a stranger would assess their lives, given their furniture and the snake and Griff’s foiled-over windows and the remaining welcome home plants. White trash, you might think. Or the house of someone who’d just gotten back from the hospital or jail. A family that needed a little more money and new carpet and a better air conditioner, a family with an old dog and dark wood paneling and sagging floors and a couple of cracked single-pane windows. That was the worst of it, though. Nothing else showed through. This came as a small revelation: You wouldn’t know this was the home of the kidnapped boy or the woman who hurt herself in public. You wouldn’t know this family had been torn asunder, that each of them was, in one way or another, scared of the other three. You’d think: These are just simple people, regular and steady and unafflicted. You’d think you could trust them. You’d suspect your own secrets were worse than theirs. Even if you reached to the top shelf of the closet and found the pistol, you’d hardly think anything of it. You might even be comforted to hold the gun, to feel its distinct and reassuring heft. You might believe that the man who’d stashed it there was responsible and bold and true, someone you’d be proud to know, someone who could, when the time came, summon the will to do what no one else would.
OVER HIS LIFE, ERIC HAD NOTED HOW MEN AROUND TOWN watched his father, how they sometimes afforded him the same berth they would a growling dog. How they avoided eye contact. How they wouldn’t interrupt him when he spoke. Whether the men had personally quarreled with Cecil or sensed some hardness in him or simply knew his history, Eric couldn’t say. There were stories. The story of him breaking a shill’s nose at a poker game in Refugio. The story of when, instead of calling the cops, he let a shoplifter keep the car stereo he’d swiped, but only after Cecil slammed his wrists in Loan Star’s heavy back door. The story of him beating a man with a tow chain in the parking lot of the Castaway Café because the man made some lewd gesture toward Eric’s mother.
And the story of Rick Olivarez, the man who’d worked under Cecil at the pawnshop before Ivan. This was in Eric’s youth. Rick had drawn cartoons for Eric, characters with long legs and short pants and oversized ears under jokey thought bubbles. He could make his voice sound like Donald Duck’s. One Christmas Eve, Eric’s parents had gotten Rick to wear a Santa Claus costume and visit the house with a bag of gifts. He’d presented Eric with a model train he’d been coveting in the hobby shop window. There were inevitably pictures of that night in one of the photo albums Cecil had given to Eric the other afternoon on his driveway. But on a muggy August morning Cecil, who was usually out of the house early, unexpectedly ate breakfast with Eric and his mother. He explained that he’d fired Rick the previous night. He told them to steer clear of him from here on out; Eric had to promise not to take rides from Rick or accept drawings or gifts, and to hang up if Rick called the house. None of it made sense, and though Eric kept expecting his father to fill in the blanks, he never spoke of him again. Nor did Eric or his mother ever see Rick around Southport. He just disappeared. His absence was so complete it was as if he’d never existed at all.
Years later, Ivan told Eric tha
t Rick and Cecil had gone floundering after work that night, and Rick had gotten drunk and started confessing things to Cecil. “Upsetting things,” Ivan said. “Sins, I guess you’d call them.” Cecil kept opening beers for Rick, letting him talk. When their ice chest was empty, Cecil punched Rick in the solar plexus and grabbed a fistful of his hair and held his face underwater. He pulled him up, gasping and disoriented, and hauled him back to the truck and hit him again on the jaw, a blow hard enough to put him to sleep. Then he drove two hours up toward Karnes City and dumped Rick in a cotton field without his boots or shirt or wallet.
“Where is he now?” Eric had asked Ivan.
“Down in Mexico, somewhere near Saltillo.”
THE ONLY CAR AT LOAN STAR WAS THE CADILLAC. IT WAS A FRIDAY, typically a busy day at the shop—people who’d gotten paid came to clear their loans, and people who needed money for the weekend came in with things to hock—but with the Shrimporee coming, Cecil had probably assumed the store would be dead. Past the pawnshop, traffic was worse than earlier. A winding line of cars, stalled by construction and ferry delays, snaked down Station Street. Two cops in dark blue uniforms waved drivers through the detours and then stopped traffic when groups of tourists pushed into the crosswalks on their way to the beach. The high school band had stopped practicing, but the other sounds still hung in the air: swinging hammers, table saws, the steady beeping of a truck in reverse. In the distance, just before the water, the main stage was taking form. To Eric, the poles looked like masts of ships rolling over the horizon.
He didn’t call Tracy to say he was stopping by. Nor did he worry about parking on the street instead of inside the garage. If anyone asked, he’d say he’d come to discuss last-minute issues with Justin’s event at the Shrimporee. The risk was tolerable. He also hoped such blatancy would keep him honest while he was alone with Tracy. Later, in the years of uncertainty that followed, he’d wonder if he’d been courting trouble, trying to sabotage the night ahead. To think of it was to understand how close a different future had been. If Tracy’s husband had come to the condo, or if Laura or Cecil had ventured out to Villa Del Sol, they would all have been so mired in pain and anger that everything would have been derailed.
“What’s wrong?” Tracy asked and ushered him inside. She checked for anyone watching and closed the door behind him.
“I just wanted to visit,” Eric said.
“Visit,” she said, flirty. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”
They sat opposite each other in the condo’s living room, him on the love seat and her in a recliner that Eric thought probably belonged to Kent, her husband. The space was unfamiliar. They’d never lingered in there before, and more than anything, he was struck by the room’s brightness. Sunlight reflected off all the polished surfaces—the cream-colored vase on the mantel, the small crystal chandelier, the granite-topped table. Eric felt dirty in the room, worried that he’d leave boot tracks on the carpet or smudge fingerprints on the upholstery.
They talked about Griff, about the wild and lucky coincidence of Tracy having found him that night. They talked about the storm and about the Shrimporee. She said she had a surprise in store for everyone.
“I didn’t even tell Laura about it,” she said. “I was going to, but then I started thinking she might enjoy a surprise, too.”
“Laura hates surprises,” Eric said.
“This one might get a different reaction,” she said. “I liked her, for what it’s worth. If things were different, I think we’d be friends. I think we’d get together and bitch about our husbands.”
Eric leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and clasped his hands. On the coffee table lay a fan of the magazines to which Tracy contributed her travel fictions. The covers showed pictures of Tokyo and Greenland and St. Petersburg, places neither he nor anyone in his family would ever see.
“Is there something you came to say, Eric?”
Because she asked him so directly, the idea appeared clearly in his mind: He’d come to say goodbye. He’d come to thank her and apologize and say that he loved her in a regretful way. He’d come to say he was scared of what would happen tonight, scared for his father and himself and Buford.
“I just wanted to thank you,” he said. “For what you did for Griff, and for all the work you’ve put in with the Shrimporee event.”
“That’s what you came to say?”
“It is,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
“Of course.”
“Because if this were a movie, I’d say this feels an awful lot like the part where the man cuts bait.”
“I’m not cutting bait,” he said.
“But you’re not coming back to the bedroom. Not today and not ever.”
“Things have gotten complicated.”
“As opposed to before?” she said.
“With Justin back and with the trial coming up, I guess I’m feeling like—”
“An asshole?”
“Yes,” he said. “I feel like an asshole.”
“The feeling is accurate, I’d say. That’s how you feel to me, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” Tracy said. Her legs were tucked under her in the recliner. She raised her eyes to the light, blinking, trying not to cry.
Eric studied the travel magazines. He remembered how she used to say I’m in Tokyo and I’m in Russia, how that was a joke she used to like.
“Where are you now?” he asked.
“I’m right here, wondering when you’re leaving.”
“I meant with your travel writing. Where didn’t they send you this month?”
“You can only be in one place at one time.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“I always knew you would be. I always knew.”
32
“I SHOULD’VE LET YOU DRIVE,” LAURA SAID.
“It’s cool,” Justin said.
“You can drive us back home.”
They were on the long stretch of causeway between Portland and Corpus, driving to his appointment with Letty. On either side of the bridge, the water looked like mica. Had they been on solid ground, or if the causeway had sufficient shoulders, she would have pulled over and had Justin get behind the wheel. Letting him drive hadn’t entered her mind until late, and she thought the oversight explained why he hadn’t said much in the last twenty minutes. She felt dim, but also relieved to find such a handy explanation for how clammed up he was.
Gulls canted over the water. A few boats floated out near the ship pass. Laura could still feel the tremble under her skin, but with her hands on the steering wheel, she couldn’t tell if they were actually shaking. The causeway bobbed with the traffic, a subtle lunge and sway that she felt in her stomach, as if each seam were a wave passing underneath. The road nauseated her a little, or it worsened a nausea she’d been feeling all along. Ahead, the steel arc of the Harbor Bridge came into view, along with the shipyards and the USS Lexington. Seeing them exhausted her, made her want to weep. She had no idea why.
“Are you still feeling okay about the Shrimporee?” Laura asked. “I had coffee with that Tracy Robichaud. I think she’s putting together something really nice, but if you’d rather—”
“I’m not worried about it,” he said. He was watching the water stream by outside his window.
They passed pelicans and herons, and the pilings from the old bridge that had come down in a storm whose name Laura couldn’t remember. Her mind was sapped. She wanted to rally for Justin, for both of them, but she also wanted him to open up. She believed she deserved it. Believed she’d earned it. Soon she’d have to relinquish him to Letty for an hour, and just then, with the seams waving under them on the causeway, Laura didn’t want to hand him over. Under normal circumstances, she thought she did a decent job of keeping such possessiveness in check. She knew she shouldn’t feel this envy and resentment, knew she should be thankful that Justin had a professional he felt comfortable confiding i
n, but today, with all that was behind her and all that lay ahead, she couldn’t fight it. Talk to me, she thought. Tell your mother something real. After his session, he’d be distracted by whatever they’d discussed, by whatever he’d told her that Laura couldn’t know, and then he’d concentrate on driving, on crossing the Harbor Bridge the way his father had taught him.
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