All I get is a voicemail from my mother asking me if I’m really, really sure I want to marry a Mexican. This was settled nine months ago when we gave her her first grandchild, so it does not bear a response.
Each time Soledad answers the phone her face is glowing and peaceful, as if she’s entered some holy place and been blessed. Maybe Dale was right. This is a gift—for her, at least.
12:47 a.m.
Soledad has decided we should be taking notes based on these calls so that, when the various crises hit, we will be prepared for them. I try to make sense of them based on the time stamps, but I’m still a little high and it’s confusing to keep it all in order. I’m arranging notecards on the coffee table when the house line rings again. She picks up, puts it on speaker so I can hear.
“Hey, Mom.” His voice is deeper this time, a little crackly. “Coach says the first game will be on the twenty-first, if you want to come.”
“Of course we’re coming, sweetie,” she says.
“I can hardly hear you,” he says. “Is something wrong with your phone?”
“Just sunspots,” she says. This is the excuse we’ve concocted.
“Okay. Well, can you promise me something?”
“Yes?”
“Can you and Dad not fight the whole time like you did last year?”
She seems a little surprised, since we rarely raise our voices. “Um, sure, sweetie.”
“Okay. Because I’d rather you didn’t come at all if you’re gonna do that.”
“I promise,” she says. “We both do.”
She hangs up after he does, looks up, glares at me. “Something you want to tell me?”
I shrug. “Not really.” I go back to my notecards and don’t think any further about it.
1:15 a.m.
We should both be sleeping, but there’s no point in trying. The lights are still on in all the houses on our street, so no one else is either. Soledad has been quiet since the last call, glancing at me once in a while to see if I have anything to say to her. I don’t.
Her cell phone rings.
“Hi Mom.” Future-Oscar’s voice is shaky and high, like something’s happened.
“Is something wrong with the line? I’m not getting a picture and the sound is terrible.”
I remind her of the lie. “Sunspots,” she says.
“Do you have a cold or something? Your voice sounds different.” He’s older now, his voice almost a man’s.
She smiles, practically hugs the phone. “No, honey, everything’s fine.”
I hear him take a deep breath. “Okay. I didn’t want to do this over the phone, but I thought you’d want to know. Izzy already knows, so please don’t be mad at her.”
I mouth, Who’s Izzy? at Soledad, but she just shrugs. Her grandmother’s name is Isabella, but call her “Izzy” and you’ll get an earful. “What is it, honey?”
“I’m getting an apartment off-campus with Eric this summer. We’ve got jobs lined up, so I won’t be coming home.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says, and waits for more.
He laughs nervously, the way Soledad sometimes does. “Uhh, there’s more. I don’t really know how to say this, but, ummmm...Eric’s not just my roommate.”
My limbs go numb and it’s hard to take a full breath. No one says anything for a while.
Soledad breaks the silence. “Are you telling me you’re....”
“Gay,” he interrupts. “Yeah.”
Another silence.
This time he’s the one who breaks it. “Oh, Jesus, Mom. Say something.”
She sinks into her chair like she’s been kicked in the gut. “I don’t know what to say, sweetie,” she finally replies.
“You still love me, right?” The tone is joking, but his voice sounds as if he’s about to cry. I’m guessing this is the moment when my heart is supposed to swell with love for my son no matter who he is, but I’m still just numb.
“Of course I do, baby.” She’s slumped across the cushions and holding in her breath.
I hear sniffling on his end. “Don’t you or Izzy tell Dad, okay?”
“Do you want to tell him now?” She starts to hand the phone to me, but I don’t take it.
“Dad’s there?” he says. “I thought he and Chloe were still in Costa Rica.” I gesture madly for her to go along with it, but she looks at me with murder in her eyes.
“Uh, they are...” she says. “You’re right. Why don’t you call him when they get back?”
“Oh, shit,” he says. “It’s that wormhole you told me about, isn’t it? Did I just out myself as a baby? I’m sorry—I can’t say any more.” Then the line goes dead.
She grips the phone so tight I hear the battery cover crack, then flings it at the wall. The batteries fly out, but it’s otherwise unharmed. She turns to me, eyes wide and sharp as stilettos, the skin on her face taut and pale. “Who the hell is Chloe?”
“No idea.” This is a lie. Chloe is the new girls’ gym teacher—cute and blond and a little busty, far too bubbly and cloying for my tastes. She might be interesting if life kicked her around a little.
Soledad continues to glare.
We go back and forth for a good twenty minutes: I spew the usual sci-fi platitudes about how she can’t blame me for something I haven’t done yet; because we know it now, it doesn’t have to happen. But there’s no point.
“I’m sorry, honey.” I try to put my arms around her, but she pulls away.
“Don’t touch me,” she says, and disappears into the kitchen.
I go to check on Oscar—maybe my epiphany will happen when I see him as a baby. He’s still asleep, still face-down, clutching his stuffed Clifford the Big Red Dog. It starts off well enough; my first impulse is to pick him up, hold him, rock him for a while. Then, maybe because I’m overtired, I start to wonder if this means there’s time to fix it—toy trucks, weightlifting, sports.
I go outside for another ciggie on the front porch. Dale isn’t there anymore. I peer through the gap in his living room curtains; he and Erma are crouched on the floor in each other’s arms, the phone dangling from her hand. Tears are running from Erma’s eyes. Then they turn a little and I see she’s smiling. I turn away, finish my smoke in our driveway—this isn’t for me to see.
2:53 a.m.
We don’t even try to go to bed, even though the event is due to end any minute. Soledad and I are on opposite ends of the couch; we don’t talk, don’t even look at each other. I keep trying to say something that will fix this, but language has deserted me.
Finally she turns to me, no tears, no anger. “Are you unhappy with me?” she asks flatly.
“No, honey.” I try to scoot closer, but she waves me back.
“I just don’t know what would possess you.”
“Neither do I.”
Then it comes: a photo from Oscar’s number on our cell phones, dated twenty-four years from now. It’s heavily pixilated and blacked out in a few spots, but we see enough: a mocha-skinned baby girl not quite a year old, in pink jammies and a little purple bow around her forehead. There’s a big crooked smile on her face, and she’s clutching a worn, faded Clifford the Big Red Dog. She has Oscar’s eyes and ears—they must have used a surrogate.
She’s beautiful.
Soledad and I stare at the image on separate phones, from each end of the couch, running our fingers along the LED screen.
Then the pixels degrade, and the LEDs go black.
“Wow,” Soledad says. “Just...wow.” I put my arm around her from behind and squeeze. She lets me.
4:30 a.m.
Soledad has gotten two more texts: one from her sister saying the surgery went fine and her father’s awake (this was two years ago); the other from Oscar, asking if we can have pizza tonight. She says yes.
The event has passed, and the astronomer, bleary-eyed, is back on TV. Nobody died, the world didn’t end, and NASA has a decade’s worth of data to pore over. He encourages everyone to take stories of str
ange occurrences with a grain of salt—it may take years to sort out exactly what’s happened. After he says this, he wipes a tear from his eye, at which point Soledad gets up off the couch and shouts, “Ha!” Then, embarrassed, she turns to me. “I think I need to go to bed.”
6:35 a.m.
My eyes snap open as Oscar cries across the hall. Still in our clothes, we stumble in. He’s sitting up in his crib, face scrunched in hunger. Soledad lifts him out and hugs him tight, her back turned to me. “It’s okay,” she says soothingly. “It’s gonna be okay.” I come up behind her and try to touch him, but he pulls his hand away and buries his face in her chest. I try to comfort myself by thinking he’s probably wiping his nose on her, but it doesn’t work. With nothing else to do, I start repeating after her, over and over, until I forget who I’m saying it to.
The Very Civilized Execution of Walter Grimley
The town of Patience had tolerated Walt Grimley’s excesses for a long time without comment. He’d lost himself after Miranda died, we’d reasoned, and was owed a wide berth. Even when he got violent and crazy, we forgave, because that was our way. Then, one afternoon at the farmers’ market, Walt drank himself stupid and exposed himself to Julie and Joyce Grebcik, age sixteen and fourteen, and we knew something had to be done.
We came at sunset on a moist, warm evening in late June, on foot, horseback, the narrow little foot-propelled scooters everyone used when the gas pumps went dry. Some were dressed in funeral suits and lace dresses, because if we were going to decide a man’s fate, we ought to take it seriously. Others came in T-shirts and jeans, because suits and dresses were a thing of back-in-the-day and didn’t matter anymore. We gathered at what used to be the city hall: an old, squarish, chocolate-brown brick building with golf-ball sized pockmarks in the façade. Crabgrass and knee-high fescue grew out of cracks in the walkway. The last mayor and his staff from back-in-the-day had papered over the windows before fleeing to god knows where, and the paper had gotten moist and gummy and stuck to the glass.
Someone lit a kerosene lantern. Inside, there was an inch-thick coat of gray dust on everything, and the air smelled like stale, moldy bread. Despite the somber occasion, we were vaguely excited—this was the freshest, most spontaneous thing that had happened here since the coy-wolves ate Nora Brimeyer and we had to go into the woods and shoot them all.
Once everyone was seated, we all stared at Roy Martinez, a short, thick man with a wiry black goatee and an old fedora. Roy looked around to see if anyone else would take charge, and when no one did he shrugged, and stood up. “Okay, then,” he said. “We all know why we’re here.” He pulled out an old slate chalkboard from the storage closet and asked us to list our complaints against Walt.
The charges were thus:
Drinking himself stupid and violent on that awful corn whiskey he distilled in his barn, then beating Seth Riley, the schoolteacher, into a puddle of blood and broken teeth;
Selling two jugs of the aforementioned spirits to Shane Dobson, age sixteen, who then rode his horse through the south wall of the old First Methodist Church and died (subsequently, the horse had to be shot at the scene, which was an awful sight);
Shooting Paul Foreman in the ass with an old Glock after he caught Paul picking wild strawberries from a bush Walt claimed was on his property, though that patch of land had been in Paul’s family since before any of us could remember. Paul still had to walk with a cane as a result.
The aforementioned lascivious advances toward Julie and Joyce, which, while not as tragic, nonetheless served as the final straw.
Roy sighed. “Anything else?” A few of us whispered comments about Walt’s smell, which was like armpit sweat and hamburger grease, but that didn’t seem reason enough to do away with a man.
“In that case,” Roy said, crossing his arms over his big belly. “What do you propose we do?”
Pete Grebcik, a tall, wiry wolf of a man in a black short-sleeve dress shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, stood up. He wore an old faded blue cap with a red “C” on it, tilted low over his eyes. In the low light you couldn’t see his face, which made him even scarier.
“I got a shotgun back home,” Pete said. “Just say the word and I’ll blow his goddamn head off.”
It was known that Pete feared no one and could do the deed if need be. After those two bikers showed up in town fifteen years ago looking to loot the place of food and gas, Pete confronted them in Casey’s Tavern with a crowbar, and ten minutes later they were running for their lives. Both Julie and Joyce sunk low in their seats, looking up at him with fear. They’d never before seen what some of us had—the ugly, wild animal side of Pete that was capable of anything.
“He took liberties with my girls,” Pete said, his deep gravelly voice cutting through the low rumble. “A man ought to take care of that himself.” A few, the ones who’d been there and seen what he’d done with the crowbar, clapped. Most looked down at the floor, or at the people sitting around them, eyes darting about to see who was in favor of it, and who shared their discomfort.
“Hold up there, Pete,” Roy said. “We don’t behave like that, and you know it.” We murmured our agreement. This was Patience, not Dodgeville or Hazel Green, where they’d hang anybody for anything.
“So what are we gonna do about it?” Pete asked.
“There’s got to be some kind of precedent,” Roy said. He turned to a very old man in a wheelchair, in white overalls and a red plaid shirt, sitting a few feet from the chalkboard. “Bud?”
At ninety-seven, Bud Carlson was the only person with any real memory of way-back-when. Roy had asked his grandkids to bring him, to provide some much-needed perspective.
Bud, whose skin had turned pale gray, scrunched up his face so that his two white bushy eyebrows nearly became one. “If I remember right,” he said in a soft, gravelly voice, “they’d lock up a man like Walt for the rest of his life in a little room with bars on it, and he’d just stay there until he was dead.”
We began to chatter nervously. The thought of being cooped up like that, with no view of the sky and no open spaces, made some of us queasy.
An old lady said, “Did they feed him?”
“Yep,” Bud said. “Kept him going like that for years and years. Probably would’ve been kinder to put him down.”
“Well,” Roy said, “maybe that’s off the table.”
Pete stood up again. “We can’t just leave him be. We gotta do something.”
The room was tense—this was Patience, after all, where we’d stayed civilized when every other place had seemingly gone to hell. Part of that meant letting go of small things. But where Walt was concerned, our forgiveness had gotten us nowhere.
Everyone nodded.
“Sounds like we’re set on the what,” Roy said. “Now it’s just the how.”
He sent a small group of us three doors down to what used to be the public library: a flat-roofed building with rusted-out yellow siding. A few of us pored over the thick, cream-colored books with tiny print and attempted to penetrate all those long sentences and clauses. What we all agreed, after our eyes lost focus and our heads hurt, was that the way-back-when was damned complicated.
None of the options were attractive: beheading was too brutal, and we’d have to use a cleaver anyway because no one had a sword or guillotine lying about. Hanging was out as well—someone found a book chapter that said sometimes people’s heads came off, and angry as we were, we couldn’t do that to Walt. We didn’t have poison gas and couldn’t think of a single reason why we’d ever need such a thing. Bullets were for deer and wild turkeys and, if we were lucky, the occasional boar. And someone would have to pull a trigger or a lever or swing an axe. Everyone knew Pete would, but that’d be messy and unpleasant.
For a minute, everyone fell silent, like maybe we should just call it off. Sooner or later Walt would drink himself to death in his hovel outside of town, and then we’d be rid of him. But the burden of civilization did not allow us to shirk our duty like
that.
With no good options, and a desire to have something to show for our efforts, we sat down amid the dusty shelves and devised a plan of our own. We had but two ground rules: it had to be humane; and we all had to have a part in it. It took a couple of hours, and there was some heated disagreement, but in the end, we arrived at an acceptable solution. We made some sketches, and a list of things we’d need, then shuffled back up the street to show Roy.
He sighed, long and loud, and looked at the floor. “You sure about this?”
We nodded, reluctantly.
“If that’s the best you can do,” he said, “I guess it’s time to fetch Walt.”
That night the fireflies were out in force, and the June bugs buzzed around the ears of the posse marching up the dirt road toward Walt Grimley’s house. Their footfalls made no sound, and they did not speak. Roy wanted to wait until dark, when Walt would be in the bag and less likely to put up a fight. Andy Snow, who at seventeen was already six-foot-six and half again as broad-shouldered as any man in Patience, followed close behind, carrying a length of nylon rope—sisal would’ve dug into Walt’s wrists and ankles, and this had to be humane. Roy picked him because he was strong enough to pull a horse cart by himself, and because despite his size and strength, he was baby faced, with big blue eyes and a blond fishbowl haircut—hardly a sight to inspire terror. His parents objected, but he said he could handle himself, and they knew it. With them were the Skoal twins, Jeremy and Jason, age nineteen, smaller but wiry, with narrow dark eyes set deep in their skulls. Each of them carried an axe handle, just in case. No blades, we’d agreed—this wasn’t to be a massacre.
Roy took point, unarmed. He was brave like that.
When they arrived at Walt’s house, he was sitting on the porch swing with a metal cup in his hand, shirtless and barefoot in overalls, brownish liquor dripping from his greasy yellow-gray beard. Miranda would never have let him get like this, but she’d got cancer twenty years ago and there was no one left to treat her.
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