Angels Burning (20 page)

“How has he been selfish?” I cry.

Smoke whines softly. She reaches down and pats his head.

“You, me, and Grandma,” she explains. “People think being selfish means hogging the blankets or not sharing your french fries but the ultimate selfish act is hurting the people who love you. He cut us out of his life because it was easier for him. He never gave a thought about what it would do to any of us.”

She's right, but I can't blame Champ for hurting us. I've never been able to blame him for anything. After what he's been through I do believe he's earned a free pass, but she's also right that I wouldn't feel this way if he were the brother of some random woman who walked into the station telling me he left his son with her. I'd be sympathetic to his past
but I'd be adamant that he needed to put the welfare of his child ahead of his old wounds.

“Rules of behavior apply to people as well as dogs,” Neely falls into her instructor voice. “A well-trained dog can be part of every aspect of your life while a dog that misbehaves ends up in the pound. No matter how much you explain this to people, there's still those idiots out there who equate training methods with torture and think making a dog listen to you is being hard on him.”

“What are you saying? We failed to train Champ properly?”

“I'm saying he needed someone to help him and that should've been us, but he bolted the minute he was off his leash.”

“And what would you do with that dog once you got him back?”

“First step, kennel him.”

“Oh, great. We should've locked up our brother?”

“Figuratively.”

“And how were we supposed to do that?”

Smoke raises his left paw, his sign he's distressed. He only shakes with his right paw.

She stoops down and wraps her arms around him.

“Make him explain himself to us instead of making him dinner,” she replies, her tone softening. “You were right last night. I had him for a whole day and didn't ask him a single personal question other than ‘Are you still a Steelers fan?' and ‘What made you buy a Kia?' ”

“The hamster commercial?” I ask her.

She nods.

“Now you're being selfish,” I tell her. “Don't hog all the guilt. I want my share.”

“Can't you find him?”

“I'm going to try, but I tried for years to find him before. What makes you think I'd have better luck now?”

“Sneaky little bastard,” she comments, getting back to her feet. “Remember when he disappeared for a day and it turned out he was hiding in different places all over the house, we just couldn't find him?”

“I wanted to kill him.”

I can't prevent the words from coming out, and the fact that I wanted to stop them makes me realize how often I censor my thoughts about my brother. The trauma he suffered elevated him to some kind of saintly martyrdom in my eyes. It's a relief to feel something negative about him again no matter how small or fleeting. It restores his humanness.

Neely shoos Smoke in the direction of Mason and the other dogs. We both watch him trot away.

“I can't keep Mason,” I say as much to myself as to my sister. “I don't know anything about kids.”

“I don't know anything about kids either.”

“I have a job.”

“I have a job, too.”

“But yours is more flexible.”

“No, it isn't. I have four K-9s coming at the end of the month. That's a full-time commitment on top of my private lessons and classes. And my volunteer work at PAWS and the ASPCA. I'm busier than you. And besides, my job is more important.”

“How can you say that? What's more important than maintaining law and order?”

“You think the dogs I train don't help maintain law and order? And they save lives.”

After what happened last night, this last remark stings.

She's right. The dogs she's trained have pulled people from burning buildings and from under rubble after explosions and earthquakes. They've tracked down hikers lost in the woods, rescued drowning children, helped capture criminals, and sniffed out illegal contraband. She keeps scrapbooks documenting all of their careers, every commendation, every mention in the media. Every birthday is noted with an updated photo; they all look alike to me.

When the dogs retire from service, she sends each one a leather collar with gold studs and ten pounds of frozen marrow bones.

“You have a job with health insurance,” she tells me.

“So?”

“He's going to need health insurance. Kids get sick a lot. They break bones. They stick things up their noses.”

“You have health insurance, too.”

“But I have to pay for mine.”

“God, we sound like old ladies.”

“Speak for yourself. I'm not old and I'm no lady.”

She starts walking away.

“Go to work,” she says without looking back at me. “The citizens need you. But so does this little guy.”

She needs me, too, and I need her. Most days this is enough to see me through.

SANCTUARY RETIREMENT
and Convalescent Home has been around long enough that it's still called a retirement and convalescent home, not an alternative living environment for mature individuals. Neely and I looked at a few of those, too, and Neely informed me if there ever comes a time when she has to be permanently kenneled, she wants me to have her put down. I promised I'd do the best I can.

Sanctuary is on the outskirts of town, handy for both of us. The main building is an impressive three-story redbrick farmhouse with dozens of windows trimmed in white that belonged to a prosperous family who woke up one day a hundred years after their farm was established to find the quaint country road the house faced was now a highway with a Walmart going up in full view of their front porch along with the inevitable strip mall that always accompanies the megaretailer like arms stretched out in a yawn of consumerism. They sold the house and land to a developer who hasn't done much with it except to tear down the old barn, attach a generic hospital-looking addition to the stately old house, and build a driving range next door. The back of the home has a spacious patio that looks out on a serene expanse of forested, rolling hills, but the residents prefer by far to sit on the front porch where they can watch the traffic on Jenner's Pike and the happenings in the Walmart parking lot. In summer, some of them drag chairs off the porch
onto the lawn to watch the line of golfers whack away at buckets of balls.

Grandma isn't ill. She's old and brittle. She has severe arthritis in her knees and needs a walker to get around. During the course of two years she broke a wrist and a hip and cracked a rib. She recovered amazingly well for someone her age, but she agreed with Neely and me that it probably wasn't safe for her to live on her own anymore. She was approaching ninety at the time, but it was still hard for her to give up her independence. She mopily moved into the home and within a week, she was organizing
Downton Abbey
parties and leading walker aerobics. As often happens in small towns whenever people all of a certain age are thrown together, it turns out she knew practically everyone here, and of course, they all knew who she was, the mother of poor, beautiful, murdered Cissy Carnahan.

Time has been good to my mother's memory. More than three decades have passed. The town is full of people who weren't even born when she died, and if they are aware of her story, it's only the sensational headlines relating to her demise and not the details of her life. Her peers are in their seventies and Grandma's are in their nineties. Age has mellowed many of them, and society's views have softened. Unwed mothers are everywhere now, and my mother's wanton behavior and style of dress is tame compared to everything they see on TV and in the pages of the
People
and
Us
Weekly
magazines littering the common area of the home. My mother may have been promiscuous and a lousy housekeeper, but she was well-mannered and respectful in public. Nothing like those Bad Girls or Real Housewives. Here, in Grandma's world at least, she's no longer thought of as an aggressive immoral temptress but as a victim of male lust, her dalliances merely surrendering to their constant hounding, and her three bastard children upgraded from untouchable trash to forgivable mistakes.

Three old men wearing ballooning shorts with skinny pasty legs sticking out of them ending in black socks pulled halfway up their calves and some sort of orthopedic sandals have formed a peanut gallery for the driving range today. They all have on ball caps and wraparound sunglasses that remind me of the goggles we used to wear in high school
chemistry labs and are drinking mugs of coffee that look too large for them to lift. They represent a third of the male population here. Of the forty residents, only nine are men.

I greet them and the ladies sitting on the front porch.

“Your grandma's inside playing gin,” one of them tells me.

“At eight in the morning?”

“Playing for buttons.”

“Ah, serious stuff.”

The women spending their final days at the Sanctuary with my grandmother are part of a generation and a class of blue-collar and farm families that made their own clothes. Most of them were very accomplished seamstresses in their day and accumulated treasured stores of unmatched buttons over the years. My grandma kept hers in a coffee can. When we were kids, Neely and I would dump them out on the floor in a kaleidoscopic spill of little discs and sort them into piles ranging from the boring white ones to the ones we were convinced were made of actual jewels and precious metals. I can still remember some of my favorites: a navy blue one with a silver anchor on it, a red one carved to look like a rosebud, a glass one that sparkled like a diamond, a coppery one shaped like an owl, a purple Lucite one shaped like a heart, one made from peach-colored taffeta, one from scarlet velvet.

The residents use them in place of money when they gamble. No one takes these stakes lightly. Everyone is sentimentally bound to their buttons.

I check in at the front desk. I can see Grandma from here sitting at one of the tables in the common area with her friend Marge, both of their heads bent over their cards, their cottony-white hairdos emanating a tinge of chrome blue underneath the fluorescent lights. Grandma's coffee can is sitting next to her elbow. Marge keeps her buttons in a shoe box.

The rest of the tables are sparsely occupied with other ladies having their morning coffee. Some are reading the local newspaper. Someone must have woken up the managing editor last night, because Zane's shooting made the front page. There's a picture of Tug being led in handcuffs to one of our cruisers and one of Brie Massey following her
son's gurney to the ambulance. Thank God there isn't one of me, but I'm sure some of the neighbors got me with their phones. They might have even taken video. I'm probably getting a million hits on YouTube right now stalking across the Massey front yard in my fiesta wear clutching my gun. I've probably overtaken Grumpy Cat.

“Hi, Gram,” I greet her, and lean down to give her soft, powdery cheek a kiss; it's like brushing my lips against a moth's wings.

She grabs my hand resting on her shoulder and gives it a quick squeeze, never taking her eyes from her cards.

I called and told her I was coming.

“Aw, don't bet the turquoise button,” I tell her.

“It's fake.”

“I know, but I love that one. Neely and I used to pretend it came from a real Indian.”

“Let's take a break, Marge,” she says, putting her cards facedown on the table. “This one won't let me bet anything. It will be nothing but, ‘Oh, no. We used to pretend that one came from the moon, and not that one, we used to pretend it was real gold from a pirate's chest.' ”

Marge smiles.

“Just a bunch of worthless old buttons,” she says, surreptitiously unfolding a napkin and placing it on top of her pile.

I crane my neck to get a look in her box, and she quickly covers it with the lid.

“We saw you on the late news last night,” Marge tells me as I take a seat between the two of them.

Great
, I think to myself. There wasn't time for anyone from the nearest TV news station to get there. Someone did film it with his phone.

“What were you wearing?” Grandma asks.

“Ugh.” I throw my head back and close my eyes. “I was almost killed, Grandma. Maybe you should ask me about that.”

“There's no such thing as almost killed. You're either killed or you're not.”

I feel her pat my thigh under the table.

“I'm glad you weren't killed.”

I don't have much time. I should already be at the station. I'm not going to beat around the bush.

“So you saw Tug Truly was the shooter?”

“What a terrible, awful thing,” she says, shaking her head.

Marge clucks her agreement.

“First the girl is murdered, then the brother murders someone else.”

“The Massey boy is still alive. He made it through surgery. There's a chance he's going to be okay.”

Grandma doesn't seem to hear. I've cleared center stage for her. All combined there are thousands of years of wisdom living under this roof and everyone is prepared to speak up on just about any topic, but my grandmother is the undisputed authority on murdered family members. Every ear in the room is tuned to our conversation, although everyone is acting like they're absorbed in something else.

This is exactly what I want. People sometimes clam up if you ask for information point-blank, but if you have a private conversation with someone loud enough for them to overhear and leave gaps in the story only they can fill, you'll have your answers in no time.

“There's nothing worse than having your child die before you,” Grandma continues. “Cissy was so young and so pretty.”