Duane's Depressed (12 page)

Nellie was surprised to see her mother up at such an hour, but glad too—she had spent her last cent in Cancun and couldn’t pay the taxi driver.

“Mom, do you have two hundred dollars? I had to take a taxi home,” Nellie said. “It was a black man that drove me—he was real nice.”

“I guess I’d die of surprise if one of my kids showed up not needing money,” Karla said. She riffled through three or four
purses and a jacket or two and finally found enough twenties to pay the bill.

“You want to come in and have coffee?” she asked the black man, waiting patiently in her driveway. “It’s two hours back to Dallas. Or I could just pour you some in a paper cup if you’re in a hurry.”

The driver gratefully accepted the coffee and drove off.

“You look like you got a nice tan, honey—how’d it go with Tommy?” she asked, giving her daughter a quick once-over.

“That boring little shitheel, I can’t remember why I even went with him,” Nellie said. “How come you’re up so late, Mom?”

Something didn’t feel quite right in the house. Nellie thought it might be jet lag on her part, but actually she felt pretty peppy. She just had a feeling that something was a little off.

“I’m grown, can’t I stay up late if I want to?” Karla asked. “Anyway, you have to stay up late if you want to see the best comedy acts—they don’t put ’em on while normal people are awake.”

“That’s true, but it don’t explain why you look like you’ve been crying,” Nellie said.

Like her mother, she preferred to cut right to the chase.

“Well, now that you mention it, your father left me,” Karla said—why hide the truth from your own child?

“Oh no, another midlife crisis,” Nellie said. “When he comes back let’s try to get him on Paxil. It sure helped me right after I came out of rehab.”

Karla opened her cabinet and studied the various whiskeys available to her, deciding on tequila, in honor of her daughter’s safe return from a land where it was so popular.

“Your daddy’s too old for a midlife crisis—at least, he is unless he’s planning to live to be one hundred and twenty-four,” she said. “He’s sixty-two. People have midlife crises when they’re in their forties.”

She poured herself a nice slug of tequila and held the bottle up for Nellie to see.

“Want a little of the hair of the dog that’s been biting you for the last few days?” she asked. Nellie was the only child she
had who would drink with her. Dickie and the twins preferred drugs.

“Maybe just a dribble,” Nellie said. “Just enough to remind me of Mexico. It’s a drag coming back to a place where there ain’t no beach.”

She thought about the feeling she had, the feeling that something wasn’t right in the house.

“Is there another woman involved . . . is that why Daddy left?” she asked.

Karla shook her head but Nellie remained skeptical.

“Just because you don’t know who it is yet doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” she said.

“Well, I don’t think so,” Karla said. “He left yesterday morning, on foot.”

“On foot—why?” Nellie asked. “You didn’t throw his car keys in the septic tank again, did you?”

She remembered the septic tank incident vividly because her mother, once she calmed down, had tried to bribe Fug, her boyfriend of the moment, to dive into the septic tank and hunt for the keys. But Fug was too chicken, and those particular keys were never found.

“I didn’t throw his keys in the septic tank—we didn’t even have a fight,” Karla said. “I thought we were getting along fine.”

Before Karla could elaborate Nellie suddenly remembered that she was a mother. She sprang up and ran down the hall to take a quick look at Little Bascom and Baby Paul, both sleeping like the angels they were. Then she peeked in the master bedroom, just to be sure her father wasn’t there—and he wasn’t.

“He’s gone all right,” she said, when she got back to the kitchen. “Start from the beginning and tell me all about it.”

Karla was glad to have her daughter home. Nellie was usually sympathetic when it came to troubles with men—she had had plenty of them herself.

“I don’t know what the beginning was,” Karla admitted. “Day before yesterday he showed up about noon, parked his pickup, and just walked off. He didn’t say a word to anybody.”

“Where’d he walk to?” Nellie asked. “If he left he had to go somewhere.”

“Out to the cabin,” Karla said. “Walked back in, had a nice meal with the grandkids, told them he was mainly walking for his health, and left again at three-fifteen the next morning. He told the kids he wanted to stay in good health so he could live to see them grown up and married . . .”

She had to pause briefly in her narrative, choked up at the thought of her own grandkids being grown up and married. Even dark little Barbi might grow up and marry, someday; then she would have no kids living at home, unless, of course, there were divorces at the grandkids’ level.

“He didn’t seem mad or anything, when he left,” she went on. “The only crazy thing he said was that he’d like to burn his pickup.”

“Mom, it could be senility,” Nellie said. “I’ve heard that senile people hide things and burn letters and stuff.”

“Letters, sure, I’d burn letters if my boyfriends had ever written me any,” Karla said. “But I never heard of anyone wanting to burn their pickup—how’s he supposed to run an oil business without a pickup?”

Nellie had to admit that was a puzzler. Pickups were the first facts of life, where they lived. She was beginning to feel a little anxious. What if her father really had gone for good? Pretty soon all the grandkids would be whining because they missed their Pa-Pa. The very thought made her wish she was back on the clean white beach of Cancun, wearing the string bikini that had brought her so many admiring looks and made Tommy afraid to leave her side for more than about twenty seconds at a time.

“So, is he at the cabin?” she asked.

“Yep—Bobby Lee had supper with him,” Karla said. “All they had was soup and crackers.”

“Mom, that’s okay, there’s nothing crazy about having a light meal once in a while,” Nellie said.

“No, but Bobby Lee said he was just real distant,” Karla said.

“Oh well, who wants to talk to that little shrimp anyway?” Nellie asked. “All he wants to talk about is how good he can do it even though he’s only got one ball.”

“How would he know? He hasn’t had a girlfriend since he
had the operation,” Karla said. “I’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t so whiny. He shot his little toe off yesterday—that’s one more thing that happened while you were gone.”

“Maybe they could page Daddy on the radio and let him know I’m home,” Nellie said. “If he knew I was here he might come back. I’ve always been his favorite—you said that yourself.”

“Won’t work. Bobby says he’s unplugged the radio; he’s real cut off,” Karla told her. “Anyway he knows when you were due back—we marked it right there on the calendar.”

The calendar hung on the wall right beside the microwave. Nellie went over to look, and sure enough, her return date had been recorded in her own neat hand, in contrast to the rest of the calendar, which was just a mass of scribbles, most of them scribbled by Rag. The scribbles mainly seemed to involve dental appointments for the grandchildren, but they were constantly missing their appointments because nobody but Rag could read Rag’s handwriting, and she sometimes couldn’t read it herself.

“What does Rag think about Daddy leaving?” Nellie inquired.

“Oh, it suits her fine—it’s one less mouth to cook for,” Karla said. “I’m the only one here in despair. Julie and Annette stay stoned all day—you know how they are. I can’t expect much support from them.”

“I know, they’re dopeheads,” Nellie said. She suddenly felt very, very sleepy—the fatigue accumulated in a week’s round-the-clock partying in Mexico had begun to wash over her, like a great warm wave.

“But
I’m
home now,” she added. “It’ll be all right, Mom. Daddy will get tired of the cabin and walk back in a couple of days.

“You need to not overdramatize,” she said. Then she gave her mother a good long hug and a kiss and went to bed.

16

W
HEN
N
ELLIE WENT TO BED
Karla rolled up in a blanket and channel-surfed until she struck the Weather Channel—it was by far her favorite channel for late-night viewing. After a certain hour she grew tired of weird comedians and brassy talk show hosts: she just wanted some nice soothing weather. The pleasant thing about the Weather Channel was you really didn’t have to watch it or even listen to it—you could just sort of absorb it, like the weather itself. Karla often let it play all night, while she lay on the couch, flipped through magazines, or dozed; the Weather Channel allowed her to inhabit a comfortable country between sleep and wakefulness. She got to hear the sound of human voices without having to engage with a human personality. Also—although she knew this wasn’t a Christian trait—the worse the weather was in some remote part of the world, the cozier it felt to lie in her blankets and drowse. If the weather was
really
bad elsewhere, with whole towns sliding into the surf in California, or floods causing people to have to sit on the roofs of their houses in Missouri, or to rescue their half-drowned pets in Arkansas, then the better it felt to be dozing on a nice dry couch in Thalia.

Of course, on this occasion it would have been a lot cozier to drowse on the couch if her husband, Duane, had been asleep in the bedroom, where he usually was when she turned on the Weather Channel. Of course, he was only six miles away: he
wasn’t experiencing terrible weather in Missouri or California, but he wasn’t where he belonged, either. Where he belonged was in their bed.

Despite two healthy slugs of tequila, Karla didn’t feel relaxed enough to drowse, didn’t feel interested in flipping through catalogues, and, for once, didn’t feel soothed by the sight of a storm front moving in on Detroit. Despite the tequila, the weather, and her daughter’s safe return, Karla could not seem to settle down in her mind—and she couldn’t understand why. Duane had always needed to be by himself from time to time; there was really nothing new about that. The thought occurred to her that it might be no more than that. Their house, admittedly, was a noisy place—it would be perfectly normal for a man to want to be someplace where it was quiet for a day or two. Earlier in their marriage Duane had spent a good deal of his time in a boat fishing, for the same reason. Sitting in a cabin on a hill and sitting in a boat fishing were not such radically different things; Karla could not get a clear fix on why the former bothered her while the latter didn’t.

All she knew was that the two things felt totally different. Lots of men fished, some of them probably for no better reason than that it gave them an opportunity to escape their domestic lives, or whatever. That was perfectly normal—she herself had taken many a soothing shopping trip to Dallas for essentially the same reasons. Getting away from it all was a motive she certainly understood—it was Duane’s decision to
walk
away from it all that threw the whole picture out of kilter and caused her to feel that she was dealing with a whole new phenomenon. Very few men of her acquaintance had ever walked six miles for any reason whatever, and very few would choose to sit by themselves in a bare little cabin that didn’t offer much in the way of creature comforts—not when they could have been staying in what was, by common consent, the most comfortable house in Thalia.

In her gut, Karla knew something had changed. This wasn’t a mood she was dealing with: this was something more fundamental. Why it had struck just when it had, she had no idea. But there it was, like a pregnancy: something new had started growing and she had no choice but to deal with it.

A little before dawn she threw on a robe, took her car keys off a peg by the door, and whipped her BMW out of the driveway. In a minute she was on the dark road that led to Duane’s cabin. In five minutes she was parked on a hill with a view of the cabin, her lights off, her motor idling. In case Duane’s craziness took the form of walking around before it was light, she didn’t want him to see her. If he thought she was snooping he would be twice as difficult. There were a lot of things Duane liked about her—forty years of marriage had convinced her of that—but one thing he definitely didn’t like was her determined snooping. Karla wanted to know everything that was going on, always had, always would. If Duane wanted to keep something from her he had to be pretty sly to do it—and he knew this. Over the four decades they had been together each had honed their skills—snooping and antisnooping—to a fine degree. Karla’s ambition was to snoop so skillfully that she left no track—several times she supposed she had done just that, only to have Duane, through the exercise of some sixth sense, find her out. It was a game they both continued to play. Several times Karla had promised him she would never snoop again, only to break her promise immediately. Duane expected her to snoop, which didn’t mean he
wanted
her to. Their cat-and-mouse games had always been serious and still were.

“Duane, I
have
to snoop,” Karla told him many times. “It’s a matter of survival. If I didn’t snoop and find out things you try to hide from me I wouldn’t know anything about you at all, and what kind of marriage would that be, where the wife don’t know nothing about the husband?”

“Better than what we’ve got, from my point of view,” Duane said. “Why can’t you just give privacy a chance?”

“I just can’t,” Karla admitted.

This morning, particularly, she didn’t want Duane to find out that she had been snooping around the road that led to his cabin. She cut her lights before she even rounded the last bend in the road, so as not to flash even the most distant light on the hill where her husband was sleeping. Fortunately the BMW was a quiet-running car—a kind of stealth car compared to the rattly pickups that made up most of the traffic along that route. The
road was a faint white track ahead of her; she purred along it slowly and stopped at a point where she was fairly sure she could see the light in Duane’s cabin when it came on; there she paused. Duane had good hearing. If she turned the motor off he might hear it when she turned it back on to leave, so she left it running. She got out of the car and listened—even from twenty yards away she could barely hear the motor running, and the cabin was several hundred yards away, up across the hill. There was no likelihood that Duane was going to detect her snooping this time, not unless he did it by ESP.