Like Family (28 page)

T
HE
NEXT DAY WAS
Sunday, and we drove to church listening to Johnny Cash. Bub sang the words to “Folsom Prison Blues” pointedly, his glances
into the rearview like poison darts. On the way home, there was no music whatsoever, to make as much room as possible for
the soul spilling that would surely follow the morning’s sermon. Nothing.

At home, we were gathered for another talk, this time in the living room.

“Listen,” Bub said. “On Saturday night Penny and Paula and Tina all had the flu,” (as if we had forgotten the flat ginger
ale and saltines, the lying around musing about how gross it would be if we all barfed at the same time) “and Hilde’s back
was out, remember?” (When Hilde’s back went, she slept flat-out, beached in the middle of the living-room floor. She drank
out of hospital cups with built-in straws, peed into a yellow plastic bedpan, which Bub had to empty, and generally moaned
like she was going to die. Yes, we remembered.) “Any one of you girls in the living room could have gotten up in the middle
of the night.”

Hilde made a throat-clearing noise that sounded like she was scratching her tonsils with a wooden spoon.

“What honey? Do you have something to say?”

“They were sick.”

“Yes, the girls were sick. I just said that.”

“They were sick. They wouldn’t have gotten up.”

“So what, are you saying Teresa must have done it?”

“I’m not saying that.” Her voice cracked. (She was saying exactly that.)

“What, then? What?”

“Nothing. I’m not saying anything.”

Bub shifted his weight on the sofa and sighed, the sound of patience leaking. “I’m giving you girls until tomorrow night.
If you don’t have the guts to come to me on your own, I don’t want you in my house. There’s nothing worse than a liar.” He
stood up disgustedly and walked down the hall to the master bedroom. Hilde followed, tugging on the hem of her blouse.

“This is so unfair,” I said, when their door was shut.

“Yeah, whatever,” said Teresa. “They don’t think you did it.” She looked around the living room as if she was thinking about
burning it down, then went into the kitchen and got on the phone. Was she calling her friend Stephanie? Sascha? Maybe it was
Kenny. I thought about the way Teresa and Kenny had been on her bed in the cabin, their bodies knotted like pipe cleaners.
They were having sex, they had to be, but I knew it would never occur to Teresa to share that information with me. Somehow,
we’d fallen into ourselves over the years, into privateness and silence. Or maybe we’d always been separate, my bubble and
hers and Penny’s bobbing side by side through all the homes and harms. Why had I never said anything to my sisters about Mr.
Clapp and his chair? He had never called it a secret, but I had made it one anyway.

And what were the odds that Mr. Clapp had targeted me alone? After Becky Bodette left, Teresa was by herself in the back bedroom.
How easy it would have been for Mr. Clapp to go to her there. And he had, of course. It was suddenly as clear to me as the
puzzle of Kenny and Teresa’s bodies on the cabin bed. Teresa was as much a bed-wetter as I was in those years with the Clapps,
as nervous and as numb. Was Mr. Clapp the reason she wanted to run away that time?

I wouldn’t ask. Just like I wouldn’t ask if she had stolen the ten dollars. I went to bed and lay there in the dark while
Teresa crouched in the kitchen with the phone. I could hear the murmur, pause, murmur of phone talk, but nothing specific.
She could have been confessing. She could have been crying or spitting with rage, ready to walk out the door that very night.
How was I to know? I lay as still as I could, straining to make out a single word, and heard only my breath, my busy heart,
my listening.

“I
CAN’T TELL YOU
how disappointed lam that it’s come to this,” Bub said the next night after dinner. On the table next to his plate was a
sheet of notebook paper folded twice, clipped closed with a ballpoint pen. He placed his right hand on top of the paper like
one does a Bible.

“Everyone outside but Penny,” he said.

Penny looked alarmed —
did he know something she didn’t? —
pinned to her chair like a bug, expecting anything. The rest of us bolted. We threw ourselves onto the lawn, picked at tufts
of clover and waited for the verdict. Over in our concrete pond, the dogs were fishing. They crouched down and walked back
and forth through the shallow water with their mouths open. When a goldfish swam in, they chomped their teeth together and
then swung their big heads to one side. The little fish flew into the grass to shrivel like apricots. You’d think the dogs
would have eaten the goldfish, they were carnivores after all, but they seemed more interested in the hunt.

Ten minutes later, Penny came out of the house looking unscarred. We asked her what happened, but she just pointed to Tina.
“Your turn,” she said, and then deflated onto the grass. “Sorry. Dad says I have to zip my lip.”

All Teresa and I could do was wait — too cruel — while the dogs chomped and flung, chomped and flung. Finally I was up. Bub
still sat at the table, with the dishes pushed back and piled all around. He had the notebook paper open and the pen uncapped,
and his watch was off and lying next to them.

“Sit down,” he said. “This is a lie-detector test. If you’re lying I’ll know.”

He took my hand in his and put two fingers on my wrist at the pulse point. “Did you take the money in Hilde’s purse?”

“No,” I said. He wasn’t looking at me but at the watch. He was counting.

“Do you know who
did
take the money?”

“No,”

The Timex ticked on. I could feel my blood under his pressing fingers.

“Did Teresa take the money?”

“No. I don’t know.”

He wrote something down on the paper and then told me I could go.

The only one left was Teresa, and although I wasn’t there for her test, we soon found out she failed miserably. Her pulse
raced and raced when Bub asked her the questions. It was so obvious she was the one. I heard her screaming in her room when
I came back into the house. She had been grounded for a month and Bub had taken away her ugly-ass dumpling car, the one she
didn’t want in the first place.

“Let this be a lesson to you,” Bub said to Penny and me as we tried to watch
Mork and Mindy
over Teresa’s screeching. “Lying is the worst thing you can do. How can I ever trust anything that comes out of her mouth
now? Tell me that.”

T
WO
DAYS LATER, WHEN
the Avon lady rang the bell to deliver an order, Hilde suddenly “remembered” what happened to the ten dollars. It bought
cologne for Bub in a bottle shaped like a roadster, and a cake of green eye shadow. Nobody stole anything.

This should be good. I
thought, and waited for the apology that was sure to come, for Hilde’s shamed face at the dinner table. But she wasn’t sorry,
apparently, and Bub wasn’t sorry. They didn’t take anything back. The Cadet keys made their way back onto Teresa’s dresser,
and she was wordlessly ungrounded. She didn’t even seem mad about it, no madder than usual, anyway. She was as cold as something
metal, biding her time in the unlaunched rocket of her room. In two months she would turn eighteen, and in that time, no one
would be sorry enough to make her want to stay. No one would speak the true, verifiable fact: a liar is not the worst thing
you can be.

W
HEN
P
ENNY AND
I went to visit our cousin Keith at St. Agnes, we shared an elevator with an orderly who was escorting a metal gurney from
the second floor to the ninth, so we got a good long look at him. He wore scrubs the color of smog and paper shoes and was
chewing something small — a sliver of toothpick? a button? — that made his mouth do a kisslike twisty thing. Penny met my
eyes, rolled hers, and that’s all it took. We were hijacked by a fit of snorting. After a minute, we had the sense to turn
away from each other and were able to gain a thin composure. Then Penny emitted a postlaugh sigh that was half leaking bicycle
tire, half hoot owl, and we were off again, laughing loudly as the orderly glowered. The doors opened with a ding at nine.
He tried to exit with a maturity that would shame us, but one rubber wheel stuck in the door crack and the gurney spun sideways
like a grocery cart possessed. He started to swear quietly at it, forcing it forward with his weight, and a small blob of
drool dropped from his mouth to the silver platter of the gurney.

He drooled!

When the orderly finally got the cart unstuck and rushed away, paper shoes whooshing along the corridor, Penny and I were
alone in the elevator, red-faced and wet-eyed, sighing. I looked up at the twinkling numbers and said, “You know we passed
our floor, right?”

“Yeah, I know.”

K
EITH
WAS IN INTENSIVE
care, having barely survived an electrocution accident. He was a field-worker for the phone company — one of those men who
go up in hydraulic lifts to check the lines, tool belts jangling from their hips like giant charm bracelets. Keith was up
in the lift when he grabbed hold of a power line that was supposed to be shut off. The voltage traveled through his left arm
like blood through a vein, then split, shooting down through both legs and feet, and out the top of his head. The jolt sent
him flying right out of the basket and down some twenty feet to the hard ground. His partner had been sitting in the truck
for the ordeal, which had taken only seconds, and ran out to find Keith crumpled on the side of the road, looking dead, dead,
dead.