The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (41 page)

“It’s like a picture out there,” my father said. I was thirteen then. We stood in the dark room and watched the snow coming down past the streetlights. No cars passed by. We could see lights on in the houses around us. Everyone was hunkering down to wait this one out. Over twenty inches by morning, said WAKO radio out of the county seat, Phillipsport. The wind was up, and already the snow was starting to drift against the side of our shed. My father’s Galaxie, parked in our driveway, was barely holding its shape as the snow covered it. “Roger, I swear.” He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “It’s like we’re in a picture,” he said, and I’ve always remembered that, because it was one of the first times he ever said anything that I sensed came from some private place inside him, which he generally kept to himself.

My mother was in the family room behind us with the television playing. It was a Saturday night. I’m sure of that because I remember that
The Carol Burnett Show
was on. My mother laughed at something, and I could hear the television audience laughing too. My father and I turned at the same time, looking back through the French doors that separated the living room from the family room. We saw the lamplight there. He squeezed my shoulder again, and at his touch we headed toward those French doors. Once we opened them, we stepped back into the life that was ours.

“Baby, you should’ve seen,” my mother said to my father. She was kicked back in her Barcalounger, her arm bent at the elbow so it went up at a right angle. She held a Virginia Slims cigarette between her fingers and the smoke curled up into the lamplight. “It was the funniest thing. I was afraid I was going to wet my pants.”

She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. She’d just had her hair done the day before, and her loose blond curls came down over her shoulders. I’d always known she was a pretty woman—prettier than most of my friends’ mothers—but she looked particularly glamorous there in the lamplight. Big gold hoop earrings dangled against the sides of her turtleneck.

“We were watching it snow,” my father said.

I believe now he must have been uncomfortable with my mother’s beauty. He wasn’t the kind of man who could enjoy knowing that wherever he went with his wife other men would be looking at her. He was more the type—thoughtful and shy—who preferred to live a private life. If there were pleasures to be had, he’d rather the world not know about them. He was the county tax assessor, and he knew that it was a man looking for trouble who chose to parade his riches and not expect someone to take notice and wish himself into a share of that wealth.

“Everyone has to pay for what he has,” he told me once. “That’s what I know, Roger. No one gets off scot-free.”

He wasn’t a looker. Not that he was an unattractive man, but next to my mother he paled. He had sloped shoulders and a long face and a nose that was too big. I expect he spent most of his married life shaking his head over his dumb luck in landing a woman as beautiful as Annie Griggs.

One night at the Uptown Cafe, we walked away from our table, and just before we got to the door I heard a low wolf whistle. I know my father heard it too, because just for an instant his back stiffened, and he gave a quick glance behind him. My mother took his arm, and that claiming gesture must have soothed him, because he opened the door and we stepped out onto the sidewalk. Later, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I heard them talking about what had happened. “Dang it, Annie,” my father said, and after a while my mother answered in a quiet voice, “It’s not like I ask for it.”

What she was asking that winter night, when she told my father about the comedy sketch she’d seen on TV, was for us to sit down with her and be a family—to give her, I imagine now, a reason to be happy with her home and the people in it.

But before any of that could happen, someone knocked on our front door.

“My word,” my father said. “Who could that be on a night like this?”

He went into the living room to open the door, and after a while I heard Mr. Timms’s voice. It was a loud voice, full of dread and fear. “It’s Jean,” he said. “She’s sick and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Sick?” my father said in a way that told me he didn’t know what to do about it either.

“She went to bed for a rest after supper, and now I can’t get her to wake up.”

My mother had already put the footrest down on her Barcalounger. I could feel the cold air around my legs, and I knew my father was holding the front door open as he talked to Mr. Timms.

“Tell him to come in,” my mother called to my father. “Harold, come inside,” she said.

The ceiling light snapped on in the living room. The front door closed, and I heard Mr. Timms stomping snow from his boots on the rug just inside the door.

I followed my mother into the living room, and there he was, bareheaded, the collar of his black wool coat turned up to his ears. He’d stuffed his trouser legs into the tops of a pair of green rubber boots, from which snow was melting. He wore a pair of glasses with black plastic frames, and those glasses were steamed over now that he’d come in from the cold.

“Annie?” he said, and he sounded so helpless.

“Don’t worry, Harold.” My mother walked right up to him. She reached up and took his glasses off his face. She used the hem of her sweater to wipe the steam from the lenses. “I’m going to get my coat and boots on,” she said. “Then I’m going to come see to her. Everything will be fine.”

Mr. Timms reached out and touched my mother lightly on her arm. “Thank you, Annie,” he said, and I believe it may have been then, though he surely couldn’t have known this, that he started to fall in love with her.

It must have been a feeling that simmered those three years after Mrs. Timms died. She died that night, was dead already, in fact, when Mr. Timms stood in our living room, putting his glasses back on and waiting for my mother to come with him.

“There wasn’t a thing I could do,” she said later, after the ambulance had finally made its way through the snow and taken Mrs. Timms away. “Poor Jean. She was gone when I got there.”

My father and I had eventually put on our own coats and boots and made our way next door. My mother called for the ambulance, which was something, so my father said later, that Mr. Timms should have done instead of coming next door to our house. “He didn’t know what to do,” my mother said with a sharp bite to her voice. “That poor man. He was lost.”

Connie wasn’t crying. That would all come later. She sat on the couch in the living room and stared straight ahead, not saying a word. My mother finally sat down beside her and took her up in her arms. “You sweet girl,” my mother kept saying, rocking Connie back and forth. “You sweet, sweet girl.”

Mr. Timms was in the bedroom with Mrs. Timms, and from time to time I heard a thud and I imagined that he was banging his fist into the wall. “Go see about him,” my mother said to my father. After a while I heard his and Mr. Timms’s voices coming from the bedroom. “Oh, Jesus,” Mr. Timms said, and I heard my father say, “We’re right here, Harold.”

Then finally my father came out of the room, and without a word he went outside. Soon I heard the scrape of a shovel, and when I looked out the Timms’s front window, I saw my father clearing the sidewalk and the steps up onto the porch. He kept at it, digging out the driveway. “The ambulance was coming,” he told me once we were back in our own house. “I didn’t know what else to do but to clear it a path.”

In the weather, it took a good while, but finally the ambulance was there, its swirling red lights flashing over the Timms’s house. The paramedics took Mrs. Timms out on a gurney, and later we learned that she’d died because of a bad heart. “Who’d have thought?” my mother said. She told us that it made it plain how quick we could go. “If you want something, you better grab it,” she said. “You never know if you’ll have another chance.”

After Bill and my father finished with the Galaxie that Sunday in August, they decided to go squirrel hunting. Bill called for me, and I got up from the bed and went outside to see what he wanted.

“Grab your .410,” he told me. “We’re going after bushytails.”

I looked toward my father. He was putting down the hood of the Galaxie, and he said, “How ’bout that, Roger? It’s just the three of us here anyway. Just the three bulls. What say we get out and roam around a little? Shoot a few squirrels, have a little boy time.”

That summer he’d been trying extra-hard with me, imagining, perhaps, that he and my mother were close to being finished, and once they were, he’d want to have me on his side. The problem was he’d never been the kind of har-de-har-har man that Bill was, and any attempt on my father’s part to be friendly with me came across as forced and left me feeling uncomfortable.

We should have been talking about my mother and the fact that our family was on the verge of coming apart. We should have considered what was causing that to happen and what we might be able to do to stop it. Instead my father was puffing himself up, getting all wink-wink, palsy-walsy, pretending there wasn’t a thing wrong. It was just a summer Sunday, and we were going hunting. Men out with their shotguns. A part of me thought that if my father were truly a man, this thing between my mother and Mr. Timms wouldn’t be going on, and Connie and I would still be sweet on each other. I wouldn’t be living in the shadow of my mother’s indiscretion and my father’s inability to do anything about it. As wrong as it was, I found myself giving him the blame, thinking there was something about him—a lack of heart, or courage, or by-God-you-won’t—that made my mother do what she did.

So when he made that big show about the three bulls going off to have some boy time, I got a little fed up with the way he kept acting like we were charmed when really we weren’t at all. We were gossip. We were the family folks could feel sorry for or judge. Either way, our lives weren’t ours anymore. We belonged to the town and its prying eyes and clucking tongues. I was tired of that. I wanted my father to finally acknowledge that fact.

So I said, “Where’d Mom go?”

She’d slipped out of the house after dinner. We’d gone to services at the First Christian as usual and then come home to the meal she’d prepared. Bill came by and had coconut cream pie and coffee with us. Then he and my father went out to work on the Galaxie. I lay on my bed and heard Mr. Timms fire up his Olds. He honked his horn as he went up the street, and Bill said to my father, “There he goes.”

From my bedroom I could hear my mother singing along with the radio from next door. She had a pretty singing voice, and as I listened to her, I couldn’t help but think how happy she sounded. Soon I heard our screen door creak open and then slap against the jamb. I sat up and leaned over to look out the window. She had on a red summer dress that had a halter top and a pleated skirt. Her bare shoulders were shiny in the sunlight. She carried a box purse made from woven straw. It had strawberries and white blooms on it, and she held the handle and swung it back and forth as she walked. Her shoes, a pair of strappy sandals, slapped over the sidewalk. Her curls bounced against her bare back, and I thought she looked like a girl heading off to somewhere she’d been looking forward to, and despite the fact that I knew that Mr. Timms was most likely waiting, I couldn’t help but feel happy for her.

She turned back once and waved at my father and Bill. “Going fishin’, boys,” she said and then walked on up the street.

Now, as I waited for my father to answer my question, I saw the slightest grimace around his lips.

“She went visiting,” he said.

I wouldn’t let him off that easily. “Visiting who?”

Bill was wiping off his hands with a red shop rag. “Get your gun, hotshot.” He threw the rag into my face and gave me a hard look that told me to shut up and fall into line. “Chop, chop, buddy boy. I mean it. Right now.”

It was a quiet ride down into the country. Bill drove his El Camino, and the three of us crowded onto the bench seat. I was crammed in between Bill and my father. Our guns, my .410 and my father’s and Bill’s twelve-gauges, were cased and stowed behind us in the bed.

“Damned hot,” Bill said.

We were on the blacktop south of town, and the fields were flashing by, the corn stunted along the fencerows, the ground cracked from lack of rain.

“No good for the crops,” my father said, and it went like that for quite a while. Just a thing said here and there. The windows were down and the hot air was rushing in, and it was hard to carry on a conversation, but I knew, even if we’d been cruising along in air-conditioned quiet, no one would have felt much like talking.

That was unusual for Bill, because he generally had something to say, and he wasn’t afraid to say it. He was a different sort of man from my father. He was blustery and hot-tempered, but fun-loving too. He was always pulling a prank on someone and then looking so daggone happy about it that everyone forgave him. He was a trackman on the section gang, and back in the winter his trickster ways had finally caught up with him. He pulled a joke on Mr. Timms, stuffed five cigarette loads into one of his cigars, and when Mr. Timms put a lighter to it, the cigar exploded and frayed at its end. Mr. Timms, startled, jumped back, slipped on the icy rail, and fell onto the slope of the gravel bed.

He was all right, just shaken and bruised a little, but he was pissed off too. “I don’t have to ask who did that,” he said, staring right at Bill. “Some people are ignorant. That’s all that needs to be said about that.” What Bill didn’t know—or if he’d ever known, had no reason to recall—was that day was the anniversary of Jean Timms’s death. “Now how was I to know that?” Bill asked my father later. “He’s got it in for me now. You can by God know that for sure.” True enough, Bill had spent the rest of winter and on into spring and now summer suffering the brunt of Mr. Timms’s anger. “Any shit job you can think of,” Bill had said to my father earlier while they were working on the Galaxie. “You can bet I’m the one who’ll get it. I’ve just about had enough.” Bill blamed this all on my father. “R.T., if you just told him you know what’s what between him and Annie, maybe then he’d ease off.” Bill had never been married himself, but he thought he knew how to handle matters of the heart. “Timms wouldn’t be so quick to bust my ass if he knew that you were onto him. He’s that way. He likes to think he’s a decent man. Let him know he’s a phony, R.T., and he’ll be more humble.”