The Favor (21 page)

She turned to see Deb, who’d come in the back door, and Kathy staring in confusion at the garbage pail. It overflowed with a thick and gloppy mess of potato and macaroni salads. Janelle gaped.

Deb shook her head. “Oh, gosh.”

“But I don’t...” Janelle shook her head, not sure what to say. Hours of work, ruined. All that food, wasted.

“Did you leave her alone?” Kathy’s expression said she was trying to be understanding. Her tone, however, was more than a little judgmental.

“I took a nap.”

“She does this. I told you,” Deb said to Kathy in an undertone.

“You left her alone,” Kathy stated with a frown. “I thought you were here to be making sure this sort of thing didn’t happen—”

Janelle didn’t stay to hear more. Nan’s door was closed tight, though Janelle had left it cracked open. She knocked twice and opened it before Nan could tell her to come in. Her grandmother sat on the edge of her bed, the front of her nightgown thickly stained, the trash can at her feet filled with crumpled tissues. She pulled a few more from the box while Janelle watched, and used them to scrub at her hands. She looked up.

Nan looked so sad; her expression broke Janelle’s heart. “I wanted to help for the picnic. I don’t know what I thought, honey. I got confused. I didn’t remember making that bowl of potato salad. I thought it had been in there for a long time.”

“So you threw it away.”

Nan nodded. “I threw it all away. I didn’t want anyone getting sick from it. Then I came in here and thought I’d just lie down again until everyone came. And then I realized what a mess I’d made.”

“You know we just made that potato salad yesterday, right?” Janelle took the tissue box away and set it on Nan’s shelf. “Let me help you. That’s not going to do it.”

“Is everyone here?” Nan’s voice shook.

Janelle forced a smile, forced herself to look Nan in the eyes. “Yes. So we’re going to get you cleaned up. Put on something nice for your company. And then we’re going to go out and have a picnic, okay?”

“But the potato salad...”

“Someone can run to the store and get some more. Or I’ll just make up a quick pasta salad. We have plenty of elbow macaroni in the pantry, and with some Italian dressing, a few olives, cherry tomatoes, it’ll be great. No problem.” Janelle put her hands over Nan’s, ignoring the slick goo of mayo and mustard. “Come on, Nan. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine!” she cried. “I ruined it!”

Bennett had gone through a tough period when he was in third grade, just after Janelle and Ryan had called it quits. He’d blamed himself for everything from the mail not being delivered on time to the teacher yelling at his class and making them miss recess, to his favorite TV program getting canceled. He’d cried out “I ruined it” more than once, just this way, and Janelle had done the same for him that she did for Nan now.

“You didn’t.” She squeezed her hands gently. “There’s plenty of food.”

“Who’s out there? Deb? Joey?”

“Yes. And the cousins. Everyone we invited.”

Nan sniffed. “Kathy will say something about it, you know she will. She can’t keep her opinions to herself, never could.”

“We’ll tell her there were spiders in it.”

Nan looked surprised. Then slightly gleeful. “No!”

“Sure.” Janelle grinned. “I’ll tell her you put the bowls out on the counter while I was napping, and spiders crawled in there and you had to throw them away.”

“She’ll never believe it.” Nan laughed, then again.

“Doesn’t matter. That’s what we’ll tell her, anyway.” Janelle got up and went to the plastic stacking storage bins she’d tucked into a corner of the bedroom. When Bennett was a baby she’d kept them next to his diaper changing area to store supplies, and she’d found a similar use for them here. Wipes, lotions, medical supplies. She took a package of wipes and held it up. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

As she wiped away the mess from Nan’s hands, careful not to scrub too hard at the thin and fragile skin, her grandma sat quietly. When she was done, Janelle meant to move away, but Nan took her hands and held them. She turned hers over to show the brown spots on the backs, the swollen knuckles. She still wore her wedding band, plain gold, along with the broader band that had been her husband’s.

“Sometimes I dream I’m young again,” she said. “I dream I’m a girl. And then I look at my hands, and I know I’m really an old, old woman.”

Janelle didn’t know what to say to that, but when Nan squeezed her fingers and smiled, she realized that sometimes nothing needed to be said.

TWENTY-FIVE

“I SAW YOUR brother at Mass last weekend.” Marlena Tierney’s red hair had gone gray long ago, but in the past few years she’d started dying it again.

The color was garish, unnatural. Clown-red. It matched the bright lipstick she still insisted on wearing. The nail polish. She wasn’t an old woman, but time hadn’t been particularly kind to her, and she knew it.

“He sends his love,” Gabe’s mother continued. “Said to tell you to make sure Andrew gets to church. You, too.”

Mike probably included their dad in that, but Marlena would’ve stuck her hand in a jar of angry wasps before she mentioned Ralph’s name. Gabe leaned forward to light the cigarette she held up. She gave him a coy smile, the way she always did, but refrained from cupping his hand the way she would’ve if he’d been another man and not her son. He knew her ways, all right.

“You should tell him we need to see him more often,” Gabe said, knowing it made no difference. “Andy misses him.”

“He’s very busy. He’s got an active congregation, you know that. His parishioners need him to be there for them. It’s not,” she said, “like he can just go on vacation or something any time he wants to.”

Since Gabe knew for a fact that his brother had indeed gone on a vacation, a cruise to Mexico and the Bahamas, no less, this argument held little weight with him. Gabe hadn’t taken a vacation in years, not unless you counted the hunting trips to camp, which he did not. “We live less than three hours from him. He could make a day trip more than once every six months.”

Marlena shrugged and drew in the smoke, holding it for a few seconds before letting it stream out the side of her mouth. She looked at him through squinted eyes. “You could go see him, too, you know. He’d love to see you. It wouldn’t kill you to go to church, either.”

“It might.” He smiled.

After half a minute, she smiled back. That was the mother he remembered best, or at least wanted to. The one who smiled and laughed and got down on the floor with him to play with Matchbox cars and LEGO. Not the one who sat and wept at the kitchen table or locked herself in the bathroom for hours. Not the one who’d left them. And not this present-day crone who’d asked Jesus for forgiveness plenty of times, but never her own sons.

“How
is
your brother?” Marlena asked after the clock’s second hand ticked in silence one time too many. “Andrew.”

“You could come see him yourself. Find out.”

Marlena stubbed out her cigarette only half smoked. “You know that’s not a good idea. What with the...problems.”

They’d been over this before, a dozen times over the years. Gabe guessed he’d go over it a dozen more without any expectation her decision would change. Marlena had come to the hospital to see Andy after the accident, when he was still unconscious. She’d stared at his bruised and bloodied face for a long time without a word, then turned on her heel. Gabe had followed her to the parking lot, where she’d fumbled with a cigarette and leaned onto the hood of her car as if she might be sick or faint.

“I never wanted it to be like this,” she’d said without looking up at him. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

Gabe, who hadn’t eaten or slept more than a few minutes at a time in the four days since the accident, had pulled his lighter from his pocket. It was the first time he’d lit her cigarette, and that time she
had
cupped his hand to hold the flame steady. Her fingers had been cold, the flirtatious smile she gave him warm before it slid from her face and left her expression blank.

“Nice lighter,” she’d said.

“It was a present.”

Marlena had nodded as if that made sense. He remembered how greedily she’d sucked at the cigarette, as if the smoke was oxygen. The sun had turned her hair to fire.

“Don’t you understand? I thought I was doing the best thing,” she’d told him.

Gabe knew the smell of bullshit. Whatever his mother had thought when she decided to leave her husband and three sons behind without so much as a forwarding address, he didn’t believe it really had anything to do with anyone but herself.

“We all thought you were dead,” he’d told her, just to see if she looked surprised.

She hadn’t. “That was your father’s idea. Not mine.”

“But you let him do it.”

That was the first time he’d seen her smile. “Don’t you get it? Nobody
lets
Ralph Tierney do anything. He does what he wants, how he wants it, and you’d better do it, too, or else....”

“Or else you end up almost dead or wishing you were,” Gabe had said.

That was when she got in her car and left him there.

Years had passed, but nothing changed. Andy woke up, forgetting most everything in his life. They never told him his mother was alive. Mike had sided with her on that one, and Gabe hadn’t had the heart to fight them. Mike knew Andy better, after all. As for their father, when he heard his wife had gone to see her son in the hospital, all he’d done was spit to the side.

“It’s not his problems that are the issue,” Gabe said now. “It’s yours.”

Marlena scowled. “If you’re going to talk to me that way, Gabriel, you can march yourself right out of here. I don’t need a lecture from you on how to live my life.”

“Surely the blessed Father Mike would tell you the same thing.” Though he couldn’t have, because if the hallowed priest-son had told their mother to visit with Andy, she’d have done it. With bells on.

“Michael agrees with me that it would be too much for Andrew at this point. It would be too confusing, too hurtful. It’s better this way,” Marlena said stubbornly, but without looking Gabe in the eyes, as if he might use some secret laser power to force her to agree.

Gabe sat back in the chair. “Right.”

She gave him a narrow-eyed glare. “You’re so much like your father.”

It was the easiest way to get him to leave, comparing him to the old man, and she knew it. Gabe didn’t give her the satisfaction. He crossed his ankle over his knee and leaned back with a small smile.

“You even look like him,” she said. “I’m sure the ladies just eat you alive, don’t they, Gabriel? I bet you have them lined up for blocks just waiting to get a piece of you. And yet here you are, almost forty years old and not married. Not even a girlfriend. I’ll never have any grandchildren, at this rate.”

“You’ll never have any grandchildren, period.”

She looked sad; he even believed she was. “I guess it’s just as well, since if you had any kids I’m sure you wouldn’t even allow me to see them.”

“
I
see you,” he pointed out.

“Once every few months, and then you come and sit for a while and berate or insult me.” Marlena sniffed and delicately pulled another cigarette from the pack. It hung from her bottom lip as she spoke, gesturing toward him. “Light me up.”

He did.

“I see you’re still using that old lighter.”

She’d given him a new one for his birthday a few years ago. Shiny, silver, engraved with his initials. He had it in a drawer at home. He flipped the lid closed on this one and tucked it back into his pocket.

“Michael tells me she’s back in town. Living with her grandmother again. She has a son....”

Gabe got up from the table. “Don’t. Even.”

Marlena fluttered her hands, doing her best to look innocent. “What? What?”

She knew what. Gabe grabbed his coat from the back of the chair, already reaching for his keys. “Tell my brother he should come and visit his other brother more often. Andy misses him.”

“I just want to see you have a family, Gabriel. A wife.” Her words caught him at the back door. “I just want to see you happy.”

Gabe paused with his hand on the knob. “Because that whole marriage and kids thing worked out so well for you, right?”

From behind him, Marlena gave a heavy sigh. “Don’t judge everything by the mistakes your father and I made.”

He laughed at that. Shook his head. “That’s kind of all I have to go by, isn’t it?”

She called out to him from the doorway as he was getting in his truck. “I just want to see you stop being so angry all the time!”

Gabe revved the engine in response and drove away. He looked in the rearview mirror and watched her wave. He didn’t wave back.

TWENTY-SIX

Then

WHEN JANELLE WAS small she could lean out and grab Gabe’s hand across the alley. Surely now that she’s bigger, her legs longer, she can actually step across to the window, so long as his is open on the other side. Trouble is, Gabe’s window is closed, and he has his headphones on. And why would she want to try and get from her window into Gabe’s?

The answer is simple. She’s been watching him, on and off, for the past couple weeks. If she can see him, she knows he can see her. At first she made sure to keep her curtains closed. But one night after she’d turned off her light and lay in bed, September still hot enough to feel like summer, she’d watched him come out of the shower and into his room. She’d watched him take off his towel and lie down on his bed and do that thing boys do. The thing girls do, too.

Did he know she watched him? Janelle didn’t think so. He’d acted too unselfconscious for that. Not like he was putting on a show. Not like she did the next night, when she came out of the bathroom with her hair slicked back and wet, her body still so damp her thin T-shirt clung to her. She’d put on some music and danced and danced, never once looking at the window or giving him any idea she knew he saw her...but she hoped he did.

It’s been about a month of that, now. Back and forth, sometimes her light stays on and his goes off. Sometimes she sits in the dark and watches him. And now, tonight, she measures the distance between their windows with her eyes.