Thank You for All Things Page 27

  “At least I didn’t have to use Grandpa Sam’s hoist to get you up,” I say, and once Oma’s on her feet, she laughs until her eyes get drippy.

  “Speaking of your grandpa, I’d better check on him. Want to join me?” she asks.

  “No. I’ve got things to do.”

  Oma pauses, wiping her eyes, though the humor is gone from her mouth. “Honey, you haven’t been spending much time with your grandpa lately. I’ll bet he misses your company.”

  “He’s asleep most of the time now, anyway,” I say.

  “But his spirit knows you’re there.” She watches me closely for a moment.

  “I’m fine, Persephone,” I say, using her new name so I can stay on her good side. I know Mom is going to tell her I rode all the way to town.

  Oma pauses. “Oh, you don’t have to call me that anymore. I’m not sure it feels right. I’ll just be until the right name finds me.”

  The second she slips into Grandpa Sam’s room, I hurry upstairs to get my memory stick. I don’t run on the way back, though, because I don’t want to make Oma suspicious by sounding like I’m in a rush.

  I wait for Milo, since the shower’s stopped. And after what seems like forever, he emerges from the bathroom, his hair sopping wet and dripping on his lenses, comb ruts separating the strands into tiny, uniform columns. “I did ten miles today. In record time too.” Milo looks over at Feynman, who’s sleeping so soundly that his tongue is lying out on the floor.

  I wrinkle my nose. “You’re such a bragger.”

  I say this to offend him, of course, so he’ll get lost. “Geesh. I was just telling you,” he says. He pats his thigh for Feynman to wake and follow, and Feynman does, though his head is low and his eyes are half shut.

  The second Milo’s door closes, I grab Mom’s computer off the counter and plug the memory stick in. I’m just yanking it out when the county nurse’s car pulls into the drive. “Oh, Barbara’s going to show me how to use that hoist,” Oma says as she hurries to get the door.

  I don’t want to learn how to do that, even though Oma wants me to so I can help her. Instead, I hurry upstairs and plug the memory stick into my computer and search for Mom’s latest journal entry. It was written just last night!

  He’s gone. This time, I fear, for good.

  I tried so hard to let what I was feeling on the inside come out, but it was like my body wouldn’t cooperate. He pried until he got the story of Howard out of me. If only he had pried equally hard to get the words “I love you” out of me. I tried to wrench them out of myself, but the weight on my chest wouldn’t let them rise. And because my body wouldn’t cooperate, he’s gone.

  Everyone’s asleep and I’m at the kitchen table now, trying not to listen to Dad in the next room. He’s gone, for all intents and purposes. His mind has drifted off to wherever it is the mind goes before death comes. Now he only waits for his body to cooperate and release him. I can’t look at him, and apparently Lucy can’t anymore either. It’s ironic that once again, Dad and I are alike. Both of us waiting to be set free.

  I tried calling Clay again tonight. He never picked up. I guess this means I’m grouped with Ma now, because he doesn’t take my calls either. Ma still leaves him messages. Sweet messages, telling him what’s new with her, me, the kids, and now Dad. Occasionally he leaves her one back—dialing her around midnight, once he knows she’s sound asleep, pretending it’s the first chance he’s had to call all day and stiffly making one or two comments before promising to catch her soon. Ma misses him, but unlike me, she has hopes that he’ll let us in his life again.

  I feel bad for Ma that Clay has shut her out of his life. She carries the school photos that Clay’s wife, Judy, sends in her “Grandmother’s brag book,” photos of kids she’s seen only once, even though Clay’s oldest, his daughter, is almost as old as the twins—and she saves the thank-you notes they write her for the Christmas gifts and the few bucks she sends them on their birthdays. And what? Pretends that it’s not Judy’s hand that writes the notes from the boys, and that those nice granddaughterly words Brit writes weren’t dictated to her by her mother? That can’t make her feel all that special, can it?

  I’m not as nice as Ma. The last time I bothered to call Clay and he actually picked up—just two weeks after we got here (picked up, I’m sure, only because he thought I was bringing him the “good news” that Dad was dead)—I confronted him. I told him that Ma doesn’t deserve this. That she didn’t do anything.

  He told me I was right. She didn’t do a goddamn thing.

  I pretended I didn’t get his point. I told him how she cried for him every day after he left, and I asked if he knew that. All he had to say about that was that she always cried when she was drunk.

  I sighed and reminded him that she wasn’t the same person anymore. Then it was his turn to sigh. “I’m just not one for visiting graveyards,” he told me.

  There was an awkward pause, and then I said, “Speaking of graveyards … are you coming home for Dad’s funeral?”

  He told me that he’d see what his schedule looked like. God, that burned me. I reminded him that I didn’t want to do that freak show either, but I had to. I suggested that maybe he could come for Ma’s sake, and mine, and I got snippy when I suggested that maybe his clients could wait a couple days to have their boobs perked and their asses lifted.

  “That’s not the kind of surgery I do anymore,” he said flatly. “I do reconstructive surgery. Kids with deformities. Accident victims who got their faces rearranged. Those sorts of things.”

  I paused. I wanted to tell him that I was proud of him for making something out of himself. For having an honest career. Instead, I sniped that I would have known about his career shift if he ever bothered to talk to us. He said good-bye shortly after that, leaving me loathing myself for my knack for fucking it up with every male I ever had in my life, be it lover or brother, father or what have you.

  It’s hard to believe that Clay was only seventeen when he walked out of this house—this family—for the last time.

  I never did know what started the argument. It could have been anything: Clay not dumping the garbage the way Dad wanted it dumped—the burnables in the burning barrel, the slop taken out to the trees behind the shed to rot or be eaten by wild animals, the cans tossed in the heap in the woods until the heap got high enough for Dad to bury. Or maybe it was just because Dad didn’t like the look of Clay that day.

  I was upstairs when I heard their voices rise, seemingly in unison. My ears perked instantly, my intestines cramping involuntarily.

  I opened my bedroom door and stood frozen. Listening. Willing Ma to hurry home from Marie’s, where she’d gone to have a new zipper put into a pair of Dad’s work pants. Not that it would have mattered if she’d been home, of course. She’d only have done the same as me: stood frozen until things got totally out of control, then hovered at the edge of the scene, pleading with them to stop, her pleas not any more effective than mine in penetrating Dad’s rage-reddened ears.

  “You worthless little prick!” Dad bellowed “When I tell you to do something, why in the hell can’t you do it right? You aren’t worth the bucks it costs to keep you fed.”

  I heard the sound of breaking glass and Dad telling Clay he could clean that up too. Clay yelled back that he wasn’t the one who threw it, his voice low and level. Challenging.

  Dad’s words weren’t unusual, of course. I’d heard them all before. But what was different on this particular day was that his rage seemed to be starting at the same pitch it normally ended on.

  Ma had warned us about this. How Dad was under a lot of stress. “Just try to do as you’re told, and don’t argue. We have to show him a little more patience right now. The bank turned down his loan application, saying that it’s too risky to give him a loan that size and suggesting he find some investors, then come back. You know your father won’t do that. I think it’s finally sinking in to him that he’s never going to have that sawmill and that he’ll be w
orking at the paper mill the rest of his life. He’s losing his dream, kids.”

  I assured Ma we’d be good, but all Clay had to say was, “Fuck him and his sawmill.”

  Clay was even more defiant after Ma’s warning. Not because he didn’t believe that Dad was more volatile than ever, but maybe because he knew what was coming and he just wanted to get it over with. Nothing was worse than the calm before Dad’s storms.

  I hurried down to the kitchen and stood in the doorway. “Where’s Ma?” I asked, as though I didn’t know, and as if I didn’t notice that they were standing with their chests a foot apart, jaws as tight as their fists.

  Neither of them acknowledged that I’d spoken.

  “Don’t you get lippy with me, boy,” Dad said. “I’ll fuckin’ deck you. Don’t think I won’t.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be so stupid to think you wouldn’t,” Clay said.

  Dad slowly, deliberately, moved in until his chest was butted up against Clay’s, the pocket of his T-shirt level with the pocket on Clay’s. “I don’t know about that. You’re pretty fucking stupid.”

  It hurt me, hearing Dad talk to Clay like that. When we were little, Dad let him walk on his boots, and sometimes he even got down on his hands and knees to be Clay’s bucking bronco. Cuddled him once, when Clay was thrown into the coffee table and split his cheek open. And on weekends, Dad even took him fishing at Clement’s Creek. I resented the special treatment Clay got back then, but I didn’t have to hate him long, because it all stopped about the time Clay started school. In time, I had to wonder if maybe it didn’t hurt Clay more than me, when things got so bad. After all, you can’t miss what you never had. But Clay had it all once.

  I silently begged Clay to do what he’d always done. Put as much distance between Dad and himself as he could, and do it as quickly as possible. But Clay—six inches taller in the last eight months, with arms bulky from using the weight room after school—didn’t flee this time. Instead, Clay told him, “Go ahead. Deck me. And I’ll fucking deck you back.”

  Clay swayed slightly, then thrust himself against Dad. Dad, not expecting any physical force from Clay, had to step back on one boot to keep his balance.

  “Clay!” I shouted.

  Shock stiffened Dad’s face, but only for a moment; then the corner of his mouth curled up sardonically. “What? You put on five pounds and you think you can take your old man now? That it?” Dad moved so close that Clay had to tip his head back a notch to keep his gaze locked with Dad’s. “You couldn’t take down a goddamn pussy, you little punk.”

  Blotchy patches of red burned over Clay’s cheeks. Not out of shame this time, but out of rage. “Oh,” he said, mimicking Dad’s mocking tone. “Is that what makes you such a big man? The fact that you’ve taken down a few pussies? Guess it’s gotta be, since you aren’t getting that big fancy mill that you were so sure was gonna make you a somebody.” Clay shook his head and laughed. “You know what, old man? YOU’RE the fucking joke, not me. YOU’RE the fucking loser!”

  In a split second, Dad grabbed the front of Clay’s shirt, twisting it and yanking so that the armholes strained against Clay’s underarms and exposed his belly. “You fucking little bastard. I should kill you!”

  I was standing no more than a foot from the phone. I could dial Marie’s, I thought in my panic. Marie would hear the trouble and come. She’d know what to do. She’d be here in—

  But there was no time, of course. Already, Clay was in the process of doing the unthinkable, cranking back his arm. I shouted at him not to do it, but he did it anyway. His fist met Dad’s jaw with a crack.

  Dad’s head jolted back, then cocked forward, his eyes bulging first with shock, then fury.

  He let go of Clay’s shirt, leaving the cotton twisted and bunched over Clay’s heart like a crushed white rose. Then, in a blur of movement, his fist rammed into Clay’s face with double the force Clay had used. Vomit rose and soured my throat while blood gushed from Clay’s nose.

  For a split second, I expected Dad to recoil at what he’d done. Even though he’d slapped Clay around plenty in the last couple of years, he had never outright punched him, the way a man slugs another man. Even then, when it was only a cuff, Dad apologized at some point, pleading with him (as he did with Ma) to not push him so hard. “God damn it, boy,” he’d always end up saying, “you know I’m a hothead like my old man was. Don’t make me act like him. For God’s sakes, I don’t want to act like him.”

  But Dad didn’t look sorry at all. And when he finally found his words, it wasn’t to apologize. “You gonna call me a fucking loser now, boy? Huh? You had enough from this ‘loser,’ or do you want some more?”

  Clay didn’t bother trying to catch the blood that spilled down over his mouth. “Go ahead. Beat me until you kill me. You think I give a fuck?” Blood-tainted spittle showered from Clay’s mouth. “You’d do me a fucking favor by getting me out of this hellhole.”

  Clay pulled his shoulders back, fists clenched, blood oozing down over the wadded white of his T-shirt. “Go on. Show me what a big man you are. I dare you!”

  “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God,” I could hear Ma say. But it wasn’t Ma’s voice saying those words. It was mine.

  Dad looked confused. He stepped back and turned around, as though he was going to walk away. But he didn’t walk away. Instead, he cocked his arm and bunched his fist. Then he spun back and, in one movement, delivered his fist like a cannonball into Clay’s stomach.

  I don’t know how many times he hit Clay. I closed my eyes and clamped my hands over my ears, but I could still hear the thuds and the grunts that accompanied each blow. I cried out for Ma, for Marie, for anybody who could make Dad stop.

  It took me a few moments to realize that my pleas and Clay’s gasps were the only sounds left in the room. I opened my eyes and Dad was gone. Outside, I heard his truck start and saw a smear of black pass the window.

  I hurried to Clay, who was bent over, one hand gripping the edge of the counter and the other clutching his ribs as he struggled to get to his feet.

  I grabbed him to help him up, his skin damp and hot beneath his shirt. There was blood splattered on the linoleum and drops falling on the tops of my sandal straps, oozing between my toes. “Oh, God, Clay, you’re bleeding all over the place.”

  Clay unfolded himself with a groan. His eyes were as red as the blood that drained from his nose.

  “I’ll call Ma!” I said.

  Clay lifted the hem of his shirt and swabbed his face. “What the fuck good would that do?” he said between broken teeth.

  I was babbling, and I couldn’t stop. “I’ll call Marie. She’ll come and take you to the hospital. Al will come too, and—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said.

  I stood silent, shaking, as he headed toward the door, groaning as he fished in his pocket for the keys to the beat-up Chevy he’d bought from Henry Bickett. Out the door he went, leaving me standing there in his blood.

  Clay never came home again. Not once.

  Mr. Walker called me into his office the first day Clay returned to school, asking if I knew what had happened to Clay’s face—which was badly swollen and bluish-purple, the bulges under his eyes tinged yellow. His nose was cocked and lumped.

  There was no question in my mind about what to say. “He got into a fight with some boys from Larkston,” I said. “They beat him up because one of them thought he was hitting on his girlfriend.” It was the story Clay had told me to tell, when he grabbed my arm in the hallway while we changed classes, just seconds after my name was called over the loudspeaker, summoning me to the principal’s office.

  “You sure about that, Tess?” Walker said, scrutinizing me behind thick glasses.

  “That’s what he told me.”

  I packed his things in trash bags and moved them around the back of the shed, just like he asked me to do when he stopped me in the hall to ask how it went with Walker. He must have come for them in the middle of the night, because the
y were gone on the fifth morning.

  If the school ever caught on that Clay wasn’t living at home, they didn’t question Ma or me. Clay’s car was in the parking lot each morning when I got to school, and it was there when I boarded the bus each night.

  Nobody seemed to know where Clay slept. Rumors circulated that he’d moved in with his girlfriend, Heather, and her family, but when Ma called there to check, Heather’s father assured her that they hadn’t seen Clay since “the incident,” and it was better that way: Heather didn’t need to be running around with “trash.”

  A couple weeks later, word trickled to Mitzy that one of the starters on the basketball team, Colin Blake, was convinced that Clay was living in his car. He’d caught Clay in the boys’ bathroom at six o’clock in the morning when he came in for an early practice, and Clay had the sink stopped up with a sock and was washing his armpits with soap from the dispenser.

  Clay got a job at the Piggly Wiggly after school, stocking shelves and bagging groceries. It must have afforded him enough money to make it, because every time I chased him down in the hall and tried to give him the small wad of bills Mom siphoned from the grocery fund, he shoved my hand away, saying he didn’t want a thing from “those fuckers.” I kept the money hidden in my room because I couldn’t tell Ma that he refused her help.

  “Ma didn’t do anything. She wasn’t even there,” I told him. “And she’s bawling her eyes out every day, worrying about you. At least give her a call so she can hear that you’re all right.”

  But he never did.

  Clay talked to me less and less in school in that last half of our senior year, until he wasn’t speaking to me at all. Or anyone else, for that matter. He dropped Heather and his friends right after the big blowout, which was probably a good thing, since all they did was party—and his name appeared on the high honor roll that last semester. He didn’t show up at graduation, even though he’d won scholarship money. And a week after graduation, somebody told Dad that they saw Clay boarding the Greyhound.