The Weight of Him(30)

His anger ebbed to embarrassment and he spoke in a rush, trying to hold on to his temper and the strength it lent him. “You know what I know, Lisa? I know it always has to be your way or no way. Well, not this time.” He swung around and barged out the back door.

*

Billy returned to the yard, relieved to see Lisa’s car gone. Tricia stood leaning against the back wall.

“Is she long gone?” Billy asked.

“Not long enough,” Tricia said. He gave a small laugh. Smirking, Tricia dropped her cigarette butt and squashed it with her shoe. “She means well.”

He nodded at the killed cigarette. “Would you not give them up?” he asked gently.

She looked into the distance, her face hard again. “We all have our crutches.”

His lower jaw slid to the right, setting his teeth on edge.

“I will go back off them eventually,” she said, softening. “Besides,” she said, gruff again, “they’re too fecking expensive.” She pushed off the wall and returned inside.

He looked at the umbrella clothesline, and at the empty space where the old clothesline used to be, asking himself why he hadn’t swapped it out much sooner. Why Tricia hadn’t insisted. Maybe to punish themselves.

Tricia reappeared at the back door with a plate of leftovers for the feral cats, her cheek bulging. She had taken to sucking a mint after every cigarette, an attempt to mask the reek of burnt tobacco. As soon as she dumped the leftovers into bowls, the cats descended, their noises like children crying.

She knew he hated her to bring the cats around, full of fleas and disease. It had started with one mangy creature many years ago, a white and black kitten on the verge of starvation that Tricia had nursed back to health with a doll’s bottle. Now the number of feral cats sometimes climbed to as high as seven or eight a day. His father said Billy should take a shotgun to them. “Survival of the fastest.”

Tricia made mewling noises and the cats called back to her. When Michael was a baby, Billy would whistle and Michael would also purse his lips, blowing only tiny saliva bubbles. It made everyone laugh.

Back and forth the noises went between Tricia and the cats, as if in lively conversation. Some days it seemed she talked more to those cats than she did to anyone else of late. Not that she’d ever been all that talkative or outgoing. She didn’t like to get too close to people. Once, after a few drinks, she’d said, “It all ends in tears.”

When Tricia was nine, her mother died of throat cancer, and it was left to Tricia, the oldest girl, to take care of her father and five siblings. Her father had died about three years back, that horrendous motor neuron disease, and over the past two decades all but one of Tricia’s siblings, an older brother she wasn’t close to, had emigrated down under, to Melbourne. She’d known much more family death and broken bonds than Billy ever had, and then on top of all that, Michael.

She kept her attention on the cats. “That’s it, eat up.”

“You know you’re only adding to the problem?” he said.

“What do you want me to do? Let them die?” Her words hung in the air and she hugged herself. He understood how now, more than ever, she’d feel the need to keep things alive, especially those creatures with the odds stacked against them.

She kept her attention on the cats. They ate fast, devouring every last scrap. “Everything must have built and built in his head until it got to be too much somehow. Do you think that was it? Could it really be that simple? That terrible?”

“Yes,” he said with a rasp.

She flapped her arms, shooing the cats. “You’re done, go on, go.”

She returned inside. Billy stayed in the yard. One cat remained, a large gray and black tabby somersaulting over the grass and holding hard to a dead bird in its paws. Over and over the two tumbled. Then the supposedly dead bird took to the air, gliding more than flying, and traveling dangerously low, but still managing to make its escape.

As Billy reached the back door, the bird further confounded him and flew back into view. The second it returned to the lawn, the cat pounced. Billy charged, shouting.

He stood over the bird on the grass, breathing hard. There was no blood or sign of injury, but it was dead this time for sure. He bent down and cupped it in his hands—its body blue-black, its neck brown, and a single white stripe in its inky tail. He couldn’t understand why it had returned. Suddenly angry, he fired the tiny corpse into the far field. For long moments afterward, its warmth stayed on his hands.





Ten

At breakfast, Anna sliced and quartered her grilled tomato, spilling its juice and green seeds. Her knife rushed to rescue her eggs and sausage from the bleed, saving them from cross-contamination. A picky eater, every meal with her was a production. Had been right from the beginning.

Billy pulled his attention away from her mouthwatering breakfast, remembering long-ago nighttime trips to the supermarket to get various kinds of baby formula for her, his large hands grasping at any and all mixtures that might get her to sleep through the night.

Mostly, though, he stacked his basket with food for himself and would savage biscuits, bars of chocolate, sliced cheese and deli meats, and bags of sharp, salty crisps in his car in the dark. Anything to fortify himself before his return home and Anna’s inconsolable screams, Tricia’s frantic pacing.

He would try his best, but nothing he could do would soothe Anna. Back then, she had only ever wanted her mother. Michael, on the other hand, had always favored him, right up until that day in the sea in Kilkee.