Sweet Water(66)

My hand searches the bowels of my endlessly large designer bag for my oversize sunglasses. There are too many compartments in it to find anything, and the stiff leather is unforgiving on my dry hands.

I don’t know why I thought I needed such extravagances in the first place. I’d trade a mint for a happy family and some sanity right now, for my son to be in good mental health, his focus on finishing his senior year and going to college, not his dead girlfriend and his messed-up parents who left her body in the woods.

I travel farther south on the highway and remember precisely why. To my right, the Ohio River runs brown, gleaming sludge sliding down sodden riverbanks. It flows adjacent to rusty train tracks, the remnants of a once-powerful steel mill port city still recovering after business went overseas.

Once I drive beneath the overpass, I know I’m on the other side of the proverbial tracks, where I could never afford designer bags and sunglasses.

I went through a brief spending spree in my early twenties, after I’d had my children and struggled to lose the weight (by Sewickley standards). I buried my insecurities in designer goods to lift my self-esteem, and then when I regained my wits and waistline and ditched my minor case of the baby blues, I realized those purchases were just filler items for what I was missing inside from my lower-middle-class upbringing.

When the cancer survivor attended my mother’s funeral with her freshly grown, silky hair, she was dripping with expensive things—a leather bag with symbols on it I didn’t recognize, large diamonds that scratched when she hugged me, and nicely threaded clothing that hung just right.

She became my pace horse, my symbol for what I should strive for.

But then, when I got there, to that same place, at a very early age, I realized that wasn’t how you won the race. None of that stuff really matters. Just because I have it doesn’t mean I need it.

As I pull up to my childhood home, where Dad still lives, a three-bedroom, all-brick bungalow built in the 1950s, I’m saddened by how I regarded it growing up. It’s a walk-up in the Avalon community with crisp green shutters, a one-car garage, and one maple tree of notable mention out front.

There was nothing dazzling enough about it to make me eager to invite over friends when I was younger, but today it looks just perfect, quaint. I think I resented it growing up because no matter how hard Dad had worked, he still seemed to struggle to pay the mortgage every month.

Over the years, I stopped bringing the boys over, even though the house has a nice concrete patio out back, which was fine for me to play on when I was a kid but seemed insufficient beneath the raucous feet of my two active sons.

Dad only comes to my house for visits these days. We have a dining room table large enough to seat an army and a hallway bathroom with extras in it, like a bidet, which Dad doesn’t care for. He seems strangely uncomfortable when he comes over, most likely because he and Martin have never really gotten along, even after all these years. Dad would say off-color things like, “Well, la-dee-da, not only do you have robot gadgets to clean your floors, you also have toilets to clean your—”

“Dad!” I always pray he doesn’t use the bathroom when he comes over so he won’t comment on the bidet. Josh’s parents installed it, and even though we don’t use it, Martin isn’t handy like Dad, so he certainly isn’t going to uninstall it. Dad made it a focal point of discussion several times when the family conversation had run dry.

The boys found it especially amusing, especially when they were younger, a time when poop and fart jokes were all the rage. But unfortunately for all parties involved, Dad didn’t realize the joke had peaked with his grandchildren’s introduction into young adulthood.

Today, I’d love to be amused and aghast by my father’s off-color jokes, but these are different times. I am here for one reason only—to find out what Dad found in Martin’s room that day that’d made him so upset. What was he trying to tell me in the ornament shop? Surely Josh was way off base with his assumptions of Martin’s guilt. I just need Dad to prove it to me.

Thinking back to my conversation with Hanna and the happenings in the dean’s office shortly after Tush had died, her response sticks out more now than it did before. “I think Martin is very lucky he has good lawyers.”

She mentioned Meat too. They’d both been in deep trouble, but they were also both cleared of the charges.

I think of the more recent headlines from a Penn State hazing incident that went sideways and resulted in a student’s death. The frat brothers had serious charges thrown at them like manslaughter and aggravated assault.

Pictures on students’ phones captured bits and pieces of the night and were used as evidence. What if someone had pictures of Yazmin and Finn? There are cameras in the sky everywhere nowadays. There’s no way we’re going to get away with this. Maybe Martin is comparing this to Livvy’s case, but that was in the early 2000s, and things weren’t nearly as high-tech as they are now.

Anxiety hits me hard as I see Dad’s truck in the driveway and realize it’s been a very long time since I visited him. There are also a few things I notice that are amiss as I walk to the front door. Dad is usually particular about weeding and not letting the plant life sprawl through the limestone walkway, but I see some noticeable patches of green that would’ve driven him straight to the shed for his special gardening shears years ago. I wonder why he hasn’t taken care of them.