Sweet Water(69)

Is he suggesting somehow that his job would have been in jeopardy if he spoke up about what he knew? What he found? I inhale sharply. “No, not exactly. I’ve come here so someone can tell me the truth.”

“Now you want the truth, Sarah?” He looks at me as if I’ve been standing at the wrong bus stop for the last century. “I started to tell you twenty years ago, and you wouldn’t listen.”

“That’s not true.” I’m digging the sponge into a near-spotless plate. I will hate-scrub the fuck out of these dishes until they shine.

My dad cackles and then coughs again, and my concern for his health returns, but not enough to stop me from letting him explain himself. “It is true. The sun rose and set on Martin Ellsworth in your eyes. There wasn’t a person in the world who could tell you a bad thing about him. You wouldn’t hear of it.”

I’ve filled up the dish rack, and now I start drying them and putting them away, too harshly. I bang and clatter my stress away. My father’s shitty china with the blue flowers is paying dearly for my past mistakes.

“I’m listening now.” My back is turned away from him.

“I’ll tell ya all about it, but you have to stop hitting those dishes. They’re old; they’re going to break, and your mother picked them out.”

Oh shit. I sigh. “I’m sorry.” I never knew that.

I start gently massaging the plate in my hand. Dad has never moved on from my mother, and when I made my life ten miles up the street on the other side of the overpass, part of it, I realize now, was to escape the old life he refused to leave. The one where he never replaced Mother’s dated drapes and still used her old dishes.

“So it’s a short story, really. Your dear husband hazed the hell out of his pledges. Made them drink to excess. The smallest one didn’t make it. Too much alcohol, too little body mass. And then your husband’s daddy swooped down in his big black limousine and made it all disappear with a few lump sums. One to the school, marked as a donation, and one to the parents of the deceased in India, for condolences. But attached to that payment was a contract that neither party could ever file a civil suit.”

“What?” I’m numb.

“Apparently, your husband wanted him to drink just as much as the other pledges. Earn his keep. Even though he knew very well he couldn’t handle the alcohol. Then they all left him on a couch at the end of the night. Unattended.”

“Earn your keep.” It’s a phrase Martin used with the boys in regard to college admittance. “Enroll in honors classes, gifted programs. Earn your keep in the Ivy League schools among all the other kids fighting to get a spot.”

My tingly scalp is burning, and my eyes are failing. I’ve put every dish away and drained the sink, but I still need to busy my fingers. I grip the dish towel and yank at the stray strings.

“No, he wasn’t there. He was sick that night. He wasn’t . . .” My voice cracks.

When my father doesn’t speak, I glance up and find him giving me a wide-eyed look of surprise. “You really did believe that, didn’t you?”

I hold on to the counter for dear life. I’m going to be sick. “The nurse had records . . .”

“Sure she did. Martin had a little cold that week and went to the nurse and got some medicine. There’s proof of that, a record they submitted to the cops, but he didn’t have anything bad enough to put him down for days or even a full evening, like he claimed.”

No. No. No.

“You think he was there, the night that Tush died?” I ask. “I was there that night—”

“I know he was there. They made up the cover story that he wasn’t to save his ass. The president really wasn’t there, supposedly, and there was no one else to hold accountable, because it was just Martin and the pledges, so all those good ol’ boys got off scot-free.”

“But, Dad, how do you know for certain Martin was there?”

“Because, Sarah, I had to clean that pigsty of a frat house, and your husband, being the super-nerdy, organized, engineer-type that he is, kept a log of everything he did. He logged what time his pledges arrived, when they completed their duties, who was shining his shoes that day. Everything.”

“That sounds like him,” I say absentmindedly. I tie a string around my finger and pull, but I can’t feel a thing.

“I stumbled upon the log and saw that he made copious notes that evening when he claimed not to be there. Same handwriting as the ones he’d made on previous entries.”

Martin has distinct handwriting. He took some sort of calligraphy class at the Academy and still leaves curlicues at the tops of his Ts and Rs, the serifs on his Es emphasized to resemble the annoyingly lavish one on the family crest.

“Maybe he came and left—”

“The newspapers said he went home for an extended period of time because he was too sick to care for himself.” My dad shakes his head.

“He could’ve written in the wrong date.”

“If he wrote in the wrong date and it didn’t happen, then why did all the pledges get a lump sum of money from Mr. Ellsworth too?”

“What?”

“Well, what else would be their incentive for keeping their mouths shut, Sarah? They’d lost their friend. And they could’ve all been expelled for lying to the dean, but the dean was in on it too. There were seven pledges, plus the dean makes eight. He paid them each a hundred grand in cash envelopes.”