The Best of Me(86)
We’d been on the road for a little more than an hour when we stopped at a farmers’ market. Inside an open-air pavilion, a woman offered complimentary plates of hummus served with a corn and black-bean salad, so we each accepted one and took seats on a bench. Twenty years earlier, the most a place like this might have offered was fried okra. Now there was organic coffee and artisanal goat cheese. Above our heads hung a sign that read WHISPERING DOVE RANCH, and just as I thought that we might be anywhere, I noticed that the music piped through the speakers was Christian—the new kind, which says that Jesus is awesome.
Hugh brought my father a plastic cup of water. “You OK, Lou?”
“Fine,” my father answered.
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking, since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us—us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?
“I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?
At the far end of the parking lot was a stand selling reptiles. In giant tanks were two pythons, each as big around as a fire hose. The heat seemed to suit them, and I watched as they raised their heads, testing the screened ceilings. Beside the snakes was a low pen corralling an alligator with its mouth banded shut. It wasn’t full-grown but perhaps an adolescent, around three feet long and grumpy-looking. A girl had stuck her arm through the wire and was stroking the thing’s back while it glared, seething. “I’d like to buy everything here just so I could kill it,” I said.
My father mopped his forehead with a Kleenex. “I’m with you, brother.”
When we were young and would set off for the beach, I’d look out the window at all the landmarks we drove by—the Purina silo on the south side of Raleigh, the Klan billboard—knowing that when we passed them a week later, I’d be miserable. Our vacation over, now there’d be nothing to live for until Christmas. My life is much fuller than it was back then, yet this return felt no different. “What time is it?” I asked Amy.
And instead of saying “Who cares?” she snapped, “You tell me. You’re the one with a watch on.”
At the airport a few hours later, I picked sand from my pockets and thought of our final moments at the beach house I’d bought. I was on the front porch with Phyllis, who had just locked the door, and we turned to see the others in the driveway below us. “So is that one of your sisters?” she asked, pointing to Gretchen.
“It is,” I said. “And so are the two women standing on either side of her.”
“Then you’ve got your brother,” she observed. “That makes five—wow. Now, that’s a big family.”
I looked at the sunbaked cars we would soon be climbing into—furnaces, every one of them—and said, “Yes. It certainly is.”
A House Divided
Because I’d accumulated so many miles, they bumped me to first class on the flight from Atlanta to Raleigh. I had assumed that our plane would be on the small side, but instead, owing to Thanksgiving and the great number of travelers, it was full-size. I was seated in the second row, in front of a woman who looked to be in her early sixties and was letting her hair fade from dyed red to gray. After she’d settled in she started a conversation with the fellow beside her. That’s how I learned that she lived in Costa Rica. “It’s on account of my husband,” she said. “He’s military, well, retired military, though you never really leave the Marine Corps, do you?”
She started explaining what had taken her from North Carolina to Central America, but then the flight attendant came to take a drink order from the guy next to me, and I missed it. Just as I was tuning back in, a man across the aisle tried to open his overhead bin. It was stuck for some reason and he pounded on it, saying to anyone who would listen, “This is like Obamacare: broken.”
Several of the passengers around me laughed, and I noted their faces, vowing that in the event of a crisis, I would not help lead them to an emergency exit. You people are on your own, I thought, knowing that if anything bad did happen, it would likely be one of them who’d save me. It would be just my luck. I had passed judgment, so fate would force me to eat my words.
After we took off from Atlanta I pulled out my notebook, half making a list of things we’d need for Thanksgiving and half listening to the woman behind me, who continued to talk throughout the entire flight. I guessed she was drinking, though I could have been wrong. Perhaps she was always this loud and adamant. “I never said I’d spend the rest of my life there, that’s not what I meant at all.”
It was dark by the time we landed in Raleigh, and as we taxied to the gate, one of the flight attendants made an announcement. The “remain seated until the fasten seat belt sign has been turned off” part was to be expected, but then she added that we had some very special passengers on board.