Winter Loon(94)

I put the lid back on the box and pushed it into the corner with my foot. “No, I don’t want your payoff, is all.” I looked around. I had no place in Aveline’s house with him there. “I can’t believe you left me there with Gip and Ruby. I only just got that letter, you know. Up until, what? Not even a month ago, I had no idea what happened to you. You could have been dead for all I knew.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

Jolene’s voice was in my head, telling me fighting with him wouldn’t do me any good, telling me to be patient. “You were supposed to know because you were supposed to come back for me. That’s what you told me you’d do.”

Elizabeth glided into the room, leapt into my father’s lap. He ran his fingers against the nap of her fur, making her arch her back. “Thought you’d be better off.”

“No, you thought you’d be better off. You took your cat but left your son behind.” I shook my head in disgust. “I don’t know what Aveline sees in you. I’m going back to the motel.” I picked up the box and rested it on my knee to open the door.

He stood, dropping Elizabeth unceremoniously to the floor. “Give me a chance to set things right. You’re welcome here in this house with the rest of us. You leave now and Aveline won’t forgive me. Do this for me, Little.”

“I’m not Little anymore.”

“I’m sorry. I know that. Wait and see, Wes,” he said, adding promises of better days ahead.

Answers. A way forward. Patience. I said I’d stay a few weeks, maybe until after Christmas, though my father was quick to remind me I had nowhere else to turn. I checked out of the motel, my few belongings in the bag over my shoulder. The redhead touched my fingertips when I pushed the plastic key to her. She told me she was sorry to see me go.



IN THOSE EARLY WEEKS OF December, Aveline worked day shifts while Annaclaire was in school and Mrs. Blue was at the senior center. That left me and my father alone. We worked alongside each other getting storm windows in, though it was late to be doing it, snaking the chronically clogged bathtub drain, then unskewering a Barbie gown tangled with Aveline’s blond hair. “Not glamorous anymore, doll,” he said. We rehung a cabinet in the kitchen that had come unmoored. Talk was small, even when the subject was serious. He knew about Gip and Ruby from Aveline, but neither of us seemed able to talk about the bigger things. Instead, we nodded and yupped at each other like a couple of sheep in a pasture.

He’d promised Mrs. Blue we’d try to fix a dead key on her piano and that was our task for the day. We removed the doilies from the top of the upright and flipped the lid open. “You know,” he said. “I’m surprised Ruby and Gip didn’t off each other sooner.” He climbed on a stepladder. “Hand me a flashlight, will you?”

“There was more to it than that,” I said.

“Yeah?” His voice knocked around inside the piano, against the wires and wood, playing flat notes like a dull mallet.

“Ruby got it in her head that Gip . . .”

“That Gip what?” The voice in the piano again.

I was glad the women weren’t in the house. I couldn’t have said it in front of them, didn’t want them to even hear the words. “Well, that he’d molested Mom, I guess.”

A hard knock, a curse, and his head popped out of the piano. “What?”

I tried to make it short, about Kathryn, the eviction, and finally, the hunting knife I’d found and kept.

“What knife? I don’t know about any knife,” he said. He let the lid drop with a thud that shook all the wires at once. He handed the flashlight back to me and stepped down. “I have no fucking idea how a piano works.”

I got the knife from the box I stored in the front closet under the sheets and blankets I folded up and put away each morning. He unsheathed it, touched the blade and tang. No hint of recognition, no fear like I’d seen in my grandparents.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, with a hint of admiration. “So Ruby thought Val used this to cut Gip, to keep him away from her? Fuck.”

“There’s more.” I handed him the pack of photographs.

He took them out, handled each one, layering his fingerprints over mine, over Ruby’s. He turned them over, looked at the date on the back, then to the images again. His eyebrows told the story—raising, twitching, knitting. “She won a camera playing bingo. We never could afford to get the film developed. That’s Daisy alright.” His voice hushed. Teeth raked across his lip. He raised his chin. “Never thought I’d see her again.” He shuffled through the pictures again. “You found the film in that box of hers?”

“No,” I said. “Ruby must have had it the whole time. Got it developed right before the fire.”

He sat down on the top step of the ladder, dropped his head into his hands, lifted it again. His face was anguished. “Why are you doing this? Why bring this up again?” He probed me with that look of his, and I tried to give it back so I wouldn’t have to speak. “Oh Christ,” he said, his backbone collapsing.

“Did you know?” I asked.

He stood, shook his head, handed the pictures back to me. His voice balled up like a fist. “Clean up. Geneva’s going to be here soon. And put that fucking box away.” He grabbed his coat from the open closet and walked out, leaving me with the stepladder and tools, the photographs and the past.