The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(120)
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A few days after Slick’s funeral, Ragtag started walking in circles. Patricia noticed he’d follow rooms around their edges, always turning to the left, never to the right. He sometimes bumped into doors on his way through them. She took him to Dr. Grouse.
“I’ve got two pieces of bad news for you,” he said. “The first is that Ragtag has a brain tumor. It won’t kill him today or tomorrow, and he’s not in any pain, but it’s going to get worse. When it does, bring him here and we can put him to sleep.”
The second piece of bad news was that the tests to find the tumor cost five hundred and twenty dollars. Patricia wrote him a check.
When she returned home, she told Blue. The first thing he said was, “We need to get Korey.”
“You know we can’t do that,” she told him.
She didn’t think they could do that? They’d paid for Korey to stay at Southern Pines for eight weeks, and she had a whole program of therapists and counselors and doctors, and they all kept telling Patricia she had trouble sleeping, and seemed restless, anxious, and unfocused, and it would be unwise to pull her out prematurely. But when she’d visited the day before, Korey had seemed clear-eyed and calm, even though she didn’t say much.
“Mom,” Blue said, talking like she was hard of hearing. “Ragtag is older than me. You got him for Korey’s first Christmas. If he’s sick, he’s going to be scared. He needs her.”
Patricia wanted to argue. She wanted to point out that they couldn’t interrupt Korey’s program, that the doctors knew best. She wanted to tell him that Ragtag wouldn’t know whether Korey was there or not. She wanted to tell him that Korey mostly ignored Ragtag, anyway. Instead, she realized that she wanted Korey to come home very badly and so she said, “You’re right.”
They drove to Southern Pines together, and signed out her daughter against the advice of her doctors, and brought her home. When Ragtag saw her, he began to bang his tail against the floor where he’d been lying.
Patricia kept her distance while Blue and Korey hung all over Ragtag that weekend, soothing him when he barked at things that weren’t there, driving to the store and getting him wet food when he wouldn’t eat dry, sitting with him in the backyard or on the sofa in the sun. And on Sunday night, when things got bad, and Dr. Grouse’s office was closed, the two of them sat up with Ragtag as he walked around the den in circles, barking and snapping at things they couldn’t see, and they talked to him in low voices, and told him he was a good dog, and a brave dog, and they weren’t going to leave him alone.
When Patricia went to bed around one, both kids were still sitting up with Ragtag, patting him when his wanderings brought him close, speaking to him, showing him patience that Patricia had never seen in them before. Around four in the morning she woke up with a start and crept downstairs. The three of them lay on the den sofa. Korey and Blue were on either end, asleep. Ragtag lay between them, dead.
They buried him together around the side of the house, and Patricia held both of them while they cried. When Carter came by the next evening and the two of them sat down to tell Korey and Blue they were getting a divorce, Carter laid out how it was going to go.
“This is the way things are going to be,” he said. He’d told Patricia that kids liked certainty and he was the better qualified of the two of them to map this new reality for them. “I’ll be keeping the house on Pierates Cruze and the beach house. I’ll pay for your school and college, you don’t have to worry about that. And you can stay here with me for as long as you want. Because this is your mother’s decision, she’ll be looking for a new place to live. And it may not be very big, and it may be in another part of Mt. Pleasant. She’ll only have the one car, so you probably won’t be able to borrow it to go see your friends. Your mother may even need to move to a new city. I’m not saying these things because I’m trying to punish anyone, but I want you to have a realistic idea of how things are going to change.”
Then he asked them who they wanted to live with during the week. They both surprised Patricia by saying, “Mom.”
IN COLD BLOOD
February 1997
CHAPTER 42
Patricia pulled into the cemetery and got out of her car, tote bag swinging. It was one of those sharp winter days when the sky looked like a great blue dome, white around the bottom, darkening to a saturated robin’s-egg blue at the top. She walked along the winding road that ran between the grave markers and stepped onto the grass when she got to the right row. The dry grass crunched beneath her shoes as she walked to Slick’s stone.
Her inner thigh throbbed like it always did when she walked over uneven ground. Korey felt the same kind of pain, too. It was something they shared. But Patricia refused to accept it was permanent for Korey. They’d already started going to see specialists, and one doctor thought a blood transfusion and a series of synthetic erythropoietin would help Korey produce more red blood cells and that might eliminate the pain. They planned to start as soon as school was out. They only had enough money for one of them to try this treatment. That was fine with Patricia.
Everyone was broke. Leland had declared bankruptcy just after the new year and was selling houses for Kevin Hauck on commission. Kitty and Horse had lost almost everything and were chopping Seewee Farms into parcels, selling it off piecemeal to keep the lights on. Patricia didn’t know how much Carter had sunk into Gracious Cay, but judging by how many times her lawyer had to remind him to send the child support checks, it was a lot.