My face burns. “That bitch.”
“Yeah,” Uncle Jimmy says. “And then she starts laughing and telling him she knows how much he wants it and how she wants it too, and starts unbuttoning her blouse. Swear to God, I’m not making this up. She says she’s not expecting anything but a little fun on the side. But your old man, he wasn’t having any of it. He laid the law down, told her to march herself right back out to her car and to never come back. Told her he loved his wife and he loved his kids, and he wasn’t about to let any big pair of tits mess that up.”
“He said that?”
“Pretty much. And I’ll tell you what, as a man who has let a big pair of tits lead him down the wrong road too many times, I can’t tell you how much I admire your dad for being able to do that. I mean, I might fight and screw and just in general get rowdy, but your dad’s a stronger man than I am any day.”
Obviously Uncle Jimmy’s all proud of my dad and everything, but I’m like, “Really? How much strength does it take just to do the thing you ought to do in the first place? Is that something to be proud of? It’s like bragging that you don’t rob liquor stores or kick babies.”
“You’re young, Ceejay,” he says. “You don’t know. Maybe someday you’ll find out.”
“Well, I’ll tell you this—if she comes back around, she’s going to get an earful from me.”
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Huh-uh. That’s exactly what you can’t do. You can’t say anything about this to anyone. Maybe later your dad will tell your mom, but it sure isn’t anything she needs to find out about right now. The best thing you can do is just keep it to yourself no matter how hard that is.”
I know he’s right. It’ll be hard, but I have to do it.
I’ll have to do something else too, and it’ll be just as hard, maybe harder. I’ve been elected to call Bobby about going to the funeral. Back when we were going to visit Grandma, I knew he’d never go, but a funeral is different. It’s like a duty, so I figure I’ll have to do my best to talk him into it this time.
When I call Dani’s place, he’s actually there for a change instead of hanging out with the captain. They had to exchange the engine they ordered for Angelica, and now they’re waiting for the new one to come in. The captain is still real down about the situation, but Bobby figures the new engine will change everything. He could go on about that for another thirty minutes, but I have to break in and tell him about Grandma. His response is, “Well, they say only the good die young, and Grandma sure wasn’t young.”
Now, okay, Grandma was kind of like our adversary all this time, but that’s still pretty cold, especially since she just died. It really rubs me the wrong way. I’m like, “Come on, Bobby, don’t talk like that. I know you and her had your differences, but she’s still Mom’s mom. And I think she did change there at the end. Besides, it was pretty intense seeing her lying in that hospital bed looking so frail, trying to hang on just for her family’s sake and all. You have to let bygones be bygones at a time like this.”
Bobby snorts a laugh at that. “She might’ve been hanging on for Mom, but she sure wasn’t hanging on for you and me. You know how it’s always been, Ceejay, you and me, we’re different—born into the wrong family. Outsiders in our own home. You’re not all of a sudden going to start acting like the rest of them, are you?”
“You didn’t see what it was like, the way Mom and Lacy took care of her. It wasn’t easy. They’re a lot tougher than you might think.”
“Okay. Good for them. What do you want me to do about it, cry?”
This is too much. Of course, Bobby and I always talked about how we were different from the rest of the family, but he was never mean about it like this. He wasn’t even mad about it. He thought it was funny. Our parents and siblings were just these goofy aliens that didn’t understand us. I always figured he still loved them, though.
“No,” I say, my voice rising. “I don’t want you to cry about it. But I damn sure think you need to come to the funeral. You don’t have to come for Grandma, but you should at least come for Mom. It’ll be real goddamn shitty if you don’t.”
There’s a long pause. I guess he isn’t used to me cursing him.
“Then goddamn shitty is just how it’s going to have to be,” he says finally. “Because I can’t go to a funeral, Ceejay. I just can’t. Maybe everyone will hate me. They probably have a right to, but there’s nothing you can say that’ll make me go. There’s nothing anyone can say.”
“And so that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
I hate to get beat by anything, but I know I’m beat this time. The only thing left to do is think of a lie to tell Mom so Bobby’s absence won’t go down quite so hard.
36
Here’s the lie—Dani’s little boy, Ian, is sick, and Bobby has to stay home with him while she’s at work. It’s not the best lie in the world, but it has a kid in it, so I figure as soft-hearted as Mom is, she’ll play along. Of course, she does, too. When I tell her, she says she thinks Bobby’s doing the right thing. She even smiles, but not enough to cover up the hurt underneath. Dad looks like he’s ready to explode. He doesn’t, though, not this time.
The day of the funeral it takes several cars to get us all to Grandma’s church in Davenport for the service. The one I’m in is packed and uncomfortable, and I’m wearing a dress for the first time in about a hundred years. When we get there, the parking lot is already pretty full. Our family walks in together after everyone else has been seated, and in a weird way, with everybody looking at us, I feel like a celebrity. Like one of the stars of death’s latest show.
There must be a million flowers at the front of the sanctuary, where Grandma’s coffin sits closed. At first, I can’t help thinking that seems phony. All these people and all these flowers—surely Grandma wasn’t that beloved. I mean, it’s a sad day and all, but I saw Grandma around other people, and she wasn’t much nicer to them than she was to me and Bobby. But, looking around, I realize most of the people are from Knowles. They’re here for Mom, not Grandma. They want to show her she’s not alone, and I have to admire them for that.
We take our seats at the front, and after a couple of songs, the preacher comes on and tells us why we don’t have to be sad. He talks about resurrection, which is kind of a spooky idea, so I try not to think about it too much. The best part of the service comes when the people who knew Grandma step up to tell stories about her, and if you ask me, Lacy is the best speaker of all. Actually, she kind of amazes me. Grandma’s passing hit her pretty hard. It’s a wonder she can even get up and try to string a speech together in front of a crowd, let alone get through most of it without breaking down.
She starts off talking about how much Grandma wanted to work around the house, even though she was so frail and skinny. “And then one day we were out in the garage,” she says, “and Grandma couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds by now, but she was determined to get that place cleaned up. Boxes were everywhere, filled with a lifetime’s worth of stuff she’d packed away. I told her we should probably just toss most of it out, but she’s like, ‘No, we have to go through it all. There might be important things in there I want to pass on to people.’
“So we started going through boxes, and she came across all these old pictures of my mom and dad from high school and then some of their old wedding pictures too. She started crying when she saw those. They reminded her of how much my parents meant to each other.
“For the next week she worked almost till her skinny little fingers cracked, putting those pictures into a brand-new scrapbook along with some of the other mementos she found in her boxes. It was beautiful. And we’d sit there in the evening together, and she’d tell me about my parents when they were young. She told me she didn’t always think Mom and Dad were exactly a match made in heaven. ‘Your dad was a little high-spirited,’ she said. Which I guess is a nice way of saying he was a troublemaker.”
Everyone laughs at that, my dad included. It feels good,
a warm, healing kind of laugh that you can only get at a funeral or when something else bad happens.
Lacy smiles and turns a little red but keeps going. “Grandma even told a story about Dad’s high school days that he never told himself. And anyone who knows my dad knows he isn’t shy about telling stories.”
We laugh again.
“It seems he showed up at one of Mom’s church softball games while she was playing first base. He might have had just a little bit to drink. He’d been out fishing and wasn’t wearing anything but his waders. He was all sunburned and his hair was sticking up every which way, and he was holding a big fish up by the stringer, yelling, ‘Hey, honey, I caught a seven-pound bass! I caught a seven-pound bass!’ ”
That really gets the crowd laughing. Usually, when I hear stories about my dad cutting up in his youth, it sounds corny, but this time I can’t help being reminded of Bobby and some of the stunts he would get up to. Maybe I would’ve hung out with Dad if we’d gone to high school together after all.
“So,” Lacy goes on, “Mom yells back, ‘Well, take it home and put it in the freezer.’ But Dad just keeps walking toward the field until someone in the bleachers hollers, ‘Get out of here with that fish before I stuff it down your throat!’ I guess Dad didn’t like anyone threatening him, so what does he do? He rares back and hurls that bass straight into the crowd and hits the guy right in the face. A brawl was about five seconds from breaking out, but Mom ran over from first base and slapped Dad on the side of the head with her mitt and told him if he didn’t get out of there, she’d go get a bat. Dad pretty much went home after that. He never did get the fish back.”
Now the whole sanctuary’s roaring with laughter. When it finally dies down, Lacy looks straight at Dad and says, “So, Dad, how come you never told us that story?”
That tickles everybody all over again. A few months ago I never would’ve believed my perky mom could slap anyone with a baseball glove, but after seeing how she handled this summer with Grandma, it doesn’t surprise me a bit.
“And the thing is Grandma told me she used to be as embarrassed as embarrassed could be by what happened that day. She thought Dad’s rowdy ways were rubbing off on Mom, especially when she tried telling Mom she couldn’t date him anymore. She said, ‘I never knew my little curly-headed girl could get so mad. She stood right up to me and said she was not only going to keep dating your father but, by God, she was going to marry him too!’ ”
I look at Mom. She’s blushing, but her smile shows how proud she is of herself.
“And then Grandma said something I won’t ever forget,” Lacy goes on. “She said she wished more than anything that she had a picture of that seven-pound bass. She’d put it right on the front page of the new scrapbook because it would remind her of just how strong the love was between my parents. She said she wanted to be that strong as she went through her battle with that stupid old cancer. And she was. She was every bit that strong.”
Lacy’s voice starts breaking on those last few words, and then the tears hit, but she gets through the important part. It’s beautiful. I’d start clapping if that kind of thing was allowed in church.
At the reception at Grandma’s house afterward, everyone’s hanging out and eating piles of ham, green beans, chicken, and coleslaw. I pull Lacy aside and tell her how proud I am of her, not just for the speech but for the way she toughed it out with Grandma the whole summer long. “You are a badd badass girl,” I tell her. “One hundred percent.”
“You would’ve done the same thing,” she says.
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Of course you would have.”
“But they picked you to go.”
“Only because you had a summer job already lined up. Mom and Dad probably figured I needed something to put a little backbone in me. And they were right.”
“I’m pretty sure you already had it. Besides, Grandma got along with you a lot better than she would have with me.”
“I don’t know about that. After you came up to visit, Grandma went on and on about how glad she was to see you. She talked about how much you were like Dad, and that was a good thing because Dad had more steel in him than any ten other men she knew.”
“More steel, huh?”
“That’s what she said, and she said she could tell you were the same way.”
“You really miss her, don’t you?”
She looks down. “She changed my life.”
I squeeze my arm around her shoulder. “Looks to me like you changed each other’s lives.”
The rest of the afternoon, we sit around Grandma’s living room eating and talking. Everyone seems happy, but it’s the kind of happiness that has a deep underground stream of sadness below it, which I discover isn’t a bad thing. Relatives meander by, along with church people and strangers from Davenport, but somehow, for once, I don’t feel out of place.
Mom sits on the sofa next to me, and I press close against her as she opens the guest book where everyone who went to the funeral signed their names. So many people showed up, we didn’t have time to visit them all or even see everyone, and now she wants to make sure she knows who came. Slowly, she browses the signatures, sometimes rubbing her index finger over the ink as if that will make her feel closer to the people who signed there. At first, it seems funny—in a cute Mom way—but then I realize how much it must mean to her when I spot a signature that glows brighter than the others, at least in my eyes. I can’t believe I didn’t see him in the sanctuary, but there’s his name in the middle of the page—Padgett Locke.
37
The next evening I’m hanging out in my room with my phone in my hand. I don’t really know why I’m holding it. I just know I’ve received exactly zero calls from a certain long-haired, skinny guy who works in a bowling alley. No text messages, e-mails, or Facebook posts. You’d think he’d at least call to say how nice the service was or something. Of course, I still think he’s one hundred percent wrong about Bobby having some kind of mental disorder. Even if I am a little worn out with Bobby for being weird lately and dodging the funeral, that doesn’t mean I’m not behind him.
So why did Padgett—he’s back to being Padgett in my mind instead of Mr. White—why did he come to the funeral? Was that his way of apologizing? Or is it because he really does have some kind of romantic feelings for me? Either way, I can’t be too mad at him anymore. After all, he probably spent hours online researching that stupid PTSD stuff. You have to hand it to him for that, at least, even if he is way off base.
All this thinking ties my brain into a knot as I pace around my bedroom. Yes, I could call him and let him off the hook for the PTSD deal. I could be the bigger person. But I’m not the one who said someone in his family is crazy. That’s something I still can’t forget. His dad got messed up on booze, but did I hang a label on him, call him an alcoholic? No. I wouldn’t do a thing like that. Still, I could call just to give him a chance to admit he was wrong.
Right as I sit down on the bed, the phone rings and I drop it on the floor like it’s a live hand grenade. For a moment, I stare at it, trying to think of something to say in case it’s Padgett, but nothing comes to mind. Doesn’t matter. It’s not him.
“Ceejay, I’m glad you’re back in town.” It’s Bobby and he sounds excited, almost happy, which is not his usual frame of mind these days. “You have to come out to the captain’s tonight. We’re going to do a little celebrating.”
Not a question about the funeral or how Mom’s doing or anything, which rubs me way the wrong way.
“I don’t see any reason for celebrating right now,” I tell him.
But he’s like, “It’s Angelica, we got the engine mounted. Everything’s ready to go.”
Immediately, I forget the funeral and Padgett both. “You haven’t tried to fly that stupid thing yet, have you?”
“No,” he says, “but we’ve putted around in the yard a little bit. There’s a guy down in Sparks who flies one almost exactly like thi
s. He’s going to give us some lessons. Come on over, though. We’ll let you drive it around the yard. It handles great. Show up around nine. Call Padgett and get a ride.”
“I don’t really know where he is.”
“He’s probably at the bowling alley. He was over here helping us earlier before he had to go to work.”
“Is he coming back over there tonight for sure?”
Bobby doesn’t answer that. Instead he’s like, “Listen, whatever you do, don’t bring that dick Tillman with you.”
“Him? I don’t even talk to him anymore.”
“Good. And if Dani happens to call, don’t tell her about it either.”
“Why not?”
“No reason. It’s just she’s a downer when it comes to the captain. I don’t need that. Just come on over about nine or so. Chuck will be here too. You have to hear this engine, Ceejay. It’s smooth.”
I’m glad Bobby’s enthusiastic about something, but I felt a lot better when he and the captain were just welding tin moons and stars to that thing. I still can’t picture them actually flying it. Of course, this would make the perfect excuse to call Padgett. I’d just be doing him a favor, nothing else. But the more I think about it, the more I talk myself out of it. He’ll just have to find out on his own. And if he happens to show up at the captain’s tonight, then I guess that’s how things are meant to be.
Brianna’s more than happy to drive me out there. She hopes they’ll let her drive around the yard, but no way is that going to happen. I don’t tell her this, but she’s way too big. You could shove a cantaloupe into a teacup faster than she could squeeze that butt of hers into Angelica’s seat.
On the way over, she asks what Padgett’s up to tonight, and she’s not satisfied when I brush it off with an “I don’t know.”
“You’re not still mad at him, are you?” she asks. “I mean, when you told me about him coming to the funeral, you sounded pretty impressed.”