Читать книгу Old Heart - Peter Ferry - Страница 5

Tom really hadn’t thrown the Fourth of July party himself for several years; his family and friends had. We’d brought the tub of iced pop, the keg of beer, the corn and cakes and pies, and the great bowls of potato salad, pasta salad, slaw, and baked beans. We’d even dug out the fire pit and roasted the pig all day long, slowly turning it and turning it so that people could come and watch, could inhale the rich, fatty smells, could feel the water running in their mouths. Tom just officiated. He was the high priest of Independence Day. All day long he sat in one of the two Adirondack chairs at the top of the broad lawn that rolled down to Frenchman’s Lake, looking craggy and magisterial while subalterns attended to him, delivered things—cups of tea, glasses of beer, plates of food. People came to greet him or thank him, to sit in the other chair for a moment or two and chat with him. One of those people was my mother, his daughter, Christine, who brought him a slice of watermelon. “Lovely,” he said. “Can I have a little salt?”

“Not supposed to use salt. Which reminds me, did you take your meds?”

“’Course. Took ’em first thing. Always do.” But in fact he hadn’t taken them, and later, after he’d softly closed his bathroom door and was standing in front of the mirror looking at his pill organizer, he discovered that he hadn’t taken them the day before, either, or the day before that. So he took them all right then, took three days’ worth, a whole handful, not so much because he thought he needed to or was concerned about his health as to prevent Christine from finding them still in their little compartments. But that was later because right then he did not want Christine to know he’d forgotten or to see how hard it was for him to get up from the Adirondack chair.

For the year since my Uncle Tony’s death, he had wondered if the day would come when he couldn’t get out of his chair at all (Tony sometimes used to grab Tom’s hand and pull him up), when he couldn’t move himself far enough forward or push himself all the way up into a standing position. It occurred to him now that this was no longer a concern. Funny. He had worried about it. That someone might see him struggling and use it as evidence of one thing or proof of another. He had never even thought of that when he had bought the chairs in kits at the lumberyard ten years earlier and assembled them one breezy summer afternoon out on the lawn with Tony’s help and Brooks stopping by.

“Oh, my God!” Brooks had said. “It’s such a cliché!”

“What?”

“Adirondack chairs on a rolling lawn. It’s a bad book cover, Dad.” This from a guy who hadn’t had a real job in two years, whose dyed hair you could spot from two blocks and whose muffler you could hear from six. Remembering now, Tom once again marveled (is that the word when you are annoyed?) at his younger son’s almost total lack of self-awareness. “I think I’m in a greeting card. For God’s sake, Dad, promise me one thing. Promise you won’t paint them green.”

So he had painted them bright pink, a coat of oil-based primer one day and then two of shockingly pink pink over the next two days. Actually, Tony had painted them and with meticulous, timeless care, his tiny pointed tongue protruding in concentration, his stubby little fingers clutching at the brush as he knelt in the grass and talked to himself, sang, “Love, love me do, you know I love you” over and over again. Up on the porch, Tom watched and called out from time to time, “Atta boy, Tony. Spread that stuff on as smooth as silk.” A couple of days later they became the Ironic Chairs because Tony got the words “Adirondack” and “ironic” mixed up. When I was studying French in high school, I called them the “chaises ironique” and my sister, Carly, called Tom and Tony the “chers ironique,” and the legend was born.

Tom and Tony sat in those chairs for the next nine years, Tony’s short legs never quite reaching the ground, Tom’s long ones usually crossed, one foot dangling. They sat in them all summer, of course, and all fall, as early in the spring as they could, and even on selected winter days when the temperature moderated, the sun shone, and the wind died down. The neighborhood kids whom they let fish from the dock always waved and called them “the big man” and “the little man,” and one once said to Tony, “You’re almost little as me.”

“That’s ’cause I got Down syndrome,” Tony explained with something like the patience a parent shows a child. “It makes you little. ‘I’m little but I’m old,’” he then said, paraphrasing his father and quoting Harper Lee.

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-one. My birthday was on April sixteenth and we went to the Museum of Science and Industry. You ever go there?”

“No.”

“Gotta go. They got a Nazi submarine.”

Brooks could be facetious one moment and supercilious the next, and Tom was embarrassed to admit that he couldn’t always tell or perhaps trust the difference, which was to say he never really knew how much Brooks objected to the chairs, if at all. He wondered now, as he had so many times, if he’d have felt differently about his second son if they’d called him Bill or John. The name “Brooks” had been Julia’s choice, and Tom had always thought it pretentious. Or would Brooks even have been a different person? Would he have gambled less? (That was another thing Tom wouldn’t worry about after this day.) Brooks seemed always to be trying to fit his name or make it fit him. Not Tony. He’d been a Tony every day of his life. There was no other name for him. Nor Christine, for that matter, who had seemed to him as a girl beautiful and fragile in about equal proportions, like a piece of crystal. At fourteen she was a willow, thin as a girl wants to be thin, with fine features, mother-of-pearl skin, and hair that curled of its own accord. By twenty-four she had fretted herself plain; she had a horizontal crease across her forehead, her fine features had become a little sharp and her skin a little pallid, her hair no longer curled on its own, and she was now thin as a girl does not want to be thin. She was habitually harried. She still had a good heart and always meant well, but sometimes she lacked the time and patience to do well.

The day was hot and sunny. A perfect Fourth of July, as if he’d ordered it, and perhaps he had. It was, after all, his day; he thought for a moment that perhaps even God might recognize this, might owe him just one day. But no. God owes nobody anything. He knew that. Had always known it. Had lived by it since when? The war, perhaps; could any soldier believe otherwise? Was it then that he first fancied himself a “cheerful fatalist”? Had first made his constant companion the knowledge that any moment, this moment, might be his last? Life is short and hard, pass the beer nuts, please. But hadn’t people always known this? When had it changed? When had people begun to believe that they have a right to happiness? In Rousseau’s day? In the land of the free and the home of the brave? Maybe in his own lifetime. Maybe since the advent of penicillin or x-rays or social security or health insurance or malpractice suits or emotional distress. Tom had always known that one day Roger Daugherty would not say, “Fit as a fiddle” or “You’re in perfect health.” Roger, about whom Tom had been skeptical when he’d taken over the old man’s practice. Too young. Wet behind the ears. He’d decided to try him out on something easy: a physical exam, and Roger in that tiny examination room listening through the stethoscope, saying, “Do you smoke?”

“Yes.”

“Hmmm.”

And Tom later, putting his shirt back on, saying, “Tell me, Doctor, did you know that I smoke from something you heard in my chest or because you saw my cigarettes in my shirt pocket?”

Roger had hesitated. “Well, I saw the cigarettes.”

“I know I should quit, but it’s hard.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You smoke, too?”

“Trying to quit.”

Now Tom hesitated. “Want one?”

Roger thought. “Sure.” He got up to open the windows and turn on the fan. Tom shook out two smokes, and they sat there together, knees practically touching, using the wastebasket as an ashtray. He must have been about forty then, Roger thirty and fresh out of residency, but that had sealed it. Roger had been his doctor ever since. Now they were both old men.

“Mr. Johnson?” someone was saying. “Bryce Heinz. You probably don’t remember me. …”

“Well, of course I do, Bryce.”

“Please don’t get up.” And then he was meeting his former student’s wife and two teenaged children and the student was telling a funny story about something Tom had said in class one day.

“I just wanted to stop by and say hello.”

“Well, I’m so very glad you did, Bryce.”

Now the lawn was filling up with people, Christine or someone had put on a CD—was it Creedence Clearwater? He could never tell (he probably would have chosen the 1812 Overture or the Brandenburg Concertos, but he’d lost the privilege of playing music at all because two of his neighbors had complained that he played it too loud especially in the early morning although a third liked to awaken to Tom’s music especially Debussy because it allowed her to feel that in a world of calamity and distress, there was also some grace).

In the lake young guys with their girlfriends on their shoulders were engaged in chicken fights, and Tom was thinking about diphtheria. He had read in the paper way back on New Year’s Day that it had been the leading cause of death in the United States one hundred years ago, and Tom did not know what diphtheria was. He had intended to look it up half-a-dozen times and never had. This was probably what Christine and Brooks meant by lapses in memory. But Tom had always been absent-minded. No, it was his getting lost in the woods that really concerned them. Of course he hadn’t really been lost in the woods; he’d been lost in thought. He’d been working on his plan, but he couldn’t tell them that. Besides, he’d often gotten lost. It had been Tony’s old dog, Al Jones, who’d always known the way home. He’d followed Al Jones for years. And if he hadn’t stepped in the creek and finally been coming out of the woods all wet and muddy just when Christine had stopped by after dinner, she would never have known.

Diphtheria. If he could get out of his damn chair, he’d go look it up right now. Or if he had the energy; was this what Roger Daugherty had meant by “losing strength”? What if he really couldn’t get up, and no one came by or looked out a window and a storm blew in and lightning crackled all around? Would he raise his face to the pelting rain? Would he be willing to die this way? Tom was testing himself again, and as was always the case, he knew he wouldn’t know the answer until the moment. And then there was what he was going to do the next day. He knew he would regret it sometimes. He knew there was a chance that he’d regret it altogether, that it would be a mistake. He had tried to be objective. He thought his odds were good. If he could just weather the bad days. If he could just keep his eye on the ball. If he could remember the alternative. Of course it was a wild hare, but wasn’t that exactly the point? In truth, he wasn’t quite sure; it all seemed so big.

What he was entirely sure about was that despite all the people who covered his lawn this day, despite the letters and phone calls and marriages and promises and prayers and all the many and constant attempts not to be alone, he was. First and foremost, before anything else and after everything else, he was alone. It was a fact. It was his fact. It was what he knew and always had known. He’d known it as a child at his brother’s funeral amidst the flowers, robes, music, scented air, and stained glass, all of which were elaborate lies carefully designed to deny the thing that was so viscerally apparent, so blatantly obvious to him even then. And all his life he had wondered if it was a fact he would abandon, knowledge he would compromise when he was old and sick and death was near. He wondered if he would find himself in a church pew searching for some solace in the ancient words and smells and rituals. He hadn’t yet.

His brother had died of a burst appendix at the age of twelve. What year was that? 1930 or ’31? Tom had been eight. Diphtheria, influenza, diarrhea. Simpler ailments for a simpler time. With so many childhood dangers lurking, he wondered if parents then could afford to love their children as much as parents did now that babies came with warranties: three years or thirty-six thousand miles. Don’t worry about measles or small pox or polio or tuberculosis or diphtheria, whatever that is; we’ve got those covered. Did his parents love him a little more or a little less after Paul’s death? Love was riskier then. A little riskier. Did they love him at all? They didn’t kiss him much. Didn’t hug him. Didn’t really touch him after a certain age. Perhaps they were afraid. Perhaps they weren’t. Perhaps they simply knew what people had always known until very recently. Pass the party mix, please. And had it been easier when you’d had more children and loved them each a little less? Perhaps he had loved Brooks not too little but too much. (The thought momentarily relieved the guilt he seemed to always carry with him.) Had he doted and smothered and coddled until the boy thought he deserved it all: happiness, success, prosperity, even luxury, seventy-six point eight years, a full head of blond hair, and erections on demand?

Someone sat down heavily in Tony’s chair. It was Brooks, and Tom’s heart sank a little because he was wearing the Brooks smile, the one he always wore when, even though you’d said “no way,” “absolutely not,” said “no” a thousand times in a thousand ways, he was going to ask you again. He was the most relentless person Tom had ever known. Self-centered and relentless. And now here was another grand scheme, an insurance deal he was working on with Claude Collier that would revolutionize the home health care industry, and if they could just get their foot in the door of one major health care corporation, like Premia, for instance, and Claude had contacts. … Tom put his hand on Brooks’s forearm to stop him. He didn’t want to hear this.

“Brooks, listen to me for a minute. I called Paul Sianis at Coldwell Banker and told him I wasn’t going to sign that contract tomorrow.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Dad, why’d you go and do that?”

“Because I’m not going to sell this house, Brooks.”

“Oh, for Chrissake, Dad, we’ve been through this. …”

“Hush, now. Listen to me. I didn’t say I’m not leaving. I am. I said I’m not selling, and the reason is that I’m going to give this house to you and Christine. Fact, I already have. All you two have to do is go into Jerry Santoro’s office and sign the papers. It’s all arranged.”

Brooks and Christine would own it jointly, but Tom wanted Brooks and Marian to live there. He’d explained it all to Christine. But there was one condition: they had to live there ten years before the house could be sold. By then, he reasoned, the house should be worth a great deal of money. Tom talked about buying the place after the war, when it was the only house on this road, about paying twelve thousand dollars for it and wondering how he’d ever make the mortgage payments every month, about the money he and Brooks’s mother had saved and invested, about how he would be quite comfortable, about his good teacher’s pension. “Now, I know you weren’t very happy about the size of Tony’s estate, but there was method in my madness,” Tom said. “I used up his money so we wouldn’t lose so much of it to taxes, and now you’re getting the house instead. It’s worth more anyway, and a lot more if you take the taxes into account.” What Tom didn’t say was that this way Brooks couldn’t blow the money, or gamble it away, not for a while at least.

Through all of this, Tom was aware that Brooks was quiet, and after he finished, there was more silence. Finally Brooks said, “Know what’s worried me?”

“What?”

“What we’d do with these damned ironic chairs. Now I guess we don’t have to do anything.”

“Except sit in them.”

“Perfect timing, too. You’re number one on the list at Hanover Place. I didn’t tell you that, did I? They called a couple of days ago.”

“Hmm,” Tom said, “someone must have died.”

“Now, Dad, please don’t start. …”

But he wasn’t about to. It was a diversionary tactic, just a little ground fire to make Brooks think Tom was still fighting. In point of fact, the battle was over. It had gone on a long time, but it was over. Tom was tiptoeing away under cover of darkness, rowing with muffled oars, and Brooks had no idea. Neither did Christine, of course, and that he regretted, but it had to be.

The battle had started long ago, when Julia had died. Julia turning her face to the wall, closing her eyes, breathing ever less deeply and often. It had been the act of turning away. He’d been standing there talking, making small talk, and she had simply rolled over as if to say in the plainest terms what they both knew: We have wasted our lives on each other. In that sense it was dismissive, impersonal, perhaps even cruel. In another it was intimate, an acknowledgment of the secret only the two of them shared completely, and for just a moment hope had formed and burst again in his heart like a soap bubble: ephemeral, glistening, and doomed. Or perhaps it was just the act of a woman so worn out by dying that she had no time for pretense or delusion. Whatever it was, it had left each of them utterly alone: he standing there, she lying there.

What he was left with was the house and Tony, and almost immediately Brooks had started in about selling the house. Had Tom suspected an ulterior motive even then? At any rate, he was appalled; he was only seventy-four at the time. The arguments were the usual ones: too much upkeep, too much yard work, out here all alone.

“I’d rather be out here all alone,” said Tom, and at that time it was true, “than any other place in the world.” But he wasn’t all alone, of course; he had Tony. His sidekick, his soulmate, his pal. And then when he didn’t anymore, well, then he was all alone and then he did have time on his hands and then the house did seem suddenly large and empty. And then he really could go looking for Sarah van Praag, as he’d always told himself he wanted to. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Oh, come on, Dad, think about it. Chance to be with people your age. Socialize. They say it keeps you young. Who knows? Maybe meet someone.” Why was Brooks always saying these things? He lacked knowledge not only of himself but of Tom, perhaps of everyone. Somehow he’d always treated Tom as a generic commodity, as if he must feel as all other parents, teachers, old people feel. It raised Tom’s ire that Brooks could be so stupid about his own father, or perhaps uncaring. Maybe it just hurt him.

“Brooks, I’m a curmudgeon. I don’t like people.”

“And what about Tony? Wouldn’t it be good for him to be in a more social milieu? Everyone would love him. Besides, there’ll come a time when you’re going to need help with him.”

Social milieu! He’d finally put an end to it, at least round one of it, with Christine’s help. He had just the two of them—no spouses, no kids—to dinner. He wowed them with his paella Valencia, softened them with Spanish wine, amused them, charmed them, and then, while Tony was doing the dishes and singing “She Was Just Seventeen” in the kitchen and they were oohing and ahing over his flan and espresso, he said, “Look, you two, I went through a bad time when your mother was dying, and I know there are probably hard times ahead with Tony, but right now I’m in a very good place. I’m on one of those little plateaus of happiness and good health that comes along every so often, and I am enjoying it thoroughly.” He said that he had Tony, Al Jones, music, books to read, this place that he loved, the lake to swim in and sail on, the forest to walk in, and his family all around. “I’m strong, I’m healthy, I’m happy. Please let me be. Please.”

Christine looked under raised brows at Brooks. “He’s right, you know.” And they let him be until Tony died, and then it started again.

“Dad, you already know about ten people who live there.”

“Yeah, but do I like any of them? And what about Al Jones?”

“He’s a dog, Dad.”

“He’s the best damn dog in the world, and I’m not going anywhere without him.”

“He’s incontinent.”

“Don’t exaggerate. He has an occasional accident.”

He was holding his own until the “incidents” that occurred after Tony’s death and after Al Jones got too old to take long walks. That was what Brooks called them: “incidents.” The first was an automobile accident. Tom glided through a stop sign and was broadsided. Neither vehicle was going very fast, so the damage was minimal. Problem was, the stop sign was at the end of Tom’s street less than a block from his house; he’d been stopping at it for almost fifty years. This time he didn’t.

“I didn’t see it,” he said.

“How could you not see it, Dad? It’s practically in your yard.”

“I just didn’t, okay?”

Incident number two was the time Tom got lost in the woods. “Dad,” Christine said when she saw him wet to his knees, his boots caked with mud, “what in the world!”

“Don’t even bother to ask.”

“But Dad, I have to ask.” And of course she did have to ask and to wring her hands. It was part of her. It was in her genes. So now she came with him whenever she could for his walk in the woods. Sometimes he tried to outpace her just to prove a point, but usually they just walked and talked, and the first time they did, he realized that it had been a long time since it had been just the two of them like that, since their conversation hadn’t been cluttered with details. Once he took her soft, cool hand and held it a long time as they walked, and once he asked about her marriage, and she blushed and said, “We’re fine, Dad. We’re good. For a while we tried to be great, and that didn’t work out so well, but as long as we stick with good, we’re okay.” Then she smiled at him a little wistfully, and he looked at her a little differently. Had she grown wise and strong in time, and had he missed it?

The third incident was actually a series of incidents that had to do with snowmobiles and Jet Skis, both of which Tom loathed because they were so noisy and disturbed his peace. Almost since both vehicles had been invented, Tom had been trying to get them banned from the lake, as they had been from several others. But also almost since their invention, snowmobiles had become a working-class institution, and Jet Skis had been celebrated as “poor men’s yachts,” and since there was a blue-collar town at one end of the lake and a summer community consisting of trailers and shabby cabins at the other, Tom was derided and dismissed as an elitist. He made matters both better and worse when he saved a Jet Skier’s life.

It was a weekday summer morning about ten o’clock, and Tom was sitting on the dock in a lawn chair, reading. Around the bend came a Jet Skier going fast and much too close to the shore. Tom put down his book and yelled at him, to no avail. Then he watched the boy, who, it turned out, was fourteen, lose control and plow into the neighbor’s dock. Tom stood up, looked, and listened. A moment later he heard a gurgled “Help me.” Tom let himself down into the waist-deep water and slogged the hundred feet to the accident. The boy’s legs were trapped beneath the heavy machine, which had turned onto its side and become wedged beneath the dock. His arms were free, and he was flailing but sinking. Tom got behind the boy, put his hands under the boy’s arms and across his chest, and rested the boy’s back against his own legs and body so that he could keep his head above water. Then he began to call for help. It was almost an hour before the garbage collectors came by and heard his now weakening pleas. By then both Tom and the boy were shivering and exhausted. The local weekly put Tom’s photograph on the front page and called him a hero.

Unfortunately, they also interviewed him. To the question “What can be done to prevent accidents like this one from happening in the future?” Tom answered, “Keep hillbillies and half-wits off the lake, and ban Jet Skis altogether. I think that in order to operate a snowmobile or a Jet Ski on Frenchman’s Lake, you should have to meet one or both of these qualifications: first that you have an IQ of at least 75 and second that you have less than 75 percent body fat. That should pretty much eliminate the problem.” With that public statement, Tom’s status moved from eccentric to crank, and the affair became an official “incident.”

And incident number four, which Brooks came to call “the last straw,” had to do with his income taxes. It wasn’t that Tom didn’t do the tax return. He did. He filled out the forms neatly, completely, and accurately, all before April first, and he even wrote his check for two hundred forty-three dollars.{Then he put the stamped envelope aside and forgot about it. Christine found it on May 6 while sorting through a stack of mail. “Dad, didn’t you send your taxes in?” she said.

“’Course I did. Had ’em in by April first.”

“What’s this, then?” She held up the envelope.

The IRS fined him, and it was agreed that Christine would come by once a month to look over the bills and help him balance his checkbook and that next year they would hire a professional to do his taxes. It was humiliating. If it had happened twenty years earlier, it would have been a good joke, maybe even one he told on himself. “So I did ’em early, set ’em aside, and forgot to send ’em in. What a moron.” It was also the first time that Brooks mentioned the term “power of attorney,” causing Tom’s heart to sink into the deepest pit of his stomach and his mind to flood with fear and paranoia. Had it come to that? Was he that far gone?

“Just sign it over so Christine can help you keep track of things, Dad.”

“No way. Never.”

On the phone his lawyer, Jerry Santoro, had said, “Oh, hell, Tom, they can’t make you do it unless you’re a lot worse off than you are. Not to worry.”

“Well, I do worry.”

“Tom, look, you’re fit, you’re strong. I know men ten years younger …”

“That’s not what my children think.” He resisted adding “or doctor.”

“Children don’t think, Tom, you know that. You still out there on the lake sailing your boat?”

“Sometimes, but they want me to stop.”

“Don’t stop, Tom. Die at the tiller! That’s what I say!”

He felt a little guilty because he hadn’t sailed in almost two summers and really wasn’t even sure he could anymore. Or was he just buying into Brooks’s propaganda? He found himself thinking more than once about Wayne Rasmussen. He even said his name out loud once, and it sounded so odd and foreign on his lips that he thought perhaps he had never said it in all these years, not since the first time. He had been fifteen then. His father had gotten him his very first job working on a delivery van at Christmastime for Walter Flowers, the florist. Walter’s son Walter Junior was seventeen, and it was his job to drive the delivery van and call out the next address from a routing list on a clipboard that hung from the rearview mirror. It was Tom’s job to locate the next delivery, which he would then run up to the door of this house or that while the van idled in front. The only time Walter Junior got out of the van was when they had multiple deliveries at the hospital or the county home. Then he would walk ahead with the clipboard while Tom pulled a wagon full of flowers behind. Tom didn’t mind the hospital, but he dreaded the county home, which had been converted from a shabby old hotel called The Monroe and was full of people slumped in wheelchairs sitting at odd angles in dim corridors and the smells of stagnation, decrepitude, old flesh, dying flesh, dead flesh that no disinfectant could ever wash away or disguise. It was a smell with which for the rest of his life Tom’s association was immediate and absolute, like burnt hair, vomit, shit, and spoiled food.

“Wayne Rasmussen.” Walter Junior said his name as they went up in the elevator. “Room 412.”

Wayne Rasmussen was a man notable not so much for being old as for being ill. You could see the veins and very nearly the bones through his skin. He was sitting upright in a hospital chair, and all four limbs were tied down.

“Mr. Rasmussen? Got a little Christmas flower for you,” said Walter Junior.

“Nice,” said the old man as Tom put it down on the nightstand. “Nice. You wouldn’t happen to have a little Christmas cigarette for me, would you?”

“Well …” Walter Junior hesitated.

“Make an old man mighty happy. Only pleasure I got left. Hell, look at me, I’m nine-tenths dead already. Ain’t hardly nothing left of me. Won’t do no harm.”

“Sure,” said Walter Junior, tapping three smokes out of his pack.

“Now, just untie my right hand here.”

“Well …”

“Can’t smoke without my hand here.”

“Of course.”

“Walter …” said Tom.

“Shut up,” said Walter Junior. They left the old man smiling and inhaling deeply. They delivered the last of the flowers and went back down in the elevator. Out on the sidewalk a small crowd had gathered around a fallen body. Tom thought someone must have slipped on the ice, but the person was dressed in a hospital gown. His legs and feet were bare. Someone looked up, and then they all looked up at an open window.

“Must’a just sat there on the sill and tipped over backwards,” someone said.

Tom heard a siren. The man had hit a no-parking sign, and bits of him stuck to the pavement, the ground, and the sign. Back in the van, Tom sat in the drop seat on the passenger side. “That was Wayne Rasmussen,” he said.

“So what if it was? He was nine-tenths dead anyway. Didn’t you hear him?” Walter Junior was shivering so violently as he said this that Tom was afraid they would crash.

“You shouldn’t have … we shouldn’t have …”

“Don’t you ever tell anyone, you hear? Don’t you say a goddamn word. If you do, I’ll say you did it.”

“Me?”

“My word against yours.”

And so he didn’t tell anyone, at first out of fear, then out of shame, then perhaps out of habit, until the day he told me. But he decided that day at fifteen that he would never end up in a home for old people. Never.