pretty vile, but at least it had caffeine in it. I added a second spoonful of sugar. “There is a reason, Thomas. You, and I, have just been through something pretty traumatic. We’ve lost our father. And as difficult as this is for me to get through, I suspect it’s even more troubling for you. I mean, you guys lived under the same roof.”
“He got mad at me a lot,” Thomas said.
“Like when?”
“He was always telling me to do things I didn’t want to do.” He gave me a look. “Kind of like you right now.”
“But Dad was never mean to you,” I said. “Annoyed once in a while, maybe, but not mean.”
“I guess,” he said. “He didn’t like me staying in my room all day. He wanted me to go out. He didn’t understand how busy I am.”
“It’s not healthy,” I said. “You need some air. Thomas, you have to know, in your heart, that there’s a problem when you’re so addicted to what you’re doing that you don’t even go to Dad’s funeral.”
“I had to go to Melbourne that day,” Thomas said.
“Jesus, Thomas, you did not have to go to Melbourne that day. You did not have to go to Melbourne, or Moscow, or Munich, or fucking Montreal. You needed to go to our father’s funeral.” I knew I wasn’t being fair, blaming Thomas for this. I knew he most likely couldn’t help himself. As soon as I’d said the words, I regretted them. Getting angry with Thomas for not overcoming his obsession was like getting angry with a blind man for not seeing where he was going.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. Neither of us did, for the better part of a minute.
I broke the silence. “I think it’s important, right now, while I’m trying to sort out a few things, that you go see Dr. Grigorin. I’d also like to talk to her.”
Thomas eyed me curiously. “Are you having some issues, too?”
“What?”
“I think, actually, that’s a good idea. You should talk to her. She could help you.”
I blinked. “Help me? Help me with what?”
“About your need to control other people. She might be able to give you something for that. She gives me something to help me with the voices. So she might be able to write you a prescription, too.”
“Well, there’s an idea,” I said.
“You could go on your own,” he suggested. “You can tell me what she had to say when you get back.”
“We’re going together.”
He licked his lips, started opening and closing his fingers. His mouth was getting dry. Anxiety was setting in.
“The appointment’s at eleven,” I said.
“Eleven, eleven, eleven,” he said, casting his eyes upward, like he was trying to remember what he’d written down in his datebook.
“I’m pretty sure you’re free,” I said. “We’ll need to leave here around ten thirty.”
Thomas got out of his chair, took his bowl over to the sink, and rinsed it under the tap. He always left the cleanup to me, so I had an idea just how much he wanted to avoid me.
“Don’t walk away, Thomas.”
“I really have a lot to do,” he said, starting to walk out of the kitchen. “You don’t understand how important it is.”
“You can fiddle around with the GPS in the car.”
That stopped him. “You have a navigational system?”
“Built right into the dashboard,” I said.
He looked at the closet by the front door, where his jacket was hanging. “We could go now.”
“It’s only eight thirty. We don’t want to sit around waiting for the doctor for two hours.”
He thought about that. “Okay, I’ll be ready at ten thirty. But you have to promise to talk to the doctor about your behavior.”
“I promise,” I said.
AFTER Thomas had gone up to his room, and I’d finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes, I decided it was time.
I headed out the back door, walked across the yard that was, a full week after it had last been cut, in need of a trim, then came to a stop where the ground sloped down to the creek.
It was, as I’d told Harry Peyton, a steep hill. The kind that, if you felt you had to cut the grass on it, you’d be best doing it with a weed trimmer, or maybe a hand mower. If it got away from you, the worst that could happen is it would bounce down the hill and end up in the water.
A lot of people, had they owned this place, would have been content to end landscaping duties at the hill’s crest. Let the grass and weeds grow wild on the slope. But Dad liked the idea of a groomed yard that went right to the water. The creek didn’t exactly make the Kilbride homestead a beach house, but Dad figured it was as close as he was ever going to come. So every week, spring, summer, and fall, Dad did the hill when he cut the grass on the rest of the property.
I remember Mom asking me, during one of our phone chats about a year before she died, to talk my father out of his practice of riding the mower on this hill, side to side, leaning into the slope to keep the machine from tipping over.
“He’s going to get himself killed,” she’d said.
“He knows what he’s doing, Mom.”
“Oh, you men,” she’d said exasperatedly. “I tried to get Harry and Len to talk some sense into him and they said the same thing.”
Turned out the men were wrong.
The tractor, with a green hood and fenders and yellow seat, was sitting upright at the bottom of the hill. The hood was sitting askew over the engine and the tops of the back fenders were scuffed and scraped. The steering wheel was bent.
My understanding was, the tractor had rolled once and landed on Dad. When Thomas got there, it wasn’t possible to roll the tractor back up the hill. It would have been too hard to go in that direction. So he’d given the tractor a shove downward. It had rolled a couple more times and landed on its wheels on level ground just before the creek.
It had been there ever since.
I walked carefully down the hill. It was easy to see where it had all happened. The grass was about three inches high going down the side of the hill, then jumped up to about five. At that point, the ground was torn up where the mower had dug in as it rolled.
I stood a moment, one foot ahead of the other for balance, looking down at the place where my father had taken his last breath. Where that last breath had been crushed out of him. I felt a lump forming in my throat. Then I went down the rest of the way to the machine.
I didn’t know whether I’d be able to get it back to the barn. The accident might have damaged the engine. When it was flipped over, it was possible all the gas had drained out of the tank. The battery might very well be dead.
Tentatively, I swung a leg over and dropped my butt in the seat. It felt odd, sitting there, knowing I was the first person in this seat since my father. The key was still in the ignition, set to OFF. I went to raise the blade housing, which you put into the down position only when you are actually cutting grass, but it was already up.
I put the choke on full, slid the throttle all the way up, and turned the key.
The engine coughed a couple of times and black smoke puffed out of the exhaust. The damn thing roared to life. I brought the choke back down, eased off the throttle, pushed in the clutch, and dropped the machine into its lowest gear to get it back up the hill.
I held my breath the whole time I was making the climb.
Once I’d crested the hill I drove the tractor to the barn, parked it inside, slid the door shut behind me, and went back into the house.
THOMAS was downstairs, all set to go, at ten. Wearing a blue plaid shirt, olive-colored pants, black shoes, white socks, and a windbreaker the color of a traffic cone.
