stoplight turned green, but I sat there a bit longer, staring.
Belly had to be yanking my chain, I told myself. Or he was just plain mistaken. I hit the gas.
twenty-four
The diced onions had just begun to sizzle. I was peeling the ring bologna when Mom emerged from her bedroom in pajamas and robe. One lamp was lit in the living room, the lake invisible in the dark beyond the windows. Mom sat down in her easy chair, wrapped herself in my River Rats afghan.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.
“I was reading. I thought I might watch the news.”
The news wouldn’t be on for another hour.
“Can I make you a sandwich?”
Mom turned her head, gave me a look. “Do I look like your father?” My dad had loved fried bologna sandwiches, taught me how to make them. Mom never cared for them. “Phyllis made us a nice salad.”
“Good.”
She turned back to the living room. The TV remote sat untouched on the table next to her. I took out a cutting board and began to slice the bologna lengthwise into the pan. The long curls of meat crackled in the bubbling butter.
“It was quite a day in Starvation Lake,” Mom said.
I had decided I wasn’t going to tell Mom about my job situation until the website appeared the next day. I had some questions, but Mom wasn’t going anywhere, and I was hungry. I uncapped the ketchup and squirted it around the pan. The sugary tang filled my nostrils.
“I’ll say,” I said. “What was going on with you and Shirley? I thought she was going to punch you.”
Mom made a show of folding her arms. “Are you just going to talk to the back of my head?”
I looked at the bologna and onions snapping in the pan, looked back at Mom. I turned the heat off and went over to sit on a footstool facing her.
“OK,” I said.
She shook her head, threw the afghan back off her shoulders. “What did you ask me?” she said.
“About Shirley. The hockey fight you guys had at town hall.”
“Hockey fight?”
“Shirley McBride, Mom.”
She wasn’t remembering. But she was trying. She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips together in her lap.
“Shirley and I-oh, God. That was like a hundred years ago. The only person who gives a damn about it is Shirley.”
“Gives a damn about what?”
She opened her eyes. “Eddie.”
“Gracie’s dad?”
“Yes. Eddie. Your father’s cousin. The one who died in the war. “
“OK.”
“He used to come up here on weekends when he was in high school. I didn’t really know your father yet. I actually met Eddie first. Down at the public access. He pretended to help my father put our boat in.” She smiled. “He was standing on the stern and Daddy gunned the boat and Eddie went flying.”
“Ah,” I said. “You and Eddie had a little summer fling?”
“Well…”
“I’m not sure how much of this I want to know.”
“Not a fling,” Mom said. “I wasn’t that kind of girl.”
“Good.”
She sat there thinking. She looked at me. “Shirley,” she said. “That was her on the sidewalk today.”
“That was her, yes.”
“She was wearing braids. All sorts of braids.” We were back in the distant past again. “After Eddie, she wouldn’t braid my hair anymore.”
“No?”
“No. She never forgave me for Eddie. Even after, especially after Eddie died, and she started in with the boyfriends.”
I thought of the trailer where I would knock on the only door and sing out, “Graaaayseee!” Most days Gracie would come right out and close the door quickly behind her. Once in a while she’d ask me in because she hadn’t finished her Frosted Flakes and tea. I thought her kitchen smelled like a doctor’s office. Shirley might come to the table and sit silently smoking in her slip. Once there was a hickey the shape of a snail on the skin over her collarbone.
“All those men, every single one of them a piece of shit.”
“Right.”
“I’m sorry, son. Forgive my language. Shirley was drawn to that like a deer fly, but those men…” She brushed at her eyes. “What was I supposed to do? Turn Gracie away? Send her back to that revolting little trailer in the woods?”
“You did the right thing, Mom. Gracie loved you.”
“She loved you, too, Gussy.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why won’t you believe me?”
“Mom,” I said. “When you saw Gracie at Audrey’s the other day, she gave you an envelope.”
“I didn’t see Gracie at Audrey’s the other day.”
“Yes, you did, you told me you did.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Now she was telling the lie she’d forgotten to tell two nights before.
“All right. So what?”
“She brought you an envelope.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do. It was a life insurance policy.”
“No-”
I stood. “Should I get it out of your bedroom?”
She gave me a look of reproach that she couldn’t sustain. “Sit down,” she said. I sat. “I brought the envelope to Audrey’s. Gracie had sent it to me, she said for safekeeping. Of course I had to take a peek. And when I saw that…” She shook her head no. “I’m glad I peeked. I don’t want that money.”
The money Shirley had been talking about at town hall.
“So you tried to give it back?”
“I told her I didn’t want that money, I didn’t want her to die.”
I leaned in closer. Gracie would have given Mom the policy around the time she gave Soupy her letter to Haskell, “in case something happened.” Around the time Gracie supposedly was with Felicia Haskell at the pizzeria. I looked over at the bouquets people had sent. Felicia’s weren’t there anymore.
“Mother,” I said, “she was just giving you her life insurance policy. Did you have some reason to think she was going to die? Did she tell you she was in some kind of danger?”
“No.”
“Or you don’t remember?”
“I remember. She was fine.”
“Did she say anything about-wait.” I was thinking about the rejection letter, which made me think of the Zamboni shed, which made me remember what I had found there. “Hang on.”
