child care. If anything, he did more than Arlene around the house because she left all traditional masculine chores to him. He was, after all, the only man in the house.
He often wonders now if his mother felt similarly isolated as the sole female in a house of men. In the years since his father’s death, Tim has put in a lot of time helping his mother create the pretty, well-maintained house she never really had. The basement rec room was one such project-white paint brightened the inevitable knotty pine paneling, his father’s beloved bar was replaced with a craft table, the crappy old sofa was tossed. He also helped her wallpaper the dining room and do some modest updates in the kitchen. Mother and son paid lip service to the idea that these renovations were geared toward an eventual sale. Yet Tim knew his mother would never move. Because if Doris moved, where would Go-Go go when he boomeranged, as he did every few years or so? That was one room they never touched, Go-Go’s little bedroom at the head of the stairs. Through high school, college, and two marriages, Go-Go’s room remained the same, waiting for him to fail again.
Yet although Go-Go’s intermittent homecomings should have been disappointing to their mother, she never quite saw it that way. Doris was thrilled to have him back, and Go-Go, whatever his faults, was good company for their mother after their father died. So Tim did the work, standing in for the father who had died too young, and Go-Go made their mother laugh, the perpetual baby of the family. Yet it is Sean, far away, who still gets to be the good son, the perfect son, the pride and joy. How does that figure? Maybe being perfect can be achieved only at a distance.
Tim wipes down the counters, letting Arlene carry the conversation with his mother. It’s mindless, maddening chatter-analyzing various mutual acquaintances, discussing that morning’s Mass. Tim may not have standing as the best son, but there’s no doubt that Arlene’s the best daughter-in-law, steady and reliable. Doris likes Lori, too, or did before she threw Go-Go out. Doris can’t take the side of anyone who has hurt one of her sons, no matter how justified it might have been. Sean’s wife, Vivian, is on Doris’s permanent shit list because Doris thinks it was her idea to move to Florida. Funny, because Sean was for it. So why does Doris blame Vivian? Probably because Sean told her as much. A lot of lying goes into being perfect.
As a prosecutor, Tim feels he has a particular insight into lying. People lie to him all the time. Perps, of course, but also cops who don’t want him to know about corners cut, rights violated. Even colleagues lie. Tim lies, too. Everyone lies. It’s a cardinal rule of homicide investigation, but he feels this maxim has broader applications. He lies to Arlene-harmless things, not for advantage, just to keep the peace. He lied to her, for example, about “loaning” Go-Go money a year or so ago. They do OK, with her back to teaching school, but they don’t have money to throw around. Loaning-OK, giving-money to Go-Go was, by definition, throwing money around, out, away. But Go-Go was never more sincere than when he promised to pay back a loan, and Tim couldn’t bear not to reward Go-Go’s belief in himself, wan and flickering as it was. Had Go-Go ever been truly confident? He was loud and brash, yes, but that’s not confidence. When Tim tries to talk to his daughters about the dangers of the world, they roll their eyes, wholly convinced that they know everything. Go-Go was never like that. He was bold, but not fearless. He knew the world could hurt him. He just didn’t know how.
Doris and Tim Senior made it clear that Tim and Sean were never to speak of what happened the night of the hurricane. They led by example. If someone mentioned Hurricane David, his parents would pretend to need to be prompted on the date. Eventually it didn’t even seem a pretense. “Oh, that storm,” Doris might say. “That was the night that we went to the Robisons’ house and stayed because the power was out and the street in front of their house filled with water.” Tim and Sean were more than happy to leave it at that. If Go-Go was never molested, then Chicken George never died. It was almost as if Chicken George never existed at all.
In law school and later, preparing for the bar, Tim sometimes laid out the facts of that night as if it were a case he might one day prosecute. A man who had been sexually assaulting a child chased him and another child through the woods. He slipped and fell, injuring himself fatally. The children dutifully reported this to their fathers, who trekked back into the woods and found his body. There was no crime in this. Well, Mickey pushed Chicken George. She admitted as much. But she was acting in self-defense. She was not even fourteen, a child by the standard of the law at the time. No, they committed no crime that night. Still, as an adult, as a father, Tim has often longed to speak of it. Not to Go-Go, never to Go-Go. That would have been unfair to him.
He can’t tell Arlene either because they have been together too long now, the time for such secrets is past. There’s Sean, but Sean is even more adamant than their parents that they must not speak about the night of the hurricane. Tim thinks it’s because it doesn’t jibe with Sean’s version of Sean. Gwen, Mickey-now-McKey?
Tim carries the clean platter, one of his mother’s “good pieces,” to the built-in corner cupboard. It goes on the highest shelf, which is not quite within his reach. “Ma, where’s the stepladder?”
“Oh, I put that out in the garage, years ago. Just stand on a chair.”
He does, although he’s nervous about his weight, and he doesn’t like the idea that his mother gets up and down from a chair when she needs something from the upper reaches of the breakfront. He really should get that stepladder out of the garage, have it closer to hand.
His father always complained that the house wasn’t well built, but it appears more solid to Tim than the overpriced town house Go-Go bought for his family last year. Tim couldn’t begin to help with that purchase. One thing to hide a thousand or so from Arlene, quite another to come up with fifty thousand. His mother mortgaged this house without consulting him or Sean. He probably should be grateful that the housing market had already imploded, even if the stock market crash did ding the hell out of his girls’ college funds. Otherwise, his mother would have taken out even more and ended up underwater in her mortgage in a house that had been hers in full before his father died.
Both Tim and Sean were outraged when they heard about the loan, but it was too late to do anything. Doris claimed she didn’t understand why they were angry with her. “I bought a house for my grandbabies, and that’s who all my money is for anyway, the grandchildren.” Tim didn’t want to explain to her that she had taken her primary asset and given it in full to two of her six grandchildren. The whole subject made him feel small and mercenary. But Sean had no problem expressing his fury. He told Doris she should rewrite her will to make up for this inequity, reflect the fact that the $50,000 loan was an advance against what the girls might have inherited and they would be entitled to nothing else. A disproportionate advance, he added, with surprising bitterness. Of the three boys, Sean is the best fixed. Only one kid, the kind of kid sure to score a financial aid package to college because of his cross- country stuff. Plus, Sean’s father-in-law is loaded. “It’s not about the money,” Sean said heatedly when Tim called him on this.
In Tim’s experience,
Arlene catches his eye and gives him a smile, one in which there is a world, a history of understanding. She is both insider and outsider in the Halloran family and her perspective, more dispassionate, yet also more forgiving, keeps him on an even keel. Go-Go got the beauties. Sean’s Vivian has a wealthy, privileged family. But there’s no doubt in Tim’s mind that he, of all the Halloran boys, made the best match. How did he do this? How did he find the right woman when he was a sophomore in college, only a few years older than Michelle is right now? Let Sean be the favorite. Tim’s the lucky one, and he’ll take lucky every time.
Chapter Twenty-seven
