The Most Dangerous Thing

cared about his clothes, dressing better than either brother. He chose beautiful wives. Merely beautiful, unfortunately, with little else to offer, especially that first one. Terrible, terrible girl, and Doris blames herself for that choice, too. Lori wasn’t much better, in Doris’s estimation, but she didn’t pummel Go-Go, and she was the mother of two of Doris’s grandchildren. Lori has power over Doris, and she knows it. Vivian plays the same game. Just this afternoon, Sean, in his regular weekly call, admitted that he would be visiting alone for Easter because Duncan has other plans. He tried to disguise it as positive news- such a good cause, very valuable for his college application, who could be a better chaperone than Vivian. There’s a name for what her son is, and it isn’t very polite.

What Sean didn’t realize was that Doris considered it a case of good news/bad news. It is bad news that she won’t see Duncan, but very good news that she doesn’t have to see Vivian, who always enters the house on Sekots Lane as if it smells. True, sometimes the odor of cabbage lingers-everyone else in the family loves her cabbage rolls-but the house is pin neat these days, a perfect case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for. It is neat because there is no one to clean up after except herself. It takes Doris three days to fill the dishwasher, almost a week to have a load of clothes to run through the wash. If it weren’t for the dogs, she’d probably never have to sweep the floors. She remembers-not quite wistfully, but with a little more perspective-the days when she thought she would be found dead under a mound of boys’ underwear.

Yet there also is solace in being alone because her loneliness makes sense now: she is lonely because she is alone. Why was she lonely when the boys were here, when Tim Senior was still alive? Part of it was being the only female, the butt of every joke. Tim grew disenchanted with her for a time, and he let the boys see that. Doris Halloran, the enemy of fun. Now Doris believes she was born lonely. Lonely is who she is. If she had been born a man, she would have been a good priest, yet she didn’t think she was cut out to be a nun. Nuns were meant to function in groups. Priests got to run the show.

She had enjoyed the final years with Tim Senior, when it was just the two of them, with occasional rebounds, as they called them, from Go-Go. There is something to be said for lowered expectations. Tim mellowed a lot as he aged, especially when he saw how the boys turned out. It gave him a thrill when one of Tim Junior’s cases ended up in the news, and he endorsed Sean’s idea-really Vivian’s scheme, in Doris’s view-to leave journalism for a more lucrative field.

Go-Go’s fitful path through life was hard on them both, but Tim Senior himself had been in his midforties when he found the right professional fit, running a small handyman company. Funny, because he wasn’t particularly handy, but then he wasn’t the handyman. He was the guy who sat in an office and dispatched his workers to the women who needed them, the guy who kept the books, filed the paperwork. The idea had come to him in the mid- 1980s, when he saw that cartoon on the cover of a newsweekly, the one that announced the era of the yuppies, a new word at the time. Tim told Doris: “If both people are working, then there’s no time for doing stuff, but extra income to pay others to do things that we always did for ourselves.” The business was steady, if not spectacular, and he sold it two years before he died for a tidy sum that left them comfortable. Not go-to-Florida-for-the-winters comfortable, but he paid off the house, a big deal. They celebrated with dinner at Haussner’s.

For Tim Senior, the big secondhand revelation of running Mr. Handy was how-he blushed when he used the word in front of Doris- horny the women were, how often his guys were propositioned. They never said yes. Or at least they told their boss they never said yes. But here was the kicker: These women, in their power suits, married to men pulling down six figures, were gaga for guys with tool belts.

Doris and Tim could talk about sex because they were actually having it again. While her early menopause had seemed tragic at first, the end of her monthlies made it possible for her to have sanctioned sex with her husband with no more fear of creating life-or death. Doris began to take better care of herself and even used Rogaine for her hair loss. They found they could talk about all sorts of things that had once been taboo-the miscarriages, which Tim admitted he blamed on Doris, how cowed she had been by his temper. They could talk about almost anything. Except Go-Go. Any discussion of their youngest son either escalated into an argument or ended abruptly, as if they had run into something hard and unyielding.

So when Tim Senior, sitting in this chair, clutched his chest and fell to the floor and said “Go-Go,” Doris knew he believed himself to be dying. There is no other way he would have gasped out those two syllables. She hoped he was wrong, even as she tried to remember CPR, assuming she had ever learned it. But when she started to run to the kitchen phone to call 911, he grabbed her wrist, desperate for her to stay with him, to have someone there for his last few minutes of life.

And then he was dead. The story has become a legend in the family because it happened on October 9, 1996, during the Orioles’ play-off game with the Yankees, the one where a boy interfered with play and the Yankees won. It’s a good story, one that appears to make her sons feel better, and isn’t that what stories are for? Doris has no intention of telling them that the game had ended an hour earlier and that Tim Senior accepted the Orioles’ bad luck philosophically. There was a time when he would have broken something over a bad call, but those times were long behind them. In middle-verging-on-old age, Tim and Doris had found a rhythm together, contentment if not true happiness. And contentment is pretty good if you’ve never been particularly happy.

Only it turned out that Tim Senior wasn’t even content. That was the sad part, learning in those final moments what lay beneath the muted, restrained temperament of Tim’s last years. Doris thought his mild success had made life easier for him, but Tim had kept a secret all these years: “I killed that man. For Go-Go. I killed him.” Why did he tell her? Why should she have to know such a terrible thing, and what should she do with it? It made her wonder if the years she thought of as contented had felt different to Tim Senior, if he held his temper and treated her nicely because he considered it his penance.

For fifteen years, Doris guarded Tim’s secret, and she assumes the other men did the same, although she has her moments of wondering. She tries to remember her encounters with Tally Robison over the years, if she dropped any hints about knowing something, but the woman always acted superior to her, so her conceited manner was no clue. She never saw Rita again, although her daughter was around sometimes. She considered tracking down Father Andrew-long gone from the parish, out west somewhere-and talking to him about the situation, albeit in a hypothetical way. If a man killed a man who touched his child, would God forgive that? Is that murder? But Doris doesn’t want to know the answer. She thinks Tim did the right thing.

Which is why she told Go-Go, when he came back this time, the last time. Always given to moping, he had fallen down a very deep hole after being kicked out by Lori. He said she had no cause, but Doris assumed her daughter-in-law had some complaint. She worried it had to do with other women. She’s not sure why, it’s just a feeling she has. Go-Go has a problem with women, did all during his first marriage, which is part of the reason why Claudia got violent, started attacking him. The alcohol was merely a substitute for the thing he really wanted. So when Go-Go was drifting around the house, feeling sorry for himself, she finally told him: Your father did this for you. Your father loved you.

Within a week, Go-Go was dead.

She puts down her book, although she is only twenty pages from the end. Doris hates to go to bed with a book finished. She can’t say why. Certainly it’s not because she fears dying in the night and never knowing the ending. Maybe it’s because it’s a little less lonely, knowing she has a group of people waiting for her in the morning, people who can’t go on unless she opens the book. Hello, Meg! Hello, Josie! What’s up with you? For a while, her favorite series was about two Alabama sisters, and then the writer died, which felt almost like a betrayal. Then Doris discovered she can still reread those books and derive almost as much pleasure from them. The books never change, the characters never disappoint.

Whereas with Go-Go, all she can do is wonder how many secrets she’s required to keep, and for how long.

Chapter Twenty-nine

I t is no small thing for two mothers of young children to arrange a coffee date, and it takes several days for Gwen and Lori to find a convenient time and place to meet. They end up agreeing to late morning, at a