“D-d-did they love each other?”
“Of course they loved each other,” Richard growled. “What the hell kind of a question is that? They were crazy about each other.”
“I was j-just wondering.”
“You must remember them.”
“Kind of.”
“And if they were alive today, they’d want your ass back in school.”
They had been through this countless times since he quit last year, and Richard looked for every opportunity to nag him about it.
Brendan continued driving without comment, hoping that Richard would just run out of steam. They were coming back from Richard’s men’s club where he’d spend the afternoons playing cards with some of the other Barton old-timers.
“Why don’t you go back in the fall, for cryin’ out loud?” he asked. “You’re not going to get anywhere waiting tables. You’re too damn smart for that. I don’t want to see you waste your life.”
“I d-d-don’t like school.”
“You didn’t give it a try. I almost never saw you crack open a book, except all that poetry stuff.”
Brendan didn’t respond.
“You finish school, go to college, and get yourself a degree like all the other kids. Your parents did. Jeez, if they were still alive they’d kill me for letting you quit. You should do it for their sake, for cryin’ out loud.”
“M-maybe.” Brendan’s mother had been a defense lawyer and his father was a librarian. And, as Richard often reminded him, they were “education-minded” people.
“Otherwise, you’re gonna end up like me, working with your hands and killing yourself for every buck you make.” He held up his hands, now knobbed and bent with arthritis.
“But you liked being a plumber.”
Richard humpfed. “Yeah, I did. But tell that to my joints and lower lumbar.” He rolled his head the way he did when the arthritis in his neck flared up. Richard once said that he had lived most of his life without pain—it had been saved for the end.
Brendan turned down Main Street of Barton. To the right was Angie’s Diner. For a second, he felt his head throb. “Was she pretty?”
“Who?”
“My m-mother.”
“How could you not remember? She was beautiful.” There was a catch in his voice. Richard was Brendan’s mother’s father. “She looked like her mother.”
Brendan gave him a side-glance. Richard was crying. He had not seen Richard cry since his wife, Betty, died some years ago. He envied Richard, because Brendan could not recall ever crying. Maybe it was the medication his doctor had him on. Or maybe he was just dead. “I remember her,” he said.
“You should with your memory, for cryin’ out loud.”
But the truth was that Brendan only recalled his parents during the last few years of their lives. Before that —before he was seven—he drew a near blank, including nothing of his earlier years; yet he could recite most of what he had read or seen and could recall great sweeps of recent experiences in uncannily vivid details. It was as if his life before age seven didn’t exist.
“I w-w-wish I’d known them better.”
Richard nodded and wiped his eyes.
They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then Brendan asked, “When you were in the war, did you ever kill anyone?”
Richard gave him his wincing scowl. “Why the hell you want to know that?”
“I’m just w-w-wondering.” Richard once told him he had spent weeks in Okinawa.
“Yeah, I killed some people. Why, you thinking of killing somebody?”
“I’m just w-w-wondering how it made you feel afterward.”
“They were Japs, and it was war. It was what I was supposed to do.”
“Later on, after the war, did it b-b-bother you when you thought about it? That they were human beings you’d killed?”
“No, because I didn’t think about it. Just as they didn’t think of all my twenty-year-old buddies they killed as
The thrum of the wheels filled the silence. Then Brendan asked, “Were you scared of dying?”
“Of course I was scared. We all were. What do you think? We were kids, for cryin’ out loud. We had our whole lives ahead of us.”
“What about now?”
Richard humpfed. “I’m seventy-nine, Brendy. That’s a lot of mileage. I’m ready to get off the bus, but I’m not scared. Not at all. Why you asking?”
“Just curious.”
Richard humpfed. “But there’s a few things I want to see get done before I go. Like seeing you getting your ass back in school and going to college. Don’t give me that look. You’re a talented kid—I just don’t want to see you waste your life. That’s the promise I made to your mom, and that’s what I want to take to my grave with me.”
Brendan’s eye fell on the Christopher medal on the dashboard. “D-do you believe in God?”
“What are you doing, writing my obituary or something?”
“J-j-just curious.”
“Yeah, I believe in God.” Richard winced and rolled his head again. Then he chuckled. “But I’m not sure He believes in me.”
Brendan turned down their street, thinking that he might actually miss Richard.
Richard wiped his nose on his handkerchief as they approached the house. “You know, there are a couple boxes of their stuff downstairs in the cellar you might want to go through,” Richard said. “A lot of old papers and things. Maybe even some old photographs. I don’t know what’s in there. Your grandmother had packed them away, but you might want to look. It’ll be good for you.”
Brendan pulled the truck into the driveway and helped Richard into the house. While the old man settled in his La-Z Boy with the newspaper, Brendan went down to the cellar.
The place was a mess. Beside the workbench was an old lawnmower engine on a mount which Brendan had taken apart to rewire. He liked working with machines. Just for the challenge of it, he would disassemble clocks or old motors until he had a heap of parts, then reassemble them from memory. He never missed.
He moved to the very back of the cellar and opened the small storage room which sat under a window through which, in years past, a chute would be lowered to fill the area with coal. Now it was stacked with boxes and old storage chests.
On top lay Richard’s shotgun in its imitation-leather sheath. They had used it for skeet shooting when Brendan was younger. He zipped it open and studied the weapon. It was a Remington classic twelve-gauge pump action piece with contoured vent rib barrels and twin bead sights. It had been fashioned of polished blue steel and American walnut. The wood had lost most of its gloss and the barrel badly needed polishing. But it was still a handsome weapon. As he felt the heft, scenes of skeet and trap shooting with Richard flickered though Brendan’s mind. And the nights when he contemplated blowing his own head off.
He put the gun away and went through the boxes.
Many contained baby effects—clothes, shoes, a set of Beatrix Potter baby dishes and cups. There were also some of Brendan’s early school- and artwork. The drawings were very primitive, stick-figured people and houses barely recognizable. The schoolwork was also unimpressive. He recalled none of it.
After several minutes, he located a carton with papers and photographs. His mother apparently was something of a photographer because she had put together albums chronicling Brendan from his earliest days as an infant up to five years of age. The photographs mostly in color, a few black-and-whites, were arranged chronologically and dated. Brendan spent nearly an hour going through them page by page.
