Henry hammered on, but I drifted off. Next thing I knew, a phone was ringing. Somebody had switched off my light, tucked me under the covers, and set my notebook and pencil on the night table beside a glass of water. I slipped out of bed. From the window I saw the light from Henry’s bedroom still shining on the lawn below and heard the sound of his sleepy voice upstairs. I climbed the steps and stood in the dark hall, listening.
“I know, Susan, I got your messages…. Yes, well, something more urgent came up and your check slipped my mind, I’m sorry.… You know, Susan, it’s late. It’s been a long day and I’m just too tired to go there tonight. How about I concede that I’m a low-down, no-account rat and put the check in the mail tomorrow? How would that be?”
I stepped silently inside the room as he slammed down the phone. He pushed his glasses up on top of his bare head and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. He was lying on his bed, dressed in a work shirt and jeans, a book facedown on his chest. Folders and papers and the sheaf of phone messages Fred had taken for him littered the bedspread. He looked up and saw me standing there, and set his glasses back on his nose.
“Sorry about the phone,” he said.
“So are you?” I asked him.
“What?”
“A low-down, no-account rat.”
He snorted. “My ex-wives certainly think so.”
“How many wives have you had?”
“Three.”
“All three of them divorced you?”
“Just two.”
“How come?”
Henry shrugged. “I’m not easy to live with.”
“Me either.”
“No?”
I shook my head. “Mama said I was the most cussed person she’d ever met.”
“Is it true?” he said, turning the tables.
“I’ve got a temper.”
“Welcome to the Royster family.”
“Which wife was that on the phone?”
“Number two. Susan. The woman I thought I ought to marry. Beautiful, smart, the kind of woman who could take me places. In our case, straight to the devil.”
“What happened to number one?” I said.
“Who knows? She took the settlement and ran.”
“And number three?”
His voice softened. “Cancer,” he whispered, in a subject-closed way.
“I’m sorry.” I felt bad for bringing it up. “Any kids?”
“You’re the first.”
This startled me, and I wasn’t sure whether in a good way or not. Henry’s kid. I’d have to think on that. I moved closer to see the book he was reading. “What’s that about?”
He turned the book around and set it on the edge of the bed so I could see. An old lady, wrinkled as a prune and dressed in black, stared back at me. On the facing page stood a low house on a vast desert. I studied the woman’s face: old but strong, with piercing eyes.
“Georgia O’Keeffe,” Henry said. “She lived in the New Mexico desert. She had a temper, too.”
I turned the pages and saw color pictures of painted deserts, big flowers, churches and animal skulls, and more photographs of her house and the land around it, called Ghost Ranch, the caption said. The landscape was large-minded and peaceful, a place I might like to go.
“I like your room,” I said.
“Fred said you looked around.”
“He said I was nosy.”
“Curiosity is a good thing.”
“That’s what I said!”
“Fred was teasing you. This is your house now too, Zoë. Make yourself at home. Look at anything you like.”
“I can read your books?”
“Of course.”
“That’s good,” I said, looking up, “because I already borrowed one. About a Japanese boy who drew cats.”
He thought for a moment, then nodded as if remembering. “A good story,” he said. “True.”
“It really happened?”
“A different kind of true,” he said, pointing to his heart. “True here.”
I didn’t tell him I hadn’t read it yet.
“Books are so much easier than people,” he said, taking in all the books around the room.
I’d always thought that, but I didn’t know anyone else did.
I reached into my T-shirt pocket, took out the ten and two twenties he’d given me earlier, and set them on the bed. “To help with Mama’s bill.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I saw in your checkbook. I know you paid it. Five thousand four hundred and fifty dollars, now five thousand four hundred even. It’ll take me a while, but I’ll pay you back.”
“You were nosing around, weren’t you?” Henry took the bills, folded them, and reached across to slip them back into my pocket. “Let’s just say that paying your mother’s bill made me feel better about all those years I didn’t know about your father and mother and you, all right?”
“How’d you find out? About me, I mean?”
“A man came here one day and told me. Your mother’s friend Ray.”
I made a face.
Henry went on. “He knew about your father, Owen, from your mother. She told Ray that you were Owen’s child. He figured out the rest and found me himself.”
I’d never heard anyone speak my daddy’s name. Before today, he was just “your father,” “your uncle’s half-brother.” There weren’t even pictures of him that anybody knew of. Hearing his name made him seem, for the first time, like a flesh-and-blood person.
Ray told you all this for nothing? I nearly asked, but I stopped myself. Ray never did anything for free. Instead I asked, “You went to pay the hospital today?”
“Yes, and then to my lawyer’s to take care of some paperwork. That’s why it took all day.”
I thought of all the hospitals Mama had stayed in, all pretty much the same as Rose Hill. Locked doors and windows, halls that smelled like cigarettes or pee, and always somebody screaming. Did anybody get well in those places? I was glad Henry had gone alone. I never wanted to see a place like that again.
“Your mother’s affairs were …” He seemed to be trying to find a softer word than the
