“Matthew or Mojo?”
My question was a serious one, but she replied with a tired laugh. “Matthew,” she said, “although Mojo, too, I suppose, dumb bird that he was. Ask for trouble and you’re sure to find it. That goes for the both of them.”
She shooed the hens and Ben Franklin into the henhouse, and we stepped through the gate to retrieve Mojo’s body. “Got to get him out before Old Ben gets to pecking him,” Leela said. “They develop a taste for blood real easy. Then he’ll be pecking at the hens and anybody who comes near.”
“That’s the last time I ever try to keep a second rooster. I should have killed him earlier like Candy said.”
“Nah.” Leela made threatening noises at Ben Franklin as I dragged Mojo out through the gate. “You meant well by it. Can’t nobody ever fault you for meaning well. And it’s Mojo’s fault in any case. He was the one always picking a fight. Old Ben’s just stronger and scrappier.”
The rooster was heavy. I stopped for a minute and set him on the grass. His long throat had been torn open by Ben’s savage talons, splattering the gray-and-white down of his beautiful Brahma coat with clotting blood. I had failed to desex him properly, failed to keep his fence in good repair. The signs had been in front of me the whole time, and I’d shrugged them off. My mother never would have.
Leela saw the tears I fought. In the most sympathetic voice, she said, “Don’t worry about it, Jill. It’s only their nature.”
“It’s my fault. I screwed it up.”
“Well, you didn’t mean to. You’ve had a lot on your shoulders lately. Can’t expect you to keep an eye on every last little thing.”
“Yeah, but I knew about it. I just didn’t bother to think it all the way through. Damn it.” I picked Mojo back up again by his feet and resumed my walk toward the trash pile.
“Nobody does every time,” said Leela. “You think it’s just you? Least you’re young. Take a look at my life sometime if you want to know about someone who can’t see the train coming.”
She was bent over picking up twigs and half-rotted leaves from the yard as she followed me, working around the trail of blood from Mojo. I said, “That’s not true.”
“It’s true enough. We do what we need to do to get by, Jill, especially when we’re busy and our choices aren’t many. You’ve got the will to speak up, at least. And the will to move on if it gets that bad.” She straightened and gave me a mild smile.
“Nothing would ever be so bad that I’d leave my family,” I told her. “Not Cade, and not the rest of you, either.”
“Life can get funny,” she said. “You never can be too sure about it. Any decision you make, I’d love you just the same. No matter who you leave or where you live.”
I stopped where I stood and turned to her, searching her eyes for meaning. And what I found, I couldn’t doubt: that she knew everything I knew, and that she loved me like a real mother does, without fear of loss or pain.
Chapter 27
Dad wasn’t doing well. He didn’t eat much and he slept all the time. Sometimes when I caught sight of him in the recliner, knocked out, he looked so pale and still that I had freak-out moments thinking he was dead. He’d gotten worse since Elias died and everybody figured he was depressed, but now I was starting to think something was really wrong with him. He wore sweaters even when it was hot inside. He’d always been built Irish like my grandmother’s family, short in the legs and thick around the chest. Now he looked withered, like an old man. I wouldn’t have guessed my father could even get that skinny.
His body wasn’t the only thing falling to crap around here. The wood siding on the north side of the house was starting to rot where it hadn’t been painted for years, and we had a roof leak in Elias’s room. Mom had put down an old canning kettle in there to catch the drips, and the stain spread like a coffee ring on the ceiling. I went in there once to clean up the papers that had gotten soggy on the floor before we realized about the leak. The water had trickled under the bed, and under there I found a little stack of porno magazines and also a photo of me and Jill. The colors were washed out where the water had gotten to it. I wasn’t sure what to think, exactly, about the fact that it was there. It could have just been a coincidence that he had it in his room, like maybe he kept it around the way people do with family photos all the time. At the same time, the thought sort of wormed its way into my head that it was his way of keeping a photo of Jill in his room but excusing it because I was in it, too. I thought about him putting his thumb over my face to make me disappear and then I shoved that thought out of my head before it got any worse.
Also, there was the Saturn. On top of the usual problems, every time I braked it felt as if I’d just pulled onto gravel. I handed it over to Dodge so he could figure out what the problem was. Sometimes with a car you get a sense when it’s going to be a cheap repair and other times you can feel in your gut that the fix is going to cost you an assload of money. This was one of the latter situations.
“It’s your rotors,” Dodge said once he got back from the very short test drive. He dangled my keys in the air and I pocketed them. “Feels like you’ve got bags of marbles where the brakes ought to be. I wouldn’t drive it.”
“I got no choice.”
“We got the Jeep, right? Just use the Jeep.”
I shook my head. I hated driving the Jeep. Jill could drive that thing and shift like a NASCAR driver, and I still dropped gears every time between second and third. It was the hesitation that got me, and I knew it, but I couldn’t seem to overcome it.
“Well, you got a choice,” Dodge said patiently. “Drive the Jeep, or get your ass killed. Pick one.”
I got in the Saturn and slammed the door. Dodge just shook his head at me. Thunder, the larger of Dodge’s beagles, jumped against the door and bayed, scrabbling his nails against the paint. I opened the door again and he hopped in. His tail smacked my face as he climbed straight into the back looking for fast-food wrappers. I figured he was better off with me than getting kicked around the house by Candy.
“Don’t you get my dog killed,” Dodge shouted. I gave him a thumbs-up and backed out of the driveway.
I kept the car at fifty-five so I wouldn’t have to brake suddenly for speed traps. On the open road, I rolled down the window. The violent throttle of the wind was satisfying. It was only a couple of miles to Piper’s house. It was set far back from the road at the top of a little rise, a battered Victorian with a new American flag on a pole in front of it. Two cars sat in the driveway and I didn’t know if either of them was hers. I steered the car into the gravel pull-off right in front of it, stopping just behind the little shack where they used to sell produce in season. The signs were faded but still nailed up: Fine Fresh Lemonade. I shut off the ignition and eased the seat back so I could look past that shack to the house. Thunder climbed into my lap and rested his muzzle on my leg. After a minute I cut the engine back and turned my Dave Matthews CD on low. If the car was about to shit the bed anyhow, it didn’t matter much if I ran the battery down. And the music made me think about better days, high school and college both.
Piper had had this hat from Guatemala, knitted, with earflaps and strings that hung down to about her elbows. She had mittens that sort of matched. They were made from about four hundred colors of yarn and she started wearing the hat as soon as the weather got cool. That fall when we were both seventeen, I’d get on the school bus in the morning and see that hat pointing up above the green vinyl seat and I’d go over and sit next to her. We were an item then and she expected it. She was always huddled over whatever book was assigned to her for English, reading like a madwoman.
