'Yeah.'
'Nothing else about Keith's mood?'
'No.'
'You're sure you didn't say anything else, Warren.'
'No, nothing,' Warren assured me. Another swig. 'What would I say?'
'I just need to know if there was anything else.'
Warren shook his head with childish exaggeration. 'Not a word, Eric.' He lifted his hand. 'I swear.'
'Okay,' I said, 'Okay, that's not too bad then, I guess.'
Warren took a swig and smiled like a little boy briefly in trouble but relieved now, all the burden lifted from him.
He chuckled. 'But I got to admit, they made me nervous, those cops.' He threw his head back, as if peering upward into the heart of some distant memory. 'People like that always make me nervous.'
I took a sip from my bottle, my own relief not all that different from Warren's, satisfied that he'd said nothing damaging about Keith.
'They all have the same look in their eyes, those guys,' Warren added. 'You know, suspicious.'
I glanced at my watch, anxious to get home.
'Like that guy who came by the house after Mom's accident,' Warren said. 'The one we had, you know, when we lived in the big house.'
He meant the house we'd lost, the one Dad had mortgaged to the hilt in his failed effort to regain financial ground, the one the bank had finally taken from us.
'I loved that house,' Warren added. 'Remember how we used to sail on the pond?'
'Yeah,' I said.
'We'd already lost it when this guy came,' Warren said. 'I was packing boxes and he...'
'What guy are you talking about?'
'Some insurance guy.'
'I don't remember any insurance guy coming to the house,' I said.
'That's because you were with Aunt Emma.'
I had been twelve years old the summer of my mother's death, and I recalled how my father had driven me across town to stay with his sister until, as he put it, 'things calmed down.'
'I stayed with Dad, remember?' Warren said. 'Helping him pack.'
My father had often enlisted Warren to do such heavy work, so it didn't surprise me that he'd used him as a kind of packhorse when he'd had to clean the house out before its repossession.
'Where was Dad when this guy came to the house?'
Warren shrugged. 'You know Dad. He could have been anywhere.' He looked at the empty bottle, then raised his hand and ordered another. 'Anyway,' he said. 'With Dad not around, I didn't know what to do. But I figured, okay, this is just some guy from the insurance company, so, if he wants to talk to me, so what? I didn't see any harm in it.'
'So you talked to him.'
'Yeah. I was just a kid. He was a grown man. Big guy. You know, an adult. You don't say no, right?'
Peg arrived, plopped down Warren's beer then glared at me. 'You?'
'I'm fine,' I said.
She turned heavily and lumbered back up toward the front of the bar. 'Besides, he was just asking about general stuff,' Warren added. 'Like how things were.' He rolled the bottle between his hands, getting jumpy again, as if he suspected that I was laying some kind of trap for him. 'You know, was Mom okay. Stuff like that. Family stuff. I didn't think much about it then, but it sort of gives me the creeps now.'
'Why?'
'Because he seemed, you know, suspicious.'
'Suspicious of what?'
'Us. I guess. Things in the family. Between Mom and Dad. Like, were things okay between them.'
'He asked you that?'
'No, it was more a feeling I got, you know, like he was wondering if things were okay with them.'
'What did you tell him?'
'That everything was fine,' Warren said. 'Which is why I couldn't understand why Dad got so pissed when I told him about this guy. Told me to keep my mouth shut, not let this guy in if he showed up again.' He took a sip from the beer and wiped away a residue of white froth from his mouth with the back of his hand. 'I guess he told the guy the same thing, because he never came back after that one time.' He shrugged. 'So whatever it was, it got settled, right?'
'Sounds like it,' I answered. I glanced at my watch again. 'I have to get home, Warren.'
'Yeah, sure,' Warren said. 'I'll just hang around, finish my beer.'
I got to my feet. 'Just remember, if the cops talk to you again, be careful what you say.'
Warren smiled. 'You can count on me,' he said.
TEN
Keith was in his room when I arrived at home.
'How'd he take it?' I asked Meredith. 'My not wanting him to make deliveries for a while.'
'I cant tell,' Meredith answered. She was in the kitchen, standing at the cutting board, running a knife across the fleshy surface of a late-summer tomato. Its juices ran out onto the board and added a tang to the air. 'He's just wears that same, flat face. No emotions. 'Flat affect'—that's what they call it.'
'Who calls it that?'
'Psychologists.'
'He's a teenager,' I said. 'All teenagers have 'flat affect.''
She stopped slicing. 'Did you?'
It was an unexpected question, but one I thought I could answer with a swift, decisive no. Then I recalled the moment when I'd been told of my mother's death, the way her car had plunged off a thirty-foot bridge. She'd been impaled on the steering wheel, a fact my father had not been reluctant to divulge, and yet, for all the gruesome nature of her death, I had simply nodded and walked upstairs to my room, turned on the phonograph, and listened to the album I'd just borrowed from a friend. Before now, I'd considered such behavior merely my way of choking off my grief, but now, thinking through it again, I couldn't be sure that I'd actually felt my mother's death as viscerally as I might have expected. At the funeral, for example, I'd sat silently beside my equally silent father, toying with my sleeve, while Warren sobbed uncontrollably, his fleshy shoulders shaking, huge tears running down his fat cheeks.
'Maybe I did,' I admitted. 'When my mother died, I didn't exactly fall apart.'
'But I thought you loved your mother,' Meredith said.
'I think I did,' I said. 'I mean, she was the one who wanted me to go to college, scrimped and saved.'
I remembered how, even in the midst of our worsening financial situation, she'd hoarded a few pennies from each month's budget. She'd called it my college fund and had sworn me to secrecy, made me promise not to tell Warren and especially not to tell my father. It couldn't have been very much money, of course, and after her death I'd always assumed that my father had found it buried deep inside a closet or on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet, then spent it in his usual way, probably on a final bottle of expensive brandy.
'I should have been really hurt by her death,' I said. 'But I don't remember being all that upset about it.' I recalled the slow, deliberate tone my father had taken when he broke the news, his voice even, emotionless. He might as easily have been informing me of a sudden change in the weather. 'My father didn't seem all that upset, either,' I added.
Meredith looked as if I'd just revealed a formerly hidden aspect of my character. 'Maybe that's where Keith gets it then.' She began slicing the tomato again. 'Anyway, it's not supposed to suggest anything, this flat affect behavior.'
'What would it suggest?'
'You know, that he's a monster.'
