“Disappointed?”
“Not at all.”
Neither of us knew where to take this conversation, so we both fell quiet again. I heard Munro stomping around upstairs.
“Were you able to see Prester?” I asked.
“Yes, but the cop there had to frisk me first. Can you believe that?”
“Was it Dunbar?”
“No, some bald guy with a red face.” She began to blink away tears. “Prester kept ranting about how they’re going to cut off his fingers and toes.”
Those were the least of his worries if the state pressed a murder charge against him. “The nurse said he’s going through alcohol and opiate withdrawal. He’ll be better once it’s out of his system.”
Her wet eyes glowed in the overhead light. “He keeps saying he wants to die. I’m afraid he’ll try to kill himself.”
“He’s safe in the hospital.”
Heavy footsteps came tumbling down the stairs, two sets. A moment later, Munro stepped into the room, tugging Lucas by one scrawny arm. Seeing father and son together, the resemblance was unmistakable: Both were undersize, delicate, and blond. But whereas Munro was as good-looking as a teen idol, Lucas looked like a poorly done caricature of his old man.
“Where’s my notebook?” he said.
“Forget about the notebook,” said his father. “Tell him what you just told me.”
“I didn’t steal no binoculars.”
“Come off it, Lucas,” said Jamie.
“I looked under his bed,” said her ex-husband. “All I found was a Playboy magazine and a lighter and some other crap.”
“What about the closet shelf? He has other places he hides things.”
“Who are you going to believe-this guy or your own son?”
At that moment, Tammi wheeled herself into the foyer from the television room. Something about her frailness reminded me of origami, as if she’d been folded like paper into that chair. “What’s going on?”
“It’s all right, Tammi,” Jamie said.
“Look, Mr. Munro, all I want is to get my binoculars back,” I said. “Then I’ll be on my way.”
“I know you’re lying, Lucas,” said his mother. “You know you can’t fool me.”
“Search anywhere!”
“That just means you have a new hiding place,” she said.
Lucas readjusted his glasses and bit his lip. The kid was as guilty as sin.
When Munro stepped close to Jamie, I realized they were nearly the same height. “Why are you taking this cop’s side? You’re his mother. Why don’t you start acting like it?”
She shoved him with both hands in the chest, hard enough that he took a stutter step backward. “Get away from me!”
Munro turned to me as if I were a referee. “Did you see what she just did?”
I had, and it had taken me by surprise, too. I kept forgetting that Jamie had a temper. “Everybody needs to calm down here.”
“Can I have my notebook?” Lucas asked.
Jamie ignored my advice. “You don’t care at all about your son,” she snarled at her ex-husband. “You were scared shitless of Randall. Now that he’s dead, you’ve decided you’re the man of the house again.”
“I am the man of the house.”
“You aren’t half the man Randall was. Literally.”
He snorted and shook his head. “After everything I did for you, that’s what you to have to say to me? You fucking slut.”
“Watch your language in front of the boy,” I said.
“What are you? The language police?”
He was so small, it was hard for me to feel threatened, but in my short career I’d learned not to dismiss threats of violence, even when they came from little men. Two of the most dangerous sucker punchers in my previous district were a father and son duo who could have weighed in as jockeys at the Kentucky Derby.
“If you don’t calm down, you and I are going to have a problem,” I said.
“We already have a problem.”
Part of me was wary and watchful. I knew how quickly a situation like this could veer out of control.
Jamie grabbed his biceps with both hands. “Stop it, Mitch. Please, just stop it.”
Munro peeled her hands away. He pulled his T-shirt over his head, revealing a muscular abdomen totally lacking in body fat. Across his chest was a large tattooed heart bearing the inscription FOREVER JAMIE. “You see this?” he asked her. “Do you even remember when I got it?”
“I remember,” Jamie said in a softer voice than the one she’d been using.
“I don’t deserve to be treated like this,” Munro said. “Not in front of my own son.”
On cue, we all looked at Lucas, who was standing there with an expression of dismay on his pale face. The boy had no idea what was going on here. He and I were in the same boat in that regard.
Jamie crouched down to get closer to eye level with her son. “Here’s your notebook, Lucas.”
“Thank you.”
“Tell the warden.”
“Thank you,” the boy mumbled.
She tousled his hair, then smoothed it back into shape. “Now are you going to tell us where you hid his binoculars?”
“I didn’t steal nothing,” the boy said.
“See?” said his father, as if that settled the matter once and for all.
22
Before their divorce, my mom and dad were constantly nipping at each other like two starving dogs. Looking back, I realize it was my mom who bit the hardest. Not that I could blame her. Living with a violent alcoholic, watching him stay out all night or disappear into the woods for an entire weekend, not knowing whether he had run off with another woman or was lying dead in some flooded roadside gully, watching him squander the dollars and cents she’d carefully saved on bottles of whiskey while she and I made two meals out of a single box of macaroni and cheese-was it any wonder she wanted to tear his hair and scratch his face? After ten years of this uncertain life, she had become hardened, desperate, even a bit cold-blooded, you might say; a grim woman faced with a choice: leave this dangerous man once and for all, or lose herself and her son forever.
That was why I was so shocked to learn that she’d maintained sporadic contact with my dad over the years that followed. She talked to him on the phone at night when my stepfather and I were asleep. Maybe they even met a few times. It is not inconceivable that they had sex.
In that light, the spectacle I had witnessed at the Sewall house was not surprising. I could believe that Jamie was both determined to break from her past and incapable of banishing her ex-husband from her affections. Jamie’s interest in me might very well be heartfelt, I realized, but mistakes aren’t so easily shaken off, especially when they take the form of a twelve-year-old boy.
Having been that child myself, I thought I understood the contradictions inside a mother’s heart. But one of the perils of being naive is that you cannot identify that particular quality in your personality. You have an outsize sense of your own sophistication.
So when Jamie escorted me to the door and whispered, “I’ll call you,” I felt confident that she would continue to struggle for a while, feeling affection, pity, and disdain for Mitch, but that eventually her emotions would align and point the way forward. In the meantime, all I had to do was be patient. I considered myself to be a realist. Whatever would be, would be.
