The word relatively didn’t surprise Marion. She herself had done her first drinking when she was his age. Then again, look how she’d turned out.
“What were you thinking?” she said. “You brought Judson here. You were responsible for him—did you not think of that?”
“Mother. Please. I am very sorry, all right?”
“Sweetie, look at me. Will you look at me? I’m not angry with you. I’m just surprised—you’re always so considerate of Judson.”
“I’m sorry!”
The poor boy. She took his hands and kissed his head.
“Jay was fine,” he said. “He was playing Yahtzee, and I wasn’t that buzzed. Everything was fine until…”
“You picked the wrong woman’s house to get drunk in.”
He gave a little snort. Her opinion of Doris Haefle was known to him. She’d told him all sorts of things she didn’t tell the other kids. And now she had new things to tell him. The hotness of his hands, the reality of the boy she so especially loved, was burning a hole in the tissue of her fantasies of Bradley. “Let’s get you home,” she said.
When she returned from the closet with their coats, Perry was eating from a plate of meatballs. They were tempting, but so were cigarettes. The old cycles of nicotine, of hunger and its suppression, of anxiety and relief, were coming back to her. Leaving Perry to get some food in him, she stepped out onto the front stoop.
She was only halfway through the Lucky when he opened the door. She had a red-handed impulse to drop the cigarette, but it was important that he see her as she really was.
He goggled in cartoonish astonishment. “What, may I ask, are you doing?”
“I have my own contraband tonight.”
“You smoke?”
“I used to, a long time ago. But it’s a terrible habit and you must never try it.”
“Do as I say, not as I do.”
“Exactly.”
He shut the door and stepped into his rubbers. “Can I try one anyway?”
Too late, she realized her mistake. At some point, she was sure of it, he’d take her smoking as permission to smoke himself, and it would be yet another thing to feel guilty about having done to him. To quell this new anxiety, she sucked hard on the cigarette.
“Perry, listen to me. There’s one thing you can do that I will not forgive. I will never forgive you if you become a smoker. Do you understand?”
“Honestly, no,” he said, buckling his rubbers. “I don’t think of you as being a hypocrite.”
“I started smoking before anyone knew how dangerous it is. You’re too intelligent to make the same mistake.”
“And yet here you are, smoking.”
“Well, there’s a reason for that. Would you like me to tell you what it is?”
“I want you not to die.”
“I don’t intend to die, sweetie. But there are some things you need to know about me. How are you feeling now?”
“The buzz no longer buzzeth. Buzzeth buzzeth buzzeth—see?”
In the story she began to tell him, as they made their way home, there was nothing of Bradley Grant, nothing of any man except her father. The snow, deep on the ground and still falling, gave her voice a curious distinctness while dampening its carry, as if the world were an enlargement of her skull. Perry listened in silence, wordlessly offering her a hand where the snow had formed drifts. Until now, she’d kept the suicide a secret from her kids. Even to Russ she hadn’t spoken of it in many years; she had the sense that it frightened him, or embarrassed him; as did, for that matter, everything else related to her innermost self. Perry’s face was hidden by the hood of his parka, and as she proceeded to describe her own mental disturbance, following the suicide—the dissociation, the episodes of slippage, the months of insomnia, the weeks of catatonic lowness—she had no idea what he was making of it.
They reached the parsonage before she’d finished. In the driveway were two sets of recent footprints, one coming, one going. Guessing that they were Clem’s, she called his name as soon as she and Perry were in the kitchen, but the house was obviously empty.
“I wonder if he went to the concert,” she said. “You probably want to get down there, too. We can talk more in the morning.”
Perry was eating a cookie. “If you have more to say, let’s hear it.”
She retrieved the Luckies from her coat and opened the back door for ventilation.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. This is hard for me to do without smoking.”