“You asked for nothing,” I said. “Jesus. You can’t think that.”
“I know.”
“This was done to you. To you and Coach both.” Words I’d been hearing.
“I know.”
She got a little wobbly, and I thought she might fall apart but she didn’t. She sat on the bed talking through what she’d have to do, starting tomorrow. Money to repay, shit to sort out. Lawyers. She looked like a kid, curled against the headboard in her white stretch pj’s, twirling a strand of her hair around one finger, talking like the head of the house. All I could think of was little Angus bearing those Hellboy eyes on her, all her life. Growing her skin of leather.
I told her to push the heavy chest of drawers against the door after I left. And waited to be sure she did.
56
It was April, not quite a year after Vester, and it happened the way I knew it would. I came home and found her. Early evening, not yet dark. Damn April to hell, I could be done with that one. November also. Birthdays, Christmas, dogwoods and redbuds, even football season. Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
I almost didn’t feel anything at first, cleaning her up like I’d done so many times, getting her decent. And then the house, cleaning up her mess and her kit. Hiding stuff, before I made any calls. There were few to make. Thelma had run out of reasons to know her. Like everybody else. I had no wish to see the aunt again, but the EMTs said they had to get hold of next of kin, so I turned over Dori’s phone. Aunt Fred was in the contacts. I’d erased some other numbers first, but nobody cared to track down any mysteries. Another OD in Lee County. There’d been hundreds.
And just like that, I was “the boy that went in there and found her.” People were saying I’d broken into the house, various things. Stories grow on the backs of others. Regardless my clothes and everything being all over the house. Aunt Fred didn’t remember me at all. I watched her pick up a pair of my jeans off the floor like she’s scrubbing a toilet, saying something to the mini-me daughter about Dori having a lot of men friends. I should have screamed the bitch to hell, but my throat had closed up. My baby girl. No words of mine were called for, because just like before, the aunt chose everything. Church, music, one funeral fits all. They buried her beside Vester and her mother. The only thing they got right.
I just felt like a rock through the service, or a hunk of ice. Not cold-hearted against the handful that came out to show respects, it wasn’t their fault. Mostly they were the care nurses that had helped with Vester. Also Donnamarie and them, from the store, and a few girls that might have been friends with Dori in school before they got bored of her. Guilty, curious, who knows what brings people out to view the dead. The funeral was so wrong, I couldn’t see how it mattered. I’d already done everything in the world I could for Dori, and it added up to nothing.
Seeing Angus, that was a surprise. She came up behind me as I was going into the church, and pretty much steered me like a blind man through the day.
At the graveside, we all stood around waiting for over an hour, because Aunt Fred and Tonto got lost. Four or five miles, church to cemetery, and they’re lost. They’d been up there the year before for Vester, but I drove. This time they were on their own, and couldn’t be bothered with the directions I gave them, saying they had the navigator thing in their phones. But you get on these back roads, and that business goes off the rails.
The day itself was cruel, a blue sky to rip your damn heart from your lungs. Trees in bud, yellow jonquils exploding out of the ground, dogwoods standing around in their petticoats. Vester’s people were in one of these little graveyards way back up the side of a mountain, where you look out across the valley to all the other ranges rising one behind the other in so many different shades of blue, it’s like they’re bragging. You have to reckon in the old days people had a more optimistic outlook on the death thing, and picked these places for the view.
People got chatty and impatient from waiting around, regardless the scenic overlook, but the minister was getting paid by Aunt Fred, so he wasn’t having her miss any part of the show. Quite a few walked back to their cars and left. I had no wish myself to throw a handful of dirt on Dori’s little white coffin. She’d had enough of that in life. Angus and I took a walk up the road past the cemetery into a little stand of pines. We sat on some boulders and watched birds hopping around on the ground looking for bugs, throwing the duff aside with their jerky heads. Angus asked if I was going to be okay, and I finally fell apart to some degree. She let me snivel.