A car I didn’t recognize was parked at the closest corner of the Loop, just down from the bird lady’s house. I hadn’t noticed it when we came home, but now it looked suspicious. There was someone sitting behind the wheel, a large shape that caused any inclination to walk over and get a closer look to evaporate like steam.
At home I showered to warm up from being out in the rain. As I was drying my hair, I meandered to the big windows to get a better look at whoever was in the car, but they were gone.
6
David Barren’s business partner was dead.
Dad read it to me out of the paper nine days after Mary’s funeral. We were sitting on the front porch, enjoying the first rays of sun prying over the mountains and sipping coffee strong enough to peel paint.
“Says Ryan Vallance was thirty-four years old, no spouse, no children. Found deceased in his home day before yesterday. Foul play hasn’t been ruled out.” Dad looked over at me. “Didn’t you guys go to school with him?”
Yes. Ryan Vallance. Captain of the swim team. He’d enjoyed holding freshmen underwater until they nearly passed out. A real prince. Rachel had told me one afternoon while lying side by side in a motel room bed that Ryan was part of the reason David’s business was lagging. Ryan seemed to think he was still twenty-three and stayed out late too much. More than once he’d missed client meetings and just the week before had been incommunicado for almost three days. Rachel said David had finally gotten a text from him and paid for an Uber back to Sandford from a bar in New York. Ryan seemed to have gotten in some kind of fight—she wasn’t sure, only that he looked terrible the next time she saw him. Black eye, split lip. He made a quip about how she should’ve seen the other guy.
None of this had done anything to improve David’s mood at home. I asked her again if he’d ever laid a finger on her or the boys, but she said no. Never. Just the yelling. The ranting. The insults. She always looked embarrassed when she opened up about it, like she was somehow to blame.
I wondered what would happen now that Ryan was out of the picture. Would things get worse or better for her?
“What a shame,” Dad said, folding up the paper. “Anyone that young passes away, I always think of the parents.” His voice thickened. “No one should have to bury a child.”
Rancor for Ryan drained. I squeezed Dad’s shoulder and asked if he wanted more coffee. He said sure.
As I was topping off our cups, I noticed a scatter of mail across the kitchen counter. Bills. Medical, mostly, with utilities and the mortgage thrown in for flavor. You’d think the medical bills were for Dad’s checkups and prescriptions that were supposed to slow the process of his disease to a crawl, but many were holdovers from my mom’s stroke. It was incredibly difficult to understand how three days in intensive care that ended in death could haunt the living for years to come, yet here we were.
In my mother’s infinite wisdom, she had abstained from life insurance. I can’t recall the reason why now but had overheard her say the word waste one evening when I was younger and the subject came up between my parents. Waste, however, didn’t apply to the fact she’d willed half of her Roth IRA to the church.
I flipped the bill I was holding back on the counter and made a mental note to visit Father Mathew in the coming days. We needed to talk.
Dad wasn’t on the porch when I came outside. His voice echoed from the open attached garage. “Where the hell’s my shovel? Does Martin still have it?”
He was looking around at the tools aligned neatly on pegs studding the garage walls. His round-nose shovel, which I’d borrowed a few days ago to plant some shrubs at the corners of my walk, was missing. “Martin” was a friend who’d owned my house prior and moved out several years back. The associations his mind made at times always made sense in a roundabout way. I’d taken the shovel, and I lived in the house across the street. Martin used to live there, thus Martin had his shovel.
“Martin took it to dig his potatoes,” Dad said.
“I have it, Dad.”
“You do? I coulda swore Martin took it.”
“Martin moved quite a while ago.”
The pause. The realization. It wasn’t then, it was now. “Oh right. You took it for the shrubs.”
“Yep.”
His hands balled into fists, and he lowered his head. “This goddamned disease.”
We stood there that way for a minute, the son in the doorway holding two steaming cups of coffee, the father near the back of the garage, impotent rage rolling off him like heat.