I break off from the group at the Pop Stop, still located in the same bungalow with the overhanging eaves catty-corner to The House. The front patio is hedged with potted plants, and two college girls are discussing the hair color of their future children at a table beneath the ceiling fan. It’s busy inside, cooler but steamy from the open kitchen. I order a mushroom-and-cheese omelet and an orange juice. While I wait, I wander over to the whiteboard-painted walls to read the things kids have written in black marker since the fifties, their names and dates, who rocks and who sucks, whom they love and will be with forever. I squint, trying to find curls of Denise’s handwriting in a high corner above the back booth where she used to drink black coffee and practice her Spanish with one of the cooks. Over the years students have scribbled over her Dalí quote—something about genius and death, if I remember correctly.
I hear my order number and carry my tray outside, where I can see the girls coming and going from The House half a block away. I thought about knocking on the door, letting them know I was here, and just… what? Warn them? It seems bordering on hysterical. It’s me he’s after. But if he can’t find me, would he settle for them?
I eat half the omelet and drink all the juice and throw away the grease-sopped paper plate. My appointment is at eleven, and I know from plenty of experience that it’s only a twelve-minute drive. I plug the address into Waze as I walk to my rental car, in case there is more traffic now, or maybe a shortcut, but amazingly, the automated voice suggests I do everything the same.
RUTH
Issaquah
Winter 1974
My brother brought over one of his kids. A boy. Seven or eight. He had small wet eyes, like he was sick or crying. I think they were blue. His skin was pulled tight against the fragile bones in his face, so that you could see the blood thrumming the green veins in his temples. Like all children, he was too young to take care of himself but capable of extreme emotional destruction. I had offered to watch him while my brother and sister-in-law took the baby to some special doctor’s appointment and my mother picked out the shade of hydrangeas for my father’s garden ahead of the last frost, but once we were alone in the house, I regretted it. Allen terrified me.
“How come you’re old but you live with Grandmom?” Allen asked after I’d gotten him situated at the kitchen table with paper and crayons.
I checked my watch. Hardly thirty minutes had passed since my brother dropped him off. The special doctor was located somewhere in Utah. Something about a cleft, surgery, a mouth? The baby looked fine to me. I wished they had left her with me instead of Allen. I actually liked babies, even the fussy ones, which apparently my niece was. I thought it was adorable when she puffed out her lower lip and jammed her fat fists in her eyes. Allen was the best baby, my sister-in-law was always saying with a loose strand of hair stuck to her lip.
“Grandmom needs my help right now.” I opened the door to the refrigerator. It was almost lunchtime. “Do you want a ham sandwich?”
“Sure,” Allen said in the same breath as his rough laugh. Was he saying sure to a ham sandwich? Or sure in the sarcastic sense, to the first thing I’d said? Grandmom needs my help right now.
“My dad says you like detention,” Allen said, gouging harder at the paper with a pink crayon. He’d used up the red crayon completely. I’d seen him hesitate before picking up the pink, as if touching it may make him less of a man.
I put ham and mayonnaise on the counter. “That doesn’t make any sense, Allen.”
“Yes, it does.”
I got out the plate with the crack down the middle, deep enough to trap the kind of bacteria that was known to cause a gnarly case of diarrhea. “Do you know what detention is? It’s when you have to stay after school because you’ve done something wrong. Nobody likes detention.”
“He says you do things so that everyone will look at you more.”
I got out a knife. Not detention. Attention. Don’t kids hate mayonnaise? I slathered it on nice and thick for Allen, then grabbed an onion and started chopping that up too.
“He says you hurt Grandpop’s feelings so bad he died from it.”
We had cheese, but I wasn’t giving Allen any cheese. I hid the onions between slices of ham and squished the sandwich flat. “You want to know a funny story about your dad, Allen?”
Allen didn’t answer. He was busy running the pink crayon down to a nub. “Your father was the worst player on the school baseball team, but Grandpop felt bad for him, so he begged the coach to let him play in a game that they were sure to win anyway. He was about to strike out, and he was so embarrassed he wet himself, Allen. All the kids on the opposing team laughed at him.”