Labor Day (14 page)

Mandy liked putting the baby in outfits and taking him for walks at the mall. They had their portrait taken at Sears, in front of a scene of a field with mountains in back. Frank with his arm on Mandy’s shoulder, Mandy with Frank Junior propped in front of her, his red hair combed into a single curl. Frank was worried that the flashbulb could hurt his eyes, but Mandy had laughed at that.

You’re not going to raise him to be a pansy, are you? she said. Boys need to toughen up.

Almost the moment she came home from the hospital she’d wanted to get out of the house. I’m going crazy, she said, sitting around here all the time with your grandmother, hearing her stories about the old days.

So Frank took her out to dinner—an Italian place, with wine
and a candle on the table where the wax burned down in rainbow colors, covering the bottle they’d stuck it in, but the spaghetti tasted like Chef Boyardee. When he got the bill, Frank had thought about how, for this much money, he could have rustled up something really nice at home. His gram’s lasagna was better.

And he worried about leaving Frank Junior with his grandmother. She’d had a stroke the year before, just a small one, but the doctor said there was a fair chance it might happen again. Suppose it did, when she was watching the baby.

So mostly Frank stayed home, nights, with Frank Junior, so Mandy could go out with her sister or her girlfriends. She had found a job now—at a Wendy’s that had opened up out by the highway.

One time, when they were at the mall, a couple had walked by. The woman was pregnant, looking like she had a few months to go. The man had an arm around her shoulders. They both looked young, the age of Frank and Mandy, not that he felt young anymore. But this guy had a certain kind of good looks that red-haired men possess on occasion. Not completely unlike Ryan O’Neal, though with the beginnings of a belly forming.

When the couple came within view, Frank had seen Mandy’s body stiffen, and her eyes follow the man.

You know him?

Just someone that comes into the restaurant sometimes.

Then she started bowling. Then it was bingo too. Then it was drinks with her sister, and more phone calls, and one time, when he’d come in from the barn earlier than normal, he’d heard her laughing on the phone, a sound in her voice he’d never heard when she talked to him.

One night when she was supposed to be at bowling, he’d left the baby with his grandmother and drove the truck to Moon
light Lanes. The women’s league doesn’t play on Tuesdays, the guy told him. You must have your nights mixed up.

He drove to the Wagon Wheel out by the highway then, and when her car wasn’t in the parking lot there, he tried Harlow’s. She sat in a corner booth. Some guy in a Phillies shirt with a hand on her knee.

We aren’t discussing this here, he said. This is for home.

He drove back in the truck and waited, but she didn’t come home that night, or the next night either. Francis Junior seemed to be fine without her was the truth, and Frank was thinking, if she would just leave him the baby, everything would be OK. Day three, sometime near suppertime, she finally pulled up in front of the house. One look at her, one look at Frank, his grandmother had said, “I’ll take the baby.” From upstairs, he could hear her murmuring to Francis Junior. His gram was running water in the tub.

Mandy was leaving. She had met a real man, she said. Someone to take her out of here. What kind of future did he think he was making for them here, him and his Christmas trees?

I never told you before, because I didn’t want to hurt you, she said. But all those times I acted like I was having a good time in bed. I wasn’t.

There was more, no need for a recap. The main thing was, she didn’t love him, never had. She just felt sorry for him, off in the war and everything, knowing there would be nobody to welcome him home except for a senile old woman growing pumpkins.

Why he even pursued this next was a mystery. It wasn’t something he needed to know, or anything that made a difference, concerning how he felt about his son. But something made him ask her if the baby was his.

She had laughed. If she hadn’t been drinking heavily already,
she might not have answered as she did, but she had thrown her head back and laughed so hard it took her a moment before she gave him the answer.

That’s when he pushed her. No doubt he wanted to hurt her, but he didn’t expect her to fall. Her head had hit the granite of their front step, going down. A single trickle of blood coming from her ear, nothing more. Only her neck was broken.

Not right away—because at first he had just knelt there, with her head in his hands—but after a few minutes, he realized the water was still running upstairs. The tub must be overflowing, because there was water coming through the ceiling now, through the plaster. So much water now, you would have thought a pipe had burst. Like the kind of downpours they had in the jungle sometimes, only in his house.

He took the steps two at a time. He threw open the door to the bathroom. Inside, another woman crumpled on the ground, this time his grandmother. Her heart had simply stopped beating.

And in the water, red hair plastered against pale skin, his thin legs limp and still, arms by his sides, and his face staring up with a look of wonder in his eyes—a look as if nothing less than an aurora borealis were shining down on him—lay the body of Frank Junior.

When they first brought him in, the lawyer assigned to his case had called it a clear case of manslaughter.

Frank was responsible for Mandy’s death, he told them. He never meant to kill his wife but he had. That was the fact of it, and he would take his punishment.

The part they didn’t expect was the next. Her sister had come forward to say the baby wasn’t his, and that when Frank found out, he’d murdered his own son.

What about my grandmother? he said. The doctor ruled she had a heart attack. It was an accident.

She had a heart attack all right, the D.A. said. What old woman with a weak heart would not, when she came upon the sight of her great-grandson, murdered by her flesh and blood?

The D.A. charged him with murder. Frank’s lawyer, sensing things were going badly, had called in an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder, right at the end of the trial. They went for a temporary insanity defense. By that time, Frank barely cared. What difference did any of it make anymore?

They gave him twenty years before parole eligibility. He served the first eight of them at the state hospital. When he was ruled competent, they moved him to the penitentiary. At the time he had jumped out the window, he had two years to go.

But I knew I had to get out of that place, he said. I knew there was some reason to jump. I wasn’t wrong about that.

The reason was her. My mother. He didn’t know it at the time, but he had jumped out that window to come save her.

CHAPTER 13

M
Y MOTHER ASKED ME TO GO
to the library for her. She and Frank wanted a book about Canada, the Maritime Provinces. Rather than all three of us going out, she figured the safest thing was just me, on my bike.

You understand, Henry, Frank said, I’ve got your mother here. You remember how I tied her up before. This is what is known as a hostage situation.

The way he said the words reminded me of my mother, the time a year or two after the divorce when my father had filed some kind of paper and some woman called a guardian
ad litem
came over to our house and asked my mother questions about her attitudes concerning parenthood.

Do you feel bitterness and resentment toward your ex-husband? the woman had said. Do you express your anger concerning this bitterness toward your son?

I am not bitter or angry toward my son’s father, my mother told the woman. (Flat voice. Her mouth arranged in something resembling a smile.) I think he is doing a good job.

And how would you describe your attitude toward your exhusband’s wife? Your son’s stepmother? Would you say you have ever impacted in a negative fashion on their relationship?

Marjorie is a nice person, my mother said. I am sure we will all be able to work together fine.

This guardian
ad litem
didn’t see the part that happened after. She was gone when my mother had opened up our refrigerator and taken out the gallon milk jug from the top shelf. (Real milk. She still went grocery shopping in those days.) She didn’t see my mother opening the jug and standing there in the middle of the kitchen, slowly pouring the contents on our floor, as if she were watering a pot of flowers.

Now, too, though in a different way, I had no doubt that Frank’s words—
this is a hostage situation
—were what he knew he had to say at that time. Whatever else I thought about what was going on between my mother and Frank—that they were going to run away together to some fishing village in Canada, and leave me behind to live with my father and Marjorie—one thing I never believed was that Frank had any intention of hurting my mother. Whatever he said about that, it was to make sure we’d never get in trouble, if someone ever found him at our house.

I won’t tell, I said, playing my role of the frightened son, as well as Frank had played his, of the heartless convict, on the loose.

Sunday afternoon of Labor Day weekend was not a big time at the Holton Mills library. The only reason the library was even open that day was because they were having a book sale, all proceeds going toward the purchase of new curtains or something
along those lines. Out front on the lawn, a group of women were selling lemonade and oatmeal cookies, and there was a clown making balloon sculptures, with boxes of old books for sale like some recipe collection of great meals to make in a Crock-Pot and the autobiography of Donny Osmond. There was a nice, cheerful mood to the whole thing, with people milling around talking about how hot it was, mostly, and comparing notes on what they were doing to keep cool. Not comparing notes with me, of course. It was like I gave off a set of sound waves too high pitched for the human ear that transmitted the message—
Stay away
. All these happy, cheerful people munching cookies and browsing through the stacks of old
Information Please
almanacs and
Jane Fonda Workout
books (three copies, that I spotted) couldn’t have known what was going on back at my house, of course, but I guess I gave off the impression of someone that wasn’t interested in balloon sculptures or beach reading, which was true.

Making my way up the steps and inside the building, I was thinking I must be the only person in the whole town who wasn’t off at some cookout that day, playing Frisbee or chopping up the potatoes for potato salad or splashing around in a pool. It was one thing to swing by this place for a bunch of Agatha Christies and a lemonade. But what kind of a loser would be at the library, researching Prince Edward Island on the last weekend of summer before school started?

Only there was one other person. She was sitting in the reading room, where I had come with my notebook to copy facts down from the encyclopedia—these being the days when we still used encyclopedias to find out about things. She was sitting in one of the leather chairs I often sat in myself when I hung out here, only she sat in the lotus position, as if she was meditating, but with a book in front of her. She wore glasses and she had her hair in a braid, and she was wearing shorts that left a lot of her
legs showing, which made it particularly obvious how skinny she was.

She looked my age, but I didn’t recognize her. Normally I’d have been too shy to say anything, but maybe it was having Frank around that last couple of days—the picture of him jumping out that window, and all the other crazy stuff he’d done since, and the feeling it gave me that the world was such a crazy place you might as well just go for it—I asked the girl if she went to school around here.

I didn’t before, but I just moved here, she said. I’m supposed to try out living with my dad this year. The official reason is I have an eating disorder and they’re hoping a new school environment will help, but really I think my mom just wanted to get rid of me so she can fool around with her boyfriend without me getting in the way.

I know what you mean, I said. I would not have imagined I’d discuss with anyone how I’d been feeling about my mother and Frank getting together, but this girl appeared to understand, and she didn’t know anybody around here, and I liked the way she looked. You couldn’t call her pretty, but she gave the appearance of being a person who might care about things a lot of girls didn’t, who were only interested in clothes or getting a boyfriend.

I asked her what she was reading. I’m investigating my legal rights, she said. Also child psychology.

She was doing a study of certain kinds of adolescent trauma to support her case to her parents that she was currently experiencing it.

Her name was Eleanor. Normally she lived in Chicago. Until now, she only came here for school vacations sometimes. She was going into eighth grade. She had gotten into this really great private school where they focused mainly on drama and none of the kids cared about sports and you could wear any kind of
clothes you wanted or a nose ring even and the teachers didn’t get on your case. But at the last minute she couldn’t go.

My stupid parents said we didn’t have the money, she said. So, hello Holton Mills Junior High.

I’m going into seventh grade, I said. I’m Henry.

I’d gotten a stack of books about the Maritime Provinces—the Maritimes, it turns out they were called. I had set them down on the floor next to the other leather chair, across from Eleanor’s.

Are you writing a report or something? she asked.

Kind of. It’s for my mother. She wants to know if Canada might be a good place to move.

Something about Eleanor made me not want to lie to her. My mother and her boyfriend, I said. I was trying out this word that I’d never used before. Not in connection to my mother anyway. There seemed to be no harm in saying it. Just because a person’s mother has a boyfriend doesn’t mean he’s an escaped convict.