Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (18 page)

Tonight I would make those journals obsolete. I would be the best ever,
the only one,
driving Kyle and Jerry Savage and Arthur Whiting and who cared who else out of her memory for good.

Three messages were on the answering machine. The first was from Thea.

"Thanks again for coming this morning, Gordie. My dad came out of the operation fine. He didn't get to Recovery until an hour ago, so I would have taken your whole day." She sounded run-down. "They found a couple of blockages that hadn't shown up on the angiogram, but he's out of surgery and babbling nonsense, so everything's A-okay."

She'd be spending the night in the hospital. Her father, she guessed, wouldn't be out for another five or six days.

My mother's was the next. Since my visit home, I had rarely been returning her calls, which made her hysterical. But here she sounded relaxed, so much so, I thought, that with Alicia's arrival still an hour away, I'd call her.

"You're a sweetie pie, Gordie," she said. The old Zenith was on in the background. A studio laugh track. She never used to watch television at this hour. "Thea told me you spent the whole day with her. That was extremely decent. I can promise you it's something she'll never forget."

I sensed her stretching the phone over to the television as she turned the sound down. "I remember every person who came to visit when your father was dying. Every single one."

It had been so long since we'd had a normal conversation that I almost didn't know what to say. "When did you talk to Thea?" I asked.

"About an hour ago."

"Only family was allowed in the recovery room. I haven't heard about the operation."

"I don't think it was particularly successful," she said. "When they went in, they found much more damage than they'd expected."

I heard the flick of a lighter, her sharp inhale. I pictured her licking her lips, the way she did when she took a cigarette from her mouth to talk.

"They usually hope for ten years after a bypass, but the doctors have been reticent. Thea sounds okay, but you know how bottled up she is. Suffer in silence."

I opened some windows to air out the apartment, took a broom from the hall closet, and began sweeping. Talking to my mother was taking my mind off Alicia's secrets.

"I tried to get the day off, but there's a bug going around and I'm all that's left," she said. "Dean Cantor wouldn't let me go. I practically run the place and he wouldn't let me go."

"So you almost came here?"

"Oh yes," she said. "I would have been there tonight."

I looked at the bottles of wine, the flowers lying on the kitchen counter, and considered what a disaster that might have been. "Well, I should probably go," I said. "I'm out with the police reporters tonight. We've had a rash of payback killings."

"Be careful," my mother said.

I got off the phone with a sinking feeling, a passing sadness. Why lie? She hadn't forced me this time. Not a single question about work. This phone call had been different; I'd seen how it could be with my mother, someday, when her expectations were met.

The last message was from Margaret.

"This is Margaret Whiting. I wanted to follow up on our conversation from last weekend." The line had the muffled echo of long distance or a cordless phone. "If you could call me tomorrow I would be grateful."

She left both her home and work numbers. I wondered what kind of work she did. I figured maybe she taught elementary school: strict, orderly, old-fashioned.

I had expected, even on the answering machine message, some kind of apology or explanation for Joe's outburst, but Margaret, I would see, was unapologetic, believing, when it came down to it, that discussion ends with the act.

I slid the bottles of wine into the freezer. Without a vase for the flowers, I put what was left of my Maxwell House into a plastic bag and the flowers in the coffee can, and set the arrangement on the living room chest, where it looked nice and rustic.

I put the Patsy Cline tape in the cassette player and lit the dozen votives, which I placed around the living room, on my bedside table and bureau, turning off all the lights. I took a long shower with the oatmeal soap, shaved my face smooth, dressed in a pair of comfortable pants and my favorite threadbare button-down shirt, and waited for Alicia to buzz the intercom.

By the time she arrived, more than an hour late, I'd had three glasses of wine, the votives were getting down to their tins, and Patsy Cline was singing "I Fall to Pieces" a second time around.

"This place isn't so small." She turned on the overhead light, then poked her head into my bedroom, where she dropped her bag.

"How about some wine?" I asked, filling a glass.

"No, I'm fine. I'm too tired to drink."

"Are you sure? It'll help you sleep."

"Maybe a couple of aspirin." She dropped to the couch. "Do you have some juice or something?"

I brought her a glass of orange juice and some Tylenol and sat next to her, reaching my arm across the top of the couch. I combed the curls back off her forehead with my fingers, wiped the perspiration through her hair. Kissing her temple I noticed the brown
roots
that were coming in. I never used to like dyed hair, in the same way that I couldn't stand makeup or chewing gum or high-heeled shoes, hut on Alicia brown roots looked sexy—the woman in transition again, changing her look especially for me.

"What time is it?"

I gestured at the kitchen clock, which read a quarter to eleven.

"I'm going to take a shower." She sat up. "Do you have cable? I don't want to miss the news."

"I only have regular TV."

"Huh." She went to the bedroom and undressed. I turned off the Patsy Cline tape, blew out the votives, poured the glass of wine in the sink.

Alicia returned, freshly scrubbed, in a huge black and gray Colorado football T-shirt that fell nearly to her knees.

My heart sank. A football player, some enormous hulking brute, had given this to her.

"What's that box?" she asked now, pointing to the scanner, which sat on top of the television. I hadn't turned it on in weeks.

"A police radio."

"Why do you have it?"

"To know what's happening in the streets. I listen to it all the time."

I turned it on, flipping between stations. "Any good reporter should have one of these," I boasted.

"But you're an investigative reporter."

I pressed up behind her, sliding my hands under her shirt. "I like to keep a feel for the city," I said, squeezing her shoulders. "If something really good comes over, I'll go out to the crime scene."

"You go to crime scenes?" She turned around, suddenly interested. "I've always wondered what that would be like."

The dispatcher on Channel 3 was sending two cars to break up a party in South Grand.

"I go all the time," I said.

"Let's go, then," she said, and she meant
right now.
"I just need to put on some jeans."

She came back from the bedroom in her jeans with the football shirt untucked, and turned up the volume on the scanner. I tried telling her that nothing was happening, it wasn't a good night for crime scenes, praying all along,
Please, let's not have a shooting.
Each time I attempted to distract her, she raised her hand to indicate,
Not now, I'm trying to listen.

The police had broken up the party without incident; the dispatchers were going through their neighborhood checks. After a while, she began to look tired again. It was well past midnight, and I had work in the morning.

"I'll tell you what," I said. "How about you come by the office tomorrow night after work and I'll show you around the newspaper. We can do the crime scene another night."

She didn't argue, and later I watched her beneath the Fred Astaire poster, her head on my pillow, surrounded by my clothes and my photographs.

I climbed into bed and curled my body behind hers, kissing the ridge of her shoulder, breathing in the sweet scent of oatmeal soap.

AT WORK
Thursday morning there was a note on my desk saying that Ritger had called and he wouldn't be in for the rest of the week. The number he left, in case of emergency, was not his home telephone, so I looked it up in the crisscross directory: Sandy Hill Rehabilitation Center.

His jaw again.

This wouldn't be the first time that he'd gone back for a major treatment. He'd been back twice before, each time returning to work in a foul humor. Once he'd slept on it badly and the jaw had to be realigned; the other time they'd actually rebroken it, putting him on a painkiller that made veins rise around his forehead and neck.

But something countered my good mood that morning. On the way back from the cafeteria I'd noticed that the painting in the lobby—the reproduction of Remington's
Pony Express,
the first sight to greet me each day as the doors opened to the newsroom—had taken on new meaning. Beneath the flaring nostrils of the horse and its eager rider was the sweeping orange cursive of Bobby Campanis.

I could look nowhere, it seemed, without facing Alicia's past.

Around lunchtime, Margaret called from what sounded like a busy restaurant.

"Shall we pick up where we left off?" she asked.

I couldn't remember just where we had left off, only that she had begun to draw the truth out of me before Alicia interrupted us.

"You were telling me that you're an obituary writer," she said. "I appreciated your honesty, so I thought I'd return the favor."

I heard a door slide shut, drowning out the noise of the busy restaurant.

"I know you're not writing a story about my brother, Mr. Hatch—we've been over that—and I won't pry into your motivations. But I thought you'd be interested in knowing a bit about Alicia."

"Anything you'd like to tell me, I'm happy to hear," I said.

"The first time I met her was at the wedding," Margaret began. "Their courtship was extremely brief."

She said the wedding took place down in the Ozarks, where the Whitings owned a cabin on Table Rock Lake, thirty miles from the Arkansas border. The cabin, which had been in the family since 1939, sat at the tip of a long point on twenty-five acres of open field. Arthur's father liked to fish there. His mother raised wolfhounds.

"We'd have the puppies whelped by June," Margaret said. "By August they'd all be in good homes."

She knew exactly how many dogs her family had brought into the world: sixty-eight, in fifteen litters. She had kept close track of them, counting dozens of prize winners in the family pedigree.

When both their mother and father died unexpectedly within a year of each other, leaving Margaret, the oldest and still in high school, in the role of surrogate parent, Arthur became obsessed with carrying on the tradition—first as a handler, then as a trainer, breeder, and judge. He never owned fewer than a dozen wolfhounds at a time, all of them show quality.

"Dogs were the passion of his life," Margaret said.

It was natural, then, that he would give Alicia a puppy as a wedding gift.

"Who was at the wedding?"

"That was a curious thing. She didn't have anyone there, not even her parents. I believe they live in Texas."

"Her parents? Aren't they dead?"

"They're not dead," she said. "At least they weren't three years ago. Alicia tells lies of convenience."

I thought if anyone had been untruthful thus far in my short time with Alicia, it had been me.

"Would you like to know how they met?"

"Sure," I said hesitantly.

"Alicia came into the bank for a ten-thousand-dollar loan, and he fell for her instantly." She laughed bitterly, the kind of laugh that seemed on the edge of tears. "She never did pay the loan back. Arthur did."

I was fidgeting with the phone cord, twisting and untwisting it around my finger.

"And something else," she continued. "Alicia didn't look at all like she does now."

According to Margaret, in the fall of 1986 Alicia had a strung-out look. Her skin was pale and drawn, her hair spiked, rust red. She couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds.

"Even in her wedding dress she looked like a stray," Margaret said.

"I have a hard time believing she ever looked like that," I said.

"Perhaps I should send you a photograph. I know how implausible it must seem."

I paused. "Okay."

"The physical change was almost immediate," she said. "When I saw them that spring, her color was more natural and she had gained weight. By fall, she looked like she does today."

Alicia found work with a local veterinarian, took up dog grooming, trained to be a handler. She began dressing like the ladies in the dog club and became increasingly obsessed with making her puppy a champion.

"She's utterly transient," Margaret said. The judgment in her voice put me on the defensive. "Because she had no life of her own, she moved into Arthur's and completely took over."

I didn't wish to hear any more. I knew if Margaret carried on much further I might say something I'd regret, so I told her that I ought to be getting back to work, perhaps we'd be in touch. But before I hung up I couldn't resist trying to learn more about their falling-out.

"At the estate sale, Alicia told me that you used to live in her house," I said.

"It's not her house, it's Arthur's," Margaret shot back. "He bought it."

"But you used to live there, right?"

"I had been looking to settle back down in St. Louis, so I moved in with my brother temporarily. That was 1982. Headquarters had moved me to Ohio for a couple of years, to open a new branch office."

Margaret had struck me as anything but the corporate type. I'd been guessing that she was a schoolteacher.

"Where do you work?"

"Ralston Purina," she said. Purina headquarters was in St. Louis, and now it made sense.

"So you lived at the house on Dalecarlia for what, four years?" I asked.

"It was only meant to be a few months, as I said, but as so often happens, the months turned into years. The best four years in my memory, if you want to know the truth. Arthur and I had very few people in our lives, so we were a great comfort to each other."