Tell (2 page)

“Where is it?” my mother said. “Where's the picture of Jamie?”

Detective Antonelli frowned again. “Whoever took the keys may have taken the frame. Is it real gold?”

My mother nodded. “I bought it for him.”

“Well, maybe that's why the thief took it,” Detective Antonelli said. He asked my mother one last time if there was anything else missing. When she said no, he thanked us for coming in.

I stayed home from school on Monday. More people phoned and came to the house. Later, I changed into a sports jacket, a good pair of pants (not jeans), a shirt with a tie (I had to borrow one of Phil's), and regular shoes, not sneakers. My mother changed into a black skirt and a black top. She didn't want to drive, which was probably a good thing because she kept crying, so we took a taxi to the funeral home for the viewing. My mother made me go with her to look at Phil,
who was lying in a casket in his best suit. She stood there for a long time, staring at him, kissing him on the cheek a couple of times (don't ask me how she could make herself do that) and crying. After a while, we sat down facing the coffin. Jack was there, dressed in a dark suit. He shook hands with everyone who came to look at Phil and to hug my mother. He thanked everyone for coming.

Every time someone came up to my mother to tell her how sorry they were about Phil, she turned on the waterworks. I thought she would dry out, she was crying so much.

People said the same things to me that they said to her:
I'm sorry for your loss. I can't imagine how you must feel, losing your father. He was such a great guy.

“I wish people would stop calling him that,” I complained to my mother later, when almost everyone had left.

“Stop calling him what?” she said.

“My father. Phil wasn't my father.”

“He raised you from when you were eight,” she said.

“But he wasn't my father.”

“Stop saying that,” my mother said. She was angry now and tears were gathering in her eyes. “I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't met him. I don't know how I would have managed to raise two boys on my own. Don't you remember what it was like, David? Don't you remember how hard it was before Phil came along?”

Before Phil, my mother had been on welfare. We lived in a rundown apartment that had mice and cockroaches, leaky pipes, broken tiles in the bathroom, no air-conditioning, and elevators that never worked. I remember my mother used to cry all the time then too because there was never enough money and she never got a break from looking after Jamie and me.

“Phil took good care of us,” she said and burst into tears again.

I put my arms around her until she calmed down. I handed her some tissues, and she dried her eyes. I told her again that everything was going to be all right.

I thought the viewing was bad. The funeral the next morning was worse. My mother didn't just cry. She sobbed. Especially when Jack got up and spoke about Phil.

Jack is a good guy, which is why I always had a hard time figuring out why he hung out with Phil. They played poker together almost every weekend, and every fall Jack and Phil and a couple of other guys went on a hunting trip together.

After Jack spoke, a guy from Phil's work, a trucker like Phil, got up. He said that Phil was a devoted family man and that he always talked about his family when he was away from home, which was basically from Monday to Friday, when he hauled a load of something halfway across the continent and a load of something else all the way back again. He said that Phil talked about his wife all the time—and my mother started to bawl. He said that Phil always treated his two stepsons like they were his own flesh and blood, and he described how broken up Phil had been when the younger one drowned. He said that Phil carried a picture of Jamie on his key chain, that it was always right in front of him, dangling from his ignition, and that he'd lay it on the bar next to him after he finished driving for the day and was ready to hoist a cold one. He said that Phil was always telling people about Jamie and his other son, David. He said that's the way he referred to me—as his son, not his stepson. He said Phil was proud of me.

Yeah. Right.

My mother was practically hysterical when they got ready to close the coffin. For a minute there, I thought she was going to crawl inside with Phil. She was sobbing and moaning. Tears were rushing down her cheeks. She was holding a wad of tissues that was all wet and clumpy from all the crying she had done. Jack had to hold onto her to keep her on her feet.

From the church we went to the cemetery, where my mother cried some more. Then we all went back to our house, where a bunch of my mother's friends were waiting with food for all the guests. After that it was kind of like a party—people talked about a lot of things besides Phil. My mother sat on the couch in the living room with a couple of her friends. She was pale and looked tired.

“Tough day, huh, David?” Jack said. He had come outside on the back porch where I was sitting. He dropped down onto the top step beside me and took a swallow from the beer bottle in his hand. “How are you holding up?”

“Okay, I guess,” I said. “I'm kind of worried about Mom, though. She hasn't stopped crying in days.”

“It's scary for her,” Jack said. “She's afraid to be on her own.”

“She's not on her own,” I said. “I'm here.”

Jack squeezed my shoulder. “I know, David. What I meant is, she's afraid to be on her own with no one to look after her the way Phil did. Maybe she's afraid she's going to end up the way she did after your dad went away.”

I looked at him. That was a funny way to put it.
After your dad went away,
like he'd taken a trip instead of died.

When Jack looked back at me, something changed in his face. He took a quick gulp of beer and stared out at our backyard, which was more weeds than grass. Phil always said that he worked hard all week, so he damn sure wasn't going to work like a farmer all weekend, trying to grow Astroturf in his backyard the way all the neighbors did. My mother wasn't interested in gardening either, other than sending
me next door to borrow the Taylors' lawn mower every so often and getting me to run it over what grass was out there.

“What I meant was,” Jack said again, “it was hard on your mother when she was alone with you and Jamie. She worried all the time. She stopped worrying after she met Phil.”

That wasn't exactly true. If you ask me, she just worried about different things. Mostly she worried that Jamie or me or both of us would do something to make Phil think that going out with a woman who already had two kids was a bad idea. Jamie was five years old when Mom started seeing Phil. I was seven. When Phil used to come over, when they were still just going out, she used to bribe us to be good (
I'll rent you some games for your PlayStation
) or threaten us (
If I have to tell you even once to be quiet or to behave, there'll be no TV for a week—I mean it, boys
). I mostly listened, but not Jamie. Jamie never listened to anyone, ever. When I think about it now, I think maybe he was
one of those hyperactive kids, you know, the kind who can't sit still even if they wanted to.

Mom married Phil when Jamie was six and I was eight. After that she worried that Phil wouldn't stay married to her on account of us. She read somewhere that kids from a first marriage sink something like half of all second marriages. She told us,
If Phil tells you to do something, do it
. She said,
He's your father now
. She said,
If you mess up this relationship for me, I don't know what I'll do
. I didn't want to mess things up for her. I don't think Jamie did, either. But that didn't mean he could all of a sudden change into a different person.

Mom tried threatening him. She tried bribing him. Then she came up with an idea. He could be as wild as he wanted during the week, when Phil was on the road. But on weekends, when Phil was around, he had to be quiet and sit still and not make noise. Plus, he had to pay attention to Phil and do what Phil told him.

It was a bad plan. If you let a little kid like Jamie act any way he wants five days a week, he's just naturally going to want to act that way all the time. He got wilder and wilder. It really pissed Phil off on Friday nights when he got home, tired. And on Saturday morning, when he wanted to sleep in. And on Saturday afternoon, when he wanted to relax. And on Saturday night, when he and Jack and his other friends came over to play poker. And on Sunday morning, when he was hungover and wanted to sleep in again. And on Sunday afternoon, when he wanted to relax because first thing Monday morning he had to be on the road again.

So my mother worried about that. She worried all the time. I think she worried more after she married Phil than she did when she was raising us alone.

“Sometimes I think about my real dad,” I said to Jack. “I wonder what he was like. I wish I remembered him.”

Jack looked at me, surprised. “You do?” he said. “You never talk about him?”

“That's because Mom never wants to talk about him. But he must have been really smart. And I bet he was way nicer than Phil.”

“You didn't like Phil much, did you, David?”

I looked down at the toes of my shoes. It didn't seem right to say you didn't like someone when you had just come from his funeral.

“Well, no matter what you think of him, Phil loved your mother,” Jack said. “And he stuck around—even if he could be a jerk sometimes.”

I was surprised to hear him say that. “I thought Phil was your friend,” I said.

“We played poker,” Jack said with a shrug.

He made it sound like things hadn't been the way I thought, like he and Phil weren't best buddies after all.

“I'm more a friend of your mom's than I was of Phil's,” he said. “I've known your mom for a long time. I only met Phil because of her.” That was news to me.
“She's stronger than she thinks, David. She's going to be okay.”

“How long have you known Mom?” I said.

“Since high school.”

That was news to me too.

“Did you know my dad?” I said.

Jack looked at me for a minute. I think he was going to tell me something. But someone started yelling in the house. It was my mother. She was all hysterical again when we got inside.

“He lied to me,” she was saying. “He told me I would always be looked after, but he lied to me.”

It took Jack a few minutes to find out what had happened. Phil had told my mother that he had life insurance and that if anything ever happened to him, she would have nothing to worry about. It turned out that wasn't true. He didn't have any insurance.

The next day my mother started checking out other stuff about Phil. What she found made her mad at first and then started her crying again. It turned out Phil had a big mortgage on the house that my mother didn't know about. It was a new one. One of Phil's poker buddies told her later that Phil had taken out the mortgage because he gambled a lot and lost a lot. It also
turned out that there was almost nothing in the bank.

“We're not going to be able to stay in this house,” she told me that night. Her eyes were all red and puffy, but she wasn't crying anymore. “I can't afford the mortgage payments on what I make at the supermarket. Even if I get more hours, it still won't be enough for the mortgage and all the bills.”

“Where will we go?” I said.

“If we sell the house, we'll make some money. Not a lot, but some. And we can probably sell some of the furniture and some of Phil's things. We'll find an apartment. A
nice
apartment, not like that one we were in before. I'm going to see about getting more hours and maybe even another job. I think you're going to have to find an after-school and weekend job, David. We're going to be on a pretty tight budget.”

I stared at her.

“What's the matter?” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

I got up and hugged her. “We're going to be okay, Mom. I know we are.”

She hugged me back. “I don't know what I'd do without you. I love you, David.”

I felt good about that.

When I got home from school the next day, my mother didn't act like she loved me. She was too busy freaking out.

“Where did you get this?” she screamed at me, shoving a hand into my face.

I couldn't understand what she was talking about. Where did I get
what
?

She opened her hand. In it was a small gold picture frame with a little loop in the corner of the frame. Usually there was a chain through the loop where you could attach it to a key ring. But there was no chain there now. It was broken off. In the frame was a picture of my kid brother.

“Where did you get this?” my mother screamed at me again.

I couldn't believe she had it in her hand. I had to force myself to stay calm. Instead
of answering her question, I said, “Where did
you
get it, Mom?”

“I was doing the laundry.
Your
laundry.” Geez, most of the time she was nagging at me to put my dirty clothes in the hamper or was complaining because I was old enough to be doing my own laundry, so why was she still picking up after me and folding my stuff out of the dryer and putting it away? For the past few months, her rule had been that if I didn't at least make the effort to put it in the hamper, she wasn't going to make the effort to wash it. Then I could see what it felt like to wake up one morning and have nothing but dirty clothes to put on for school. So why all of a sudden was she picking up after me again and doing my laundry for me?

“I found this in the dryer,” she said, still holding out the gold-framed picture. “You want to tell me how it got there, David?”

“I don't know, Mom,” I said. “It looks like the chain got broken somehow. Maybe that's why the cops didn't find it with Phil's keys. Maybe it got broken and he put it in his pocket.”