The Late Child (48 page)

So, as she approached the center of Tarwater, she drove especially slowly. The two policemen in Tarwater—there had always been two—didn't have that much to do. They sat in their cars and waited, most of the night, and they loved to pounce on speeders. Also, she had the feeling that her father's pickup was not too well equipped for night driving. Only one headlight seemed to be working; either that or her vision was weird.

Still, the town looked awfully peaceful, maybe because it was such a relief to get beyond the sound of her mother's voice. There was not a single car moving on the streets of Tarwater when Harmony drove up to the jail. Tarwater had no buildings more than two stories high—it was essentially a one-story town. Across the stretch of prairie to the south she could clearly see the sign for the Best Western. Just being able to see it was kind of reassuring; if the other headlight went out on the pickup she could probably just walk to the motel, it wasn't that far.

Only a single police car was parked in front of the jail when she pulled up, but there were six teenagers sitting there, on the curb. At first she thought it might be a youth gang that had been let out of jail. There were three girls and three boys. When she
stepped out of the car they all said “Aunt Harmony” at once, it was a big surprise. Then it dawned on her that the youth gang was composed of her nephews and nieces—Neddie had a girl and two boys, Pat a boy and two girls.

“We knew you'd come to see Uncle Billy, we just wanted to meet you, you're the most famous person who ever lived in Tarwater,” a skinny boy said. Harmony knew he was Neddie's just from his skinniness.

“Aren't you Dickie?” she asked. “And you're Don and you're Donna. And you're Dave and you're Deenie and you're Debbie.”

For some reason her sisters had given all their children names that began with D. Harmony thought she had done well to get their names right. Once the introductions were over, nobody had much of an inkling of what to say next. Harmony certainly didn't, although she was touched that they had all wanted to meet her so badly that they had parked themselves on a curb in Tarwater, in the middle of the night. It certainly showed that they cared about their auntie.

Another fact that kind of soaked in was that none of her nieces and nephews were all that young; she was not seeing the little kids she remembered from Polaroids. They all seemed to fall in an age group between seventeen and maybe twenty-five. She had stayed away too long—much too long—to get to see them as kids. It seemed only a short while ago that she had been getting pictures of their earliest birthday parties, or snaps of the boys in their Little League uniforms—pictures from childhood. But already the childhood of the children in those pictures was gone; they just weren't children anymore.

“You're all grown up,” she said. “Can I give you all hugs?”

Before she knew it they were all hugging her; it was as if they had been waiting for the hugs for years and years—all their lives, really. She was thinking, as she hugged them, that none of them looked too happy—not in an overall sense; not happy as Eddie was happy. They seemed older than their years, as if life in Tarwater had aged them too quickly. It was a little confusing; it was supposed to be city kids that grew up too quickly; but her
nieces and nephews seemed to have grown old as they grew up. All but two already had children, and several had had more than one marriage.

“Aunt Harmony, you're still beautiful,” Debbie said.

“We're sorry about Pepper,” Don said. “We only got to meet her once.”

“Maybe if she had lived in Tarwater she wouldn't have got AIDS,” Deenie suggested; Harmony knew she was just trying to be comforting, but the way it came out wasn't comforting. The very thought of Pepper living in Tarwater was confusing. She might have already had babies and an ex-husband and have been abandoned; she might never have known Laurie or the nice bakeries of New York. If she could have lived, Pepper would have had good things ahead of her. Harmony was having a hard time imagining what good things the nice young people in the street had ahead of them, other than more children, more divorces, more husbands and wives who weren't much different from the husbands and wives they had got the divorces from.

“Aunt Harmony, did we make you sad?” Deenie asked. Probably she felt Don had done the wrong thing, in mentioning Pepper.

“Honey, it's just a sadness I have,” Harmony said. “You didn't cause it. Have you been in to see Uncle Billy?”

“He doesn't want to see us,” Dickie said.

“He thinks we're all fuckups,” Debbie said. “He told Peewee not to let us in the jail.”

“We all want to meet Eddie, real bad,” Donna said. “We saw him all over the place on TV.”

“He's so cute,” Deenie said. “We're going to go out to Grandpa's in the morning and take him to breakfast.”

“Try to find a place with real maple syrup,” Harmony advised. “He's kind of picky about things like that.”

“I don't guess I'd know real maple syrup if I was eating it,” Don said.

“Mom says he's a match for Granny,” Debbie said. “I'm glad somebody's a match for her, none of us are.”

“I'm a match for her,” Donna said. “I'm not letting some cranky old lady push me around.”

Harmony was looking at the little town, empty even of cars; not one single thing open at ten at night except the jail. The sight of it was making her want to go to the airport. She had never before had such a strong feeling of needing to go to the airport; she wanted to be someplace where at least a few things other than the jail stayed open past ten at night. It was touching that her nieces and nephews had wanted to meet her so badly that they would come to the jail in the middle of the night; it was touching, but also complicated. She had missed their lives—what could she and they do with one another now? She knew she ought to get a good night's sleep and start right in the next day meeting their children and learning their husbands' and wives' names and finding out what jobs they worked at; but the thought of doing that made her feel hopeless, it was too late. She had missed being an aunt—it wasn't her calling, as Gary would say.

“I have to go now, Auntie,” Don said. “My girlfriend works at a Circle K in a bad part of Tulsa—I have to be there in twenty minutes to pick her up. If she has to stand around, guys try to pick her up.”

“They don't have to try very hard, either,” Donna said, with a kind of flatness in her voice that reminded Harmony of Neddie.

“Donna thinks Jeanie's a slut,” Debbie said.

“She's not a slut, she just likes to be picked up on time,” Don said. “It's hard for an outsider to make much headway with this family.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Donna said. “Anybody who's not a slut can get along fine with this family.”

Something about the look on Don's face touched Harmony—it was a hopeless look. Perhaps he knew in his heart that Donna was right and that his girlfriend really was a slut. Probably she wouldn't wait two minutes at the Circle K before going off with some guy, if Don wasn't right there to meet her. The look made Harmony want to hug him, really hug him. Maybe he had just taken the only girl he could get because he was too lonely to do
anything else. Harmony could see, from looking around the empty streets, that it would be easy to get lonely enough that it would keep you from being picky. She had been that lonely even in Las Vegas, and certainly there were plenty of guys to choose from in Las Vegas.

When Don left they all began to leave, too—they just kind of drifted across the street, with a wave or two—they all had cars parked on the other side of the square. Harmony waved too; she felt ambivalent about seeing them leave. When they were standing around her, close, they all looked old, but now that they were wandering across the street they all looked young again—very young, just a bunch of skinny kids who had grown up in the same family in the same small town. They all seemed too skinny, but in ways that had nothing to do with their bodies. It was their experience that was skinny: they had too much experience of a flat place and not enough experience of the big world and the interesting things it held. She wished that at some point she could have scraped up the money to fly them all to Disneyland—then they could tell all their friends that their famous aunt had flown them there. It occurred to her that maybe she could still do it, someday; it might be even better because now some of them could even take
their
kids. It would be killing two birds with one stone. Even so, Harmony couldn't help feeling how much more advantaged Eddie was. He had been to Disneyland when he was four, and meant to go to Disney World in Florida pretty soon, too.

“I need to go there before I'm eight, at the
latest
,” he said, often.

Then her nephews and nieces came convoying around the square in their cars. The only one who didn't have a car was Don, who had a motorcycle. He rode it without a helmet, too. Except for Don the boys drove large rattly cars whose mufflers weren't the best, and the girls drove small economical cars that all looked a little bent, as if they might have been involved in a few fender benders.

All the nephews and nieces waved at her before they disappeared up the road, to wherever they lived their lives. She knew
Eddie would be thrilled to have breakfast with them, if they remembered—sometimes people's memories just weren't as good as their intentions.

Harmony decided to walk around the courthouse before she went in to see Billy. She was definitely the only person walking around the courthouse at that hour; it should have been a peaceful stroll, but in fact she felt a little unsettled. Being among her family, so suddenly, was sort of like arriving unexpectedly in a country she had visited once previously, long ago. She was vaguely familiar with the customs and the language, but only vaguely. Since she
had
been to the country long before, she had expected that things would soon fall into place. She would learn what to do and what not to do, what to say and what not to say. Still, she felt a little rattled: the country was more different than she had expected it to be. The fact that she had come back after a long absence gave her a power she wasn't comfortable with; mainly, it was the power to wound: to make people feel their manners were bad, just because their manners were different. She didn't want to make her nephew Don feel like he was a hick just because he couldn't tell real maple syrup from fake maple syrup, even though her five-year-old son could make that distinction from one lick of the spoon. She knew she had to be real careful not to give her nephews and nieces the impression that she thought their lives were skinny, although she did think that. Lots of young people worked with her at the recycling plant in Las Vegas, but with those young people she had a sense that just about anything could happen—they could move to New York, they could go to college; one she knew was even writing a book; another was a ranked tennis player. His rank was around seven hundred but in her book that wasn't bad, considering how many people there were who played tennis.

With her nephews and nieces, though, she
didn't
have a sense that anything could happen; mostly she had a sense that anything couldn't happen; only a few things could happen. Mostly the young people who had just driven away were going to live lives their parents had lived, only with different hairstyles, in different
clothes, driving different cars. Mainly, it would be external things that would be different; the internal things probably weren't going to be different at all.

It didn't take very long to walk around the courthouse. Before Harmony could even halfway sort out her feelings she was back at the jail. At least the walk had helped to wake her up. Often in Las Vegas she would kind of get buzzy in the middle of the night, get a second wind or something—usually, when it happened there, she would just wander over to a casino. Maybe she would bump into somebody she had worked with and they would chat for a while. She could always find someone to talk to, in the casinos, even if it was three o'clock in the morning.

Things weren't that way in Tarwater; in Tarwater there was only the jail. If there had been a convenience store in sight, Harmony would have walked to it to buy some gum, she felt she would be a little less nervous if she had some gum to chew. But there was no convenience store in sight, and no one in sight, either, when she went in the jail, although, on the counter, there was a little bell you could ring. Beside the counter was a whole wall of wanted posters; she had not realized there were so many people out there who were wanted by the law, although she probably should have realized it; two or three of them had been her boyfriends. Back in her earlier days she had been reckless; she had liked to hook up with the wild guys, once in a while.

She did a quick scan of the posters to see if any of her boyfriends were still wanted; mainly the scan was a way of putting off ringing the bell. It was a little like checking into a small hotel in the middle of the night; probably the person who would have to check her in was already asleep. But, finally, she rang the bell.

The minute the bell jingled Peewee appeared—he got there so quick Harmony felt like he must have been standing on the other side of the door. Peewee had only been a grade behind her in school, but now he was almost bald. He had just a little bit of hair around the edges of his head.

“Harmony, my gosh, we thought you'd never come,” Peewee
said. “Billy's been waiting. All them nephews and nieces of yours kept coming in to use the bathroom.”

Peewee smiled a little smile—it reminded her of Ross, whom she still hadn't called. The way Peewee smiled touched Harmony, though. It was a smile that told her he didn't expect much. So many men smiled that smile: maybe they had expected to be sports heroes or make a lot of money or marry a movie star; or maybe they didn't even aim that high. Maybe they just thought they could run a nice little business, or have a happy family life or something; but, then, before they knew it, a lot of life slipped by, with none of the above happening. Then it seemed they began to expect less and less, until the day came when they didn't expect anything at all—maybe they still expected to breathe, or to watch television, maybe see a ball game now and then, but that was about where such men's expectations seemed to stop.