Turn Signal (7 page)

He used to wake her like this all the time, in the middle of the night, after he himself had awakened and was aroused by her closeness, her smell. And she would, without saying a word, slide her panties down and push herself backward into him, moaning, and they would do it right there, lying on their sides, sometimes more than once. They often would do this without saying a word, their conversation reduced to incoherent ecstasy. Sometimes, he would fall asleep still inside her. Sometimes, best of all, she would be the one to awaken him, her hand sliding slyly up his leg and then stroking his instantly hard cock. They would never even see each other in the pitch-dark of their bedroom at the farmhouse.

Something, though, has changed the dynamics of all that. Jack figures he's batting less than .500 on his midnight sorties since they've moved to Speakeasy Glen. More often than not, Gina groans rather than moans or thrashes about in her sleep, and he rolls back on his side of the bed. Not once, since they've moved, has Gina initiated what he used to refer to, at breakfast the next morning, as a dream-fuck.

He pushes harder, hoping. But she jerks away from him and mumbles something unintelligible but unencouraging. He sees his average sliding farther downward.

They still make love, although maybe it's once or twice a week now instead of six or seven times, the way it was not that long ago. He is somewhat baffled, because their downward sexual spiral seems to have been exacerbated by the move from the old place, which Gina had truly come to dislike, with its antiquated plumbing and electrical system, its smell of liniment and age, to what she herself still calls her dream house.

She continues to say she's fine, really, about his little mid-life crisis that continues to deplete their bank account. She tells him he has to do what he thinks is best, that she has faith in him.

Still, on a horny, sleepless night, he wonders.

CHAPTER SEVEN

He knocks, waits, then knocks again, louder. Brady's music—it feels like Lynyrd Skynyrd—is vibrating the walls. Finally, after enduring the midday sun another hot minute, Jack uses his penknife to flip the hook-and-eye screen-door latch and walks onto the porch.

Jack's grandfather built the house in 1920. His father, Kenneth, moved in with Ellen, his bride, in 1938. He was 20 and she was 17. Multiple generations of Stones have lived here, often three generations at once. It ends with Brady.

This morning, Sandy called early, or what seemed early to her brother, and told him they had to be out of the house by 2 p.m., had to have Brady out as well. Definitely have to have Brady out, because there was a prospective buyer.

No problem, Jack told her. We'll have done all the visiting we can stand by then.

“Don't be that way,” she'd beseeched him after a short silence, and he said he wouldn't.

They are supposed to meet here at noon. Sandy is bringing a bucket of chicken, potato salad, whatever, and the three siblings are going to have a good old-fashioned picnic, cooked by some 15-year-old fast-food dropout, here at the old home place Mike and Sandy can't wait to get rid of. Gina and Sandy's husband were more than willing to let them limit the festivities to natural-born Stones only. Sandy said Brady was certainly welcome to join them, but everyone including Brady knew he wasn't.

The boards creak under Jack's feet as he walks across the south leg of the U-shaped porch. It was everybody's favorite feature. The real-estate agent oohed and aahed over the way it surrounds the house on three sides, all but the west. There was always a cool place to sit or play when they were kids. The remnants of a hurricane three years ago took down the big maple in front, so this side doesn't offer the relief it once did. Still, it's quite a porch. Jack misses it. The deck at their new home doesn't hold a candle to it. You need a porch, this far south, a screened-in porch. But decks are cheaper to build.

He reaches for the key he's kept for most of his life, since they started locking the front door. He's finally coaxed it into the keyhole and is pushing open the door when he realizes the music has stopped.

Before he can call out, he hears a metallic shuck-shuck, and his one and only son jumps out of the first bedroom on the right. Jack is staring into the barrel of a deer rifle. Behind it, Brady's bald head and bright, fearful eyes shine out from the darkness.

“Brady!” is all Jack has time to scream, diving toward the kitchen door to his left as the darkness and quiet explode.

He lies there, halfway in, halfway out.

“Dad?” he hears, through the ringing in his ears. “Dad? Is that you?”

Jack assures him, as soon as he catches his breath, that it is indeed his father, and that he intends to do something foul and painful with the rifle as soon as he feels steady enough to stand.

Brady puts the gun down and rushes over to help him up.

“I'm sorry. Geez, I'm sorry. I mean, I was sitting in the bedroom, listening to music when I heard that lock turn. Wow. I thought it was …”

“Who? Who'd you think it was?”

Brady is silent for a few seconds. “I don't know. I just thought it was somebody didn't mean me any good.”

Jack is afraid there would be many suspects if Brady did turn up dead sometime, at the end of a dark Richmond street or off the side of some winding country lane, kneeling with his hands tied behind him, or even in his own bed, dried blood caked around his slick, shiny, ruined skull.

When Ellen was still living, after Jack and Gina moved to Speakeasy Glen, she would mention some of Brady's friends. They did not sound like people Jack Stone wanted anywhere near his mother or his son. But Brady still needed some time to get his bearings. They grow up slower these days, Jack knows. And Ellen's was about the best place, they all agreed, for him to stay. He could at least nominally look after his grandmother (although Jack was pretty sure Ellen had taken care of Brady more than the other way around, almost to the end).

And at least somebody in the family, he thought, was willing to stay out here and keep her company. Ellen could've spent plenty of nights with Jack and Gina, even if Gina didn't exactly do back flips over that possibility. But when it started getting dark, the only place his mother ever wanted to be was home. The only comfort Jack gets now is in knowing that she didn't ever have to leave. Brady found her one morning, cold and peaceful in her own bed, her eyes open and her head turned to one side as if she were still admiring the forsythias blooming outside the window.

Jack gets off the floor, brushes the dust off his pants and shirt, and looks up. There's a silver-dollar hole in the porch screen, jagged along the edges. He tries to guess the probable trajectory and figures Brady didn't hurt anything else except perhaps an oak tree across the road.

“Well,” he says, “I don't suppose we have time to fix that before Mike and Sandy get here.”

“Please don't tell them how it got there,” Brady begs him like a little kid. “Mike thinks I'm a big enough fuckup as it is.”

And your point would be? Jack is thinking.

“I guess we could tell them a woodpecker did a kamikaze into it,” he says at last. “Better put that gun up. Seriously, did you really think somebody was breaking in? And isn't it just a little bit of a violation of your probation to be playing Rambo out here?”

“Well, you never know,” Brady says, and looks away, out across the raggedy front yard. Jack is almost certain that he does know, that his son has been smoking dope, something he promised he wouldn't do. His pupils seem to almost fill his eyes.

“Jesus, Brady. You knew we were going to be here at noon.” Jack looks at his watch: 11:40. “Let's see if we can't get some windows open in here. Air this place out. They've got somebody coming to look at the place at 2. You've got to get your ass out of here by then, too.”

Brady beats him back to the bedroom and starts hurriedly and sloppily cleaning up. Jack doesn't really even want to see what's in there.

He did such a piss-poor job of raising Brady. Ellen performed most of the parenting, and his guilt is only lessened by the knowledge that at least he did more than the boy's mother, whom Brady calls Saint Carly, spitting afterward if he's outside at the time. He's seen her exactly once—one time too many—since his second birthday.

The sense of how little he's done for Brady reaches out and pulls Jack back whenever he starts to, as Brady puts it, “play daddy.” If he didn't finish high school, or find a job he could stay with, or a wife, if he got messed up on drugs, well, whose fault was that?

Jack looks at his son and sees a lot more of Carly and the Hamners than he does of him and his family. Brady is a little under six feet, with the wide, thick body of Carly's brothers and the infectious smile, promising so much more than it can usually deliver, part of the charm that has kept him out of jail, off the streets and alive. So far.

He started shaving his head when he was 18, and it works for him, with his good skin that tans so naturally like his mother's did. He's got a great cleft chin and a little diamond earring in his right ear. He's done bit parts in a couple of movies they filmed in Richmond and had roles in a few area theater productions. The women seem to be crazy for him, although Jack sometimes wonders about his taste in them.

Why the hell can't you straighten your ass out? Jack always wants to ask him, and sometimes does. Mostly, though, he's afraid of the answer, and he stays silent and useless.

Mike and Sandy get there just after noon. They've come together in Mike's Cherokee. Probably wanted to huddle first and get their story straight before taking on little brother, Jack figures.

Mike's been at Philip Morris for almost 30 years, a supervisor for the last 12. He's hoping to retire in another three. He has Jack's reddish, thinning hair, but he outweighs his younger brother by 30 pounds, and he smokes a pack a day. He doesn't really look 11 years older. He isn't so much well-preserved as soft, not fully validated despite his 59 years. He's been on his own since his wife left him 10 years ago, the day after Raymond, their youngest, graduated from high school.

“It's his eyes,” Gina said once. “They're like little BB's. And he doesn't look right at you when he talks.”

Sandy's been a homemaker most of her adult life, the only one of them to finish college. Her kids are grown and gone. She could get a job now, but she makes no secret of her desire to never “punch a time-clock again.” She was a sixth-grade teacher for three years after she married, and she hasn't been back. Every time Jack sees her, she seems out of breath. She's been sure for 20 years that she has cancer, but so far the doctors have been unable to find it.

Jack does not have that many fond memories of his childhood, although he thinks that he should. To hear everyone talk about it later, he was spoiled rotten, the apple of everyone's eye, The Baby.

He remembers being something of a fifth wheel, a pest to his older siblings and something of a burden to parents who were not young enough to chase him around the yard, playing tag or ball the way they had with the other two. Kenneth and Ellen were still in their early 20s when Mike and Sandy were born.

It wasn't until he showed some aptitude at sports that he remembers getting much voluntary attention from his older siblings.

“So,” Mike says, looking almost at him, “how'd the reunion go? Surprised you could make it up this early.”

“It was OK. Mostly people I see all the time anyhow. Gerald Prince was there. You remember Jerry Prince?”

Mike laughs as he flicks an ash into the Coke can next to his lawn chair. They're on the porch because Sandy won't let him smoke inside. She's afraid it might hurt the sale value.

“The Little Princess? Good God, I hadn't thought about him in some time. He's in New York, is that right?”

They hear a truck start up in the side yard and see Brady roar past, not looking in their direction, peeling a little rubber as he turns left out of the driveway, toward town.

“I told him he ought to be out of here by 2,” Jack says, in way of explaining why his son has not chosen to speak to them.

Sandy is passing out paper plates, admonishing them to put all the chicken bones and other trash in the white plastic bag she's attached to the side of the porch table.

“Jack,” she says, “how's the book coming? Are you almost done? I mean, is it finished?”

He tells her it is finished, and she makes a show at seeming excited by this. At least, Jack think, she tries. Mike told him, a month after he sold his rig, that he thought he'd lost his mind.

“So, how much … I mean, do you think somebody'll want to pay you something for it?” Sandy asks.

“Dunno,” Jack says, gnawing on a drumstick. “I sure hope so.”

“You don't have us in there, do you?” Mike is looking more or less at him. “I've heard of people that just totally embarrassed their families by writing shit about them in books.”

Sandy gives Mike a sharp look. “Jack wouldn't do that. He wouldn't embarrass us. And don't talk like that.”

“Just asking.”

Jack explains to his older brother, again, that it's a novel, that it's fiction.

“That means made up,” he says.

“I know what fiction is,” Mike tells him, glaring out across the yard. “You ain't talking to an idiot. Hell, I've got more education than you do.”

True. Mike went through two years of junior college.

Jack asked them to come out here. You don't know, he told Mike, how many more times we'll be able to be together in the old place. Somebody might buy it next week.

“If there's a god,” Mike said, but he and Sandy both were able to free up some time from their busy schedules. For Mike, it's maybe a 40-mile round trip. Sandy and Jack live only five miles away.

Either of them might have mentioned that if Jack was so sentimental about getting together with his older siblings, he might invite them to dinner more than twice a year. Even when Jack lived in the farmhouse, he and Gina didn't socialize that much with them.