What Dies in Summer (16 page)

“Hey-hey-HEY,” said Cam, slapping Hubert on the leg with the back of his hand. “Is that choice or what?”

“Better know it,” said Hubert, taking another swig of beer. “Like to get me some of that.”

By the time they dropped me off in front of Gram’s, Cam and Hubert were talking about amplifiers. They hardly noticed when I slid out of the van and closed the door.

I went up the front steps, across the wide porch and into the house. It was quiet inside but I could feel that L.A. was here so I crossed the living room and went into the kitchen. She had the
newspaper spread out on the table and was on her knees in a chair, leaning over the table with her elbows on the paper and her chin in her hands. There was a pencil stuck in her hair, just the way
Gram did it, and her eyes were slitted with concentration. Her all-out crossword attack stance.

Reading over her shoulder, I had the feeling
zebra
was the word she was looking for, but I didn’t say anything. When L.A. wanted help she’d let you know, and I wouldn’t
advise anybody to hold their breath. She glanced at me, gathered up the paper and jumped to the floor.

“Guess what,” she said.

“Tell,” I said.

“We’re cooking.”

From this I knew Gram had dropped L.A. off, left on some other errand and was going to be late getting back, leaving it to us to get supper together. Which under other circumstances would have
been good news to me because I secretly liked cooking, but it was L.A. who’d received the assignment and that gave her absolute control of the operation. Gram required L.A. and me to be
sea-cooks, which she said meant not starting anything you couldn’t finish, always cooking enough food to go around and getting it on the table regardless of the weather. Also never leaving
the galley while anything was still dirty. But the first, last and no-exceptions rule was that there’s only one cook at a time in the galley. Anybody else passing through better be a helper,
and if his tongue has been cut out ahead of time, so much the better.

Not needing to ask what L.A. wanted, I went to the cabinet for a box of macaroni and cheese while she got out a pan and filled it with water. She put the pan over a burner and turned on the
flame, then shook some salt into the water. After considering for a second, she shook in a little more.

I was standing respectfully back, holding the macaroni box for her and watching the blue flames curl up under the pan when Gram came in the front door. As she walked into the kitchen, I saw
tears in her eyes and noticed she seemed a little more bent, and older somehow, the way she sometimes did after she had been downtown talking to Mrs. Bruhn, the social worker. And I was sure that
was where she’d been this time. She stopped and looked at us, then said, “Come here, you two,” and gathered both of us to her with trembling hands.

GRAM COMING HOME
with tears in her eyes was trouble any way you cut it. It seemed to me the more trips she made downtown to see Mrs. Bruhn, the more
dog-miserable each one made her, but this was way worse than usual. She cried about as often as L.A. did, in other words next to never, which made it clear we now had an out-and-out situation on
our hands.

“What’s wrong, Gram?” asked L.A.

“Come into the living room, both of you. I’ve got some things to tell you. Your mothers will be here in a few minutes.”

Now I knew we were in it up to our hocks. L.A. was no easy scare, but her expression told me she was thinking along the same lines. Which for me confirmed the worst: the women were now spooked,
which removed my option to be afraid. As the only male on the scene, I had to think of something useful to do or say.

“I’ll get you some tea,” I said firmly to Gram, heading for the refrigerator.

Gram said, “I know we’ve always talked about both of you going back to your homes someday, but I’m afraid that’s all changed now. It looks as if you two vagabonds are
mine for good.”

Hearing it said right out loud this way stopped me in my tracks, but L.A. reacted differently. She looked at Gram with a little frown line between her eyes, an almost visible question mark
forming in the air above her head, not troubled or anything, just waiting for the punch line. And that was when it dawned on me for the first time that for L.A. the possibility of leaving
Gram’s had never been on the table. And I guess now that it came down to cases, something inside me had probably understood for a long time that I wasn’t going anywhere either. I was
past answering to anybody but Gram for my uncombed hair and unfinished homework.

“Okay, Gram,” we both said.

She looked at us and wiped the tears from her eyes. After a minute she said, “Well, now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“No ma’am.”

Gram blew her nose in a tissue and motioned us into the front room, where we assumed our bad-news positions on the couch. She took the green chair.

“All right, then,” she said. “What I’ll start with is that I’ve made a decision about some things, and about the two of you, that Mrs. Bruhn has urged on me. And I
agree with her—both of you have seen and heard more, been through more, than most adults . . .” She looked hard at L.A. “I believe you are strong enough for this.” She took
a deep breath and let it out. “A better question would be,
am I
?”

She stood and walked across the room and into the hall, and a second later we heard her bedroom door open. After a minute or so she came back holding a letter that was old and yellowed, with
creases from folding that were worn through in a couple of places. She handed it to me and said, “Read this, both of you.”

It was written in pencil. I held it so L.A. could read with me:

I heard L.A.’s breath catch, and as I finished the letter a sharp-edged image of Gramp came to my mind—a big man, whiskey-soaked but impossibly strong, with a voice like rocks
rolling down a wooden chute, always good to me but somehow crossways with Mom and Aunt Rachel for as long as I could remember.

Gram said, “Silence has ruled us for too long. The time has come to put an end to that.” She honked into her tissue. “I’ve lost track of the occasions when I argued with
Mrs. Bruhn that what she seemed to be driving at couldn’t be so, that so monstrous a thing wasn’t possible, not in our family. But finally the weight of it became too much, too many
things began to make sense to me at last—I simply couldn’t deny it any longer.”

Just then Mom came in the front door, looking mad, confused and maybe scared all at once, but trying not to show any of it. Not so different from me, I realized. She was wearing blue jeans and
sandals and a tight orange pullover top with no sleeves, not an outfit Gram would approve of, I knew, but to me she was as beautiful as ever, and at that moment I missed her so much I could hardly
breathe. I wanted to hold her, to make this instant last, but I also wanted to turn away or shut my eyes or maybe even yell at her. At that point my thoughts bottle-necked, and I ended up not
saying or doing anything.

Mom dropped her purse and car keys on the coffee table and flopped into the green easy chair. “Hi, baby,” she said to me as she shook out a Kool and lit it with the thin lighter from
the pocket on the side of her leather cigarette case. “Hi, Lee Ann. You guys doin’ all right? I’m about burned down myself.” She crossed her legs and blew out smoke.
“Rachel coming or not?” she asked the ceiling.

L.A. bit her thumbnail. Jazzy huddled in her lap, looking from Mom to Gram and back.

“You heard her say she’d be here, Leah,” Gram answered. “This would be an excellent time for her to live up to her word.”

Mom looked at Gram. “Yeah. Right. Well.” She fiddled with her cigarette and the ashtray.

Suddenly Aunt Rachel banged in through the front door, seeming not to notice L.A. looking away from her, then glanced around at all of us and sort of let her shoulders drop. “Just the
women and children, huh? Good.” She shot me a look and said, “Sorry. No way we need to be calling y’all kids anymore, is there? My God, look at the size of you, Bis. Where’d
you get those shoulders?” Even at this distance I smelled the alcohol on her breath. Just alcohol, no whiskey or gin smell, so it was vodka, probably straight from the bottle as usual.

Aunt Rachel was a little more hard-edged than Mom, with sharper movements and a more direct way of looking at you. Her hair, the same color as L.A.’s but not as out of control, was brushed
back to show the little amethyst earrings she wore. In this light it was just barely possible to see that one of her eyes was green and the other brown. She was usually a boots and jeans kind of
person but now was wearing her tan skirt with a light blue blouse. She set her purse on the end table and went into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and close, and a minute later she
came back with a bottle of Dr Pepper.

“This stuff is an addiction all by itself,” she said and sat on the couch next to me, glancing first at Gram, then at L.A. L.A. met her eyes for the first time, and a look sizzled
between them. “So is it truth time, or what?”

Gram took off her glasses, looked down at them and pinched the bridge of her nose. “In a way, I suppose that would be refreshing,” she said with a break in her voice. “I
can’t say how it affected Leah, but Mrs. Bruhn has refreshed me with considerable truth lately. And dear Lord, I think today it was about all the refreshment I could’ve lived through.
However, one goes on—if one can. And there are things we must deal with.”

She wiped away tears again and put her glasses back on.

“Mom,” said Mom tightly. “Why can’t you just leave it alone? What are you after here?”

Gram stared at her for several seconds, then said, “Leave it alone, Leah?”

“Yeah, leave it alone. What’s the point now, after all this time?”

Another hard look from Gram. “Then it is true,” she said.

This was one of those exchanges that sometimes happened between women—especially when one of them was Gram—seeming to me to leave out whole paragraphs but still going straight to the
next page with no loss of meaning or rhythm.

“I’m going home,” said Aunt Rachel. She didn’t move.

Gram looked at all of us one at a time, even Jazzy. “Leah, you and Rachel are my flesh and blood,” she said. “So are these two youngsters. I love all of you with my whole
heart, and what has happened to you hurts me more than I can express, more than I think you will ever know. But we are not going to live under this poisonous cloud of deceit any longer.”

“That’s easy for you to say . . .” said Aunt Rachel, drawing a line with her finger down through the beaded condensation on her Dr Pepper.

“No, dear, it isn’t,” said Gram. “Far from it. But I am through with willful ignorance, and so are we all if I have any say in the matter. I needed to hear Mrs. Bruhn
today, like it or no. And I need for us all to face the truth right now.” She looked at each of her daughters.

“Good Christ,” said Aunt Rachel.

“Yes, I’d like to think so,” said Gram. “But I do often wonder.” She closed her eyes for a second, then said, “But I ask—no, I demand—that you
tell me here and now, both of you, why I didn’t know this terrible, terrible thing about you and your father. Why neither of you found a way to talk to me. Or to someone.”

There was a long silence. Finally Mom said, “Oh, fuck,” and stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. “That’s totally unfair, Mom. Would you have even heard it back then?
Could you have stood up to him?”

“Shut up,” said Aunt Rachel.

I noticed L.A.’s jaw was tight and her eyes full. Gram took a jerky breath and looked down at the tissue she was holding. “I suppose that’s a reasonable question,” she
said. “Evidently neither of you thought I could.” She looked up. “Was I, for the love of God, the only one in Rains County who didn’t know?”

“I was just so scared,” said Mom.

“Shut. The. Fuck. Up,” said Aunt Rachel through her teeth.

Mom looked at her sister, then at me, and down at her own hands. “At first I didn’t understand it,” she said. “I didn’t know things like that weren’t supposed
to happen. Then later when I did understand, he said if I told I’d be taken away and locked up and never see you or Rachel again.”

“Jesus, Leah,” said Aunt Rachel. “Like you didn’t follow him around. Like you didn’t offer it to him.”

“Goddamn you, Ray!” Mom screamed. “You are so full of shit! At least I never asked for it in the mouth! Asked for it, Ray! Down on my pretty little knees!” She thumped
her knees with her fists.

Throwing her head back and baring her teeth, Aunt Rachel let out a strangled moan and grabbed a fistful of her own hair in each hand as if she were trying to tear it out.

“
No!
” Gram stood up suddenly and threw her glasses to the floor with both hands. “By
God
, no! That’s enough! This is not what I brought you all here for,
and I won’t have it!”

There was a crackling silence. Mom and Aunt Rachel glared at each other, panting, as I bent down to pick up Gram’s glasses. L.A. was holding Jazzy tightly and looking bleached out. Jazzy
trembled all the way out to the ends of her whiskers.