Emma had gotten up to cover the pie before a big gray tiger cat got to it. She stood still for a moment, then turned, her arms crossed over her bulging belly.
“Mr. Cochran, your father … he really was crazy.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“No, I mean, he was sick. Mentally ill. Some kind of chemical imbalance that made him act the way he did. Only nobody knew about his illness until a couple of years after you left.”
For the second time that day, Cash reeled, Emma’s words sparking off the wall of hurt and hate he’d kept in perfect repair for most of his life. “What are you talking about?”
“I wasn’t here yet—this was before I’d even met Lee—but apparently one Sunday Dwight came to town and kinda crashed the Baptists’ church service, ranting and raving and whatnot. I gather it got pretty ugly.”
Cash softly swore. “He hurt anybody?”
“No. Scared the bejeebers out of a lot of folks, though, if the way some still talk about it is any indication. Anyway, long story short, he ended up in a state facility. Lee said they tried to find you or your brothers, but it was like all three of you had vanished.”
“That was the idea,” he muttered. They were both gone now, but even before their deaths they hadn’t been close. Not when they’d saved their own butts but couldn’t see their way clear to save their baby brother’s. If he’d talked to either of ‘em more than a handful of times after they’d split, that was saying a lot.
“Once they got Dwight on the right meds,” Emma was saying, “he started acting as normal as you or me or anybody.” She paused. “When he did all those things to you, said all that stuff … that wasn’t your daddy talking. That was the sickness.”
“So, what?” he flung at her. “I’m supposed to just say, ‘I see,’ and forget it ever happened?”
“I’m only telling you what I know. What you do with it is your business.”
The rebuke hit its mark. Breathing hard, Cash turned away, grinding his fingers into the back of his neck.
“Anyway,” Emma continued, clearly unperturbed, “Lee and his folks were in the congregation that Sunday. In fact, Lee and his daddy helped the sheriff subdue Dwight, and Lee’s folks felt compelled to take responsibility. Because if they didn’t, who would?”
Yeah, Lee’s parents had definitely had a handle on the whole “Love thy neighbor” thing. Even neighbors nobody else wanted anything to do with.
“Lee’d started down at New Mexico State by that point,” Emma said. “And it was some months before the doctors felt Dwight was stable enough—and could be counted on to take his meds—to release him. So he came back here, even if there wasn’t a whole lot left to come home to by that point. Still, he needed looking after. Lee’s folks did it at first, but after they died, Lee and I took over. At least until Dwight went into a home a year or so later. Place down in Albuquerque. Nothing fancy, but Dwight seemed to like it well enough.”
Smoothing the wrinkled flannel shirt over her stomach, she said, “I assume your father left the house to us because we were the closest thing he had to family. But I had no idea Lee’d never told you what was going on.”
“Like I said, we weren’t in touch—”
“He could’ve gotten a message to you, if he’d wanted. Somehow. But it wasn’t until after Dwight’d left us the place that Lee finally admitted you didn’t know. We had words about that, believe you me.
“So, knowing the cat would be out of the bag once the lawyer contacted you, Lee asked him if he’d send along a note of explanation. Again, I assumed Lee had been forthcoming at that point. Clearly I was wrong.”
“Why?” Cash lashed out, not even fully understanding the pandemonium threatening to break loose inside him. “Why didn’t he just tell me the truth?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said as a dryer buzzer sounded from the closed-in porch behind them. “At least, not for sure. Um … do you mind? I’ve got at least four more loads, and if I lose my momentum I’ll be doing laundry at midnight.”
Bile rising in his throat, Cash watched her disappear into the add-on his father had built before everything went haywire. The splintered plank floor probably bore the imprints of Cash’s knees from when he’d been made to kneel for hours, reflecting on his sins. He drew a deep breath and followed her, standing in the doorway.
The warm, cluttered room smelled clean. Sweet. Dozens of Ball canning jars lined the pantry shelves, lined up by their contents’ color like a child’s crayon box—yellow to red to orange to green—glistening against the bright, white walls … and white tiled floor.
“What do you mean, you don’t know for sure?” he asked at last.
The dryer open, Emma pulled out a peach-colored towel, efficiently folding it into fourths. “Like I said, I thought Lee had told you. Although I know your father didn’t want you to know about his illness.”
“Why not? After all, it gave him the perfect out.” At her sharp glance, he sighed. “You may as well know, I’m not a nice person. Not saying I go around kicking puppies or taking people’s heads off because I’m having a bad day or anything. I’m not a total SOB. But my milk of human kindness has always run several quarts low. Finding out about my father. it doesn’t change anything. Certainly it doesn’t make me feel, I don’t know … whatever you think I should be feeling.”
Another towel clutched to her chest, Emma considered how little the man in front of her lined up with the image she’d carried of him all these years. Of course, nearly twenty years was bound to change a person. She wasn’t the same she’d been at sixteen—why would Cash be?
But whereas marriage and motherhood had softened her, made her more malleable, clearly Cash’s experiences had produced the opposite effect. She could practically see the accumulated layers of caution hardened around his soul, like emotional polyurethane. And yet, as impenetrable as he thought they were, their translucence still allowed a glimpse of the aching heart beating inside.
“I don’t think anything, Mr. Cochran.” At his snort, she dumped the folded towel into a nearby plastic basket, then shooed away The Black One before he settled in for a snooze. “Who am I to say what you should be feeling? I didn’t go through what you did. Anyway …”
She hauled out the rest of the towels, heaping them on top of the washer. “As I was saying, your father didn’t want you to know. According to Lee, once he was in his right mind again and started piecing together what he’d done to you and your mom and your brothers, he was horrified. Ashamed. Didn’t matter to him, either, that he hadn’t been responsible for his actions back then. I guess he figured what was done, was done. That some things, you couldn’t fix.”
The towels folded and in the basket, she clanged up the washer lid, transferred the wet clothes to the dryer, slammed the dryer closed, then dumped the next load in the washer. When she went to pick up the heavy basket, however, Cash grabbed it from her.
“Oh! You don’t have to do that—”
“Where’s it go?”
“Our—my—bedroom.”
A shadow flickered across his eyes before he carted the basket to the master bedroom, the soft pastels and thick comforter on the king-size bed a far cry from the cold white walls, brown spread and worn hooked rug from when Dwight still lived here.
“Looks nothing like I remember.”
“That was the idea.”
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