Though the compliment had been genuine, Kevin knew it wasn’t true. At fifty, he was beginning to show his age, and women (especially younger ones) had begun to respond to him with the kind of distance usually reserved for respectable middle-aged men.
“Thanks, Oli. You look great, too.”
“Oh, nonsense,” she said, waving off the compliment. “I’m a fat old squaw woman—a happy one, though.”
They both laughed. There was a long pause.
“Well,” Olivia said finally. “I’s on my way to Douglas and my sister Dotty ast me to drop by the college here and pick up my niece for the long weekend. Thought I’d look you up, see what you were up to.”
“Well, I’m glad for it,” Kevin lied. “I know a good place to eat dinner.”
Tucson had no shortage of great Mexican restaurants, but the best were on the old south side, family-owned businesses that had been passed down through several generations. They went to Mi Nidito on South 4th Avenue, a place that served, among a cadre of great food, the best taco buffet in town. As he and Olivia sat down with their full plates, Kevin held an outside hope that she had just breezed in to say hello and did not harbor some ulterior motive. They chatted a quarter hour, the usual exchanges about relatives and mutual relations between two people who had not seen each other in a long while.
Kevin finally spoke up after a pause in the conversation. “You got any other business in Douglas?”
Olivia shrugged. “Something I been thinking about for a while. Meaning to do.”
Kevin nodded. He had a dark guess about what she referred to. He ventured a sort of ruse, though he knew she would detect it immediately. “Hubert’s estate?” Her uncle Hubert had died in Douglas the year before, and Olivia had had legal trouble with the will.
Olivia shook her head, intent on picking at the lettuce on her plate. Finally, she looked up at him. “I’m going back to the Escrobarra.”
Kevin felt a sudden flush in his chest, like something draining from him, as though someone had pulled the stopper from a full sink. He’d dreaded this confrontation for years.
Olivia spoke. “I know what you went through up there, Kevin. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t what O.D. wanted.”
“Oh, Oli, please!” He pushed himself back from the table.
“You know you need this, Kev.”
“I know I don’t, Oli—I do not.” Kevin’s voice rose. He looked about the dining area, though no one seemed to be listening. He lowered his voice. “I’ve had nothing to do with hunting or shooting in thirty years. I don’t believe in guns anymore.”
“Oh, I see them all the time,” Oli came back. “They’re as common as ghosts and UFO’s.”
“Okay, so you’re a rhetorician? You know what I mean.”
“I’m not talking about hunting, or guns,” Oli said. “I’m talking about going back to the site and doing what O.D. asked.”
“I haven’t even been to Douglas in a decade.” His parents had moved away nine years before, so even six years later, when his father, Thomas, had died of a heart attack, he didn’t have to go within thirty miles of that valley. But Oli was at the funeral, and for the two days she’d spent in the guest room at his parents’ house she did not mention the subject. It was only as she stood at his parents’ front door, ready to leave, that she spoke of it: “With Tom gone, it’s just you now,” she said.
Kevin had nodded at her characteristically cryptic phrasing. He knew well what she referred to. The failing O.D. was Thomas McNally’s life-long friend and had charged both Kevin and his father with the task, a deathbed request that Olivia had held onto with a bulldog’s grip.
After O.D. had refused the chemical therapy, had grown so emaciated as to look mummified, he’d called them to his house and asked them jointly, father and son—something a person agrees to do under the circumstances but then avoids, like someone who hides from debt collectors for unpaid bills. For a decade now his wife, Olivia, had been that debt collector.
A thought struck Kevin. “You brought the ashes, didn’t you?”
Olivia had just taken a bite and finished chewing before she spoke. “Trunk of my car.”
“Jesus.” Kevin no longer cared if anyone in the restaurant heard him.
“I talked to your mom, Kevin. You need to do this.”
“Oh, yes. I should have known. My meddling mother.”
“You need to bring your devils out into the open. Not just for you but for me—for all of us. We need a kind of spiritual settling.”
“I’m not a very spiritual person.”
“That’s bullshit. Don’t believe in guns! When did you get so full of shit?”
Kevin was two feet from the table now, his body folded into a kind of childlike pout. O.D. had been like family to him; still, there were places both physically and consciously he would not go. That afternoon in the Peloncillos on Escrobarra Ridge was one of those places. He could live with the nightmares, even the flashbacks, but he wasn’t going back to that ridge.
“You blame yourself,” Olivia said boldly. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”
“Good part of it was. I got people killed, Oli.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “You were a boy. You need to go back to that ridge. O.D. knew that.”
Kevin was thrown into silence.
“That day has pressed its shape on you. You wear it around, Kevin, like a mourner’s coat, and you don’t even know it.”
“Oh, that really makes sense. Jesus, Oli, you sound just like him.”
“Like who?”
“You know who.”
Olivia sat up from her food and squared herself to him, a fighter about to deliver a knock-out blow. “You need to do it for him, especially him.”
Kevin looked at his watch and let out a long breath. He became aware that he was slightly rocking his upper body.
Olivia touched his forearm, then the side of his face. “Settle down, honey.”
Kevin felt the impulse to cry. “I am settled down, Oli, and I want to keep it that way. I adjusted myself to that incident a long time ago. I’ve put myself right with it, and my life is moving along well.”
Olivia took both his hands. “Kevin, you haven’t put yourself right with it.”
He pulled away, looked toward people drinking at the adjoining bar but saw none of them. He dropped his shoulders, shook his head. His eyes loaded up. “God, Oli. Don’t do this to me.”
“You can’t just keep it shut down, dear. You got to let it out—if just to stretch itself and get some sunlight. So you can live your life.”
“I am living my life!”
“Not all the way.”
Kevin saw other diners glance in their direction, whispering to one another. “I knew my damned mother would put you up to this.”
“But she didn’t, Kevin. This was my idea. Yes, she wants it for you, but after what happened last time, she wouldn’t dare try.”
Kevin looked at his full plate and felt nauseous.
“You’re like one of my own, sweetheart. You know that.”
Kevin reached for her hand and squeezed it. “I’ve got a long weekend,” he said. “No classes Tuesday, either. I’ll