her face soft and radiant with undisguised pride.
My eyes stinging as the already-dead house somehow found a way to die a little more, I was suddenly filled with a pure, brilliant hatred of the echoing emptiness banging against my eardrums and sucking the oxygen from the air.
Mutt, my personal cat, came pacing silently in from the hallway. He was mostly black, with two barely visible tan markings above his eyes that gave him a permanently surprised expression, and he stopped and stared at me now as if I were the last thing he’d expected to find in here. Jana had taken him along when she and the girls moved out, thinking he was more attached to them than to me, but he’d run away the first day. Then three days after that I’d found him sitting on the front doormat, licking a curled paw and ignoring me. He’d somehow made it almost six miles across town to come home, probably using up several of his spare lives on the way.
As cats go, he wasn’t a bad roommate – no clawing the furniture, keeping me awake at night or spraying in the house – but he reminded me so much of Jana and the girls that I sometimes had to work at not resenting him for it. On the other hand, right now I was glad to have the company of another conscious being.
‘Ahoy,’ I said.
He gave no sign that he heard me.
The thought of other conscious beings brought to mind the only Dallas phone number I didn’t need to look up. I grabbed the phone and punched it in.
‘Dr Lee Ann Rowe’s office,’ said LaKeisha.
‘This still group night?’
‘That you, Lieutenant Bonham?’
I said what I always did: ‘Call me Jim.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘It is, and she should be out any second. I’ll put you on hold. Enjoy the music.’
The next thing I heard was a slow instrumental version of ‘Satisfaction’, strings and light brass, which I enjoyed as much as I could.
Thinking about LA as I waited – as always trying to edit out the memories that underlined my own failures and selfishness, my inability to prevent what had happened to her – I argued myself around to the position that this call was justifiable, that I wasn’t going to kick up any dust from the past that she couldn’t deal with, that she was probably tougher than me anyway, and certainly no longer had any need for my protection. If she ever really had.
Then, thinking some more about families, I looked up at the pictures on the wall: Jana in front of the fieldstone fireplace at the Flying S; Gram, my grandmother Miriam Hunnicutt Vickers, who’d raised LA and me after everyone else ahead of her on the depth chart had defaulted – a wise and beautiful woman, battered but never broken by a world that didn’t deserve her, looking sadly into the lens from among the tomato plants in her garden; and my own daughters, Casey and Jordan, on horseback, the November sun backlighting their hair against a background of red and gold leaves.
But images of Deborah Gold’s dead flesh began shouldering their way back in, her half-shut eyes gazing emptily down at me through the icy rain, her viciously violated body already gone cold on its way to rejoining the soil.
Then the soundtrack transitioned to ‘Circle of Life’, taking me smoothly back through time to an evening with the girls not long after the separation, the three of us sharing a tub of popcorn and watching a movie aboutcartoon animals having conversations and singing songs, Jordan saying, ‘That’s pretty dumb,’ not carping, just thinking out loud. ‘They’d be eating each other.’
A huge sigh from her sister Casey. ‘It’s a meta phor, you dink.’
‘I think you mean fable, Miss Hairball.’
All her life Casey had been what Jana called an ‘easy upchuck’, like a cat, throwing up for any reason, or no reason. When there was a purpose it was usually evil – to duck chores, an exam, or some adverse social situation – and it had earned her the nickname Hairball. She was a little sensitive about it.
My eyes stinging as the already-dead house somehow found a way to die a little more, I was suddenly filled with a pure, brilliant hatred of the echoing emptiness banging against my eardrums and sucking the oxygen from the air.
Mutt, my personal cat, came pacing silently in from the hallway. He was mostly black, with two barely visible tan markings above his eyes that gave him a permanently surprised expression, and he stopped and stared at me now as if I were the last thing he’d expected to find in here. Jana had taken him along when she and the girls moved out, thinking he was more attached to them than to me, but he’d run away the first day. Then three days after that I’d found him sitting on the front doormat, licking a curled paw and ignoring me. He’d somehow made it almost six miles across town to come home, probably using up several of his spare lives on the way.
As cats go, he wasn’t a bad roommate – no clawing the furniture, keeping me awake at night or spraying in the house – but he reminded me so much of Jana and the girls that I sometimes had to work at not resenting him for it. On the other hand, right now I was glad to have the company of another conscious being.
‘Ahoy,’ I said.
He gave no sign that he heard me.
The thought of other conscious beings brought to mind the only Dallas phone number I didn’t need to look up. I grabbed the phone and punched it in.
‘Dr Lee Ann Rowe’s office,’ said LaKeisha.
‘This still group night?’
‘That you, Lieutenant Bonham?’
I said what I always did: ‘Call me Jim.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘It is, and she should be out any second. I’ll put you on hold. Enjoy the music.’
The next thing I heard was a slow instrumental version of ‘Satisfaction’, strings and light brass, which I enjoyed as much as I could.
Thinking about LA as I waited – as always trying to edit out the memories that underlined my own failures and selfishness, my inability to prevent what had happened to her – I argued myself around to the position that this call was justifiable, that I wasn’t going to kick up any dust from the past that she couldn’t deal with, that she was probably tougher than me anyway, and certainly no longer had any need for my protection. If she ever really had.
Then, thinking some more about families, I looked up at the pictures on the wall: Jana in front of the fieldstone fireplace at the Flying S; Gram, my grandmother Miriam Hunnicutt Vickers, who’d raised LA and me after everyone else ahead of her on the depth chart had defaulted – a wise and beautiful woman, battered but never broken by a world that didn’t deserve her, looking sadly into the lens from among the tomato plants in her garden; and my own daughters, Casey and Jordan, on horseback, the November sun backlighting their hair against a background of red and gold leaves.
But images of Deborah Gold’s dead flesh began shouldering their way back in, her half-shut eyes gazing emptily down at me through the icy rain, her viciously violated body already gone cold on its way to rejoining the soil.
Then the soundtrack transitioned to ‘Circle of Life’, taking me smoothly back through time to an evening with the girls not long after the separation, the three of us sharing a tub of popcorn and watching a movie aboutcartoon animals having conversations and singing songs, Jordan saying, ‘That’s pretty dumb,’ not carping, just thinking out loud. ‘They’d be eating each other.’
A huge sigh from her sister Casey. ‘It’s a meta phor, you dink.’
‘I think you mean fable, Miss Hairball.’
All her life Casey had been what Jana called an ‘easy upchuck’, like a cat, throwing up for any reason, or no reason. When there was a purpose it was usually evil – to duck chores, an exam, or some adverse social situation – and it had earned her the nickname Hairball. She was a little sensitive about it.
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