“I don’t know why you need all those pockets.”
“To shoplift just like you taught me. What happened to Janet and the dogs?”
“Doing potty in the backyard and she better pick it up. Three dogs? My house isn’t big enough. And Quincy won’t stop chewing things. Why would anyone name a dog after that silly TV show?”
“Where’s Mom?”
“Getting her nails done. Maybe it’s her hair. Who can keep up with her?”
“I doubt what’s-his-name can keep it up with her,” Lucy says, “he’s so old and still eats like he’s fat, won’t be pretty when he pops that rubber band around his gullet. But he’s rich, I guess. She’s not bringing him over, is she?”
“This is Jake.” I introduce him inside the living room and take the ice chest from him.
“How do you do, ma’am?” He hands my mother a flower he made.
“Well, isn’t that something. What is it?”
“It’s a hibiscus like all those you’ve got growing in front of your house.”
“They aren’t green. Do I need to put it in water?”
I carry the ice chest into my mother’s small kitchen with its terrazzo floor and painting of Jesus praying in the garden next to the refrigerator, and for the next half hour I rinse tuna filets and mix a marinade of soy sauce, fresh chopped ginger, Japanese sweet cooking wine, sake, and canola oil. Placing the fish inside the refrigerator, I take out a cold bottle of a very nice Sancerre and when I pull out the cork I smell grapefruit and flowers, and I pour a glass and get started on the fritters.
“Can I help?” Janet is in the doorway, very blond with bright eyes and a touch of sun, Sock and Jet Ranger at her heels, and then Quincy barges in, banging me with his swinging tail.
“There’s room for only one.” I smile at her. “How about a glass of wine?”
“Not yet.”
“If you could take our friends with you, please.”
“Come on, Quincy. Let’s go, gang.” She whistles at them and claps, and off they go.
I chop the tough conch meat, green pepper, celery, and garlic while I overhear voices in the living room of Lucy, Janet, my mother, and our guest chatting as if they’ve been friends for many years, and my mother’s voice is louder the more deaf she gets. The hearing aids I bought for her usually stay on top of the bathroom counter near all of the various cleaning pastes and brushes she needs for her dentures. And when she’s alone, which is most of the time, she wears the same housedress and doesn’t care if she can hear or has teeth.
I squeeze Meyer’s lemons and find the deep fryer in a cupboard when I hear the front door open again, and then I smell the baby back ribs Marino carries in, huge white bags with Shorty’s Bar-B-Q on them in red with their logo of a cartoon cowboy wearing a ten-gallon hat that has a big bullet hole in it.
“Out, out, out.” I take the bags from Marino and shoo him out of a kitchen that can’t possibly hold both of us. “I don’t think you bought enough.”
“I need a beer,” he says and that’s when I catch the look on his face, and then a different look on Benton’s face as he appears in the doorway.
“When you get to a stopping place,” Benton says to me and something has happened.
I dry my hands on a towel as I look at both of them in jeans and button-up shirts, their nondescript windbreakers hiding the pistols they carry. Marino’s face is stubbly and pink from long days and the sun while Benton’s looks the way it always does when something is wrong.
“What is it?”
“I’m surprised your office hasn’t called,” Benton says.
I check my phone and there’s an e-mail from Luke Zenner I didn’t notice while I was buying fish and driving and then distracted by my mother. Luke writes that everything is under control and not to worry, he won’t get started on the autopsy until later tonight when the Armed Forces chief medical examiner General Briggs is there. He’s flying in from Dover Air Force Base to assist and act as a witness, and what a shitty thing to happen Christmas Eve. They’ll take care of it and hopefully everyone can have tomorrow off. Have a nice holiday, Luke wishes me.
“It’s better you’re out of town anyway,” Benton informs me, and then he tells me what little he knows and there isn’t much to know, really. There rarely is when someone makes the simple decision to end life and end it easily.
Ed Granby waited until his wife had gone out to her spinning class today at around four p.m. and he locked all of the doors of their Brookline house, using the key on dead bolts that could be opened only from the inside so she couldn’t get back in and find him first. Then he sent an e-mail to the assistant special agent in charge, a close friend, telling him to drive to the house right away and let himself in by breaking out a window in the basement.
Granby’s e-mail has been forwarded to Benton and he shows it to me inside my mother’s kitchen as oil heats in the deep fryer.
“Thanks, buddy,” Granby wrote. “I’m done.”
He went down into the basement, looped a rope over the chin-up bar of a cable machine, wrapped a towel around his neck, sat on the floor, and hanged himself.
“Come on.” I turn off the deep fryer and grab the Sancerre and two glasses, and Benton and I walk out of the kitchen, past everyone in the living room, where piles of presents from my compulsive shopping are around the small tree.
My sister Dorothy has just arrived, wearing skintight faux-lizard designer pants, a low-cut leotard, and heavy makeup that make her look exactly the way she doesn’t want to look, which is older, flabbier, with oversized augmented breasts as rigid and round as rubber balls.
“I believe I will.” She eyes the wine and I shake my head Not now. “Well, excuse me, I guess I’ll have to serve myself.”
“We only came down so we could wait on you,” Lucy says.
“As you should. I’m your mother.”
Lucy doesn’t go after her the way she usually would, her eyes on Benton and me as I open the back door and feel the pleasantness of the late afternoon and see the long shadows in my mother’s small yard, not the yard from my childhood, and I always remind myself of that when I come here and don’t recognize anything, not the plantings or the house or the furniture, everything new or redone and soulless.
The grass is thick and springy beneath my feet, and the air is cool as it blows through old grapefruit and orange trees still heavy with fruit. We sit in webbed lawn chairs near the rock garden, with its palms and small statues — an angel, the Blessed Mother, a lamb — amid sunflowers and firecracker plants.
“So that’s what he does to his family the day before Christmas.” I pour wine and give Benton a glass. “I’m not sorry for him. I’m sorry for them.”
I lean back and close my eyes, and for an instant I see the key lime tree my mother had in her backyard when I was growing up. The citrus canker got it and it’s not the same part of town and not the same yard, and Benton reaches for my hand and laces his fingers through mine. The sun smolders a fiery orange over the low, flat roof of a neighbor’s house and we don’t talk. There’s nothing to say and nothing that’s happened is a surprise, and so we are quiet as we drink and hold hands.
When most of the wine is gone and the yard is in the shade, the sun too low to see, only a tangerine hint in the lower part of the darkening sky, he tells me he knew Granby was going to kill himself.
“I figured he might,” I reply.
“I knew it when Marino lifted him off the pavement by the back of his belt,” he says. “I could see it in Granby’s eyes that something important was gone that was never coming back.”
“Nothing was ever there to come back.”
“But I saw it and I didn’t do anything.”
“What would you have done?” I look at his sharp profile in the early dusk.