He heard her occasionally offer a cheery hello to one person or another, sometimes followed by sucking her teeth. “That was Geraldine, the one who dropped that dog off in a cornfield in Shippensburg and told her kid it ran away. That was Maxine, the one who thinks she’s special because her car parks itself. She has a basket full of carrots, lettuce, and tomatoes. She shops here for salad. Isn’t that cute?” He couldn’t tell her now, alone in public, surrounded by people she despised. Yet he knew that if he didn’t tell her now, he never would. “Mom, I have bad news.”
Hearing “Mom,” she fell silent. “I knew. I felt it for a long time.”
When the call ended, Achilles was sickened by the sense of relief he felt. They had last spoken a month ago, the day before Achilles lost his cell phone pulling the wheelchair-bound man out of the water. He’d made a promise to call her at least once a week. It seemed to be enough. Over the past few months, her mood had been resigned, and somber. It was as if she was at last mourning. She had apologized. I shouldn’t have given you those papers. It was your father’s idea, and I went along with too many of his ideas when he was alive. I didn’t need to do it when he was dead. Last wishes aren’t always best wishes.
From the morgue straight to the condo. When Ines found him packing, he said, “A guy from my unit, a funeral.”
CHAPTER 23
WAGES HAD WANTED HIS POSSESSIONS RETURNED TO BETHANY, especially his cross. He’d said, “If I get fucked, take it to my wife when it’s all over. I don’t want some sergeant in a lizard suit wheeling up to the door in a blue LTD, followed by a box a week later. Promise me, Conroy.”
Achilles was Connie, Troy was Conner. At times like that, they were Conroy, and Wages had spoken to them as if they were one person, as if he assumed they would both survive. Achilles had always expected that both he and Troy would make the trip to New Orleans if anything happened to Wages, but he knew it would be Troy who actually placed the cross in Bethany’s hands, Troy who comforted her, wrapping her in his long arms, resting his cheek against her hair and murmuring consolations in a voice so deep she felt it more than heard it. Later, when Achilles found himself on that white couch because it was Wages delivering Troy to him, Achilles had repaid that kindness by wondering more than once if delivering the cross would have been his ticket out of the living room. He had not wanted it, or wished it, only wondered. Still, the thought nagged him. How he wished he had stayed home. Wages, Merriweather, Wexler — how he loved them, but how he wished he had stayed home. It would have been better had he not gone at all.
He would be supervisor by now, or at least night shift manager of the ripping room, spending his nights among buzzing saws and idle chatter, the sweet smell of sawdust underfoot. He and Janice would have come back to town, with little Keelies in the backseat, and helped his mom decorate the house for Troy’s return. Otherwise they’d only come home for the holidays, like Turkey Day. It had been almost a year since he left home, and again Thanksgiving was right around the bend. He could have been driving these same roads but with Janice in the passenger seat instead of Ines, who’d insisted on accompanying him this time.
Achilles assented, suspecting he’d be dropping her off as near as Mississippi and no farther than North Carolina, the exact location depending on when he worked up the nerve to tell her the truth. He had to tell her now, she who insisted on being there for him because he had been there for her, there for Troy, there for Grandpa Paul, there for Wages’s mother.
He couldn’t tell her in Louisiana, amid the wreckage. By traveling north and avoiding the Gulf Coast, Achilles hoped to avoid much of the destruction, but the damage was as extensive far inland, as upsetting as it had been when he was driving down from Atlanta, when he had wished someone was with him. Now he wished he was alone. Ines sat in silence, sometimes pressing her hand to the glass, shaking her head dreamily, other times looking straight ahead. She kept her sunglasses on at all times. Eden Isle, Slidell, Picayune, Hattiesburg — all wrecked, traces of damage vanishing only when they reached Meridian, almost two hundred miles away.
He couldn’t tell her in Mississippi, she slept through it. He wanted to tell her at the rest station north of Atlanta, but she looked so peaceful feeding the ducks. He couldn’t tell her in South Carolina; she was upset by the sudden ubiquity of the Confederate flag.
They’d hit snow north of Charlottesville, and he had to concentrate on driving. Meanwhile, Ines was enthralled by the scenery, the snowbanks, white fields, and bejeweled trees, cooing at a setting that took her back to her college years. It was the first time she’d smiled during the entire trip. He couldn’t tell her then. The weather reduced their pace to a crawl at times, putting them behind schedule so that it was sunrise by the time they reached Maryland, where she noticed the plates and, having never been to the DC region, called it a real metropolitan area, as she could tell by the variety of license plates.
As they neared his house, Ines looked out over the carpet of subdivisions and remarked that she’d never taken him for a literal suburbanite. He assured her he wasn’t, even as they passed the Kmart and Wal-Mart and Target, the outlet malls and strip malls. He disowned it all, explaining how it spread around them like fungus. But she oohed at a couple of the houses, couldn’t get over how clean it all looked, imagined it to be the safest place on earth. They reached the zenith of the highway overlooking his town, and he could see the streets, black ribbons in the white snow. He admitted once taking that as evidence of a grand design.
“It does look kind of like a section of a brain.”
“I thought so too. Once.”
“Once?”
“A long time ago. When I was a kid.”
“That wasn’t so long ago.”
It wasn’t, but as they approached the house, it felt like part of another lifetime. “Here we are. It’s not much,” he said, pulling up the drive.
Trees, seclusion, red shutters; she loved it all. “It’s like Santa’s workshop.”
Unlike Santa’s workshop, the house was quiet. He hoped his aunts would be around to act as a buffer. But when he knocked and let himself in, it was clear they weren’t there. The first thing he noticed was the smell of Pine-Sol, bleach, and ammonia. Ines used only natural cleaning products; by comparison, his house smelled strongly of chemicals. The odor that once signified clean was as alien as the scent that assaulted him in the back of taxicabs. His mother was in the recliner, where she’d been sleeping for quite some time judging by the cushion lines imprinted on her cheek. At least she wasn’t wearing her backpack.
“Ines, this is my mother, Anna Conroy.”
His mother smiled sleepily. “She’s so beautiful.”
Ines would see that he was poor, but that was the least of it. Whenever Ines described people spending their entire life wrapped up in their own little world, never leaving home, never getting an education, Achilles thought of his mother. He imagined every possible reaction except what he received. At last we meet. I’ve been waiting for this moment. Finally. I’ve heard so much about you. They exchanged lines as if they’d rehearsed for weeks, and it was at last opening night. His mother put on the kettle. Achilles wanted to tell her that Ines bought her teas from a special shop run by some Asians—Chinese people—but Ines graciously accepted the bagged tea, and the Ritz crackers with squares of American cheese melted over them.