Mona had sent him MapQuest directions to his mother’s house but he was inattentive when he reached Green Valley which, all in all, was rather brownish. On the drive down on 19 through Papago property he had been mystified and captivated by the weird flora, the saguaro, cholla, paloverde, and the spiny ocotillo. Sunderson wasn’t a traveler, another sore point in his marriage. Other than a long flight to Frankfurt for army hospital work he had only been west of the Mississippi once and then only briefly to Denver to retrieve an extradited prisoner. He was somehow pleased to note that the Rocky Mountains looked fake. Southern Arizona was another matter mostly because Marion had loaned him a book about the Apaches called Once They Moved Like the Wind, which left him with the obvious conclusion that the Apaches were the hardest hombres in the history of mankind. Dwight and his followers were unlikely to ape such a recalcitrant tribe, preferring “nicer” Indians.
His mother’s house was a small stucco bungalow right next to a large home owned by his sister Berenice and her husband Bob whom Sunderson considered a nitwit, albeit a wealthy nitwit, having managed to acquire a dozen RV parks. Bob’s Cadillac Escalade was parked out front, sixty grand worth of nothing and Sunderson had the irrational urge to ram it with his Avis compact but then giggled at the impulse like a child.
He was barely in the front door before his mother hissed, “Shame on you, son.” She was seated on the sofa wrapped in her wildly colored macramé throw, the air conditioner on so high on this warm day that she needed the blanket’s warmth. Berenice had given her a home permanent and her hair was such tightly wrapped white nubs that her pinkish knobby skull was revealed. “You have disgraced our family, son.”
“Mom, you have no idea of the tensile strength of some women there. They go to the gym every day. She had me in a bear hug.”
“From what I heard in e-mail and on the phone you were behind her in plain view.” His mom was smug with self-righteousness.
“The night was black and cold and snowing. No one could see a thing. I was carried away with passion.” Sunderson had decided that a strong offensive was best and could see that his mother had become doubtful in her attack posture.
“We’re having your favorite chicken and biscuits,” Berenice interrupted.
“Darrell Waltrip is kicking ass,” Bob said, turning from his NASCAR event on the television, then noticing Sunderson. “There’s room for you in the company,” he added.
Sunderson sat down beside his mother and took her stiff hand. She turned away, still unwilling to let him off the hook.
“I e-mailed Diane and you can tell she’s upset about your behavior.”
Sunderson tried to imagine the language his mother had used to describe his behavior to Diane, and then Diane’s trilling laughter when she read the e-mail. Berenice brought him a stiff whiskey on the rocks for which he was grateful. He spilled a little when Bob bellowed, “Waltrip won!”
Sunderson ate too much of the stewed chicken and biscuits but then so did everyone else. His mother dozed off at the table after her last bite of lemon meringue pie. Looking at her he dwelt on the mystery of her giving birth to him sixty-five years before.
“She’s not doing too well. Her heart is weak,” Berenice said, clearing the table. “And you look like you could use a vacation. Couldn’t you go fishing someplace down in Mexico?”
“He could start work tomorrow,” Bob piped up, finishing his second piece of pie and rubbing his tummy as if he had accomplished something noteworthy.
He had left his cell phone in the car and noted that Diane had called for “no reason,” or so she said in her message. He called back before he got on the freeway back to Tucson. While they talked he watched an octogenarian shuffling down the street with his walker. Sunderson resolved to shoot himself in the head before he would live in a retirement colony. Diane joked about his “scandalous missteps” with Carla. She had always been amused rather than judgmental about human foibles, but then her voice weakened and she said that two days before her husband had been diagnosed with liver cancer. Since he was a doctor himself he had become immediately depressed about the inevitable prognosis. “I’m so sorry,” Sunderson offered. “Things had been going so well,” she said before hanging up. She had only been married half a year.
Heading north on the freeway he saw clearly again that like so many his marriage, the central fact of his life, had failed because the marriage and the job didn’t go together, couldn’t coalesce, couldn’t coexist in a comfortable manner. The simple fact was that when you worked all day monitoring the least attractive behavior of the species you’re going to carry the job home. Diane, a very bright woman indeed, couldn’t believe in the fact of evil, which always reminded him of Anne Frank’s deranged statement that people were essentially good. If you’re a cop long enough even songbirds are under suspicion. The daily involvement with minor league mayhem did not predispose one to large thoughts. His brain short-circuited again. His unused first name, Simon, only served to remind him of the Mother Goose verse, “Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair.” He signed his name S. Sunderson and no one he knew had the guts to call him Simon, except his mother. In his childhood any grade school boy that used Simon got his ass kicked while the girls tortured this sore point as did his sisters Berenice and Roberta. The family called Roberta “Bertie” because of the eccentricity of his parents calling the little brother Robert who had been the family’s long-term headache until he died of heroin in Detroit where he was the soundman for a Motown band. When Robert was a boy he’d had a terrible accident at the big saw at the pulp mill and Sunderson and the rest had all stood in a circle looking at Robert’s lower leg on the railroad siding. When the ambulance came the driver put the appendage in a small burlap bag. This item was large in Sunderson’s accretion of emotional mold.
When he reached the Arizona Inn in the twilight he saw that Diane’s near doppelganger was sitting near the vacant Ping-Pong table under the smoking cupola. He barely had the courage but joined her and was rewarded with a broad smile. This made him happily nervous so he lit a cigarette. To his surprise she lit one of her own.
“I rarely smoke but at dinner I had an argument with my mother. I’m fifty-five and she’s eighty but she tried to make me eat my spinach.” She laughed at the absurdity.
“I had an argument with mine, too,” he admitted.
“About what?”
“I misbehaved at my retirement party in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the news reached her by phone and e-mail all the way out here.”
“What did you do?”
“It’s too indelicate to admit.” He felt himself blush.
“Please. I’m an Episcopalian but I’m an adult. I want to hear some naughty talk,” she laughed.
“I sort of made love to a dancing girl out by a woodpile. There were witnesses looking out the window of the cabin.” He was pained to admit this but he liked the fullness of the laughter that ensued.
“You sort of made love! What did your mother say?”
“She said shame on you son.”
More laughter and Sunderson leafed through a large book she was looking at. It was a coffee table book about petroglyphs in the Southwest.
“That’s wonderful. My name’s Lucy. My mother served spinach, a vegetable I hate, at my birthday dinner. Maybe you’re like Kokopele, a mythic Indian with a fondness for ladies?” She showed him a petroglyph of Kokopele, the humpbacked flute player. The light was growing dim and she invited him to join her for coffee and a brandy. He followed her on a longish walk through gardens past rooms and bungalows a little worried that he wouldn’t find his way back to his room, which he saw as a deliciously childish worry.
“Keep your hands off, buster. I’m happily married,” she said at the door.