Berenice was out in his yard looking at plants so he asked her to fetch Mona’s material without snooping. Naturally tears formed and her face reddened with anger but it was all for show between a brother and sister who in their childhood had readily gotten in each other’s stuff. There were three bedrooms in the second story of the house with his parents up front, then Berenice and Roberta, and then he and little Bobby in the back. Berenice and Roberta had a skeleton key and kept their door locked but Bobby had found a key in their dad’s desk that worked, thus by reading Berenice’s diary they had discovered she had lost her cherry the night that, as a junior, she had been crowned homecoming queen. Sunderson had been a sophomore at the time and Bobby five years younger in the fifth grade. He had questioned, “What’s a cherry,” but Sunderson couldn’t bring himself to answer. The kids had come along in two tiers with Roberta then a year later Bobby coming along after Dad left pulp cutting and driving a log skidder for the comparative prosperity of a job at the mill. When Sunderson had teased Berenice about her lost cherry she had countered by stealing his packet of stolen Trojan condoms and putting them on their mother’s plate at Sunday breakfast and an insufferable scene had followed.
Sunderson thought about his family while waiting for Berenice. A lump arose in his throat with the image of Roberta pulling Bobby up the steep hill in her red wagon in the time between when he lost his leg and when his prosthesis could be fitted.
Sunderson was sitting in a lawn chair and feigned sleep when Berenice returned with the manila envelope. He was relieved when she drove away. The packet remained unopened for five days because of a double obsession, the first one being why he should stay so far from his native ground and in a state of severe physical and mental wreckage. He didn’t have an answer least of all revenge, which was far too large and fancy a word. In the Upper Peninsula people only said “getting even.” The other obsession was Melissa but then he couldn’t proceed beyond her physical image and the slight lisp in her voice. She was only minimally attractive, handsome maybe, a little full-figured like so many of the local Chicano women. He tried to imagine being a father to her daughter but failed. Back at the office Roxie had told him that he should get married again in order to pass on his retirement benefits when he died. That was U.P. thinking. It was not a prosperous area and perhaps half the population had no health insurance. A fishing acquaintance with Lou Gehrig’s disease had shot himself to save money for his wife.
Sunderson was growing a beard to hide the face he no longer understood with its yellowish-blue chin bruises. On the fifth morning of Mona’s unopened package he had hung a hand towel over the bathroom cabinet mirror so he wouldn’t see himself. He took his coffee out to the lawn chair in the yard surprised to find that his landlord was out weeding flowers rather than being on a nature expedition. The man explained that his wife was ill from her chemo, which she had to take for the cancer, as he called it, rather than for simply cancer, a usage Sunderson had noted in the upper Midwest as if cancer were a singular scourge and monster rather than its own multifoliate cellular nightmare.
“Despite what someone did to you, you should walk every day or you’ll turn to shit,” Alfred said.
“That’s probably true.” Sunderson was mildly pleased that he didn’t feel pissed off as he usually did with advice of a personal nature.
“Out here we live up in the sky compared to the Midwest. You have to work to get your lungs acclimated. If you’re in the backcountry you might think of carrying a pistol.”
Sunderson nodded in agreement and Alfred walked away. If you have to carry a pistol for nearly forty years you’re not enthused about continuing to do so. Maybe Marion could send his pistol with the books but it could be illegal. He couldn’t remember. Sunderson had never been interested in gun control except to favor the banning of automatic weapons and having the conviction that the United States would be better off if like Canada we banned handguns. Ultimately he didn’t give a shit though it was likely if he had fired a warning shot they would have stopped throwing rocks. Again he thought that there was no real conclusive evidence for much of anything.
Except hunger. He was wobbly from lack of food and went inside to heat up some lentil soup Berenice had made him. He put it on the stove and then sat down at the kitchenette table and finally opened Mona’s material. On top of the stack was a brief e-mail from Lucy whom he had given Mona’s e-mail to keep in touch. “Your idea was to try to screw me and forget me. You’re a bad person. Love, Lucy.” This message confused him because the severity of his concussion had caused memory lapses the doctor said would probably be temporary. Mona’s letter about her “disaster,” however, fully penetrated his bruised brain. Mona had fallen in love with a brother and sister, and her mother had made a surprise visit back home and caught the three of them making out in bed together. She had beat on them with a broom. The upshot was that her mother insisted she have counseling for her perversion. Sunderson made an effort to be shocked but instead was stimulated for the first time in two weeks. He hadn’t dared think sexually about Melissa in an attempt to stay high-minded to withstand the disappointment if she turned him down for a date.
He sipped at Berenice’s soup, which was without seasoning, while leafing through a pile of cult material that Mona had found on the Internet. It was bizarre indeed but didn’t quite catch his interest. He impulsively called a friendly hospital orderly named Giacomo, not a Mexican name but when the orderly was babbling in the hospital room he had said that he was named after a Tucson landlord who had been kind to his parents when they came north in the 1980s. Giacomo said that he didn’t have Melissa’s cell phone or land line numbers, the latter unlisted because Melissa’s brother was a big-time narcotico in one of the warring cartels and gossip had it that her brother killed her husband because of a deal gone wrong. She and her daughter were always in jeopardy of being kidnapped and the name Melissa was an alias and he had no idea what her real name was. She hadn’t appeared for work today.
Sitting there with his tasteless soup Sunderson felt his confused mind becoming more liquid. The image of Mona in bed with a brother and sister floated toward Melissa and her baby daughter overlooked by Daryl, which Mona wrote was Dwight’s new alias.
There was a knock at the door. It was Alfred who handed Sunderson a map saying that he had marked some places in the area for their interesting walks. Alfred then invited Sunderson to join him and his wife for dinner at their favorite Mexican restaurant. Sunderson wanted to refuse but could think of no reason to do so and accepted. After Alfred left he noted that when he pulled up his trousers the waist had become loose. He had probably lost a dozen pounds in the nearly two weeks since the stoning though part of that was because he had forgotten in his dream confusion to drink any alcohol after never missing a day since he entered college. He called Marion knowing that it was lunch hour at the school.