He looked at her with fixed eyes, his arm leaning across the doorway so she couldn’t leave.
“You got jewelry, right? You got the ring I gave you.”
“Runner, please, Ben’s in trouble, bad trouble, I got a lot of bad stuff going on right now. Just come back another time, OK?”
“What the hell has Ben done?”
“There’s been some trouble at school, some trouble in town, it’s bad, I think he might need a lawyer, so I need any money I have for him and …”
“So you do have money.”
“Runner, I don’t.”
“Give me the ring at least.”
“I don’t have it.”
The girls were pretending to watch TV, but their rising voices made Michelle, nosy Michelle, turn her head and openly stare at them.
“Give me the ring, Patty.” He held out his hand like she might actually be wearing it, that chintzy fake-gold engagement ring that she knew was embarrassing, flimsy, even at seventeen. He’d given it to her three months after he proposed. It took him three months to get off his ass, go down to a five-and-dime, and buy the little bit of tinsel he gave her while on his third beer. I love you forever, baby, he’d said. She knew immediately then that he’d leave, that he was not a man to depend on, that he wasn’t even a man she liked very much. And still she’d gotten pregnant three more times, because he didn’t like to wear condoms and it was too much trouble to nag.
“Runner, do you not remember that ring? That ring is not going to get you any money. It cost about ten dollars.”
“Now you’re going to be a bitch about the ring? Now?”
“Believe me if it had been worth anything, I’d have pawned it already.”
They stood facing each other, Runner breathing like an angry donkey, his hands shaking. He put them on her arms, then removed them with exaggerated effort. Even his mustache was shaking.
“You are really going to be sorry about this, Patty.”
“I already am, Runner. Been sorry a long time.”
He turned, and his jacket brushed a cocoa packet on to the floor, scattering more brown powder at his feet. “Bye girls, your mom’s … a BITCH!” He kicked one of the tall kitchen chairs over and it cart-wheeled into the living room. They all froze like forest creatures, as Runner paced in tight circles, Patty wondering if she should make a run for a rifle, or grab a kitchen knife, all the while, mind-pleading that he just leave.
“Thanks for FUCKING NOTHING!” he tramped to the front door, swung the door open so hard it cracked the wall behind it and bounced back. He kicked it open again, grabbed it, banged it into the wall, his head bowed low against it, all his strength slamming it again and again.
Then he left, his car screeching down away from the house, and Patty fetched the shotgun, loaded it, and set it atop the mantelpiece with a scattering of shells. Just in case.
Libby Day
NOW
Krissi ended up sleeping on my couch. I’d walked her to the door and realized she wasn’t OK to drive, she was slip-slopping in her shoes, a web of mascara down one cheek. As she swayed out onto my porch, she turned around suddenly and asked about her mother, if I knew where her mother was or how to find her, and it was then that I pulled Krissi back inside, made her a Velveeta sandwich, parked her on the sofa, and wrapped a blanket over her. As she rolled into sleep, setting the last quarter of the sandwich carefully on the floor beside her, three of my lotion bottles fell out of her jacket. Once she passed out I tucked them back in.
She was gone when I woke up, the blanket folded with a note scrawled on the back of an envelope: Thanks. Sorry.
So Lou Cates didn’t kill my family, if Krissi was to be believed. I believed her. On that count at least.
I decided to drive down to see Runner, ignore the two messages from Lyle and the zero messages from Diane. Drive down to see Runner, get some answers. I didn’t think he had anything to do with the murders, whatever his girlfriend might say, but I wondered if he knew something, with his debts and his drinking and his gutter-friends. If he knew something or heard something, or if maybe his debts had triggered some horrible vengeance. Maybe I could believe in Ben again, which is what I wanted to do. I knew now why I’d never gone to visit him. It was too tempting, too easy to ignore the prison walls, and just see my brother, hear the Ben-specific cadence of his voice, that downward slope at the end of every sentence, like it might be the last thing he was ever going to say. Just seeing him, I remembered things, nice things, or not even nice. Just regular things. I could get a whiff of home. Way back when everyone was alive. Man, I wanted that.
I stopped at the 7-Eleven on the way out of town, bought a map and some cheese-flavored crackers that I discovered were diet when I bit into them. I ate them anyway, heading south, the orange powder floating through the car. I should have stopped for a meal on the way to Oklahoma. The air on the highway was thick with tempting smell-pockets: french fries, fast-food fish, fried chicken. But I was in an unnatural panic, worried for no good reason I would miss Runner if I stopped, and so I ate the diet crackers and a mealy apple I’d found on the corner of my kitchen counter.