“You didn’t get any?” Marjorie said. “You must really smell like gasoline tonight.” She was actually trying to be light.
“He’s not a lowlife, Clare,” he said to her as she set a wedge of pie before him and dropped a fork onto the table. Even Marjorie, who had silently sided with her mother every time she’d had the chance, looked up in surprise at Clare. “It’s the boy whose sister was killed last summer.”
“Sheila Morton,” Marjorie said.
“The tramp,” Clare said.
Ruckelbar took a bite of pie. He was going to stay right here. This was the scene he’d drifted away from a thousand times. They were talking.
“She was not a tramp,” he said. “This boy is a nice boy.”
“He’s disturbed,” Clare said. “God, going out there to sit in the car?”
“Sheila was a slut,” Marjorie said. “Everybody knew that.”
The moment had gone very strange for all of them together like this in the kitchen. An ordinary night would have found Ruckelbar in the garage or his bedroom, Marjorie on the phone, and Clare at the television. They all felt the vague uncertainty of having the rules shift. No one would leave and no one knew how it would end; this was all new.
“She was, Dad,” Marjorie said, setting Ruckelbar back in his chair with the word “Dad,” which in its disuse had become monumental, naked and direct. They all heard it. Marjorie went on, “She put out, okay? One of those guys was from Woodbine. What do you think they were doing? They were headed for the Upper Quarry. It’s where the sluts go. You don’t try that road unless you’re going to put out.”
Ruckelbar had stopped eating the pie. He put down his fork and turned: Clare was gone.
A SUNNY SATURDAY in New England the last day in October: Ruckelbar lives for days like these, maybe this day in particular, the sun even at noon fallen away hard, but the lever of heat still there, though more than half the leaves are down and they skirl across Route 21 and pool against the banks of old grass. Ruckelbar sits in his old wooden office chair, which he pulls out front on days just like this, the whole scene a throwback to any fall afternoon thirty years ago, that being Clare’s word, “throwback,” but for now he’s free in what feels like the very last late sunlight of the year. It’s Halloween, he remembers; tonight they turn their clocks back. It doesn’t matter. For now, he’s simply going to sit in the place which has become the place he belongs, a place where he is closest to being happy, no, pleased he never moved, pleased to have this place paid for and not be running the Citgo in town chasing in circles regardless of the money, pleased to have the only station in the twelve miles of Route 21 between Garse and Corbett, nothing to look at across the street but trees rolling away toward Little Bear Mountain. Ruckelbar won’t make fifty dollars the whole day and he simply leans back in the sunshine, pleased to have his tools put away and the bay swept and the office neat, just pleased to have the afternoon. As he sits and lifts his face to the old sun, he feels it and he’s surprised that there is something else now, something new swimming underneath the ease he always feels at Bluestone, something about last night, and he tries to dismiss it but it will not be dismissed. It took years to achieve this separate peace and now something is coming undone.
Last night Ruckelbar had gone to Clare’s room. After Marjorie had finished her pie and left the kitchen, her dishes on the table still, he’d sat as their talk played again in his head, burning there like a mistake. He hadn’t known the Morton girl and in defending her he’d let his wife be injured. But he felt good about it somehow, that he had protested, and his mind had opened in the realization that something in him had been killed when they’d changed Marjorie’s name, and he’d hated himself for not protesting then, but he knew too that he’d always just gone along. He lifted the two plates from the table and then put them down where they were. He went to Marjorie where she talked on the phone in the den and he stood before her until she put her palm over the speaker and said, annoyed, “What?” He said, “Get off the phone and go put your dishes away. Now.” He said it in such a way that she spoke quickly into the telephone and hung up. Before she could rise, he added, “I think you should watch your language around your mother; I’m sure you didn’t please her tonight in speaking so freely. She’s worked hard to raise you correctly and you disappointed her.”
“You started it,” Marjorie said.
“Stop,” he said. “You apologize to her tomorrow. It will mean a lot to her. You’re everything she’s got.” Ruckelbar wanted to touch his daughter, put his hand on her cheek, but he didn’t move, and in a moment Marjorie left the room. He had not done it too many times to reach out now, and besides, his hands, he always knew, were never really clean.