The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

Lee Martin A man looking for trouble From Glimmer Train Stories

My uncle was a man named Bill Jordan, and in 1972, when I was sixteen, he came home from Vietnam, rented a small box house on the corner of South and Christy, and went to work on a section gang with the B & O Railroad. If not for my mother and her romance with our neighbor, Harold Timms, perhaps my uncle would have lived a quiet and unremarkable life, but of course that’s something we’ll never know.

“He’ll do all right,” my father said one night at supper. He looked out the window and nodded his head. It was the first warm day of spring, and the window was open. I smelled the damp ground, heard the robins singing. “I’m glad he’s back,” my father said, and I believe now, for just an instant, my mother and I let ourselves get caught up in his optimism, a gift we desperately needed, although we were the sort of family that never would have admitted as much.

“How’s your pork chop?” my mother asked.

“Bill’s going to be aces,” my father said.

Then we all sat there, chewing, not saying much of anything else at all. Bill was home, safe, and for the time that’s the only thing that mattered.

By summer, though, he was fed up with Harold Timms, who happened to be his foreman on the section gang. It was generally known throughout Goldengate that Mr. Timms was keeping time with my mother, a fact that rankled Bill day in and day out, because on the job he was tired of acting like he didn’t know better. My father, a withdrawn man who kept his troubles to himself, had apparently decided to ignore my mother’s adultery.

“I have to do what Harold Timms tells me every day,” Bill said to my father one Sunday afternoon when they were in the shade of the big maple alongside our house, changing the points and plugs on our Ford Galaxie. “And all the while everyone in town knows he’s getting it steady from your Annie.”

I lay on my bed, listening. Out my window, I could see Bill leaning over the fender of the Galaxie. The hood was open above him, and he was going to town with a spark plug wrench. He had on a black bowling shirt with a print of a teetering pin wearing a crown and the words King Pins across the back. He’d rolled the short sleeves tight on his biceps. From where I was lying, all I could see of my father, who stood on the other side of the Galaxie, was his hand on top of that fender. His long, narrow hand. The face of his Timex watch seemed enormous on his slender wrist. A brown leather band wrapped around that wrist with plenty of length to spare. I knew he’d had to punch an extra hole in it so the watchband wouldn’t be too loose.

“Dammit, R.T.” Bill banged the spark plug wrench against a motor mount. “You need to put a stop to that monkey business. For Roger’s sake if for no other reason.”

My name came to me through the window and caught me by surprise, as if my father and Bill knew I was eavesdropping, even though I was sure they didn’t. My father’s hand pulled away from the fender, and I imagined him, outside my view, fuming.

The leaves on the maple rattled together. It was August, the start of the dog days, and we were grateful for every stir of air. Next door at the Timms’s house, a radio was playing. The curtain at the window lifted and fell back with the breeze. I could hear the faint strains of “Too Late to Turn Back Now,” and the chorus — I believe, I believe, I believe I’m fallin’ in love — annoyed me because I knew it was Connie Timms listening to it, and I was fretting about her because she’d told me after church that she and I were through.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. We were outside on the sidewalk, and people were coming out of the church and down the steps. “I want a boyfriend I can tell the world about. I don’t want some...” Here she struggled to find the words she wanted, the ones that would describe what she and I had been up to that summer. “I don’t want an affair,” she finally said.

Now I can almost laugh at the way that word sounded coming from a girl her age. At the time, though, my heart was breaking. I watched Connie run down the sidewalk to her father’s Oldsmobile ’98, fling the door open, and get inside. I knew she didn’t mean for me to come after her. I wanted to, but I didn’t have the nerve.

If not for my mother and Mr. Timms, everything between Connie and me might have been fine. Bill and my father weren’t saying anything I didn’t already know. My mother and Mr. Timms. Like my father, I tried to ignore what was going on between them, but it was impossible.

Earlier that summer, Connie and I began to take note of each other, and as we got cozy, we agreed to keep our hey-baby-hey a secret. What would people think if they knew? Apples didn’t fall far from the tree. Why did that concern me? I suppose there was a part of me that believed I was betraying my father by throwing in with the daughter of the man who was coming between him and my mother.

How could Connie and I make our affections known when her father and my mother were the subjects of so much gossip? I’d like to say we wanted to be better than that gossip, but I suspect the truth was we were embarrassed. We were afraid the town was watching us, and every time we were together on the sly, I felt guilty. I wanted to think that we’d found each other solely from our two hearts syncing up, but as long as there was the story of my mother and her father, I wasn’t sure. Maybe we were just following their lead.

We couldn’t have said any of this at the time. At least I couldn’t have. I won’t presume to speak for Connie. I only know this: no matter what we could say then, or what we knew by instinct, one fact was plain — whatever was happening between the two of us could never be separated from the fact that her father and my mother were lovers.

“We can’t let anyone find out,” I told Connie early on. “We can’t be trashy like them.”

“My father’s not trashy.” She had a pageboy haircut and her bangs were in need of a trim. We were talking over the wire fence that ran between my backyard and hers. She had on Levis and white Keds sneakers and a T-shirt that advertised Boone’s Farm, a soda-pop wine popular in those days. She brushed her bangs out of her eyes and stared at me. “He’s lonely. He’s a very lonely man.”

I loved her brown hair and her blue eyes. I loved the smell of her perfume — something called Straw Hat, which was all sweet and woodsy and made me want to press her to me and breathe in that scent. She could have said anything to me at that moment and I would have taken it as gospel. So I let that statement about Mr. Timms’s loneliness absolve him, and with my silence — much to my shame now — I allowed my mother to become the wicked one in the story of their affair.

Mr. Timms was a widower. His wife, a nervous, fretful woman, took sick one winter night when a heavy snow was falling. It started around dusk, and before long the streets were covered. The snow kept coming down as night crept in. My father and I went into our living room to watch it out the window. By that time the snow was up to the top of the drainage ditches that ran alongside the street.

“It’s like a picture out there,” my father said. I was thirteen then. We stood in the dark room and watched the snow coming down past the streetlights. No cars passed by. We could see lights on in the houses around us. Everyone was hunkering down to wait this one out. Over twenty inches by morning, said WAKO radio out of the county seat, Phillipsport. The wind was up, and already the snow was starting to drift against the side of our shed. My father’s Galaxie, parked in our driveway, was barely holding its shape as the snow covered it. “Roger, I swear.” He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “It’s like we’re in a picture,” he said, and I’ve always remembered that, because it was one of the first times he ever said anything that I sensed came from some private place inside him, which he generally kept to himself.

My mother was in the family room behind us with the television playing. It was a Saturday night. I’m sure of that because I remember that The Carol Burnett Show was on. My mother laughed at something, and I could hear the television audience laughing too. My father and I turned at the same time, looking back through the French doors that separated the living room from the family room. We saw the lamplight there. He squeezed my shoulder again, and at his touch we headed toward those French doors. Once we opened them, we stepped back into the life that was ours.

“Baby, you should’ve seen,” my mother said to my father. She was kicked back in her Barcalounger, her arm bent at the elbow so it went up at a right angle. She held a Virginia Slims cigarette between her fingers and the smoke curled up into the lamplight. “It was the funniest thing. I was afraid I was going to wet my pants.”

She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. She’d just had her hair done the day before, and her loose blond curls came down over her shoulders. I’d always known she was a pretty woman — prettier than most of my friends’ mothers — but she looked particularly glamorous there in the lamplight. Big gold hoop earrings dangled against the sides of her turtleneck.

“We were watching it snow,” my father said.

I believe now he must have been uncomfortable with my mother’s beauty. He wasn’t the kind of man who could enjoy knowing that wherever he went with his wife other men would be looking at her. He was more the type — thoughtful and shy — who preferred to live a private life. If there were pleasures to be had, he’d rather the world not know about them. He was the county tax assessor, and he knew that it was a man looking for trouble who chose to parade his riches and not expect someone to take notice and wish himself into a share of that wealth.

“Everyone has to pay for what he has,” he told me once. “That’s what I know, Roger. No one gets off scot-free.”

He wasn’t a looker. Not that he was an unattractive man, but next to my mother he paled. He had sloped shoulders and a long face and a nose that was too big. I expect he spent most of his married life shaking his head over his dumb luck in landing a woman as beautiful as Annie Griggs.

One night at the Uptown Café, we walked away from our table, and just before we got to the door I heard a low wolf whistle. I know my father heard it too, because just for an instant his back stiffened, and he gave a quick glance behind him. My mother took his arm, and that claiming gesture must have soothed him, because he opened the door and we stepped out onto the sidewalk. Later, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I heard them talking about what had happened. “Dang it, Annie,” my father said, and after a while my mother answered in a quiet voice, “It’s not like I ask for it.”

What she was asking that winter night, when she told my father about the comedy sketch she’d seen on TV, was for us to sit down with her and be a family — to give her, I imagine now, a reason to be happy with her home and the people in it.

But before any of that could happen, someone knocked on our front door.

“My word,” my father said. “Who could that be on a night like this?”

He went into the living room to open the door, and after a while I heard Mr. Timms’s voice. It was a loud voice, full of dread and fear. “It’s Jean,” he said. “She’s sick and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Sick?” my father said in a way that told me he didn’t know what to do about it either.

“She went to bed for a rest after supper, and now I can’t get her to wake up.”

My mother had already put the footrest down on her Barcalounger. I could feel the cold air around my legs, and I knew my father was holding the front door open as he talked to Mr. Timms.

“Tell him to come in,” my mother called to my father. “Harold, come inside,” she said.

The ceiling light snapped on in the living room. The front door closed, and I heard Mr. Timms stomping snow from his boots on the rug just inside the door.

I followed my mother into the living room, and there he was, bareheaded, the collar of his black wool coat turned up to his ears. He’d stuffed his trouser legs into the tops of a pair of green rubber boots, from which snow was melting. He wore a pair of glasses with black plastic frames, and those glasses were steamed over now that he’d come in from the cold.

“Annie?” he said, and he sounded so helpless.

“Don’t worry, Harold.” My mother walked right up to him. She reached up and took his glasses off his face. She used the hem of her sweater to wipe the steam from the lenses. “I’m going to get my coat and boots on,” she said. “Then I’m going to come see to her. Everything will be fine.”

Mr. Timms reached out and touched my mother lightly on her arm. “Thank you, Annie,” he said, and I believe it may have been then, though he surely couldn’t have known this, that he started to fall in love with her.

It must have been a feeling that simmered those three years after Mrs. Timms died. She died that night, was dead already, in fact, when Mr. Timms stood in our living room, putting his glasses back on and waiting for my mother to come with him.

“There wasn’t a thing I could do,” she said later, after the ambulance had finally made its way through the snow and taken Mrs. Timms away. “Poor Jean. She was gone when I got there.”

My father and I had eventually put on our own coats and boots and made our way next door. My mother called for the ambulance, which was something, so my father said later, that Mr. Timms should have done instead of coming next door to our house. “He didn’t know what to do,” my mother said with a sharp bite to her voice. “That poor man. He was lost.”

Connie wasn’t crying. That would all come later. She sat on the couch in the living room and stared straight ahead, not saying a word. My mother finally sat down beside her and took her up in her arms. “You sweet girl,” my mother kept saying, rocking Connie back and forth. “You sweet, sweet girl.”

Mr. Timms was in the bedroom with Mrs. Timms, and from time to time I heard a thud and I imagined that he was banging his fist into the wall. “Go see about him,” my mother said to my father. After a while I heard his and Mr. Timms’s voices coming from the bedroom. “Oh, Jesus,” Mr. Timms said, and I heard my father say, “We’re right here, Harold.”

Then finally my father came out of the room, and without a word he went outside. Soon I heard the scrape of a shovel, and when I looked out the Timms’s front window, I saw my father clearing the sidewalk and the steps up onto the porch. He kept at it, digging out the driveway. “The ambulance was coming,” he told me once we were back in our own house. “I didn’t know what else to do but to clear it a path.”

In the weather, it took a good while, but finally the ambulance was there, its swirling red lights flashing over the Timms’s house. The paramedics took Mrs. Timms out on a gurney, and later we learned that she’d died because of a bad heart. “Who’d have thought?” my mother said. She told us that it made it plain how quick we could go. “If you want something, you better grab it,” she said. “You never know if you’ll have another chance.”

After Bill and my father finished with the Galaxie that Sunday in August, they decided to go squirrel hunting. Bill called for me, and I got up from the bed and went outside to see what he wanted.

“Grab your.410,” he told me. “We’re going after bushy-tails.”

I looked toward my father. He was putting down the hood of the Galaxie, and he said, “How ’bout that, Roger? It’s just the three of us here anyway. Just the three bulls. What say we get out and roam around a little? Shoot a few squirrels, have a little boy time.”

That summer he’d been trying extra-hard with me, imagining, perhaps, that he and my mother were close to being finished, and once they were, he’d want to have me on his side. The problem was he’d never been the kind of har-de-har-har man that Bill was, and any attempt on my father’s part to be friendly with me came across as forced and left me feeling uncomfortable.

We should have been talking about my mother and the fact that our family was on the verge of coming apart. We should have considered what was causing that to happen and what we might be able to do to stop it. Instead my father was puffing himself up, getting all wink-wink, palsy-walsy, pretending there wasn’t a thing wrong. It was just a summer Sunday, and we were going hunting. Men out with their shotguns. A part of me thought that if my father were truly a man, this thing between my mother and Mr. Timms wouldn’t be going on, and Connie and I would still be sweet on each other. I wouldn’t be living in the shadow of my mother’s indiscretion and my father’s inability to do anything about it. As wrong as it was, I found myself giving him the blame, thinking there was something about him — a lack of heart, or courage, or by-God-you-won’t — that made my mother do what she did.

So when he made that big show about the three bulls going off to have some boy time, I got a little fed up with the way he kept acting like we were charmed when really we weren’t at all. We were gossip. We were the family folks could feel sorry for or judge. Either way, our lives weren’t ours anymore. We belonged to the town and its prying eyes and clucking tongues. I was tired of that. I wanted my father to finally acknowledge that fact.

So I said, “Where’d Mom go?”

She’d slipped out of the house after dinner. We’d gone to services at the First Christian as usual and then come home to the meal she’d prepared. Bill came by and had coconut cream pie and coffee with us. Then he and my father went out to work on the Galaxie. I lay on my bed and heard Mr. Timms fire up his Olds. He honked his horn as he went up the street, and Bill said to my father, “There he goes.”

From my bedroom I could hear my mother singing along with the radio from next door. She had a pretty singing voice, and as I listened to her, I couldn’t help but think how happy she sounded. Soon I heard our screen door creak open and then slap against the jamb. I sat up and leaned over to look out the window. She had on a red summer dress that had a halter top and a pleated skirt. Her bare shoulders were shiny in the sunlight. She carried a box purse made from woven straw. It had strawberries and white blooms on it, and she held the handle and swung it back and forth as she walked. Her shoes, a pair of strappy sandals, slapped over the sidewalk. Her curls bounced against her bare back, and I thought she looked like a girl heading off to somewhere she’d been looking forward to, and despite the fact that I knew that Mr. Timms was most likely waiting, I couldn’t help but feel happy for her.

She turned back once and waved at my father and Bill. “Going fishin’, boys,” she said and then walked on up the street.

Now, as I waited for my father to answer my question, I saw the slightest grimace around his lips.

“She went visiting,” he said.

I wouldn’t let him off that easily. “Visiting who?”

Bill was wiping off his hands with a red shop rag. “Get your gun, hotshot.” He threw the rag into my face and gave me a hard look that told me to shut up and fall into line. “Chop, chop, buddy boy. I mean it. Right now.”

It was a quiet ride down into the country. Bill drove his El Camino, and the three of us crowded onto the bench seat. I was crammed in between Bill and my father. Our guns, my.410 and my father’s and Bill’s twelve-gauges, were cased and stowed behind us in the bed.

“Damned hot,” Bill said.

We were on the blacktop south of town, and the fields were flashing by, the corn stunted along the fencerows, the ground cracked from lack of rain.

“No good for the crops,” my father said, and it went like that for quite a while. Just a thing said here and there. The windows were down and the hot air was rushing in, and it was hard to carry on a conversation, but I knew, even if we’d been cruising along in air-conditioned quiet, no one would have felt much like talking.

That was unusual for Bill, because he generally had something to say, and he wasn’t afraid to say it. He was a different sort of man from my father. He was blustery and hot-tempered, but fun-loving too. He was always pulling a prank on someone and then looking so daggone happy about it that everyone forgave him. He was a trackman on the section gang, and back in the winter his trickster ways had finally caught up with him. He pulled a joke on Mr. Timms, stuffed five cigarette loads into one of his cigars, and when Mr. Timms put a lighter to it, the cigar exploded and frayed at its end. Mr. Timms, startled, jumped back, slipped on the icy rail, and fell onto the slope of the gravel bed.

He was all right, just shaken and bruised a little, but he was pissed off too. “I don’t have to ask who did that,” he said, staring right at Bill. “Some people are ignorant. That’s all that needs to be said about that.” What Bill didn’t know — or if he’d ever known, had no reason to recall — was that day was the anniversary of Jean Timms’s death. “Now how was I to know that?” Bill asked my father later. “He’s got it in for me now. You can by God know that for sure.” True enough, Bill had spent the rest of winter and on into spring and now summer suffering the brunt of Mr. Timms’s anger. “Any shit job you can think of,” Bill had said to my father earlier while they were working on the Galaxie. “You can bet I’m the one who’ll get it. I’ve just about had enough.” Bill blamed this all on my father. “R.T., if you just told him you know what’s what between him and Annie, maybe then he’d ease off.” Bill had never been married himself, but he thought he knew how to handle matters of the heart. “Timms wouldn’t be so quick to bust my ass if he knew that you were onto him. He’s that way. He likes to think he’s a decent man. Let him know he’s a phony, R.T., and he’ll be more humble.”

My father wasn’t made for such a thing. As we went on down the blacktop in the El Camino, I took note again of that Timex watch he was wearing — the face so big on that delicate wrist — and I found myself thinking, He doesn’t have the heart. I’m ashamed of that thought now, considering everything that was about to happen that day, things I still can’t get straight enough to suit me.

Bill and my father owned eighty acres in Lukin Township just off the County Line Road. The farm had belonged to my grandparents, but that summer my grandfather was dead, and my grandmother was living in a nursing home. She’d deeded the place to Bill and my father, and they leased it out to a tenant farmer. Often on Sunday afternoons they came down to give the place a look-see. The home place, they always called it. Sometimes, like the day I’m recalling, they brought their shotguns.

We uncased our guns and started out. We skirted the old chicken house and the clump of horseweeds taller than the roof.

“Should’ve brought a hoe to cut those down,” Bill said.

“Next time,” said my father.

We walked single file along the edge of the field that came up to the chicken house and the patch of ground my grandparents had always used for their vegetable garden. The tenant farmer had plowed up the field and sowed it in soybeans once he’d cut the wheat. The bean plants were already reaching toward knee-high. We had to crowd up into the foxtail growing along the wire fence to keep from tromping the beans. The leaves on the plants in that outer row brushed against my legs.

“Sowing fencerow to fencerow, ain’t he?” Bill said.

He was in the lead, and my father was right behind him. “Using all he can,” he said. “Getting everything he can get.”

A little air stirred the bean plants. A covey of quail got up from the fencerow, their wings a loud whirring and clacking that startled me. Bill got his twelve-gauge to his shoulder, but already the covey was banking over the tree line.

“Damn, I should have been ready,” Bill said.

“Out of season,” my father reminded him.

“Who would’ve known?” Bill lowered the twelve-gauge and cradled it. “Just you and me and Roger out here. Far as I can see, there’s no one else around.”

The sky didn’t have a cloud in it, just the contrail from an invisible jet stretching out little by little. I thought about Connie — wondered what she was doing, wondered if she’d really meant it when she told me we were through. Some nights that summer we’d driven down to the farm so we could be alone and out of sight. I had a ’63 Impala I’d bought with the money I’d saved working hay crews since I was thirteen and the last two summers on a Christmas tree farm west of Goldengate. Connie sat close on the bench seat when she rode with me, her hand on my thigh. Our routine was she’d go for a walk in the evening. I’d hear her screen door slap shut, and I’d see her going on up the sidewalk. She’d have on a pair of Levis and one of the halter tops she favored that summer, her breasts loose beneath it, a blue or red or white bow tied under her hair at her neck and another sash tied at the small of her back, the tails of that bow trailing down over the waist of her jeans and bouncing with the roll of her hips. She’d walk out Locust Street to the city park at the edge of town and wait for me in one of the dugouts at the baseball field. I always gave my horn a honk when I took the last curve out of town, and when I pulled in behind the concession stand, she’d be there, ready to open the passenger side door and slide across that bench seat and kiss me.

I had a blanket in the trunk of the Impala, and at the farm we spread it out on the grass and lay next to each other and waited for the stars to come out. It got so dark out there in the country, and under all those stars we said the things that were most on our minds, the things we could barely stand to face when they were right there in front of us in the daylight.

Connie said she missed her mother, and sometimes she cried a little, and I held her hand and didn’t say a word.

One night she said, “Why doesn’t your mother love your father?”

I told her I didn’t know, which was the truth. I’ve had years to think about what the trouble between them might have been, but I’ve never been able to say it was this or that. Maybe it was my father’s caution. Maybe my mother grew tired of the careful way he lived his life. One evening when they were hosting a pinochle party for a few couples they knew from church, my father kept underbidding his hands. Finally my mother said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, R.T. Live a little.” Little things like that have come back to me as time has gone on, but I can’t say for certain they mean anything.

But one thing I remember keeps me up at night, and that’s the moment I told Connie about on the Saturday night before that Sunday when she told me she couldn’t see me anymore, and later Bill and my father and I were moving into the woods with our shotguns. It may have been the story that spooked her, that made her believe what we were doing was ill-fated and could never come to a good end.

I said to her, “Last night I heard him beg her to stop.”

My mother’s and father’s talking stirred me from sleep in the middle of the night. I don’t know how long they’d been at it, trying to keep their voices low so I wouldn’t hear, but by the time I was awake, they were beyond that point. They weren’t thinking about anything except what had brought them to where they stood — in the midst of an ugliness they could no longer deny or ignore.

My father said, “Please, Annie. I’ve always tried my best to give you a good life, to give us a good life...” His voice trailed off, and then I heard a noise I couldn’t at first identify as anything that might come from a human being. A groan, a growl, a whimper at the end. In the silence that followed, I remember thinking, That’s my father. “Annie,” he finally said. “You’ve got to stop this. If you don’t...”

His voice left him then — swallowed up, I imagine, by the terror he felt over the prospect of a life lived without her.

“You want a divorce,” my mother said after a time. “Is that it?”

My father was weeping now. I could hear that. “Annie,” he said in a breathless, shaking voice that could barely make the words come out of his mouth. “I want you to love me.”

For a good while there was only the sound of him trying to choke down his sobs and get his breath.

Then my mother said in a gentle voice I’ve always tried to remember for what it was, the voice of a woman who’d found her way to trouble and didn’t know how to get out, “I’m here,” she said. “R.T., shh. Listen to me.” I like to think that she touched him then — touched his face or his hand, maybe even put her arms around his neck and pressed him to her. “I’m right here,” she said again. “That’s the most you should wish.”

Connie hadn’t asked for this piece of information. We’d only been lying on the blanket, looking up at the stars, not saying much of anything, just enjoying being close to each other in the dark, and I’d felt safe telling her that story. I was sixteen. She was my first love. She was the only person I could tell. What did I know then about the ties that bind one person to another?

I had to live through what was waiting for me that Sunday to know anything about love at all.

“My father’s the cause of that.” Connie sat up on the blanket. She crossed her arms over her stomach and started rocking back and forth. “He should have left your mother alone.”

“She made a choice,” I said. “It wasn’t just him.”

For a good while Connie didn’t say anything. Then in a whisper she said, “Yes, they both made their choices.”

Just then a set of headlights came down the lane. They lit up the gravel roadbed and spread out over the fencerows. They came so far that they shined on the wire fencing around the farmhouse yard. I could hear the engine idling and the faint sound of the car radio. The tires crunched over the gravel as the car rolled forward an inch or two. Then it stopped.

I knew whoever was in that car was looking at the grille of my Impala. Those headlights had caught the chrome. Whoever was in that car knew now they weren’t the only ones who’d come down that lane, and they were trying to decide what to do.

Connie was still sitting up on the blanket. We were on the grass to the left of the Impala, about even with the trunk, and just barely out of the glare of the headlights in the lane.

“Roger,” she said, and I could tell she was scared.

I reached up and put my hand on the small of her back, felt the heat of her skin. “It’s okay,” I said. “Everything’s okay.”

It seemed like the car in the lane would sit there forever, the driver unable to decide whether to keep coming. A drop of sweat slid down Connie’s back and onto my hand. Then somewhere nearby a screech owl started its trill, the call that seemed to come from the other side of the living, and I felt my heart pounding in my chest.

“Oh, God,” said Connie.

Then the car in the lane started backing up. It backed all the way to the end, where it swung out and pointed itself north. I watched the red taillights, and what I didn’t tell Connie, though maybe she knew this on her own, was that those long vertical rows of lights, set wide apart, were the taillights of an Olds ’98 like her father’s.

“Whoever that was, they’re gone,” I said.

I let my hand fall to the bow of her halter top. I started to untie it, but she slapped my hand away.

“That was spooky,” she said. “That car. C’mon. Let’s go.”

So in my mind now, the image of the two of us walking toward my Impala and getting in and driving back to town is forever tied up with the picture of me stepping into the woods that Sunday with Bill and my father.

We waited and waited around a stand of hickory trees where we’d seen pieces of husks on the ground, and though from time to time we heard a squirrel chattering in the tree mast high above us, we could never get a clear shot, and after too much time keeping quiet, Bill finally said, “Fuck it. I’m done.”

He was all for heading back to town, but my father said, “Let’s walk on over to the end of the next field and see if there’s any better hunting in Kepper’s Woods. We’re here. We might as well see what’s what over there.”

Jean Timms had been a Kepper before she married Mr. Timms, and those woods had been in her family longer than I could imagine. I didn’t know any of that on that Sunday — Kepper’s Woods was just a name to me, the way Higgins Corner or McVeigh Bottoms was, places marked by the names of families, the history of whom I had no reason to know.

Surely my father knew that about Jean Timms and Kepper’s Woods. I wonder now whether he had any thought at all of what he might find there.

“Might as well,” Bill said, and off we went.

Marathon Oil had a lease road running through those woods, and that’s where we came upon the car — Mr. Timms’s Olds ’98 — nosed deep into the shade offered by the hickories and oaks and ash trees and sweet gums.

A flash of my mother’s red sundress caught my eye first — just a quick glimpse of red as she came around the front of the Olds — and then, just like that, the whole picture came into view: the dark green Olds with road dust coating the top of the rear bumper, the gold of Mr. Timms’s Ban-Lon pullover shirt, the bright red of my mother’s sundress. She walked a few steps behind the car, back down the oil lease road, and that’s where Mr. Timms caught up to her. He took her by her arm and turned her around to face him. He put his arms around her, and she put her arms around him, and they held each other there in the woods on that road where they thought no one could see.

“There’s Mom,” I said, and as soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t.

When I saw her with Mr. Timms, I found the sight to be so strange and yet somehow familiar, mixed up as it was with what I felt about Connie, that I couldn’t help but say what I did.

I imagine my father would have eventually spotted them, and what took place next would have still been the thing that happened, but even now I can’t stop myself from believing that if I’d kept my mouth shut, perhaps we would have veered away from that oil lease road, and Bill and my father never would have seen my mother and Mr. Timms. I can’t keep myself from thinking that maybe there was that one chance that we would have gone on, maybe found some squirrels, maybe not, and then driven back into town, and our lives would have gone on the way they’d been moving all that summer. Maybe there was that one possibility of grace that I cost us because I spoke. There’s Mom, I said, and Bill and my father stopped.

We were hidden in the woods, maybe fifty yards or so away, and my mother and Mr. Timms had no idea we were there.

My father said to me, in a very quiet, very calm voice, “Go back to the car, Roger.”

But I didn’t move. I was afraid that if I did, my mother and Mr. Timms would hear my footsteps over the twigs and hickory nut husks on the floor of the woods. The thought of my mother’s face turning in my direction, her eyes meeting mine, was more than I could stand to imagine, because what Bill and my father didn’t know was that one day that summer my mother said to me, “You like Connie, don’t you?”

We were alone in the house. My father was at the courthouse in Phillipsport. It was a hot, still afternoon with storm clouds gathering in the west. Soon there’d be a little breeze kicking up — enough to stir the wind chimes my mother had hanging outside the back door, the ones I’d brought her from my class trip to McCormick’s Creek State Park. They’re pine cones, she said when she saw the chimes. Little gold pine cones, she said, and even now, whenever I want to feel kindly toward her, all I have to do is call up the memory of how she held the chimes up and blew on them to set those pine cones to tinkling, how she looked at them, amazed.

I’d just come in from mowing the yard, and when my mother asked me that question about Connie, I was about to take a drink of grape Kool-Aid from the glass I’d poured. I stopped with the glass halfway to my mouth, and then I set it down on the kitchen counter.

Soon the thunder would start, at first a low rumble in the distance, and eventually the lightning would come and the sky would open up, but for the time being it was as if there wasn’t a breath of air to be found. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table writing out a grocery list on one of my father’s notepads that had his name stamped at the top — Roger Thomas Jordan, Phillips County Tax Assessor. She hadn’t made much progress. Eggs, she’d written. Milk. Then she’d stopped and the rest of the note page was covered with her name, written in her beautiful hand again and again. Annie, Annie, Annie.

“I mean you really like her,” she said. “It’s all right to like someone that way, Roger.” She looked up at me then, and there was such a sadness in her eyes. I’ve never been able to get the memory of that moment out of my head. “It’s the way I felt about your father,” she said, and then she ripped the sheet of paper from the pad and wadded it up in her hand.

Somehow I knew that what she was telling me with all that talk about Connie was that she and Mr. Timms didn’t like each other in quite the same way, that what they had going on between them was very different from what had brought her and my father together. I think that she was telling me that if she’d had her druthers, she would have felt that way about Mr. Timms — she would have liked him, and he would have liked her — but what they had between them was something very different from liking someone. It was something born out of loneliness and desperation. I want to believe that she was trying to tell me that what Connie and I had was special and that she wished it would last.

“You know I’m an old woman, don’t you?” she finally said to me.

She was forty-one that summer. If she were alive today, she’d be seventy-nine. I like to think she’d have become an elegant woman, well suited to her age, happy with what she had left in her life, but that Sunday when she clung to Mr. Timms in the woods, no one knew she’d only live ten more years, or that my father, who divorced her, would come to the hospital and sit by her bed and hold her hand as she was dying.

“You’re not that old,” I told her that day in the kitchen.

She looked at me, shaking her head, her lips turned up in a sad grin. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You just wait.”

So there we were that Sunday, Bill and my father and me, and my father said again, “Roger, go back to the car.”

When I still wouldn’t move, he said, “We should all go back. We should go home.”

That’s when Bill said, “Jesus Christ.”

And then he was tromping through the woods toward that lease road where my mother raised her head and pushed away from Mr. Timms and saw that they weren’t alone.

“I don’t know who you think you are,” Bill said when he got to where they were standing. “How can you live with yourself? And you, Annie.” Here Bill shook his head, took a long breath and let it out. “I thought you were better than this.”

There comes a moment when all that’s been denied rises up and leaves you raw and trembling. That’s what I was learning that day as I stood there — my father and I hadn’t moved — listening to Bill’s loud voice ringing with accusation and judgment.

Now I find myself wishing again and again that it would have been possible for me to tell him something that would have made a difference. Something about how broken we were. Something about how a time comes when it’s best to just walk away, even if it means leaving behind someone you swore you’d love the rest of your life. Maybe we thought we could save ourselves, but it was too late.

Although I felt all this inside me, I couldn’t find anything to say that would matter. Even now I can’t put it into words. I can only remember the way it felt in the woods in the moments after Bill shouldered his twelve-gauge, and I knew that all of us were about to move from this world into another one that would hold us the rest of our days.

Bill said to Mr. Timms, “Get into your car. Go home.” He motioned to the Olds ’98 with the barrel of his twelve-gauge. “You’ve got a daughter,” he said. “Can’t you try to be a decent man for her sake? Go on now. This is over. Annie’s coming with us.”

“Bill, calm down,” my mother said. “You should take care.”

“Don’t tell me that,” said Bill. “Not you. Not the way you’ve been whoring around. R.T. might not know how to handle you, but by God I think I do.”

My father was moving then, his long legs striding quickly through the woods to the lease road. I remembered that winter night when he’d put his hand on my shoulder and we’d watched the snow come down. The beauty of it all amazed him. It’s like we’re in a picture, he said. I knew he wasn’t made for such ugliness as was upon him now, and I couldn’t bear to see him walking toward it. I didn’t know anything to do but to follow him.

“Bill, let’s go.” He rested his hand on my uncle’s shoulder just the way he had mine that winter night. “Put that shotgun down.” He was talking in a quiet voice, but I could hear the fear in it. “I mean it, Bill. We need to go.”

My mother looked at me then, and she was ashamed. “Oh, Roger,” she said. “You hadn’t ought to be here.”

I thought my father would tell me again to go back to the car, but he was intent on dealing with Bill, who still had that twelve-gauge trained on Mr. Timms.

“Bill,” my father said, “listen to me.”

“Better do what he says, Jordan.” Mr. Timms had his hands in the pockets of his blue-and-red-plaid golf pants, standing there in a way that told me he felt positive my uncle was bluffing. “I can make things plenty rough for you,” he said. “I can see to it you lose your job.”

“I’ve put up with enough shit from you, Harold.” Bill shook free from my father’s hand. “I’m not going to put up with any more of it.”

That’s when Mr. Timms said to my mother, “Annie, tell him. Tell R.T. what’s what.”

My mother couldn’t speak. She looked at Mr. Timms, and then at my father. From where I stood beside him, I could see that she was afraid. Her eyes were wet, and there was just the slightest tremor at the corner of her mouth.

“Annie?” my father said.

“Go on, Annie,” said Mr. Timms. “Tell him what we’ve decided.”

Bill stepped up closer to him. He pressed the barrel of the twelve-gauge into the soft spot beneath his chin, and Mr. Timms tilted his head, trying to get free from the nick of the raised bead sight.

“You’re not deciding anything.” Bill kept up the pressure with that gun barrel, and he walked Mr. Timms backward, away from my mother along the driver’s side of the Olds until they were out of the lease road and off in the woods opposite us. “If anyone’s running this show, it’s me.”

I should tell you that Bill was a violent man, but I can’t, because the truth was, prior to that moment in the woods, he wasn’t. He was my uncle, my father’s younger brother, who had done his stint as a grunt in Vietnam and come home, seemingly no worse for the experience. He had his job with the railroad and that little box house on South Street not far from the Uptown Cafe, where he ate breakfast every morning before heading out to work. He kept a pot of wave petunias on each side of the front steps of his house. Some evenings I’d go driving by, and he’d be outside with his watering can. He’d have on a pair of khaki shorts and his old army shirt with the sleeves cut out. He’d throw up his arm, his fingers in the V of a peace sign, and I’d think, There he is, the happiest man alive.

What did I know about him except that? Whatever he carried inside him was a secret to me.

“I don’t know what got into him,” my father would say time and time again as the years went on. “I guess it was like he said. He’d just had enough.”

Enough of Harold Timms and the way he shoved him around on the job. Enough of the fact that Mr. Timms thought he could take another man’s wife and not have to answer for it. Enough of his gold Ban-Lon shirt that Sunday in the woods, and his flashy plaid golf pants, and that Olds ’98. Enough of things we had no way of knowing about as he tried his best to live a regular life in the aftermath of whatever he’d gone through in Vietnam. Enough.

So when Mr. Timms said what he did — “I’m going to tell you something, Jordan. And R.T., I want you to listen to this too” — Bill pulled back on the hammer of that twelve-gauge.

“Don’t talk,” he said to Mr. Timms. “Don’t say another word.”

The squirrels were chattering high up in the hickory trees, the sun was splintering through the branches, a mourning dove was off in the distance calling for rain. A little wind had come up, and it was cooler there in the woods. I thought for a moment that everything would be all right. Bill backed away from Mr. Timms, and he let his arms relax, the twelve-gauge now held crosswise at his waist. He came back to the lease road, walking backward until he cleared the Olds and was standing a couple of feet away from its rear end.

Mr. Timms followed him, stopping finally about midway down the side of the car. I could see his head and shoulders above the roof. He said, “R.T., Annie doesn’t love you. She loves me, and we aim to have a life together.”

“I told you to shut up.” Bill’s voice was loud and shaking. “I gave you fair warning.”

But Mr. Timms went on. “She hasn’t loved you in a long time. She’s just stayed with you for the sake of the boy.” Here he pointed his finger at me. “And I know what you’ve been doing with my Connie. I saw you... we saw you, your mother and me... Saturday night, two lovebirds on a blanket over there at your grandparents’ farm. I want you to leave Connie alone. She’s told you, hasn’t she? She’s only fifteen, for Christ’s sake. She’s too young to be laying in the dark with a boy.”

“I love her,” I said, and though I said it in a quiet voice, I could tell right away I’d spoken with force.

I knew that because for a good while no one said a thing. They were stunned — struck dumb because in the midst of all this ugliness, a boy had spoken his heart and reminded them all of what it was to be young and smitten with the first stirrings of something sweet and pure.

Then my mother said, “Oh, honey.”

And my father said, “We should all just leave now before this gets out of hand.”

“Hell,” said Mr. Timms. He laughed, throwing back his head, his mouth open so wide I could see a single gold molar. “You love her?” he said to me. “You don’t know what love is. You just love your pecker.”

He took a few steps toward us, and Bill shouldered that twelve-gauge again and said, “You better stop. I swear, Harold. I won’t let you drag Roger into this.”

“Oh, he’s in it all right.” Mr. Timms took two more steps — he was at the rear of the Olds now, about to step out into the open. He stopped walking and rested his hand on the trunk. “Well, at least there’s one man in your family.” He laughed again, only this time there was no joy in it. “Ha, ha,” he said. “Ha, ha.” Then his eyes narrowed, and he said, “Son, you must have inherited your mother’s hot blood.”

The blast from the twelve-gauge was sudden and explosive. The back glass of the Olds shattered, blown backward onto the bench seat. For a moment that’s all I could take in — how there was a loud crack and then the glass came apart in more little pieces than anyone would ever be able to count.

Then my mother called Mr. Timms’s name. “Harold.” She was moving past me, toward the Olds. “Harold. Oh, God.”

It all came into focus for me then, the entire picture. Mr. Timms was on the ground, his torso hidden alongside the Olds. I could see his shoes — a pair of white leather loafers with gold buckles — and I understood that Bill had shot him.

My father was running after my mother. He caught up to her just as she got to the rear of the Olds. She looked down at Mr. Timms and then put her hands to her face. Her shoulders heaved. My father took her by those shoulders as if to hold them still.

He turned back toward me and his eyes were wild. “Don’t come over here.” He was shouting, though I was only a few feet away from him. “Whatever you do, don’t.”

My mother twisted around and pressed her face into the collar of his shirt. She beat against his chest with her fists, and he let her do that until she was all wrung out. Then he wrapped her up in his arms, and as I watched him holding her, I understood that Mr. Timms was dead, that Bill had killed him, and now the world would be a different place for all of us.

My father wanted to pass it off as a hunting accident, but Bill said no, we’d call it exactly what it was.

“I’m not going to ask Roger to carry a lie,” he said. “I may not be much, but I know what’s right and what’s not.”

“You?” my mother said. “You don’t know anything.”

“At least I’ll own up to what I’ve done.”

A hickory nut dropped from a tree and hit the top of the Olds with a bang. Then everything was quiet. Just the mourning doves somewhere in the distance and a squirrel chattering and the leaves stirring in the wind.

My father said, “And what did you do, Bill? Do you intend to tell me that you meant to kill him?”

Said Bill, “I just wanted him to shut up.”

My mother pushed away from my father and went running off into the woods, trying to get away, I imagine, from what we were all going to have to face. Bill had shot her lover and killed him, and all of this had happened while Connie was listening to the radio at her house, and soon she would have to know about it.

My mother stumbled over a fallen branch and went down on her hands and knees. She fell over onto her side and lay there in the dead leaves and the dirt, and she pulled her knees up toward her chest, as if she were going to sleep — as if she’d never get up from that spot.

“I used to know you,” my father said to Bill.

Bill nodded. Then he set his jaw and looked off into the distance for an instant. He swallowed hard. “Well, I’m not that person now.” There was a crack in his voice. “And I won’t be ever again.” He looked at my father again, and his voice got steady. “It wasn’t your fault, R.T. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. My life got taken to hell a long time ago, but I’m by God not about to ruin Roger’s.”

After that, there was nothing left to do but to pick my mother up from the ground.

“My purse,” she said.

She said it was still on the front seat of the Olds, and before my father had a chance to stop me, I went to the car and I opened the passenger side door. The purse, that woven straw box purse with the strawberries and the white blooms on it. I picked it up by its thin handle. I resisted the urge to peer out the driver’s side window to see what a man who’d been shot with a twelve-gauge might look like. I didn’t want that picture in my head. I was just a kid, but I knew enough about the future to know I didn’t need that. So I concentrated on the purse. I carried it to my mother, and then the four of us started back through the woods so we could drive into town and call the sheriff. I rode in the bed of the El Camino, so whatever got said in the cab was outside my hearing. I wasn’t concerned with it anyway. I was thinking about Connie, and how she was an orphan now, and how unfair it was for me to know that before she did.

My mother was the one who told her. While Bill was on the phone confessing to the sheriff exactly what had he’d done down that oil lease road — I’ve killed Harold Timms — my mother went next door and pounded on the frame of the screen until the radio music stopped and Connie came to see what the fuss was all about.

I watched from the window of my bedroom. My father was sitting on our porch steps. Soon Bill would come out and sit beside him, and after a while I’d hear my father say, “I should have walked out on this a long time ago. Then it wouldn’t have been yours to deal with.” Bill let a few seconds go by, and then he said in a flat, worn-out voice, “R.T., I think I’ve been looking for something like this ever since I got out of the army and came back to the world.” He’d go on in letters that came first from the county jail and then Vandalia Prison in the months to come about how he’d gotten out of Vietnam, but he hadn’t been able to let loose of the rage that filled him. If it hadn’t been Harold Timms, he wrote, it would’ve been someone else. I was just pissed off, R.T. I wanted someone to have to pay for something. I guess that’s the best I can put it.

That Sunday I watched my mother reach out her hand to Connie as if she were about to touch her face. The she said, “Honey, can I come inside?”

Connie had on cutoffs with frayed threads dangling down and a white T-shirt. She had cotton balls between her toes. She’d been painting her toenails a bright red, and it made me wonder how she imagined her life being the next day and the next one after that — if she was thinking that she was glad to be rid of me so she could have a boyfriend she wouldn’t have to sneak around to see. However she saw her life unfolding, she didn’t know that my mother was there to let her know that it was all going to be different now.

“It’s about your daddy,” my mother said, and then she stepped inside the house, and I couldn’t hear any more.

I couldn’t watch that silent house and the little shaded porch with the wooden swing bolted to the ceiling. So many nights I’d seen Connie in that swing and heard her singing to herself. All those love songs that were popular then: “Let’s Stay Together,” “Precious and Few,” “Puppy Love.” She was a girl without a mother, and I was a boy who felt abandoned, so it was easy for us to love each other. But I knew Connie wanted a boyfriend she could show off, parade around with on Friday and Saturday nights, maybe go to a movie at the Avalon Theater in Phillipsport and later drive out to the Dairy Queen to see who was sitting around on the hoods of their cars before heading to the state park or the gravel pits for that alone time in the car, that baby-oh-baby time, secretly hoping that some of the other kids would happen by, so come Monday there would be talk all over school. That was the sort of gossip she wanted to be part of — the kind that said you were part of the cool crowd — not the kind I could give her, the kind filled with shame.

Soon the sheriff’s car pulled into my driveway, and I heard Bill say, “Well, I guess this is it.”

I went to the other window of my bedroom, the one that looked out over the front yard, and I saw my father and Bill get up from where they were sitting and walk across the grass to meet the sheriff, a tall, lumbering man with a dark mustache.

“I’m going to have to take you in,” I heard the sheriff say to Bill. “I’ve got deputies headed down to that oil lease road.”

“I’m ready,” said Bill.

And like that he got into the back seat of the sheriff’s car, and then it was just my father and me and my mother and Connie, whom we would watch over until her grandparents could arrive from Indianapolis to see to her.

“Go over and sit with Connie,” my mother told me when she came back to our house that afternoon. “I want to talk to your father.”

What they said to each other when they were alone, I don’t know. I only know that later that night he packed a bag and got into his Galaxie and drove off to find a motel in Phillipsport until he could locate a more satisfactory arrangement. My mother told me all of this later.

“It’s going to just be the two of us,” she said. She put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Just you and me, Roger. Can you believe that?”

I couldn’t believe anything then, and I knew she couldn’t either. It was that sort of day, a day that felt like it should belong to someone else, the way so much of my life would seem from that point on. It would be a long, long time before I’d let myself trust anyone who said they loved me.

That night I couldn’t say I loved my mother, or Bill, or my father, who had gone without saying a word to me. I could only say that I felt sorry for them — sorry for all the trouble they’d found — and I felt sorry for Connie, who didn’t deserve to be on the other side of that trouble. It would be a while before I’d be able to say that I didn’t deserve it either.

“You’ve always been nice to me,” Connie said to me that evening when we sat on her bed, not saying much at all, waiting for her grandparents to come.

She wasn’t crying, as she’d eventually done on the night her mother died. She was sitting with her legs crossed under her on the bed, rocking back and forth, and she let me put my arm around her waist, and then she laid her head over on my shoulder, and we sat there for the longest time, not saying a word.

The Philco radio sat on the table by her bed, but we didn’t turn it on. She had a bulletin board on the wall above her desk, and from where we sat I could see it was covered with things I’d never known had meant that much to her — a wrapper from a Hershey bar I’d bought for her once when we were out and she was hungry, a book of matches that we’d used to light a candle on our blanket at my grandparents’ farm, the plastic rings from the candy pacifiers we liked. Just little things like that. Nothing that mattered at all, but they did to her, and now, given what was about to happen, they did to me too.

“They won’t let me live here anymore,” she said.

I told her Indianapolis was only three hours away. “Not far at all,” I said.

“Not too far,” she said.

The sun was going down and the light in the room was fading. Through the window I could see lights going on in the houses on down the street. I couldn’t see my own house on the other side, and I was glad for that. We sat there in the twilight, not saying a word. She let me hold her, and I smelled the strawberry shampoo in her hair and the fresh nail polish on her toes, and there was nothing really we could say because we were in a world now that wasn’t ours. It was run by people like my parents and her grandparents and Bill, who sat in jail waiting for what would come to him.

“You’ll come see me?” she finally said.

I told her I would.

“I won’t forget you.” She tilted her head and kissed my cheek. Then she settled her head back on my shoulder and I felt her eyelashes brush my neck. “And I won’t blame you for any of this. Never. Not ever.”

Then we sat there, and finally we lay down on the bed. She turned her face to the wall, and I slipped my arm around her and fit my legs up against hers. She let herself cry a little then, and I told her everything would be all right. I’m not sure I believed it, but soon she stopped crying and then she said, “I wish we were the only people in the world right now.”

“I wish that too,” I told her, and it was true. I did.

We stayed like that a good long while. Maybe we even drifted off to sleep. Then headlights swept across the wall, and we heard a car door slam shut outside and frantic steps on the porch and her grandmother’s voice calling, “Connie, oh Connie, oh my precious girl.”

“Shh,” Connie said. “Don’t move.”

And we had that instant longer — that instant alone — at the end of a story that was never meant to be ours.

She was in my arms and then she wasn’t. Her grandmother was there, and I let her go. Connie Timms.

I walked out of her house and stood on the porch. I looked across the way to my own house, where a single light was on, and I saw my mother’s shadow move across the closed drapes. I thought how strange it was that I lived in that house, how strange it was that my uncle had killed a man and my mother and father, as I would soon learn, were at the end.

Connie’s grandfather, a short man with a big chest and a blue sport coat, came up the steps.

“Who are you?” he said.

“No one,” I told him.

“Young man, I asked you who you were.”

I just shook my head, already moving down the steps. There was too much to say, and I didn’t know how to say it.

“Come back here,” he said.

But I kept moving. I still think I should have had a choice, but I was sixteen. What else could I do? I went home.