My mother had a prescribed method for doing almost anything. There was a right way to research a science project and a right way to make a bed. She schooled us in the order of operations to best compose a photograph, and she showed us the proper technique to prune a rosebush. She was less dedicated to securing our undying loyalty to her way of doing things than she was interested in our mastery of her techniques—for just at least one go-around. She taught us her model of everything.
Just once, do it her way, and she’d rarely mention it again.
Except for the problem of mull, which included its cousins: sulk and fret. If we had got into trouble or fell broody over anything—be it unrequited love, or how much we wanted a car, or how worried we were over an upcoming exam, or how annoyed a brother might be at a sister (or vice versa)—there was always only one way to handle it. Even when we were little, the process was ever the same, except it would be with her alongside, hand in hand, for the routine.
“To the dock with you,” she’d say, rain or shine.
Our neighborhood bordered a small, muddy-banked lake that was too cold for swimming and too tight for growing fish big enough for people to eat. The dock was more for show than anything else, a long, silvery arm into the water that made a nice focal point against the backdrop of fall foliage or winter freezes. In spring and summer it was a pleasant halfway point for a stroll. Sometimes herons decorated the end posts, motionless until a bird-size dinner swam by.
The command would actually be “To the dock with you. ‘Feliz Navidad.’ ”
“Mama, it’s August.”
“Sing it anyway.”
The remedy consisted of a walk to the dock, thinking only of the problem at hand. We had been trained to take this walk in a strict meditation on whatever troubled us. No woolgathering allowed. Eyes on the path, mind on the worry. Nothing else, all the way to the end of the dock. Then the song, which was almost always something ridiculous and never had anything, by design, to do with the problem. It was to be sung to the lake. I tended to only hum the songs, as if I were somehow getting one over on my mother if I didn’t belt it out with jazz hands. I never skipped the step, though. I lived in superstition of ruining the spell. I didn’t step on cracks or walk under ladders either, even though my mother-stoked store of You know better told me it was all nonsense.
The cure wrapped up with a riddle for the walk home. My mother wrote down riddles on strips of paper and rolled them into an old film canister. The little plastic cylinder snugged in just right at the joint of the dock’s skirting and last pylon. I always stirred the hole first with a length of reed grass to rout out the daddy longlegs that liked to hunker down next to our stash of brain teasers.
At journey’s end, back in the kitchen or tucked up in the den or on the cool concrete of the front step with the firefly channel winking into the gloom, we talked out the riddle first, then the problem with its resolution or its next step, or sometimes its uncanny dissolution under scrutiny.
Psychology courses in college had made for easy dissection of my mother’s dock exercise, but even knowing why it worked couldn’t wring the mystery from her greatest construct. When you did it as she had taught us to do it, it felt like voodoo.
I left Christine Ames and drove back home. Not to my house, but home to where I’d learned to unpack a problem properly.
• • •
The house was painted a creamy off-white now. It had been a light gray-blue when we’d lived there. The current owners had added heavy-hinged, stained-wood shutters to the façade. It looked good, and I was somehow glad to see how much it didn’t look like my house anymore, or her house either. She was, we were, free of it all. Being there now was devotion, not obligation.
I parked in the empty cul-de-sac and went for the anti-loiter, purposeful-looking stride, straight for the lake. At ten in the misty morning wearing a business suit, it was already a strange thing to do, to be walking the squelchy trail in Dry Clean Only. It wouldn’t do to look unsure of myself. I assigned myself the song—“Bus Stop,” by the Hollies.
In the meantime, though, there was the walk and the think.
I chewed the details of the past few weeks, mindful of finding bones. Hopeful of it even. There weren’t any, so my conclusions remained mushy. But either way, at the end of the dock, it was time to let it go. I felt as absurd as I ever had, with my antique pop song and my stage of weathered wood and the audience of trees and tiny fish. I hummed.
I pulled up a thin reed and stirred away a crumpled leaf from the hidey-hole only out of respect for the entirety of the ritual. We’d taken away the trove of riddles when Simon went off to school. Surprise flashed up my arm when the reed bent straightaway against something solid. My hands shook as I jimmied out the little black cylinder, an old 35 mm film canister. Inside, a strip of curled, crispy paper:
What belongs to you but others use it more than you do?
It wasn’t my mother’s handwriting. On the other side of the paper was a smiley face and Hi, Sissy.
“Damnit, Simon.” I’d had to use the voice command to dial him because the shaking in my hands made the numbers on the keypad too small by half.
“Hey! Double damnit to you, Dee.” Simon laughed.
“The answer is your name.”
“The answer is Simon Vess?”
“No.”
“The answer is Simon Garrett Vess? I thought the answer was always forty-two.”
“No! It’s what belongs to you that others use more than you do.”
The line went quiet to the point I suspected I’d lost the signal. I was just pulling the phone away to look to see that we were still connected when I heard him again.
“You’re at the dock?”
“Yeah, real funny, you little asshole. You scared me to death with that. I thought I was going crazy.”
“Dee, why are you out there? You acted fine the other night, but you’re really upset about that woman, aren’t you? I didn’t mean to make it worse.”
“I’m okay.”
“Oh, yeah? Sounds like it.”
“Bite me.”
“Okay. So anyway, once upon a time, a brother and a sister had some lunch if she wasn’t sick of him. . . . Come on. Last time sucked. Let’s do it better. You’ve got to eat, right? My treat, to make up for the riddle. And for the other night.”
I sighed. “You’re not working?”
“Nope. Got the day off.”
“Me, too.”
“So, half hour? Be there or be square?”
“I guess.”
• • •
A vodka cranberry sat waiting for me on the bar in front of my seat. Simon was into rum and Coke these days and this day, too.
“I see lunch is poured,” I said.
“It sounds like it’s been that kind of day again.”
“As you well know, it’s been that kind of week. That kind of month, really.”
“You look spiffy for a day off.” Simon flicked the cuff of my jacket’s sleeve.
“Thank you. I had an appointment.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not at the moment.”
“I’m sorry about the riddle. I didn’t think it would freak you out so bad.”
“How would finding a riddle there, just like my dead mother used to do, not freak me out?”
“I put it there ages ago. I just wanted to know if you ever went out there.”
“Do you go out there?” I asked.
“I have. Obviously.”
“Well, were you disappointed I hadn’t thought to leave you any riddles?”
He laughed. “Kinda.”
I didn’t laugh. “Do you have any idea how dismal it is to have everybody wishing I was her?”
“Now, that’s not what I meant. Come on, Dee. That’s not fair.”
“Oh, it’s not just you. You’re in some fine company. My husband wishes I was her. And Br—”—I pulled a hand-brake turn on my tongue. I didn’t want to talk about Brian with Simon. Not yet, anyway—“that brainwashing bastard Paul Rowland.”
Simon startled at my babbling. “Why do you think Paul wants you to be like Mom?”
“Oh, he’s always making the comparison. You know how he is. She said he’d probably try to get me to come work with him at some point. With them, whoever they are. Does he try to get to you, too?”
“No. Has he been around recently?”
“No,” I glowered into my drink. “Not since the money thing. I’m just pissed off in general. Don’t worry about it. I didn’t mean to bring him up. Sorry. No use the both of us being in a bad mood.”
Our chatter drifted, but Simon kept steering back to Christine Ames and to what he presumed was bothering me. I bumpered the truth and told him stories of Patrick’s and my recent squabbles, including an edited version of Angela’s wrath. Simon was dutifully, brotherly indignant on my behalf.
“So, what was with the car, then? The plate I ran. Carlisle Inc.?”
“It’s nothing.” Shit. I’d said it too quickly. I could practically watch the antennae extend from Simon. The idea of seeing Carlisle Inc. for myself had been throbbing in my mind, ramping up its boom all morning. It was the gift of the dock walk, the answer it gave. I knew where to go next.
“Dee?”
“Simon.”
“Does she have some connection to Carlisle?”
“Who?”
“Who? Seriously? The fucking tooth fairy. Or maybe this Angela or Christine? Are you being dense on purpose?”
“No. It’s nothing,” I said.
“I don’t like this. You always talk to me. We talk. That’s what we do. Now there’s this wall that I can only knock holes in by sneaking around behind your back. What is going on?”
“Nothing. You promised you’d leave it alone and you’ve already played Twister all over that one.”
“And you promised you’d bring me in if you needed help.”
“I have not broken that promise.”
“Dee.”
“I haven’t.”
He got up from his barstool. “I’m gonna hit the head. But we’re going to have this out when I get back.” He winked at the bartender and said, “Don’t let her leave,” and headed to the back of the restaurant.
I had minutes, at best. And I knew what I wanted now. The want bordered on a need. Before I made a fool of myself and took this any further with Simon, I had one more errand to run. I wasn’t going in half cocked on this. Whatever shred of pride I had left, whatever could loosely have been dubbed capable in me was already hanging by a thread.
The first part of the last part of my quest involved neutralizing my brother so that I could take the leap I needed in peace. Then I would know what was going on and what to do with it and when to involve SuperSimon.
I pulled a $50 bill from my wallet and waved the bartender over. I slid the bill across the wood.
“I need a favor.”
She took a step back, hands raised. “Oh, boy.”
“No, it’s nothing bad. Nothing you’ll regret. I promise.”
She had a skeptic’s eyebrow. Or maybe just an experienced bartender’s.
“No really. See that bottle of Grey Goose? It’s almost empty. I’d like you to fill it halfway, right now—and very quickly—with plain tap water. When that guy comes back, we’re going to start drinking for real. He’s on rum and Cokes, but I want you to make all of my drinks from that bottle of mostly water.”
I got only a hard squint in answer and took a chance. She was wearing both a crucifix and a medal of St. Amandus, the patron saint of bartenders. A showy Catholic with at least some sense of humor, hopefully from a big, devout, pain-in-the-ass family.
“He’s my brother and I need to get something done today without his brotherly interference. You got brothers?”
She sneered but not without affection. “Yeah. Three.”
“Okay, so you know what I’m talking about. You don’t even have to worry. I’ll get him home in a taxi, safe and sound. I love him, but he’s a pain. And right now I need him to go home and go to sleep.”
“Okay.” She shrugged. “It’s your fifty.”
“What’s your name?”
“Yolanda.”
“Yolanda, you’re my hero.”
Simon returned with his serious face on.
“You’ve got the whole day off ?” I said before he could start in on me.
“Yep.”
“Then I want to get shit-faced. I’ll tell you all my sorrows if you’ll drown them with me. I’ve been trying to do the stiff-upper-lip thing. But I feel like hell.”
So we drank, and I played it. I could feel the bartender watching my performance and hoped that Simon didn’t notice her attention. I cried a little. I waited until the fourth drink so he’d believe it, confessing that I thought Patrick was going to serve papers on me soon. I made much of my humiliation over Simon’s discovery until he swore and slurred that he was sorry and that I wasn’t a wimp, that I was “the srongesss woman since Ma.” Which was, of course, ridiculous even by drunk measure.
By his foggy seventh drink he was the one shushing me down from singing at the bar. The concerned glower from Yolanda, our drink-pouring new best friend, was as good as an Oscar award to me. I’d almost convinced her that I was drunk on watered-down cranberry juice, and she had been in on the whole thing from the beginning. I bit down on the corner of the sober smile that tried to curl my lip out of character.
We had one for the road (of course we did), and I primly righted myself and, giggling, asked Yolanda to call us a taxi.
“You okay for the ride?” I said to Simon. “You’re not gonna puke in my lap, are ya?”
I heard the driver’s neck bones pop as he craned his head back to take stock of us. Pitiful midday lushes, his sad eyes summed it up.
“Nah. I got iss,” said Simon.
We rolled along, the both of us swaying and overcorrecting through the turns. It was like a dance. Simon led, I followed.
“I’ll kick his ass. I really will.” Simon’s liver was extremely unhappy with my husband.
“What are you gonna do, bury him in parking tickets?”
“Parking tickets? Pffffft. Oh, no—s’not cop trouble I’m talkin’ about.” Simon’s head rocked in a loose nod that was trying for wise, but only looked likely to send him to the chiropractor after his hangover let him get out of bed. “He’ll be begging for cop trouble if I ever set my real sights on him. You don’ know, Sissy, how good I’ve been. I do what I’m supposed to, but oooohh, man. Oh, man. If I could do what I can do . . .”
“Okay, baby badass. I mean baby brother.”
His beautiful sincerity shrugged out of the sopping booze blanket for just long enough to make the simple point he’d wanted to convey all afternoon. Or even before that, ages ago, way back when he left the riddle for me at the dock, and even when he’d pried into my business by following Patrick. “I don’t want him to hurt you. I want you to be happy. You should be happy. Ma wanted you to be happy.”
“I know, Simon. And I promise you, again, I know where to go for help. I know you’re there for me. I always have.” I patted his hand and the haze refilled his eyes.
I watched him spill out of the taxi and stagger up the steps to his plain, low rancher.
“Where to now, miss?” said the driver, watching me carefully for tears or nausea.
I blew out a deep breath, shook off the stage show I’d been playing, and found the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. His confusion set in before I’d even spoken.
“Hello.” I smiled. “Sorry about all that. Everything’s fine. I need to get something from my house first, and then take me back to my car at the pub, if you don’t mind.”