They sent my mother down to White Pine, one hundred and fifty some-odd miles southwest of Seattle. September seventeenth she traveled. She accepted all of it without contest. Despite my father’s best efforts, she insisted on a public defender, who took a plea bargain.
Twenty-five years to life.
“I did what I did,” she told the judge. “I am no more insane now than I was that day.”
Meanwhile I did nothing at all.
I still hadn’t spoken to her. I waited and I watched the news. Local. National.
Piece by piece, my father sold his workshop. Then he put our house up for sale, got into his Wagoneer and drove.
“Joey,” he said when he called to tell me, his voice full of tin, “I rented a little place. Not far from the beach. I wish you’d come up. It’s where I live now. Where we both do. Me and your mother.”
I was looking at Tess’s chair.
“Joey?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” I told him. “I’m here.”
“Come up?”
“I will, Dad. I’m on my way,” I said. “I’m nearly there.”
“Winter’s coming.” He was half-drunk.
“It’s only just fall.”
“I can feel it in the mornings,” he said.
I left Tess in front of the motel. She was alone in the parking lot watching me go. A bright day. Cool. We’d made promises, but the farther along that highway I drove, the more certain I was that I’d never see her again. She must have been relieved to be rid of me. It was too much. All that weight. All the joy gone. I’d stolen it. Me and my family.
If I were Tess? I’d have been thrilled to watch Joey March drive away. Thank God. Good fucking riddance to you and your crazy, murderous family and your fucking bird. Your bird. Who cares? Stand up and live. Enough with your whining and your moping and all your boring sadness and your exquisite sensitivity and your lunatic mother and your selfish sister and your pathetic father all alone in his prison-town dump. Good riddance, asshole. I’d have been dancing on the bar.
No matter what she saw in me, or what she said, how could she not have thought, Good riddance?