Chapter 78

Motherfuckers!”

Mrs. Collins watched her husband slam his cell phone down on the cafeteria table. Her mother was still unconscious upstairs in her hospital room, and somehow, his business had crept back into their lives. Even on Christmas Eve.

“What happened?” Mrs. Collins heard herself asking.

Mrs. Collins maintained a concerned, dutiful look on her face as she pretended to listen to her husband rant about how some “motherfuckers” destroyed the tires on his trucks and bulldozers. She vaguely heard him say that he should have broken ground on this “fucking Mission Street Woods project” a month ago, but someone was out to get him. He couldn’t afford all the delays. They were leveraged to the breaking point. The loans were coming due. She better stop spending so much God damn money.

Blah blah blah blah blah.

How many times did he start this fight? Five times a month? Ten during the audit? She could have played a tape recorder and saved herself the time. “Kathleen, who do you think pays for all this because it’s not your God damn charity work!” “But Brad, I turned Shady Pines from a tax shelter into a thriving business.” “A thriving business?! That old folks home couldn’t keep you in shoes!” When did the make-up sex stop? How can he stand the sound of his own voice all day? God, is he still talking? He is. He’s still talking.

Mrs. Collins just nodded and scratched the skin underneath her diamond necklace. That itch just wouldn’t go away. Mrs. Collins blamed the itch on being stuck in this hospital waiting for her mother to wake up. She was sweaty and sticky and could do nothing with her hair in that horrible hospital bathroom even if it were private. And she didn’t know how much longer she could pretend that she didn’t hate this man.

“Are you even listing to me?!” he barked.

“Of course, Brad. It’s awful. Go on,” she said.

As her husband continued to rant, Mrs. Collins looked over his shoulder and saw a room packed with people on gurneys. They had started moving the sick into the cafeteria like the dying soldiers in Gone with the Wind. She thought about her mother basking in comfort in the private room upstairs that could easily fit two more beds. She wondered why the poor people didn’t get off those gurneys and just kill them. That’s what she’d do. She wouldn’t stand for this bullshit for five minutes. And she supposed that’s what made her rich and poor people so hopelessly stupid.

For a moment, Mrs. Collins fantasized about the people on the gurneys standing up and marching into the cafeteria and tearing her husband’s tongue out of his mouth. God, Mrs. Collins wanted it to happen. She quietly prayed for them to get up and just kill this man already, so she could stop humoring him that the world was out to screw him even though a casual glance at the facts and his numerous bank accounts would prove the opposite was 100 percent the case.

Then, when the mob was done with him, it could go into her mother’s comfortable private room and rip her mother out of that bed with the thousand-thread-count sheets and hang her with them. Hang her for losing the memories that Mrs. Collins could never forget. The water bottle filled with vodka. The debt and the poverty. The brutal man who doused his own daughter with a hose and threw her in the backyard in December. And the mousy little mother who never did anything to stop it despite being given the opportunity dozens of times.

“If you want to be a dog, you’ll stay out there like a dog,” he’d say.

And from her mother? Nothing.

Thanks for the memories.

For eight years, Mrs. Collins watched each of her mother’s memories follow the last down the rabbit hole. For eight years, Mrs. Collins worked that nursing home to give her mother a level of care that her mother never gave her. Why? Because that’s what a Collins does. Not a Keizer. Keizers rot on gurneys in the hallway while the Collins family basks in private rooms. Keizers drink themselves to death with vodka while the Collins family gets rich selling it to them. She was a Collins now. So, for eight years, Mrs. Collins did everything for her mother, and all she asked in return is for the old woman to just die already. Just die so that she could stop remembering everything for her. Just die so that she could stop sitting next to her mother in the parlor, watching endless daytime talk shows with endless parades of victims being interviewed by every sex color or creed of talk-show host about their abuse while studio audience psychologists babbled on about how their parents must have been abused themselves. Just die so she could stop watching silly tears spilling from silly people.

If these yokels had done three months of hard time being Kathy Keizer, they would have something to cry about. Try being your father’s ashtray for a day. Try being called ugly every day. Try being called fat when you’re anorexic. Try standing wet in the freezing cold, staring at the aluminum siding of the back of your little house every night. Then, see if you can bend your mind to turn that aluminum siding into a beautiful future.

See the house, Kathy. You’re going to live in a bigger house someday.

The biggest house in town, Kathy. With a diamond necklace.

And a powerful husband. See the good husband. See the beautiful son.

You try digging your nails into your hands every night to keep from freezing to death in the backyard. You watch your father drinking in his warm kitchen. And then tell me about how that drunk bastard was abused himself. Because guess what? Some parents abused their kids who weren’t abused themselves. Even in the grand design of chickens and eggs, not everyone has an excuse. Somebody had to be first. And just once. Just one time in the last eight years, she would have given a million dollars if one of those endlessly pointless talk shows had an honest father on the couch.

“I woke up and said, ‘I’m going to burn her with cigarettes.’”

“Why? Because you were abused?” the talk-show host would ask.

“No. Because I was bored.”

Mrs. Collins would send a check to that man to thank him for his honesty and another check to his children because they might understand what Kathy Keizer’s life was really like. Everyone else, go ahead and try being Kathy Keizer for a day. And you see if by the end of it, you aren’t a puddle on the God damn floor.

“Kathleen? What the hell is wrong with you?” her husband asked.

Mrs. Collins checked the clock on the cafeteria wall. Somehow, ten minutes had passed.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I’m just feeling a little under the weather. Could you repeat that last thing?”

“I said I need to go to the Mission Street Woods to deal with this nightmare. I know it’s Christmas Eve, but we’re on a deadline.”

He braced himself as if she would rip him a new polo chute for even suggesting he leave the family on Christmas Eve. But she just smiled.

“Of course, honey,” she said. “I’ll make you the best Christmas Eve dinner when you get back from work.”

“Are you all right, Kathleen?” he asked.

“Of course I am,” she said with a measured smile.

“You sure?”

“Go to work. I’ll be waiting for you when you get back.”

With that, she gave him a kiss on the lips. He couldn’t have been more confused if she had given him a blow job without the minimum three glasses of Chardonnay on their anniversary. Mrs. Collins was many things to her husband. Understanding wasn’t one of them.

“Okay,” he said. “Call me if you need anything.”

She nodded, and he left. The minute he was out of sight, Mrs. Collins looked down and realized she had dug her fingers so deeply into her palms that they were bleeding. She hadn’t even known she was doing it. She looked into the cafeteria at all the unwashed patients on their gurneys.

They were all staring at her.

She knew that without her husband there, these people might be coming for her instead. She had studied enough history to know what happens to rich men’s wives during a revolution. Mrs. Collins knew that all these people were trying to intimidate her with their staring, but they didn’t understand.

They were aluminum siding to her.

The staring contest lasted the better part of a minute. When the last person in the cafeteria blinked and looked down, Mrs. Collins moved out of the room. Call it common sense. Call it a voice inside her head. But something told her that she had to get her son back home. She needed a glass of white wine and a long hot bath. She couldn’t wash herself off in her mother’s private hospital bathroom again. So, she went back to the room and found her mother still unconscious and her son reading to her.

“All the better to see you with, my dear,” he said.

“Brady, we have to go,” she whispered.

“I want to stay with Grandma,” he whispered back.

“Grandma is still asleep,” she said.

Brady dug his heels in.

“No. Grandma is awake. We were just talking,” he said.

“Stop lying. Get your coat.”

“I’m not lying,” he said.

Mrs. Collins looked at her mother, sleeping soundly on the bed. She had known her son to play some cruel jokes, but this was a new low.

“Brady Collins, I’m counting to three. At three, you sit in the doghouse.”

But Brady wouldn’t move.

“I swear we were talking,” he said.

“ONE,” she said.

“Grandma, wake up,” he said.

“TWO,” she hissed.

“Please, Grandma! Don’t make me go home with her!”

“THREE!”

Mrs. Collins grabbed her son and spun him around. She looked him dead in the eye.

“If you make a scene in front of these people, I will leave you in the doghouse until Christmas morning. I swear to Christ.”

Brady’s eyes went black, and he stared at her for as long as he could bear it. But eventually, he did what everyone else did with his mother. Including his dad.

He blinked first.

As soon as they left the room, Mrs. Collins began to feel apprehensive. It wasn’t the walk through the hospital, although the stares from the rabble were somewhat disconcerting. It wasn’t even the drive home, even though the accidents and fallen trees and lines at the gas station were alarming.

No. The problem was Brady.

“Mom, what’s your name?” he asked.

“Kathleen Collins.”

“No. What’s your real name? Before you met Dad.”

“Kathy Keizer. Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

Mrs. Collins might not have been the warmest mother in the world, but she knew her son. And Brady didn’t ask questions. He was exactly like his father in that respect. But right now, he couldn’t have been friendlier. It was a sick friendly, though. A calculated friendly. He was giving the Stepford smile right back to her. A silence masking itself as peace. The two of them got home and climbed the long driveway through the estate. None of the servants’ cars were there. While the cat was away, the mice did like to play. They were all alone.

“Mom, would you like a sandwich?” he asked.

“No, thank you. I just need a bath. And aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What?”

“I counted to three. You can’t fool me with this nice act. You know the rules. If you act like a dog, you’ll be treated like one. Outside.”

The air between them was silent. Mrs. Collins did not relish punishing her child. She was the opposite of her father in that way. She would never give Brady the hose. She would never let him stand in the elements all night. And she made sure he had a doghouse to keep warm in. But the rules were the rules for a reason. She needed to teach him to be better than her. She needed to give him his own aluminum siding on which to paint his own dreams. It was for his own good.

“One hour, Brady. Or do you want two?”

He was silent. Staring at her. Coiled like a snake.

“One,” he said.

“Good. Then, sit out there for an hour while Mom takes her bath.”

“Okay, Mother,” he said.

She expected some rebellion. She felt guilty when she got none. Maybe he didn’t deserve it this time. But she didn’t want her son to learn the wrong lesson and end up on a gurney in a cafeteria, did she? Of course not. So she took him out to the doghouse in the backyard while the deer watched them. She let him keep his coat.

“I love you, Brady,” she said before she went back into her warm kitchen to get her glass of cold Chardonnay.

*  *  *

Brady said nothing in return. He just sat in the doghouse and watched her like he was supposed to. His grandmother had told him this would happen. She had told him everything she wanted him to do right before she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep for his mother’s benefit. She didn’t want his mother to get distracted by something as trivial as a lucid mother.

“Brady, when you’re in the backyard, can you do your grandma a big favor?”

“Sure, Grandma.”

“The next time she throws you in that doghouse, make sure it’s the last. This family needs to heal. Okay?”

“Okay, Grandma.”

The old woman smiled her toothless grin.

“Thank you, Brady. You’re a wonderful little boy. I know it’s been hard. Old people and kids are invisible to the rest of the world. But do you want to know a secret?”

“What?”

“It makes us unbeatable at hide-and-seek.”

After Mrs. Collins went upstairs for her bubble bath, her son crept back into the house and snuck into the kitchen. He pulled the long knife out of the block with his little, freezing fingers. Then, he quietly moved up the stairs just like his grandmother told him to do.