He moved like a cat, not big, not small, but muscular. In school he had been athletic, liked to use his body, loved playing soccer, but because he had never been disciplined about it, eventually the coaches refused to use him, even though he was good. Trouble was, he was not cooperative. appeared to listen, then did as he pleased. Not a team player.
After his parents divorced, he, his sister and his mother went to live with her parents. Girls, after all, were not supposed to do anything except raise the children, even though in his mother’s family the girls ran the show everywhere, except, supposedly, in business. However, things worked out strangely for his mother. She ended up with a share in her parents’ thriving business when death came to call, first on his grandfather, then on his grieving, in denial grandmother six months later.
Not that any of it made any difference to him, lost as he was in his own world, the grating sounds of his grandmother’s angry, disparaging words often ringing shrilly in his ears whenever he tried to do anything.
“He’s a loser, you’ve born a real loser there. That’s what you get for marrying a loser. Thanks be to the good Lord you divorced him before he could get his hands on our money. But that child will be the death of you if you don’t reign him in. If it were up to me, I’d have him committed. He’s just a no-good wild child. If he weren’t so…pretty, well, it would be easier. My son and his uncles are going to have to rectify the situation. Thank heaven we don’t have to worry about Pilar.”
But, after his grandmother’s four unmarried brothers were all killed in a freak car crash at a 5-way intersection on their way home from work late one Saturday night, there was nothing left but for the old woman and her husband to leave everything to their two children, Noreen and Grant. His grandmother died an angry woman riddled with arthritis, always having felt under appreciated in a house full of men, her daughter and granddaughter notwithstanding.
Before the tragedy, the partial inheritance Sonia Hamilton Carpenter received from her own parents along with her four brothers was the only satisfaction she ever seemed to experience from her upbringing. But she was able to lord it over her dour, inexpressive husband who pretty much lived in his own landscaping company office, finding little peace at home.
The thing was, Sonia, as she was called, had no real idea what her husband was worth until he died of a massive heart attack not long after her brothers were killed, before he could specifically leave everything to their son, Grant, with the proviso that he would take care of his mother, sister and grandchildren. However, inexplicably, Sonia did nothing with her new wealth, depressed and unable to come to terms with the fact that all of her four brothers had died at once, and now her husband. So, when she died, everything automatically went to her children, Noreen and Grant. Noreen left the running of everything up to Grant, although she kept herself informed. She knew exactly what they were worth, something her brother had no problem with, an easy-going man, much like their father. And, since she was living there anyway, Noreen took over the house their parents left. Grant, a bachelor, bought a small house of his own in Kensington near their warehouse and other holdings while Noreen saw her children through their teens and early twenties, maintaining a quiet social life of her own.
Eventually Noreen’s daughter, Pilar, married and moved to Olney, away from the family, while Grant hired her son to help out in the landscaping business his father had started which he came to prefer himself. This was the only work the young man was willing to help out with, probably because by then they knew he was bipolar, or manic depressive as they called it earlier, something that set in motion a whole string of accommodations, which sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t.
Then, just when things seemed to have settled down, Grant announced his engagement to Rhonda Sullivan, his office manager and for a while this
stirred up a hornets nest.
“He’s too old to have children,” Noreen’s daughter, Pilar, said, when she heard the news from her mother.
“Men are never too old to have children,” Noreen said disparagingly.
“Well, how old is she?” Pilar asked.
“Young enough to have children,” Noreen said sourly, then sighed.
“Well, what about us?” Pilar whined.
“What about us? You’ve got your own family and a husband who supports you. You chose your life. You could have gone to work for us and he wouldn’t have given her so much say in things. But no, you had to “get away” as I recall you saying.
“Mother! I did not want you running my life the way Gramma ran yours. She drove Daddy away, you know that. She never believed he was…good enough.”
“Good enough? Good enough for what? He was good enough for me…until he started drinking.”
“Yes, well, who could blame him.”
“Nobody made him marry me, nobody forced him to…”
“Oh, yes, you loved him, right? That’s what you used to say. Nobody knew he was an illegal alien or even how old he was…”
“Enough. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s all history, ancient history, water under the dam—or is it over the dam? I’ve never known,” she said, laughing, but then continuing before her daughter could take the floor. “Fact is, after we married and came back here to live, everyone treated him like dirt. He always had a job, they saw to that, but after your brother was born, well, I guess he just couldn’t take it anymore…he wasn’t always abusive, you know…it’s just that your brother was strange almost from the beginning and he couldn’t understand that, but he was just a child and it wasn’t his fault. Your father was from a culture…”
“Where a man is a man, even a man child was sposed to be a man,” Pilar sneered.
“He was always good to you, but poor Andrew…”
“Poor Andrew my eye, he’s just weird and you know it and everyone jerked him around, you, Gramma, Grampa…even me. Only Uncle Grant tried to help him, but what’s the use of going over all that now. As you say, water under the dam,” she said pointedly, with a grin.
“He’s doing just fine. He even went to college for a while...”
“Yeah, and you probably did all his homework while he tried to convince them he was an athlete. Poor guy, didn’t have a clue, and now your brother is acting like he’s going to start a new life.”
“Never mind my brother. I will handle him, and one day you’ll find out how much your own children like you when they grow up. Mark my words.”
• • •
Andrew was always a nice-looking boy, a beautiful baby, with black, curly hair and an infectious smile. He grew into a sturdily build young man but the infectious smile was gone, his expression generally sour or blank, the smile occasionally appearing but it had lost its spontaneity.
As a boy in school his dark good looks, taken from his Mexican father, were often a source of teasing and ridicule, although he was rarely attacked physically because he was strong. All he could do in the face of their teasing was spit at his tormentors, so they learned to keep their distance.
Because he was good looking in a dark, brown-eyed mysterious sort of way, girls had a tendency to flirt with him, but he showed no interest. Not because he wasn’t interested, but because he had no idea how to respond. His sister, Pilar, hardly spoke to him, caught up in her own world of dolls and “best friends” who changed from grade to grade.
Meals were closely monitored by his mother and grandmother, homework was carefully overseen by his taciturn grandfather and when they finally died within six months of each other, he felt nothing but a kind of relief. He enjoyed playing soccer but nothing else seemed to find its way into a passion until his uncle gave him his original red 1970 Mustang which he tinkered with for hours but rarely drove anywhere unless he was testing it for something.
He did like to eat but could go for long periods of time without food if he was preoccupied with the Mustang or working on a piece of wood he liked or even working outdoors for his uncle. The work kept him in good condition as he aged, along with the walking and biking machines he bought eventually for the basement of the house his mother eventually bought for him.
And he never forgot the dog house…Gretchen’s dog house, his first real experience with dark places. And the basement of his grand parents’ house was another comfort zone until his mother bought him the small, compact Sears Roebuck house with a garage in an older, quiet neighborhood in Silver Spring. She also gave him a second-hand green Dodge two-door she found for sale in the want ads of a local paper.
Money was of no concern. His grandparents had left some money in trust for him which his mother and uncle doled out, always giving him more then enough for his wants and his uncle paid him extra when he worked in the landscaping part of the family business during the spring, summer and fall.
It was only when the darkness fell over him that sometimes he was given pause. And, when it escalated over the years, he went out into the night to find dark houses to enter with no particular object in mind beyond the thrill of entering dark, unknown places undetected.