“WHAT DID YOU do with the paper?” Steve asked. That night over beers I’d filled him in on what I’d learned. He got more and more excited as I talked.
“Threw it out. Along with years of bills. I only kept her poems.” I paused, wondering what I’d done with them. Poetry wasn’t my thing, and hers didn’t make much sense. Lots of dreams and death. But it was the closest thing I’d had to talking with her.
I dragged myself away from the sad memory. “Does the name Wes ring a bell? Did your mother mention that name?”
Steve shrugged. “Sounds close to West. Sometimes she was hard to understand. She talked in whispers and ran out of breath easily. By the time she told me about my real father, she was near the end. When I asked her point-blank my father’s last name, she just drifted off to sleep.” He reached for another beer. Added the empty to the lineup. “It upset her, I think. And I wanted to make our last time together happy. Well, not happy but peaceful. I hid my own feelings the best I could. I just sat with her. Let her talk or not.”
How different from my last few weeks with my own mother! After months of daydreaming on the sofa and sitting in the dark at night smoking, she was suddenly busy all the time. Shopping, gardening and working on her paintings in the back shed. She wouldn’t let me see them. I’ve got a commission, was all she’d said. I thought she’d turned a corner.
After she died I found the paintings. Nothing but slashes of color—black, blood red, midnight blue, orange. The colors of a scream.
I grabbed some potatoes and began to scrub. Steve drank. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now,” he said finally. “We have a name and a connection. Your uncle. We can talk to him tomorrow.”
“No, we can’t.”
“Oh, he doesn’t live around here anymore?”
“He does. But…we’ve lost touch.” I chopped the potato fiercely. “The O’Tooles don’t talk to me.”
“What happened?”
“I happened.”
Steve stared at me awhile, like the beer was slowing down his brain. “Jesus H. Because your mother was unmarried? She was just a kid! And who does that these days?”
“The O’Tooles do. Back in the eighties in Lake Madrid, that was a mortal sin.” I felt my face grow hot with the anger I’d held back. “They didn’t care about God—they were mad at my mother for the shame. She was sixteen years old, in eleventh grade. And she wouldn’t give me away. Wouldn’t go stay with the nuns. She stayed right here in town and rubbed their noses in it.”
“I get that they were mad. And ashamed. Small-town gossip can be nasty. But if we went to see them, I bet they’d be happy to see their own flesh and blood. All you have to do is break the ice.”
“Don’t hold your breath. You don’t know them.”
“Jesus H., Rick! Grow a pair! These people owe you!”
Rage flashed through me. I fought it back, hating the white-hot burn. “Don’t you dare charge into my life and tell me how to live it! I’ve been doing just fine without you and any of the rest of the goddamn O’Tooles!”
“And I didn’t come all this way just to have an old family grudge block me off.”
“It’s more than a family grudge! It’s my… my…” I had no word for it.
We squared off across the table littered with beer bottles. Both of us breathing hard. “Do you want me gone?” Steve said finally.
“Maybe that’s for the best.”
“But do you want me gone?”
I hesitated. Confusion tangled my words. “I want my life back, before all of this. Before the dead guy and my uncle and all the memories.”
“But do you want me gone?”
I couldn’t answer him. I didn’t know. I shoved the pot away and headed for the door. “The goat needs milking. You…you do whatever the hell you want.”
A few minutes later, while I was out behind the barn, I heard the front door slam and his truck start up. I came around the barn just in time to see the plume of dust as he blasted out the gate.