Unable to sleep, Dick rose an hour before the sun and got on the road, and the trip, so far, has been a journey of self-loathing interspersed with jazz from KKJZ and attacks of mind-numbing anxiety. It is St. Patrick’s Day, and Dick wonders if the luck of the Irish is limited to those of green-beer-and-cabbage descent. He could use a bit of four-leaf-clover luck right now, and though not superstitious, he wears the only item in his wardrobe with green, a golf shirt with thin mint stripes that Kiley gave him for Father’s Day two years ago.
The tank is half full, but he fills up in Adelanto anyway, two hours into the four-and-a-half-hour drive. He smokes another cigarette, his third of the day, and stares at the glowing window of the minimart. He should eat something but knows he won’t be able to keep it down. A nervous stomach, his mother used to say, a nice way of saying, even as a boy, he was a coward.
Be a man! he thinks as he climbs back into his Volvo. Be a man! Be a man! be! a! man! The mantra plays each time he is asked to do some requisite act of manliness of which he should be capable but finds himself grossly incompetent: killing the rat dying a slow death in the sticky rat trap in the garage; telling Jim’s idiot baseball coach to go to hell; letting Caroline know she can’t screw the plumber in their bed, in their house, while they’re still married; facing the Pentco board and convincing them to give him another chance to figure out Freeway, his anti-allergen medicine that could help millions.
His fingers start to tingle, and he pulls to the side of the road and puts his head between his knees. He is very familiar with panic attacks, having suffered them since high school. He needs to calm his breathing before he hyperventilates. Grabbing a McDonald’s bag from one of last week’s lunches, he places it over his nose and mouth and inhales the stale smell of grease and fries, his shame overwhelming.
It takes several minutes for his breath to settle, and he pulls back onto the road.
* * *
A little before eleven, he arrives at Janelle’s, and, despite the circumstances, the sight of the sunshine-yellow Victorian brings a smile. The house is like a bright little lemon drop plopped in the middle of a drab landscape of dull clapboard boxes and desert.
The screen door slams open, and Jesse bounds out. Though he looks like Dee—fine-featured with large, expressive eyes—his raven hair, tan skin, and deep-colored cheeks are his dad’s.
“Hey, Uncle Dickie.”
Dick hugs him longer than necessary.
Dee walks from the house, and he hugs her just as hard.
“Thanks for coming,” she says, pulling away and giving a brave smile.
“Hey, Dickie!” Janelle hollers from the kitchen window, her curly blond hair catching the sun. “Come on in. I made sandwiches.”
Dick follows his sister and nephew inside.
He busses Janelle on the cheek, and before he can pull away, she catches his face between her hands and plants a sloppy kiss on his forehead. Dick’s certain she does things like that to fluster him . . . which works every time. His cheeks burn, and his eyes dart every which way to avoid looking somewhere they shouldn’t.
Janelle was the first girl Dick ever kissed, and because of that, he’s probably had more fantasies about her than any other woman on the planet, and he thinks she knows that and finds it endlessly entertaining.
She hands Dick a plate with a grilled cheese sandwich, potato chips, and a dill pickle. He carries it to the dining room and joins Jesse and Dee at the table.
“Hobby shop?” Jesse asks, his face lit up.
Dick reflects his nephew’s grin back and nods. He and Jesse have been building model airplanes since Jesse could walk.
“The new Corsair is out,” Dick says.
“Cool,” Jesse says. “But I still need to finish the biplane.”
Dick feels a pang of guilt as he thinks about the biplane they started three months ago, the thought reminding him of how long it’s been since he last visited.
“I think I’ll pass on the hobby shop,” Dee says. “I have some things to do back at the house.”
* * *
A few hours later, Dick drives with Jesse and their hobby shop purchases into the neighborhood of his childhood home, two parallel streets with a dozen small, tidy houses built in the thirties for the workers of the borax mines.
In Otis’s driveway is a shiny black sedan, and Dick’s eyes ricochet from its glossy paint to his sister’s blue Subaru two driveways away as panic floods his veins. How could he have been so stupid as to let her come back here alone? He slams on the accelerator, whips into the driveway, and races into the house.
Dee looks up from the sofa, where she is curled with feet tucked beneath her, a bag of chips in her lap, and the TV blinking in front of her.
“Uncle Dickie?” Jesse says, walking in behind him, a question in his voice.
“I need to use the restroom,” Dick says quickly to cover up his “freak-out,” as Dee would call it, and hurries down the hall.
Sitting on the toilet, he shakes his head, feeling like an idiot. He is not equipped for this. Already, he messed up. Otis is two doors away, and he let Dee come here alone. And now, the three of them are here, which is quite frankly no less unsettling.
Through the door, Dee laughs at something on the television, and he is struck by a jolt of déjà vu. His mom used to laugh like that. She’d sit in that exact spot, her feet tucked beneath her like Dee’s are now, and laugh. He shakes the feeling away. The house holds ghosts, and each time he returns, he needs to fight past the dizzying vertigo that inevitably knocks him off balance.
Blowing out a breath, he pushes to his feet and returns to the living room.
“How’d it go?” Dee asks, sitting up and stretching her arms over her head.
“Great!” Jesse says, appearing from the kitchen with a half-peeled banana. Then he launches into a long explanation about the parts they bought and how he’s going to paint the biplane.
Dee listens patiently, and Dick marvels as he always does at what an amazing mom she is, especially considering she never had anyone to teach her.
Finished with his explanation, Jesse bounds out the sliding glass door to the patio, and Dee’s eyes follow with concern.
Standing, she says, “I need to get ready for work. Don’t let him stay up. He has school tomorrow, so he needs to be in bed by nine.”
* * *
From the open sliding glass door, Dee says, “I’m going to take your car so I don’t have to move it.”
Dick nods from the patio table where he and Jesse are working on their planes. She hurries away in her waitress uniform, still as pretty as she was in high school. Dick had hoped after Jesse’s dad left that she might find someone, but it’s been eleven years, and it’s always just been her and Jesse.
He returns to the Corsair as Jesse paints Swiss crosses on the wings of his biplane. Being with Jesse is not like being with most kids. Since he was a toddler, he’s been content with silence, which is good for Dick since he’s never certain what to say. Dick’s own kids are like most kids; they like noise—the television, music, games, bickering, exclaiming, complaining. Sitting still for hours, working on model airplanes from bygone eras, Kiley and Jim would lose interest before the parts were out of the bag. Dick has always been curious about genetics. He and Dee come from the same parents but are so different. Yet Jesse, her son, shares something with him undeniable and unique.
The left wing of his plane is slightly off-kilter, and Dick is debating whether to disassemble it or force it straight when the back gate opens. He looks up to see Otis walking through, and his blood goes cold.
“Dickie?” Otis says, his voice pitching in surprise. He stops a couple steps inside the gate. “I thought you left.”
Past Dick’s panic, a single synapse connects. Dee took Dick’s car, so Otis thought it was Dee who was home. Alone. With Jesse.
Dick’s eyes move from Otis’s face to the right pocket of Otis’s navy-blue windbreaker, his hand fisted around something long enough to cause the hand to partially stick out. Dick’s fingers tighten around the fuselage of the plane in his hand as he stands.
Straightening to his full height, he manages a tense, “Nope. Still here.”
Otis tilts his head as if sizing Dick up, and Dick feels as if he’s making the decision right then as to what he is going to do.
Forcing his eyes to remain steady on Otis’s and to not roam back to the windbreaker, which the night is far too warm for, he says, “You need to leave.”
“You heard him,” Jesse snarls, and Dick realizes his nephew has stood as well.
Otis’s eyes move from Dick to Jesse, and Dick watches as a sick smile crosses his face.
A flood of adrenaline surges through him, and he repeats, “Leave.”
The smile twitches, and Otis gives a half-salute as he says, “Have a nice night, boys,” then pivots and leaves the way he came.
Dick nearly shoves Jesse inside, yanks the sliding glass door closed, and latches it, heart pounding.
“Uncle Dickie?” Jesse says, voice wavering, his mettle of the moment before evaporated.
“It’s okay,” Dick says, forcing his face into what he hopes is some semblance of reassurance before turning to face him. “He’s gone.”
“But what about tomorrow?” Jesse asks, knowing, as Dick does, the half-salute held the silent promise of “see you around.”
Dick works to keep his face blank. “Tomorrow, I will figure something out. I’m not leaving until I know you and your mom are safe.”
It’s a lie, a guarantee he can’t possibly make. Only minutes ago, Otis waltzed into their yard, and Dick was entirely unprepared.
But Jesse is an eleven-year-old boy, and desperately he wants to believe. Santa doesn’t exist, but the world is still good. Bad things happen, but not to him. His uncle is here, so it’s going to be okay.
“I’m going to bed,” Jesse says and shuffles toward his room.
Dick looks at the clock on the mantel, realizes it’s nearly ten, an hour past when Dee told him Jesse needed to be in bed, and he hates himself a little more.
When Jesse’s bedroom door clicks closed, he pulls out his phone to call Sheriff Barton. He stares at it, his hand clenched around the device so tight his knuckles are white. Nothing Otis did was against the law. He walked into their yard. Dick asked him to leave. And he did.
He shoves the phone back in his pocket, then walks to each window and door in the house to check that they are latched. Each is secure. Each could easily be broken into.
In Dee’s room, the room that used to be his parents, he looks over the bureau, but his dad’s rifle is gone. Continuing into the garage, he rummages through the amassment of stuff until finally he unearths what he is looking for: Lucille—forty-two inches of hardwood cut from the heart of a hickory that fell at the hatchery where his dad worked most of his life. The bat was a gift for his tenth birthday, and her name was carved into the barrel by Dick that same day, named for his mom’s love of I Love Lucy. It’s still too heavy for baseball.
Carrying it into the house, he lies on the sofa, and with its comforting spirits beside him, he waits.