3
TIM CONDUCTED TWO male cousins, hands in pockets, across the lawn and toward the house. Grass blades, stiff icicles, snapped underfoot. My other two cousins, Blaine and Andy Pearson, weathered the cold to take in a movie and then go off for drinks. Boiling Waters’ only hot spot was a bar fixed like a lantern on the town limits. Tim served the Blue Water Cafe as bartender one summer, home from a California college. He could not take the long trek home without haunting the local dive. “I’ll catch up with you later,” he promised as the guys split off.
The firmament darkened as the cold front took hold, leaving a dusting of stars exposed through a small window of sky. The front dragged a tail of arctic weather into the county. The black sky was dense as though the air holes to earth were shut off.
I wanted the house to myself, but to Tim I said only, “I’m so tired.” My forearm ached from the pangs.
“I’ll make you some coffee,” he said, carrying his gun aimed at the ground. “Heard from Braden?”
I shivered and avoided his question. Porter’s paw prints dappled the muddy ground. By morning the predicted hard freeze would turn the ruts into frozen cavities.
Since the aunts all offered their good-byes once the soup bowls were washed and put away, the house was stilly silent, as if nothing but moths lived inside. Lilly left for Raleigh. Renni and Tootie retreated into the hamlet two towns away called Siphon. Fanny drove Delia back to the trailer to feed her animals.
The back porch light illuminated the walk the rest of the way. I pulled open the screen door. A coarse wind blew sleet into my eyes. I squinted and the wind took the screen door out of my hand until Tim grabbed it and helped me inside.
“Finally. Quiet,” he said. He carried my father’s rifle to the gun cabinet behind the dining table and locked it inside. He put the key atop the cabinet, as was my father’s habit.
The kitchen remained as my mother had left it. A framed photo of Delia and me was wedged between a loaf of bread and a nearly empty cereal box on top of the refrigerator. Mother had cleaned off the top of the appliance one day, wiping away the dark kitchen residue that forms in places above eye level. The photo snapped by Aunt Renni was the last one taken of Delia and me together. Ever. We posed on the diving end of the small square dock’s north shore. Delia’s two front teeth had not grown in. My hair was pulled into double braids. We wore identical pink bikinis. Delia had taken a growing spurt and outgrown me by a good inch. Her shoulders stooped forward, her two small hands covering her stomach. Her eyes were cast toward the water.
She had learned to swim and took to it so well I called her the Mermaid of Sylers Pond. She won first place in a swim race at the city pool. I was both jealous and astounded when her hand slapped the pool ledge and the whistle blew. She was a natural at water sports but couldn’t stick out the class to finish Red Cross training the summer I became a lifeguard.
To look at us in that photograph, we were a genial pair of sisters, swapping pokes in the arm.
Tim saw me looking at the photo. He had known me long enough to know the pain between Delia and me.
“Sorry you didn’t bag your deer,” I said.
“That Blaine. He’s an awful shot. Shouldn’t have taken him. Never could hit a moving target. He’s nothing but a big dumb nut.” Tim laughed as he always did when he did not know what to say. I had known him to laugh when his baseball team lost a game. It was a nervous laugh.
“You see that white deer again?” I asked.
“I’m not lying. I got up early to go walking in your daddy’s field. The rest of the house wasn’t up. Right smack in the clearing, he came down for a drink at the lake. Pale brown spots on his rump. You know, like a photo negative. Stop looking at me like that.”
I debated whether or not to tell him I had seen his deer. Truth be told, I was not certain what I had seen.
He jabbed me under the arm.
“Stop, I’m not in the mood,” I said.
“I see something in your eyes. Want to tell me what it is?”
I ran my finger over one lid. “Is it a smudge?”
“I mean inside you.” Tim was still standing against the door. “You got this funny look. I can’t get anything out of Fanny. You women are all bullheaded, like you got this club and no guy can come in.”
I fished a can of coffee from out of the dish cabinet.
“Where’s Fanny?” he asked.
“She wanted to see Delia’s place.”
“Too depressing to stay around here,” he said, pulling out a chair for me and then one for him.
“I think that’s why. That and she didn’t believe Delia kept chickens in her kitchen.” I dug out the can opener. The coffee hissed open.
“You and Delia still go at it?” The funny tilt of his head was his way of telegraphing that he was not all about goading me this time.
“Delia? No. At least, I don’t take the bait. I let her win is what I mean.” I wanted to let Delia win would have been more truthful, but the emotional issues took too long to explain. This week was the first time I had seen her in over a year. If I admitted that, he’d call me inhuman for staying away so long.
“She’s not so nuts like everybody says,” said Tim. I spilled the coffee grounds but kept talking as if I hadn’t. “I don’t mind her.” Tim was always one year ahead of me in school, thus two years older than Delia. The distance helped his perspective.
I kept sifting grounds into the coffee filter. “I’m glad you see good in Delia.” I wasn’t lying. Delia got to me only when she scared people around her, usually a stranger who did not understand her ways.
He took the filled filter, hefting it one-handedly. “I said I’d make the coffee.” He gave me one of his annoying redneck hip bumps, nudging me away from the counter.
“Don’t treat me like an invalid,” I said. I didn’t like him coddling me. Delia took to Tim’s indulgences better than I did.
His belt buckle flashed, silver chrome shaped into the face of a race car driver. He dressed in boot-cut Levis, faded and straight as a razor. He’d thrown on a rumpled plaid shirt, unbuttoned and, under that, a screen-printed T-shirt. Across his toned chest, a largemouth bass fishtailed into the air.
I pulled two cups out of the dish drainer. “You haven’t said much about Meredith. How’s the wife, Tim?” Fanny mentioned Meredith had taken ill.
“I’m calling her tonight. I hated leaving her. But she’s got this idea in her head she can cure herself through herbs and whatnot. Then there’s her tedious budget. She wants us to build this dream house. It’s a bungalow really. Nobody is building bungalows in Colorado. Then she found me this low-budget flight, said I ought to come, but that she’d stay home and heal.” He peeked into the water-well lid on the coffee maker. “She’ll do it too. Meredith’s got, like, these steel guts.”
“I’ve flown those budgets before. Six layovers … go up … down.”
“Thought I would be sick.”
“I’m glad you have Meredith.”
“You didn’t exactly marry a slouch yourself.” Tim forgot to fill the coffee well.
I flushed the glass coffeepot under the hot-water spigot. “I’m making a full pot.”
“The nights just started.”
Beads of water hissed under the carafe. Tim put me at ease. Made me want to confess. He had had that effect on me since adolescence. “I want to ask you something. Do I seem uptight?”
He squeezed my good upper arm. “If you were wound up any tighter, you’d spring.”
“I don’t mean to be.”
“Who’s been saying you’re uptight, Syler? Not Braden. He wouldn’t.” He thought highly of Braden. During the NASCAR season, my husband would fly Tim and three of his buddies to Concord, where they would gather for beers at the racetrack.
“No one’s said that,” I said. I hadn’t been called Syler in five years. I grew tense but couldn’t say why. Several Bundt cakes had been left sitting out on the counter. “Who bakes all these anyway?”
“You have to get caught up on your funeral traditions. When Dad died, Bundt cakes were stacked all over Mom’s kitchen,” said Tim. “It’s what people do when they don’t know what to do.”
“Maybe they stand for something. They’re circular. Is that spiritual?”
“No.”
“Think people bake them because they’re trying to express the hole they feel,” I asked, “when they lose someone?”
“It’s a cake with a hole. You think too hard. You’ll give yourself one of those headaches.”
I swung the conversation away from me, headaches, or broken arms. I was back home where I was known as one of the Syler girls, the unsung women whom neighbors whispered about on porches, yet smiled and waved at when Mother drove us past. Tim’s persistent questions still hit my vulnerabilities so I changed the subject. “What’s different about you?” I asked. There were dark circles under his eyes, but he had stayed up late the night before.
“I feel old.”
“Coffee’s ready.” I filled the two cups and placed the carafe back under the filter to finish brewing. I set a cup in front of him. “Hard to believe my mother kept this old Formica table.”
“It’s a classic. Can you say yet how you’re holding up?”
“I can’t say for sure,” I said. My crying jag that afternoon left me feeling ashamed, as if I were responsible for Daddy’s death. I was ten again and responsible for my family’s pain.
“You’re like your mother, not wanting a morsel of sympathy. I remember that about her too,” said Tim.
I reached for the headache medication. The large bottle stayed in the middle of the kitchen table next to the hot pepper vinegar. I popped two capsules and swallowed coffee to wash them down. Tim and I split a wedge of cake. He stuffed several bites into his mouth, overfilling his mouth until his cheeks ballooned. He laughed. Crumbs blew out of his mouth.
I got up, laughing, to find the dustpan.
“I’ll get it later,” he told me. “Stop cleaning, will you?”
“This house never smells clean. Maybe if I light a candle, it won’t smell like a pharmacy.” The hospice-care women had poured Daddy’s leftover medications down the disposal, but the medicine stink hung in the air. “Something about this old house, Mother used to say, was hard to keep up.”
Without a bit of hesitation, Tim said, “I talked to Braden.”
The news silenced me. I couldn’t breathe or cuss.
“Just now.” He came up with a fast excuse. “I got depressed when we didn’t bag our deer. Braden was always good for a laugh, so I called him.” He touched the rim of my cup. “I hate it when you look at me like that.”
My spoon clanked inside the half-empty cup. I pushed it away with both hands. “I should check the thermostat,” I said. Tim often lied to annoy me, or at least he did when we were kids. So when he confessed about calling Braden, I pretended not to care. “Aren’t you meeting Blaine and the guys at the Blue Water?” I asked. “They’ll be out of the movie soon.”
“Stop changing the subject,” he said, put out with me. His knee hit the table leg, causing the hot pepper vinegar bottle to tremble.
“Why did you call him, Tim?”
“I was worried about you. You look awful.”
“Did you say that to him?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“He told me what happened, but I didn’t ask.”
“Shut up, Tim! He wouldn’t. He told me I couldn’t.”
“You two are not over. I know Braden. He’s decent. Not like those other guys you dated.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you’ve drifted as a couple.”
“That’s what men say when they don’t know what to say,” I said, angry. Tears slipped down my face.
“I can’t stand to see you like this,” he said. He touched the cast on my arm. “You always kept ahead of the others.” The dim naked bulb overhead turned the whites of his eyes yellow.
I walked to the sink and leaned over the porcelain. The sleet had subsided. The wind whistled past the house. Through the window, nightfall seamed the sky and land together, thin and hard. The moon was covered entirely.
“I’m an idiot,” said Tim. Both of us fell quiet, and then he said, “Meredith says I can’t stay out of other people’s business. She says it’s because I live in the South. Not that she hates the South. She likes it better than Pittsburgh.”
The ibuprofen was like a pebble in my stomach. The polite thing to do would be to forgive him. But I stared into the space that swallowed Syler Acres. The dark could hide me entirely, and I’d be as happy as happy could be. “What else did Braden say?”
“Was there something else he could say?”
I stared at the empty cup.
Tim muttered that he was filling my cup again. Then he got down on one knee and used a napkin and fork to clean up the cake crumbs.
His breathing was audible as he walked on his knees to the open trash container. I sprinkled cleanser into the sink to whiten the scratched porcelain. I kept my back to Tim until he finally said, “When you were small, we’d stay over, Fanny and me.”
I nodded.
“Most nights I was the last to fall asleep. You girls had it so good. The three of you would curl up next to the gas stove in your folks’ living room here. I’d be jealous. All of you slept warm as kittens, all rolled up in your mother’s quilts.”
I still owned one of those quilts. I allowed him one accepting look, liking him better telling a story.
“I was the only boy. So I’d sleep sitting up in that plastic chair.”
“No one made you sleep in Mother’s chair, Tim.” It was actually her mother’s chair passed on, called Naugahyde, but I didn’t correct him.
“Then right about the time I’d be nodding off, you’d have a bad dream.”
“Is there anything about me you don’t remember?” I stared at my feet. Sleet had dissolved on my suede boots. I slid out of them.
“I was scared when you had those bad dreams. Delia and Fanny, they’d sleep right through it. The two of them could sleep through heavy artillery fire.”
I slipped back into the chair. The hot coffee tasted strong.
“You still have those bad dreams?” he asked.
I stayed too long out on the porch that morning, and my throat was raw. The coffee warmed my throat.
Tim’s voice was soothing. I closed my eyes. He said, “When you met Braden, I knew he’d take good care of you, that I’d not have to worry about you anymore.”
“I’m not nine anymore, Tim.” He had Meredith to play Mother Hen to now. That ought to have satisfied him, but he kept prying. The headache spiked through my skull. I remembered something I’d overheard in the kitchen at noon. “I heard you enlisted in the National Guard. Is that right?”
“It was awhile back, even before the war. I’ve still not gotten called up. Maybe because I’m a park ranger. Could be I’m on some list. We needed the extra money. I want Meredith to have her house.”
Headlights moved across the window glass above the sink. Two car doors opened and slammed closed. Fanny’s laugh spilled out across the drive. Delia was yelling, “Who’s the ice queen? Me, me!” A bit of moon showed through the clouds like a mustard streak on a child’s face.
“What is it you want?” Tim asked. He leaned toward me. Our privacy was drawing to a close, so it was his last chance to pry me open. “I’d buy it for you if I could.”
“What are you going to do? Knock over a gas station?”
“I’ll have to think about it. Don’t know if I’d go to jail for you.”
“Best you don’t. You’d be the worst candidate for jail. You were never good at being the girl, and you’d definitely be the girl in jail.” Since he wouldn’t laugh for me, I said, “I want to finish school, I guess. I’ve made a lousy pilot.” I didn’t know if that was the answer he wanted.
“What’s to finish?” He acted impressed with me. Considering his soft spot for Delia, I measured the validity of it. “I think you and Braden really want to make a go of it. But you made his life yours. Meredith says that if you really love each other, you can have a life of your own and a life you share.”
Tim’s mosquito-persistent probing was softening my resolve not to spill my guts to a man who still had my ex on speed dial. “I feel as if I’ve had a fill-in-the-blank question hovering perpetually over my life.”
“Say that to Braden.”
“You saying that if I make my life my own, Braden will return to me?
Tim never knew it all. But what he said brought comfort. He called it his conduit from heaven. He blinked, which was what his father had taught him to do when at the dead end of manly advice.
The girls made it to the back door, stomping their feet on the back porch rug, laughing raucously.
“We’re being invaded. I have to go to the airport tomorrow. You want to give me a lift?” he asked.
Fanny burst through the door. Delia followed close behind, yelling the punch line to a dirty joke. She was snorting. Her arms high in the air, my sister brandished a couple of wine-cooler six-packs and said hoarsely, “Drinks for the house.”
Too many women underfoot sent Tim off for the Blue Water Café.
Fanny got the idea to dress for bed before coming back to my father’s house. They drove home like that, Fanny wearing a T-shirt and blue lounge pants under her coat. I put on Felix the Cat pajamas. Braden had not liked them, so the store folds were still new.
“It’s high time for a pajama party,” said Fanny. “We changed at Delia’s and drove over here like nincompoops. Delia kept lookout for Deputy Bob.”
“I’ll show him the bird, is what!” said Delia. “How I’d love to moon that man after all the grief he give me.”
“I was literally hooting,” said Fanny.
“You was farting,” said Delia. She turned off the back porch light.
“No lie!” said Fanny. Her expression was one of mock shame.
“If her old man back at the motel, trying to bed down all those kids, could have seen her out tomcatting down Cornell Street in her pink nightie, well, it would have been all she wrote.” Delia dropped an empty wine-cooler bottle into the waste can.
“But Delia, she wouldn’t do it,” said Fanny.
“My clothes are my pajamas.” Delia excused herself to go out for a smoke. “Tim forgot the drink we brung him. I’ll finish it.” She screwed off the lid and pressed the bottle to her lips. Tiny dog hairs pirouetted through the air behind her. She forgot her coat. The second I hesitated to remind her, Delia stepped out into the cold. A cloud of smoke blew past the door glass.
“Delia does have live chickens in her kitchen,” said Fanny. “Here’s how it goes. She has this birdcage, right. So she takes wire cutters, and she cuts the front out of the birdcage, lays it open, makes this, I don’t know what you call it, a drop bin for the chickens.”
“Drop bin?” I said.
“So the chicken, Least One, right, will lay an egg for her breakfast. The egg, she says, rolls down the ramp—that’s what you call it, an egg ramp! So when she gets up to make her breakfast, she says, the egg is waiting for her.”
“Sounds made up,” I said.
It was not the first time Delia had thought up an elaborate scheme to shortcut household duties. Once she cut the tops out of popcorn tins, left them all over her house. She did it to cut down on the time it took to empty the seven glass ashtrays her boyfriend brought home one night from a shooting gallery.
“You really think she’s got that chicken trained to do all that?” asked Fanny. Then she fell facedown on the kitchen table. She laughed, slapping the tabletop.
I leaned forward, whispering as if my mother were still alive and sleeping down the hall. “If she cut open the birdcage, won’t the chicken get out?”
“This chicken sits there on this little pile of hay like it don’t know it can run away,” said Fanny.
“Then there’s got to be a big mess.”
“She changes out the newspaper underneath, like it’s a freaking parakeet,” said Fanny.
“You’re lying,” I said.
Fanny held up two fingers and crossed her heart.
By midnight, Fanny chucked six-pack carton number one under the table. She pulled carton two out of the refrigerator. “I’m good,” I said. Delia went out for her last smoke.
“Hurry and close the door!” Fanny said. “I can’t believe how fast the temperature has dropped.” I loaned her a bathrobe to warm up. She still wore her red rain boots and wool socks. After Fanny gulped down half her wine cooler, she got up from her chair and fetched an entire Bundt cake. I told her not to cut me a slice, so she cut one for Delia and one for herself. Fanny had seldom eaten anything sweet throughout her teen years. She was bulimic in high school, so I often found her up in my bathroom giving up what she had just ingested. After discovering she was pregnant with her first child, though, she followed in her health-conscious husbands footsteps. Dill was a vegetarian. She said she would never date a construction guy. But the promise to herself was dropped when she saw him for the first time. He was fit and muscular, utterly sinewy and brown from his job as a roofer. I could not imagine Fanny throwing up vegetables. She glowed like a girl on a ski slope, her skin the color of pink carnations.
“I’m sorry I talked about Delia awhile ago,” said Fanny. “If I were to go out the door, I’d hate to think you’d talk about me. If I was an idiot, forgive me.”
“My headaches finally subsiding,” I said. I put on another pot of coffee. I didn’t know how to answer Fanny. Most people who talked about Delia seldom apologized.
“No one thinks you’re an idiot, Fanny,” I said.
She arranged bottle caps in the plate border around her cake. “I do.” She laughed quietly.
Delia coughed outside from her perch on the second step. She blew out a stream of smoke. The wind blew the haze back into her face. She closed her eyes and took another drag. Her hair had grown down her back. The dark strands lifted and spun in the wind. It was magical the way the moon and the wind changed her looks.
“Gaylen, my mother says you’re going to stay at Aunt Amity’s,” said Fanny. “Is it snowing up there yet?”
“I hope so,” I said. “The pines look pretty in the snow.”
“Dill and I stayed at Amity’s one summer when she was off visiting her sister. We started a family after that and haven’t been back,” said Fanny. “I guess they might have sold the place after she died. But none of the family could agree on a price.”
“Did you know her well?” I asked.
“Not really,” said Fanny. She poked my cast.
I flicked her cheek. We started gouging each other, laughing, until Fanny came up out of her chair as if she were coming after me.
Delia threw open the door. “Tell me what’s going on!” she yelled. She made a run for our small mob.
“I’m beating up your sister,” said Fanny.
“Hit her hard!” screamed Delia.
Fanny and I just stared.
“There’s someone else not here besides Braden,” said Fanny.
“A whole bunch of Sylers are missing,” I said. It was the only job I gave to Delia, calling family members to invite them to Daddy’s funeral. She did not call a soul on the list Renni gave to me.
“I’m talking about your brother,” said Fanny. “His name was Truman, wasn’t it?”
“He wasn’t Daddy’s son, so he wouldn’t be here,” I said and then remembered, “Delia, you called Truman when Mother died. Did he say anything?”
She sat tinkling a long strand of necklace, one I had not noticed her wearing until now. It made a soft swishing noise, like the sleet outside. She flipped it behind her, causing the single silver charm to fall down her back. “I didn’t want him showing up at my mother’s funeral wearing handcuffs and under prison escort,” said Delia. It was strange to see her suddenly so full of herself.
“That’s not what you told me, Delia,” I said. I had asked her to call Angola Prison, my mother’s last known address for him. When Mother passed away, Delia’s job was to call the prison and see if they would send him by escort to the funeral. Maybe it was my nosy curiosity, but I wanted to meet a half brother I scarcely remembered.
“It’s like everyone forgets your mother had a son,” said Fanny.
“Truman had a different daddy than us,” said Delia.
I had not thought of Truman, not during Daddy’s illness nor even throughout the funeral preparations. He was my mother’s boy, the boy never mentioned, not even at Christmas.
“Delia, you told me that Truman wasn’t allowed to come to Mother’s funeral, that he was in a maximum security prison.” Now that I thought about it, it did seem odd that Truman would be locked up in a max-security prison for stealing cars.
“Medium security, I said,” said Delia. I couldn’t tell if she was lying or if my memory was lagging.
“You kept Truman from coming to Mother’s funeral?” I asked. I didn’t know if that was why I was mad or if it was because she had made a decision without asking me.
Delia kept fiddling with the wine cooler caps.
“Don’t prisons allow their inmates to attend a parent’s funeral?” I asked.
“Of course. They make arrangements,” said Fanny.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“My father’s cousin’s son,” said Fanny. “He had a friend who was in prison for tax evasion. He got to go to his mother’s funeral.”
The wine cooler and the painkiller were going to my head.
“Like, how would they do that?” I asked. “Escort him in with a prison guard? Wouldn’t that be odd?”
“That’s why I told him no,” said Delia.
After all this time, she was finally telling me. It was a rare power play for Delia.
Fanny chucked a third empty into the waste can and then examined the wedge of Bundt cake in front of her. “How did I get cake?”
I had never stopped to count the years. Truman was fifteen, or so they said, when he took off. I might have been four years of age. “Has it been twenty-five years?”
Delia said, “Somebody peench me.”
I could never tell when she was trying to be funny.
“I got rigermordus standin’ too long out in the cold,” she said.
“Delia, you said that when they told Truman his mother had passed, guards had to restrain him,” I said. “But that wasn’t the reason, was it? It was because you denied his leave, wasn’t it?” I could feel my ire rising. I hated it when she lied to me.
Delia didn’t answer.
“Gaylen, has it been that long?” asked Fanny. “I mean since you saw your brother?”
The clock over the sink hit twelve thirty.
“Half brother,” I corrected her. “I never knew him, Fanny.”
“Tim says he remembers Truman,” said Fanny, pinching off a bite of cake and stuffing it in her mouth.
“I remember him returning to our house once,” I said. “Maybe I was eight. It’s hard to say.”
There was a faded photograph of a boy, large dark eyes, full lips, in my mother’s bureau drawer. “Maybe it was because of his picture, but I have this image of him only as a boy.” I kept his picture. Mother never framed any of his photos, but she was never that kind of domestic, setting many framed photos around the house. She was a busy woman working her job at Weyerhaeuser, not so full of children and husband as to make little photographic tributes for others to notice.
“Who we talking about now?” asked Delia.
“Truman, your brother,” said Fanny. “Do you remember him?”
Delia shrugged. “Hot coffee!” She poured a cup.
My headache came back strong in the front of my skull. Truman was never brought up at family gatherings, so hearing Fanny fire off one question after another was agitating.
“What do you remember about Truman?” asked Fanny.
“I asked my mother about him once,” I said. The pain medication relaxed me. I lifted my feet and rested them on the crossbeam beneath the table.
“It was because of one of those … what do you call it … regressive memories,” I said. By age seven, my arm bones had the extension capabilities of a small rhesus monkey, so stretching between the door frame of Mother’s room to touch the opposite door frame of Daddy’s room was proof that I was growing and not, as one aunt incorrectly speculated, the family midget. It was at that exact point, my right hand touching Mother’s entry, the left pointer finger pressed against Daddy’s, that I remembered.
“I can see him plain as day,” I said to Fanny, “a tall boy in that same hall space. He walked Delia and me to my father’s bed.” Because the mental snapshot had bubbled up from my memory from when I was age three, I surprised my mother when I told her about it. With the picture of this boy so lucid in my mind, I picked her brain. “It annoyed my mother when I brought up Truman’s name, but that was all the more reason to ask. My mother walked in at that same instant that I remembered, her arms holding a bundle of warm linens fresh off the line. It was morning, the windows open, a warm breeze blowing the curtains back a few feet out from Daddy’s bed. I told Mother, ‘I remember something. A boy standing here, tall and a teenager.’ She dropped the linens onto the sofa.”
“What did she say?” asked Fanny.
“She said, ‘That’s impossible,’ and ‘You were too young.’”
“It was Truman,” I said, but still didn’t know how I knew. “He showed Delia and me a biology kit or some such, like a dead frog. Mother explained that it once belonged to Aunt Tootie, so she even remembered the very day I recollected. Mother said she told him not to bring the kit into the house.”
“Like a dissection kit, sounds like, like from Aunt Tootie’s biology lab at school,” said Fanny.
“I told Mother, ‘You whipped him.’” Mother kept repeating that he deserved it. Her voice was shaking. When she was defensive, I felt a deep and abiding sympathy for her, too much to persist when she had had enough. That was Delia’s weakness, not knowing when to back off from Mother when she had had enough.
I expected Delia to respond, but she kept drinking.
Fanny glanced toward my mother’s bedroom. “You know I loved Aunt Fiona, Gaylen. But my mother said she wasn’t good to Truman back then.”
“You don’t know what to believe. The two of them didn’t get along. Besides,” I said, “Mother married Truman’s daddy too young and had him when she was only sixteen. She got into disagreements with everyone over him because she was so young.”
“He was a bad kid,” said Fanny.
“I don’t remember him as bad,” I said, keeping my voice low, my eyes fixed on Delia in the event she decided to blurt out something. “I don’t know why she beat him that day, but he must have done something to set her off like that.”
“It’s hard to remember back to age three,” said Fanny, swigging the last drink of her cooler. “I can’t remember seventh grade. What else do you remember?” she asked.
“He cried.” While I stared into my father’s bedroom, the picture of the three of us faded. A pain spiked through my head, but there was plenty of ibuprofen.
“I don’t remember,” said Delia, her brows knitting together in confusion.
“You were a baby, too young,” I said.
“Then so were you,” said Fanny. “Delia’s a year younger than you, right?”
“I remember,” I said. My mother was angry with him. She rushed into the room. She took Truman by the arm. She hit him and then kept hitting. He screamed.
“Are you all right, Gaylen?” asked Fanny. “You don’t have to tell us any more.”
“I’ve stayed up too late.” I rubbed my temples. “I shouldn’t have had that wine cooler.” The headache was back. “I don’t even drink. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Mother said Truman was a runaway,” said Delia.
Fanny glanced away.
“He’s our brother, Gaylen, and we ain’t even tried to write him,” said Delia, her voice cracking. The wine coolers were making her emotional.
“Should we?” asked Fanny. “Do we know what prison?”
“Angola. He could be out by now. Or back in.” I pulled out my bottom lip, thinking. “We don’t know him.”
“My mother used to call him the boy erased,” said Fanny. We all sat in silence for the time it took the coffee maker to beep and go off.
“Maybe Renni knows more,” I told Fanny.
“Don’t bring me up to Mama, Gaylen,” said Fanny, leaning forward and whispering. “And don’t tell her we were all sitting here talking about your mother. She’s finally at peace about your mother and all of the Syler squabbles. Let sleeping dogs saw logs and all that.”
The house creaked. Fanny and Delia kept laughing, arguing over the last wine cooler. Fanny started a game with Delia and me, challenging us to make a list of the top ten things you can do with Bundt cake.
“Am I drunk?” asked Delia. “Or are there twelve of them circle cakes sitting in a row? How in god’s name do people expect us to eat all them things?”
I set to work stacking up the girls’ empty plates with my one good hand.