I got up before daybreak, grabbed my backpack without even flipping on the lights, and made my way over to the Pump ’N Munch where my bus idled near the car wash. The sun rose over sod farms but I was back asleep before we hit Minneapolis and didn’t wake up until we were deep into Wisconsin. We passed through Madison and, after hours of rolling plains, my mind too frazzled to think about anything but the scenery, came Chicago, where I met my transfer.
Raindrops tapped and clung to the windows as we rounded the south shore of Lake Michigan and then, after a few more hours on a highway that ran along the sandy sometimes rocky shoreline, a sign: SOUTH HAVEN. Lakeside mansions with long piers, lights green or red flashing at the end, then a sheet metal pyramid with smokestacks that reached the sky, the coal plant. Steam rose to meet the rain clouds. Beyond, the lake was red, a cloudy puddle of fresh water and clay. Even, light rains stirred the bottom. Along the shoreline white herons on long legs stalked prey among people, pasty white, stretched out on towels trying to catch what few rays were coming through the occasional showers.
The bus kneeled with a hydraulic whoosh and let me off at a Gas-N-Go on the main road. Friday afternoon traffic crawled in both directions. A phone book hung on a chain from a payphone near the door, so I looked up Frank Jorgenson and went inside to ask the attendant for directions. Then I wandered through the short stretch of downtown vacancies, most of the stores papered over and for sale like the downtown row in Holm. A bicycle shop, a bakery, live bait. All the other storefronts empty.
My heart pounded as I walked the streets of South Haven, nerves on edge as I prepared to see my mother for the first time in almost nine years. I still had no idea what I would say to her and when I tried to think of something I was distracted by the people of South Haven. A woman digging at a patch of dirt near her house, children playing touch football in a front yard. I wandered on, wondering why my mother would leave Grand Marais or Holm for a place like this, until I came to her street. The world blurred before me when I saw my mother’s house. Three stories on a wide lawn with a porch along the front and a garage around the side, all beige with brown trim, it looked to me like a gingerbread house, and in a small heart-shaped garden on the front lawn, lilies and irises bloomed. Unsure if my misty eyes were from happiness, sadness, or some odd mix of both, I stepped up onto the porch and pressed the doorbell, my heart quaking in my chest. I hadn’t been this nervous since the last time I had come knocking at her door.
The door opened a crack and a single brown eye peeked through.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hello, Mother.”
The door swung open and there she was: my mother at thirty-four, twice my age. She had grown a bit thicker since I had last seen her, maybe from the baby, but aside from a few strands of gray, her hair still matched her eyes and she still had the same timid smile that I’d come to recognize as my own. She wore a navy-blue dress with red polka dots and her neck was wrapped three times with a string of what looked like pearls. On her way out the door—ten minutes later and I might have missed her.
“Shane! Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.” She said it with a nice high tone that dropped as it progressed, and I was nine years old again, knowing that my mother didn’t want to see me. “What are you doing here?”
I pulled open the screen door and my mother stepped back, maintained a distance—she made no move to hug me; rather, she showed me to the living room. It had a high ceiling and big windows that looked out onto the front yard. A soft brown couch took up much of the room and a matching chair sat to the side. A framed print hung on the wall, a woman splayed out in a field of long grass looking toward the horizon where an old farmhouse and barn stood.
“Well, have a seat.”
My mother sat on the chair, plucked a piece of lint from her dress, then crossed her arms and met my eyes in a way that didn’t make me feel too welcome. I set down my backpack and flopped onto the couch as near to where I had come in as possible.
“So you live here with Frank?” I asked when I could no longer stand the silence.
“How do you know Frank?” she asked.
“I don’t.”
“Yeah, this is Frank’s house,” she said. “How did you even get here?”
“The bus.”
“You know what I mean.”
A flood of sadness welled up inside me until my throat grew closed and my nose ran. “Dad’s dead,” I choked out. I wiped my face on the sleeve of my flannel shirt and looked up to see that my mother was now looking out the window with great concentration. She stood and walked past me to get a closer look at whatever she saw. “I wanted to see you again before you were too.”
Sinking deep into the couch, I told her back about my trip to find her using the Christmas card, how the money she had sent me all those years ago had gotten me this far, and how I had tracked her down while living in her old apartment in Holm. She listened to me but didn’t look my way—of course, I had come unannounced so she may have had other things on her mind—and she didn’t make a single movement when I broke down telling my story, merely waited for me to get through the checklist of things I had to say to her before she could go back to her life.
“You’ll be staying here, I guess,” she said when I finished. “Let me show you your room. Bring your bag.”
I picked up my backpack and followed her through the dining room, past an old wooden table that seated six, and into the kitchen to the staircase. Three doors stood closed on the second floor but my mother only showed me the spare room, empty except for an old bed and a nightstand.
“Settle in,” she said.
So this was it. Another dusty room in a small midwestern town. Stale, but at least there was light. I stepped to the window and between the peaked roofs of a couple houses and a few treetops I could make out Lake Michigan in the distance. A single sunbeam broke through the clouds to leave a trail of glitter on the water.
As I descended the stairs, I heard her pick up the phone. I froze in place and, a few clicks of the buttons later, she spoke.
“No, no, I don’t know where he’s going . . . couple days, he said . . . well, I’ll bring him down there for now.”
She hung up the phone and stood there a moment. The next step I took made a loud creak and my mother spun with her hand on her heart.
“Oh my God, Shane,” she gasped. “You scared the shit out of me.”
She started laughing then, in the throaty way I remembered from my childhood, and I joined her it was so infectious. She leaned back against the counter and wiped her hand across her forehead as if the squeaky step had been a close call with death. Our laughter faded, but it eased me into feeling a little more at home. My mother picked up a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and lit it with an unsteady match.
“I bought a restaurant, Shane,” she said after a couple puffs built a wall of smoke between us. “I was struggling there for a while but I think this place is finally it. This weekend is the grand opening. We’ve been serving dinner for a few weeks already to work out the kinks, but here it comes. Tonight’s the last practice night, tomorrow is the first official. It’s nice that you’ve come—you can help out.”
My expression betrayed me then. The smile dropped off my mother’s face and she looked at the floor.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know how to talk to you anymore, what to say. Is that something you’d want to do? If you came to see me, that’s where I have to be.”
“Well,” I said, “let’s see this place then.”
“Great,” she said and she was back on top. My mother stubbed out her cigarette, led me through the back door, and into the garage where a black jeep was parked. She pressed a button on her key ring that made the lights flash, the horn honk, and the doors unlock with a loud click. I climbed in and buckled my safety belt.
“Nice truck,” I said. “Is it new?”
“It is,” she said. “We had a little money left over from the restaurant loan.”
She backed out onto the road and tiny raindrops speckled the windshield. We passed back the way I had come and, while I watched the scenery pass, my mother kept looking my way as she drove. When I turned to her she flicked on the windshield wipers and pointed.
“Look at that,” she said.
“They work very well,” I said and she smiled, looking back at the road.
The wipers kept a steady rhythm and as we pulled onto the lake road my eyes were drawn out over the reddish water to the small whitecaps whipped up by the wind.
“Burrrr,” my mother said, and when I didn’t look her way she said it again. “Burrrrr, it’s cold!”
“It is cold today,” I said and when I met her eyes she shook her body in an exaggerated shiver.
The restaurant ran long and narrow along the lakeshore, with tall windows looking out at the water and a gravel parking lot out front. We parked among the few cars near the door and my mother left the keys in the ignition. Inside, a red-faced man with curly dark hair stood behind the bar talking to two women. He wore blue jeans and a shirt buttoned halfway up, chest hair sprouting. His hands were palm down on the bar, one in front of each woman. He said something I couldn’t hear and slapped his hands down on the bar before he turned and came over to us. He leaned over and kissed my mother on the mouth.
“You must be Frank,” I said.
The man set a tumbler in front of me and poured some brandy.
“Frank’s long gone,” my mother said.
The man nudged the glass toward me. My mother nodded her head and I picked up my drink.
“You can call me the Fisherman,” the man said and lifted his hand to be shaken. I reached at an awkward angle. He gripped my fingers and shook them.
“What kind of handshake is that?”
My mother laughed. The Fisherman reached out and took a clump of my hair in his hand.
“What the fuck is this now?”
The Fisherman took a couple steps away, put his elbow on the bar, and then his face in his palm. “Jesus,” he said. One of the ladies called him over and he turned to talk to her.
“He’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” my mother whispered.
I asked her about Frank but she didn’t answer. Instead, she watched the Fisherman with eyes like slits, nothing that resembled trust. He talked to the ladies while he made two more drinks, brandy in tumblers, not the drinks in stemmed glasses like the ones in front of them. He put a cherry in one and a splash of water in the other. He said something and laughed into the air above him as he carried the drinks our way.
“Old Fashioned for the lady,” he said, setting the drink with the cherry in front of my mother. “And a splash of lake water for the Fisherman.” He raised his glass, my mother raised hers, then they both looked down at the tumbler before me. It would be a long weekend.
We drank. The Fisherman poured another round, made mine with ice and cola. This one would sit on the bar. The shot burned warm in my stomach and I felt lighter, giving me a much better feeling about what was happening.
“So this is your place?”
“We have one dinner that costs sixty dollars,” she said. “We’re going to be rich as soon as we pay off this credit card.”
“Credit card?” I asked, looking away, my good feelings leaving as quickly as they had arrived. “I thought it was a loan.”
Above three levels of liquor bottles hung giant cocktail glasses. My mother followed my gaze.
“Those are for family-sized margaritas,” she said. “Should we get out of here?”
I nodded. I wanted to be as far from the Fisherman as possible but I wouldn’t get my wish.
“We’re going drinking, baby,” my mother called to the Fisherman. “Get Susan to cover the bar.”
Susan was a cousin I didn’t know I had, my mother’s brother’s daughter, half a pair of twins. She walked behind the bar and set to washing glasses, loose blond hair bouncing on her shoulders with the motion of her hands in the sink. The Fisherman stood behind her, staring. One of the ladies asked for the check but he didn’t even flinch.
“Get your jacket, baby,” my mother shouted, startling him out of his trance. “We’re leaving now.”
The Fisherman didn’t think to let me take the front seat so I climbed in back and tried to lean up into their conversation, only to be blocked by the Fisherman’s arm, as he kept his hand on my mother’s shoulder the entire drive. He told her about his day bartending and finished off his story by saying that all the women he had served in the bar that day were cows.
“I swear it, dear,” he said. “Compared to you it was a real moo-fest in there today.”
She laughed and swatted at his knee with her hand. The Fisherman knew how to talk to my mother.
The bar was called The Laughing Heron, a dark place where the tables and chairs were made from raw lumber. We were at a high table along the wall, my mother and the Fisherman were seated and I stood. The area between the tables and the bar was packed with men who had spent most of their lives laboring—painters, fishermen, a man who worked either in a coal mine or a foundry—and another group that appeared to have spent much time lifting heavy things. This was as good a time as any.
“So, I’ve come all this way to ask you to be a part of my life,” I said. “I want to forgive you.”
The Fisherman laughed. My mother furrowed her brow, then looked away.
“Forgive me for what?”
“For abandoning him, I believe,” the Fisherman said.
“I know it’s far,” I said. “But we could meet up once in a while. I could take the bus again sometime. And soon I’ll be living in Minneapolis in the dorms at the university. You could come visit on weekends. I’ll get a job and put you up in a hotel.”
“Weekends are going to be pretty busy at the restaurant,” the Fisherman said, then under his breath: “College boy.”
“What?”
“I should get more drinks,” my mother said and made her way to the bar. The Fisherman and I looked at each other. He brushed my hair out of my eyes with a thick finger, then told me he had something he wanted to tell me later. My mother came back with a drink for the Fisherman and one for herself—I was still holding my first, unsipped, in my hand.
“You have a brother,” my mother said, then dragged on her cigarette. “But you won’t get to see him. Because of Frank.”
“Your mother’s a tornado, boy,” the Fisherman said, “leaving broken homes and crying children all over the Midwest.”
I shot a dirty look at the Fisherman, then asked my mother where Frank was again.
“He’s probably getting it from behind right now,” the Fisherman said and laughed. “Do you want me to tell this story for you?”
My mother looked down into her brandy and nodded.
“Well, your mother was at the restaurant and someone tossed melted butter all over her pants. She drove home quick, to find your stepdad bent over the kitchen table with a dick in his ass. I’ll spare you the details, but your mother changed her clothes and went back to work.”
“I knew something was up,” my mother said. “He never cared when I gained weight. Said he would love me anyways.”
“Maybe he loved you for who you are,” I said.
“That guy only loves cock,” the Fisherman said. “I’m going to piss.”
He got up and his chair fell backwards. He looked down at it, then up at my mother before he walked off toward the bathroom. My mother stood and righted it for him.
“I’m not too lucky, Shane. First, there was your father, of course. Then Donald, who you met, the biker—damn, what a mistake he was. And now this business with Frank. It’s not too easy for a woman, you know.”
“You really fucked up when you left my father,” I yelled, having lost what goodwill I had built up for my mother until then. “He was a rock.” People at nearby tables turned toward us.
My mother looked into her drink for a moment, tapped at a floating ice cube with her finger. “He was a rock,” she said, looking up from her glass. “You’re right about that. But rocks are cold, Shane. People don’t need rocks, they need warmth and love. I’m sorry, but when that’s gone you shouldn’t be tied to someone cold and unloving.”
“That’s what marriage is, Mother,” I said. “A lifelong commitment. ’Til death do us part.”
“This doesn’t sound much like forgiveness,” she said. “And you know nothing about it anyways. You’re coming up on that time in your life when you’re going to become something, Shane. You’ll soon be who you are for the rest of your life. If you’re going to be anything, don’t be a rock.”
“He’s dead now so it doesn’t matter either way, does it?” I asked. “But let me ask you one thing: Is that story about Frank true?”
The look in her eyes told me it was a lie but before she could answer, the man next to me swung his arm and knocked my drink out of my hand. Brandy and cola splashed on my mother and the man. The tumbler shattered, sending long shards of glass sliding across the floor.
“You better watch where you’re going there, pretty boy,” the man said. His sideburns continued down his jawline and up into a mustache. His chin was clean shaven.
My mother rose from her seat.
“What did you say to my son?” she yelled.
“I told your faggot son to watch what the fuck he was doing,” the man snarled.
“We’re going to leave,” the Fisherman said from behind us, “but you better hope we don’t meet again.”
The man told us all to fuck off and turned back to the group he was with. The Fisherman sucked down his drink in one long pull, then my mother paid our tab and we left.
The Fisherman and I sat in the dining room after my mother had gone to bed. Six candle flame bulbs burned dimly in the chandelier overhead. A bottle of brandy and a bottle of cola sat on the table and some crooner played on a portable radio that followed the Fisherman around the house. He often sang along.
“Old Dino was my godfather,” the Fisherman said. “Nicest guy you’ll ever meet.”
“Who?”
“Dino,” he said, leaning toward me with a furrowed brow. “Dean Martin! The guy singing. Famous Dean Martin? Shit!”
“I thought this was Frank Sinatra,” I said.
“Naw!” he yelled. “No, no, no, no, no! Sinatra is a pussy! He poked a hole in his eardrum to get out of the army. Old Dino never saw combat but at least he went where he was assigned.”
I didn’t care at all. I had no idea why I was still up, sitting with this man I hardly knew. I had taken a seat at the table upon our return from the bar, expecting that my mother would join us but, after the Fisherman and I poured drinks for ourselves, she had swept through the room claiming she was tired, then went to bed alone.
“Sinatra stayed behind to fuck everyone’s wives.”
“Well, that sounds familiar,” I said.
A new song started up and the Fisherman garbled the words so badly I had no idea what he or Dean Martin were singing. At the second verse he pointed to the radio and smiled as Old Dino told us how he had been a rover, but now that was over.
“I once had sex with five women at the same time,” the Fisherman told me as the song ended. “Five girls, one boy,” he sang, mutilating the final lyric, “no grief, much joy.”
Startled, I sipped my drink. I had been planning to let my drink sit untouched, but I reached for it every time the Fisherman made me uncomfortable.
“You could probably do that,” he said and I sank into my seat, crossed my arms. “You could be a male escort. You’ve got the face, but you’d have to cut that fucking hair away from it.”
Outside, the rain dripped from the eaves, tapped on the windows, and I tried to imagine anyplace other than where I was. I wondered if it was raining in Holm, if the sheriff had taken the evidence from Jenny and made a move on Svenson.
“I’d have to see your cock, of course. To be sure.”
I sipped my drink and when I set it down my hands moved to the brandy and the cola, setting a bottle to each side of my drink, a wall of liquid between us.
“I love blondes,” he said. “Blondes with Heavenly Bodies. That’s the name of my club in Chicago. I’m part owner.”
The Fisherman stood and walked into the kitchen. Opened the freezer.
“Blondes get me into trouble with your mother,” he called from the kitchen. “There are a couple at your mom’s restaurant that I’d like to fuck. Your cousin Susan, for one. Her sister I haven’t met yet, but I’m sure I’d do her too—they are twins, after all. She probably looks just like her.”
I heard the rattle of an ice tray being emptied into a bowl and then water from the tap. Refilling the tray. The Fisherman may have been a drunk but he was a man with priorities. He came back with the ice and finished his drink. He took one cube and filled the rest of his glass with brandy. I took three and added cola. He raised his and downed half the glass in one pull.
“I’m a bad man,” the Fisherman said. “Do you know why they call me the Fisherman? ’Cause I throw people in the lake.”
I sipped my drink and absentmindedly shook my head.
“You don’t believe me?” he asked, chair screeching across the floor as he stood up. He looked hurt by my betrayal. “I’m actually on the run right now, staying here while things cool down. My club’s going through a bankruptcy. I stopped at this bar on my way out of town, met this woman, and walked into this.”
“My mother knows about this?” I asked. “You remember that you’re talking about my mother, right?”
But he wasn’t talking to me anymore. Maybe he was recounting his life to himself, stacking up his feats of manhood, justifying his presence to the world. The song on the radio changed and he sat back down, singing along to snippets of Old Dino; sometimes he knew the words, sometimes he didn’t. His bravado reminded me of Russell’s stories about girls from the days before our night together behind the Aurora and, horrified, I came to understand one thing I had inherited from my mother: her taste in men.
“People in Chicago know that if you’re giving someone cement shoes I’m the man to call.”
His eyes cut at me with the same hungry look he had set on my cousin earlier. I picked up my glass but didn’t drink, held it for a moment, then set it back on the table. The phone in the kitchen rang but the Fisherman didn’t notice.
“Five women at the same time and they paid me to do it. You could make a thousand dollars a weekend and all you would be doing is fucking women.”
“I don’t think I could do that,” I said but he didn’t answer. He leaned back into his chair and his head lolled on his neck, his eyes fluttered, and his mouth popped open just enough for his tongue to slip out. When his unseeing eyes stared off at the wall beyond me for a moment I thought he had passed out sitting up, but then he shivered back to consciousness and smiled so wide I could see that one of his frontmost molars was missing.
“What did you say?”
“I said I don’t think I could do that.”
I reached for my drink and the Fisherman came out of his chair, wrapped his hand around my bicep, dug his fingernails into the soft skin on the inside of my arm. He pulled me out of my seat and pushed me backwards until I was against the wall. His strength made me weak and I folded into his arms.
“Show me your cock,” he said through clenched teeth. His brandy breath tickled my ear and sent goose bumps up all over my body.
My free hand went to my belt and he let go of the other. I undid my pants and closed my eyes. When I opened them, the Fisherman was now in my chair, brandy in his hand, staring. The phone was still ringing in the kitchen.
“You couldn’t even please one woman with that little thing,” he said and laughed. “And look! Your little guy is standing up! Your mom was right—you are a faggot. Just like Frank.”
It took me a moment to understand that he was mocking me. I looked down at myself, now fully aroused, then pulled up my pants, walked past the Fisherman into the kitchen, and picked up the receiver.
“Hey Jim,” a woman’s voice asked. “Have you put her to bed yet?”
“What?”
“Jim?” The voice grew flustered. “Come over here and fuck me right now.”
I cut the connection and dialed Jenny’s number. It rang ten times with no answer. It was late—maybe she was sleeping. When I hung up, my mother was behind me, eyes heavy with sleep, creases on her face from her pillow.
“Who was that?”
“It was nothing,” I said. “Wrong number, then I tried to call my friend.”
“A friend in Minnesota? Long distance?”
“Yeah, no one answered.”
“You could’ve asked.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
My mother made her way to the dining room but, before I could hear what she said to the Fisherman, I climbed the stairs. The guest room was quiet and cold, rain tapping at the window, so I got under the blankets and shivered until I warmed the bed with my body. I was on the edge of sleep when the phone rang again. A crash came from the kitchen and my mother started yelling. The Fisherman’s voice grew just as loud. I thought for a moment that I should go break them up but then it was morning.
My sleep a mere second of restless darkness, I stumbled downstairs to find the Fisherman was still awake, still drinking, the same Dean Martin songs playing on the portable radio. He smiled at me over his liquid breakfast. Red eyes and messy hair but otherwise unfazed.
“I told your mother you showed me your cock last night,” he said. “We had a good laugh about it when I drove her to the restaurant this morning.” He lifted his glass, toasting me, and then drained it.
I walked past him to go to the bathroom.
“And you need a fucking haircut,” he said, holding a twenty-dollar bill in the air. “Your mother gave me this for your barber.”
On the way to the barber shop, the Fisherman stopped at the bar on the ground floor of the big white hotel that overlooked the lake. He ordered me a Bloody Mary and for himself, of course, brandy and water. He drank in silence until he was halfway done with his second drink. My first sat sweating before us.
“You need to start taking care of yourself,” he said. “You’re all mousy and queer-looking. You need to look sharp. Get a haircut every two weeks. I mean short hair, not any of this hippy bullshit. Clip your fingernails and use a file. That’s important. No woman wants to be all clawed up on the inside.”
The bartender was sorry to interrupt but wondered if the Fisherman had paged someone. He said yes and ordered another drink.
“Probably the barber,” he said. “Told him to call when a spot opened up.”
“You paged a barber?” I asked but the Fisherman didn’t answer. He finished his drink and went off to the phone.
The bartender came back with the drink and set it down. Then he picked up the empty, looked over at the Fisherman and back at me.
“Your old man always drink three of these before noon?”
“It’s likely,” I said. Then, in a moment of genius that I haven’t matched since, I told him he wasn’t my old man, rather that I was a prostitute from Chicago and we had a room upstairs. The bartender stepped away when the Fisherman returned, tapped the other bartender on the shoulder, and they both looked our way for a while.
“You gotta go to where the pussy is,” he said. “Go dancing. Trim your pubic hair, for God’s sake, and get a suntan.”
The Fisherman tossed his drink back in one big swallow. He set the twenty my mother had given him for my haircut on the bar and we left. Outside was gray, raining again. The Fisherman drove two blocks and pointed. Said he would be back to pick me up in twenty-five minutes.
I ran through the rain to the door. A bell jangled when I entered and a woman with blond hair and bangs asked if she could help me.
“Someone called and said there was an opening,” I told her.
“I’m the only one here,” she said, “and I haven’t called anyone. No matter, there’s no one waiting.”
She put me in the chair and faced me toward the mirror so I could watch my hair fall in long swaths to the floor. The change was immediate and, as she made her way around me from one side to the other, I could see side-by-side how my long hair had made me look like a girl. It didn’t help me understand why it had led some people to the edge of their wits, but I could see the cause for confusion in a way that I hadn’t before. I had always been me, as far as I could tell, the change in my hair so subtle from day to day that I had grown into my own vision of myself over the years it took to get that long.
When she was done, I appeared to be a respectable young man. My hair shorn close on the sides but still long on top, a cowlick in front kept my bangs out of my eyes. I bent down, took some of the cuttings in my hand, and thought of my father. Now I looked very much like him. He had been the one who allowed me to keep my long hair in spite of my uncle and everyone else in Grand Marais, telling me all along that I was my own person, that it didn’t matter what anyone thought. It was a defining aspect of my personality and I had expected having short hair to cause some deep change to my very being, but I felt no different. With or without my hair, I would still be as much of a man as I always was, the man my father encouraged me to be.
I paid for my haircut with the last of my cash, left five bucks as a tip and pocketed three quarters, then waited in a seat near the window, watching the rain. Two hours after he dropped me off, the Fisherman pulled up and laid on the horn, didn’t let up until I was in the car. I didn’t ask where he’d been, but I imagined it had something to do with the woman who had called for Jim.
My mother made a little squeal when she saw me, ruffling my new haircut.
“So handsome, just like someone else we know,” she said and looked around, but the Fisherman was already standing at the bar, lake water on his mind. Then, pressing a folded banknote into my hand, she got to the point: “I want you to help out tonight. If anyone asks you for anything, do it. I have a lobster in the back for your dinner.”
Another hundred-dollar bill. I stuffed the money in my pocket and left her at the host stand where she and my cousin planned out the seating chart for that night’s reservations. In the dining room, the busboys draped white linen over the bare tables, then laid out the flatware and the waitresses followed with cloth napkins and metal carafes of hot water to polish the wineglasses and silver. Fresh roses had been cut and a small vase had been prepared for each table with a single stem and baby’s breath. For the finishing touch, I lit candles in tiny gold-flecked cups and placed them just far enough from the flowers that the petals didn’t wilt.
It was the nicest restaurant I had ever seen but I had a sneaking feeling that even if it did live up to its looks, my mother would grow bored with it and move on to the next thing that caught her wandering eye. My father, me, Donald, Holm, Frank, her other child, the restaurant, the Fisherman. My mother wasn’t hospitable; she knew nothing of hospitality. I knew she didn’t care about any of the people who would visit her place that night—she was looking out for herself and there wasn’t anything wrong with that. I decided I’d do best to follow her lead, and with that thought I was free. An incredible lightness came over me. It was done. I had found my mother and taken it as far as it could go, and soon I would be back in Holm with Jenny again for the last few weeks of summer, then off to the rest of my life.
The people were few at first but by seven o’clock the restaurant was full and the rain had stopped, a warm evening sun angling in on the dinner guests through the lakeside windows. I followed the Fisherman around the dining room and watched him stare at my cousin. He had no purpose or function at the restaurant and, as if to prove this, he ordered dinner at seven thirty when the dining room was still full. He had a tall glass of lake water and the sixty-dollar entrée that my mother had been so proud of the previous day: lobster tail, crab legs, and filet mignon. Halfway through his meal he got up to find Susan, asked her if she would melt some more butter and bring him another drink. She brought the butter and when she set it down the Fisherman grabbed her wrist and pulled her close. He licked her face from chin to ear, then pushed her away and told her she forgot his fucking brandy before he picked up his silverware and went back to his meal.
At sunset, while clearing plates from a table near the window I was distracted by a heron stalking through the shallow water near the shore, hunting. As I watched, the bird stopped in the glittery trail of sunlight on the water, poised on one leg, and struck before it stalked off down the beach, a crayfish hanging from its beak by the claw. The crayfish struggled, swinging from its trapped arm, clapping at the bird’s neck with the other claw until its wrist was severed, when it fell to the sand incomplete. The bird waddled after it to take another stab but came up with an empty beak before it flapped its wings and lifted itself into the air.
After the dinner business was finished, I asked my mother to bring me to her house so I could rest before my bus ride home. I told her I wasn’t hungry but she sat me down at a table by the window with a glass of beer and stomped off toward the kitchen, then came back with the biggest lobster I had seen all night.
“It’s a three pounder,” she said and pulled out the chair opposite me to sit down. Uncomfortable, she shifted in her seat, folded her hands, smiled up at me. “Is there anything else you need here?”
I thought for a moment that maybe I had been wrong about my mother, but when I told her I had everything I wanted she stood and walked off. Thinking she was planning to return, I set down my fork and watched her weave through the men milling near the bar and around the bartender, take a glass, and fill it like the Fisherman had—ice, brandy, cherry—then, bringing the straw to her lips, she turned and leaned against the bar, eyes on the television mounted in a corner I couldn’t see. I waited for a while, watching her watch television, but when she went for a second drink I turned back to my meal.
I had never eaten lobster before and, though I had seen people eating it all night, I wasn’t sure how to use the cracker, didn’t know how to get the meat out of the claws. I struggled with a claw for a while but then moved on to my potatoes and corn on the cob, forked out the tail and got that down. I sipped my beer and looked out at the lake, now dark, but I could see the lights of a passing tanker and a sailboat anchored out in the distance. In the reflection I saw the Fisherman approaching and tried to ignore him, hoping he would leave me alone, but he walked right up to my table and ripped the claw I had been working on right off my lobster.
“What, do you not know how to do this?” he asked, then snapped the claw in half with his hands and slurped the meat out of the shell before he picked up my cup of butter and took a sip. He looked down at me and shook his head before he tossed the empty claw back on my plate and turned toward the bar.
In bed that night, my thoughts about the Fisherman became images that haunted my dreams. Having his way with my mother, my cousin Susan and her twin, and Jenny. Then all four at once, making eyes at me to be the fifth, reaching out, taking me by the shoulder, shaking me.
“Be a fucking man,” he said, rattling me with each word, but that scene fell away and I opened my eyes to see that it wasn’t the Fisherman’s hands on my shoulders but my mother’s.
“Wake up, Shane,” she said, eyes closed, still asleep herself. “It’s time to leave.”
My mother dropped me off at the Gas-N-Go without getting out of the jeep, rolling down the window to thank me for helping out at the restaurant before spinning the wheel and heading back to the Fisherman. No mention of another meeting and then she was as gone as she had always been, the only thing remaining was the hundred-dollar bill in my pocket. I made my way into the Gas-N-Go, bought two shitty donuts, and told the cashier she could keep the change. Ninety-eight dollars plus coins. I didn’t want anything to do with it. Stood outside and ground the nasty pastries in my mouth, swallowed them down while I waited for the bus, alone, in the dark. Soon all of this, my mother, the Fisherman, and South Haven itself, would be behind me forever.
When the bus pulled into the station in Chicago, I had an hour before my connection and just enough change to call Jenny’s house from the pay phone. No answer. This worried me. She hadn’t called my mother’s house like she said she would, hadn’t answered when I called, and now she still wasn’t around. My paranoia from my last day in Holm returned and I was certain that Svenson had figured us out and gotten his hands on her. I did what I could to squash those thoughts, but soon I was back on the phone, growing more and more worried until it was picked up on the nineteenth ring.
“Jenny?” I asked. Silence. “Jenny?” Only breathing on the line. Something was wrong—Kristina had answered the phone. She had made her way from where she was to the kitchen, in her drugged-out state, hoping it was Jenny. This was not a good sign.
“Kristina?” I asked. “Answer! Are you okay? Do you know where Jenny is?”
More deep breathing and then a dead line. My three quarters fell into the phone, leaving me with nothing, and I wished then that I hadn’t been so hasty with my mother’s money.
I made my way onto the bus when it was time and, in spite of my worries or maybe because of them, I passed out and moved right into a dream. Jenny’s house stood before me, so close yet impossibly far as I stood immobile in the street, watching Jenny approach on foot. I called her name but she didn’t hear me, couldn’t see me. Oblivious, she stepped up onto the curb, focused on her front door until the sound of a pump action drew her attention up the street. We both turned to see the barrel of a rifle sticking out the open window of a pickup truck, like in a cartoon or an old movie, holding her as its target. The door swung open with a screech and a young man stepped out, not taking his sights off Jenny. Although his silhouette could have been any boy in town—cowboy hat, T-shirt, jeans, and boots—neither of us needed light to know who was after her.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said, though she hadn’t. “You get your ass in the truck.”
She stood her ground for a moment and a swell of wind came over them, shuffling the leaves of the nearby trees.
“But my mother,” she said, not pleading but rather calm, “you know she needs my help.”
“You should have thought about that before you tried to cross me.”
“I didn’t cross you,” she said. “You’ve been running on that shit for days. We both have. Let’s go inside and get some sleep. I’ll hold you ’til you’re tired. You aren’t thinking straight.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said and motioned with his gun that she get moving.
As she stepped across her lawn, she looked to her neighbors’ windows, all dark. Defeated, her shoulders slumped and she made the last slow steps to the open passenger door. After she climbed in, Svenson circled the front of the truck, sights still trained on her, opened his door, and stuck the barrel of the rifle deep into her stomach before he got behind the wheel. After his door screeched shut he threw the truck in gear and peeled out into the street where I stood, lead-footed, unable to jump out of the way as he ran me down. I raised my hands before my face to block the light, then bolted upright in my bus seat, the lights of the tall buildings of downtown Minneapolis flickering on in the growing twilight. An hour to go and we couldn’t get back fast enough.