POPS HAD SOMEHOW MANAGED TO LIVE not only through that night at The Valhalla but through all the years since. What’s more, the man he thought might kill him had done much less than that: he’d died himself, years later, in Pops’s disbelieving company.
It was a long way from that night in Chicago to Pops’s wake, and maybe longer still from La La Lyng to Bett Bargaard, but there she was. Spending her final moments by his open casket. Her head tilted heavenward, her black shawl like something from central casting, her fingers laced at her chest, she appeared in much the same way I imagined Pops would have, had his ghost walked in to comfort her. The funeral director waited in the otherwise empty funeral parlor, his finger swiping an iPad, his tie still knotted. I’d not worn a tie, or even a jacket, and suddenly that felt shameful. As I buried my hands in the pocket of my khaki trousers, Bett unlaced hers and turned to offer wordless permission to the director, who stepped to the casket and lowered the lid. He shook Bett’s hand and bowed his head and, though I could not hear him, I suspected from the look on his face that his condolences were sincere. While he whispered, she turned to face me for the first time since I’d arrived. She didn’t smile. But then, she rarely did.
When the director turned to leave her side, he signaled me to join them.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t know there were two sons.” He gestured toward the casket. “Would you like to see your father? I can open it again.”
“No. Thank you. I’d rather keep the memory I have.”
“Not uncommon,” he said, then held up the iPad as though to say he had details to attend to. With that he hurried off, leaving Bett and me alone and face-to-face for the first time in years. It occurs to me now how instructive it is that the first thing I said to her, there beside Pops’s cold casket, was “Can I help pay for this?” I meant all of it—the casket, the service, the burial plot wherever that would be. I hadn’t meant to be businesslike, hadn’t meant to replace the director’s tone with one no doubt similar. I simply didn’t know how to talk to her.
“It’s okay, Jon. Your father had all this accounted for.” She took my hand with both of hers and held it between us. “You didn’t want to see him?”
Her touch was like a dizzying spell, and I can remember well the sensation of weakness in my legs. I looked over at the casket, then back at her. The softness of her hands holding mine, Pops there beside me, cocooned in white silk and his only suit: it was as if I finally realized why I was back in the first place. I can also remember those few tears sliding down my face. And Bett reaching into her purse to retrieve a handkerchief.
“I guess not,” I finally answered, wiping my cheeks.
“I understand.”
“I don’t,” I said, and hiccupped a laugh. “Anton did a nice job.”
“He did.”
“Where is he?”
“He went to pick Angelica up at the airport. Her flight was delayed because of the snow.”
“Of course,” I said, as though I hadn’t forgotten about his daughter. A new wave of shame rose in me.
“I need to sit down,” she said, and did, in the same chair she had occupied during the service. “Here,” she patted the one next to her. “Angel is almost fifteen now, can you believe that?”
“I can’t.”
“How are your kids?”
“They’re good. Great.”
“And Ingrid?”
“She’s terrific.”
“She’s not here,” Bett said.
I might have bristled or been embarrassed again, but the best I could do was admit she wasn’t. How could I explain to Bett that Ingrid’s grievances shared no resemblance to mine? How could I describe Ingrid’s fierce loyalty to our children to a woman who had no loyalty to me, much less to Annika and Clara and Ben? Did I dare say that if it had been she who had passed away, I might not have been there? Did my expression betray any of this?
I didn’t know the answers to these questions, but when Bett said, “Should we go have dinner?” it was a relief to escape from the pall of resentment.
“Sure,” I said.
We sat silently for a moment, each of us looking at Pops’s casket, before I returned the handkerchief. She put it back in her purse and snapped it closed and then held it tight on her lap. “He’d be very happy you’re here, Jon. It would be a great relief for him to see the two of us sitting together.” Now she took my hand once more. “It’s a relief to me, too.”
This calmed me, and we looked at each other and smiled before she said, “Let’s go home.”
Home. For Bett that meant the house Pops built on Fifth and Russell in north Minneapolis when she found out she was pregnant with me. This would have been the summer of ’59, the same year he shelved his competitive jumping skis after finishing in third place at the national championships in Leavenworth, Washington. He always told us the house took him three months from the concrete foundation to drapes in the windows, and all that without a power tool in his arsenal.
Here was the house I grew up in but also a place that seemed almost never to have existed at all, and when I followed Bett’s old Ford Taurus into the driveway it felt not like a homecoming but as though I were visiting the home of a character in one of my novels. As she parked in the garage and her taillights flicked off, I killed my engine, too. The headlights dimmed and the falling snow disappeared in the darkness. I got out and walked over to her, and offered my arm as we walked to the door on the side of the house.
“Anton will shovel this blasted snow when he gets here,” she said, searching for the keyhole in the dark. “Sixty winters I’ve lived in Minneapolis. Never missed one of them.”
“How many in this house?” I said.
As she unlocked the door, she spoke over her shoulder. “Fifty-five.”
Bett removed her coat and hung it carefully behind the door. She untied her boots and slid them off and stepped into a pair of house slippers before going to the kitchen sink and turning on the light above it. I recognized the choreographed arrival, one practiced since I was a teenager. Next would come the transistor radio on the windowsill, and the voice of some WCCO news anchor announcing headlines and weather on the 8s. I told myself I’d remove my own coat and shoes if the radio came to life, which it did only a second later.
When I reached behind the door to place my coat on another of the hooks, I saw Pops’s mackinaw hanging there, the green wool worn smooth by so many Minneapolis winters. His hat was there as well, one of those Elmer Fudd numbers with the ear flaps. His boots sat on the floor next to Bett’s. It was not the last time I’d experience his ghost that night.
“Come in. Sit down,” she said, tying an apron behind her back and gesturing at the kitchen table. As soon as I saw it, the tears welled up again. I pressed them back.
“Can I make you some coffee?” she said.
“Do you still keep a bottle of brandy up there?” I pointed at the cabinet above the stove.
“It was your father’s brandy,” she said, standing on her tiptoes and opening the cupboard. The bottle was still there. She nudged a footstool over and stepped up to retrieve it. She uncapped the bottle and poured a finger into a snifter brought down from the same cupboard as the booze. “Jon,” she said. “Please sit down.”
I took the glass to the kitchen table and sat facing the window onto the backyard. The light above the garage door showed the swirling snow and it occurred to me that driving home to Duluth wouldn’t be a good idea. I took my phone out and looked at the weather app. It was snowing at home, too, with several inches forecast before midnight.
“Honestly,” Bett said. “You kids can’t go five minutes without looking at your gizmos.”
“Just checking the weather. I was planning to drive home tonight.”
“Oh, nonsense. We’re supposed to get ten inches of snow. That’s what they said on the radio.”
As if to take her side, the radio trumpeted its news alert, then a familiar voice crackled over the airwaves. “This is Tom Allworth with your WCCO news update. Snow continues to fall over most of Minnesota tonight . . .” he droned, filing a weather report three entire minutes and chock full of details. As a Minnesotan, I hear those reports like I hear old, almost-forgotten songs. Which is to say I practically hummed along with Mr. Allworth, right up until he concluded: “A travel advisory is in effect for all of Minnesota through noon tomorrow.”
“See?” Bett said, nodding at the radio and sitting across from me.
“I wasn’t planning on this,” I said, checking the time on my phone. It was a few minutes after seven o’clock. “I better call Ingrid.”
“Ingrid can wait a minute, yes? Sit here with me. Before Anton gets home. Enjoy your brandy.”
I unwrapped the scarf still around my neck and took a sip.
“It’s been a long time since you and I sat together, Jon.”
“It sure has.” I took another sip and set the snifter on the table. Bett reached across and lifted the glass and took a sip herself.
“Not much has changed around here,” she said.
“I noticed.” It even smelled familiar, like the furniture polish she used and of coffee left too long in the pot.
“And what about you?” she asked.
“Not much is changed with me either. Still teaching at St. Scholastica. Still wondering how the kids grew up so fast. Still doing my best to impress Ingrid.”
“And still writing those books. I read the last one. About the lighthouse keeper and his wife.” Her eyebrows arched. “I wonder where you come up with those stories.”
“I couldn’t say, to tell you the truth.”
“A woman who pretends to be a man? An upstanding man who has to keep his true self hidden? All that shame and lying, it’s interesting to you?”
“They’re more than interesting,” I said, and took another long sip of brandy. “What time will Anton and Angel be here?”
“Are you hungry? You must be hungry,” she said as she stood. “I can find you something to nibble on before dinner.”
“You don’t need to do that. I’m fine.”
“How rude of me—”
“Bett,” I said, “it’s okay.”
She stopped where she stood, reached for the bottle of brandy on the counter, then came back to the table. She sat down and poured another ounce in the glass and took another sip before sliding it across the table. “I’m sorry, Jon. I just don’t know how to act around you.”
“Like you said, let’s just sit here. Tell me about Pops. What happened?”
She folded her hands atop the table, sighed, and looked at the ceiling, her long, thin neck whitening in the light from above. “He was out in the garage. Had just shoveled the driveway and he was changing the wiper blades on the car. Anton found him. He was coming over for Sunday dinner. I was just in here making pork chops. I didn’t even know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She lowered her chin and looked at me. “I’m sorry, too. They say when things like this happen, you’re supposed to know. You’re supposed to sense it. Feel it in your heart. I had no idea.” She sighed. “They say he probably had a heart attack. They say he probably died quickly.” Her voice was emotionless, but the expression on her face betrayed something. A vulnerability I don’t think I’d ever seen before.
“Will you be okay here?” I asked.
“I hope so. Anton will help.”
“Where’s he living now?”
“He’s got an apartment up on Broadway and Washington. Right by the bar,” she said, and whatever vulnerability had briefly touched her was gone as quickly as it had come.
“It’s okay for Angelica to stay there?”
“She’ll stay here, of course. She has your old room.”
“Anton’s running the show there at Boff’s?”
“Well, it’s still Sheb’s place, but yes. Anton’s the manager.”
It was with Sheb’s godforsaken name reverberating in the space between us that Anton’s headlights appeared muted in the snow. The light shone through the window beside the kitchen table and stalled there, almost throbbing, the snow outside lit again. Bett pulled the curtain aside and nodded and said, “I told him to put new tires on that truck.”
I looked outside, too, and could see his pickup stuck on the slight incline of the driveway. My car, even with its snow tires and front-wheel drive, had slipped as I pulled up. I watched him back the truck out of the driveway and park it on the street. A moment later Anton and Angelica stepped out, their silhouettes moving swiftly toward the house. They burst in behind a gale of laughter. Bett hurried to meet them.
“Angel,” she said, her voice more alive than I ever remember hearing it. “You’re here, sweetheart.”
“Hi, Nana. I’m sorry the plane was late. I’m sorry I missed Pops’s funeral.”
I watched them hug, saw Anton kiss Bett’s cheek as he dropped his daughter’s bag and smile as he looked at me. “This guy’s everywhere I go all of a sudden.” He turned to his daughter. “Hey Angel, you remember your uncle Jon?”
She pushed the fur-lined hood of her parka back and offered her outstretched hand. “Hi,” she said.
“It’s been such a long time, Angelica. You’re not a kid anymore.”
“I guess it’s what happens,” Anton said. “They change when it’s a decade between seeing them.” Next he spoke to Bett. “Almost dinner time? I could eat a goddamned horse.”
“I’ll get it ready.”
“Thanks, Ma. Angel, want to help Nana?”
She followed Bett into the kitchen while Anton took off his coat and boots. Angelica was already helping Bett unload dinner from the fridge and was cutting cheddar cheese and folding slices of roast beef onto a small platter before Anton sat down and looked out the window. He motioned for me to join him.
“If it keeps snowing like this,” he said, grinning, “we could have an accumulation.” And then he sprang up like he’d forgotten the most important thing, weaving between his mother and daughter and into the fridge, where he grabbed two bottles of High Life and a can of Coke. The soda he cracked and set on the counter by Angel, the beers he uncapped, handing one to me and tipping the other in my direction as he sat down again.
“That was a very nice remembrance you gave tonight, Anton,” Bett said.
He finished a long pull from his beer. “It’s what you’re supposed to say at something like this, right?” He took another drink of beer. “You have something to snack on, Ma?”
She stopped what she was doing and reached into a cupboard and retrieved a bag of potato chips, which Anton tore open and grabbed a handful. His phone pinged, and he removed it from his pocket and read the message.
“You driving back to Duluth tonight?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
He finished the last third of his beer. I hadn’t even sipped mine yet. “Then enjoy your beer. You can crash at my place.”
His phone pinged again. He looked at it, said “Fuck you” under his breath, and then turned to Bett. “Let’s get this grub on the table. Jon needs something to wash down his beer.”
As quickly as that, the fixings were spread across the counter. Roast beef and cheese and mustard and pickles and onions. A bowl of macaroni salad. The bag of chips. A loaf of bakery bread, which Bett cut in slices as we made our plates. We all gathered around the kitchen table again, the three of them conversing easily and happily, almost as if we hadn’t just said goodbye to Pops for the last time. Only once was he mentioned. Angel asked what he looked like in the casket and Anton said, “Like he was dressed for church.”
“How’s your mom?” I said.
Angel looked up at Anton in what I understood was a request for permission to speak. He nodded, and she said, “Fine.”
“What’s she up to?” I asked.
“I don’t know. She waitresses at this place called Pequod’s. And she takes classes at City Colleges.”
“Always trying to improve her circumstances, that one,” Bett said.
“Hey,” Anton snapped.
“I miss you is all,” she told Angel.
“I miss you too, Nana.”
“But you’re here now—right, girl?” Anton said. “Tomorrow we’ll go out to the mall. I bet that sounds pretty good.”
“Thanks, daddy.”
“What kind of classes is she taking?” I asked, not oblivious to the tension Esme, Angel’s mother and Anton’s ex-wife, aroused as a topic of conversation, but also genuinely curious. I’d seen her only six or eight times, but she had impressed me from the first minute as the best thing that had ever happened to Anton. At least until Angel came along.
“She’s taking phlebotomy classes.”
“Like, how to take blood?” Anton said, smirking.
“She’s gonna get a certificate, then she’ll work at a clinic or blood bank.”
Bett sat up to say something, but before she could, Anton shot her a warning stare. They both might have been thinking the same thing—that Esme was already a bloodsucker—but Anton didn’t want Angel to hear them badmouth her mother.
“Good for her,” I said.
“She’ll be done in May.”
“Tell her hello from me,” I said.
“Yeah, me, too,” Anton said, taking a bite from his sandwich.
“Don’t be an asshole, daddy.”
“Never.” He reached for her hand and held it for a moment. “Angel’s gonna be a senior next year. Straight As for this one. Just like Uncle Jon.”
“You misremember,” I said. “I hardly ever got any As, much less straight.” To Angel I said, “What’re your favorite subjects?”
“Math and science.”
“Maybe you could go to college for phlebotomy, too,” Anton said, the tone of his voice shifting. “You and your mom can open a business togeth—”
The chime of his phone interrupted his meanness. He read the message, closed his eyes against it, then looked at me. “Well, big brother, we have to end this fête a little early.” Then he turned to Angel. “I’ve got some work to do tonight, kiddo. Uncle Jon’s gonna come with me. But I’ll be back first thing tomorrow morning. We’ll be at the mall when the doors open.”
“But what about the cake?” Bett said. “I made Angel’s favorite.”
“Save me and Jon a piece for breakfast tomorrow.”
Bett put her fork down. She got up and walked through the kitchen and into the living room.
“What’s up?” I asked, meaning with Bett.
“I suppose she’s upset we’re leaving.” He took Angel’s hand again. “Why don’t you finish your sandwich and then clean up this mess for Nana. Maybe you can talk her into a game of cribbage.”
“Do you really have to go?” she asked.
“Sheb’s an asshole.”
The look on her face changed immediately. Resigned and disappointed and understanding. I wondered if it was the look of a child used to moving between her parents. Used to wishing things were different.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“It’s okay, daddy. Tomorrow will be fun. Can we go to Vescio’s for dinner?”
“Anything you want,” Anton said. “I’m gonna say goodbye to Nana.”
He walked into the living room, leaving Angel and me alone in the kitchen. “It was a nice funeral,” I told her. “Your dad’s eulogy was terrific.”
“Well, he loved him.”
“Did he?”
She ignored my question and finished eating.
“What did you think about Pops?” I asked.
“I thought he was the nicest man in the world.” She got up and brought her plate to the counter. “Do you want anything more to eat, Uncle Jon?”
“No, thanks,” I said. When Angel started putting things away, I got up and helped her. We worked without speaking and it wasn’t until we were wiping the bread crumbs off the cutting board that Anton came back to the kitchen and clapped his hands.
“All right, sweetheart. Grandma wants to play some cribbage. Don’t keep her up too late. You too. Hit the sack early. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
“Okay, daddy.”
He took his leather coat from the hook and gave her a big hug. “I love you, Angel my angel.”
She smiled. “I love you, too.” To me she said, “It was nice to see you, Uncle Jon.”
“Yeah. It was. I hope it won’t be so long before it happens again.”
I stepped to the door and kicked my boots on and donned my coat and stepped out into the night. Anton was right behind me.
“We can take my truck,” he said, clicking the remote key so the lights beamed on the unrelenting snow.
As he drove off, I looked up at the house. The curtains were half-open in the big front window and Bett was standing there, watching us go. I hated myself for the relief I felt at leaving her. I hated myself again when I took a pull off Anton’s offered flask, but the wash of hot bourbon shook me from my self-incrimination.
“Life’s just never gonna be easy for her,” Anton said, his truck fishtailing in the snow. He took a drink, too.
“Will she be all right?”
“She was never all right,” he said.
“So it’s not just me?”
He looked over at me, his face glowing in the light of the dashboard. “Never has been, brother.”
It was a good reminder. “Where are we going, anyway? What’s the rush?”
“First stop’s the barge office. After that, let’s see where the night takes us.”
As he turned north onto Penn, I dialed Ingrid’s number. When the call went to voicemail, I told her I was staying the night in Minneapolis and asked her to call me back when she could. I put my phone back in my pocket, and Anton turned the radio on. It was tuned to a classical music station, and he started playing an imaginary violin. Outside the snow swirled in the streetlights like it would never land. When we got to Plymouth Avenue, he made a right and turned down the volume on the radio.
“There’s something you should know about Sheb. He’s old as fuck and looks like half the man he used to be, but what he lacks in youth and size he makes up for with meanness.”
“Why would I care about Sheb?”
With his right hand slung over the steering wheel, he turned to look at me. “Because you’re going to want to tell him to go fuck himself, and I’d advise against it.”
“Tell him to go fuck himself?”
Now he looked back out at the street. There were no cars in front of us. Any time he slowed or accelerated the truck fishtailed. At times, it seemed almost to be floating off the street. “Not all of us are out from under him.”
It was my turn to look sideways at Anton. He glanced back at me and raised his arms as though he were an orchestra conductor focusing on the oboes, whose sound suddenly filled the truck. “Not out from under him?” I said.
“Fucksakes, Jon, quit repeating me. You know what I mean. You know Sheb’s got us by the balls. That hasn’t changed just because you drove down from Duluth to say goodbye to Pops.”
I didn’t respond.
“Listen, just don’t be a prick. To Sheb especially. But don’t give me any shit either, right?”
“Yep.”
He knocked back another drink of whiskey and dropped the flask on the center console. “I can’t believe the son-of-a-bitch called me out in this.” He gestured at the blizzard. “Of course, Sheb’s got a driver, and brand new snow tires.”
A question occurred to me, and I asked it before I thought better. “Did he pay for Pops’s funeral?”
Anton glanced at me again. He reached inside his coat and fished from the pocket not his booze but a wad of cash. “I paid for the fucking funeral,” he said, holding up the bills as we passed under a streetlight. “Feel free to kick in.”
I might have pleaded my case—that I’d already offered Bett money, that I was willing—but I only nodded and told him I would. I was beginning to see myself in a way that felt unfamiliar. And despite the fact that by that hour in our lives Anton and I were as removed as we had ever been, he seemed to know me better than I knew myself. It was almost as if he possessed my own sixth sense. And it wouldn’t be the last time that was true on that night.