He tries the diner next. Not really hungry after the corn dogs and venison, but he orders a stack of pancakes with bacon. Donna is the soft one, large and matronly, always kind. “How are you, Jim?” she asks, and there’s room left for him to answer.
“You’re really asking,” he says.
“Yes.”
“I like that. Why is Rhoda’s family so much better than mine?”
She chuckles, soft and friendly. “You haven’t been to any of our meetings about the estate. We’re the worst family you could imagine.”
“But even when you say that, you seem so nice it’s hard to believe.”
“I’m one of the ones cutting Rhoda out of the will. My own closest sister. Because we need the money for our new house. We went too far. The mortgage is too big.”
“How could you do that to her?”
“Mom always hated Rhoda, because she was too much like her. So I’m just following her wishes. I’m not doing anything to mend the situation and make it fair. If I were a good person, I would want it to be fair, but I’m not. I can see now I’m like everyone else.”
“Rhoda’s not like that.”
“True. She’s actually generous and fundamentally doesn’t care about money. I know she’ll still love me and talk to me even after I screw her in the estate.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. But back to the question. How are you?”
Jim is looking around at this place, a basic diner, nothing fancy, big plates of eggs and potatoes and pancakes, all-day breakfast mixed in with turkey dinners and minestrone soup for late lunch or an afternoon snack, almost all the customers obese and wearing crap jackets over T-shirts, most of the men in baseball caps. He never belonged here. “About me,” he says. “Maybe I’m going to kill myself soon, very soon. Who knows? I don’t know when it started or when it will end. But I need to see Rhoda again. You have to help me see her.”
Donna sets down the plates she’s been holding, the remains of someone else’s lunch. She looks so much more tired suddenly. “Don’t do that to her, Jim,” she says. “You don’t know what it’s like after a suicide, when it’s someone who was close. You could break her with that. Even Rhoda. Strongest person I know, but if you add that right after she’s been through this, less than a year later, I think that’s too much. You can’t do it.”
“It’s not a thing I can make a decision about. I’m just reporting to you the way things are going, not saying I want them to go that way.”
“You know that’s not true. You’re making a decision, even now. When my dad was running away, my mom didn’t have to raise the shotgun and fire. She could have let him go. She had already written a suicide note to him.”
“I think she pulled the trigger without a thought, without a single thought.”
“It was a choice.”
“What if she was only watching at that point? No longer living her life but only watching it happen? Momentum. Everything set in motion.”
“Don’t believe that. It’s dangerous to believe that.”
“But think about what was happening in your mother’s life. The marriage over, against her will, no choice at all about it, and he’d just told her he’d had an affair for the last sixteen years, right?”
“Yes.”
“And he said all those years were a lie, as if she didn’t live them. Sixteen years gone, and the worth of all the married years before that. Maybe that’s too much to lose.”
“That’s true, but she still didn’t have to kill him.”
“I think she did, and just because he had a big gun collection. That simple. The guns were there, and everything in her life was not possible, and that’s when a gun bridges the gap. The gun brings the pieces back together. It’s like a power to bend time and event, the only thing that can fight momentum. The world can make sense again. And more than that, she can become real again. After she pulls the trigger, she reenters her life. She’s present again, and that’s what she had lost.”
“You’re dangerous, Jim. Don’t you see my sister.”
“But I have to see her.”
“Don’t you do it. Don’t you take her from me, you asshole.” Donna has grabbed his upper arm now, shaking it, and he realizes she’s so big and her arms as strong as his.
“Do you have a gun?” she asks.
“No,” he says, and he’s trying to free his arm but she’s holding on and they’re both standing now, and people are looking. “I don’t have it. I’m seeing a therapist, and they made me stay away.”
“Well you stay away. That’s right. You stay away from all of us. Go back to Alaska and do whatever you want up there.”
She’s pulling him toward the door, the second time today he’s been forced to leave. Apparently he’s not getting along with anyone too well. “My pancakes,” he says.
“You leave her alone, Jim,” she says, and he can feel her shaking as she pushes him out the door and the small bells jingle and she closes it after him fast and locks it. Only glass, and he has the pistol and could shoot her right now through the glass and shoot some of the good folk eating their pancakes, too, but he feels too tired. So tired and so low, crashing fast, and he just sits on the edge of one of the huge ceramic pots holding flowers. A bit of sun coming through the clouds, bright overcast, and no one driving or walking on this street knows anything about him or what was just said, all reset again, waiting for the new Jim to re-form.