IT WASN’T UNTIL the next day that Dec could get his father alone. He arrived home from school to find the house empty and made his way to the shop. It was empty as well, apart from the miniature troops crowding the worktable: Brits, Yanks, Canucks. They were all lined up and ready, painted and waiting. On the beach, the Nazis were waiting, too, sandbagged and camouflaged, dressed in Feldgrau — field grey. His father had talked about it all through dinner. He’d talked about all sorts of things — anything he could think of that wasn’t anything at all.
Dec found him, at last, up at the House of Memory. The front door was wide open and he was in the vestibule with his tool kit and the packaging for a security system. He was attaching the alarm keypad to the wall and didn’t hear Dec arrive over the sound of the drill. He started when he saw him.
“Thought you might be the man from the phone company,” he said. “We’re going to have to get the line reconnected.”
Dec stood at the threshold. ‘Birdie says you’re getting married.”
His father carried on with his task. The drill whirred; another screw sank home. He spoke calmly but firmly. “She spoke out of turn,” he said.
“So you’re not getting married?”
The drill whirred again. Stopped. Bernard stepped back to inspect his work. “We’re looking into an annulment.”
“What’s that?”
“A judicial proceeding to nullify the marriage. That’s all.”
That’s all, thought Dec. Declare the marriage null, as if it had never happened. He leaned against the doorframe.
“Does Lindy know?”
His father looked cross. “Lindy was beyond caring about any of us a very long time ago.”
“You know that for a fact?” demanded Dec. “She told you that?”
“No,” said his father. “How many times do I have to tell you, Son? I have not heard from her. Period.” With a weary sigh he sat down on the pew. He bent over his drill, removing the Phillips head bit, putting it back in its case. Then he carefully placed the case back in the neatly appointed tool kit. He looked up at Dec, squinting a bit from the sun. “What’s all this about?”
Dec shifted his weight to the other leg. What was it about?
“Birdie has been good to you,” said his father patiently. “She’s been a mother for Sonya, who never really knew Lindy. And as for me, where am I likely to find another woman her equal?”
Not in your workshop, Dec thought. Not unless you send away to a model company. Maybe you could get someone in l:72-inch scale.
He wanted to say that, but he held his tongue.
“Dec, do you have a problem with this?”
Dec shook his head. But he did, he did have a problem. Lindy. Her memory, buried for so long, had burst out of him like a jack-in-the-box, demanding his attention. She was everywhere, especially up here.
“It’s just that Mom…never…”
But he wasn’t sure what Mom never did. Never said goodbye?
“I’m listening,” said his father.
But for some reason Dec didn’t want to share his thoughts with his father. Didn’t want to share Lindy with him.
“Is this about the estate?”
Dec’s head jerked back. “What?”
“Is that what’s on your mind?” said his father. “Because the estate is not an issue. It will be settled on you and Sunny. That’s the way it was always going to be. Birdie knows that.”
Dec’s face puckered with distaste. “I don’t care about the money,” he said. “And I sure as hell don’t care about this place.” It wasn’t what he meant to say, not really, but he couldn’t take it back.
His father replaced the portable drill in its case and snapped the lid shut. He looked up, his face a mask. “Well, that’s useful to know,” he said.
He looked past Dec down the hill. He frowned and glanced at his wrist, which was bare, though the skin was pale where his watch should have been.
“What happened to your watch?”
His father looked at him, still frowning and looking a little pained. “I broke it,” he said. Then he picked up his tool kit and squeezed past Dec out the door.
“How?”
His father stopped on the porch and turned slowly back.
“How what?”
“How’d you break your watch?”
His father’s hurt expression deepened. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a simple question, Dad. A guy wears a watch every day, then suddenly he’s not wearing it.”
His father glanced again at his wrist. “I broke it when I was building the wall in my shop, okay? Why do you want to know?”
Dec rubbed his face. “Forget it,” he said. But from the look in his father’s eyes, he didn’t look as if he was going to forget it any too soon.
With one last worried glance back at Dec, he left. Dec watched him until he had disappeared over the lip of the hill. Then he closed the door and leaned his forehead against it, his eyes closed. In the dark of his mind he saw his father, his hand grasping the neck of a bronze statuette. He saw him raise the thing high in the air and bring it down with such force on the back of Denny Runyon’s head that the watch on his father’s arm flew apart.
He opened his eyes with a start.
A rattling sound interrupted his thoughts. It came from inside. He listened, heard a low murmuring: Lindy talking to herself. Or so he thought. Then he wondered if she was talking to someone else, though no one answered her. He peered through the crack of the vestibule door.
She was in the front hall, standing on a stepladder in her flouncy wedding dress and a black cowboy hat. The ladder was near the bookcase. She must have been kneeling on the topmost step because the chiffon of the dress fell down around the ladder, making it look as if she had absurdly long, aluminium legs. He almost laughed but stopped himself. He was upset with her. Why hadn’t she come to meet the bus? She always met him at the bottom of the hill. What was she doing up on a ladder talking to herself?
Then he realized she was talking to one of the busts that stood on the top of the book cabinets. She was eye to eye with it — the one with the broken nose and the scowling face. She had one hand on the shelf for balance; the other hand was stroking the statue’s bronze head. She was so close — whispering close — and it almost looked to Dec as if she was going to kiss it.
She jerked her hands away and teetered on her perch.
“Mom!” he cried, afraid she was going to fall.
“Dec,” she said, when she had recovered her balance. “Jeez, you scared me!” She clambered down the steps and turned to him, brushing her hands together, rubbing them down the front of her dress. “Is it so late?”
“What were you doing?”
Her eyes grew large, as if she was holding back a joke. She looked up at the bust and then back at Dec.
“I was sharing a little secret with Mr. Know-it-all,” she said at last.
Dec looked up at the grim face. “What secret?” he asked.
She came and gave him a brisk hug and a smacking great kiss right on the top of his head.
“It wouldn’t be a secret if I told you,” she said brightly. She rubbed at the fingers of her right hand. They were grimy but the substance came off easily enough in rubbery strands.
“Tell me,” he said.
She put her hands on her hips as if she was angry. “So now I’ve got two men around the house I have to answer to,” she said, tapping her foot. “And all the time I thought you were on my side.”
“I am,” he said. “Tell me what the secret is.”
The cowboy hat was a child’s thing with a string under the chin to hold it in place. There was a black-and-white whistle attached to the end of the string. Lindy put the whistle between her lips and blew three times. Dec stepped back, covering his ears.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I thought you were deaf.”
“I’m not deaf.”
“Well, then don’t keep asking me what the secret is. It’s private. A girl’s got to have some privacy. Don’t you think?”
He nodded but he was confused. Didn’t she trust him any more? “I never tell Daddy any of our secrets,” he said. “Honest.”
She smiled and made a kissy face. “I know you don’t, Skipper.”
Her hands cradled his face. She smoothed back his hair. “My, my,” she said, combing it out with her fingers. She took it in her hands on either side of his head and pulled it out like bird’s wings. She pulled and pulled.
“Owww!”
She stopped and leaned forward until she was eye to eye with him. “A boy should never have so much hair a girl can pull it,” she said.
Through the tears in his eyes, he gazed at the expectant look on her face. He knew what that meant.
“Time to get scalped?” he said.
“And who scalps Chief Big Hair?”
“Birdie does.”
“And who is Birdie?”
“The bestest friend a girl ever had?”
“You got it, Skipper.”
She held him close. The bodice of her dress felt crinkly and stiff against his cheek. It smelled old. He pulled away from her and she pouted.
“You don’t love me any more,” she said. And before he could say a word – before he could say that he loved her more than anything in the world, she found her whistle again and started blowing it so shrill and loud, Dec had to wrap his arms around his head. His eyes filled with fresh tears and he yelled at her to stop, but she just kept blowing till her face was as red as her hair.