Sly and his cigarette waited on the porch while the lawmen ran through the rain to get back to the dock. It was so damn quiet on this lump of land in the middle of the water that he could hear everything. Just everything. A tree full of birds tweeted to his left. The shushing sound of waves hitting the shore came from all around him. Before long, he heard the tap of hard knotted rope hitting the deck of Sheriff Rainey’s boat. The wordless murmur of two men’s voices drifted up to him, as did the quick cough of a boat motor coming to life.
He was not surprised to hear the house’s front door open behind him as that motor raced for a second before the sheriff shoved his throttle forward. Joe had been listening, making sure they were gone before coming outside to have a long-overdue talk with his old man.
The boy—who was past thirty and a family man, so he should stop calling him a boy—lowered himself into the rocker beside him. Their chairs were conveniently located so that they didn’t have to look each other in the face, and Sly was glad for that. After a time, and not a long time because Joe had been waiting to ask this question for years, Sly heard his son take a deep breath and say, “How did my mother die?”
***
Faye was trapped, as surely as if she were a mouse who had wanted a suspicious hunk of cheese a little too much and had paid the price. If she came out from under the porch now, Sly would know she’d been eavesdropping on his talk with the sheriff. That might have been okay. The more pressing matter, the thing that was going to keep her lurking under the staircase until they quit talking and went inside, was this: She couldn’t interrupt Sly while he was answering the most important question of Joe’s life.
This was going to be a problem. Joe was a hunter, so his ears were as attuned to the sounds of animals as hers were attuned to the sounds of boats. And Faye, technically, was an animal. To keep Joe from hearing her, she was going to have to sit still and try not to breathe. Or to sneeze.
Oh no, now she’d thought about sneezing. She raised her eyebrows and flared her nostrils and did every other facial contortion that might distract the reflexive part of her brain that wanted to sneeze. Just as she thought the urge would never pass, Sly started to talk and she forgot all about sneezing.
***
“What do you mean? How’d your mama die? Son, you was there. Didn’t you hear anything the doctors said?”
Silence.
Sly only let the quietness hang for a second. “I guess you didn’t. Or you was too upset to pay any attention. Son, your mama had cancer. Of the ovary.”
“I never heard of anybody getting cancer and dying the same week. You were gone on a long haul. A real long haul. You came home and she went straight to the hospital and died.”
“It was more than one long haul. That’s what shames me. I was gone two…three…months. I think it was just three. I hope so. I should’ve asked her more questions before I went. She should’ve told me more than she did, too, but it ain’t right to blame the dead.”
“You’re saying she didn’t tell you everything. What part did she leave out?”
Faye heard a long sighing drag on a cigarette.
“Patricia left out the part that said she was dying. She—” Sly’s voice had ramped up until he was nearly shouting before he stopped himself and started again, quietly. “She did tell me she had cancer. She did. But there’s the way she said it and there’s the way I heard it and there’s the way it really was. She said the doctor said she didn’t need any operation, which I was real glad to hear, since we didn’t have any insurance. She said the doctor had give her some pills that would do her for a while, then maybe she’d need some radiation. Or chemo. Or something.”
“I don’t remember her getting chemo or radiation.”
“She didn’t, but them words scared me, because I knew I couldn’t pay for ’em. All I could think of was the money and how I could get enough to pay her bills. And I’ll tell you for true, I wasn’t even nice to her about it. I wasn’t thinking about how she felt at all.”
“You weren’t real good at that.”
Another deep breath was filtered through a cigarette. “Nope. And I didn’t do any better by you. Years probably went by that I didn’t say a nice word to neither one of you. I never got happy unless I was on the road. I was a big man out there. They knew me at the truck stops and the pool halls and the bars. They knew I was always happy to buy a man a drink or tip a waitress enough to make her smile, because five or ten dollars can make you look like a big man when everybody’s been drinking long enough. Coming home to that shitty house I’d rented for the two of you only reminded me how I wasn’t big. I was little. And I always would be. Thinking about them doctor bills I wasn’t going to be able to pay just made it worse…made me worse.”
There was silence again and this time Faye noticed something special about it. It was truly silence. There was no clacking of beer bottles hitting wooden porch tables. Neither man had twisted off a bottle top and tossed it on the floor. She heard no sips, no swallows.
Joe was a light drinker and so was she. There was wine and beer in the refrigerator and they’d offered it to Sly when he arrived, then they’d failed to notice when he drank nothing but coffee for two weeks. She wondered how long he’d been sober.
“Women don’t just up and die because their husbands are mean to them. If she didn’t need surgery or chemo or radiation for the cancer, how bad could it’ve been? Dad. She died. She passed out and we took her to the hospital and she never woke up again.”
“You think you’re telling me something I don’t know? I came home from all those hauls, bringing more money than usual but surely not enough to pay for cancer. And she was hardly there. You didn’t see it?”
“See what?”
“Son, I don’t think she’d ate a bite since I drove away.”
Now came the slight whistling intake of breath, the little choking sound that was the only sign that Faye’s husband was crying, and Faye knew that she was going to have to find a way to start eating again. Knowing what he knew now about his mother, it would kill Joe if he had to keep watching her waste away, just as it was killing her to hear him cry.
She’d heard this sound during the whirlwind emergency that had been Michael’s birth. She’d heard it on the day Amande was kidnapped. And she mustn’t think about this now or he’d hear her weeping, too, but she’d heard it on the day they lost the baby.
“Mama was always skinny. And tall. Must’ve been almost six foot. I was near fifteen before I passed her up. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see how sick she was.”
Sly’s voice lowered a tone, deep and warm, and Faye heard the note Joe used when he was talking to little Michael. “When you passed her up, you passed her up. You was a half-a-foot taller than her by the time she went, and you only eighteen years old. When you looked down at her, she just looked little. How was you supposed to see that she was getting littler every day? I should have been there. I’d have seen it.”
“But you said the doctors thought she didn’t need any medicine. I don’t understand.”
“That’s not what they thought. When I finally met her doctors—and they musta thought I was a genuine asshole not to have come met them before that—they told me what they really thought. She was too far gone for surgery when they first found it. Maybe for chemo, too, I don’t know. But radiation would’ve shrunk it. It would’ve shrunk it up. Eased her pain. Given her some more time. She thought it was stupid to pay for radiation that wasn’t gonna save her, so she told them to give her some pain pills and send her home.”
“For three months? She hurt for three months with just pills to help her? Dad.”
This time, there wasn’t even the sound of a man sucking in smoke. There was nothing to crack open the quiet night.
“No, Son, she didn’t hurt for three months with just pain pills. She didn’t take them. For three months, she didn’t take ’em. She saved ’em up until I’d got home and she knew you wouldn’t be by yourself, then she took ’em all. So, you see, a woman can just up and die, when things get bad enough.”