Chapter Eleven

IT ONLY TAKES TEN MINUTES to walk to the sheriff’s station from Eatn’Park. It’s a small, square, nondescript building of tan brick fronted by a concrete courtyard with nowhere to sit and very few places to lean if a person decided to loiter. The American flag flapping on a white pole is of average size: slightly bigger than the one at the post office but much smaller than the one at the Ford car dealership across the road.

Sheriff Ivan Z is about to get into his cruiser. He hesitates with the driver’s side door open, trying to determine if I’m someone he wants to greet or speed away from.

He chooses the first option and comes walking toward me as I approach the building holding a white paper bag with two coffees and two smiley-face cookies inside it.

“Look at you,” I call out, smiling. “All dressed up. Full uniform. Even a hat. Where are you off to? A costume party?”

Ivan has a notorious dislike of uniforms. It was an ongoing dispute between him and the former sheriff that Ivan usually won simply because Sheriff Jack wasn’t going to show up at his house and force him into polyester pants and a keystone-shaped belt buckle every morning. Now that Ivan has the top job, he can’t get out of dressing the part from time to time. His public requires it.

He smiles back at me while wagging a warning finger.

“Better be careful or I’ll write you up for hurting the sheriff’s feelings. That for me?” he asks, glancing at the bag.

“Sorry,” I tell him. “For my kid. How have you been? It’s been awhile. How’s that hot doctor you were dating?”

“She married that asshole lawyer she was dating.”

“That’s depressing.”

“Yeah. Well, we had some fun together but I’m not ready to settle down yet.”

“Still have that lifetime of sleeping with beautiful girls ahead of you?”

He nods.

“How about you and your search for stimulating conversations?”

“I know there’s one out there.”

He continues smiling at me with his mouth, but the expression has left his eyes. They’ve become troubled. They’re still a striking blue, and I’m sure there are plenty of women eager to be seduced by them, but his years of hard drinking have taken their toll on the face they peer from and he looks older than he is.

He stares past me to the road beyond and past that to something I can’t see. He always had this habit even when he was at the height of his glory days and shouldn’t have had a care in the world. He never seemed able to stay in the moment for long; he was always searching for something, whether it was on the horizon or deep inside himself I could never tell.

Clay has the same look sometimes. I wonder fleetingly if it has something to do with the fact that both of them grew up without fathers.

Ivan lost his dad in the massive explosion that ripped through Gertie, wiping out half the male population of his hometown of Coal Run in a single morning.

I always felt a kinship with the Coal Run kids even though I had lost a mom instead of a dad and our grief was not entirely the same.

A mom takes care of a child in a hands-on way; a dad’s care is more abstract. When I lost my mom, it was like being on a camping trip and coming back from a hike and finding all my supplies missing: my food, my warm sleeping bag, the first-aid kit. When all those fathers were taken away, an entire town lost its compass.

The back to the station opens and Clay steps out. His uniform is pressed, his boots and badge rubbed clean, his dark hair cut short and neat, his body trim, his stride purposeful even when he has no purpose, his sunglasses in place so he can watch without giving away his own thoughts. Add to this his impeccable politeness, his unyielding belief in the necessity of rules, and what I call his “deputy voice,” and you have what appears to be, on the surface, the ideal cop.

It’s what’s going on below the surface that causes problems for him. He can’t relax. He can’t stop worrying. In his baby book under the Baby’s First Sentences heading, I have recorded: “I want goose,” which was how he pronounced “juice,” “I love Mama,” and “Don’t drive fast.”

One of his very first creative writing assignments in school was to describe his dream vacation. Other kids wrote about going to the beach, or Disney World, or the zoo, or even to their grandparents’ house. Clay wrote that he wanted to stay on the balcony outside our apartment with a cool drink and keep an eye on his mom’s parking space while she was at work.

Even now, on the occasions when I’ve seen him at his job, I always feel like he’s holding his breath the entire time. He reminds me of a balloon that’s been filled with too much air, and as soon as the problem is resolved, I expect him to release his tension all at once and go whizzing crazily through the air until he suddenly settles to the ground and there’s nothing left of him except an empty brown polyester deputy uniform with a badge pinned to it.

Ivan intercepts Clay and tells him something and Clay nods and nods again before continuing on his way toward me.

“And Penrose,” Ivan calls over his shoulder as he climbs into his car. “You have my permission to take the stick out of your butt while you’re talking to your mom.”

“Okay. Thanks,” Clay yells back.

He takes off his shades, slides them in his shirt pocket, and turns to me.

“That’s just the usual banter I have with the sheriff.”

“Banter with the sheriff? You sound like you just stepped out of an episode of Gunsmoke.”

I hand him his coffee and cookie.

“You look tired,” I tell him. “Did you do something wild and crazy for your birthday?”

“I spent the night babysitting Dusty at the Golden Pheasant.”

“Is he getting worse?” I ask, peeling the lid off my own coffee and watching the steam drift away.

“Brandi kicked him out,” Clay tells me. “He’s living at his restaurant until the end of the month when the bank takes it.”

“Wow. That’s terrible.” I take a sip of my coffee and stare forlornly at the scuffed tips of my boots. “That doesn’t sound like Brandi. Especially with three little kids at home. They’ve been through so much. She even forgave him for the affair he had with that skinny little fake blond publicist. I could’ve snapped one of her spindly little arms in two as easily as I can break a pencil.”

Clay frowns at me.

“You’re the only person I know who categorizes people by how easily you think you can cause them bodily harm.”

He slowly opens the bag and peers inside it like the cookie might be alive and eager to escape.

“I guess he’s become pretty hard to live with,” he goes on. “It’s hard enough being his friend anymore.”

He pulls out one of the cookies and hands it to me. He takes the other one for himself and leans back against the hood of a car after making sure that it’s not dirty.

“He’s been acting strange since the accident, and I’m not just talking about the post-traumatic stress symptoms they all suffered from: the chronic insomnia, the nightmares when he does sleep, the panic attacks, the mood swings.”

I’ve witnessed more than a few of E.J.’s panic attacks, but he gets them far less than he used to. Isabel says that Jimmy still has a bad nightmare now and then but for the most part the two of them, along with Lib and Ray, seem to be doing okay.

Dusty, on the other hand, always looks drawn and skittish. Every word out of his mouth is a complaint, or tinged with bitterness.

He’s become a far cry from the carefree little hell-raiser who used to sit at my kitchen table all innocent grins and dimples, eating a plate full of bacon and eggs after a sleepover with Clay while waiting for me to find the crayfish he put in my coffee mug.

He and Clay complemented each other perfectly back then. I believe Dusty single-handedly kept Clay from becoming a hermit when he moved back to Jolly Mount during the fifth grade. He dragged Clay to pickup baseball games over at the township park, taught him how to ride a bike, and made him go to his first girl-boy party, while, for his part, Clay explained the importance of periodic bathing to Dusty, taught him the joys of wrapping coins and cashing the rolls in at the bank for paper money, and happened to have a tube of Neosporin ointment and a pack of gauze bandages in his windbreaker pocket the day Dusty ripped open the palm of his hand on a rusted screw while playing on an old abandoned tipple.

Dusty had no fear. No hesitation. Everything he encountered was meant to be experienced physically. He never pondered or studied or wondered. A creek was meant to be splashed into. A road was meant to be crossed. A rock was meant to be thrown. A tree was meant to be climbed. A path was meant to be followed.

He had an equally straightforward way of classifying people. Most of the men around here, including his dad, were meant to be coal miners because they were strong and they weren’t afraid of the dark. His mom was meant to be a mom because she had a soft lap and made good food. His pediatrician was meant to be a doctor because he knew what every kind of medicine was for and he wasn’t scared of blood. Cam Jack was meant to own everything because his dad owned everything before him. I was meant to be a cop because I liked to help people and then tell them what to do.

To Dusty, everything had only one true purpose, and he didn’t like it when something was used in a way it wasn’t supposed to be used.

It bothered him that Clay put maps on his wall to show him places he might not ever see instead of using them to get to the places right now.

Those times when he saw me going out in a pretty dress and I didn’t come back with a husband upset him.

All the problems he encountered in his young life he believed were caused by things and people being used in ways that went against their true natures.

I can’t help being struck by the irony that this same boy who came from a family composed of four generations of miners suddenly decided after the rescue that his true calling in life was to run a restaurant.

No one could fault him for no longer wanting to work in the mines after spending four days slowly suffocating to death trapped inside one, but we were all skeptical from the start about an actual sit-down restaurant’s chances of survival in a town that could barely support a Subway. Not to mention Dusty’s own capabilities as a businessman. But Dusty was pumped up at the time from his newfound celebrity and wealth and was easy prey for the fawning financial advisors who descended upon him when the money was rolling in.

One was a guy from Pittsburgh who had advised Franco Harris and a few other retired Steelers from the glory-day teams of the seventies. He was the man responsible for getting Franco his own line of frozen pizzas.

He told Dusty that a lot of athletes bought restaurants. It was an easy way to make money. They didn’t have to do any work. They simply loaned their names to the places and watched their investments triple and quadruple.

He believed owning a restaurant would work for Dusty for the same reason it worked for athletes. He was a star now.

It sounded good in theory, plus it also helped solve the problem of what Dusty was going to do for a living, so he went ahead and invested all his money in the project. But he soon found out there were two very important differences between him and a revered professional athlete when it came to bankrolling a business.

First of all, professional athletes had enough money to hire people who knew how to run a restaurant to run the restaurant for them, and that’s why they were able to own a restaurant and not actually work in it. Dusty only had enough money to convince a bank to loan him more money so he would be able to lease a building, buy equipment, and insure the operation. He hired a few waitresses and a cook, but after six months was rarely able to pay them. A liquor license was financially out of the question, which meant none of his buddies ever came by.

And secondly, people wanted to hang out with star athletes and would do just about anything in order to run into one; it turned out not so many people wanted to hang out with a man who had only been in the news for a couple of weeks, especially a man most of them had known since he was in diapers.

To the rest of the world he had become the epitome of a blue-collar hero, but he didn’t live with the rest of the world. He lived among coal miners and unemployed coal miners and retired coal miners, and to them he was no different than they were. This didn’t mean that they weren’t sympathetic toward him and that they weren’t glad that he had lived through his ordeal, but they didn’t feel that he had done anything that merited plunking down their hard-earned cash for a mediocre meal on the outside chance he might stop by their table for a chat. He hadn’t won any Super Bowls; he had merely survived a really bad day at work.

Clay takes a bite from the perimeter of his cookie. He will eat all along the outside, saving the black icing eyeballs and smile in the center of the yellow icing face for the very end.

“I can’t explain it. He’s changed. He’s not himself anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

He thinks about what he’s going to say next before he says it.

I watch his face. It’s hard for me to see myself there, although I’ve been told many times how much we resemble each other.

He has my mother’s smile. He has Shannon’s chestnut hair and my father’s large powerful hands. He also has a lot of his own father in his face, but Clay will never know this and neither will anyone else.

“Maybe there are some people in this world who can look at his job and look at his little house and look at him already having three kids when he’s barely twenty-four years old and think he’s stupid or he’s a loser. But he’s not. He was content with that life. It’s what he wanted and that’s all that matters.”

“I thought he wanted to be an astronaut.”

“When we were kids. Sure,” he laughs. “I wanted to be a cowboy.”

I smile at him.

“Until you realized horses shit wherever they want to.”

“Didn’t you have a childhood dream?” he asks me.

Surviving my childhood, I think to myself.

“Sure. I wanted to be a rock star,” I throw out to appease him.

He concentrates on the careful eating of his cookie.

“All I know is ever since the accident, he’s got it in his head that being a miner isn’t good enough anymore. That he needs to prove himself to the rest of the world and be somebody.”

He scrunches up his nose when he says the word “somebody.”

“Before the accident Dusty had never been farther than Centresburg. After the accident he was flown first class to Hollywood to be on The Tonight Show. He went to Disney World. He got a letter from the president and had dinner with the governor. He was on TV and the cover of Time magazine. He was famous. And then all of a sudden he wasn’t.”

I don’t point out that the same thing happened to Lib and Jimmy and E.J. and Ray and none of them have felt the need to be somebody, but they’re all a good deal older than Dusty and I think they’re happy just to be alive.

“Before all that happened he never questioned his life. Any part of it,” Clay adds.

“Sometimes it can be a good thing to be exposed to more and question your life.”

“Sometimes it’s not. They ruined him.”

“Who is ‘they’ exactly?”

He gestures with the final remaining bite of his cookie at the car dealership across the road with its American flag the size of a barn undulating in the breeze like a patriotic sea above the seemingly endless rows of gleaming SUVs.

“Everybody who isn’t us.”

He finishes eating and looks inside the bag for a napkin. I’ve already anticipated the need and hold one out to him.

“Now all he has to live for is this lawsuit,” he says.

“What do you think about the lawsuit?”

“I don’t think there’s any way to assign blame in something like this. Cam Jack runs unsafe mines and nobody does anything about it. Coal mining is a dangerous profession; the miners know this. What it boils down to is Cam Jack has more money than God. Why shouldn’t the Jolly Mount Five have some of it for themselves and their families after what they went through?”

“So it’s a noble cause. Sort of like Robin Hood robbing from the rich to give to the poor.”

“Except there’s no robbing. They’d come by the money honestly. A jury of their peers would award it to them because they earned it.”

Did they earn it? I ask myself. And if so, how much did they earn? What is the market value of a man’s sanity these days? What is considered reasonable compensation for spending four days entombed on a cold rock shelf a mile beneath the earth’s surface in impenetrable darkness and absolute silence, his tongue swollen with dehydration, his stomach hardened into a starving knot, his breath coming in shallow pants, his nose assaulted by the smells of shit, piss, puke, fear, and sweat and the sickly sweet scent of blood and rot coming from the gangrenous leg of his delirious friend? Should it be more or less than the amount of money Cam Jack’s investments earn in a day?

I think about Shannon and the bidding war over her unborn child. Eighty thousand dollars from Family X, or will she be able to get ninety thousand from the Jamesons? Is this a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a child when the world is filled with so many unwanted ones or is it ridiculously low? Shouldn’t the price tag be millions of dollars? Or is a child worth anything at all if its own mother is willing to sell it?

He finishes wiping the yellow icing from his fingers, crumples the napkin into a ball, and puts it in the empty bag.

I notice him glance at his spit-shined black boots to make sure there are no crumbs on them.

“Did you change that lady’s tire yesterday?” he asks me.

“Yeah. She was a piece of work. Thanks for that.”

“You made some money, though, didn’t you?”

“Sure. Now I can afford four days of health insurance.”

“That’s not funny, Mom. I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Clay. Wait. I have something to tell you. Your Aunt Shannon’s back.”

“What? Aunt Shannon? She’s back? Here?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She just showed up yesterday at my house.”

“After all these years? She just showed up?”

“Yes.”

He opens his mouth to speak again but nothing comes out. He looks genuinely stunned.

I wonder what’s going through his head. Clay was only five years old when we moved out of Dad’s house and left Shannon behind, but he had been very attached to her by then and used to follow her around full of the blind devotion and intense fascination that all little kids feel for older kids who pay the slightest bit of attention to them.

Shannon had grown fond of him, too, even though she’d been outwardly jealous at first. It took some time but eventually his solemn brown eyes and the serious way he wrinkled his silky-smooth forehead like a troubled puppy whenever she asked him a question won her over. Plus as they both grew older I knew she enjoyed being adored, even if the only reasons for it were because she could ride a two-wheeler and was allowed to stay up past eight o’clock.

Clay’s presence in the house changed a lot of things for us, most notably our relationship with Dad. Once I had a baby of my own, I finally stood up to him. Shannon and I never talked about my sudden surge of maternal strength. I always thought she must have been thankful for it because it benefited her, too, but over time, long after she had disappeared from my life, I began to wonder if she might have hated me for not standing up sooner. Did she ever wonder why I didn’t stand up for her? Or myself? Or did she already know the reason?

I did my best to protect her. I kept her out of Dad’s way as much as possible. I distracted him from her when I could, offering my own body as an alternate punching bag in the same way I might have enticingly waved a juicy piece of raw meat in front of a ravenous dog who was contemplating a bowl of dry kibble.

But it wasn’t within my power to tell him to stop. I assumed she understood this. For seventeen years I felt I had no right to tell him he couldn’t beat me and my sister because he was our father and I believed we belonged to him as surely as his lunch pail.

My son, on the other hand, belonged to no one but himself. He would be a man someday. No one could own him. Not even me, his mother. But as his mother I had a responsibility to him, and it was to make sure he would never experience any harm or misery that it was in my power to prevent.

I never saw my dad hit my mom, but I heard the fights. My mother’s screams and crying; my father’s cursing and shouting; the thumps and thuds and sounds of things breaking—they were all part of the sound track of my life that I’d listen to, hiding in my room with my eyes closed against the horrible possibility of what the picture must be.

I think my mother thought I wouldn’t be affected by the violence if I didn’t see it. Or maybe that I wouldn’t hate my father for hurting her if I didn’t witness it with my own eyes. She was wrong on both counts.

I knew from my own experience that letting Clay see his mommy or his revered Aunt Shannon, who could pop a wheelie on her blue two-wheeler, get belted across a room by his grandfather would be harmful to him. I also knew that listening to it happen while he sat helpless and mute in another room would be a form of misery so pervasive and permanent he would wear it for the rest of his life like a skin.

I had never been allowed to make any decisions in regard to Shannon and me because our destinies had been set, but once Clay came along I was presented with a choice: a mother’s duty or a daughter’s sentence.

Clay never knew about the abuse Shannon and I endured when we were younger. Because of this, after we left Shannon with Dad, I couldn’t talk to Clay about my fear that the beatings might have started again, and after Shannon’s disappearance I couldn’t share my awful suspicions with him about what my dad might have done to her.

All I could do was tell him she ran away and then do my best to hide my grief and fear while listening to him ask all the questions I asked myself: Why would she run away? Why wouldn’t she come here? How could she leave us?

I didn’t have answers for either of us. Eventually, he stopped asking.

Now I brace myself, wondering if he’s going to start asking those same questions again, or break out into some sort of difficult emotional reaction I’m not equipped to deal with, or throw a bunch of accusations at me like E.J. did. But what I get is a big smile.

“Mom,” he says and gives me a hug, “you must be so happy.”

“Well, yes,” I say a little uncertainly as I return his embrace.

“Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. And she’s going to have a baby any day now.”

“A baby? That’s great.”

His smile grows.

“The baby will be my cousin, right?”

His excitement is contagious. I smile back at him, but my thoughts quickly turn bittersweet as I remember him showing the same kind of enthusiasm every time I’d tell him I was going on a date and he’d get his hopes up that this newest man would turn out to be a potential dad.

I also know that there’s the possibility his cousin will be sold.

“Can I see her?”

“Of course you can see her. I’ll talk to her when I get home. What are you doing tonight?”

“I’m busy tonight. Maybe later this week.”

“I assume this means you’re not coming to Isabel and Jimmy’s.”

Clay and I have a standing invitation to Sunday dinner. Clay rarely goes anymore. I plan to go today to tell them about Shannon.

“No. I’m working.”

He shakes his head, still smiling.

“Wow. That’s unreal. Aunt Shannon just showing up out of the blue.”

He thinks about it a moment longer and the smile begins to fade. His happy gaze falters slightly.

He slips his sunglasses back on before I can see any substantial hurt or betrayal in his eyes.

“It’s supposed to snow,” he tells me in his deputy voice, glancing at my bare legs. “You should put some pants on.”

I watch him turn on his heel and begin walking back toward the building.

I have no idea what he does outside his job, and I only know what he does at his job because I used to have one similar to it. It’s hard for me to believe sometimes that this is the same person who used to write me two-page, single-spaced, intricately detailed accounts of everything he had done and thought during the day and leave it for me on the coffee table along with a bottle of One-A-Day vitamins and a calcium supplement on the nights I worked a shift that ended past his bedtime.

I’ve always thought of boys and men as completely separate beings and girls and women as part of the same whole. Looking at a little girl I can always envision the resulting woman, like a cake before it’s been frosted, but I’m never able to see a man in a little boy’s face.

A boy becomes a man: The expression used to frighten me. I didn’t like to think that one day Clay would become a man. I was very attached to the little boy he already was. It sounded like an act of sorcery. A wand would be waved, some smoke would appear, and my sweet, grinning, gangly, doting little boy would disappear forever and in his place would be a big, hairy, serious man who I would continue to love and hopefully understand but who would be a stranger to me.

This was basically what happened, aside from the smoke.