On Saturday mornings he still had breakfast with his parents, a family tradition they’d continued far longer than any of them had expected. He supposed if he’d been able to leave town as he’d originally planned, moved somewhere more art-infused than Wynotte, North Carolina, or if he’d gotten married like his mother wanted, the weekly breakfasts would’ve come to a natural end.
Instead they persisted. Only now, rather than his mother rising early and cooking a full spread, Gordon swung through the Hardee’s drive-through and bought them all biscuits. His mother just couldn’t do it anymore, much as she wanted to. He was always sure to say that Hardee’s biscuits couldn’t hold a candle to hers.
The three of them were sitting around the table talking about the weather, observing how spring would give way to full-blown summer too quickly as it always did, when there was a knock at the door. His father, still head of the house in spite of his frailty, began to rise, but Gordon held up his hand.
“No, Daddy,” he said, his voice stern. He looked from his father to his mother, taking in one rheumy gaze, then another, before asking, “Did y’all hear about the jacket they found out on the old Oxendine property?”
He’d known he’d have to bring this up. He just hadn’t known when to bring it up: Before or after they ate? Get it over with early or wait until he was walking out the door? He had to go over the rules with them again, provide a refresher on what to do to minimize the inevitable attack on his character that came whenever news of Davy Malcor broke. He felt like every time this happened, it took a year off his parents’ lives.
His mother and father nodded in unison, eyes wide like children’s. The loose flesh of his mother’s neck jiggled rather grotesquely with the movement. Sometimes he didn’t recognize the woman in front of him. It was easy to forget she’d once been beautiful.
“We have to be careful,” he said, keeping his voice level yet firm. “We don’t know how far it’ll go this time.” The knock sounded a second time, more insistent than the first.
“What about Harvey?” his father asked, and Gordon felt the happiness he felt anytime his father remembered something like a name or a place or an event from long ago. His father didn’t have dementia or Alzheimer’s, but he was forgetful. He was far from the certain, decisive man he’d been when Gordon was young. They’d recently stood in a Belk’s department store for a half hour as his father anguished over choosing a simple tie. In the end Gordon had chosen for him.
“I’ve talked to Harvey,” he said. “He’s taking care of things.” He fixed them with his gaze. “It won’t be like the other times,” he promised, but even as he spoke, he knew it was futile to make such a promise.
They nodded again and Gordon rose from the table to see who was knocking at the door so early on a Saturday morning. He peeked through the window in the front room that gave the best vantage point and saw, unsurprisingly but disappointingly, Monica Allagash with her cameraman, the pair a poised, sleek version of Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
He walked to the door and opened it a crack, not enough for the cameraman to get a full shot of his face. The guy had started filming as soon as he heard the locks being turned. When Monica saw that it was Gordon opening the door rather than one of his parents, her face fell. She’d clearly been hoping to get to the weaker links, to trick his parents into saying something she could twist and edit into a salacious sound bite. She called herself a journalist, but she was just an entertainer.
“No comment,” he said and started to shut the door, but she stuck her foot into the tiny crack he’d created.
“Wait!” she said. The cameraman was still filming. Gordon closed his eyes and tried to move out of the camera’s view. He thought about shutting the door hard on her foot, hearing her cry out in pain and shock. It would serve her right.
“I’ve been in touch with my attorney, and if there needs to be a statement, he will arrange that later. As of now, we are private citizens on private property. So please leave. Now.”
“Mr. Swift,” she blurted, desperate. “You have nothing to say about the discovery yesterday?”
Was it really just yesterday? It seemed like a week had gone by since he’d found her standing by his car.
He turned back to her, his face still barely visible through the crack in the door, the cameraman still recording.
“Our thoughts and prayers are, as always, with the Malcor family during this time.”
He looked pointedly at her foot until she removed it. Then Gordon closed the door and leaned back on it, thinking of how he wholeheartedly meant what he’d said. His thoughts and prayers were with the Malcor family. No matter how much they questioned his innocence or held him responsible for what happened to Davy, he could not feel anything but sorrow for their loss and a twinge of responsibility for his contribution to it. He waited a moment for his heart to slow before returning to the table to reassure his parents that it was all right. That everything would be ok, even though he didn’t believe his own words, and he doubted his folks did either.
October 12, 1985
7:12 p.m.
It’s such a nice night that, once the sun goes down and the heat lets up, Gordon opens the windows to get some fresh air. Then he switches on the television.
He still can’t believe the little house in the boonies came with cable. When he’d gone to check it out, he’d been impressed that the place had electricity and running water. The cable had been a bonus, and, while not the reason he’d said yes to the arrangement, it was a definite check in the “pros” column.
When his parents proposed that he live there and help out the farmer’s widow, a woman from their church, he’d scoffed at the idea. But eventually he’d caved. It was his own place, his parents had pointed out, and he could live there rent free in exchange for driving the old lady to and from church, fixing things around the main house where she lived, and just generally being a human nearby so she wasn’t all alone on that big old farm.
Just that evening he’d changed a light bulb for the widow, and she’d given him some homemade biscuits as a thank-you. He’d eaten them for supper with butter and preserves she’d insisted he take to go with them. “Made ’em myself,” she’d said.
He’d thanked her, patting her elderly hand, frail and spotted, the opposite of his own. He carried that contrasting image of their hands across the small yard between the two houses. Her house is large and imposing; his is tiny, a dollhouse version of hers. But he doesn’t mind; he has all he needs for now.
This is just a jumping-off place, a story he will tell later at dinner with friends after a gallery opening, perhaps, an amusing anecdote about his humble beginnings. That’s what he will call the piece he plans to start tonight: Humble Beginnings. In his mind he sees the image he aims to create. He will sculpt the widow’s hands, extended.
If he does his job, those hands will tell her story about once being busy, useful, needed. But now empty. What if, he thinks, his mind whizzing, he creates a pair of outstretched hands—one young and smooth, holding a bounty of fruit, and one wizened and spotted, holding shriveled, empty stems? He needs to start sketching while it’s all coming to him. This is his favorite part—the inspiration at the beginning, when the concept is there in all its perfection and reality has not intercepted it yet.
He rotates through the many channels available till he finds the baseball playoffs. The St. Louis Cardinals are playing the Los Angeles Dodgers. He doesn’t care who wins. Though not a huge sports fan, he likes the sound of a baseball game on low in the background as he works, likes the dull roar of the crowd, the steady murmur of the commentators’ voices calling plays, the general hum that serves as a soundtrack to his creative process. It reminds him of being a kid, drawing in his room with the sound of baseball emanating from his father’s TV in the den. It’s funny, the things that stay with you, he thinks, the things you don’t anticipate will form you.
He sits on the couch in the living area that he’s turned into a kind of makeshift studio, since it’s the largest space available to him. He has a table for all of his tools, stacks of sketchbooks, watercolors, acrylics, pencils, and pens. It isn’t perfect—nowhere near the studio provided in college—but he’s turned it into a decent enough place to make his art, a space where he can be creative.
And he does feel creative as the breeze from the open window ruffles the blank page he turns to in his sketchbook where he will start sketching out this new idea. He marks through his poor first attempts, then quickly turns to a new page, the baseball murmurings providing just the right amount of noise to keep his mind humming along.
When he hears the sounds of children playing, he thinks at first he is imagining things. But no, there the noises are again, coming through the open windows: thundering feet, a screech, belly laughter. There are definitely kids out there on the widow’s property.
He stands and wanders over to the door of the cabin, tugging it open so he can squint out into the darkness, blinking as he tries to make sense of the dark shapes in the distance. But the sounds, which had come close, have moved away. Now they are off in the distance, up toward the main road.
He leaves his front door open and goes to the phone, his hand poised over the receiver as he debates calling over to see if the widow, too, has heard the children. He knows that by now she will be in her nightgown, climbing into the huge four-poster bed she shared with her husband for fifty-three years. To call her now would upset her nightly routine.
No sense in worrying her needlessly, he reasons. It’s probably nothing. He moves back over to the door to take one last look, deciding as he does to leave the door open but keep the screen door in place. That way he can listen for anyone approaching the widow’s place, anything that may harm or frighten her. That is, after all, what he’s there for.