The Last Kind Words: A Novel Read online

  My mother remained a beautiful woman even at an age when such women were often called handsome. Her lips and chin had softened a bit more but she was still lovely, with a natural smile that always made you feel better.

  “I started finding gray strands when I was in junior high. I went wild plucking them. My mother would find them all about the house and say, ‘Ellie, being bald is worse than having your face framed by silver.’ ” She curled more of my hair around her fingers. “Looks good on you, Terry, gives you character. If you’re hungry I’ll make you something.”

  I was, but I shook my head. Sleep hadn’t done anything to wear away the tension in me. I wanted to burn it off a little. “It’s early.”

  We spoke in whispers.

  “I just wanted to look in on you.”

  “You should go back to sleep.”

  “So should you.”

  “I’m used to getting up at dawn.”

  “So am I. I have to check on Gramp. He sometimes wakes up early and doesn’t do anything but sit and stare until someone at least turns the television on for him. Kids’ shows, if you can believe it. He gets upset with anything else, but you put on cartoons and he settles.”

  “Christ, he’s really that bad?”

  “The doctors can’t do much. He’s too far gone with Alzheimer’s.” She shrugged, a lissome and graceful movement. “That and being shot in the head.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  My grandfather had been shot in the back of the head when he was sixteen, and the bullet had never been removed. You could feel the entrance wound, which had never fully scarred over. He’d made everybody do it at least once. When I brought Kimmy home for the first time, she’d grinned, pressed her purple-painted fingernail to his gunshot hole, and said, “If you think nasty thoughts about me now, Old Shep, I’ll know it. I’ll feel them.”

  He claimed it never bothered him until he was in his sixties and the headaches started. They grew worse the older he got until they began to fade along with his mind. He’d been getting a touch forgetful and had just started walking in his sleep when I left.

  I swung my legs out of bed.

  “I’m glad you came back,” my mother said. “I’ve missed you. But I’m sorry it had to be like this.” She shut her eyes and worked her mouth silently for a moment before her voice caught traction. “I’m sorry it was for him.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right. He shouldn’t have … they … he …” She caught her breath and a sheen of tears brought out the flecks of gold in her eyes. “Sometimes I hate him like a poison. I think about what he’s done, what happened, and I wish … I wish they’d hurry up with it. And then I feel guilty for thinking it, and I remember who he is, that he’s my son, and that I love him, and I want him out of there, I want him home again, I want you all home again, and I think, I think …” Her face firmed. “It can never happen, and I’m glad for that. I’m glad we don’t talk about it, even though we’d all be better off if we would. Especially your father. Did he ask you anything?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then I won’t either.”

  “You can.”

  “No, I won’t make you discuss it. You’re like all the Rands, you can’t talk about it. Sometimes I’d give my right tit for one of you to get in a gabby mood, be garrulous just for ten minutes.”

  “Ma, listen to me.” I made myself form the words. “Collie, he wanted—”

  “Shhh … it’s okay. Now that you’re done with him, you can—”

  “I’m not done. He wants to see me again.”

  “For what reason?”

  “He’s got more to tell me.”

  “Don’t listen.”

  “I have to.”

  “You don’t, and you shouldn’t.”

  “I do, I have to.”

  “Why?”

  There was no way to start talking about it and then stop. You couldn’t just explain a piece of it, unwind one thread from the knot. The little girl, the strangled teen, the nights awake, the miles that lay behind.

  My mother loved me enough not to expect an answer. She said, “I understand.”

  “It wasn’t just Collie. It was time I came back anyway.”

  “For Kimmy.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Maybe I did. I wanted to ask her if she’d seen Kimmy, heard anything about her or her family. What she was doing, if she was married, if she was still in New York. My chest grew heavy with the number of questions I had, all the unfinished business.

  But my mother was right. I had gray in my hair from her side of the family, and from my father’s side I learned to keep stony and mute about anything of real importance. It’s how I’d lost Kimmy in the first place.

  While I tried to somehow slip around my own silence my mother kissed my forehead and left the room.

  I was used to hard work and exercise now. I felt wired and antsy and decided to take a run. There were some old sweats and sneakers in my closet. I put them on. Everything was tight on my larger frame but manageable.

  I walked downstairs and felt some of the old familiarity start to ease back into me. I knew that in ten minutes it would be like I’d never left at all.

  The house had been in our family for four generations. Construction had been started by my great-grandfather and his brothers, who’d been adept architects and carpenters but piss-poor thieves who were always breezing in and out of the joint. Because they were often caught and incarcerated together, it took forever to raise the roof beams. The place had been completed a decade or so later with the help of my grandfather and his brother, who were starting to learn what to do in order to stay out of the can.

  They’d purchased three lots’ worth of land so that our nearest neighbor was a quarter mile up the road. Only a comparatively small section of the yard had ever been cleared. The rest remained wild and overgrown with trees and brush. As little kids, my best friend, Chub Wright, and I would camp back there and talk about car chases in action movies, listening to my uncles come and go through the house, unloading goods after midnight.

  Unless you were an ace heister who pulled in multi-million-dollar scores, owning a house was almost unheard of on the circuit. Thieves by their nature and calling were usually on the move. They had warrants out on them in one state so they ran to another. The heat came down so they moved to cooler climes. They never stayed put. Except that we did. It made things a little hinky. All the cops knew us. All the undercover journalists would show up at our door trying to sell us soap or vacuum cleaners, carrying cases with hidden cameras and digital feeds inside. We could spot them from fifty feet away.

  That was another reason why it took so long for the place to be built. The house was a well-crafted magic trick. Unless you were intimately familiar with its interior, you’d never guess just how many crawl spaces, hidden rooms, extended root cellars, and attic areas the place actually had. Whole sections of floorboards could be peeled back, but you had to know where the locking mechanisms were. Walls slid aside. Built-in staircases unfolded and let you climb eight or twelve feet up into recessed chambers. You couldn’t use a hammer to find a hollow spot, because damn near every inch of the extra space was filled with loot. Some of it went back fifty years. My grandfather and his brothers had boosted a lot of shit back in the fifties that they weren’t able to fence. But you never dumped hot property. You sold it or planted it or kept it. When your whole family was made up of grifters and gaffers and second-story men, that meant a ton of excess haul: old machinery, bicycle parts, busted record players, eight-track tape decks, old TVs with missing vacuum tubes, furniture, worthless silverware, and literally tons of other crap I’d never even seen.

  Under the living room where my grandfather sat in his chair, with the quiet strains of cartoon characters taking frying pans to their heads, was a cache of unfenced curio bric-a-brac going back decades. My father had never been able to resist small trinkets an
d novelty gadgets that he felt might have an interesting history. In the middle of a job he’d pocket broken shillelaghs, nutcrackers with busted hinges, dinged Zippo lighters, music boxes with cracked dancers, chipped Dresden dolls, and old tools whose purpose eluded him. He had a healthy respect for hands and couldn’t resist anything that looked like it had been caressed and fondled or well applied.

  The irony of a useless man in a room stationed over useless hidden things wasn’t lost on me. I figured if my grandfather grew lucid at all anymore, it wouldn’t be lost on him either. Gramp’s hands twitched and trembled. His eyes never left the television screen.

  My mother came in holding a bowl of oatmeal and said, “Do you want to feed him?”

  “No.”

  So she sat on the loveseat and fed him instead. I stood close to his shoulder and watched. She kept up a running monologue of childish banter, and Gramp never reacted in any way. During commercials his chin would droop and his gaze would lower, his whole body slumping forward. When the cartoons came back on he’d sit a little straighter. He’d make noises that might have been laughter.

  I took it for as long as I could and then I started out of the room. I made it two steps and knew something had happened but I wasn’t sure what. I turned and Old Shep looked exactly the same, still making his sounds but a little louder now. I looked at the floor. I scanned the room. Then I checked my pocket. My wallet was missing.

  Even with the Parkinson’s and the Alzheimer’s he was an ace pickpocket. It took me a minute to find my wallet deep in the folds of his robe. He was still in there somewhere.

  I said, “Sweet action, Gramp,” but a commercial was on and he was slumped in his seat with his strings cut.

  As I trotted down the drive into the road, JFK came lumbering after me. I ran back inside and got his leash. I didn’t know if his knees would hold up, but I didn’t plan to do more than a few miles. I wasn’t even going to pretend to be heading anywhere except Kimmy’s place.

  The area had changed some. A few more housing tracts had gone up, a couple of new strip malls. We clung to Old Autauk Highway, which broke through a few small neighborhoods down by the bay, then circled Autauk Park and my old high school. We cut north and covered a couple of miles of the back trails that still surrounded Shalebrook College. I saw there was a new building on campus, looked like a science hall. They’d completed the bridge expansion that connected the dorms to the library with a glass atrium that arched over the parkway.

  We reached Shalebrook Lake and JFK took a long drink and then hunkered down in the shallows, the small waves stirred by the wind breaking over his ridged back. He turned his face to me with a regal expression, all of his usual attitude back in place. I’d worried about him, but he was handling the run fine and actually looked healthier for it.

  I sat on a nearby bench and almost unconsciously started counting the number of houses that I’d robbed. I only realized what I was doing when I hit twenty. Most of the burglaries had been for pocket change. Even the crappiest joe job would’ve paid better and without the hazard of going away for a three-year jolt.

  “You going to be like them?” Kimmy had asked me after meeting the family, while she shook out about half a pound of hot pepper onto a slice of pizza. “For the rest of your days?”

  “I’m a thief. Thieves steal.”

  “You’re a cat burglar.”

  “That just means I steal shit while people are home sleeping.”

  “Someone’s going to shoot you in the head too.”

  “Then you’ll be able to feel my naughty thoughts.”

  She took a bite and her face flushed. “Those I’m already well aware of.”

  “Some of them.”

  We were nineteen. The world was a contradiction. It seemed both wide open to possibility and set in tracks we’d never be able to alter.

  Of course Kimmy knew all about the notorious Rand clan. Everyone in the area did. Sometimes it helped Collie and me in our romantic lives. A lot of girls liked the bad boys, and they’d expect us to take them on scores with us, let them get a feel for what the bent life was all about. Two girls I dated practically begged me to rob their parents’ houses. They knew where the stashes were, codes to the alarms, combinations on the safes. I’d say, “Where’s the fun in any of that?”

  If they pushed too hard I tossed their phone numbers. I never knew when one of them might sneak off with her mother’s jewelry and try to blame me for it.

  I wasn’t the only criminal around, so I lost some cachet. There were meth cookers on their way up and a few syndicate princes and princesses from the last couple of mob families in the area. Chub was already a first-rate crew mechanic. By the time he was nineteen he owned his own garage and was known for souping up stolen cars for strings putting together bank heists. He’d fine-tune engines until they sang and help the drivers plot out their getaways.

  I’d been arrested twice by the time I was seventeen but I was never held for more than a couple of hours. In some eyes, that meant I was just a wannabe outlaw. That was how I liked it. Being someone on the outside but no one really knowing if I deserved the rep I’d been saddled with. It was one way to keep off the radar.

  Kimmy was an outsider too, someone who hung around the lake at night with the other kids but was never quite part of their pack. Living at home, taking classes at the college, she was smarter and more sensitive than the rest of them. I could see it in the way she held herself, a hint of lower-middle-class sorrow and hushed desperation in her eyes but hanging on to the chance for something else. She was beautiful but didn’t want to be. She dressed down. She tied her brown hair back, hid it beneath hats and scarves. Others felt the crush of mediocrity and resigned themselves to it with booze or crystal, floating around the fields until it was time to show at their minimum-wage labors the next day. Kimmy bucked the trend, studied harder, glared at you harder, talked harder.

  Sitting on the hood of a ’66 Mustang, holding in a lungful of Acapulco Gold, Chub wheezed out, “That one, she’ll send you up or set you straight.”

  “Might be worth the risk.”

  “Don’t you believe it.”

  Like most teens who shared an attraction, Kimmy and I danced around each other for weeks before moving in tight enough that we had to say hello.

  First thing she ever said to me was, “My aunt, she manages an organic-health-food-and-vitamins store. Six months ago somebody held her up and cleaned out the register. Was it you?”

  “No. I don’t do armed robbery.”

  “They didn’t get much cash but they made her give up her jewelry. Everything was junk except for a gold pendant given to her by my grandmother. Inside were two tiny photos of my great-grandparents, taken in Hungary back in the thirties. It’s the only thing left of them. It wasn’t just sentimental, you know? It’s more meaningful than that.”

  She wasn’t talking about a pendant but a locket. I nodded. “I think I understand.”

  “Any chance you can help me get it back?”

  A stickup already six months old. Unless the piece was exceptional and really stood out, there wasn’t going to be much of a shot. But I knew all the fences and could probably get a line on the punk snatcher. I looked into Kimmy’s eyes and liked what I saw there. They were almost mean but I could see a little softness tucked deep inside. I wondered what had happened to her to give her such a hard shell so early on and decided I wanted to hang around long enough to find out.

  “If your aunt’s got a photo of herself wearing the locket, give it to me. If not, have her describe it in detail. Any extra information can only help.”

  Kimmy was a step ahead. She handed me a photo. There was a stickum note on the back with all the relevant info, including the name and address of the shop and the date and time of the robbery. “This is it.”

  “Give me four days. If I can’t get a line on it by then there isn’t anything that can be done.”

  She said, “Thank you,” without an ounce of real gratitude. �
�So … Friday night then?”

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  She frowned, came this close to hitting me with a sneer. “You don’t know where I live.”

  “Sure I do.”

  When she climbed into my car four days later the locket was waiting for her on the dashboard. She checked the tiny photos inside, then stuck it in her pocket.

  “What did it cost you to get it back?”

  “Nothing, the fence owed me one.”

  “Did you talk to the guy who stole it?”

  “No.”

  I couldn’t read the expression on her face in the shadowed interior of the car. I turned up the dash lights.

  “I thought maybe you’d have to fight him for it,” she said.

  “You wanted me to fight him for it, that right?”

  I watched as her lips parted into a grin and then a smile. She kissed the side of my face. It was nothing more than a peck but it started to do its thing.

  I said, “Take off the scarf.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see your hair.”

  “Why?”

  “Take off the fucking scarf, right?”

  She pulled it down until it was around her neck, then shook out her hair. It was shorter than I’d thought, but the way it framed her face added to everything else I liked about her. My breathing began to grow rough. So did hers. I leaned in and she backed away until the side of her head pressed against the passenger window. I got my hand looped through the scarf and used it to draw her to me. I drove to the dead end at the bottom of the block and then we kissed and she giggled against my chest, and when she bit my neck I growled and we fell into the backseat, tearing each other’s clothes off.

  Twenty minutes later I lit us both cigarettes and asked, “You’re beautiful but you don’t like it—why?”