The Last Kind Words: A Novel Read online

  “You should rest, Terry, you look tired.”

  “I should rest? What is it? Dale?”

  She glanced at my father.

  So there it was. “Okay, it’s Dale. What about her?”

  My mother pulled a face. I looked at my father as he sipped his beer. He grinned at me in that way that said, Your ma, you know how she is.

  My father took the lead. “Your mother found a pack of condoms in Dale’s jeans in the wash.”

  “Okay. That just proves she’s being careful.”

  Ma shook her head. “It’s not that she’s having sex … well, all right, I’m having some issues with that, but it’s natural and we’ve had our woman-to-woman talk already. But—” She drew air through her teeth.

  My father and I waited. We kept waiting. I cracked before he did.

  “But what?”

  “We don’t like the boy very much.”

  I looked at my dad. He shrugged.

  “The Rands are now judging character?” I asked.

  “No, I’m not saying that, not at all. Not really. But there’s something about him, Terry. I don’t trust him. I don’t like him. He’s older. Technically it’s statutory rape.”

  “We calling the cops?”

  She wasn’t being overprotective and wasn’t really worried about Dale because she’d found a pack of condoms. I could see that in the way my mother was forcing the issue. This was something else. She turned, and her gold-flecked gaze not only pinned me to the wall but frisked me as well.

  “Go talk to her,” she said.

  I let out a small nervous laugh. I didn’t know my teenage sister. I couldn’t imagine talking to her about her boyfriend. “Ma—”

  My father drained the rest of his beer. “It might not be such a bad idea.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s a very bad idea.”

  “You’re her brother. The only one she has left. She wanted to have breakfast with you. She saw you book out.”

  He stopped short. I knew what was supposed to come next, those things my father would never say. We all wanted to have breakfast with you. We waited. We were in good spirits. But you ran off. What does Collie want with you? Why did you choose him over us?

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Where else?” my mother said. “The lake. It’s still the place where all the kids go. That boy, he’ll be there. See what you think of him. Whether I’m just being overly concerned.” She hit me with a hard gaze. “Or whether he’s trouble. Real trouble.”

  I nodded. I trusted her. It wasn’t about the condoms. It wasn’t her being clingy. She knew he was bad news and wanted me to check it out.

  Dad got up, went to the fridge, and made me a steak sandwich. “Here, eat this. Those ranch hands might not mind listening to a man’s guts growling, but you don’t want to embarrass your sister in front of her friends.”

  But that’s exactly what I was going to do. You don’t just show up to check out your little sister’s boyfriend and wind up on her good side.

  My dad sat again and my parents started talking to Gramp as if the hollow conversation had never stopped.

  I thought, We as a family, we Rands, we have some significant issues.

  I ate my sandwich in five bites and then raided the fridge for whatever else I could find. I made two more sandwiches, finished up some potato salad, two slices of apple pie, and a half gallon of milk.

  I needed to regroup. It had been a long and emotional day already and my head was still ringing like a call to vespers. I sat on the porch digesting and looked out over the yard thick with shadows. There were a lot of places I wouldn’t let my mind go. Too many bear traps that made any kind of reflection difficult to maneuver. I couldn’t think of Kimmy and Scooter any more tonight, couldn’t imagine Collie’s victims for another minute. I didn’t want to think that Chub might still be working with strings pulling scores, that he was going to go down hard one day and leave his family all alone. I didn’t want to be faced with the realization that I almost hoped it would happen soon, that I’d have my chance with her again once he was tucked away for twelve to fifteen.

  I got in the car and forced my attention away from my brother’s files stuffed under the seat. I called JFK to see if he wanted to come along to the lake. He took a step forward like he might clamber in, shook his head as if he’d thought better of it, then marched up the porch steps.

  It wasn’t until I was on the road that I realized I didn’t know what kind of car the boyfriend drove, or if he drove at all. I didn’t know what he looked like. I didn’t even know his name. Worse than all that, I feared I might not recognize my own sister.

  The kids had taken over the parking area of Shalebrook Lake and spread out with their cars, pickups, and Jeeps across the back fields. They’d set up mini tailgate parties the way we used to do it, truck radios on, milling around coolers packed with beer. The park lamps did a fair job of illuminating the paths and picnic grounds.

  I started searching among the groups for Dale. I had no idea where to look. There had to be two hundred kids drifting about. I wandered among them. I was young but not quite young enough, and the gray patch made me stand out. I caught some glowers and scowls. I looked just like what I was: an edgy older brother.

  Heavy bass tracks and guttural lyrics moaned from car to car. They kept their radios low so there wasn’t a war of music, just a low humming and groaning punctuated by an occasional caterwaul or whine.

  So long as no one started a bonfire and everybody threw their beer bottles in the trash cans or took them back home again, the cops wouldn’t come down too hard. Cruisers usually stopped in a few times a night on the weekends just to make their presence known and keep the peace.

  Chub and I used to get badgered by the cops a little more frequently than everyone else. It didn’t matter. It helped to build the legend, something that seemed important when I was seventeen. I had some small claim to fame and hung my hat on it. I wondered if Dale did the same thing.

  I’d glimpsed her for only a minute this morning, and I knew how different a girl could look hanging out with the crowd at night than she did at home in the daylight. I imagined walking up to a teenager and discussing condoms, only to get hauled off by the cops for talking to the wrong girl.

  Those teen-vampire romance novels she adored so much had left their mark on her generation. Most of the girls were dressed in black and red, tight low-slung jeans, lace and velvet blouses, long leather coats. A lot of makeup attentively applied to accent lips and eyes.

  I made two complete circuits of the area before I finally homed in on her.

  Dale seemed to be in her element among the crowd, weaving between tribes, drifting. I took up a perch beside a tree, lit a cigarette, and watched. She was the popular chick, everyone focusing on her, circling her, asking her opinion. She held a bottle of beer but sipped from it rarely. She was offered a joint and a cigarette and passed them both by. She laughed quaintly, almost shyly, but with a gorgeous smile and her neck tilted back. Her lips were strikingly red, cheekbones heavy with purple makeup that almost looked like bruises. Boys put their arms around her but only briefly. She kept on the move. I couldn’t tell which might be the boyfriend, if any of them.

  Beneath a tight, short leather jacket she wore a skimpy black T-shirt that left her midriff exposed. She had a lot of shake when she walked. I saw that she’d gotten a small tattoo near her navel. At this distance I couldn’t make the tat out. You couldn’t get a tattoo if you were under eighteen, not even if a parent said it was okay, and my mother never would have. That meant she had a fake ID. That sort of shocked me and it shouldn’t have. Damn near everyone had fake identification. Fifteen seemed so much younger to me now than it once had.

  I kept trying to see my little sister within the young woman before me. I’d missed out on some of the most important years of her life. I wondered how well she remembered me. I thought she must hate me. Not only had one of her brothers totally fucked himself and the family over
and then vanished from her life, but almost immediately afterward so had the other. I wondered how I could have done it to her. I wondered how I could have done it to any of them.

  A thousand fatuous questions wafted through my head. I tossed the butt and lit another cigarette. A hard breeze made the branches flap and residual rainwater shook across the field. Kids laughed. A bottle broke and hysteria-laced giggles erupted. Car engines rumbled. A drunk kid took a header and almost fell into the lake.

  Dale was breaking from one group and heading toward another. I made my way toward her on an intercept course. She sensed me before I’d taken five steps and turned. She made a beeline for me. I saw that her tattoo was of her namesake, an Airedale. She had a ring through her navel, and the dog was posed as if leaping through it. I thought that was kind of cute. She wore no expression but her eyes blazed.

  “What are you doing here, Terry?” she asked.

  “You called me, remember?”

  “Not here in New York. I mean what are you doing here right now.

  At the lake.”

  “I just—”

  “Mom sent you.”

  I’d be stupid to deny it. After all this time the first words out of my mouth shouldn’t be lies. “Yeah.”

  She sneered. The flickering golden light threw pools of shadow across her face. “Did you really come two thousand miles just to check on me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But you’re going to do it anyway.”

  “I thought we could talk a little.”

  Her lips flattened. They were as red as if she’d just chewed through her wrist. “Now you want to talk?”

  “I do, Dale.”

  “About what?”

  She was like the rest of the Rands. Her anger and hurt had been locked so far down inside that when they sluggishly awoke and crawled out they became a monstrous and frightful thing. I saw them emerging. I turned my face aside.

  It was my own fault. I shouldn’t have cut out and run this morning. And I definitely shouldn’t have let her catch me doing it.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Anything.”

  “Anything.” The word hung there. “I don’t know that I like you following me. You’ve been watching me, haven’t you? You’ve been here for a while watching me. What gives you the right? You haven’t even said hello. You haven’t even asked me how I am, how I’m doing. You never called, Terry. Not even on my birthday. Never. You could’ve called.” Her voice was a low growl. “Even if you didn’t want to see any of us, you could’ve picked up the phone. You could’ve written. You could’ve let me know you were alive. You could’ve shown some concern, for even one minute. You could’ve done any of a thousand things, Terry, and you didn’t. Now you want to talk?”

  I reached out and drew her into an embrace. My timing was off, as usual. I should’ve let her vent longer, but I thought that once she got started it might never stop. I was still avoiding responsibility.

  She didn’t resist. She didn’t hug me back either. It was like holding on to a mannequin dressed like a young woman who sort of looked like my little sister. I kept at it, but there was no point. I let her go.

  She said, “Is this where I’m supposed to forgive you?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s just that I wanted to hug you, all right?”

  “You going to give me a lecture?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either.”

  “About whatever you think I need lecturing on, Terry. That’s really why you’re here.”

  “You’re confusing me, Dale.”

  I wanted to ask her what she felt about Collie. I wanted to know how his reputation had affected her in school and elsewhere. If instead of being known as a child of the nefarious Rand clan of thieves she was now marked as the sister of a thrill killer. I stared at that smear of blood-colored wax over her lips. I was as bad as the rest of my family. I didn’t want to ask anything of real consequence for fear of being asked something meaningful in return.

  “What did Mom and Dad say?”

  “They found condoms in the laundry and they don’t like your boyfriend.”

  “Ah, shit. So that’s where that pack went.”

  “Always double-check your pockets, Dale. Always.”

  “So now you’re reporting back to them.”

  “I’m here because I wanted to see you and say I was sorry for running out this morning.”

  We locked eyes. I tried to let her read me. I didn’t know what it would mean or how it would go down, but I made the effort. She seemed about as satisfied as she could be under the circumstances, and her lips eased into a small, soft smile. She turned aside for a moment, and when she turned back the smile was gone.

  “You really came back for Kimmy, didn’t you? Not us. Not Collie.”

  “I don’t know why I’m here, Dale.”

  “At least you’re telling the truth now. That’s something. Did you see her yet?”

  “I saw her. I didn’t talk to her.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  I shrugged. It was my father’s gesture. It was meant to deflect honesty, intimacy, and insight. I couldn’t make it a habit. “She’s married to Chub now. They have a kid. It’s not my place.”

  “But you watched her.”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “So what was the point of that?”

  “Good question,” I said.

  “Five years out there on a ranch beneath the big blue sky, lots of time to clear your head, and you come home with a brain as full of snakes as when you left.”

  I lifted my chin and studied her face. “Fifteen and you know everything there is to know, eh?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, so she found condoms. What parent is going to like the guy who’s having sex with their little girl?”

  “That’s a mature way to look at it, Dale.”

  “I do my best.”

  “I’m glad. So how about if you introduce me to the guy and we leave it at that?”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then you don’t.”

  The wind grew stronger. I could smell more rain in the air, another storm rolling in. Dale’s hair flapped in the breeze and for a second I saw the little girl I remembered, slipping off to sleep with her head on a Princess Lilliput pillowcase while I read about hepcat James Dean-looking blood drinkers who romanced the ladies across deep black fields beneath a hunter’s moon. A twinge of regret banked through me.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go meet the beau.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “seriously, that’s what you call him? The beau?”

  “I do.”

  She locked arms with me and drew me along as we threaded through the parked cars and the kids talking and getting wasted. She took me to a ’69 Chevy that looked like a 396—a speed demon, a racer with wide tires to hug the curves. Only the parking lights were on, glowing bright yellow as we approached. The radio groaned with a heavy bass.

  The beau was propped up on the hood, laid out across his windshield, holding a beer and taking in the starshine. He was much older than I’d expected, maybe twenty or twenty-one. He shouldn’t have been dating a fifteen-year-old girl. My shoulders hitched.

  He had darting eyes, and his nose had been broken at least once and badly set. It lent him a touch of character he hadn’t earned. He went shirtless and wore four black leather wristbands on his right forearm. Jeans cinched his waist, the seams straining as he slid off the hood. He was so skinny he looked half starved. He smelled of oil, acne ointment, and second-rate pot. A tattoo of foreign words was scrawled in black script along his left shoulder. His nose and bottom lip were pierced. He had a pencil beard that rode around the very edge of his jaw, no mustache.

  “Butch, this is my brother Terry.” She gripped him around the waist so tightly he let out a little gasp. She glanced back at me. “Terry, meet Butc
h.”

  We shook hands.

  His voice had a focused edge to it, strong and clear, which I wasn’t expecting. “You’re the one who’s been out west,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s that like?”

  I had a hard time remembering. I strained to come up with an anecdote, a yarn, some kind of an accounting that would be good enough to tell to anyone who asked. But the harder I tried to recall the last half decade the less substantial it seemed. Fences, a lot of fencing, always in need of repair.

  Luckily Butch didn’t really give a shit. He hadn’t waited for a response. “I think about heading out that way. You know, just getting on the road. Hitting three or four states in a couple days. Prairies. Farms. All those highways, all those exits. That’s got to be the life, right?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  I knew one thing. Dale and Butch might’ve hung around the lake most nights but they did a lot of cruising too. Nobody kept a machine like that and didn’t let out the clutch and tear up the streets. I could see them burning down Sunrise Highway, out past the barrens, flipping off the Hamptons and heading down to the beaches.

  He was territorial the way most young men were, and he put on the same show. He kept a hand around her waist, rubbing his knuckles against her bare midriff, telling all the other punks around that she was his and his alone. I’d done it myself. I couldn’t hold it against him, except I did. A part of me wanted to kick his teeth out, but I supposed that was about par. It was his way of proving he had a bloom on her that her own flesh and blood never would.

  He asked, “Hey, babe, can you get me another beer?”

  “Of course. You want one, Terry?”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  She climbed into the backseat and I could hear her rattling a cooler. “We’re out. You want a Mike’s Hard Lemonade instead?”

  Butch said, “What do you think?”

  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Dale slipped off, walking briskly but with a sexy sashay. As she moved across the area I could see her silhouette appearing every so often in the blaze of headlights.

  A fine drizzle started. I liked the feel of it. Trees bucked and branches swept to and fro, the lake showing small whitecaps.