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  Gail's wounds, in the fluorescents of the hospital, looked worse.

  People came in to take her blood pressure, to ask questions, to move her from one room to the next, to do some small amount of probing, to change her from her American flag towel and torn shirt to a hospital gown. The cop's jacket was already gone. All the while he and Greta looked on and made all the jokes they could think of as quickly as they could make them. Gail had stopped crying. She rubbed at her neck as if to remove the name of her assailant, but the name would not budge.

  It took some time but eventually she was settled in a room upstairs, tucked in for the night safe and sound, a room that was nice. A room Vaughn envied her, because it was quiet and clean and had lots of apparatus—machines behind the bed, metal plates on the wall, coiled black tubes and things with dials on them—and the doors to the closet and bath were an attractive light wood—maple, he thought—and there was a usable loveseat covered in a nubby fabric. The furnishings were Knoll. The room had a kind of reassuring chill, like a motel with extra sauce; but, of course, he wasn't staying.

  Greta had come up in the elevator with him, then decided to make herself scarce and told him she'd meet him downstairs. He stayed with Gail for a bit in the room with the lights low and the hum of the air conditioner comforting, and he held her hand at the edge of the bed; and she stared at the television mounted near the ceiling and said, “Maybe you guys could come over and stay at the house a bit. Just a week or something. A couple weeks, maybe. I don't have this divorce thing quite together, really.”

  He squeezed her hand and made some kind of sound, just an utterance, a noise to indicate he'd heard.

  “I know, it's odd, Vaughn, but here we are and I'm still having trouble. I was just so used to having you around, you know, being together even if it wasn't so great. And, I don't know, people aren't so interesting, maybe. Not that you're all that, but—”

  “You really know how to treat a girl,” he said.

  “C'mon. It's not you anyway, it's everybody. Newton's always good. And I miss your father—all those sicko phone calls when he was sort of propositioning me? That was something. Remember that? After your mother died? He was in a bad way then.”

  “He was,” Vaughn said.

  “I wouldn't mind talking to him tonight,” Gail said, picking up Vaughn's hand and dropping it back on the bed.

  “I wouldn't mind talking to him either,” Vaughn said. She patted his hand. “Yeah, I know. Has that gotten any better?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I have to go in a minute.”

  “Maybe I'll call Newton. What time is it out there? Is it, like, midnight?”

  “More like three-something,” he said.

  “Wake him up,” she said.

  The nurse who came to check up on Gail was very crisp. She walked well. Her skirt made a percussive sound, very quiet but insistent, like Tony Williams. The nurse was charming and friendly; she had a light laugh. Just the kind of woman Vaughn would want to check on him in the middle of the night after he'd gotten hammered in a car accident or a fistfight. He wondered why wives didn't do more checking on husbands in the middle of the night. Gail had never checked on him in the middle of the night. Greta never checked on him. Why? Probably in cowboy times the women all checked in on their cowboy husbands, because the women had some sense that they depended on those cowboy husbands, and that their relationships were predicated on a balanced distribution of duties and responsibilities, and that among the responsibilities of the women was checking on their cowboy husbands in the wee hours, just to be sure they had not been scalped by savages or mishandled by some disgruntled wranglers. Vaughn made a note to himself to bring this up to Greta later. He knew what she would say. She would say, “How do you know I don't check up on you?”

  When the nurse was gone Gail said, “Okay, forget I mentioned the move thing. I'm doing fine. Just a little hiccup.”

  He leaned over the bed and kissed her on the cheek and felt how soft and lovely her skin was. He took in her scent as well, which, in spite of the mess of the evening, was not erased. It wasn't a scent he recognized from their marriage. It was the new scent she had been wearing since the marriage. It was a scent he found stirring, even seductive, in spite of everything.

  Greta and Vaughn stopped at a green BP station to fill up the car and to get Greta some M&M's and Fritos, which, eaten together, “were sublime,” she said. This was a specialty she'd picked up from her late husband. Then, Greta at the wheel, they were tooling down the beach highway stuffing their faces with M&M's and handfuls of corn chips. He said, “She wants us to move over there.”

  “She does?” Greta said.

  “Just for a bit. Just until things settle down.”

  “Wants us to move?”

  “That's what she said.”

  “Fancy that,” Greta said.

  They rode in silence, the only sounds the tires rolling and the Fritos crunching. After a minute Vaughn said, “We don't have to do it. We could say no.”

  “You could say no,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said. “I guess.”

  “I don't think so,” Greta said. “I'm guessing this is a command performance and we're locked in.”

  “Might be that,” he said.

  “I don't mind,” she said. “It's odd, but what isn't these days? Last time I talked to her, Gail asked if you were still going on about your father. I said you were.”

  “What a world,” Vaughn said. “My ex and my new girlfriend discussing my problem with my father.”

  “It's not a problem,” she said. “He's dead.”

  “It's a problem for me,” Vaughn said. “I didn't do his death well.”

  “So you say. I told you it wasn't your fault.”

  “Not my fault he died or not my fault I wasn't good to him?”

  “You loved him,” she said. “Gail told me that. Told me all about the funeral, the telephone, the woman you had looking after him.”

  “There wasn't any funeral,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “I dispatched him over the phone. Into a cardboard box, into the fire.”

  “It's not the old way, but it's okay,” Greta said. “It's modern.”

  “It was easy,” he said. “That's what I noticed.”

  “You could have made a big deal out of it. Would that have been better?”

  “Hey,” he said. “Maybe it's fine to dump your old man over the phone with some funeral home weasel who gets prickly when he figures out you're going minimal on the arrangements.”

  “Gail said your father would have approved,” Greta said.

  “She's probably right,” he said. “But there's me, too. I had him picked up at the house and shuttled to this joint where they burned what was left of him and blew the ashes out the back end of the oven.”

  “Now you're being dramatic.”

  “I didn't want to see him. I just wanted it over. I mean, once he was dead.”

  “Let's talk about something else,” Greta said.

  “You'd do more for a dog,” he said.

  “You're whining, Vaughn.”

  “Put him out for the garbage man,” he said. “In that stupid white shirt and those stupid gray slacks he always wore.”

  Greta wiggled the steering wheel. “If you keep this up I'm going to crash and accidentally kill you.”

  “Okay,” he said. He opened a second bag of M&M's. “Let's forget it.”

  He counted the M&M's in his palm. He added three Fritos. One of the Fritos was two Fritos stuck together. He popped the batch into his mouth. “You and Gail are more friendly than necessary,” he said, munching.

  “It's the modern world, blasted into the heart of your life,” Greta said. “You're in the crosshairs of destiny.”

  “It might be better if you kept things on an ex-wife/new girlfriend basis?” His voice went up at the end so that she would be sure to get the question, so that she would be sure to understand that he was asking a questio
n, not making an assertion.

  “We're fine. We're just sort of half-friends,” she said.

  “Some things are between you and me, I mean.”

  “Duh,” she said. “And some things are you and her.”

  “I didn't mean that,” he said.

  “Sure you did. That's cool,” she said. “I'm not that into her.”

  “Whatever,” he said, pinching a half-dozen Fritos in one hand, putting them in his mouth, then pouring a handful of M&M's. When he got the chewing down to something manageable he said, “I didn't take care of my father and then he died. That's the trouble. I think that's the trouble.”

  “Here we go,” she said.

  “We're responsible. Me and Newton. We didn't love him enough.”

  “Get out the love meter, baby.”

  “We never went over there. We called and pretended to care, but mostly we just waited to get off the phone. Maybe it was just me. I don't know what Newton did. Newton's just like him anyway.”

  “Newton is just like him?” she said. Greta pulled the car off the road onto a sandy parking area that was used by beachgoers, shut off the lights, and ran the car windows down. It was muggy and a little chilly. They listened to the water of the Mississippi Sound slap around in the shallow bay. The stars were bright in the sky; there was a moon way off in the west. In one of the few houses across the street from the water someone was pulling an all-nighter, listening to an opera. Vaughn recognized an aria by some famous soprano; they heard bits and pieces of it over the sounds of the few cars running the coast highway that early in the morning.

  Greta turned in the seat and said, “You loved him plenty, Vaughn. I don't know you that well, but I know you well enough to know that. You love him still. You feel guilty because he's dead, but you didn't do it. You have to understand, you have to kind of get serious about this, because it becomes a problem after a while. One way or another everybody fucks up sometime. So even if you did fuck up, which I can't figure, it's over now.”

  “In a big way,” he said.

  “Oh, please,” she said. She danced in her seat, arms in the air. “Drama queen, drama queen.”

  “Am not,” he said. “We weren't kind and then he died.”

  “I don't want to play this,” she said. “He died because it was time. He was old. Your mother died a year before or something, whatever it was. Did you kill her, too?”

  “No. But everybody loved her. She was an angel. She was the Little Town of Bethlehem. She was St. Theresa of the Little Flower, whatever her name was, only she wasn't little.”

  “A medium-sized flower then,” Greta said.

  “Ha ha ha ha,” he said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You were fine with your mother's death, but you believe you contributed to your father's death. I don't know. I've only known you what, four months? Five? Already I've heard enough about this.”

  “He was sort of annoying,” Vaughn said. “I mean, he wasn't annoying that last year—he was just sort of pitiful—but before that he'd been annoying. I mean like when both of them were alive. And when we were children, he was annoying.”

  “Not unusual,” she said.

  “We never really hugged him once we were adults,” he said.

  “Oh God, hugging,” she said. “Too much. Call Oprah. Where are the M&M's?”

  He handed her the bag. It was getting light in the east. He liked sitting out there by the beach listening to the sounds, looking at the lights. The early morning was lovely, the sounds were soothing and constant—the hiss of car tires, the light splash of the water in the gulf, the crickets, the buzzing electronics of the streetlights. Very musical.

  After a few minutes he said, “Okay. Here's the deal. I'll get over it. But I feel this and I'm not going to stop feeling it because you say it's silly, or you say I did fine. I did not pay enough attention to my father. I didn't call him. I didn't go see him. I didn't take care of him. I didn't respond to hints he made in conversation. I think he wanted to come live with us. I knew it but I ignored it. When it came up, I'd say, ‘Well, that's an idea. We can think about that.’ I was trying to get him into a home where people would take care of him, other people, where he would pay people to see to his needs, really to be friends. But of course, the people in those places aren't very often friends, are they? And we knew that, Newton and I. We went over there and tried to get him interested in the idea—took him around, showed him various old folks' homes where he could buy a crummy future. We almost had him convinced once. It wasn't a bad place. Some of the places were frightening, but a couple were livable. One was kind of charming, like a bigger version of a good hospital room. It had that kind of hospital room feel about it, but it would have been just that room, a single room, all the time. He would have to go out in the hall to meet anybody, to see any of the other people. The hall was like the street. He'd have this room instead of an apartment or a house. In fact, I think Newton looked at an apartment one time. Newton the Fancy, the Swell, the Well-to-Do. I should tell you about Newton someday.”

  “You've told me already,” she said. “You don't like him.”

  “I like him well enough. I used to, anyway,” he said. “He's my brother. I love him. I care for him.”

  “No, you don't,” she said. “You wouldn't kill your father, but your brother, maybe.”

  “Where do you get these ideas?” he said.

  “Double duh,” she said.

  “Okay, he's sort of a jerk. I'll give you that. I'll just admit that right up front. He's full of himself. He's thrilled to be alive and he thinks the world should be thrilled right along with him. He's condescending, presumptuous, controlling, devious, self-centered, and narcissistic.”

  “Hey! Welcome home!”

  “I know,” he said. “Everyone in my family. Well, everyone but my mother. She was none of that.”

  “Your brother is very successful,” Greta said. “This upsets you.”

  “Of course it does. Everybody loves him.”

  “If everybody hated him, you'd be buddies, right?”

  “Probably,” he said.

  “So you feel better now? Cleansed? Did you get this passion for truth and justice from your father? That sounds like your father. Everything I've heard about your father, that sounds like him, like what he wanted more than anything else.”

  “Well, he didn't get much from us, not the last days, anyway.”

  “How many days was it? Let's talk about this; let's get down to brass tacks. How many days?”

  “Don't be funny,” he said.

  “I'm not being funny,” she said. “Are you talking the last week or the last six weeks or the last hundred days? What? Six months?”

  “From the moment my mother died until the day he died. A year and a half. But he was old. I mean, I'd written him off before that, but I think before that I was acting okay. It was after Mother died that I couldn't bear him anymore. He knew it, too. He knew as soon as she was gone it was all over for him. He knew that we'd only been paying as much attention to him as we had been for her sake. That's probably the worst of it.”

  “That's bad,” Greta said. “That couldn't have been much fun for him.”

  “Exactly,” Vaughn said.

  Some geese were flying by and honking. Vaughn looked up in the sky—he couldn't see them. There were a lot of lights up and down the highway along the edge of the water but no geese that he could see. They were odd-sounding.

  Greta started the car. “Let's go to the house,” she said. “I'm tired.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “This is weird shit with Gail, huh? I feel better having said this stuff. I don't know. Who knows what's happening next?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Moving,” he said.

  They had started rolling out of the car park, tires crunching the sand, and the car stopped suddenly. Greta turned to him and said, “It's fine. Just don't make a big deal out of it.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I don
't want to do it,” she said. “But it's not a deal killer. Eddie can take care of the house. We can stay over there. Or you could, for that matter. I don't have to, if Gail would rather.”

  “No,” Vaughn said. “She said ‘us’ specifically. ‘Us’ is what she said. I said I'd talk to you about it.”

  “It is kind of crazy,” Greta said. “Your house, your ex-wife—nutball.”

  “I could tell her you said no.”

  “Great,” Greta said. “No, thanks. It's a short-term thing anyway, just to get her straightened away.”

  “She was pretty beat up,” he said.

  “We didn't do it, Vaughn.”

  “We are angels of mercy,” he said.

  “Oh Jesus,” she said.

  8

  Back at Greta's he couldn't sleep. The morning sun was glowing in the smeary windows and neighbors were moving around outside, chain saws chattered, tiny rented bulldozers roared. The guest bedroom was too small, too cluttered, and Vaughn felt out of place, and he was worried about Gail. He lay in the bed holding his eyes shut with his fingertips and thought about the thoughts running through his brain, which were mostly about his father, who was dead, and about whom he thought more often than ever. This morning he imagined, as he often did, his father's life during the year after his mother died. His father lived then in the two-bedroom, two-story apartment outside Atlanta in the group of four hundred apartments called the Mark V that he and Vaughn's mother picked out years before—a large apartment in a gated development with landscaped lawns, large sections of glass in the buildings, brick construction, shingled roofs, handsome fences around the patios, small private gardens.

  His father had the corner apartment, and he was alone now all the time except for when the woman came in from Catholic Services. This was a woman Vaughn had hired when his father started using the walker—an aluminum apparatus with wheels on the front, feet to the back. He also had a wheelchair, which Vaughn had bought for him.