Bryan Gruley: The Hanging Tree

Nor had I hung Gracie in the shoe tree.

“What do you want me to do, Elvis?”

“Forbear, son.”

“It’ll be three grafs in tomorrow’s paper. Relax.”

“I will not relax. Let the girl go to the grave she obviously desired, and let us build the rink we desire.”

“What does one have to do with the other?”

Elvis came halfway out of his chair, then sat back down. “You don’t know, do you? You don’t know the connection?”

I shrugged and immediately wished I hadn’t.

“You didn’t catch the TV news this morning?”

I had that sinking feeling a reporter gets when he’s about to find out he got scooped. I glanced behind the counter. Audrey had slathered my rye slices with jam and was hurrying to wrap them in wax paper.

“I was busy.”

“Hah!” He looked triumphantly around the diner. “So you don’t know about the suicide note.”

It was no surprise to have a suicide note at a suicide. But I knew nothing about Gracie leaving one. I reminded myself of what Darlene had said about not believing everything I heard. Audrey handed me the foam cups of coffee and the brown bag folded around my rye slices. I gave the room my best knowing smile.

“Stay tuned,” I said.

Elvis and some of the others were still chuckling as the door jangled shut behind me. Actually, they were starting to piss me off. A young woman was dead, and even if she wasn’t my favorite person in the world, she deserved better than to be shunted aside for the sake of a hockey rink.

I put the brown bag under one arm, balanced the coffees in one hand, pulled out my cell phone, and dialed Darlene, hoping everyone in the diner wasn’t watching. When her voice mail came on again, I said, “Damn it,” and stuffed the phone in my pocket.

Steam was curling out of a pan on the stove in my mother’s kitchen when I pulled my truck onto the shoulder across the road from her little yellow house on the lake.

The house perched atop a short bluff that tumbled down to a crumbling concrete sea wall and a floating dock that was now propped on a pair of metal sawhorses above the shoreline. Mom had sold our boat years ago, when I’d first gone to Detroit to work for the Times. Now her house, along with Darlene’s mom’s house next door, was among the few remaining from when the first autoworkers and retired Detroit cops and firefighters came north to build their weekend retreats and retirement places.

Most of those cabins, with their screened-in porches and corn brooms standing by the back doors for sweeping sand out of kitchens, had been sold off and ripped down to make way for the fat-faced two- and three-story homes built by the guys who actually ran the auto companies, and doctors and lawyers from Chicago who rarely showed their faces at Enright’s or Audrey’s. Guys like the one supposedly building us that new rink.

The old things about the lake that Mom and I liked-the cinder-block garages lined up along the beach road, the smell of ammonia in the garbage to keep out raccoons, the sounds of dinner plates being cleared from a picnic table in the August dusk-were slowly disappearing. Mom liked how the old houses were tucked humbly back into the shoreline woods, just visible enough from the water that you knew whose dive raft was bobbing out front. The new places, she complained, seemed to be vying with the lake itself for attention. “People can build whatever they like,” she would say, “but they should remember that the lake is not just a fancy coat of paint.”

We took solace in the lake itself. On summer evenings, we’d sit on our oak swing atop the bluff and watch the setting sun make eddies of pink and tangerine undulate on the water. It was enough.

I had come back to live with Mom after staying for a while in a tiny apartment directly above the Pilot newsroom. Shortly after Media North took over the paper, I received in the mail a one-page letter addressed “Dear Tenant.” It said my lease, which was about to expire, would not be renewed because my drafty, leaky, cramped apartment that smelled faintly of mildew apparently was part of “Media North’s ongoing efforts to maximize shareholder value.” Mom was happy to have me back, and I was glad to be there, not just for my old room or her pot roast and Swiss steak suppers. I was worried about her. She seemed to have aged more than a year in the past twelve months.

The kitchen lights were on but I didn’t see Mom. As I approached the back door, I heard music playing inside. It seemed a little early for that.

“Hello?” I said, opening the door.

It took me only a few seconds to recognize the song. Mom usually played it just once a year, on the anniversary of my father’s death:

If ever I would leave you

It wouldn’t be in summer…

An open bag of turnips sat on the kitchen counter next to a glass baking pan containing a pork tenderloin smothered in rosemary. I looked into the pot steaming away on the stove. There was nothing but a little water in it, as if some had already boiled away. Why was Mom cooking so early anyway?

I turned the stove off and looked through the kitchen into the living room. My mother rocked gently in her favorite easy chair to Robert Goulet’s crooning. She had dragged the chair from its usual position near the fireplace to the picture window where she could gaze out onto the frozen expanse of the lake. Bunched about her shoulders was the blue-and-gold River Rats afghan she’d knitted for me when I was in high school and then had claimed for her own.

“Hi, honey,” she said.

She’d seen me in the reflection in the window.

I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. She reached up with a one-armed hug, her pajama flannel soft on my neck. She had been crying.

“Hi,” I said. “Are you cooking?”

She gave me a blank look, as if she didn’t understand the question. She didn’t remember. I waited. She turned her gaze back to the lake.

“Turnips,” she said.

“Turnips?”

“I was going to make turnips. Last week, I bumped into Gracie at the drugstore and I promised I’d make them for her the way she likes them, mashed with lots of butter and salt and parmesan.”

Liked them, I thought. I put my hands on her shoulders, tried to find her eyes in the window reflection.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It was the last time I saw her.”

Gracie had stayed with us on and off after her father-my own father’s cousin, Eddie-had had his chopper blasted from the sky over a jungle in Vietnam. She was one year older than me. As a kid, she lived with her mother mostly in between her mother’s boyfriends. My mother would come home from bingo saying she’d heard that Gracie’s mom had been seen wriggling her butt on the lap of some new out-of-town guy at Enright’s. “Better get Gracie’s room ready,” she’d say, and I’d dread having to share my tiny bathroom with all of Gracie’s perfumes and hairsprays and boxes of tampons. I never understood why, but she always seemed to get her brightest red lipstick smeared on the mirror. And I hated mashed turnips, especially when Mom made those instead of potatoes.

Mom and I quietly watched the lake. Robert Goulet sang. She loved his voice, a voice so big, she said, it could fill up the sky. As if to prove her point, she would wait until my father was out on the lake in our little runabout with the ten-horse Mercury outboard, then she would put Goulet on the stereo and blast it over the outdoor speakers so my father could hear it all the way out at Pelly’s Point. “Nobody sings like that anymore,” she would say. “Not even Frank sings like that anymore.”

My father teased her that she loved Robert Goulet because he looked like Dad. “You mean,” my mother would tease back, “you look like him.” And then he would bow in his paint-spattered coveralls, the drywall contractor with the dimpled chin and eyes as blue as the lake, and she would curtsy in her polyester slacks and Ban-Lon shirt, the housewife with the waves of hair and the smile that could light up the sky, and they would whirl around the living room while I watched from the kitchen, sheepish but happy.