Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

“So you think this is just the middle-aged crazies?” Janet sounded relieved. “Well, he won’t be the first guy to get the urge to dip his wick into a much younger woman when the clock starts tolling fifty.”

His hand tightened around the banister until his knuckles showed white and his arm shook. To hear all his pain, all his teeth-gritting self-control, all his astonished joy dismissed as a midlife crisis was almost more than he could bear right now. He knew his sister and his mother loved him, but they didn’t know him. Nobody knew him.

Except Clare. Who was lost to him now.

He let his next step come down loudly, then thudded the rest of the way down the stairs. His mom’s tiny living room opened directly onto an even tinier dining room, where the two women were sitting, folding single printed sheets of paper into thirds.

Margy Van Alstyne looked up at him with the face of a worried chipmunk, well-padded cheeks between frown lines above and a little wedge of a chin below. That, combined with her short, beer-keg body, gave her a misleadingly harmless appearance. “Hey, sweetie. We were just talking about you. Did you have a good nap?”

He cleared his throat. He could at least try to sound normal, even if he couldn’t feel that way. “Yeah, I was out like a light. What’s this you two are working on?” He picked up one of the pamphlets. “An antiwar rally? Aw, Mom, not again.” One of his mother’s proudest possessions was a photo from a 1970 Time magazine showing her in a screaming match with the then-governor of New York at a peace demonstration.

“Just because the corporate war machine doesn’t have you in its clutches this time doesn’t mean I’m not going to shout out against this blood-for-oil idiocy.”

He scowled at his sister. “Are you in this, too?”

Janet, like him, had gotten most of her features from their father, and they shared a rangy build and bright blue eyes. She used to have his almost-but-not-quite-brown hair until a few years ago, when it mysteriously went blond overnight. From fright at turning forty, she claimed. Now she stretched out her long legs beneath the table and cracked her arms over her head. “Don’t look at me. I’m just the hired help.”

“You’d be singing a different song if you had sons instead of daughters,” their mother said.

“I did all the singing I intend to do back when I was a kid,” Janet said. “I’ll help you fold your mailers and I’ll take ’em to the post office and I’ll even drive you to Albany to picket at the statehouse, but I have yet to see that anything an ordinary person does has any effect whatsoever on the powers that be.”

“And this would explain why you drive your old mother batty by refusing to vote?”

O-kay. At least they were off the topic of him and his marriage. Or him and Clare. “I’ll see if there’s anything I can make for dinner,” he said, beating a retreat into the kitchen.

He was head-deep in the pantry, wrestling out a sack of potatoes, when he saw Janet’s jeans in the doorway.

“What are you going to make?” She moved out of the way as he hoisted the twenty-pound bag onto the table.

“Potato soup,” he said. “Mom’s on one of these all-protein, no-carb diets. All she ever has for supper is this freeze-dried wild salmon or turkey sausages.”

“So of course that makes you crave bread and rice and potatoes.”

“What can I say? I guess I’m the type to want what I can’t have.” He tried to smile, but from the look on Janet’s face, he didn’t succeed.

She dropped her voice, in deference to their mother’s presence in the next room. “How are you doing? Really?”

“Really?” He stared at the potato sack. He was numb, that’s how he was. Cauterized. He knew that soon he’d smell the stench of burned flesh and all those nerves that had been seared in half would come screaming to life and he would be in a world of pain. He knew that if he took his concentration for one moment off the here and now and started thinking about the future, he would probably pull on his boots, leave his mother’s house, and jump off the conveniently located bridge-just a two-minute stroll from her front door-into the rocky, ice-rimmed waters of the upper Hudson River.

“I’m okay, I guess,” he said. “Considering.”

Janet looked at him skeptically. “O-kay. And how’s Linda?”

He felt his lips draw tight together. “Busy. She’s redoing all the drapes and stuff she originally did for the Algonquin Waters Spa and Resort.” Pretentious name. Although, having met the owner, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the place had been called the Peasants Stay Out Hotel.

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“What’s with you and Mom?” Time to change the subject, little sister. “You two don’t usually wrangle over her causes.”

She pulled a face that said, I know what you’re doing, but I’ll play along anyway. “That’s because she’s been sticking to the save-the-earth stuff since… well, since the last Gulf War.” She dug several potatoes out of the bag and dropped them into the sink.

“Stop the development, stop the war-what’s the difference?” He stooped to retrieve the colander from one of the lower cabinets.

“Easy for you to say. You were in Vietnam.”

He snorted a laugh.

“You know what I mean. You weren’t the only freshman in Millers Kill High whose mother was arrested for throwing cow’s blood on the Armory.” She opened a drawer and got the peeler out. “I went to all those sit-ins and lie-ins and marches with her, and it didn’t mean squat.”

“C’mon. You know Nixon was quaking in his boots at the thought of Mom.”

Now Janet was the one who snorted. Russ turned on the tap and unhooked the wooden cutting board from beside the kitchen window. As his sister rinsed the potatoes and began her rapid-fire peeling, he threw open the freezer door. “Mom! You got any salt pork?”

Her voice floated over the sound of running water. “That stuff will clog your arteries, sweetie. Never touch it.”

“How about some real bacon, then?” He withdrew a package of 100% Lean Turkey De-Lite Bacon and waved it in Janet’s direction. “Look at this crap,” he said.

“Nope. What you see is what we’ve got.”

He swung the freezer door shut. “I’m going to the market. I can’t make potato soup without pig fat.” He stepped into his boots, waiting on the soaking board next to the back door. “Try not to tear each other’s hair out while I’m gone.”

Janet smiled at him. “Watch yourself, smart-ass. Mom believes she can fix anything if she just tries hard enough. If you don’t sort things out, and fast, she’ll make you her next cause.”

Russ was clearing off his windshield and headlights when his cell phone, plugged into a wall socket in the kitchen, began ringing. He was carefully pulling out of the drive when it let off a series of sharp beeps, indicating he had a message. And he was well down Old Route 100, absorbed in his wipers beating away the fast-falling snow, when his mother got up from the dining room table to answer her own phone, ringing off the hook in the living room.

Later-much later-Officer Mark Durkee would wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t gotten the phone call. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion. He often popped in a video and turned off the phone about an hour before Rachel got home from her shift as a surgical nurse at the Washington County Hospital. Maddy, their five-year-old, was like a crack addict getting a pipeload when it came to her Disney Princess tapes. She wouldn’t budge until her mother arrived, and by then he’d be an hour into his evening nap, soaking up enough sleep to make it through another eight-hour overnight in his squad car.