Джеймс Паттерсон - The Midwife Murders

My mother hugs Willie so tight that even she feels compelled to say, “You just tell me when I’m hugging you too hard, Willie.”

“Now!” he shouts.

So she turns to me and hugs me just as hard. As far as I’m concerned, she can never hug me hard enough or long enough. As Mom and I hug, I can see two men over her shoulder. Coming through the screened front door are my dad and my brother, Cabot. To put it bluntly, my dad is a mess, a frightful mess. He can’t weigh much more than 110 pounds. A small plastic oxygen tube is attached to his nostril, and the tube itself is attached to a portable oxygen tank on wheels. Daddy hobbles and stumbles along with his walker. Cabot wheels the oxygen tank, looking none too sure of himself.

In fact, Cabot doesn’t look a helluva lot better than Daddy. My brother is almost as frail and skinny as our father. Cabot’s eyes are red rimmed. His head twitches. His brown hair is greasy and matted. His arms shake terribly as he tries to guide the oxygen tank behind Daddy.

Mom sees her two men on the tiny front porch. She stops hugging and starts yelling. “Harold, you should be staying inside on the couch. Cabot, you should be inside with him. You’re in no proper state of mind to be wheeling the oxygen.”

Two things are immediately clear to me: one, Daddy simply does not hear his wife talking; two, Cabot is still a serious drug user. I break away from Mom and rush toward my father, who looks up at me. He’s confused.

“It’s me, Daddy. It’s Lucy,” I say. I kiss him, but he bends his head back down so quickly that I end up kissing the top of his mostly bald head.

“Where’s that little monkey-faced kid of yours?” Cabot asks. He laughs as he speaks, and I know he means it as a joke, but there’s a flatness to his voice, a definite lack of humor. It makes me wince slightly, even though I know that Willie and his uncle Cab usually have a really good relationship. It’s almost like a friendship between two young boys. Now Willie runs toward me and Daddy and Cabot. The next thing I know, Cabot is rubbing Willie’s hair, and I’m trying to hold the oxygen cart steady.

“Hey, bro,” Cabot says to Willie. “I got the new Call of Duty game. Come on inside here so I can beat the shit outta you.”

“Nice way to talk in front of a child, Cab,” I say. But my opinion doesn’t count for much down here in Walkers Pasture. Willie has taken hold of Cabot’s hand, and they’re heading back through the front door. Even The Duke is barking behind them and following. Mom and I are both involved in trying to turn Daddy around to begin the painful journey back to the front door.

“It’s amazing,” I say to my mother as we baby-step to the door. “Willie’s always had a fancy for Cabot. Now even The Duke’s taken a shine to him.”

“I know. I know. Most grown-ups think Cabot’s just a lazy druggie, throwing his life away,” Mom says. “And I guess they’re right. But you know, Lucy, sometimes children and animals have better instincts than grown-ups.”

I disagree completely, but I don’t say so.

We are at the front door, helping Daddy get up the step to the inside. I lift his left leg. The leg is in. Mom lifts the right leg. It’s in. It feels like the three of us are climbing Mount Everest.

CHAPTER 40

MY MOM HAS A big voice. She never shouts, but if she had been an actress she would’ve been heard in the last row of the balcony. At the moment she’s calling from the kitchen.

“If somebody doesn’t come help me shell these butter beans, we’ll be eating nothing but pork shoulder and fresh air for dinner.”

I’m in my old bedroom. I’m lying on my old bed, the one with the red-and-blue plaid cotton spread. Willie will sleep on the other bed, the one I always called the “guest bed,” the one with the matching red-and-blue plaid cotton spread.

Right now everything in our house is looking and sounding like Hallmark cards and Norman Rockwell paintings. Willie and Cabot are playing their video game. Although Cabot is shaking so much that it’s a wonder he can even hold the controls.

Daddy’s been transferred to his wheelchair, and he’s fallen asleep with his earbuds in, listening to some sweet George Jones tunes. And Mom is basting the pork shoulder and apparently shelling the butter beans all by her lonesome. I can guess what else is for dinner: Mom is the only person I’ve ever known who manages to make Rice-A-Roni from scratch.

“So good that it tastes just as fine as the packaged stuff,” she always says. Mom’s Rice-A-Roni is deadly rich, with one or two sticks of margarine, and butter beans swimming in more margarine. To top it off, she’ll crack open one of her homemade jars of cranberry sauce with pecans.

I jump up quickly from the bed. That sense of teenage déjà vu drifts in and out of my senses: I’m me at fourteen with a basketball game tonight. I’m me right now, and I spot Willie’s Star Wars backpack on the “guest bed.” I’m fourteen, and in a second, I’m a grown-up. And in a minute, I’m standing over a colander with my mom, shelling butter beans.

“I saw that big shiny red Mercedes parked smack across the street, Mom,” I say as I begin squeezing beans from their casings. “It’s so big that it takes up almost two parking spaces.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I see it there sometimes.” Her voice has a forced sort of nonchalance. But she knows where I’m heading with my question about the fancy Mercedes SUV.

“Balboa Littlefield’s car, right? Balboa’s always had a red car,” I say. “A fancy red car. When I was in high school, Balboa had a red Pontiac Firebird, then a Thunderbird. He must have run out of different kinds of birds, ’cause this one is a Mercedes. A red Mercedes.”

Mom doesn’t answer. She pretends to be distracted by the arrival in the kitchen of The Duke, who must have grown tired watching Willie and Cabot play Call of Duty.

“How about a nice fresh butter bean, Mr. The Duke?” Mom asks as she tosses one into the dog’s mouth. The Duke suddenly has an odd expression on his face. Then he spits it quickly onto the floor.

Mom says to The Duke the same thing she used to say to me and Cabot when we were children: “You just don’t know what tastes good.”

The Duke, disappointed, curls up at our feet and closes his eyes. I return to the conversation that Big Lucy thought she’d escaped.

“We were talking about the red Mercedes, Mom,” I say.

“Were we?” she asks. Suddenly she’s quiet and very innocent, two things she never has been.

I say nothing. Then after a few seconds she speaks sternly. “Oh, for God’s sake, Lucy, of course you know, I know, we both know that that shiny piece of car belongs to Balboa Littlefield. He’s also got a powder-blue Mercedes-Benz just like that one.”

Now it’s my turn to be perturbed. “That son of a bitch has been making money for twenty years dealing drugs to everyone in this town. Nothing ever changes here,” I say. I’m shelling butter beans as fast and angrily as I can.

“Nothing nobody can do about it, Lucy. He’s considered to be an upright citizen here in Walkers Pasture. There’s even talk that they’re going to name that playground with the kiddie pool sprinkler after the wealthy Mr. Littlefield.”

“It makes my blood boil,” I say. “They’d be better off naming it after the devil himself.”

“They just can’t stop Balboa. He pays off the cops. He pays off the judges in Wheeling. He gives out packets of marijuana like they were pumpkin seeds.”

My turn again. “And Balboa Littlefield is the reason you’ve got a son inside, age thirty-two, shaking and sweating, unemployed and weighing less than The Duke, and, I dunno, useless, awful, stinking. I’ve run out of words.”