Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

The next part is when I stopped being a mother. I agreed to give a deposition about where Rex had been the days before the arrest, which was actually nowhere I knew. The truth was that he’d taken off without explanation or phone calls for three days, which was normal for Rex. He turned up that Saturday afternoon, without his Corvette, dropped off by a friend he’d been helping set up a restaurant in the city, he said. This was when he asked to borrow our car the next morning. His lawyer said that this little deposition from me was the last thing Rex needed to make sure he didn’t take part of the fall for Luke. It was, Carol said, the least I could do given the circumstances. So despite the fact that I had on the same day found out that Rex had a police record that included fraud and multiple drug charges, I gave the deposition. And when the lawyers and the DA and Rex then told me that I needed to convince Luke to plead guilty and get a reduced sentence, I did that, too. They told me that even though Luke was eighteen and not a minor, he would only get a slap on the wrist because it was his first offense, that it wouldn’t affect his scholarship or his life in any way. Do you think I bothered to check with anyone — Stanford, his coach, another lawyer — to see if they knew what they were talking about? Of course I didn’t. I listened to Rex. And instead of hiring a decent lawyer and letting a jury decide, I convinced Luke to go along with the plea that they all wanted from him. He was terrified by this point, in jail for days, and the DA spooked him with threats of spending all of his twenties behind bars. The public defender told Luke it was his best shot at a normal life, and in the end he pled guilty. He pleaded guilty and spent eleven months in prison.

What happened next won’t surprise you. Rex got off scot-free and in three weeks was gone. No good-bye, no phone call, no note, no thank-you. Nothing. I never saw or heard from him again. I’ll bet you saw that part coming, Winton. That part in the story when the dumb woman does or gives the guy who can make her laugh the thing he wants and then he disappears. You’ve heard that part of the story before. You’ve heard it and seen it and done it a thousand times.

Did I tell you a woman came to my door tonight and hit me in the face? She did. You probably know her father. Another dumb sucker like me sending money to strangers. At least he’s lucky enough to have a daughter to step in. Which she did. She let me have it. And thank God. She knocked some sense into me. Finally, someone knocked some goddamned sense into me! You know what she said? She said I destroyed people’s lives and she was right. She told me I had to stop, Winton. She told me to stop, and right now, even though it’s too late to do anyone any good, I’m stopping.

Before Winton speaks, Lydia stands up from the kitchen table. She drops the receiver from her ear and hugs it to her chest for a few seconds before carefully returning it to its cradle. Upstairs, the television has been turned off, and for the first time all evening her apartment is silent.

It has been nine months since he ditched his bike here and snuck down the driveway and across the lawn to the house. Like on that night, there is now a bright moon, not quite full, but nearly so. It lights the road and, opposite the chained driveway entrance, acres of apple and pear orchards where Silas and his friends spent many hours as kids. In the bluish light he pictures Ethan and Charlie whipping apples from long sticks into the stone walls and watching them explode. How many afternoons had they spent there smashing fruit and laughing their heads off? He remembers the Mexican workers who would wave at them and let them be. No one ever seemed to miss those apples or care that they were trespassing. When was the last time they came here? Silas wonders. Two summers ago? Three? It seems like another lifetime. Something shines in the dark across the road, and at first he can’t tell what it is, but as he steps closer, he sees it’s June Reid’s old mailbox, dented and silver and still standing. It leans to the left, and the red metal flag points toward the ground. He turns back toward the top of the driveway and descends slowly.

There is no house now, just a dark rectangle of dirt and rock. He sees no sign of anything burned or charred, no sign of what had been here. Its size surprises Silas. It does not look large enough to have once held rooms and furniture and all the complicated systems that keep a house operating. He approaches where the kitchen window would have been and stares into the air above the strange patch of earth. It looks like a garden, he thinks, waiting to be planted, or an enormous grave, freshly dug and filled. He hears a twig snap, and when he jumps to look behind him he sees what is left of the small stone shed, half-lit in moonlight like a ragged ghost. The small cedar shingle roof is mostly burned off but the walls and door remain. Impossibly, two of the boxes of Ball jars are still stacked there. He steps inside, sits down on the dirt floor, and leans back on the cold stone.

Nine months ago, he’d come back here because he had no choice. He tries to remember how late exactly it was, but that part is fuzzy. He knows he got home from work by eight o’clock, because he ate dinner with his parents and sisters. He remembers them needling him about the wedding preparations and the rehearsal dinner at the house. What he’d seen, what he’d heard, who was there. He couldn’t understand why all the interest, especially from his mother, who kept asking if he’d seen Luke’s mom, Lydia. She’d always had a problem with her. Did she wear one of her little, low-cut dresses like she used to turn up in at the Tap? His sister Gwen yelled, Mom! That’s not nice! His father laughed and it went on from there.

After eating the vanilla ice-cream bar his mother gives him for dessert, he gets up from the table to go to his room, impatient to pack a hit and crash to sleep. Halfway up the stairs, something seems off. He stops midstair, thinks. The knapsack. Where is it? His chest tightens. Did he just leave it at the kitchen table? He bolts down the stairs into the kitchen and tries to act casual as he sails past the table to the kitchen sink. Glass of water, he preemptively mumbles as he scans beneath the table and sees nothing anywhere near where he was sitting. Before getting trapped in conversation, he disappears upstairs and into his room, where he thinks through each beat of the afternoon. He had his knapsack when he and Ethan and Charlie were fucking around and getting high on the Moon. He remembers rushing back and stashing it in the stone shed behind boxes of Ball jars so it was out of sight and off his back while they hurried through the remaining work.

It hits him. IT’S STILL THERE. Behind the box, in the shed, next to the house. The fucking knapsack is still there, and in it his bong, his pot, his learner’s permit, his school ID, and his cash. An army of people will be showing up first thing in the morning to empty that shed and set up the wedding reception. Rick Howland, the caterer, for one, is definitely going to be there before eight, and Luke is up at six most mornings, so even if he thought about beating Rick to the house, Luke would no doubt be walking the property, picking up sticks, and cursing his half-assed workers for doing such a lame job.

Silas sits on his bed and tries to regulate his breathing. He’s crashing from being on his feet and high all afternoon, and he feels like he’s hyperventilating. He balls his fists into the top of his thighs, takes a deep breath, and wishes he could go to sleep. But there is no way around the grim truth: he has to go back. He has to ride back up Wildey Road and down along Indian Pond after everyone in his house — and hopefully by then in June Reid’s house, too — is asleep.