Tim Sandlin - Social Blunders

“I’m not your pal; I’m your son.”

“How much to change your story?”

“I hate to be disrespectful, but stick your money in your ear.” See how controlled I was, a lesser person would have said ass .

“I have associates who could hurt you real bad,” Skip said.

With each exchange, our voices grew louder. It had been a while since I’d dealt with a male long enough to argue. The feeling was like I’d separated from myself, as if I were watching TV and in the program at the same time.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “You do an awful thing to a little girl thirty-whatever years ago and now you have the scrotums to act like the injured parties.”

That shut everyone up for a while. I think Skip was figuring out what scrotums meant in this context. Cameron put both hands in the pockets of his windbreaker. He seemed to be figuring repercussions. What I noticed was how pretty the day was—silver-blue sky setting off the sienna red of post oaks lining the fairways. That’s my pattern during heightened emotional states—I focus on irrelevant details.

“Would you mind taking off your cap?” I asked Cameron.

He considered refusal, then gave a what-the-hell shrug and took off his Duke cap.

Just as I suspected. “You’re bald,” I said. “You’re left-handed and edging into fat.” I left out tall. “You probably aren’t the sperm father anyway.”

I couldn’t believe the coldness of his eyes. The man could out-Indian Hank Elkrunner. I tried staring him down but lost and had to cover my loss with talk. “But just because you aren’t the genetic culprit doesn’t mean you aren’t morally responsible for what you boys did to Lydia.”

Skip blew up. “What we did to Lydia. Your mother was a whore.”

Time for the dramatic gesture. Lydia didn’t teach me much, but she was the queen of the dramatic gesture. I moved up within six inches of Skip’s face. “To hell with your associates, Mr. Prescott”—if you say Prescott right, spit sprays on the P—“either hurt me now or shut your ugly beak.”

Skip’s blotches spread down his cheeks to his neck and he blinked like a strobe light. I expected him to belt me and us to roll around the driving range grass like grade school ruffians. But Katrina was right—he was a wimp. Thank God.

I snatched the club from his hands, spun around, and walked back to the golf cart. “Here’s how we test our steering wheels,” I said, and I showed him a trick my sales manager, Ambrosia, taught me. I stuck the club handle through the wheel and wedged it under the instrument panel. Then I bent Skip’s golf club into a U.

Skip’s eyes went wide at the sacrilege. Cameron smiled.

Time for the tough-guy exit. I threw the ruined club in Skip’s direction. “Next time it’s your spine, Pops.”

Pretty effective. I wish a woman had been there to watch.

Gilia Saunders was waiting at my car. She stood, blonde in the sunlight, holding a purse-like gym bag on her right arm, wearing a jean skirt and a short-sleeved shirt with no collar and an alligator over her left breast.

“Men piss me off,” I said. “Anything they can’t control is a threat.”

“You’ve been talking to Dad,” Gilia said.

“Do you think I’m dressed like a rag picker? What the hell is a rag picker?”

She studied me with that non-judgmental look on her face. She had the cheekbones and neck of an Indian. I was real aware that she was an inch or so taller than me, which put her around five eight, tall for a girl. She also had considerably better posture.

“You are dressed casually,” she said.

I had on a Wyoming Cowboys T-shirt and button-fly Wranglers. The T-shirt—jeans, too, for that matter—had seen better days. But I was raised to think men who care about what they wear are vain.

She did this shrug thing with her shoulders that made the alligator jump out at me. “I don’t mind. I like a man with the confidence to look like a slob at the country club.”

Mixed signals here. Was she implying she likes me or I’m a slob? Or both?

“How was your swim?” I asked.

“Two miles of backstroke. Then I came here for lunch, hoping I would run into you.”

Holy shit, I was having a non-typical day. “How did you know I was here?”

“Mom told me the men sent you a summons.”

“And you were hoping to run into me?”

She nodded, but didn’t explain why she was hoping to run into me. She leaned the bag on one hip and stood with her shoulders square to the Dodge. She seemed to expect me to talk, only I couldn’t know what to say until I knew why she was here.

To move the conversation along, I said, “Gilia’s a flower.”

“You got it.”

She put a hand on the chrome trim on top of the Dart. Her fingers were long and large boned, like her hips and knees. Four fingernails were shiny perfect—Mary Kay showpieces—but the index finger fingernail was torn short and ragged.

“Could we go somewhere and talk?” she asked. “Dad might see us here. He wouldn’t like it.”

“You want to talk to me?”

“Why not?”

We got in the car and I drove us to a city park. It was only a block-long grassy place astride a stagnant creek filtering down a weedy ditch. On the far end a couple of unattended children played on a wooden merry-go-round. I parked where we could watch the children but not be expected to run rescue on a skinned knee.

Gilia scooted away and leaned against the far door. “Do you ever feel like you’re the only one left speaking the language you speak?” she said. “Everybody in the world knows words you don’t know.”

I could tell this woman wasn’t into small talk. “Sometimes I can’t process waitresses or store clerks.”

She nodded eagerly. “Exactly. It’s like the syllables are jumbled and I’ve lost the decoder ring.”

“I don’t understand the relationship here. Am I supposed to treat you like a woman I would enjoy talking to, or a possible sister?”

“Don’t you talk to your sister?”

“I never had a sister, although my mom was more a sister than mother.”

“I have two brothers.”

“Actually, she was more a bad baby-sitter than a sister or mother.”

“One of my brothers is Southern macho and the other’s a brat.”

“I met the brat. He thought I was Jehovah’s Witness.”

“That’s Bob. Ryan is the Southern macho. He lifts weights and watches TV sports and says ‘Bitchin’ when Mom isn’t around. I don’t understand how I’m your possible sister. Katrina Prescott didn’t explain and Mom wouldn’t stop crying, but it seems like either my dad is your dad or he isn’t.”

“Is your mother Skip Prescott’s sister?”

“How’d you know?”

I ran a relationship chart in my head. “That means you might be my sister, but it’s just as likely you’re my cousin.”

“Out with it. What’s the deal here?”

I told her the story of Christmas Eve 1949—how Paw Paw Callahan promised he would come home but didn’t, so Lydia called her friend Mimi’s brother and the boys came over and Skip injected oranges with vodka from a syringe. When I came to the rape, Gilia got real still. Before that, her eyes had been moving, watching the children on the merry-go-round, keeping track of street traffic. At the word rape she looked directly at me. I had to meet her eyes or lose credibility.

“Dad pissed on her?”

“That’s what Lydia says.”

We were quiet a long time after that. She looked down at the floorboards. I could see her jaw, clenching and unclenching beneath the skin. Her hair was very blonde, right up to the scalp.