“That’s all I ever wanted, Uncle. A home for her, you know? A home.”
“Drink some tea, Charlie.”
Charlie did. He raised the cup and sipped loudly, his eyes on his reflection in the French doors. His shoulders were slumped, and he seemed to be staring at a man he used to want to talk to but no longer.
“I think she needs to hear that, Charlie.”
“She fuckin’ hates me.”
“I don’t think so.”
Charlie held his cup in the air. He sipped again. He lowered it slowly, set it carefully onto its saucer.
“Well maybe I fucking hate me.”
“Maybe you hate your behavior, nephew.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Behavior can be changed.”
Charlie looked at him, his eyes pink and heavy-lidded. He held his head back accusatorily. “I don’t think so.”
This wasn’t the time for argument. Not now.
“Charlie, I want you to rest on the couch for a while before you drive, okay?”
“Nope. I’m good.” Charlie stood and drained his tea as if it was a beer. There was no reasoning with a drunk, and Francis knew he would have to stop him physically, but he’d gotten lucky once and doing it again was out of the question.
“Charlie, if you get behind that wheel, I will call the police.”
“Do what you fucking want, Uncle. I’m going home.”
Perhaps if Charlie had backed carefully out of the driveway, Francis would have done nothing. But his nephew’s car had jerked backwards into the road, its headlights flashing across Francis’s neighbor’s windows, and then, as if he’d made his point, Charlie drove slowly away. For a long while, it seemed, Francis held the kitchen telephone in his hand. He saw the cracked foundation and splintered corner of that house on the boulevard. He saw his own crushed lower leg hanging in a sling. He saw the stainless steel bedpan in Beth’s hands, and there was really no need to see anymore. He put on his glasses and dialed, trying to remember the make of his nephew’s sedan, its color, its plates.
It’s quiet now. No rain or gusts of wind. In the darkness, Francis can no longer hear Devy’s muffled voice either, and he’s relieved. His eyes are going, but his ears still seem to work and for this he’s grateful. The strains of her voice, they were in the urgently confiding tones close friends use with one another. Or lovers. How is this possible?
But it’s time for sleep. Early tomorrow he’ll have to call Marie. Find out first if the police did locate and stop Charlie, which they may not have. But for Charlie’s sake, Francis can only hope they did. Maybe it was even Jimmy Swansea, and then Francis will offer to do what he can. Charlie will need rides to and from work and—who knows?—perhaps meetings like the ones that saved his father. Like the ones that probably saved his marriage, too. And maybe tomorrow won’t be the best day to take Charlie’s mother to lunch. But then again, why not? Why not tell Evelyn it was him who did this? Her brother-in-law, Francis William Brandt, who’d taken action and hopefully prevented something catastrophic?
Francis’s knee still hurts. He hopes he hasn’t injured it, but he also feels more substantial than he has in a long while, his ship righting itself a bit. He sees himself standing before a sea of children not unlike Devon. On their own too soon, their faces a mask he’d like to talk his way into. Perhaps he should put his name in as a substitute. He can do that. One or two days a week, he should. Why not?
He turns on his side and rests his hand on the surface of the cool, empty sheet beside him. That Thursday night in January. He’d gone out for milk for her tea the next morning, that’s all, just that, so who was this man who unlocked the door and closed it to the cold and hung up his coat and hat? Who was this man who took off his gloves and pushed them into his coat pockets and carried the milk into the warmth of their living room to find his wife fast asleep? Her reading glasses hung just beneath her nose, and her chin had dropped and what was this on her blue sweater? Oatmeal? No, for he could smell it as he lowered himself to her, and so this man was expecting a high fever, a stomach flu, a wife who would need Pepto-Bismol and help to bed. Not this stillness. Not this absolute quiet. Her hands he grasped falling away like useless objects left behind.
Francis feels sleep begin to cover him like a warm blanket. There is Devy’s concave cheek and her closed eyes, Triz smiling up at him in the Tiki light, Beth’s damp head leaning against his shoulder as he kisses her hair and lifts a dueling pistol and aims its long barrel at his own nephew who is running, running toward a ditch under an unrelenting sun.
DEVON OPENS HER LAPTOP and Skypes Hollis. It’s past two, but he doesn’t sleep. He says that’s when they come for him, when he’s lying on his bed in the quiet dark. He sees them, fathers and uncles, mothers and little kids, all huddled in their night clothes in the dirt.
The screen becomes his face. The lamp with the burned shade is on behind him, and he looks like he’s been sleeping. He’s clean-shaven and he’s wearing a white T-shirt with a rip in it on his left shoulder. She can see his skin.
“Did I wake you?”
“No, honey. You know I don’t sleep.”
“Can I come see you? Like, really soon?” Her voice sounds young to her, and this makes her feel shy but Hollis is nodding his head, his eyes on her, and it’s like what she’s just said is a song in the air only he can hear. “In two days I’ll be in my Airstream. Can you be here in two days?”
“I think so. I mean, I know so.”
“You sure?”
“I have to.”
“Good.”
“Yeah, good.” Devon feels a little scared, and Hollis lights up a cigarette. He’s nodding again, smiling at her, blowing smoke through his nose as if it’s love and he has so much of it, so much of it to give.
DEVON WALKS SOFTLY down the hallway. She flicks on the light over the kitchen table. On the counter beside the fridge is Francis’s blood pressure medication and her GED notebook, and she grabs it, then pulls a pen from the jar of them under the phone. Aunt Beth’s car keys hang beside Francis’s. Her reading glasses still hang from a magnet on the fridge too, and Devon thinks how he’s always been so quiet about missing her. He’s lucky to have you there, kid. Her face warms. She glances at his bedroom door. It’s open a few inches, and she tiptoes quickly across the kitchen and shuts off the light and hurries to her room.
She sits at the small desk she’s never sat at before. She turns on the lamp. She pulls out her iEverything and sees it’s 2:47 in the morning. The sun will be up soon. She opens the notebook and writes:
Dear Uncle Francis,
If I could change the
She crosses this out. She slowly rips out the page and balls it up and flicks it at the wall. Dirty Devon. Bobby and Luke made that website, but what if tonight only her father logged onto it? What if Francis never saw it? He still knows. Her mean, shit-faced father, how could he not tell him about his tramp? She’d come to live with Francis to start clean. But how can anyone ever be clean with family? Blood is too dirty, dirty with love that can so easily turn to hate.
She writes:
Dear Uncle Francis,
Thank you for being so good to me. I don’t deserve it. Maybe I never did.
LOVE,
Devy
She reads it, then stands and leaves the notebook open to that page and drops the wadded paper into the trash basket. She carries the iron and ironing board back to the closet, and she folds the ironing board as quietly as she can and leans it under the closet shelf, pushing the iron up there and pulling her duffel bag down. It’s the one she used for track meets so long ago, and as she stuffs her underwear and an armful of bras and T-shirts into it, she sees herself running again, running under a hot sun.
She picks her underwear and shorts up off the floor and empties the bureau drawers of her clothes, pushing them all into her bag on the bed. She cleans the bathroom and zips all she needs into a cosmetics case her mother loaned her. It’s from Lord & Taylor,
and Devon feels like she’s stealing it. She shoves it on top of her clothes beside her laptop and cord, and she zips her duffel and carries it to the doorway. Then she makes her bed, pulling the spread as tightly as if she were at The Whaler. Outside her window the sky is still dark, but she knows it won’t be for long.
She has almost six thousand dollars in the bank. She’ll have to be there as soon as they open. She’ll go to the one on River Street because they have a big parking lot down in the back near the floodwall. It’ll be a safe place to leave Aunt Beth’s car. Then it’s a short walk to the train station in Railroad Square, and she’ll text her mother to call Francis and tell him where it is. She’ll text her not to worry either.
But you should paint yurself, D. Sick. She’ll text him, too. But first she’ll sit back in her train seat and put on her Dr. Dre’s and pick music that makes her feel free, the car rocking over the bridge rails and the swirling dirty water below, heading south to places she’s seen on her screen but only from the insides of rooms in houses on streets in cities she used to think were all the same, but how can they be if Hollis Waters is from one of them?
She pulls the duffel bag over her shoulder. She glances down at her open note to Francis, then she’s tiptoeing down his dark hallway and into his kitchen past the door to his bedroom where he sleeps alone. A hollowness opens up in her chest. She promises herself to come back and visit him before it’s too late.
It’s hard to see. There are only the shadows of things. She feels along the fridge to the wall and the phone, touching first her uncle’s keys, then her dead aunt’s, a woman Devon can feel judging her from the grave even though she’s only borrowing something, not stealing it. She has never stolen anything in her life, and she never will. She steps into the cool, still air of the closed garage and she sees Sick’s face. The way he looked at her as she let him in, the only one. His hair hung down and his lips were parted and as he moved inside her his eyes seemed to shine with a sweet sadness, the kind that only comes when you know something good can never, ever last. But you keep going anyway. All you can do is keep going and never quit.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank Kourosh Zomorodian for his expertise on the work of a project manager. I’d also like to thank my mother-in-law, Mary Dollas, for her help with bank telling details. And I’m particularly grateful to my daughter, Ariadne, for her help with Facebook and cyberspace, in general.
And here’s to my agent Philip Spitzer (and steadfast Lukas and Luc), and to my truly gifted and essential editor, Alane Salierno Mason.
COPYRIGHT
Copy © 2013 by Andre Dubus III
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dubus, Andre, 1959–
Dirty love / Andre Dubus III. — First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-393-06465-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-393-24133-4 (e-book)
1. Man-woman relationships—Fiction.
2. Life change events—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3554.U2652D57 2013
813'.54—dc23
2013017214
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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ALSO BY ANDRE DUBUS III
Townie
The Garden of Last Days
House of Sand and Fog
Bluesman
The Cage Keeper and Other Stories
Andre Dubus III, Dirty Love
(Series: # )
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