Torch

  Before they planted the wildflowers, he took Kathy on a tour of their land. He started by introducing Beau and Lady Mae, and then they wound their way through the pasture and ducked under the fence and walked deeper into the woods to the blueberry patch, the horses gazing after them into the trees, where he and Kathy disappeared from their sight. He showed her the swamp and the place where their old cabin had been, where they’d all lived while he and Teresa built the house, and then he took her the back way into the clearing and showed her the gravesite they’d made, an oval of dirt set off by stones. They stood solemnly at its base, at a gap in the stones where they would place the headstone when it arrived.

  “It’s lovely,” she said, looking around. “Very peaceful. I bet she likes it here in this spot.”

  Bruce took the packet of wildflower seeds from his front pocket and held them without opening them up.

  “Do you feel her?” Kathy asked. “I mean, her presence here?”

  He didn’t answer, unable to speak. He bent down and removed a branch that had fallen onto the grave. A few weeks before, he and Claire and Joshua had raked through the dirt and manure with their hands, mixing Teresa’s ashes into it. The ashes had not been what any of them expected, not like ashes at all, but rather small jagged pebbles with pocks and pores, which looked disturbingly like shards of burnt bone. Before beginning, they had each put one of these shards into their mouths and, holding hands, swallowed.

  “I feel her presence,” Kathy said in a hushed voice. “It feels very spiritual to me.”

  “I don’t feel her,” he said, though he did. He felt her so much he had to cough so he wouldn’t cry. She was everywhere—in the air and the grass and the trees—but he would not admit this to Kathy. In knowing Bruce, she had come to believe she knew Teresa. In loving him, Kathy had come to love her. He’d felt grateful for this until now, out here in the clearing, in what he could only describe as Teresa’s presence, where it suddenly felt that to even so much as mention her name to Kathy would be a betrayal of the person she’d once been.

  “Should we get started?” Kathy asked reverently.

  Bruce shook the packet of seeds. They made a rattling sound against their paper container. He hesitated, realizing he should ask Claire and Joshua first about planting the flowers here, but then Kathy put her hand on his back, and he ripped the packet open.

  “Wait,” she said. “Before we plant I want to sanctify the space.” She pulled a bundle of sage tied in string from her coat pocket, lit both ends with a lighter, and blew on them until they burned. He watched as she walked in a large circle around the clearing, holding the sage above her head, the smoke trailing white behind her. She made smaller and smaller concentric circles, until the last one encompassed the plot where Teresa’s ashes lay, as well as Bruce, who stood at its edge. She knelt and crushed the burning ends of the sage out in the dirt where Teresa’s stone would go.

  They were silent together for several moments and then Kathy cupped her hands and Bruce shook the seeds of wildflowers into them.

  Joshua and Claire were sitting on the front porch when Bruce pulled up to the house that Saturday afternoon, waiting for him, as he expected.

  “We just saw a hot air balloon fly over,” Joshua called to him when he got out of his truck.

  Bruce looked up at the cloudless June sky. “They’re having some kind of festival out of Brainerd. It’s in the paper this week.” He continued to gaze at the sky in order to delay having to look at either one of them.

  “So we were thinking we should go up to the Lookout for dinner,” said Claire from the rocking chair. “There’s nothing in the fridge.”

  “It’ll be crowded, but who cares,” said Joshua. He was bouncing a tiny rubber ball and then chasing after it when it bounced away. “We can sit at the bar if we want.”

  Bruce continued to look at the sky, as if searching for more hot air balloons. His hands trembled and he pushed them into his pockets to still them.

  “Kathy Tyson and I got married,” he said without turning to either of them. He said it quietly, almost privately, as if he hadn’t spoken at all.

  “What?” Claire asked, standing so quickly from her chair that it rocked wildly behind her.

  “Kathy Tyson and I got married,” he said more slowly and kindly this time. “Yesterday. I know this is hard but—”

  “Hard?” shrieked Claire. “What are you talking about? I don’t even understand what you’re saying.” She turned to Joshua, as if he would explain.

  “I’m saying that I loved your mother very much—I still love your mother—I will always love your—”

  “Bullshit,” said Claire savagely, and then burst into tears. “You married Kathy Tyson? You got married? Mom has been dead for two months and you’re already married?”

  “Almost three. It will be three on Monday,” he said quietly. He was looking at the ground now, at a tiny beige row of anthills. He obliterated one with his foot.

  “Almost three!” Claire howled, as if he’d physically wounded her. “Forgive me if I lost track. Forgive me if I wasn’t counting the days until I could dump my mother—”

  “I’m not dumping your mother.”

  Claire sat down on the step and put her face into her hands and cried without caring what she sounded like. Joshua sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulders.

  “This is what she would have wanted,” Bruce said, appealing to Joshua. He felt that perhaps Joshua would have more sympathy for him, man to man. “She would have wanted for me to move on, you know? To live my life …”

  “What about our life?” he asked, his face, his entire self, like a stone.

  “Yeah,” said Claire from behind her hands. She stopped crying and abruptly looked up at him with her red eyes and demanded an answer. “What about our lives?”

  “Your lives?” he stammered. “She wanted you to have a good life too.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in marriage,” said Joshua.

  “Look, you two are not some goddamned committee that gets to approve or disapprove of what I do with my life. Let’s just get that straight right this minute.” Fuck the kids, he thought. He reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. When he lifted the cigarette to his mouth, he could see his hands were shaking harder than before, which made him think Fuck the kids even more.

  “Okay, so let me understand this,” Claire said after several moments, her voice even and hard. “You believe in marriage. You just didn’t believe in it with our mom.”

  “No. I believed in it. Your mom did too. Listen, we had a marriage. Just because it wasn’t legal it doesn’t mean that it meant anything less to either one of us.”

  At this Claire began to sob hysterically again. Bruce knelt down in front of her and rubbed her arm. Joshua walked to the end of the porch so he wouldn’t have to be near Bruce.

  “Don’t touch me,” Claire begged weakly, after taking several heaving breaths, and when he continued to stroke her arm she cried out “Please don’t” so piteously that he stopped.

  “Do you love her?” asked Joshua.

  “Who?”

  Joshua just stared at him.

  “Kathy?” Bruce asked.

  Joshua made no response.

  “Of course,” Bruce said, more adamantly than he felt. And he did love her, though when he thought about his love for her his mind careened from one thing to the other, landing almost always not on Kathy herself but on how unbearable it was to be without her. “I don’t love her the same way as I loved your mom, if that’s what you’re asking. It takes years to build that kind of thing, but yes, I love her. Of course I do.” Joshua was looking directly into his eyes and then Claire sat up and looked at him with her wet eyes too, both of them looking out of Teresa’s eyes. He looked away from them. “What I want you to know is that this has nothing to do with how I feel about your mom. It has to do with the fact that I can’t live alone.”

  “You don’t live alone,” Joshua sa
id. “You live with me and part of the time with Claire.”

  “I know—and that doesn’t have to change. But I need a companion. I need company.”

  “What about us?” Joshua asked. “Where do we get company?”

  “You have Lisa. And Claire has David.”

  “We broke up,” Claire said bitterly. “You know we broke up.”

  “I thought you were just taking some time apart,” he said, and saw that this only made her more upset. “Okay, I’m sorry. I mean, you’ll have someone someday. Someone special. You will.”

  Claire huffed in disgust and shook her head.

  “But they’re not our mom,” said Joshua. “We can’t just go out and find someone to replace our mom like you.”

  “I’m not replacing your mom.”

  “You have a wife,” Joshua pressed on. “We will never have a mother. Okay? Never.” Tears began to drip from his eyes. They made a trail down his face and fell off his chin.

  “Josh,” Bruce whispered, but didn’t go to him. Mosquitoes landed on Bruce’s neck and arms and he slapped at them until Claire reached for the bug spray on the porch ledge and handed it to him without a word.

  “You’re always welcome here,” he said at last. “Both of you. Always.”

  “ ‘Welcome?’ ” parroted Claire, and then let out a small sharp laugh. “Welcome? This is our home, Bruce. Did you think we thought we weren’t welcome here?” She paused, and then another thought played across her face. “No. No way. Don’t tell me she’s moving in.”

  “Claire.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Claire.”

  “Don’t say my name,” she snapped. “Just don’t even fucking speak to me.”

  “She has a really small house. It’s not even a house—it’s a cabin. It’s one room. It wouldn’t make sense for us to live there,” he explained, though Claire would not look at him. “But this won’t change things for you. Your room is still your room. And I think you’re going to like—”

  “When did this start up?” asked Joshua.

  “When?” Bruce asked, uncomprehendingly.

  “Has this been going on for a while?”

  “Not until after your mother died, if that’s what you’re asking. If you’re asking whether I cheated on your mother, the answer is no.”

  “That’s very big of you,” Joshua said.

  “Fuck off,” said Bruce. “I have my life, you know.”

  “So,” Claire said. “Let us get this straight. This means we have to pack our mom’s things up, right? Like tomorrow.”

  Bruce thought about it for a moment. He hadn’t considered every detail. “It means—”

  “Does it mean that Kathy is moving in tomorrow?” Claire demanded. “Just say yes or no.”

  “Not tomorrow,” he said. “For the weekend we plan … I’ll stay over there. But yes, Kathy will move in. It doesn’t mean that all your mom’s things …”

  “Thank you,” she said, holding her hand up.

  “I’m sorry I hurt you. I didn’t want to.” He paused, looking at them imploringly. “Do you want me to suffer forever? Don’t you want me to be happy?”

  “We want you to be happy,” Joshua said.

  “Of course we do,” said Claire, softening now. She turned away from him and looked down at her bare feet, her arms wrapped around herself, each hand holding the other shoulder. “There’s one thing I ask, and I’m sure Joshua agrees.” Her voice was trembling, so she paused. “I want Kathy to stay away from Mom’s grave. I just want that to be our private place. There’s no reason that Kathy needs to even go back there. She has nothing to do with Mom. It’s our sacred ground.”

  “Okay,” he spat. He knew he would have to tell them about the wildflower seeds he and Kathy had planted, but he couldn’t do it now.

  “Do you promise?” Claire asked.

  “Yes,” he hollered, suddenly enraged. “Yes! Yes!” he yelled louder. “I fucking promise.”

  Neither one of them would look at him.

  “Are you happy now?” he shouted so loudly that the horses, grazing near the fence, lifted their heads. “What else do you want? Is Kathy allowed to use the bathroom? Does she have your permission to heat up a pot of water in the kitchen or is that sacred ground too?”

  Fresh tears streamed down Claire’s face. Joshua became incredibly still and quiet, standing on the opposite end of the porch.

  “Huh?” he demanded. “Huh? I asked a question and I’d like an answer. Is there anything else you want?”

  They made no response.

  “Answer me!” he screamed.

  Ever so subtly, Claire shook her head.

  “Nope,” Joshua said coldly.

  “Good.”

  He walked to his truck and then turned back to them, still seething. “You know what? I’m not your father,” he said, hating himself already but unable to stop. “And I don’t owe you kids anything. You got that? You understand?”

  He got in and started the engine with a roar. His anger was spent the moment the truck began to move, having left him as quickly as it came, but he continued on anyway, letting the truck roll slowly down the driveway. He wasn’t going back to Kathy’s. He wasn’t going to a bar. He wasn’t going to town or to the river or to the lake. He didn’t know where he was going, but he was going. He watched Claire and Joshua in his rearview mirror as he drove off and he kept watching them for as long as he was able to, until the trees and the high grass and the glint of the sun and the curve of the land overtook them and they were gone.

  13

  ON MONDAY MORNING Joshua found a notebook. Lisa Boudreaux it said in his own handwriting on the back cover, with a fancy heart scrolled around it. A small rush of sorrow and nostalgia and anger surged through him at the sight of it, and he tossed the notebook back to where it had been, amid the scatter of junk behind the seat of his truck, among the half-full cartons of oil and empty cans of Coke and old pens without their caps, and he kept searching for what he was looking for—his proof of insurance. He could picture it in its double-sized white envelope with the little translucent pane in the front. He shoved the seat back into place and turned to Greg Price, who stood leaning against the side of Joshua’s truck in his neat beige police officer’s uniform. He was the Midden town cop, the only one, and he’d been the cop for almost all of Joshua’s life.

  “The thing is that I have insurance. I just can’t find the papers.” He put his hand in the pocket where his cell phone was and said a little prayer that it wouldn’t ring. The idea of Vivian even so much as leaving a message while he stood there with Greg Price made his stomach turn.

  “You gonna speed through town anymore?” Greg asked him.

  “No,” Joshua said and then added, “sir.”

  “You gonna speed once you’re outta town on the open road?”

  “No sir, I’m not.” Greg stood studying him for so long that Joshua looked down. A kaleidoscope of glass shards was splayed in the dirt, white and orange and clear, someone’s headlights or taillights smashed to bits. “It’s that I was running late to get to my girlfriend’s house,” he explained.

  “Who’s your girlfriend?” Greg asked gruffly, his beefy arms crossed over his barrel of a chest.

  “Lisa Boudreaux.” He put a hand on the rim of his truck bed, warm already, though it was only ten o’clock in the morning. “Not that that’s an excuse.”

  “No, Mr. Wood, chasing after pussy is not an excuse,” Greg said, and smiled, as though everything suddenly amused him and then the smile left his face and he continued to stare at Joshua without saying anything for several moments. “Ain’t you buds with R.J. Plebo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Haven’t seen him around in a while.”

  “He moved up to Flame Lake.” He kicked the dirt and an orange shard of glass moved a few inches. “That’s where his dad lives.”

  “But I seen your truck over at the Plebo place a lot.”

  Joshua concentrated on keeping
his breath even, though he felt suddenly like he was being choked. He didn’t have any drugs on him aside from a small bag of marijuana in a tackle box beneath the seat, which was nothing but a lucky stroke.

  “We’re friends.”

  “You and Vivian?” Greg winked at him. “You like the older women?”

  “No,” said Joshua, blushing. “Me and her and Bender are friends.” He looked up at Greg, his face intentionally open and tender, almost directly appealing for sympathy, and continued earnestly, “Sometimes they make me dinner.” Everyone in Midden knew that Vivian and Bender were stoners and drunks, but they also knew Joshua didn’t have much of a home anymore.

  “Bender a good cook?” Greg said, and winked again and then began a laugh that turned into a nasty smoker’s cough, so Joshua knew he was off the hook. Greg hardly ever ticketed anyone from Midden anyway, targeting instead the people from the Cities or sometimes Blue River, or, more often than not, the Indians from Flame Lake. “Consider this your warning, my friend,” he said, slapping him on the back. “Watch your speed.”

  “Will do,” he called as Greg walked back to his car and got in. The lights were still spinning, their flash muted in the sun.

  When he got to Lisa’s house she was standing in the doorway, giving him her look.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek, hoping to avoid a fight. They’d been arguing a lot for the past couple of weeks, ever since they found out that Lisa was pregnant. She’d been moody and nauseated, crying and throwing up a couple of times every day for a week.