The Good Daughter

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” she assured him. “The biggest thing in my life is my relationship with my husband, and I am not going to let you get in the way of that.”

  “Charlotte, if you could—”

  Charlie ended the call before he could spread any more of his bullshit.

  She dropped her phone back into her purse. She neatened her hair. She finished her glass of wine. She got another from the bar. Half of it was gone before she felt the shaking stop. Thank God Mason had only called on the phone. If he’d come to the funeral, if the town had seen them together, if Ben had seen them, Charlie would have melted into a pool of self-disgust and hate.

  “Charlotte.” Newton Palmer, another shiftless lawyer in a room full of them, gave her a practiced look of condolence. “How are you doing?”

  Charlie finished her wine to drown out the curses. Newton was one of those prototypical old white men who ran most of the small towns in America. Ben had once said that all they had to do was wait for racist, sexist old bastards like Newton to die. What he hadn’t realized was that they kept making new ones.

  Newton said, “I saw your father at a Rotary breakfast last week. Virile as ever, but he said the most humorous thing.”

  “That’s Dad. Humorous.” Charlie pretended to listen to the man’s stupid Rotary story as she looked for her sister.

  Sam was trapped, too, by Mrs. Duncan, her eighth-grade English teacher. Sam was nodding and smiling, but Charlie could not imagine her sister having much patience for idle conversation. Sam’s sense of otherness was more pronounced in the crowd. Not because of her disabilities, but because she was clearly not of this place, or maybe not even of this time. The dark glasses. The regal tilt to her head. The way Sam dressed did not exactly help her blend in, even at a funeral. She was dressed in all black, but the wrong black. The kind of black that was only available to the one percent. Standing next to her ancient teacher, Sam looked like a silk bag of money by the proverbial sow’s ear.

  “It’s like watching your mother.” Lenore was wearing a tight black dress and heels that were higher than Charlie’s. She smiled at Newton. “Mr. Palmer.”

  Newton blanched. “Charlotte, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Lenore ignored him, so Charlie did, too. She pressed her shoulder into Lenore’s as they both watched Sam. Mrs. Duncan was still talking her ear off.

  Lenore said, “Harriet wanted so badly to connect with people, but she never quite solved the equation.”

  “She connected with Dad.”

  “Your father was an aberration. They were two singular people who functioned best when they were together.”

  Charlie leaned closer into her arm. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  “I couldn’t resist taunting these hateful bastards one last time. Listen—” Lenore took a deep breath, as if preparing herself for something difficult. “I think I’m going to retire to Florida. Be among my people—bitter old white women living on fixed incomes.”

  Charlie smoothed together her lips. She couldn’t cry again. She couldn’t make Lenore feel guilty for doing what she needed to do.

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Lenore wrapped her arm around Charlie’s waist. She put her mouth to Charlie’s ear. “I am never going to leave you. I’m just going to be somewhere else. And you can come visit me. I’ll make a special bedroom for you, with pictures of horses on the walls, and kittens and possums.”

  Charlie laughed.

  Lenore said, “It’s time for me to move on. I’ve fought the good fight long enough.”

  “Dad loved you.”

  “Of course he did. And I love you.” Lenore kissed the side of her head. “Speaking of love.”

  Ben was making his way through the crowd. He held up his hands as he darted around an old man who looked like he had a story to tell. Ben said a few hellos to people he knew, constantly moving forward, easily detaching himself from hangers-on. People always smiled when they saw Ben. Charlie felt herself smiling, too.

  “Hey.” He smoothed down his tie. “Is this a girls-only thing?”

  Lenore said, “I was just about to antagonize your boss.” She kissed Charlie again before sidling over to Ken Coin.

  The district attorney’s group broke away, but Lenore trapped Coin like a cheetah with a baby warthog.

  Charlie told Ben, “Lenore’s going to retire to Florida.”

  He did not seem surprised. “Not much left for her with your dad gone.”

  “Just me.” Charlie couldn’t think about Lenore leaving. It hurt too much. She asked Ben, “Did you pick out Dad’s suit?”

  “That was all Rusty.” He said, “Hold out your hand.”

  Charlie held out her hand.

  He reached into his coat pocket. He pulled out a red ball. He placed it in her palm. “You’re welcome.”

  Charlie looked down at the red clown nose and smiled.

  Ben said, “Come outside.”

  “Why?”

  Ben waited, patient as ever.

  Charlie put down the glass of wine. She tucked the clown nose into her purse as she followed him outside. The first thing she noticed was the thick smog of cigarette smoke. The second thing she noticed was that she was surrounded by cons. Their ill-fitting suits could not hide the prison tattoos and lean muscle that came from hours of pumping iron in the yard. There were dozens of men and women, maybe as many as fifty.

  These were Rusty’s real mourners—smoking outside, like the bad kids behind the gym at school.

  “Charlotte.” One of the men seized her hand. “I wanna tell you how much your daddy meant to me. Helped me get my kid back.”

  Charlie felt herself smile as she shook the man’s rough hand.

  “Helped me find a job,” another man said. His front teeth were rotted, but the fine comb marks in his oily hair showed that he had made an effort for Rusty.

  “He was all right.” A woman flicked a cigarette toward the overflowing ashtray by the door. “Made my dickhead ex-husband pay child support.”

  “Come on,” another guy said, likely the dickhead ex-husband.

  Ben winked at Charlie before going back inside. An assistant district attorney wasn’t popular with this crowd.

  Charlie shook more hands. She tried not to cough from all of the smoke. She listened to stories about Rusty helping people when no one else seemed inclined to do so. She wanted to go back inside and get Sam, because her sister would want to hear what these people had to say about their complicated, irascible father. Or maybe Sam wouldn’t want to. Maybe she would need to. Sam had always been so starkly drawn to black and white. The gray areas, the ones that Rusty seemed to thrive in, had always mystified her.

  Charlie laughed to herself. The paradox was not lost on her that after unburdening to Sam her deepest, darkest sins, Charlie felt that the most important thing Sam could take back home with her was the knowledge that their father had been a good man.

  “Charlotte?” Jimmy Jack Little blended in well with the cons. He had more tattoos than most of them, including a sleeve that he’d gotten during a prison stint for bank robbery. His black fedora put him in another place and time. He seemed perpetually angry, like it was to his utter disappointment that he was not one of the good guys being corrupted by a bad doll in a 1940s noir novel.

  “Thanks for coming.” Charlie hugged his neck, something she had never done before and probably would never do again. “Dad would’ve been happy you were here.”

  “Yeah. Well.” He seemed overcome by the physical contact. He took his time lighting his cigarette, restoring his sense of macho toughery. “Sorry about the old shit. I expected him to go down in a blaze of bullets.”

  “I’m glad he didn’t,” Charlie said, because her father had been stabbed two days ago. Being shot to death was too close a possibility for her to joke about.

  “This Adam Humphrey punk.” Jimmy Jack picked some tobacco off his lip. “Not sure I got a bead on him. Could be he was buttering her biscuit, but kids today, girls a
nd boys, they can be friends without the boom-chicka-wow-wow.” He shrugged away the inexplicableness the way he would shrug off self-driving cars and Tivo. “Now, Frank Alexander, him I know from a couple years back. Guy had a DUI that Rusty helped disappear.”

  “Dad worked with the Alexander family?” Charlie realized her voice was too loud. She whispered, “What happened?”

  “Pay-as-you-go as far as ol’ Russ was concerned. Nothing unusual about their interaction. What happened was, Frank was burping his worm in the wrong mole hole. Got a little sauced with the gal at the no-tell motel, then came home to the wifey stinking of another chick’s perfume. Or tried to go home. Cops slapped him with a DUI Less Safe.”

  Charlie knew this meant Frank Alexander’s breathalyzer had been below the legal limit, but he was still charged with the DUI because the officer deemed his driving was impaired.

  She asked, “The girlfriend, was she a student?”

  “A real estate agent, a lot older than the wife, which doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, because why? I mean, she’s got money, sure, but chicks ain’t classics, like cars. You want the soap at the end of your rope to be fresh, am I right?”

  Charlie did not want to open up a discussion on the finer points of cheating. “So, what happened to Frank Alexander?”

  “He did some community service, went to DUI school. The judge rolled the charge off his record so he could keep his teaching license. I’ve got some sources saying that the real problems were back home. Wife wasn’t too happy about the old girlfriend. I mean, shit, why go older?”

  Charlie asked, “Was there talk of divorce?”

  Jimmy Jack shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t have a choice. DUIs are a rich man’s game. The legal bills. The cash money for the drunk classes. The fines. The fees. You know that shit sets you back eight, nine grand easy.”

  Charlie knew that was a lot of money for anybody, but the Alexanders were both schoolteachers with a young child. She doubted they had that kind of cash lying around.

  Jimmy Jack said, “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like realizing you’re gonna be eating ramen noodles for the rest of your life.”

  “Or maybe they love each other and they wanted to work it out because they had a kid?”

  “That’s real pretty talk coming from you, doll.” He’d smoked his cigarette down to the filter. He tossed it into a planter by the door. “Guess it don’t matter now. Rusty’s not gonna pay me to track down this shit from the grave.”

  “Whoever takes over the case will need someone on the ground.”

  He winced, as if the thought caused him injury. “Dunno if I got it in me to work for a lawyer who’s not your dad. Present company excluded. But shit, lawyers don’t pay their bills and they just basically suck as human beings.”

  Charlie did not disagree.

  He winked at her. “All right, dolly, go back to listening to these dirtbags. Those dickholes inside didn’t know your dad. Not good enough to hold a cup of his piss if you ask me.”

  Charlie smiled. “Thank you.”

  Jimmy Jack clicked his tongue as he gave her a wink. Charlie watched him work his way through the crowd. He slapped a few backs, did a few fist bumps as he made his way toward the doors and, presumably, the open bar. He tipped his fedora to the woman who had gotten her kids back. She put her hand on her hip, and Charlie got the impression that neither of them were going to be alone tonight.

  A car horn beeped.

  They all looked out at the parking lot.

  Ben was behind the wheel of his truck. Sam sat beside him.

  The last time a boy had beeped a car horn at Charlie, Rusty had put her on restriction for crawling out her bedroom window in the middle of the night.

  Ben beeped the horn again. He waved Charlie over.

  She made her excuses to the group, though she assumed that many of them had at one point in their lives run toward a truck idling in a parking lot.

  Sam got out, her hand resting on the open door. Charlie could hear the truck’s muffler belching from thirty feet away. Ben’s Datsun was twenty years old, the only thing they could afford after the canceled trip to Colorado. They had sold his SUV for the loan pay-off. A week later, the buyer was not amenable to selling it back to them. Rusty and Lenore had offered to let them keep the loaned money, but Charlie couldn’t bring herself to do it. The clinic in Colorado had refunded the wire within days. The problem was the other bills: the flight and hotel cancellations, surcharges on their credit cards for cash advances, then the post-miscarriage hospital bills, surgical bills, specialist bills, anesthesiology bills, radiology bills, doctors’ bills, pharmacy bills and a ton of co-pays and an avalanche of no-pays. At the time, the debt was so crushing that they’d been lucky they could afford to pay cash for the piece-of-shit truck.

  They had spent an entire weekend scraping the giant Confederate flag decal off the back window.

  Sam said, “Ben offered to help me escape. I couldn’t take being in that crowd for much longer.”

  “Me, either,” Charlie said, though she would rather congregate with known felons than suffer through what she assumed was Sam’s lame attempt at matchmaking.

  Charlie had an awkward moment over the gearshift, which jutted out of the hump in the floor. She started to hike up her dress to straddle it, but Ben had made it clear the other night that he did not want his knob between her legs.

  “You okay?” Ben asked.

  “Sure.” Charlie ended up sitting sidesaddle, knees clenched together, legs at an angle, like Bonnie Blue Butler before the fall.

  The door groaned on rusty hinges as Sam pulled it shut. “A spray lubricant would alleviate that noise.”

  Ben said, “I tried some WD-40.”

  “That’s a solvent, not a lubricant.” She told Charlie, “I thought we could spend some time together at the farmhouse.”

  Charlie did a double take. She could not imagine why her sister would want to spend two seconds at that detestable place. The night before Sam had left for Stanford, she had made a not completely unfunny joke about the most efficient way to burn it to the ground.

  Ben shifted the gear into drive. He made a tight U-turn around a cluster of parked cars. BMWs. Audis. Mercedes. Charlie hoped none of Rusty’s mourners boosted them.

  “Shit,” Ben muttered.

  Two police cars were parked on the median by the exit. Charlie recognized Jonah Vickery, Greg Brenner, and most of the other cops from the middle school. They were waiting to do the funeral escort, leaning against their cruisers, smoking cigarettes.

  They recognized Charlie, too.

  Jonah made circles with his fingers and put them to his eyes. The rest of the gang joined in, laughing like hyenas as they made raccoon eyes in honor of Charlie’s bruises.

  “Fuckers.” Ben grabbed the handle and rolled down the window.

  “Babe,” Charlie said, alarmed.

  He leaned out the window, fist raised. “Motherfuckers.”

  “Ben!” Charlie tried to pull him back in. He was almost yelling. What the hell had gotten into her passive husband? “Ben, what are—”

  “Go fuck yourselves.” Ben flipped them the bird with both hands. “Assholes.”

  The cops were no longer laughing. They stared Ben down as the truck pulled out onto the highway.

  “Are you crazy?” Charlie demanded. She was supposed to be the unhinged one. “They could beat your ass.”

  “Let them.”

  “Let them kill you?” Charlie asked. “Jesus, Ben. They’re dangerous. Like sharks. With switchblades.”

  Sam said, “Surely not switchblades? They’re illegal.”

  Charlie felt a strangled groan die in her throat.

  Ben rolled the window back up. “I’m so sick of this fucking place.” He wrenched the gearshift into third, then pushed it into fourth as he sped up the highway.

  Charlie stared at the empty road ahead.

  He had never been sick of this place before.

  “Well.”
Sam cleared her throat. “I love living in New York. The culture. The arts. The restaurants.”

  “I couldn’t live up north,” Ben said, as if entertaining the thought. “Maybe Atlanta.”

  Sam said, “I’m sure the public defender’s office would be happy to have you.”

  Charlie glared at her sister, mouthing a “What the fuck?”

  Sam shrugged, her expression unreadable.

  Ben loosened his tie. He unbuttoned his collar. “I’ve done my time for the greater good. I want to join the dark side.”

  Charlie could almost feel her mind boggling. “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” Ben said. “I’m tired of being a poor civil servant. I want to make some money. I want to own a boat.”

  Charlie pressed together her lips, the same as she had done when Lenore told her she was moving to Florida. Ben was generally easy-going about most things, but Charlie had learned that his mind, once made up, was not likely to change. He had clearly made up his mind about changing careers. Maybe he had made up his mind about leaving. There was something different about him. He seemed relaxed, almost giddy, like a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

  Charlie assumed that the burden was her.

  Sam offered, “We have some Atlanta firms we work with in cases of criminal litigation. I could certainly write some letters of recommendation.”

  Charlie glared at her sister again.

  “Thanks. I’ll let you know after I do some research.” Ben unknotted his tie. The material made a thwip sound as he pulled it through his collar. He tossed it behind the seat. “Kelly confessed on the hospital tape.”

  “Jesus!” Charlie’s voice was high enough to break glass. “Ben, you can’t tell us that.”

  “You’ve still got spousal privilege and her—” He laughed. “God, Sam, you scared the shit out of Coin. I could practically hear the crap coming out of his ass when you started to parry with the judge.”

  Charlie grabbed his arm. “What is wrong with you? You could get fired for—”

  “I resigned last night.”