He almost asked Pete, then, about Lucy, if they were in touch, but he had already pulled up next to the sign that said SEWING AND ALTERATIONS and so he just said, “Here you go, Pete. You be well.” And Pete thanked him and got out of the car.
After a few moments, Tommy glanced in his rearview mirror, and what he saw was Pete Barton hitting the sign with the sledgehammer. Something about the way he hit it—the force—made Tommy watch carefully as he drove down the road. He saw the boy—the man—hit the sign again and again with what seemed to be increasing force, and as Tommy’s car dipped down just slightly, losing sight for a moment, he thought: Wait. And when his car came back up he looked again in the rearview mirror and he saw again this boy-man hitting that sign with rage, with a ferocity that astonished Tommy, it was astonishing, the rage with which that man was hitting that sign. It seemed indecent to Tommy that he was witnessing it, for it felt as private in its anguish as what the boy’s father had been doing out behind Tommy’s barns that day. And then as Tommy drove he realized: Oh, it was the mother. It was the mother. She must have been the really dangerous one.
He slowed the car, then turned it around. As he drove back, he saw that Pete had stopped smashing the sign, and was now kicking at the pieces with a tired dejection. Pete looked up, surprise showing on his face, as Tommy approached. Tommy leaned to unroll the passenger’s window and said, “Pete, get in.” The man hesitated, sweat on his face now. “Get in,” Tommy said again.
Pete got back into the car and Tommy drove down the road, back to the Barton home. He turned the car engine off. “Pete, I want you to listen to me very, very carefully.”
A look of fear passed over Pete’s face, and Tommy put his hand briefly on the man’s knee. It was the look of terror that had passed over Lucy’s face when he surprised her in the classroom. “I want to tell you something I had never in my life planned on telling anyone. But on the night of the fire—” And Tommy told him then, in detail, how he had felt God come to him, and how God had let Tommy know it was all okay. When he was done, Pete, who had listened intently, sometimes looking down, sometimes looking at Tommy, now looked at Tommy with wonder on his face.
“So you believe that?” Pete asked.
“I don’t believe it,” Tommy said. “I know it.”
“And you never even told your wife?”
“I never did, no.”
“But why not?”
“I guess there are some things in life we don’t tell others.”
Pete looked down at his hands, and Tommy looked at the man’s hands as well. He was surprised by them, they were strong-fingered, large; they were a grown man’s hands.
“So you’re saying my father was doing God’s work.” Pete shook his head slowly.
“No, I’m telling you what happened to me that night.”
“I know. I hear what you’re telling me.” Pete gazed through the windshield. “I just don’t know what to make of it.”
Tommy looked at the truck that sat next to the house; its fender glinted in the sunlight. The truck was old and gray-brown. It almost matched the color of the house. It seemed to Tommy that he sat there for many minutes looking at that truck and how it matched the house.
“Tell me how Lucy is,” said Tommy then, moving his feet, hearing them scrape over the grit on the floor of the car. “I saw she’s got a new book.”
“She’s good,” said Pete, and his face lit up. “She’s good, and it’s a good book, she sent me an early copy. I’m really proud of her.”
Tommy said, “You know, she wouldn’t even take a quarter I left her once,” and he told Pete about leaving the quarter and finding it later.
“No, Lucy wouldn’t have taken a penny that wasn’t hers,” Pete said. He added, “My sister Vicky, well, she’s another story. I bet she would have taken the quarter and then asked for more.” He glanced at Tommy. “Yeah. She’d have taken it.”
“Well, I guess there’s always that struggle between what to do and what not to do,” Tommy said, attempting to be jocular.
Pete said, “What?” And Tommy repeated it.
“That’s interesting,” said Pete, and Tommy was struck with a sense of being with a child, not a grown man, and he looked again at Pete’s hands.
The car engine made a few clicking sounds as they sat in silence. “You asked about my mother,” Pete said after a few moments. “Nobody has ever asked me about my mother. But the truth is, I don’t know if my mother loved us or not. I don’t know about her in some big way.” He looked at Tommy, and Tommy nodded. “But my father loved us,” Pete said. “I know he did. He was troubled, oh, man, was he troubled. But he loved us.”
Tommy nodded his head again.
“Tell me more about what you just said,” Pete asked.
“About what? What was I just saying?”
“The—struggle, did you say that? Between doing what we should and what we shouldn’t do.”
“Oh.” Tommy looked through the windshield at the house sitting so silently and so worn out there in the sunshine, its blinds drawn like tired eyelids. “Well, here’s an example on a large scale.” And then Tommy told Pete about what his brother had seen in the war, the women who had walked through the camps, how some had wept and others had looked furious and would not be made to feel bad. “And so there’s a struggle, or a contest, I guess you could say, all the time, it seems to me. And remorse, well, to be able to show remorse—to be able to be sorry about what we’ve done that’s hurt other people—that keeps us human.” Tommy put his hand on the steering wheel. “That’s what I think,” he said.
“My father showed remorse. He’s what you’re talking about, in one person. The contest.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
The sun had grown so high in the sky it could not be seen from the car.
“I never have talks like this,” said Pete, and Tommy was struck once again by how young this boy-man seemed. Tommy experienced a tiny physical pain deep in his chest that seemed directly connected to Pete.
“I’m an old man,” said Tommy. “I think if we’re going to have talks like this one I should stop by more often. How about I see you two Saturdays from now?”
Tommy was surprised to see Pete’s hands become fists that he banged down on his knees. “No,” Pete said. “No. You don’t have to. No.”
“I want to,” said Tommy, and he thought—then he knew—as he said this that it was not true. But did that matter? It didn’t matter.
“I don’t need someone coming to see me out of obligation.” Pete said this quietly.
The pain deep in Tommy’s chest increased. “I don’t blame you for that,” he said. They sat together in the car, which was now warm, and the smell, to Tommy, was palpable.
In a moment Pete spoke again, “Well, I guess I thought you were coming here to torture me, and I was wrong about that. So I guess maybe I’d be wrong to think you were just obliging me.”
“I think you’d be wrong,” said Tommy. But he was aware, again, that this was not true. The truth was that he did not really want to visit this poor boy-man seated next to him ever again.
They sat in silence for a few moments more; then Pete turned to Tommy, gave him a nod. “All right, I’ll see you then,” said Pete, getting out of the car. “Thanks, Tommy,” he said, and Tommy said, “Thank you.”
Driving home, Tommy was aware of a sensation like that of a tire becoming flat, as though he had been filled—all his life—with some sustaining air, and it was gone now; he felt, increasingly as he drove, a sense of fear. He could not understand it. But he had told what he had vowed to himself never to tell—that God had come to him the night of the fire. Why had he told? Because he wanted to give something to that poor boy who had been smashing the sign of his mother so ferociously. Why did it matter that he had told the boy? Tommy wasn’t sure. But Tommy felt he had pulled the plug on himself, that by telling the thing he would never tell he had diminished himself past forgiveness. It really frightened him. So you believe that?, Pete Barton had said.