“Sure, Daddy, but go on before you see something!” They shooed us down the steps.
Bobby had finished the basement himself, installing a bathroom, real floors and walls, building in bunk beds for his two sons when there’d been six children in seven rooms upstairs. Only two of their daughters were still at home, but he’d left the beds for his grandchildren to sleep in—he loved having them stay over.
He turned on a lamp and sat on the red plaid couch next to the bunk beds. I sat in the shabby armchair facing him, next to the fake fireplace. He moved his big hands uncomfortably, trying to think of something to say. I didn’t help him.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said at last.
“I didn’t want to come. Eileen talked me into it.”
He looked at the floor and muttered, “I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have last week. I’m sorry.”
“You hurt my feelings, Bobby.” I couldn’t keep my voice from cracking. “Your golden boy damned near killed me and you talked to me like I was some kind of street scum.”
He rubbed his face. “I—Vicki, I talked to Eileen about it, she tried to make sense out of it for me. I don’t know why I did it, that’s God’s truth. Dr. Herschel called me. That’s how I knew you were in trouble. You know about that part, don’t you?”
I nodded without speaking.
“I knew by then it was Mickey. Well, you’d tried to tell me, but it wasn’t until she told me he’d shot the old man that I—don’t look at me like that, Vicki, you’re making it hard to say this and it’s hard enough to start with.”
I turned my head toward the cowboy coverlets on the bunk beds.
“I called John and the Finch. They weren’t as upset as I was—they knew Mickey’d been acting queer since the day before when you brought that damned bracelet of his in. And they’d wondered about some other things. Of course they’d never told me—I was the lieutenant and he was my fair-haired boy.” He gave a harsh laugh. “What was the story with the bracelet? Why did it send him into orbit?”
I explained. “I tried to tell you Wednesday. I didn’t know what it was—I don’t think he’d worn it around me more than once or twice. He thought—you know, as long as Elena was alive she could link it to him. Well, not just that. She could tie him to the fire at the Indiana Arms. He was the person, too, who knocked us both out and tried to burn us at the other place.” I started shivering as the memories hit me. I tried to push them aside but I couldn’t.
Bobby grunted and stood up to reach for one of the cowboy coverlets. He tossed it to me and I wrapped myself in it. After a bit my shivering stopped, but both of us sat lost in our own reveries.
At least my last visitor yesterday was benign—Zerlina, again taking three buses, wanted to know how her daughter came to die. She shared a Coke and more of Lotty’s chicken soup and wept with me. She shook her head in amazement when she learned Elena had saved my life: “Thought she’d pickled her brain too good years ago to come up with something like that, but the Lord provides when you least expect it.”
As if following my thoughts, Bobby asked abruptly about my aunt.
“It’s like it all never happened. I stopped by the Windsor Arms—the hotel where she’s living now—last night. She was out front with a bottle and a crowd of greasy old men, showing her little finger in a splint and bragging over her heroics. Some people even a whirlwind won’t change, I guess.” I laughed mirthlessly.
Bobby nodded a couple of times to himself. “I want you to understand something, Vicki. Try to, anyway. Tony, your daddy, took me under his wing when I joined the force. He must have been a good thirteen, fourteen years older than me. A lot of guys were coming back from the war then, they didn’t make it easy on us rookies. Tony looked out for me from day one.
“I thought I could do the same for Mickey and it hurts me, hurts my pride Eileen tells me it is, that I could be so wrong. I keep thinking to myself, what would Tony think, he saw me making such a colossal mistake?”
He didn’t seem to want an answer but I gave him one anyway. “You know what he’d say, Bobby, that anyone can make a mess but only a fool wallows in it.”