She gave him shit. She told me all about it, hoping I’d give him shit, too. I didn’t. That was the way Dad was, and I knew there wasn’t any changing him. Whatever problems he’d had sharing a house with Thomas he had kept from me. He’d probably worried that if he had told me, I’d have felt obliged to help him out—something I’d like to think I would have done—but he wouldn’t have wanted that. He’d have seen Thomas as his responsibility, not mine. I had my own life to lead, he’d have reasoned.
But he must have felt the need to unload on someone, someone who wouldn’t feel they had to step in and actually help him with his situation. Len had been a sympathetic ear for my father, although there was nothing about his attitude that suggested sympathy to me. He was a simpleminded, judgmental asshole, as far as I could tell.
I wanted to ask Thomas about this, but was my brother a reliable witness to his own actions?
Driving away from the Prentice house, I felt myself getting swallowed into some kind of vortex. I’d come to Promise Falls from Burlington to deal with my father’s estate, set my brother up someplace, and get rid of the house, and really hadn’t made a dent in any of it. I kept finding myself sidetracked. Strange and unsettling words on Dad’s laptop. Thomas’s preoccupation with that goddamn face in the window. An unfortunate encounter between Thomas and Len Prentice, and apparently another, between Thomas and our father.
There was this other thing niggling away at my brain. The lawn tractor. The key in the OFF position. The blade housing raised, which indicated Dad had stopped mowing the lawn. But the job wasn’t finished, so why had he raised the blades?
It made me wonder whether he’d been interrupted. Was it possible someone had come down the side of the hill to talk to him? It was almost impossible to carry on a conversation with the tractor running, so Dad would have turned off the ignition. And if he thought this interruption was going to be an extended one, he’d have brought up the blades.
Was that what happened? Had someone stopped to chat? It wasn’t the best place for a conversation. It was a precarious spot, given how steep the slope was. Dad, sitting on the tractor, would have had to continually lean into the hill to keep the machine from tipping. Sitting straight up in the seat might have been all the leverage that was needed to topple the damn thing.
Which, in the end, was what happened.
But if the tractor rolled, and killed him, when it was already stopped, and if the reason Dad had come to a stop was because someone had wanted to talk to him, then who the hell was that person, and why hadn’t they called for help right away?
Thomas had been the one who finally dialed 911. After he’d found Dad, already dead, pinned by the machine.
Unless…
Unless Thomas was the one Dad had stopped for. To have that conversation. If it had turned into a heated argument, a simple shove would have been all Dad needed to go tumbling, taking the machine with him.
No.
That was unthinkable. My thoughts were running wild again, even worse than when I’d found “child prostitution” in the search field of Dad’s laptop. My mind was going places it had no business going.
It was stress, I told myself. The stress of losing my father, of having to take responsibility for Thomas—it was taking a toll.
I hadn’t even taken time to grieve. When had I had a chance? From the moment I’d arrived at my father’s house, I’d been thrown right into it. Making funeral arrangements, meeting with Harry Peyton, looking after Thomas, taking him to see Laura Grigorin.
Only now was I realizing how adrift I felt without Dad, without his guidance and steady hand.
“I miss you,” I found myself saying aloud, my hands gripped on the steering wheel. “I need you.”
I steered the car over to the shoulder, stopped, put it in park, and rested my forehead on the top of the steering wheel for a moment.
I hadn’t cried once since getting the phone call from the Promise Falls police about my father’s death. Now it was taking everything I had to keep the lid on. Maybe I was more like my father than I’d realized. I kept things bottled up, didn’t share my problems with others.
I loved my father. And I felt lost without him here beside me.
I got out my phone. A few seconds later, someone said, “Standard. Julie McGill here.”
“Why don’t you come out to the house for dinner tonight?”
“Is this George Clooney?”
“Yes.”
“Sure.”
WHEN I walked into the kitchen I saw a tuna sandwich sitting on a plate on my side of the table. There was a napkin folded at the side, and an opened bottle of beer that was now warm to the touch.
“Son of a bitch,” I said to myself. “He made my lunch.” I knew I’d asked him to, but I guess my expectations had been low. I felt bad.
I knocked on Thomas’s door and stepped in.
“Thanks for making me a sandwich,” I said.
“No problem,” he said, his back to me.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“London,” he said.
“How is it?”
“Old,” Thomas said.
“Did you eat? I hope you weren’t waiting for me.”
“I ate. And I put my plate and my glass and the bowl I mixed up the tuna and mayonnaise in into the dishwasher.”
“Thanks, man. We’re going to have a guest for dinner.”
“Who?”
“Julie.”
“Okay.”