“Did the doctors say what the chances are?” Mrs. Dawson asked.
“I don’t know that I’d be likely to believe the doctors anyway.”
“But they wouldn’t even say? If there really is a chance?” added Mrs. Schumacher. “If that Strout woman is really making any sort of headway?”
“Honestly, I have no idea.”
“What do you think he’d say?” Mrs. Schumacher’s voice was thin, as if trying to speak into a driving wind. “I’ve been wondering and wondering.”
“Me, too.” Charlie nodded.
Something faintly tightened in Manuel’s face. “And how’s your ma doing with all this?” he said. “I worry about her.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that.”
“You’re probably right,” Manuel said. “But that’s my job now. Professional, deputized worrywart.”
“Ha.”
“And what about your father?” Doyle asked. “How is he these days? Still working at that new hotel over in Lajitas? Haven’t seen him around much.”
Charlie shook his head, as if to a bad flavor in his mouth.
“Look,” Doyle added, in a tone to suggest that this line of conversation had been planned in advance. “I can guess how things are between you. But the man is hurting. Won’t even hardly talk to us. We’re worried about him. He’s not as strong as you or your ma.”
“There’s the understatement of the year.”
“See him when you’re ready,” Doyle said, showing Charlie his palms.
“Easier said than done.”
Manuel scraped his plate with a knife. “I’m sure you’re right.” Manuel bent forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “But take my advice, Charlie, and here’s a quote for that book of yours. When it comes to family, that’s a mystery no detective in the world, not Mister Sherlock Holmes himself, could hope to crack.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Where were you last night?” Charlie asked idly the next morning, just after dawn, when he found Ma combing through a mound of walnuts at the kitchen table. “I didn’t hear you come in until—it must have been near midnight.”
“Peggy gave me a few more hours with Oliver. They’ve been nicer to me lately. All those nurses and doctors, just wanting to shuffle into Oliver’s little halo of fame. It’s twisted, but that’s people for you.”
Charlie wasn’t too exhausted to miss that Ma likely intended twisted as a dig, but he was too exhausted to muster a comeback. Charlie had hardly slept, had spent the greater part of the night watching a blue square of moonlight scroll across the cheap drywall, spotlighting delicate fissures and a perfectly still scorpion. The old Navajo blanket smelling of mothballs, his brain a monstrous contraption, thumping, grinding, beating away, unable to process what Mrs. Dawson had told him. Hector had been one of his father’s students? Even now, at the kitchen table, Charlie was wondering how he might relay this information to Ma. But this new variable seemed, in some calculus Charlie couldn’t quite grasp, bound up with something unspoken between his mother and him.
Ma consulted her plate, pulverized the meat of a nut. “Hey, where are your glasses? I thought you wore glasses now.”
“Oh, right. Thanks. I forgot.” Charlie did not really need the glasses he now retrieved from his milk carton nightstand. He was only a tiny bit nearsighted. In his solitary Brooklyn days, the glasses often stayed on the secondhand bookshelf for whole weeks. Charlie knew his mother suspected the truth, that he wore them mostly for the professorial air of legitimacy their thick tortoiseshell frames lent him.
“Big plans for this morning?” Ma asked. “I hope you are being careful out there. And, I hope you won’t feel—what was your word for it? Infantilized. I hope you won’t feel infantilized when I tell you that I really don’t love the idea of you riding around on that ridiculous motorbike.”
“Actually, I was thinking I might go for another hike today.”
“Oh?”
Last night, Charlie had powered down his phone, shoved it into a drawer, but now he was imagining Jimmy Giordano’s many calls going straight to voice mail, imagining the man in his grimy Gowanus office, plotting his Plan B. Charlie swallowed, nodded, wondered if he really could do the thing he had in mind.
*
Lajitas, when Charlie was a kid, had been home to a bona fide national celebrity: the town mayor, the Honorable Clay Henry, who was a goat who drank beer. “A beer-drinking goat!” The friends Charlie made at Thoreau had always said this at some point in the first day or two of their acquaintance. It was a story to dine out on in preppy New England, that folksy, yokelish charm. “Hand to God, I’m telling the truth,” Charlie would say, his voice slipping a little Texan for effect. Charlie never mentioned the sad fact that a town could elect an alcoholic goat for mayor because it was no longer technically considered a town, an unincorporated municipality, and that the half-ghosted settlement’s primary economy came in the form of the bottles of beer tourists bought from the Lajitas Trading Post, feeding the booze to staggering, gaseous Clay Henry, before they headed down into the park. But many years had passed since Charlie had been to Lajitas, and, even with Ma’s warnings, Charlie couldn’t quite believe what he found.
Like so many of the county’s Mexican-owned businesses and an entire Hispanic neighborhood of trailers that once sat west of Bliss, whole streets had been razed. Where Clay Henry’s pen once stood was now a manicured cactus garden. And, across the street: an astonishing, fantastical sight. Behind a laser-etched placard that read LAJITAS GOLF RESORT spread a compound arranged as a faux–Wild West street scene, complete with a bank that advertised Texan trinkets, a corral that ran with chlorinated water, a swing-door saloon. A sort of Texas theme park.
Pa, Charlie thought. As Ma had instructed him to do at his first return to Bed Four, Charlie tried to imagine the worst. Cheeks of exploded capillaries, skin gone slack, eyes blinking and red. But the only image of his father that Charlie could hold in his mind belonged to the last time he’d seen him in Marfa, in that tuna-can-and-bottle-cluttered archive of sorrows Pa called “the new place,” when the man had run a hand through the matted shag of his hair as they said good-bye at the front door. “What I want to say?” Pa had told Charlie then. “All I really want to say is that I promise you. There is fight in the old beast yet, right? I just need to find my way back to—”
“To what?” Charlie had asked.
“I don’t know. You. All of you.”