“Of course she did. She dropped by here with a melted carrot cake to tell me about her aunt’s endless and agonizing death from Alzheimer’s. I wouldn’t let her in, but she shouldered into the doorway and gave me every awful detail. No one on any porch on the planet has ever so thoroughly relished a dead aunt.” We shrugged simultaneously, with the weary acceptance of small-towners toward their homegrown horrors. I added, “If it helps, she also told me that the church fired Campbell.” Adultery from the associate pastor was not a big congregational morale builder.
“Yeah. I couldn’t set foot in that church otherwise. But in some ways it’s bad. I’m scared she’ll move away with him. I’m telling everyone who’ll listen that I’m fine, it’s fine. I keep reminding folks that she’s hurting, too, and believe me, those words taste worse than Martina’s casserole. But I have to. I don’t want her driven out of town. I mean, I do. On a rail. Maybe coated in a little tar, some feathers.” He smiled, wry and weary. “But if she goes, she’ll try to take the boys, and the law leans toward the mother. I’m not letting that happen. I can’t. I have to think about them now and not strangle her.”
I swallowed, the lump in my throat grown even thicker. So this was what fatherhood looked like when it was done right from the beginning.
I wouldn’t know. The Birch line had bad luck with fathers. Birchie was the last of us to have one all the way through adulthood.
I’d had Keith, and he’d been a great stepdad. He loved me, a lot, but I still called him Keith. Once, when Rachel and I were very little, still in preschool, Keith had been playing dollhouse with us in the den. I said, “No, rocka-chair goes here, Daddy.” I didn’t even notice I’d said it.
In the next breath, Rachel launched herself at me, punching and screaming. She bit my shoulder hard enough to make me bleed. Keith had to drag her off, still flailing. Mom came running as Rachel and I both burst into tears. She stopped in the doorway, fluttering and flapping, saying, “What happened, what happened?” I stopped crying first. Rachel sobbed and heaved in Mom’s arms the whole time Keith was dressing the bite. Hard, racking sobs that ended only when Keith finished and went to hold her. I never called my stepdad anything but Keith again. Remembering, my hands moved to cover Digby, now the third fatherless Birch generation.
“You’re doing the right thing,” I told Frank.
“Yeah. And thanks for listening. I can’t say this stuff to most people, you know? It will get around.” Frank straightened, manually moving his shoulders back and down, as if they were relifting a burden. “I need to get home. Lois Gainey’s coming by at nine to write her nephew out of her will again. That’s why we came to get your trunk so early. Sorry we woke you.”
I’d forgotten the trunk. “Where’d you put it?”
“In the den. Wattie wanted us to load it in your car, but I told her we’d do that on the way out,” he said.
My suspicions were good and roused, and I turned to the stairs, saying, “Let’s go see what the little-old-lady stealth brigade is up to.” Considering they’d hidden Birchie’s illness for so long, I could not imagine that I was going to like their new plan much.
Frank began to answer and then stopped. He tilted his head, listening. A car engine had started up outside. Close. So close it had to be coming from the driveway.
“What the hell,” I said.
“Is that your car?” he asked, then shook his head no, as if answering his own question.
It had to be, though. The only car parked out there was my rental, but no one downstairs in this house had any business driving.
I was thirty-eight and pregnant, but I took the stairs in the old, fast, slide-and-leap I’d used as a kid, hands skidding down the banister. I sprinted through the den, where Lavender was sitting between the two boys on the sofa, my computer in her lap. They were all peering into the screen and eating cinnamon buns. They looked up at me with startled, sugary faces as I thundered through, Frank Darian right behind me. I flung open the front door, ran out onto the porch, and leaped down those stairs, too.
The rental car was already backing down the long crushed-seashell drive with Wattie behind the wheel. Birchie sat in the passenger seat. I could make out the hunched shape of a large chest looming in the back. Wattie must have had the boys move it while Frank and I were talking.
“Stop! Stop!” I yelled, running barefoot out onto the wet grass of the lawn.
Wattie hadn’t had a driver’s license for years now, and for damn good reasons. Where did she think they were going? Wattie’s eyes met mine, and she stomped down hard on the gas. The car surged backward.
Frank zoomed past me on his longer legs, trying to get behind the car so they would have to stop.
“Frank, no!” I screamed, still chasing the car head-on. What if Wattie didn’t see him? The Darian boys would spill out onto the porch just in time to watch their father be squashed.
The car was moving too fast, though. Frank wasn’t going to make it. Wattie’s eyes were still locked on mine, and she lost the angle as she came to the end of the drive. The back left tire cut into the yard, and the car bounced and jerked. Wattie sawed the wheel the other way, gunning the engine, overcorrecting. The right tires veered into the yard, skidding on the grass, and finally she braked.
Too late. The trunk of the car smashed into the brick mailbox pillar with a horrific crunch.
“Oh my God!” Lavender yelled. She’d arrived with Jeffrey and Hugh at just the right moment to see the crash.
I was still running for the car. Frank got there first, to Wattie’s side. He jerked at the door, but it was locked.
“Open the door!” he yelled through the glass.
Wattie wouldn’t even look at him. She stared forward through the windshield, shaken and mutinous all at once.
I leaped awkwardly down the driveway to the passenger side, the crushed seashells biting into the bottoms of my feet. I peered in the window.
Birchie stared back at me with startled eyes, her fluffy bun in a muss.
“Unlock it!” I yelled.
She obediently clicked the button, and I hauled the door open before Wattie could relock it. She was actually trying, but Frank got her door open, too. I reached in, my hands feeling all over Birchie, running up and down her arms, her face and neck, her chest and ribs, looking for damage.
“Are you okay?” I said it way too loud, right into her face.
“Of course I am, honey. Such a fuss,” she said, giving me irked eyebrows, pushing at my searching hands. “Leia, stop groping my bosom.”
“Are you all right?” Frank was jacked up and yelling into Wattie’s face, too.
“Let us go,” Wattie said, low and intense. “We’ll be right back in a minute.”
“You crashed my rental car!” I was still yelling. I could not stop.
“Bah! Barely, and we have to go,” Wattie said, angry and so very urgent. “The car will still drive. The air bags didn’t even come out.”
I was suddenly dizzy and sick, imagining if they had. Air bags going off like gunshots, striking at their frail old bodies, pulping them.
“Should I call 911?” I asked Birchie. “Does anything hurt?”
“Make her let us go,” Wattie said, clutching Frank’s arm, appealing to him.
In answer he reached across her and grabbed the keys, shutting the car’s engine off.