The Last September: A Novel

“We’ll get you some fries,” I said. She nodded and put one finger in her mouth.

Bob was already there, sitting at one of the booths. I put Sarah on the bench opposite him; she walked across it, her feet sticking slightly on the beer-scented vinyl. “You brought the baby,” Bob said. His voice was flat, surprised.

“I thought you’d want to see her,” I said.

When the waitress came to deliver his beer, I ordered fries. Bob leaned forward as Sarah examined the deep grooves in the table. She picked up the butter knife and pressed it into a blackened pair of initials.

“Sarah,” Bob said. “It’s me. It’s your grandpa.”

Knife still in hand, she looked up at him. Bob’s face looked jowly and drained of color. The veins on his hands protruded, and they trembled slightly as he looked at Sarah, Charlie’s face in miniature staring back at him. I waited for him to remark on the resemblance, but he didn’t. His eyes look watery and red.

“Do you have the keys?” he said.

The waitress arrived with Sarah’s fries. She slid them in front of her and I pulled them back. “Hot,” I said as Sarah protested. I reached into my purse and grabbed the keys, which I’d already separated from my key chain. Bob didn’t reach out as I handed them across the table, so after a few seconds I just put them down. Sarah picked them up and I started breaking her fries in half so they’d cool off faster.

“I’m going to sell it,” Bob said, staring at the keys in Sarah’s hands. “Put it on the market right away.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering who in the world would buy it now. Bob looked braced for some kind of response, maybe an objection. As if I’d want to go back and live there, ever again.

I watched him take another sip of beer. He reached out and took a fry from Sarah’s plate. He bit into it, then returned it to the edge of her plate. I slid it off and hid it under my unused napkin. And although I didn’t want my daughter to eat his half-gnawed food, I couldn’t be mad at him. I recognized the expression on his face, the one staring back at myself from the mirror. He was here, breathing the oxygen, making stabs at eating, for one reason only: he had a living child. So he had to stay in this world, because sooner or later Eli would return. As far as I’d witnessed, Bob had never been much of a parent. He wasn’t enough of a parent now to stay here, on Cape Cod, and look for Eli, or even wait for him to show up. But still a parent. As I stared at him across the knotty pine table, the smell of beer and fried food thick around us, all I could think of was everything he’d lost. His first wife. Both his sons. Any kind of peace of mind, or happiness, ever.

What can a person do when one child murders the other? Murders the other and then disappears—not only into the vast, unknown world but the more unknowable recesses of his mind? I guess you do what Bob Moss did that day at the Olde Pub, right before my very eyes. You turn pale, and frail, and very old. You wring your hands and forget your grandchild. You don’t think to reach out to the daughter-in-law, almost equally ruined, sitting there across the table, except to take the keys from her and say good-bye.

???

SARAH FELL ASLEEP IN the car. When we got there, a police cruiser was parked in front of the house. I parked beside it and got out, leaving the door open so the sound of it slamming wouldn’t wake Sarah. Inside, the same police officer who’d escorted me back to the Moss house, a young woman, stood in the front hall talking to Maxine. The sight of her back, rigid and official, made me tense. When she turned, I almost expected her to draw her gun, or cuff me.

Maxine nodded toward the counter. “She brought your computer back.”