Home. Theirs was a redbrick dormer bungalow on a landscaped acre lot. His parents had given him and Tricia the site twenty-one years ago. The wedding present yet another thing his father liked to hold over him. Billy tried not to look, but his eyes went straight to the trees behind the football pitch—those trees, all trees, ruined for him now.
He entered the kitchen. The radio was tuned to that country music station Tricia liked so much, some lament with an American twang playing. Not so long ago, he might have pulled her by the hand into the middle of the kitchen and twirled her around beneath his fingers. She would likely have pushed him away, laughing, and called him daft. Or on another day, in a sharper mood, she might tell him, “Stop, you’ll give yourself a heart attack.” Either scenario was better than how they tiptoed around each other now.
She stood at the sink peeling potatoes, all five-foot-nothing of her. He was six-foot. She glanced over her shoulder, a strip of potato skin hanging from the peeler like a diseased tongue. “You weren’t long. Town must be quiet?”
“Very quiet, I was in and out.” He didn’t say he’d done little more than stuff himself. Didn’t mention Kitty Moore.
“You just missed your mother,” Tricia said.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Fine, she was just checking in.”
A fresh bouquet of lilies sprang from a vase on the table, their smell sickly familiar. The flowers looked beautiful, but seemed tainted, like black age spots in the glass of an antique mirror. That was the way with so much now—tarnished, loaded. Birdsong that sounded like a child screeching. The creak of a door like groaning. Overhead power lines that could string you up.
He read the sympathy card, from Tricia’s aunt in New York. “That was very nice of her.”
“Yes, God bless her.” Ever since they’d lost Michael, in addition to coffee, cigarettes, and sleeping tablets, Tricia had also taken hard to Catholicism. “Although,” she continued, still skinning the potato, “I almost wish the cards and flowers, the people, would all stop coming through the door now. It seems endless.”
He understood, but the alternative didn’t appeal, either—people forgetting, and the everydayness of life without Michael taking hold. He opened the fridge door, despite still feeling full, and scanned the shelves. Every time he entered the house he walked straight to the fridge and looked inside, and every time he felt this strange disappointment, as though expecting to find something else.
As Tricia stripped the last potato bare, her shoulder blade moved faster beneath her T-shirt, bringing to mind a calcified wing. He watched the hypnotic movement, tempted to touch her, but he knew she wouldn’t want that. His touch no longer comforted her the way it had in those first few days after Michael. The last time he’d reached for her, she’d flinched and pulled away.
“Did you want a hand?” he asked.
“No, thanks, I’m almost done.”
The clothesline beyond the window tugged. Billy refused to look. Michael, at all of seventeen, had left the house in the dark of night, cut down the previous clothesline, and walked to the band of trees behind the football pitch. Billy pictured the rope on the ground, trailing Michael like a snake.
Up and down Tricia’s shoulder blade sliced. She had lost so much weight in five weeks. Her straw-colored hair was brittle now, too. A glassy look in her eyes. She added the naked potatoes to the saucepan and walked to the back door with her cigarettes and lighter. She had given up the killers for eight years, but the day they lost Michael, she had gone back on them worse than ever.
*
In the living room, John, Anna, and Ivor sat together on the couch, still in their school uniforms, their eyes locked on Dine About Town, that cooking show the whole family liked. Only now they weren’t whole. Billy’s attention jumped to the red floral rug in front of the fireplace. They’d waked Michael there in his mahogany coffin with its shiny gold handles and crucifixes. Michael’s walnut guitar still leaned against the wall in the corner, just as the boy had left it. The fast food pushed against Billy’s stomach, bloating, hurting. He thought about bursting wide open and how good that would feel.
“Did you want a cup of tea, Dad?” Anna asked.
“No, thanks, love. I’ll get myself a cup after the dinner.” He smiled, hoping to ease the worry on her little face. At twelve years old, Anna cut a miniature of her mother in old photographs—thin, pale, and short, with bright yellow-blond hair, almond-shaped eyes, and plump lips.
He suddenly wanted the children up and out, doing. “It’s such a fine evening, how about we all go for a drive before dinner?”
“No thanks,” John said, deadpan. At fifteen, he was now the eldest. He bore his brother’s likeness, at least physically, and stood tall, lean, and broad. The defiance in his wild dark curls and penetrating blue eyes was all his, though, Michael a gentler and more agreeable young man.
“We’re watching this,” Ivor said, his eyes never leaving the TV. He sounded younger than nine, his words thick when he spoke, as though every tooth he’d ever lost sat in a pile on his tongue.