I’ll put on another sweater, Joe said, so Hoskins ticked the thermostat down to sixty-three, what his father considered the perfect temperature, and watched as the numbers took a dive and his father huddled deeper into his wool sweater, his lips turning a gummy purple shade. Hoskins didn’t argue. It wasn’t worth it, never was. Instead, he compromises, because that’s what he does, he’s always been that way. So he gets up early, turns down the heat so his father will think it’s been there the whole time, and then once the old man’s up and around, absorbed in something else, he cranks it back up again. It could backfire anytime, all his father has to do is walk over to the thermostat at any point during the day and he’ll see what’s going on, he’ll take a look at where the dial is sitting and know, but it hasn’t happened yet.
He’s been meaning to buy a new coffee machine—he still has the old kind that uses the tissue-paper filters and a glass pot with the scorched bottom. One day, he figures, the damn thing’ll break and he’ll have to spring for a new one, one of those fancy stainless-steel jobs he’s seen that takes only plastic pods, and will make just one cup at a time. He turns the dial on the thermostat, then starts the coffee. He hates doing it—pulling out the filter, rinsing out the pot, dropping in fresh grounds—he tries to remember to do it at night before they go to bed, so all he’ll have to do in the morning is flip a switch, but he never manages to get to it. He’s rinsing the pot—the damn thing always has grounds swishing around the bottom of it, no matter what he does—when Joe shuffles into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. The old man’s hair is wild, sticking in every direction, but he refuses to get it cut. They buzzed it all off when I enlisted, Joe always used to say. I decided then I’d have long hair for the rest of my life.
“Is Carol here?” Joe asks, scratching absently at his wrist, where the skin is raw and torn from being worked over by his nails. Colorado winters are hard and dry, and tough on the old man’s skin. He’s carrying the newspaper in his arm, cradling it like it’s a baby wrapped in a blue plastic sleeve. “I thought I heard her.”
“Dad, stop,” Hoskins says, gently pulling his father’s hand away, and Joe looks at him, surprised, as if he’d forgotten his son was there at all. “You’re only making it worse.”
“Where’s Carol?”
“She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“Mom’s been gone a long time.”
Carol’s not gone, not exactly. She’s not dead, but she definitely isn’t here, not anywhere near here, not if she can help it. The last he’d heard, Carol was out in Nebraska, running a pool hall with her latest boyfriend. Hoskins had last seen his mother when he was ten, and all he remembers from that visit is her long tan legs and her laugh, throaty and hoarse from cigarettes and late nights. She’d sometimes send postcards, or photos of her standing beside whatever guy she was fucking, and Hoskins had always hid those from his father, not wanting to see the hurt on his face. Once, she’d sent Hoskins a package for his birthday, but when he’d peeled the box open it was empty, and he’d never figured out if she’d done it on purpose, to hurt him for being born, or if she’d just forgotten.
“Yeah, I guess she did leave a long time ago,” Joe said. He shakes the paper out of the sleeve and it falls open automatically, and there on the front page, in big black letters across the top, is a headline Hoskins never thought he’d see: SEEVER IS BACK. So much for Chief Black’s wish to make an arrest before people can go nuts—if anything can push the public into a frenzy, it’s something like this. He scans through the article, quickly. It’s mostly about Seever, and how Carrie Simms was connected to him, and there’s a name for this new murderer, because that was what reporters always did. They liked to give killers snappy nicknames, and this one might be the worst he’s ever heard: “The Secondhand Killer.”
“Oh, shit,” Hoskins says. He’d known Sammie would write the story, that it would run, but not this fast, and not like this. This is fearmongering in the worst possible way, and she’d promised it wouldn’t be like that, and he’d taken her word for it, when he should know better. The story takes up half the first page, credited to Sammie and a guy named Chris Weber, although it’s only Sammie’s photo that’s been printed beside the byline—her old photo, the same one they always used before, the one that makes her look like Miss America. “You bitch.”
“I think it’s about time you stopped being so pissed off about your mom.”
“No, Dad. It’s not that. I don’t give a shit about her.”
“Yeah, you do,” Joe says, sighing. There’s yellow splattered down the front of his shirt—eggs from the morning before. He’ll have to remind the caretaker woman to have Joe change his clothes. “We both do.”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t you say she’s running a strip club now?”
“I think it’s a bar.”
“Oh.” Joe starts to scratch the dry spot on his wrist again, but sees Hoskins watching and folds his hands together. “I bet she doesn’t wear a bra to work. That woman never did like to wear a bra.”
“I don’t know,” Hoskins says. For a moment he thinks he might laugh, but then it passes.
“Never a bra for Carol,” Joe says, sighing again. He leans back in his chair, closes his eyes. “I wish she was here. I’d like to see her.”
“You still love her?”
“Nah. I want to remind her that she’s old as fuck and shouldn’t let her tits hang out anymore.”
*
There’s a cut under Trixie’s eyebrow, shallow and raw.