June pours tomato soup into bowls, puts out goldfish crackers that she bought at the Food Lion on her way to her parents’ house.
“Please eat,” she urges her mother. When Dorothy “Dodo” Whitmire retired from her job at the state school board, her plan was to start golfing with her husband, pursue her interest in birding, which had been limited to what she could see from their deck. Now she is hunched and ashen as if she has lived years in the dark, immobile. June’s father, Dan, never much of a talker, is almost completely mute these days, and he has lost so much weight that his face looks like melted rubber.
Since Cath’s death June has tried to visit her parents at least one or two evenings a week. They are only in their late fifties, but the loss of their oldest daughter has aged them, cruelty on top of cruelty. It doesn’t help that they had both taken early retirement, which has ended up giving them unlimited time to grieve.
Everyone, even June, always assumed she was their favorite. She was certainly the “good” one, the one who gave them little cause to worry over the years. But she is beginning to suspect that they would be able to make peace more easily with her untimely death for that very reason. Cath was a work in progress, so many of life’s most basic milestones left undone. Stuck in a nowhere job she was about to lose. Incapable of getting her act together to enroll in the local community college, no matter how much she talked about it. Cath and her castles in the air. The day before she had died, she had called June with questions about high-end finishes in kitchens, which ones were worth the money, which could be skipped. She said she was thinking about buying a town house in a new development near the marsh, and there were upgrade options. June asked her how she could possibly afford it, and Cath said—coyly, June thinks now—that she was a better saver than anyone gave her credit for, that tip money had been coming in like a bumper crop this summer.
Yet her boss confirmed to Jim that he was going to let Cath go, or at least cut her hours way back, although he also insisted he had not yet told her that. He had been maddeningly unapologetic about his disloyalty to her, indifferent to the protocols of death, in which people agree to act as if the deceased were a better person than she was. “I can’t afford two waitresses off-season,” he said. “I pitch in, or my wife does.”
Could Cath’s death have been a suicide attempt? June wonders, leaning against the stove, waiting to see if her parents will eat anything. She cannot imagine her wayward, intense sister taking her own life. But she can envision Cath staging a scene, for effect, getting down on her hands and knees and sticking her head in the oven, then getting bored at her own dramatics. She had done things like that when they were children. Once, on April Fool’s Day, she had spread ketchup on herself and sprawled at the bottom of the stairs for June, only seven at the time, to find her. She hadn’t been fooled for long, but the image still lives in her head. When she has nightmares about Cath—and she has two, three a week—that’s what she sees, a ten-year-old covered in blood.
She feels guilty that she can still go about daily life in a way her parents cannot. She loved her sister, of course. But Cath was exhausting, absorbing so much attention and time. June, settled and happy, felt more and more like Cath’s second mother. Cath had begun to borrow money here and there—small amounts, but June kept this secret from Jim. She has a lot of practice, keeping Cath’s secrets.
The family never spoke about the “accident”—a word that lives in quotations in June’s head because she knows the law. If you attack someone, leap at the person with teeth bared and hands ready to strike, you have intent, even if you’re not trying to put them in a wheelchair for life. Yet if the family had dared to discuss this taboo topic, June would never have told them the connection she made long ago: Cath jumped on that girl a week after June won three awards at her middle-school graduation ceremony. June has long believed that Cath yearned to leap at her, punch her and hit her, for being the effortlessly good girl. But it wasn’t effortless. It was the only role left to her as hellion Cath burned her path through adolescence. When June was a teenager, it felt as if every conversation with her parents started with an almost absentminded congratulations on June’s latest achievement, then quickly moved to the problem of Cath, what should they do about Cath? Oh, June believes this woman killed Cath. But the quiet, analytical part of June’s mind, honed by hours of listening to court testimony, can’t help wondering if Cath provoked her.
“Eat,” she urges her parents, who move their soup spoons through their bowls but fail to raise them to their mouths. The goldfish crackers she sprinkled along the surface have bloated and sunk. This was how June and Cath had eaten tomato soup when they were little, putting so many goldfish in their bowls that you could barely see what they called the red sea. The trick was to eat them quickly, while they still had a little crunch and snap. She had thought it might comfort her parents, this unacknowledged callback to a simpler time. Because by the time Cath was eleven or twelve, it was clear she was not going to have an easy life. She wasn’t self-destructive, but she was destructive. Things broke around Cath. Things and people. Accidents, her parents always said. Cath had accidents.
But not everything was an accident. There had been a set of china, their paternal grandmother’s, in the attic. When June and Jim got engaged and set up a wedding registry, June told her mother that she was happy to take the family china. Her mother, looking embarrassed, confessed that Cath had broken most of it when she was a teenager, just gone up to the attic and flung plates and cups and serving dishes against the wall.
“You have to eat, Mom,” June says again. Her mother takes a tiny sip of soup, a larger sip from the Michelob Light at her place. She always seems to have a beer going when June comes by. But it’s just the one, as far as June can tell, nursed slowly through the afternoon and evening. She’s checked the recycling bins. Her mom is averaging one a day, no more than two.
Desperate to do anything, say anything that will rouse her parents from this dull, zombielike state, June offers, knowing it’s premature, “Jim has a lead. Into the, um, explosion. Someone—might be held accountable.”
To say that her parents brightened would be inaccurate, but their eyes focus on her, hopeful and curious. They want their daughter’s death to have meaning. There is no meaning in an accident. But if Jim is right, Cath’s death was still a kind of an accident, the consequence of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She won’t explain that to them just yet.
“That woman?” her mother asks.
“She’s—connected.” There will be time enough, assuming Jim is right, to tell them the full story. “But if his information is correct, it would have been someone else who actually did it.”