Faithful Unto Death (6 page)

“I don’t talk that talk, Bear.” He flung himself back into the chair.

Evidently he didn’t think I walked that talk, either. That shook me, too. I went back to my previous question.

“So why don’t you just divorce her? I don’t understand.”

It obviously wasn’t the money. If Graham had been old-time Church of Christ, I might have understood. There was a time in the Church when the only permissible reason to leave a spouse was for “the sin of infidelity.” In my parents’ day, there were couples who lived together separately, furiously feuding and secretly praying that the other would slip into an affair, leaving the “righteous” partner free. I knew of wives who had stayed in physically abusive marriages rather than challenge that injunction. God preserve us from that kind of sick thinking.

He shut his eyes tight, his mouth thin and bitter. He stood up. Touched the knot in his tie. Reached into his pants pocket and pulled out an iPhone and turned it on. He started walking, stopped, and faced me again.

“I know you don’t understand. But I need you to get her to divorce me, Bear. Talk to her, not to me. And you get her to do it soon. That’s something you better understand. Time is of the essence. Something bad is coming. It’s not my fault. It’s on you now.”

“Your saying so doesn’t make it so, Graham.”

He reached the door and looked at me, his hand on the doorknob.

“It’s on you.” And he left.

I looked around me at the Bridgewater golf course. Everything green and clean. Everything so ordered and affluent. But Graham Garcia had died out there just hours ago, when the moon was pouring its milky light down. And it was on me now.

Seven

M
y cell phone rang as I headed for my car—the first four notes of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Merrie made that custom ringtone for me. She’d gotten hold of my phone when I left it at home one day and downloaded Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” the whole thing. It was embarrassing. I asked her to instead change it to play the first four notes of “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” because it had special meaning for me (those four notes coinciding with the words “Onward, Christian,” a good message any time of any day). Also, those four notes are the same note, G, so when my phone rings, it just beeps. And that suits me.

It was Wanderley.

“Mr. Wells!”

“Who is this, please?”

“You don’t recognize my voice?”

I was pretty sure I did. “Detective Wanderley?”

“Yep. What can you tell me about Mr. HD Parker?”

“Besides his being Honey’s father?”

“I’m all clear on the family relationship.”

“Did you try Googling him?”

There was a prolonged pause meant to convey Wanderley’s extraordinary patience with a dense and uncooperative man.

“I did my research on the Web, Mr. Wells. I was hoping you could fill me in on the intangibles.”

There wasn’t all that much I knew, but I shared what I had. I couldn’t see that it would be any help. When I’d finished, there was another pause, this one communicating that I hadn’t given Wanderley all the information he was looking for.

“Was there something else?” I asked and leaned my butt against the car.

“Yes.”

I waited.

“You raised those girls out here in the ’burbs? Did they go to preschool?”

I said they had.

“Can you tell me where you sent them?”

Now I paused.

“Detective Wanderley, are you looking for a preschool for your daughter?”

It came in a rush.

“Clotilde wants to put Molly in preschool starting in the fall.”

“Clotilde?”

“Molly’s mom. She goes by Chloe.”

“I don’t blame her. Will Molly be three by September?”

“Three in October.”

I thought back. “It’s going to be a Mother’s Day Out program then. I think. Chloe and Molly live in Sugar Land?”

“In the Heights. But I told Chloe I’d pick Molly up and take her every day if she would let me pick the school.”

This was a completely impractical idea. Wanderley would be traveling with traffic to pick up his toddler daughter, and even in the best scenario, the child would be spending an hour and a half in the car each day. Add in a detective’s irregular hours—my phone beeped to let me know I had another call. I ignored it.

“Chloe can’t find a program she likes in the Heights?”

“She’s found one. It’s some hippy Greenpeace-type thing. There’s no math, no alphabet, all they do is garden and sing songs and play with a baby pet pig.”

I snorted.

“What?”

“Wanderley.”

“Detective.”

“Right. Listen, your daughter won’t be taking the SATs for another fourteen years. Maybe it wouldn’t be a terrible thing if your baby had a few years digging in the dirt and playing with a baby pig.”

A long, thoughtful pause.

“You don’t think she’ll get behind?”

“I don’t, no. I think it’s important to let a baby be a baby.”

“You didn’t push your girls?”

“Not when they were two. And I’ll tell you, I don’t think the pushing made any difference when I started it.”

“I don’t want to make a mistake.”

This time I laughed out loud. “Good luck on that one, son. You’re going to make mistakes. Love her and don’t drop her on her head. Everything else, I don’t know. Maybe it’s luck and genes.” My phone beeped again. “Sorry, Detective, I’ve got to go now; someone’s trying to get through.”

It was Rebecca. I could hear her pugs yapping their fool heads off in the background as I got in my car. Which meant that Rebecca had swung by her house and picked up her dogs before going to get Jo. Jo would come home covered in pug hair and our dog would go into olfactory overdrive. Rebecca is still miffed that I won’t let her bring the pugs up to the office. The pugs don’t drool, yeah, but they shed like an old rabbit coat.

“All right, Bear, Jo is at ballet class now and she’ll need to be picked up at seven thirty,” Rebecca informed me.

“That’s a little late, isn’t it? We usually pick her up around five thirty or six.” I strapped myself in my seat and made a U-turn back toward the church.

“She says she’s working on a new routine and she needs the practice. And you tell Annie Laurie to put a spoonful of butter on Jo’s tofu and sprouts, or whatever veggie glop that girl is having for dinner. Your girl is getting too skinny.”

“She’s not anorexic, Rebecca, she’s a vegetarian. Can you get those dogs to stop? It’s hard to hear you.”

I heard paper rustling and there was a snuffling frenzy. Which meant that after Rebecca had dropped Jo off, she had gone through the McDonald’s drive-thru across the street and gotten those overfed little pests cheeseburgers, plain and dry.

Rebecca said, “I’m not saying she’s anorexic, I’m saying if your shoulder blades stick out farther than your boobs do, you need more padding. Anyway, to my way of thinking.”

“Well, thanks for picking her up from school; it was a help.”

There was a small silence. “I picked her up
at
school.”

Silence on my part now, while I tried to decipher her pause and the change in prepositions. I couldn’t.

“Could you please tell me what you’re trying to tell me, Rebecca?”

Another pause. That woman’s mind is as complex as a Pharisee’s. More benign, mind you.

“She wasn’t coming from school,” Rebecca said, “not when I picked her up
.
Some boy pulled up in front and let her out. I was interested in the kids pouring out of the school and I was watching, or I never would have noticed how she joined right in the flow and made her way over to where I was waiting.”

I was so stunned I ran a stop sign. Bad idea in Sugar Land. A kid in my church got arrested for playing his car stereo too loud. Well, that, and for mouthing off when he got pulled over.

“Did you ask her what she thought she was doing?”

“No, I did not. I’m not her momma and it’s not any of my business and I’m not even certain I’ve done right in telling you about it. I know I’m supposed to do unto others as I’d have them do to me, but when He’s talking about the others, does He mean you and Annie Laurie? Or does He mean Jo? ’Cause if I were Jo, I wouldn’t want my dad’s secretary telling tales on me. But if I were you and Annie, I would want to know.”

My anger rose like scalded milk in a saucepan. I was going to get the truth from that girl, fourteen years old and cutting school to be with a boy. Not like her grades were so stellar she could afford to miss classes. She had improved them lately, but not anywhere near enough to slack off school. Without much thinking about it, I turned my car around yet again and headed toward the storefront studio where Jo has been taking ballet like a religious acolyte for nearly ten years.

“Doesn’t a parent’s need to know what’s going on with their kid trump the kid’s desire to keep secrets? In God’s eyes?” I said.

“I’m not sure it does, not in my eyes, and it’s too scary to presume to see out of God’s eyes, don’t you think so, Bear?”

“Who was the boy?”

“I don’t know who he was, I know very few teenagers. If they don’t live on my street, or go to my church, I’m not likely to know them.” Despite working for me, Rebecca attends Williams Trace Baptist. “He was a nice-looking fellow.”

“I don’t give a dang what he looks like.” I had a sudden unpleasant thought. “He wasn’t a lot older than Jo, was he? He wasn’t some predator . . .”

“He looked like a high school kid; he couldn’t be all that much older than Jo, though he had to be some older, to be driving. Course, since he’s a teenage boy, I think you have to assume he is a predator, same as you were at that age.”

I pulled off the road, into the parking lot for the Fort Bend Independent Schools Administration Annex. Kept my foot on the brake while I asked my next question.

“What about drinking? She didn’t smell like she’d—”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Bear, you do borrow trouble. No, she didn’t smell like she’d been drinking. You’re not ever going to have to worry about Jo drinking, because booze has calories, and that girl isn’t going to put one unnecessary calorie in her system. Evidently ballet dancers survive off spring water and bean sprouts.”

I didn’t say anything. I was trying to think.

“Are you there, Bear?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not going to go tearing over to that studio and yank Jo out of ballet, are you?”

That was exactly what I was about to do.

“That’s a stupid question for me to ask,” Rebecca said. “Wait a minute, Bear. Don’t eat the paper, Mr. Wiggles, give it here. Okay, I’m back with you. I know you wouldn’t do anything so foolish as to go publicly shaming a teenage girl in front of all her friends and ballet teachers. All something like that would do is make her furious and humiliated. She’d be so focused on the awful thing you’d done to her, you wouldn’t have a chance of getting her to see that her own deception was wrong and hurtful. I know you and Annie are too wise to fly off the handle and react in the moment. Ya’ll will probably sit down together and talk all this out before Jo gets home tonight, have a plan in hand ya’ll are both comfortable with.”

You see what I mean about Rebecca having the mind of a Pharisee?

“Bear?”

“I heard you, Rebecca.” I revved the engine a couple of times to burn off some anger. It just burned gas. At $3.69 a gallon.

“So, are you going back to the office?”

“I believe I’ll go on home and have a talk with Annie.”

Eight

From:
Walker Wells

To:
Merrie Wells

Subject:
touching base

Hello, sweet Merrie,

Did you get hold of Jenasy?

How’s track? How’s volleyball? How’s Latin coming along? Zarzecki gave you a pretty good foundation; you’ll be able to talk to all the dead Romans you want to when you finally get to Venice. :).

Mom and I enjoyed meeting Jackson over spring break. He seems real nice. I don’t know how practical it is for a young man to major in education as it would be impossible to support a family on a teacher’s salary, but naturally that’s his business since you aren’t serious about him. You aren’t, are you?

Are you and Jo keeping in touch? Do you know who she’s seeing? Is there anything Mom and I should know about and if there is and you won’t tell me or Mom would you tell Aunt Stacy?

You are in my prayers nightly and on my heart always. I hope you’re being faithful about church attendance, it’s so important not to drift.

Love you,

Dad

From:
Merrie Wells

To:
Walker Wells

Subject:
re: touching base

Hey dad good to hear from ya :). Yes, texted Jenasy no haven’t heard from jo lately im sure everything is fine you can access my grades via the tx tech website get mom to show you how—do c of c preachers make real $$ if they don’t get a book published? just asking ;). merrie

Nine

O
ur talk with Jo didn’t go all that well, even though Annie and I did have a plan. We’d prayed, too. It might have been partly my fault. After Rebecca’s comments concerning Jo’s shoulder blades, I paid more attention at dinner to what was actually making its way into Jo’s stomach—not all that much, as it turned out. She fed more to Baby Bear, our Newfoundland, a horse masquerading as a dog. Baby Bear (yeah, great name) was sending Jo psychic-dog-brain-waves to get her to sneak him food. That mutt has terrible manners, but no one except me seems to notice.

Annie Laurie had been right when she said I had to let Jo have the Newfoundland puppy that had grown into Baby Bear. Five years ago, we had gone over to Bobbie and Bill Woodruff’s for dinner and brought nine-year-old Jo with us because Merrie had plans for the evening and we couldn’t find a sitter. Jo had grumbled but that had all changed when we got to the Woodruffs’ and discovered that their Newfoundland bitch had nine fat little puppies, just a month old.

I’m not a dog person, but even I was charmed by the tumbling, nipping, silky-coated jet babies. Jo climbed into the pen and Hermione, the Newfie mom, raised her massive head. I thought she was going to eat Jo for violating her space. Instead, Hermione thrust a huge wet nose into Jo’s crotch and snuffled. Jo didn’t scream, which is probably how I would have responded to that inspection. Jo put her hands under Hermione’s chin and drew the dog’s face level to her own. Hermione’s head was the size of a small television—Newfoundlands are big dogs. Then Jo rubbed her face all over Hermione’s, chin to cheek and forehead to forehead. I’d never seen anything like it and neither had the Woodruffs. Jo settled herself down among the litter, her back against Hermione, and spent the rest of the evening puppy-sitting while Hermione caught up on her sleep.

Annie Laurie and I had thought Jo looked pretty cute, our mite of a daughter surrounded by the wriggling mass of puppyhood, but Bobbie and Bill watched like Jo was being baptized into some sort of sacred puppy club. Turns out, she had been.

Toward the end of the evening, Bobbie asked if we’d like to take Hermione on her evening outing while they cleaned up the kitchen, and while I didn’t have any interest at all in taking a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound dog out for a walk, I didn’t see how I could say so.

Annie Laurie, Jo, and I led the dog out into the cool night, and in spite of my misgivings, Hermione proved a placid, calm companion. She peed gushingly a number of times, and when she squatted to leave a cowpat-sized dung specimen, I balked at picking it up in the newspaper bag Bill had handed me on the way out. But my fastidious Jo snatched the bag from me, scooped up the steaming stink, and carried it back to the Woodruffs’ as though she were delivering a trophy.

Bill and Bobbie beamed at this confirmation of Jo’s inherent dogginess and, with great ceremony, sat us down to announce—Bill gravely, and Bobbie tremulously—that they were going to give Jo one of Hermione’s puppies, and that she could choose which one. My hair stood up and my jaw dropped down and Annie Laurie got a pincher grip on my knee and applied some pressure, but not enough to keep me from saying that we couldn’t possibly, we wouldn’t dream, and our yard really wasn’t big enough, and Annie increased the pressure and I shut up.

Jo flung herself into Bill and Bobbie’s arms and assured them that she loved them better than anyone in the world (yeah, “how sharper than a serpent’s tooth” and all that) and that she would be the best puppy mother who had ever lived and then that canny little nine-year-old did something very interesting.

She climbed back into the pen and picked up each puppy in turn. She tickled and stroked each puppy, but all the while, from the corner of her eye, she watched the Woodruffs. I don’t know what Jo was looking for there, and I don’t know what she saw, but when she got to puppy number five, whatever she was looking for, she found.

“This one!” she said.

Something like relief passed between Bill and Bobbie, but Bill said, “Jo, if that’s the puppy you want, you can have him, but I have to tell you that though he’s a purebred Newfie, and perfectly healthy, you won’t be able to show him.”

Bill held out his hands for the puppy and Jo passed over the protesting fur ball.

Bill turned the yowling puppy over on his back and touched the puppy’s scrotum with a finger.

“See this?” Bill asked.

Jo leaned over Bob’s shoulder. “It’s his wee.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “Boy puppies are supposed to have two, umm, two . . .” Bill looked at me.

I was not helping Bill out with this. The man had just foisted a puppy on me that would soon grow big enough to leave cowpats all over my yard.

Bill tried again. “Boy puppies should have two danglies with their, um, wee. This fella only has one. The other hasn’t dropped. It’s tucked up in his tummy.”

“Will he miss it?” said Jo. She fondled a pink-lined ear and the puppy reached up and caught a finger in his mouth and started suckling. Jo’s eyes grew misty—she was a woman in love.

“He won’t, Jo. This puppy isn’t going to need his danglies at all. Your momma and dad will take care of it for you when he’s older.” (No way was I going to be a party to that bit of emasculation; Annie Laurie later had to make that trip to the vet on her own.)

Jo had pitched a fit when she realized she wasn’t going to get to take the puppy home with her that minute; she would have to wait two months for the puppy to be weaned. Then she pitched a fit when I told her no, she could not live with the Woodruffs until the puppy was old enough to come home with us.

When the time finally came to pick up the new family member, the puppy weighed sixteen pounds and had paws the size of dessert plates. Jo brought one of her old baby blankets with her. She wrapped the puppy up and held him against her chest, his chin resting on her shoulder. No new mother ever looked prouder.

“What will you call him, Jo?” asked Bobbie.

Jo leaned her new puppy back so she could look in his face. They stared at each other for a long time. A long pink tongue rolled out and slurped her cheek.

“Baby Bear,” she said.

Annie Laurie and Bobbie started laughing.

I said, “Jo, you can’t call him ‘Baby Bear.’ Bear is my name.”

“He looks like a bear,” Jo said. Newfoundlands do look ursine. “And he’s a baby.” Jo had that implacable look on her face that, even then, portended somebody other than me getting their way.

“Well, but he won’t be a baby forever, and that’s
my name
.”

Jo rubbed noses with the puppy as she worked this out. Not whether or not to name her dog Baby Bear—that was already decided on—but how to get the name past me. It came to her, and she lifted her sunflower face to me.

“You named me ‘Josephine’ for Nana. I’m naming him Baby Bear for you. It’s a family name.”

Big smile. Checkmate.

And so we became the proud (Jo), bemused (me and Annie Laurie), and envious (Merrie) owners of a Newfoundland dog named Baby Bear. After me.

Merrie had wept buckets when she found that the Woodruffs had given Jo—not her—a puppy. I said the dog would be so big, there would be more than enough of him to go around, but she was inconsolable. My genius wife told Merrie that a dog will always love best the person who takes care of him and gives him the most walks. That, no surprise, set up a fierce competition between the girls, and Annie Laurie and I didn’t have to walk the dog once until years later when varsity sports for Merrie, and dance classes for Jo, so ate into their schedules that we started taking up the slack. By then I didn’t mind.

As ridiculous as it is for a preacher to own a purebred dog that sells for fifteen hundred dollars, as absurd as it is to have a long-haired, pony-sized dog in the hell of a Texas summer, I love the mutt. It’s embarrassing, but I do. Baby Bear will choose Jo over me any day of the week, even though she slips him veggies and I give him the fat I trim off my meat, but even though he’s not the guy he once was (halfway, at least, there
was
that undescended testicle), still, he’s the only other male in the house. We stick together. When he isn’t sticking to Jo.

So anyway, tonight we were eating in the kitchen. Annie had given up on serving dinner in the dining room about two years after our second baby was born. This was a huge concession on Annie’s part, because in the home she grew up in, there was this social dividing line between people who had their meals in the dining room with an ironed linen napkin in their laps, and people who ate in the kitchen. People who ate in the kitchen were grouped together with people who lived in trailer homes that were periodically repositioned by tornadoes, and who had season tickets to monster truck rallies. I truly love my mother-in-law, Gaither, but there are times . . . I figure maybe Martha Stewart came up to her standards, before the prison stint. Nobody else is likely to.

Anyway, even though we’re eating in the kitchen, Annie does things nicely for her family. I mean it. We don’t have linen napkins in our laps, but the napkins are cloth, and not polyester, either—a polyester napkin works about as well as a sheet of wax paper. Annie uses cotton napkins. She doesn’t iron them or anything. She’s not psycho. She just smooths and folds them straight from the dryer, same as she does the girls’ jeans. I think little things like this matter, even if Annie’s mom thinks I’ve dragged her baby to new and unimagined depths of depravity.

Jo put plenty of food on her plate, scrupulously avoiding the grilled chicken and anything it might have touched. Annie Laurie has never made a big deal over Jo’s deciding to be a vegetarian; she just started adding more vegetable dishes and nearly always had some sort of beans to make sure Jo was getting protein, but contrary to Rebecca’s comment, there wasn’t ever tofu on the table because Jo won’t eat it and neither will I. Even Baby Bear declines tofu. So what went on Jo’s plate were kidney beans (bland from being cooked without any bacon or ham), grilled sweet potato slices (Annie cooks the veggies on the top grill because Jo won’t eat them if meat juice drips on them), grilled red and green peppers, and that kind of salad they make at Carrabbas’ restaurant, where you stack tomato slices, fresh mozzarella, and fresh basil leaves. Annie always makes sure Jo has a big glass of milk, too. That’s the only food item she’s a real stickler on—Jo can’t leave the table until she finishes her milk. My point being that there was plenty of good food on Jo’s plate.

But tonight I was watching to see if Jo was really eating what was on her plate. First Jo used her fork and knife like surgical instruments: she peeled the thin skin off the sweet potatoes, slipped it to Baby Bear, then slipped him a whole slice of sweet potato. He kept a guilty eye on me, but he ate it noisily. He doesn’t know any other way to eat. Then she peeled the skin off the grilled peppers, not an easy thing to do, and set the skin aside. She pushed the now-skinless peppers to a new location on her plate. Baby Bear won’t eat peppers. Jo then pierced two beans with her fork tines and brought the fork up to her mouth. The fork went back to the plate with one bean gone. There was a long, thoughtful chew. Jo unstacked the salad, ate the basil leaves, all four of them, slipped the fresh mozzarella slices back on the lettuce leaf, and started cutting the skin off the tomatoes. I swear, it was like watching an autopsy. I was almost done with my dinner and Jo had eaten a sum total of four basil leaves and one unsalted kidney bean. I nudged Annie Laurie and nodded at Jo’s plate, but Annie poured herself another glass of wine and ignored me.

I stayed quiet as long as I could and then very gently pointed out to Jo that she had eaten nothing so far but garnish, whereas I was already finished with my dinner.

She didn’t look up from her plate. “It’s not a race, Dad. You don’t get a prize for finishing first.”

Just as cool as you please, still dissecting that perfectly decent tomato. She was removing the tomato seeds with one fork tine.

“It’s not only the time you’re taking to dismember the good food your mother set in front of you,” I said, “it’s the fact that you aren’t eating any of it.”

Baby Bear made a fussy, nervous noise and pushed my leg with his nose. He had a string of drool depending from his jaws that got left on my slacks. Baby Bear readjusted his bulk under the kitchen table to make sure I had no place to put my feet. I pushed back.

“What do you weigh, Dad? Two-fifty? Two-sixty? I’m less than half your size; I don’t need the same . . . mass of food that you do.”

I suddenly felt like I’d eaten an entire horse. With my fingers. Raw. And I keep my weight right at 235, thank you very much.

I tried to explain. “You keep telling me that ballet is a sport same as track or basketball or volleyball. A healthy, growing girl needs fuel to play sports . . .”

“You mean a healthy, growing girl like Merrie?”

Annie Laurie’s sneaker made a restraining tap on my foot.

“Well,” I said, “Merrie is a good example of a healthy—”

Still not looking up, Jo flipped her hair back and cut right in while I was speaking.

“Merrie is a moose. If Merrie wanted to do a pas de deux, she’d need Arnold Schwarzenegger for her partner.”

Baby Bear groaned.

“The young Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Jo clarified.

I stood up so fast I bumped the table, and the plate holding the grilled chicken slid, sloshing some of the chicken juice on Jo’s hand. Hardly any at all, but you would have thought I’d scalded her to death. She jumped up screaming like a banshee and rushed over to the kitchen sink, scrubbing at her hand with a soapy dishcloth.

I said, “Your sister is not a moose, Josephine Amelia. She’s five foot ten and—”

Jo whirled away from the sink, her hair flying out around her. What with the steam from the sink and all that dark hair and that pinched, furious face, she looked like a little witch. She had tears in her eyes, too. I don’t know why, crying over some chicken juice.

“Oh!” She stood in front of me, shaking, she was so angry. “I swear to God I must have been adopted!”

She slapped the sloppy cloth down on the counter and flew out of the kitchen. Baby Bear slunk off and put his head under the couch. The rest of him wouldn’t fit.