Homesick Creek (11 page)

And what about all the wedding anniversaries, the Valentine’s Days, the Christmases and Mother’s Days, every one of which Hack faithfully acknowledged with presents? Could it really just be guilt stirred up by Wal-Mart and Zales? Could these be the things you did for someone you did
not
love? Bunny wouldn’t have believed it until yesterday. But Frank had given Fanny a new one-carat tennis bracelet for her birthday just last year. Before that, there had been a watch, a Las Vegas getaway, a car. Was it possible that all this time Hack, like Frank, had simply been buying Bunny off? If they didn’t talk much, they never had; Hack was a talker all right, but Bunny wasn’t. Even when they fought, it was mostly swift, a series of standoffs, raids, and surrenders. And they didn’t fight all that often; almost never, really. Frank and Fanny had fought all the time.

Through her ruminations Bunny heard the garage door open and the low thrum of the truck engine. Immediately she felt a flood of relief. Hack had come home. He’d said he would, and he had. He wasn’t Frank; she wasn’t Fanny. Grateful that she had something to offer in return, she served up dinner.

“How was the drive?” she asked.

“Okay. Rained most of the way, you know. There was a slide in the Van Duzer Corridor, couple of trees down. Lot of cops out.”

“Uh-huh,” Bunny said. “How was Vinny?”

“Good. She was good.”

“Did she help you paint or make you do all the work?”

“Nah, she helped.” He caught Bunny’s look. “Hey, she helped.”

“You stayed over?”

“Yeah. We didn’t finish until nine or so last night. Then there was the touch-up today. How’s Fanny?”

Bunny shook her head. “Not good.”

“No?”

“She’s real broken up.”

“Well, sure.”

“The thing is, she didn’t see it coming.”

“No?”

“How could you not see something like that coming?” she pleaded.

Hack shrugged, busy with a potato.

“Well, she didn’t.”

“No,” Hack said.

“Anyway,” said Bunny.

They ate in silence.

“It’s been a while since you made a roast,” Hack said.

Bunny nodded. “I just thought—” She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the stove. “You know.”

“Sure.”

After that there wasn’t anything left to say. When they finished eating, Hack went out to the garage, and Bunny cleared the table to the distant sound of him moving around his tool bench. If their lives had a sound track, Bunny thought it would be just like that: the muffled sound of activity happening on the other side of a wall. Hack didn’t come in until it was time for
60
Minutes
. Bunny stayed in her sewing room, working on a rabbit made up like a fairy-tale princess. When she was done, she would make the princess a prince. Why was it that in fairy tales the women who waited quietly and toiled in obscurity always got rewarded with the prince? They never did in real life. In real life they ended up waitressing or slopping out motel rooms someplace. They ended up like her and Anita; they ended up like Fanny. The forward girls, the grabby ones, got the prince, and the rest of them got exactly dick. Someone somewhere had sold them a real bill of goods, even Shirl. For all her strong opinions and lack of concern about voicing them pretty much as they occurred to her, she’d been fucked too. Bunny’s father, Jack, dead these past seven years and not a minute too soon, had been a fisherman and a skipper, gone more than he was home, and a mean drunk when he was there. Shirl used to tell Bunny he couldn’t help it; when he got home, he brought with him a whole lot of cares and ugliness he needed to blow off. If he drank, and he did drink, it was just his way of letting go, and they should forgive him for it. The fact that he never spent time with them even when he was in port; that there wasn’t a single birthday he’d ever remembered, not even Shirl’s; and that he seemed to take a special delight in taunting them: These all were justifiable oversights. He loved them, Shirl maintained; even if it didn’t look like that, Bunny and Fanny had to take it on faith that all fathers loved their families deep down. But Bunny wanted to know what kind of love it was that let you treat people the way her father did. His nickname for Shirl was Bigger, and Bunny couldn’t remember a time when he’d called her anything else; at the dinner table, when he was there at all, he often singled her out for looks of especial dislike. Bunny and Fanny were afraid of him, the belt he wielded with a heavy hand, and the mouth he had on him, mocking them if they showed fear, and they always showed fear. He hit, he hit hard, and he hit them all. Shirl had had to stay in the house more than once until bruises on her face had faded enough to be covered by makeup.

Seven years ago Shirl had gotten a call from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, saying Jack had apparently fallen off one of the piers the night before. No one saw him go in, or at least no one reported it, and he had drowned. The circumstances surrounding his death were unusual enough to arouse a certain level of suspicion about foul play—he had spent his entire life on the water, after all, and presumably knew better even stinking drunk than to go fall off a high pier—but no one ever came forward with evidence, and with no pressure from the family to investigate further, the matter was quietly dropped. Bunny, for one, had felt he got exactly what he deserved; if someone had pushed him, it was probably no more than he had coming to him. If that made her a worse daughter, and she was sure it did, he had made the bed he lay in. Even Shirl hadn’t shed many tears. They didn’t even bring his body home, just held a rudimentary memorial with his final crew right there in Dutch Harbor and had him cremated, dumping his ashes into the water from the very same high pier, as though to finish the job. Bunny earnestly believed that even God wouldn’t hold it against them, knowing as He surely did how the man had treated his family.

From her sewing room Bunny heard Hack in the kitchen and then the sound of Jack Daniel’s being poured into a glass. Hack loved his Jack Daniel’s, but he wasn’t a drinker, not like her father had been, not like Bob was. She would ask him for more news about Vinny when they went to bed. Bunny had been up to the house in Portland only once, when they’d helped Vinny move in. It was old and run-down, but try telling Vinny that. The girl might as well have been moving into a luxury condominium, to hear her talk about all the amenities: its view of a pocket park at the end of the block; its proximity to a Movietime video store and Fred Meyer store; all utilities included, and for a rent that was already low.

Bunny had never wanted to move to a city or even another town. She figured Vinny must have inherited JoJo’s restless feet. But then too the child had always had her own way of seeing things. From the time she was five or six she talked about things she wanted and planned to buy for herself one day: a castle, a life-size doll she could pretend was her twin, a tree house, a pale blue car, underwear in every color but white, an unlimited charge account at Meier & Frank, two cats, a husband, and a daughter—more or less in that order. Hack had petitioned to have a son put on the list, but even Hack couldn’t always change Vinny’s mind.

Vinny and Hack. Bunny bet Hack had spent every bit as much money on Vinny as he’d spent on Bunny over the years. He’d given her a swing set, built a tree house with a brand-new vinyl floor, cedar siding, and casement windows you could really open; once he’d brought home a Cinderella outfit that came with a jeweled tiara, “glass” slippers, and a ball gown nicer than anything hanging in Bunny’s closet. A lot of people told her how lucky she was that Hack was such a good and doting step-father, all of them having a horror story to tell her about someone whose child had been molested, abused, cut down, or neglected, and of course they were right. Everybody liked Hack, which you could prove just by the fact that he’d gotten an entire town to change the name some of them had been calling Bunny for more than twenty years, never mind changing Linda to Vanilla and then Vinny. It went like that. People liked Hack more than they liked Bunny, and they always had. Even Shirl thought the man walked on water. Of course he’d worked hard to win her over. He still took treats by her house all the time, a nice salmon fillet, a new mailbox. Not that Shirl always sided with him. Sometimes she sided with Bunny, like the time when he wanted to raise Vinny’s allowance to twenty-five dollars a week. That was too much, and Shirl had told him so. Hack had backed down and kept it at fifteen dollars, which still sounded like too much to Bunny. In the end it hadn’t mattered; Hack just slipped Vinny the extra ten on the side without telling anyone. Bunny had found that out a year or so ago, when Vinny told her by accident. That was just like them; they protected each other from her like two kids.

She was just putting the finishing touches on the princess’s pointy hat and veil when the telephone rang. She heard Hack pick up the living room extension and unconsciously tensed— not that woman again—until she could tell from Hack’s side of the conversation that it was Bob on the phone.

Hack was saying, “Yeah, at the Anchor. No, the
Anchor
. Have Anita drop you off at the Anchor by seven forty-five. Well, won’t she have the car? No, not now, tomorrow morning. Anita. No,
Anita
. Look, is she there? Yeah, let me talk to her. No, now, not tomorrow. Okay. Yeah.”

Bob must have gotten off the phone, because Bunny could hear Hack expel his breath in frustration and mutter,
“Jesus,”
while he waited for Anita to pick up.

“Hey,” he said. “Yeah, real toasted, from the sound of it. He’s going to hurt himself if he doesn’t slow down . . . I know you know. Look, he wants to get a ride over to Sawyer with me in the morning. Can you have him at the Anchor by seven forty-five? I have a meeting with the facilities guy at the electric utility to talk about taking over their fleet management—could be a big deal for all of us. Okay? . . . Yeah, she’s here. Hang on.”

Hack set the phone down and yelled, “You want to pick up?”

Bunny picked up.

“Shit,” Anita said.

“Bob?”

“Yeah. He’s going to find himself wheels up in a ditch someplace if he’s not careful. Dooley followed him home again, he was so bad. Said he was worried Bob might drive off the bridge.”

“Aw, Nita.”

Anita gave a heavy sigh. “It’s okay, he should be passing out anytime now. Look, do you still have Vinny’s old bed?”

“The twin?” Hack had bought Vinny a queen-size bed several years ago and moved her old twin bed into the garage. “Sure, we have it.”

“Can I borrow it for a while? Things aren’t going too good with Doreen, so I’m moving her and Crystal home, and we just found out a mouse must have got into Doreen’s mattress somehow because there’s little bits of stuffing all over the place, and for all I know the mouse is still inside. I just heaved the whole goddamned thing into the backyard and said to hell with it. I figure Crystal can have Patrick’s old bed.”

“Sure, you can even keep ours if you want to. Nobody here’s going to need it.”

“Thanks, hon.”

“You need any help with Bob, or are you all right?” Bunny asked. Bob might be a cheerful drunk, but even cheerful drunks could turn.

“I’m all right. He’s pretty much passed out right now in front of the television. They must have shut off our cable while we were in Tillamook, but I don’t even think he noticed. The picture’s nothing but fuzz and snow, and he’s just sitting there looking at it.”

“Nita, he’s never drunk this much before. You’ve got to get him to stop,” Bunny said.

“I know that,” Anita said. “Don’t you think I know that?”

“I’m sorry, I know you do. I’m just worried for you. Look, when do you need the bed? You need me and Hack to bring it over tonight?”

“Do you think you could? I’m going to pick up Crystal at Head Start tomorrow afternoon and then get a bunch of their things from Doreen’s apartment. She needs to be completely moved out by the end of the week.”

“We’ll just put the canopy on the truck and bring it over. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

After they’d hung up, Bunny shut down her sewing machine and found Hack nursing his whiskey in front of the TV, some old Burt Reynolds movie.

“Why is he doing this?” she asked him from the doorway. “How does he expect to get extra work if he’s drunk all the time?”

“I don’t know, but he’s probably trying to get some money together for Danny.”

“I don’t see why; they’ve got some free attorney assigned to them.”

“There’ll still be costs. There are always costs. Plus as long as the man’s in jail he’s out of work. Maybe they’re still trying to make bail.”

“I heard his folks weren’t doing shit.”

“Yeah, I heard that too.”

“Well, I could just kick him, is all I know. As though Nita doesn’t have enough to be worrying about, with Doreen and Crystal coming back home, and this being the worst time of year for Anita to get work and all. They might need her one day this week at the motel, but they won’t commit.”

“You can’t solve her problems for her, Bunny.”

“I know that.”

“So we’ll help out when we can.”

“Well, that’s what she was talking to me about. She wants to borrow Vinny’s old twin bed for Doreen,” Bunny said. “A mouse got into one of theirs. I told her we’d bring it up tonight.”

Hack lifted an eyebrow. “You know it’s raining like hell out there.”

“You can put the canopy on.”

“Does it have to be tonight?”

“I want to make sure they’re really all right,” Bunny said. “It won’t take long.”

Hack tossed back the rest of his Jack Daniel’s, heaved himself out of his armchair, and together they went out to the garage to lift the pickup canopy into position and secure it, then load up the mattress and box spring. Outside, it was oily black and weeping with damp, the kind of night that, for all Bunny had grown up with it, made her feel sorry for the town’s stray cats, wet and miserable under some porch or trailer. She took in strays from time to time, and every time it was in weather just like this.

Anita met them at her door, which she held open while Bunny and Hack muscled the bed inside and to the back bedroom. Bunny could see that Anita had brought out some of her old crafts and decorations to try to make the dark little room more cheerful. One of Bunny’s early stuffed rabbits, a beauty queen she’d made in Anita’s honor, wearing a tiara and a ribbon sash saying “Miss Harrison County,” sat on the bureau. A huge stuffed bear, booty from someone’s run of good luck at the county fair’s ring toss booth one year or another, was on the bed. Over the bed hung a project Anita had labored over, a rendering of the Last Supper in needlepoint. Anita, despite the bad luck she’d always had, claimed she got some solace from contemplating the Lord, and who was Bunny to tell her she was wrong? In her heart, though, she thought that Anita might want to reconsider, in light of the fact that He had obviously chosen to stand back and do nothing whatsoever while Anita and her family went down the toilet.