Pontoon (18 page)

R
oger and Bennett finally arrived on Friday afternoon, having driven up together from the airport in Minneapolis. They walked into Mother’s house, where Barbara had fixed tuna salad sandwiches and cole slaw, and Roger looked as if two hours in a car with his brother had driven him beyond the edge of tolerance. Fratricide glittered in his eye. Bennett plopped down in the living room, doughier than last summer, seedier too—the black turtleneck stained, the blue blazer smelled of mothballs, the black sneakers torn. He’d lost most of his hair and shaved the rest. He still had the big black horn-rimmed glasses. She shook his hand. Roger stood by the door, restless from being cooped up, his eyes flicking, his right foot twitched. Surely you couldn’t sell a gazillion dollars worth of mutual funds to people if you twitched like that. She shook his hand too. In most families you might’ve hugged your brothers whom you hadn’t seen in more than a year. And she hadn’t. And wouldn’t. Couldn’t, somehow. Mother was a hugger and she was not. She had been close to Bennett when they were kids, before he got tangled up with being an artist. She had never cared for Roger at all.

“Gwen was so sorry she couldn’t come,” said Roger. “She had plans to go to Palm Springs with some women friends, and she couldn’t change it. Another time.”

“Oh,” said Barbara. “Well maybe we should hold on to the ashes and schedule it for a time that’s more convenient for her.” She wanted to take them both by the neck and boink their heads together. She remembered their roughhousing as boys, and how Roger always won with his arm-twist hold, inflicting unbearable pain, Bennett weeping and refusing to surrender, and how she would scream at Roger to let him go, and Roger, as cool then as now, would say, “Of course,” and give one last twist, and Bennett would shriek and the arm fall limp at his side, and a few weeks later they’d do it again.

“I sent off a demo of my opera to ten different opera companies,” he said. “Audio files. You send them by e-mail attachment. It’s amazing. Sent them the Orville/Wilbur duet, ‘It’s All a Question of Balance.’ I think you heard that—” Barbara shook her head. “Maybe you forgot. It’s where they’re waiting for the wind to die down and Wilbur says, ‘Let’s try flying into the wind.’ Remember?” She didn’t. She imagined operas got scads of submissions from various bald, horn-rimmed geniuses with bad breath. She couldn’t imagine her own brother ever succeeding and dressing up in a tux for a premiere and taking a bow. It just wasn’t going to happen.

Roger had a big head of curly hair—she didn’t remember the curly part—evidently he was under a beautician’s care—and looked as if he’d stepped right out of an L. L. Bean catalogue, tan chinos, loafers, pink cashmere sweater, and a shirt with little anchors on it. Mr. Casual. He had sewn his wild oats in Miami, four solid years of bad behavior, and then got lucky and found his
niche in sales, where persistent denial of reality is 90 percent of the game.

“And Jon and Sammy send their love. They’re in the midst of mixing a CD. They started a band together. Lemon Tree. It’s good. Folk. You know. About the environment, relationships, lots of things. Good stuff. I should send you a copy.”

“When did they become songwriters?”

“They’ve always written songs. They’re very talented. Sammy is going to songwriting camp this summer in Idaho.”

She set out the sandwiches on the table and opened a bottle of wine. Mother’s. An Oregon red wine with a portrait of a lady on the label. She poured two glasses. “I’m not drinking anymore,” she announced. “And I’m not a Lutheran anymore. Just so you know.”

“Gwen read that a glass of red wine a day pays big dividends for your heart. She likes those Italian wines, the Montepulcianos, the Amarettos and Barolos.”

Bennett asked her when she stopped being Lutheran. On Sunday afternoon, she said. “What happened?” She said that things suddenly became clear for her, thanks to Mother.

“Is this wine one of Mother’s?” asked Roger. She nodded. “Not bad,” he said. “A little oaky and the finish isn’t as smooth as the Italians but it’s okay. I had no idea they made decent wine in Oregon.”

“Mother took up wine right after Daddy died,” she said. “She took up a lot of things. Dancing. I found a blue ribbon in her dresser drawer for a tango contest at the Miranda Casablanca Hotel in Las Vegas. Bet you never knew your mother did the tango, did you?”

Roger said that dancing was an excellent exercise, one of the best. He wished that he and Gwen could get out to a ballroom more often. There was a beautiful one in Santa Barbara called the Santa Margarita with electric stars in the ceiling. Dancing, three nights a week. Unfortunately, in his line of work you often needed to work nights too.

Barbara stared at him.
Shut up, shut up, shut up. Shut your dumb
mouth
. He leaned back and crossed his legs and spread his arms on the sofa back and said that he hoped to retire in another four or five years and then he and Gwen would start living the life they had always wanted. Keep their home in Santa Barbara for a base, and travel from there to all the places they’d hoped to see—Japan, Rio, Vancouver, Shanghai, Tuscany—maybe buy a country house in Tuscany, near Siena, or maybe Provence. Gwen loved country houses, terraces, gardens.

“Does anybody in town know we’re here?” said Bennett. “Like regular people? I’m afraid that if I walk up Main Street, I won’t remember anybody’s name. Maybe we should review.”

“They won’t remember you either,” she said. “Thirty years is a long time, sweetheart.”

“Is Miss Falconer still around?”

“She’s ninety-two, kid. She moved to Fergus Falls to live with her sister. There were a lot of kids in choir. Thousands. I don’t think she’s holding her breath waiting for you to call.”

Bennett gave her a bleak look. “She and I used to sit in the choir room after school and play duets. She was the one who encouraged me to study music. The first real compositions I ever wrote, I wrote for her. I was looking at one the other day. It’s not bad.”

“That whole world is gone,” she said. “Mother and all her friends in the Thanatopsis Club, the ladies who put on the musicales,
the Community Concert series. It’s all gone. Speaking of which,” she heisted herself up in her chair, “I hope one of you wants to say something at the memorial, because we don’t have a speaker. I don’t think we should throw Mother into the waves without saying a few words.”

“How about you?” said Bennett. She shook her head. She couldn’t. Just plain couldn’t. She was going through too much now, being in recovery and everything. And she and Mother had had a lot of issues. A lot. She couldn’t honestly stand up and talk about Mother’s good points without referring to the others.

“What were the others?” said Bennett.

“Essentially she lived a lie and all of us had to live it with her. And now we’re all paying the price for it. Look at us.” Roger and Bennett looked at her.

“Mother messed us up good, and now we just have to deal with it. That was her gift to us. She gave us problems. I’m dealing with mine, I suggest you do likewise.”

“Hey,” Roger said. “Remember how to play Battleship?” He got out graph paper and explained the rules and that’s what they did. They shot at each other’s ships and Roger won and went to the bathroom to take his Compazine. “It keeps me level,” he said. He was in the bathroom a long time. She could hear him weeping. “Family reunions!” said Bennett. “Guess this is the last one, huh?” She couldn’t disagree with him there.

I
n Barbara’s living room, under the big leafy painting, Kyle reclined on the couch, rehearsing telling Sarah that it was all over between them. Nothing to talk about. Their living together was a big accident and didn’t mean anything. She wept, clutching his hand, begging him not to destroy something so precious with these terrible words, and he went right on—he never loved her, he was only using her to try to run away from himself. His true self.

“What do you mean?” she gasped. “Oh my God.” And then she understood. She stood up, pain written large in her face. “Oh my God.” And she turned and bolted out the door. And a moment later came the gunshot.…

His mother entered, with a pitcher of iced tea. Peppermint. “I know you’d prefer beer but work with me on this, all right?”

At the Detmers’ Debbie stood on the front steps, watching Donnie Krebsbach pack her blue luggage into his Chevy van. Donnie, good soul that he was, had agreed to drive her to Minneapolis and drop her at the airport out of the goodness of his heart. She had offered him money but he declined. Not necessary. His
pleasure. He was Florian’s son and it was his day off at Krebsbach Chev and it was his pleasure to help her out.

Mother and Daddy stood in the doorway behind her. They hoped she would come back for a good visit soon. She was always welcome, they hoped she knew that.

“I’m sorry about the wedding,” she said, for the tenth time. “Not that it was cancelled, but that it was ever scheduled in the first place. Sorry for the embarrassment.”

They laughed and threw up their hands. Don’t give it another thought. She had given Lake Wobegon something to talk about for the next ten years, right, Donnie? Donnie nodded. He had the bags all stowed and was ready to take off.

“What about the cheese and the champagne and the pâté?” said Mother.

“Keep it. It’s good. And the shrimp shish kebabs. It’ll keep for a few weeks.”

“We don’t have room in our freezer, though.”

“Give it away then.”

Mother took Debbie’s hand—“That’s what I thought too,” she said. “I thought it’d be nice if we gave it to the Lutheran church. Maybe you’ve got your own opinion of Lutherans, but—they do so much good, you know.”

“Fine. Whatever. Not a problem.” And she kissed Mother on each cheek and then Daddy and told him to take his medicine, and got in the car and off they went to Minneapolis.

Watching the Chevy van turn the corner of Elm Street and head down the hill, Daddy knew in his heart he would never see his daughter again, and he got teary-eyed. She would be killed in a freak accident, sideswiped by a semi, the van rolling and rolling, Debbie’s neck broken, lying crumpled under the coroner’s blanket,
leaving her parents to grieve. Or she would go down with the airliner. An item on the news, “Passenger jet missing over the Sierras,” and they would spend 48 hours waiting, hoping, praying, and then search parties would locate the wreckage. No survivors. A freak accident. Possibly an aileron malfunction. Investigators trying to piece the parts together. Or she would be killed by Brent late at night in her home. He would slip in through a sliding glass door and smother her in her bed and take the body out to sea and drop it in, weighted with chains, but in his haste he would not secure them tightly and the body would slip free and wash up on the coast and be found by surfers and Brent would be arrested and tried. A long trial. Only a thin web of circumstantial evidence—a vague threat overheard by a waitress, his thumbprint on the glass, seaweed in his shoes. The tabloids would play it up big and they would print a picture of Debbie’s lifeless body. He wanted to marry her for her money and now, in a towering rage, he wreaked vengeance for her cutting him loose. Or she would drown herself in the ocean. She had put on a brave front for her old parents but her heart was truly broken. She flew home to Santa Cruz, wrote a three-page anguished letter to them, put on a heavy canvas jacket, fastened chains to her ankles, and rowed a kayak out to sea and rolled over. Her body would be returned to Lake Wobegon and Daddy would ask permission to make their double plot into a triple. Bury them in a stack. Debbie on the bottom, then Mother—dead of grief a year later—and finally Daddy. He wasn’t sure when he would die. Maybe not for a few years. He would come and trim the grass over their grave every week with a hand clipper and brush the clippings off the stone and tend the geraniums in the pot. He would sit and talk to them and people would see him and think,
That poor old man. He lost his daughter 
and then his wife, all within a year. His life, gone. Everything
. And then he would die himself. He would die at home, listening to Chopin, the light fading, and then there would be Mother and Debbie, all happy and dressed in white and welcoming him to an enormous mansion full of happy people where there would never be suffering or grief ever again.

He sat on the porch, comforting himself with these bleak thoughts, as Mother called up Pastor Ingqvist and made the donation, and five minutes later, Pastor rolled up with Clint Bunsen in Clint’s big blue Ford pickup, and they walked up to the house, grinning. Pastor shook his hand. “This is just one of the most generous things I ever heard of,” he said, and he and Clint went back to the garage and started hauling the cases of Moët champagne to the truck. They had already loaded the cheese and would get the frozen shish kebabs from the high school.

“Don’t forget we’re going to need a receipt,” said Daddy. “For the tax deduction, don’t you know.” Suddenly his mind was clear as could be.