and Delia slowly circumnavigate the sloping lawn that Lincoln had only yesterday feared her mother lay buried beneath.
“I’m ashamed, Mick,” he said finally, feeling his throat constrict with these three words.
Mickey waved this away as you would a dangling thread of spiderweb. “Forget it.”
“I wish I could,” Lincoln told him.
“You really thought I might’ve hurt her?”
Lincoln nodded. “I made the mistake of going to see this retired ex-cop, thinking he might have some information about Jacy’s disappearance that never made it into the papers. Like, if anybody had been questioned or suspected. If you can believe it, I’d gotten it into my head that Troyer might’ve been involved. Except it turned out he and this cop are old friends, and rather than being suspicious of him, he got suspicious about you. When he started digging, he found out about you and Jacy’s father.”
“I always dreaded the day you or Ted would find out about that,” Mickey said. “No way to explain it without fessing up to everything.”
“It knocked me pretty much sideways,” Lincoln admitted. “Made me wonder”—here he had to pause and swallow hard before continuing—“if I really knew you.”
“Well, there’s no hard feelings, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”
“No, I know that. I’m just disappointed in myself, I guess.” This was an understatement, actually. For reasons he didn’t fully comprehend even now, he’d allowed himself to be seduced by Coffin’s narrative, its trash-vortex worldview. Instead of using the lens of his own experience, he’d genuflected before Coffin’s. The other man’s brutal, ugly stories of bad men and bad marriages had somehow undermined the validity of his own good one. Instead of seeing the idea of Jacy being buried beneath the sloping lawn of the Chilmark house as too horrible to be true, he’d accepted it as too horrible not to be. But why would he do that? Had something about the possibility appealed to him for some reason? Maybe awakened dormant vestiges of the unforgiving, oppressive religion he’d been raised in? Or was there some other darkness he was unaware of, something far more primitive than religious doctrine? Had he first glimpsed it the night of the draft lottery when Mickey’s number was drawn ahead of his own? Hadn’t something whispered to him then that all for one and one for all was just a lie they’d convinced themselves to believe in? Was this how wars happened, the seeds of conflict, large and small, growing in the gap between what people wanted to believe and what they feared must be true?
“Well,” Mickey said, “if it’s yourself you’re disappointed in, I can show you where the line forms. Last night, I told you I kept what happened to Jacy a secret because I’d promised her I would. And that’s true, as far as it goes. But it was also an easy promise to keep, because, deep down, I didn’t want to share her. Not the girl we were all in love with back in college. Not even the one you saw in the photo. Especially not her.” As he spoke, he rubbed his sternum, as if all the food he’d consumed last night at Rockers was having its belated revenge. “Delia changed all that. When I made Jacy that promise, I didn’t know I had a daughter. And as messed up as she is, I wanted you and Teddy to know about her. She had the drug problem before we met, but I blame myself for the shape she’s in. She needs better treatment than I can afford.”
“I’ll speak to Anita—”
He shot Lincoln a warning glance. “No, you won’t. I mean it.”
After a moment, Lincoln said, “I will have to tell her about all this, you know.”
“What?” Mickey said, his mock outrage momentarily convincing. “Just because you’ve been married to the woman for four decades, you have to tell her stuff?”
“I know. Pussy-whipped to the bitter end.”
“Yeah, but you’d have ended up pussy-whipped no matter who you married. At least Anita’s a class act.”
“I’ll tell her you said so,” Lincoln smiled. Somehow their conversation, painful though it was, had cleared the air, and for that he was profoundly grateful. Maybe they weren’t all for one and one for all. Maybe they never had been. But they’d been friends, really good ones, and apparently they still were. “How about a cup of coffee?”
“Nah, I’ll gather my shit and then we’ll be off. It’s not going to be easy talking Delia back into her program. The longer she’s AWOL, the