to the pickup, the junior cadet shuts the sliding glass door and thumbs the lock. When he steps back, the door shudders open a few inches anyway.
“That’s right,” the cadet says. “Lock is bust. What a craphole this place is. She’s prolly fortunate she drank herself to death before someone could walk in and murder her.”
“My son is in the room,” Hank says, in that mild tone that is scarier than if he yelled.
The cop lowers his head and thumps it against the glass. He looks shamefacedly over his shoulder.
“Ah, gosh,” he says. “I am so sorry.”
Jack removes the last little toothpick of candy cigarette from the corner of his mouth and lifts it in a gesture he hopes will be understood to mean, All is forgiven.
On the walk to the truck, though, he discovers that his hands are sticky with candy-cigarette spit. He says just a minute and goes back in to wash them.
The bathroom is a tiny closet with a rosy pink tub, a toilet, and a sink somehow impossibly crammed into it. He doesn’t look in the tub, intentionally averts his gaze from the place she drowned, won’t even look at it in the mirror. Instead he stares into the sink, where some of his mother’s hair still clogs the drain. They look like the fibers of dirty roots: a bad thought. Jack runs lukewarm water and scrubs his hands and lathers them with the little bar of soap. Then he pauses and lowers his head and breathes in the odor of his soap-slippery hands and tries to think where he has smelled this fragrance before, this particular spicy-sweet scent of geraniums.
12.
They have one more stop before they head home. Hank turns the truck into the lot at Motorsports Madnezzz, and Connor lowers himself laboriously down to the asphalt. The disabled veteran limps inside, leaving Jack alone with his father.
Hank leans back, one arm hanging out the window, and turns his head to fondly consider his child. Country music twangs on the radio.
“What do you know, Jack?” his father asks, and Jack’s heart skips, and for a moment he thinks his father has somehow guessed the terrible certainty that has begun to harden in Jack’s thoughts.
“Not a thing,” Jack says. “I don’t know a single thing.”
“That’s not true,” his dad tells him. “You know your rights under the Constitution. You know how to pull weeds and how to drive this truck. You know how to safely operate a firearm, and you can make an improvised explosive device or a simple detonator from scratch. You know your mother loved you and would’ve died for you.”
“Did she?” Jack asks.
“Did she . . . ?”
Die for me, Jack doesn’t say. Instead he says, “Love me? She walked away and drank herself to death. Just like the policeman said. She took clothes-a-pin.”
His father laughs without humor. “Clozapine. She would’ve pumped you full of that stuff if she could’ve. The Medical Establishment would like to have all of us on it, to make us less likely to question or resist.” He looks out the open window, drums his fingers on the steel window frame. “She loved you in her way. A mother’s love is planted deep. You can’t uproot that. There’s no one who can replace her. Although there is Beth. God knows Beth thinks the world of you. And she’s a good example of what an upright and dutiful woman can be. I’m glad you have Beth in your life. That’s a girl who knows how to keep her hands clean.”
“Of course,” Jack says. “She uses soap.”
And then he surprises himself by laughing—a slightly crazed, crow caw of a laugh. Suddenly he has remembered where he last smelled that particular sweet odor of geraniums. If his father knew half of what was in his head, he might not think clozapine was such a bad idea.
His father frowns, but then the doors to Motorsports Madnezzz open and Connor emerges. He has a big white fifty-gallon tank of liquid nitromethane. A man in a Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt follows him out, carrying a tank himself. Hank gets out and lowers the tailgate, and they pile the tanks in.
“I got two more for you,” says the guy in the Skynyrd shirt. He has a grungy little beard and oily hair sticking up in odd places. “I can’t wait to see you racin’ again, Connor. ’Bout time you saddled up. When are you putting tires on the track?”