Mary and O'Neil Page 0,37
and yet with each trip to the Goodwill box behind the Price Chopper, each final phone call to a bank or loan company, he felt his parents becoming real to him in a way that they had never been in life. More than real: he felt them move inside him. Jack had returned to New Haven a few days after the funeral, and alone in the house, O’Neil and Kay slipped into a pattern that was, he realized, the same one his parents had kept, or nearly. The hours they ate and worked and slept, their habit of meeting in the living room in the evenings for a cup of tea—these were all things their parents had done, and on a night close to the end of their time together, O’Neil dreamed that he and Kay were married. It was a dream in which they were both the same and also different—they were at once their parents and themselves—and when he awoke in his old bedroom under the eaves, he felt not revulsion or shame but a fleeting certainty that he had been touched by the world of the spirits.
His discoveries were many—his father, for instance, owned nineteen blue shirts; his mother kept a needle and thread in her glove compartment; on a shelf in the laundry room, behind the boxes of detergent and fabric softener, someone had hidden a pack of Larks—and yet the actual circumstances of his parents’ death, its strange location and hour, seemed unknowable. Then on a day just before Christmas, their father’s Visa bill arrived, including a forty-two-dollar charge for a motel, the Glade View Motor Court, and the mystery was solved. The charge was dated the day they had died, November 12, and O’Neil recognized the name at once: the Glade View was a run-down motel set back from the highway, about an hour south of campus. Its curious existence, so far from anything, had always seemed so sordid and improbable that it had become a familiar landmark; O’Neil and his parents had joked about it often, to fill the final minutes of their long drives together to the college. This was where they had spent the last afternoon of their lives together. O’Neil felt no embarrassment learning this—far worse had been the discovery, in his mother’s dressing table, of her diaphragm, and beneath it a faded pamphlet on “natural birth spacing.” And yet it was still troubling, like opening a door to find, behind it, another door just like it. O’Neil and Kay sat on the sofa, passing the bill back and forth between them, reading it over and over and shaking their heads. A motel. They had visited O’Neil at college, then stopped on the way home at a seedy roadside motor court, and, leaving, had turned themselves around in the storm. It was almost funny; it made, O’Neil realized, no sense to him at all. Did they do this all the time? What other secrets were they taking with them? And suddenly he realized how little he truly knew about his parents. The bills and blue shirts were nothing. A new sadness touched him, and at once he knew it was the one he had waited for. No more or less: it was the simple wish that he could have become a man before they died.
On Friday evening, with no word from Joe, O’Neil asked Kay and Jack to drive him to Patrice’s house to pick up his car, an ancient Buick he had bought out of the classifieds the week he’d returned from Europe. He hoped that the painting had proceeded without him, but when they arrived at her house the scene he found was one of abandonment, as if time had frozen at the moment of his accident. His ladder still lay in the yard behind the yew bushes, and beside it a nearly empty can of hardened paint. Though he hadn’t thought of this before, he had spilled most of a gallon on the porch roof, which was now a total loss—it would have to be reshingled, and this, O’Neil knew, would cost Joe more money.
Patrice answered the door before he could knock, holding Henry on her hip. Henry was wearing only a diaper, his eyes were glassy from a day of tears, and Patrice wore the stunned and hopeless look of someone who hadn’t slept in days. O’Neil had taken the last of the codeine that afternoon, and looking at Patrice, this thought made him feel unworthy.
She