case he shows up, but don’t go soft and let him leave. Ed, you’ve got a ride ahead of you. Get on the road so you’re home before dark.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Best not.” And Debbie stood up, too, looking as though she couldn’t wait to get out of there. She gave me a big hug. “I can put in a good word with the Kappa rush chair for you, Mimi,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. What else was there to say? I just wanted to sit by myself somewhere and let my mind go blank. “Why don’t you go to your place and see whether anyone has seen him?” I said to Steven. “It would mean a lot to me.” The fact was, I just wanted to be alone for a while.
That was when people still believed that one thing caused another to happen, when someone would have a heart attack and the guys at the Elks would say it was because his daughter had just come home with a hippie boyfriend with girl hair, or someone would have cancer, which no one called cancer because apparently if you said the word it would make things worse, and the women at bridge club would nod and say she’d been worried about her husband losing his job for six months and now look what happened.
Because my mother was a nurse she was always having to argue with people about stuff like that. I remember, when I was eight, listening to her rant all through dinner about a woman whose baby had been born with a port-wine stain on one cheek and who swore it was because she ate strawberries during the summer.
“What’s a port-wine stain?” I said, but my mother just kept on ranting. The woman could rant when the occasion demanded.
I’m probably the last person who should say this, given my work, but I think maybe there was some truth to what people thought, although no baby gets a birthmark because of anything its mother ate or saw or dreamt, that’s for sure. And maybe it was just coincidence that a week after they arrested Tommy I heard Ruth screaming my name and I came out the back door in my pink waitress uniform to see my father lying at the foot of her front steps. He was crumpled up like a pile of old clothes and so damp that it felt as though he’d been there all night and was covered with morning dew. My mother had pulled an early shift because of taking off for my graduation, and either he hadn’t been lying there then or she’d missed him in the dark.
“You couldn’t even come out of that goddamned house to help him?” I screamed, and Ruth just wailed back without words, useless, useless as always. I was mad because I was scared, too, scared as I’d ever been.
The good thing about a small town is the same thing that’s a bad thing about a small town, and that’s that everybody knows your business. So it wasn’t long after I came through the emergency room with the rescue squad guys, my hand clamped on the gurney, that someone said something to someone in the diner and Dee knew I was going to miss my shift, and somebody said something to somebody on the site of the addition to the middle school so Steven knew to come after work to the hospital. Although knowing Steven, I was pretty sure he was wondering whether he had time to put in a couple of hours on the house he was working on, which already had an interested buyer.
Maybe the latest news would even make it to Tommy in the holding cell, and Ruth in her little homemade prison. My mother called Eddie and told him to stay put until we knew more. But she took one look at my father on the gurney in the elevator and said, “Stroke.”
People were so nice to us that first week. Henry Langer came over every morning to let the cows out, clean the barn, make sure there was water in the trough, check on all the fences. Our refrigerator was full of food, ground beef casseroles and chicken pies, the counters crowded with zucchini bread and blueberry muffins and angel food cakes. Cissy said she’d taken some out to Ruth, although she said she didn’t think Ruth was eating and she mainly just cried. My mother and I were of one mind about poor Ruth