“No I didn’t. Look at you. You’re not down. You’re up. I just left you alone. Best thing I could have done, leaving you alone.”
“You could have—” But I couldn’t finish. There are some sentences you just can’t finish. Shouldn’t finish. I don’t know what I would have said anyhow.
Tommy took his time lighting another cigarette from the butt of the last one, like he didn’t want to look at me, like we were done. I’ve never been sure, but I think as I was walking away he said, “Have a good life, corncob.” But maybe I just made that up to make myself feel better or worse, I’m still not sure which.
The next morning my mother was standing at the stove and I thought about it awhile. Then I said, “I saw Tommy last night.”
“Where?”
“That bar on the highway? It’s called the Plugged Nickel.”
She nodded and took a couple of strips of bacon out of the cast-iron frying pan. “I know the man who owns it. I don’t care for you going to a place like that.”
“He was asking about you.”
My mother nodded.
“He seems good.”
We found an osprey once behind Ruth’s house when I was a kid. It’s a big bird, three feet tall, with those mean little black eyes those hunting birds have. He was pressed up against the back of the house like he was hiding. He had one wing out to the side dragging in the dirt. Even if you didn’t know anything about birds you could tell his wing was broken.
“Go get the long gun, Mimi,” my father had said. LaRhonda put her hands over her face, then peeked from between her fingers.
Sometimes you see things that seem so not-right that you never forget them. That big bird of prey, standing on the ground, at our mercy, was like that. So was my mother when she sat down and looked at me. She looked old and beaten, like she might never get up from that chair. There was a little bit of Ruth in her eyes.
“You’ve always been a terrible liar, Mary Margaret,” she said. “Worse even than your father was.”
I can’t tell you exactly when my brother disappeared. It seemed like it was near the end of my senior year in college, right after spring break. I hadn’t seen him since that run-in at Thanksgiving, but Steven had talked to him at the same bar the following fall, and LaRhonda said her father had seen him at the diner right after the big snowstorm that cut off power to the valley for close to a week. She remembered because her father said he didn’t want him there. LaRhonda didn’t care about hurting your feelings, never had. Come to think of it, she didn’t even really know when something she said would hurt your feelings. I felt sorry for her kids.
If Tom had been one of those men who had a mortgage and a car he bought on time, a wife and two kids and a boss waiting for him to sit down at his desk at nine in the morning, in other words if he’d been Ed, it would have been different. You’d go to the police and say to them, Mr. Dependable parked in the lot on Tuesday and hasn’t been heard from since. But Tommy Miller wasn’t Mr. Dependable, and he wasn’t someone whose absence the police would worry about. He disappeared the way Aunt Ruth had gotten housebound, or the way my father stopped talking after his stroke. He did it by inches so you couldn’t figure out exactly when it started. I only really noticed myself after he missed Clifton’s birthday party. That had happened before, but even when he was in jail he got some sketchy guy to drop off Tinkertoys and a card signed “Love, Daddy,” although it wasn’t in his handwriting. Clifton didn’t know the difference.
But when I got to Callie’s mom’s house and there wasn’t even a present things looked bad to me. I’d brought Clifton a tape recorder and a bunch of tapes because he liked to make up stories and act them out with different voices. I told him the tape recorder was from his dad, and he was traveling on business which was why he had me bring the present. Callie’s boyfriend made a big fuss over the tape recorder. He was such a nice guy that I didn’t even mind so much that