Chapter One: Ford
Have you ever lost someone who meant more to you than your
own soul?
I did. I lost my wife Pat.
It took six long, tortured months for her to die.
I had to stand by and watch my beautiful, perfect wife
waste away until there was nothing left. It didn't matter
that I have money and success. It didn't matter that I'm
called an "important" writer. It didn't matter that Pat
and I had finally started building our dream house, an
engineering miracle that hung onto a cliff wall and would
allow us to sit quietly and look out across the Pacific.
Nothing at all mattered from the moment Pat came home and
interrupted me while I was writing -- something she never
did -- to tell me that she had cancer, and that it was in
an advanced stage. I thought it was one of her jokes. Pat
had a quirky sense of humor; she said I was too serious,
too morose, too doom-and-gloom, and too afraid of
everything on earth. From the first, she'd made me laugh.
We met at college. Two more different people would be hard
to find, and even Pat's family was completely alien to me.
I'd seen families like hers on television, but it never
occurred to me that they actually existed.
She lived in a pretty little house with a front porch and -
- I swear this is true -- a white picket fence. On summer
evenings her parents -- Martha and Edwin -- would sit on
the front porch and wave at the neighbors as they passed
by. Her mother would wear an apron and snap green beans or
shell peas while she waved and chatted. "How is Tommy
today?" she'd ask some passerby. "Is his cold better?"
Pat's father sat just a few feet away from his wife at a
wrought iron table, an old floor lamp nearby, and a box of
gleaming German tools, all precisely arranged, at his
feet. He was -- again, I swear this is true -- known as
Mr. Fix-It around the neighborhood and he repaired broken
things for his own family and his neighbors. Free of
charge. He said he liked to help people and a smile was
enough payment for him.
When I went to Pat's house to pick her up for a date, I'd
go early just so I could sit and watch her parents. To me,
it was like watching a science fiction movie. As soon as I
arrived, Pat's mother -- "call me Martha, everyone does" --
would get up and get me something to eat and drink. "I
know that growing boys need their nourishment," she'd say,
then disappear inside her spotlessly clean house.
I'd sit there in silence, watching Pat's father as he
worked on a toaster or maybe a broken toy. That big oak
box of tools at his feet used to fascinate me. They were
all perfectly clean, perfectly matched. And I knew they
had to have cost a fortune. One time I was in the city --
that ubiquitous "city" that seems to lie within fifty
miles of all college towns -- and I saw a hardware store
across the street. Since hardware stores had only bad
memories for me, it took courage on my part to cross the
street, open the door, and go inside. But since I'd met
Pat, I'd found that I'd become braver. Even way back then
her laughter was beginning to echo in my ears, laughter
that encouraged me to try things I never would have
before, simply because of the painful emotions they
stirred up.
As soon as I walked into the store, the air seemed to move
from my lungs, up my throat, past the back of my neck, and
into my head to form a wide, thick bar between my ears.
There was a man in front of me and he was saying
something, but that block of air inside my head kept me
from hearing him.
After a while he quit talking and gave me one of those
looks I'd seen so many times from my uncles and cousins.
It was a look that divided men from Men. It usually
preceded a fatal pronouncement like: "He don't know which
end of a chain saw to use." But then, I'd always played
the brain to my relatives' brawn.
After the clerk sized me up, he walked away with a little
smile that only moved the left side of his thin lips. Just
like my cousins and uncles, he recognized me for what I
was: a person who thought about things, who read books
without pictures, and liked movies that had no car chases.
I wanted to leave the hardware store. I didn't belong
there and it held too many old fears for me. But I could
hear Pat's laughter and it gave me courage.
"I want to buy a gift for someone," I said loudly and knew
right away that I'd made a mistake. "Gift" was not a word
my uncles and cousins would have used. They would have
said, "I need a set a socket wrenches for my brother-in-
law. What'd'ya got?" But the clerk turned and smiled at
me. After all, "gift" meant money. "So what kind of gift?"
he asked.
Pat's father's tools had a German name on them that I said
to the man -- properly pronounced, of course (there are
some advantages to an education). I was pleased to see his
eyebrows elevate slightly and I felt smug: I'd impressed
him.
He went behind a counter that was scarred from years of
router blades and drill bits having been dropped on it,
and reached below to pull out a catalog. "We don't carry
those in the store but we can order whatever you want." I
nodded in what I hoped was a truly manly way, trying to
imply that I knew exactly what I wanted, and flipped
through the catalog. The photos were full color; the paper
was expensive. And no wonder since the prices were
astronomical.
"Precision," the man said, summing up everything in that
one word. I pressed my lower lip against the bottom of my
upper teeth in a way I'd seen my uncles do a thousand
times, and nodded as though I knew the difference between
a "precision" screwdriver and one out of a kid's Home
Depot kit. "I wouldn't have anything else," I said in that
tight-lipped way my uncles spoke of all things mechanical.
The glory of the words "two stroke engine" made them clamp
their back teeth together so that the words were almost
unintelligible.
"You can take that catalog," the man said, and my face
unclenched for a moment. I almost said gleefully, "Yeah?
That's kind of you." But I remembered in time to do the
bottom lip gesture and mumble "much obliged" from
somewhere in the back of my throat. I wished I'd had on a
dirty baseball cap with the name of some sports team so I
could tug at the brim in a Man's goodbye as I left the
store.
When I got back to my tiny, gray apartment off campus
later that night, I looked up some of Pat's father's tools
in the catalog. Those tools of his were worth thousands.
Not hundreds. Thousands.
But he left that oak box out on the porch every night.
Unlocked. Unguarded.
The next day when I saw Pat between classes -- she was
studying chemistry and I was English lit -- I mentioned
the tools to her as casually as possible. She wasn't
fooled; she knew this was important to me. "Why do you
always fear the worst?" she asked, smiling. "Possessions
don't matter, only people do." "You should tell that to my
uncle Reg," I said, trying to make a joke. The smile left
her pretty face. "I'd love to," she said.
Pat wasn't afraid of anything. But because I didn't want
her to look at me differently, I wouldn't introduce her to
my relatives. Instead, I let myself pretend that I was
part of her family, the one that had big Thanksgiving
dinners, and Christmases with eggnog and gifts under the
tree. "Is it me or my family you love?" Pat once asked,
smiling, but her eyes were serious. "Is it me or my rotten
childhood you love?" I shot back, and we smiled at each
other. Then my big toe went up her pants leg and the next
moment we were on top of one another.
Pat and I were exotic to each other. Her sweet, loving,
trusting family never failed to fascinate me. I was
sitting in their living room one day waiting for Pat when
her mother came home with her arms pulled down by the
weight of four shopping bags. Back then I didn't know that
I should have jumped up and helped her with them. Instead,
I just stared at her.
"Ford," she said (my father's eldest brother thought he
was bestowing a blessing on me when he named me after his
favorite pickup), "I didn't see you sitting there. But I'm
glad you're here because you're just the person I wanted
to see."
What she was saying was ordinary to her. Pat and her
parents easily and casually said things to make other
people feel good. "That's just your color," Pat's mother
would say to an ugly woman. "You should wear that color
every day. And who does your hair?" From someone else, the
words would have been facetious. But any compliment Pat's
mother -- I could never call her "Martha" or "Mrs.
Pendergast" -- gave came out sincere-sounding because it
was sincere.
She put the shopping bags down by the coffee table,
removed the pretty arrangement of fresh flowers she'd cut
from her backyard garden, and began pulling little squares
of cloth out of the bags. I'd never seen anything like
them before and had no idea what they were. But then Pat's
parents were always introducing me to new and wondrous
things.
When Pat's mother had spread all the pieces of cloth out
on the glass-topped coffee table (my cousins would have
considered it a matter of pride to break that glass, and
my uncles would have dropped their work boot-clad feet on
it with malicious little smiles) she looked up at me and
said, "Which do you like?"
I wanted to ask why she cared what I thought, but back
then I was constantly trying to make Pat's parents believe
that I'd grown up in a world like theirs. I looked at the
fabric pieces and saw that each one was different. There
were pieces with big flowers on them, and some with little
flowers. There were stripes, solids, and some with blue
line drawings.
When I looked up at Pat's mother, I could see she was
expecting me to say something. But what? Was it a trick?
If I chose the wrong one would she tell me to leave the
house and never see Pat again? It was what I feared every
minute I was with them. I was fascinated by their sheer
niceness, but at the same time they scared me. What would
they do if they found out that inside I was no more like
their daughter than a scorpion was like a ladybug?
Pat saved me. When she came into the living room, her
hands pulling her thick blonde hair up into a ponytail,
she saw me looking at her mother, my eyes wild with the
fear of being found out. "Oh, Mother," Pat said. "Ford
doesn't know anything about upholstery fabrics. He can
recite Chaucer in the original English, so what does he
need to know about chintz and toile?"
"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote," I murmured,
smiling at Pat. Two weeks before I'd found out that if I
whispered Chaucer while I was biting on her earlobe, it
made her wild for sex. Like her father, an accountant, she
had a mathematician's brain, and anything poetic excited
her.
I looked back at the fabrics. Ah. Upholstery. I made a
mental note to look up the words "chintz" and "toile." And
later I'd have to ask Pat why being able to recite
medieval poetry should exclude knowledge of upholstery
fabrics. "What do you plan to upholster?" I asked Pat's
mother, hoping I sounded familiar with the subject.
"The whole room," Pat said in exasperation. "She redoes
the entire living room every four years. New slipcovers,
new curtains, everything. And she sews all of it herself."
"Ah," I said, looking about the room. Every piece of
furniture and all the windows were covered in shades of
pink and green -- or rose and moss as Pat later told me.
"I think I'll go Mediterranean," Pat's mother said. "Terra
cotta and brick. I was thinking of trying my hand at
leather upholstery with all those little nails around the
edge. What do you think of that idea, Ford? Would that
look nice?"
I could only blink at her. In the many houses I had lived
in, new furniture was bought only when there were holes in
the old, and price was the only consideration for
purchase. One of my aunts had a whole set of furniture
covered in three-inch-long purple acrylic. Everyone
thought it was wonderful because all three pieces had cost
only twenty-five dollars. Only I minded having to remove
long purple fibers from my food.
"Mediterranean is nice," I said, feeling as proud of
myself as though I'd just penned the Declaration of
Independence.
"There," Pat's mother said to her daughter. "He does know
about upholstery."
Pulling the little hair tie out of her mouth, Pat deftly
wrapped it around her ponytail, and rolled her eyes. Three
weekends before, her parents had visited a sick relative
so Pat and I'd spent two nights alone in their house. We'd
played at being married, at being our own little family,
and that that perfect house was ours. We'd sat at the
kitchen table and shucked corn, then we'd eaten dinner at
the mahogany dining table -- just like grown-ups. I'd told
Pat a lot about my childhood, but I'd only told her the
deep angst part, the part that was likely to get me
sympathy and sex. I'd not told her the mundane, day-to-day
things, such as rarely eating meals not in front of a TV,
never having used a cloth napkin, and only using candles
when the electric bill hadn't been paid. It was odd, but
telling her that my father was in prison and that my
mother had used me to punish my father's brothers made me
seem heroic, while asking her what the hell an artichoke
was made me feel like the village idiot.
The second night we spent together in her parents' house,
I lit a fire in the fireplace, Pat sat on the floor
between my legs, and I brushed her beautiful hair.
So, later, when she looked at me over her mother's head, I
knew she was remembering the night we'd made love on the
carpet in front of the fire. And from the looks she was
giving me, I knew that if we didn't get out of there soon
I'd be throwing her down on top of her mother's fabric
samples. "You're so alive," Pat had said to me. "So
primitive. So real." I didn't like the "primitive" part
but if it turned her on...
"You two go on," Pat's mother said, smiling and seeming to
intuit what Pat and I were feeling. And, as always, she
was unselfish and thinking of others before herself. When
the drunk teenager who killed her a few years later was
pulled from his car, he said, "What's the big deal? She
was just an old woman."
*
Pat and I were married for twenty-one years before she was
taken from me. Twenty-one years sounds like a long time,
but it was only minutes. Right after we graduated from
college, one of the teaching jobs she was offered paid
exceptionally well, but it was in an inner city
school. "Hazard pay," the man on the phone who was begging
her to take the job said. "It's a rough school, and last
year one of our teachers was knifed. She recovered but she
wears a colostomy bag now." He waited for this to sink in,
waited for Pat to slam down the phone.
But he didn't know my wife, didn't know what her boundless
optimism could take on. I wanted to try my hand at a
novel, she wanted to give me the chance to write, and the
money was excellent so she took the job.
It was difficult for me to understand such selfless love
as hers, and I was always trying to figure out the why of
it. Sometimes it would run through my head that Pat loved
me because of my childhood, not in spite of it. If I were
the same man but had grown up in an orderly house like
hers, she wouldn't have been interested in me. When I told
her that, she'd laughed. "Maybe so. If I'd wanted a clone
of myself I'd have married Jimmie Wilkins and spent my
life hearing him tell me I was half a woman because I
couldn't have kids."
For all that Pat and her family looked like they lived an
ideal life, the truth was, there were several tragedies in
their past. In my father's family -- my mother was an
orphan and I was glad of it as my father's eleven brothers
were all the family I could handle -- a tragedy was a
reason to stop life. One of my uncle Clyde's sons drowned
when he was twelve. After that Uncle Clyde hit the bottle
and stopped going to his night security job. He and his
wife and their six other kids ended up living on what she
made at McDonald's, and one by one their kids dropped out
of school, or ended up in jail or on welfare, or they just
wandered away. Everyone in my family seemed to think that
this is what should have happened after Ronny's death.
Forever after, they talked about Uncle Clyde's great grief
over his son's tragic death in mournful whispers.
I was seven when my cousin Ronny drowned and I wasn't sad
because I knew that Cousin Ronny had been a brute. He'd
drowned while terrorizing a four-year-old girl. He'd
grabbed her doll, run into the pond, and proceeded to
dismember it, throwing the body parts into the murky
water, all while the little girl stood on the bank, crying
and begging. But as Cousin Ronny ran into the deep water,
he disturbed a snapping turtle that bit his big toe, and
he and what was left of the doll went under, where he hit
his head on a rock and knocked himself unconscious. By the
time anybody realized he wasn't pretending to be dead
(Cousin Ronny was a great one for crying wolf) he actually
was dead.
When I was told that Cousin Ronny had died -- which meant
that he'd no longer be around to bully me and the other
little kids -- all I felt was relief. And I was sure that
Uncle Clyde would be glad, too, because he was always
yelling at Ronny that he was the worst kid in the world
and that he, Uncle Clyde, should have "cut it off" before
he'd made such an evil son.
But after Ronny died, Uncle Clyde went into a state of
bereavement that lasted the rest of his life. And he
wasn't the only full-time mourner in my family. I had
three aunts, two uncles, and four cousins who were also in
lifelong mourning. A miscarriage, a chopped-off limb, a
broken engagement, whatever, were all reason enough to put
life on hold forever.
I grew up praying hard that nothing truly bad ever
happened to me. I didn't want to have to spend decades
drinking and crying about the tragedy that had blighted my
existence.
When I met Pat's extended family and saw that they were
all laughing and happy, I shook my head at the irony of it
all. So many tragedies had been thrust on my family, yet
here were people who had been blessed -- without tragedy --
for generations. Was it their church-going ways that had
made their lives so free of catastrophe? No, my uncle
Horace had gone to church for years, but after his second
wife ran off with a deacon, he'd never entered a church
again.
About the third time Pat and I were in bed together, back
when I still felt superior, as though my hard childhood
had taught me more about life than her soft one had taught
her, I mentioned this phenomenon, that her family had
experienced no tragedies.
"What do you mean?" she asked, so I told her about Uncle
Clyde and Cousin Ronny who had drowned. I left out the
parts about the doll, the turtle, and Uncle Clyde's
drinking. Instead, I used my natural-born gift for
storytelling to make him sound like a man who loved deeply.
But Pat said, "What about his other children? Didn't he
love them 'deeply'?"
I sighed. "Sure he did, but his love for Cousin Ronny
overrode everything else." This last bit was difficult for
me. I'm cursed with a clear memory and I could almost hear
again the ugly fights that used to rage between Uncle
Clyde and his bully of a son. Truthfully, before the boy
drowned I never saw any love between Uncle Clyde and
Cousin Ronny.
But to Pat I put on my best I'm-older-than-you look (by
three months) and I've-seen-more-of-the-world-than-you (by
the time Pat was eighteen she'd been to forty-two states
on long driving vacations with her parents, while I had
been out of my home state only twice) and told her that
she and her family couldn't understand my uncle Clyde's
feelings because they'd never experienced true tragedy.
That's when she told me she couldn't have children. When
she was eight she'd been riding her bike near a
construction site and had fallen. A piece of rebar,
embedded in concrete, had pierced her lower abdomen and
gone through her tiny prepubescent uterus.
She went on to tell me how her mother had lost her first
husband and infant son in a train accident. "She and her
husband were sitting together and she'd just handed him
the baby when a runaway truck hit them," Pat said. "My
mother wasn't touched but her husband and baby son were
killed instantly. Her husband was decapitated." She looked
at me. "His head fell onto her lap."
We lay there in bed, both of us naked, and looked at each
other. I was young and in bed with a girl I was in love
with, but I didn't see her beautiful bare breasts or the
soft, perfect curve of her hip. Her words had shocked me
to the core. I felt like a medieval man hearing for the
first time that the earth wasn't flat.
I couldn't reconcile that sweet woman who was Pat's mother
with the woman who'd had a severed head drop onto her lap.
And Pat. If one of my female cousins had had a
hysterectomy at eight years old her life would have
stopped then and there. Every family gathering would have
had everyone clucking in sympathy. "Pooooorrr Pat," they
would have called her.
I'd known Pat and her family for months, and I'd met three
grandparents, four aunts, two uncles, and an uncountable
number of cousins. No one had mentioned Pat's tragedy or
her mother's.
"My mother had five miscarriages before she had me and
they removed her uterus an hour after I was born," Pat
said.
"Why?" I asked, blinking, still in shock.
"I was breech so I was Caesarean and the doctor had been
called from a party so...so his hand wasn't steady. Her
uterus was accidently cut and they couldn't stop the
bleeding." Pat got out of bed, picked up my T-shirt off
the floor, and pulled it on over her head, where it
reached to her knees.
The irony of this matter of uteruses and families flooded
my brain. In my family girls got pregnant early and often.
So why were my uncles able to reproduce themselves
lavishly, but Pat's parents had only one child and no hope
of grandchildren?
As I watched Pat dress, I knew there was something else in
what she'd just told me about her birth. "A party? Are you
saying that the doctor who delivered you was drunk?"
People like Pat's family didn't have drunken doctors
who "accidently" destroyed a woman's uterus.
Pat nodded in answer to my question.
"What about your father?" I whispered, meaning, Did he
have any tragedy attached to him?
"Macular degeneration. He'll be blind in a few more years."
At that I saw tears form in her eyes. To hide them, she
went into the bathroom and closed the door.
That was the turning point. After that day, I changed my
attitude toward life. I stopped being smug. I stopped
feeling that only my family had experienced "true life."
And I relinquished my biggest fear: that if something
truly awful happened to me, I'd have to stop living and
retreat into myself. You go on, I told myself. No matter
what, you go on.
And I thought I'd managed to do that. After that kid ran
his car into Pat's mother and killed her, I tried to be an
adult. Right after it happened, I thought that maybe if I
heard the details of her death I'd feel better, so I went
to a young policeman standing by the wreckage and asked
him what happened. Maybe he didn't know I was related to
the deceased by marriage, or maybe he was just callous. He
told me what the kid who'd killed her had said. "She was
just an old woman," he'd said, as though Pat's mother had
been insignificant.
There was a funeral, a nice Presbyterian funeral, where
people politely wept, where Pat leaned on me, and where
her father aged by the minute.
Three weeks after the funeral, we all seemed to be back to
normal. Pat returned to teaching in her inner city school,
I went back to the night school where I taught English to
people trying to get their green card, and back to my day
job of writing what I hoped would become a great work of
literature and give me immortality -- and a top slot on
the New York Times Bestseller List. Pat's father hired a
full-time housekeeper and spent his evenings on the porch
repairing his neighbor's appliances, something he planned
to do as long as his eyesight held out. A year after the
funeral, everyone seemed to have accepted the loss of
Pat's mother as "God's will." True, there was an empty
place that her absence left behind, and she was spoken of
often, but her passing was accepted.
I thought it was accepted. But I also thought I was the
only one who felt old-fashioned, white-hot rage at the
loss of someone so good. I seemed to see things that no
one else did. There was a little hole on the arm of the
couch where the stitching had come apart. It wasn't more
than a half inch long, but I saw it and thought how Pat's
mother would have hated that little hole.
At Christmas, everyone except me was jolly and laughing
and exclaiming in delight over their gifts. It had been
over a year since Pat's mother's needless death and I was
still holding the anger inside me. I hadn't told Pat but I
hadn't written a word in that year. Not that what I'd
written in the previous years had been worth anything, but
at least I'd been making an effort. I'd had three agents
but none of them could get a publishing house to buy what
I wrote. "Beautifully written," I heard over and
over. "But not for us."
But "beautiful" or not, my writing wasn't good enough in
the eyes of New York editors to be published -- and it
wasn't good enough in the eyes of my wife. "Not bad,"
she'd say. "Actually, it's not bad at all." Then she'd ask
what I wanted for dinner. She never spoke a word of
criticism, but I knew I wasn't reaching her.
That Christmas, the second one after Pat's mother's death,
I was sitting on the sofa in front of the fire and running
my fingertips over the little hole in the seam. To my left
I could hear the women in the kitchen, all of them
chattering and quietly laughing. Behind me in the den the
TV was blaring and the males were watching some sporting
contest. The kids were on the closed-in porch at the back
of the house, counting their loot and eating too much
candy.
I was worried that I was becoming like my father's
relatives. What was wrong with me that I couldn't get over
the death of my mother-in-law? Couldn't get over the waste
of it? The injustice? The kid who'd killed her turned out
to be the son of a rich man; a battalion of lawyers had
freed him on a technicality.
I got up and put a log on the fire and while I squatted
there, Pat's father came into the room. He didn't see me
because his eyesight had deteriorated until he was only
able to see in a direct line in front of him.
He was holding a little pink basket with a hinged lid. As
he sat down on the end of the couch, just where I'd been
sitting, he opened it. It was a sewing basket, the back of
the lid padded to make a pincushion that held several pre-
threaded needles. I watched him remove a needle, his old
hands running down the long thread to check for a knot at
the end. His hands were shaking a bit.
He set the sewing basket beside him, and then, using what
eyesight he still had and his left hand, he searched along
the arm of the couch.
I knew what he was looking for: that little hole in the
couch cover that Pat's mother had made.
But he couldn't find the hole. There were tears blocking
his limited vision and his hands were shaking too badly to
feel anything. On my knees, I went to the other side of
the arm and put my hands over his. He didn't express any
surprise when I touched him, and he offered no explanation
for what he was doing.
Together, slowly, for my hands were trembling and my eyes,
too, were blurred, he and I sewed up the hole. A two-
minute job took fifteen minutes, and during that time
neither of us spoke. We could hear the other people in the
rooms around us, but it was as though they were far away.
When at last the hole was closed, I put my finger on the
thread and, bending, Pat's father cut the thread with his
teeth. For a second his lips touched my fingertip.
Maybe it was that touch. Or maybe it was what we'd just
done together. Or maybe it was just my desperate need for
a man in my life who didn't love his truck more than he
loved any human. Still on my knees, I dropped my head onto
Pat's father's lap, and I began to cry. As he stroked my
hair, I felt his silent tears fall onto the side of my
face.
I don't know how long we stayed like that. If any of the
Pendergasts saw us, no one ever mentioned it to me, not
even Pat -- but then they were a very polite family.
After a while, my tears began to slow and, as all those
women's magazines said, I felt "better." Not good, but
there was a knot in my chest that had been loosened. Maybe
now it could go away, I thought.
"I'd like to kill that bastard kid," Pat's father said and
I don't know how to explain this, but what he said made me
laugh. I'd been surrounded for over a year by polite,
nonviolent grief, but I couldn't feel that way. Twice, I'd
come close to calling one of my uncles. He'd know someone
who would "take out" that kid for a fee. I was tempted,
but I knew that a revenge killing wouldn't bring Pat's
mother back.
"Me, too," I whispered as I got up, wiping my face on the
sleeve of my new Christmas shirt. He and I were alone in
the room. When a log in the fire burned through and fell,
I turned toward it. But then, on impulse, I put my hand on
his shoulder, bent, and kissed his forehead. For a moment
he held my wrist with both his hands, and I thought his
tears were going to start again, but they didn't. Instead,
he smiled. "I'm glad my daughter married you," he said,
and no praise before or since has ever meant as much to me
as those words. They broke something inside of me,
something hard and suffocating that had taken up residence
in my chest.
An hour later, I was the life of the party. I was Mr.
Entertainment. I was laughing and joking and telling
stories that had everyone howling. No one, not even Pat,
had ever seen me that way. I'd told her that I'd learned
to "sing for my supper" when I was a kid, but I hadn't
elaborated. The full story was that my mother said that
since my father's eleven brothers had been the ones to get
her husband thrown into prison, they could take turns
being a father to me. For my entire childhood I was moved
every three months from one uncle to the next. "Here comes
Punishment," my cousins would shout when my mother drove
me from one house or trailer to the next. She'd push me
toward a door, my one suitcase with all my worldly
possessions at my feet, and give my shoulder a little
squeeze, the only sign of affection she ever showed me.
I'd not see her again until the three months were up and
she delivered me to the next uncle. Even if they lived
next door to each other, my mother made a point of driving
me.
Over the years I'd learned that I couldn't compete with my
cousins' fighting skills or their native ability to
operate all large machinery that was painted either yellow
or green, but I had a talent they didn't have:
storytelling. Lord only knows where I got it, although an
ancient great-aunt told me that my grandfather was the
best liar she'd ever met, so maybe it came from him. In
fact, I was so different, one of my uncles said that if I
didn't look like a Newcombe he'd swear I wasn't kin to
them at all.