CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The sign said Mercy Hospice Care.
Jake parked his rental car in front of a flat, one-story building surrounded by leafless shrubs.
He cut the engine and then sat in the darkness. His body felt heavy, but his heart wouldn’t stop pounding. The power to walk away was his if he wanted it. At any time he could turn around, get back on that freeway, fly off in his jet—and pretend that he could be happy without Maggie.
He had to do this. He had to.
The car door sounded unnaturally loud when he shut it. So did his footsteps ricocheting across the parking lot.
He opened the front door to the hospice. There was an empty reception desk, a wilted plant and maybe half a dozen plastic chairs. The air smelled like cleaning products and something else he didn’t want to think about.
Instead of waiting for the night nurse, he went in search of Loretta’s room himself. He found it right away. Uncle Marty was inside talking about farm equipment.
Jake swallowed down a wave of nausea. He was terrified, like a child. What a disgrace.
His hand slid across the door as he pushed it all the way open. Three people looked up—Uncle Marty, Aunt Pearl and Dillon. He couldn’t get a read on them. His radar was just as broken as he was. Then he saw Loretta lying on the bed with her eyes closed.
Slowly, he moved closer. Everything around him was blurry except for the emaciated creature with the swollen belly who lay underneath a vivid blue blanket.
He never would have known her.
The Loretta he remembered had been coarse, vulgar, bigger than life. This Loretta was attached to a lot of blinking machines. Her hands were liver-spotted, almost translucent. She’d clearly had a stroke because one side of her face was twisted downward. Even her hair grew in untidy patches now, gray like the rest of her.
Loretta wasn’t even sixty years old and looked eighty.
There were a lot of questions he wanted to ask, but he couldn’t organize his thoughts. Uncle Marty and Aunt Pearl were talking to him. He saw their mouths moving and their kind, concerned faces. Then Dillon put one hand on his shoulder and Jake flinched from the shock of unexpected contact.
This was the woman who’d told him he was worthless and would never amount to anything. The one who beat him and smashed a liquor bottle over his head.
She would never be able to hurt him again.
A clear plastic bag hung on a hook near her bed. He saw the drip, drip, drip, of the liquid into her IV. There was a thickness in his throat he didn’t recognize. Hesitantly, he touched her leg where the blanket covered it.
“Can I get you something?” Dillon asked him. “Coffee? Water?”
When Jake looked up, he realized that Uncle Marty and Aunt Pearl had left the room and were talking in the hallway. He shook his head. “I’m not thirsty.”
“Do you mind watching Mom for a few minutes?” Dillon asked. “We sure could use the break.”
“Yeah, sure.” Jake dragged a chair closer to the bed and rubbed his damp palms on his jeans. It made him nervous being alone with Loretta. He didn’t know how lucid she was, but he needed to say a few things, starting with how she’d been a shitty, horrible mother. But as he sat there looking at her, the anger just drained away.
Look at the pain he’d caused Maggie and hell, he’d been stone-cold sober. Loretta may have been a drunk, but underneath it all, she’d probably loved him. It didn’t excuse anything, but maybe now he could start to let the pain go.
Except for the click and hiss of the machines, the room was silent. In a way, they were both on life support. The only difference was Loretta had a fast pass out of here while he was left to pick up the pieces.
“Goddamn, you made a mess of things,” he said.
All his life, anger was a strong cup of coffee he drank whenever he needed it. If he felt like giving up, he thought of her. Now she had managed to cheat him even of that. Without the anger, what was left? Nothing. He didn’t even know who he was anymore. It was like starting all over again.
With a feeling of hopelessness, he bent forward and laid his head on his crossed arms. His chest ached. Loretta had directed the course of his life without even meaning to. Just because he’d done everything the opposite of her hadn’t changed that.
Jake felt something move and looked up. Loretta was reaching for him.
He stared at her, speechless.
Her eyes were open and she looked at him. Spittle collected in the corners of her mouth. “Jake,” she rasped.
There was a keening sound that shocked him until he realized that he was the one making it.
Jake bowed his head and sobbed.
* * * *
Loretta Ann Sutton died the next morning at five-fifteen. On the Fourth of July. Jake had been dozing in his chair in her room, but when he woke up, he knew she was gone.
Aunt Pearl insisted on making the funeral arrangements, so Jake and Dillon wandered the farm. After all these years, it still smelled of pine needles, diesel fuel and the musk of animals. Being at the farm with cows grazing in the fields and chickens pecking in the dirt gave him a feeling of peace. It dredged up old memories, but they weren’t the kind of memories that turned his stomach.
The only thing missing was Maggie. He didn’t know how to fix that.
“Seeing anyone?” Dillon asked as they ducked under a split rail fence. Aunt Pearl’s kitchen garden, which lay just past it, was bursting with white-flowered potato vines, thick onion spears, the fleecy tops of carrots. When they were kids, he and Dillon used to play with their green plastic army men here, which Aunt Pearl was forever digging up.
Jake stood gazing out over the tended rows. “No, I’m not seeing anyone. You?”
“Her name is Aracelia,” Dillon said. “Her family’s from Mexico. They really want us to get married.”
“Do you want to get married?”
Dillon grinned. “Thinkin’ about it.”
Jake remembered waking up in Paris next to a warm, sleepy Maggie. The feeling of contentment he had, and the certainty that he finally had everything he’d been looking for. “I was seeing someone. Her name is Maggie. She wanted kids and I was a real fucking asshole about it.”
He heard the whump of a hay bale being tossed down from the barn. A hot July breeze sifted through the pines. Usually these things reminded him of Palestine. Now they reminded him of her.
“Do you love this woman?” Dillon asked him.
Jake glanced at his brother, all Mr. Folk Singer Café in his loose white shirt. Dillon really was a man now—a man who was thinking about settling down and maybe starting a family. How crazy was that?
“Yes, I love her,” Jake said. Why not? It was the truth. “But I don’t want kids.”
“Do they scare you?” Dillon asked.
“Do you want to reenact scenes from our childhood?” Jake reached down to pick up a rusty horseshoe that was warm from the sun. He turned it over a few times in his hand. “Look, I just don’t want to screw up another human being.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
Jake looked at him, puzzled. Zen Dillon wasn’t in the habit of making those kinds of sweeping pronouncements.
“You raised me,” Dillon said. “You were only a kid yourself, but you raised me. Dude, you were my brother, my mother and my father. And I don’t think anyone could say that I’m that screwed up. No more than average.”
“You turned out terrible. You’re wearing Birkenstocks.”
But Jake flashed back to the times when he drank entire glasses of Dillon’s milk for him, which they both hated, so Dillon wouldn’t have to. When Dillon got bullied, Jake waited after school to nail the kid who did it. When there weren’t any Christmas presents and no tree to put them under, Jake dragged home a big pine branch, stuck it in a bucket and decorated it with whatever they had around the house—cotton balls for snow, tinfoil for ornaments. A roll of Cherry Lifesavers, found at school, which Jake wrapped in newspaper, became Dillon’s only present.
All of that had been for Dillon. Jake would have done anything for his little brother. Taken a beating, a bullet. Did it matter?
Was that what it was like to have a kid? That same feeling of do anything, take any risk, make any sacrifice?
“You were an amazing big brother,” Dillon told him. “The best brother I could ask for. I don’t want there to be bad blood between us, Jake. You’re the only real family I’ve got left now.”