Chapter 2 - The Sound of Packaged Crystal
By ten o'clock that evening, the kitchen on King Street smelled of burnt roast beef and damp wool.
Margaret had taken an apron from the hook behind the cellar door—an apron Helen had embroidered with yellow buttercups when Ethan was still in junior high—and was systematically dismantling the post-ceremony reception supper that had been intended for the family members who hadn't rated seats at the Bennett table at Briarwood.
There were three cold platters of Virginia ham, two bowls of potato salad that had begun to separate in their plastic wrap, and four dozen yeast rolls that Helen had baked at four o'clock on Friday morning before the madness began.
David sat at the kitchen table, his thick fingers turning a chipped ceramic mug around and around on the blue linoleum.
"Ethan’s outside," David said.
I was standing at the counter, washing the mud from my cuffs with cold water and an old bar of brown soap. The water in the porcelain basin ran yellowish-gray before it cleared.
"Where?" I asked.
"In the driveway. Sitting in that little German sports car Camille’s father leased for him when he signed with the firm in Charlotte. He hasn't turned the engine off. He’s been out there for twenty minutes with the lights on the garage door."
"Let him sit," Margaret snapped from the stove, where she was violently scraping a scorched pot of country beans into an old lard tub. "Let the gasoline run out. That boy didn't have the decency to take his mother's elbow when she was lying in the muck like an old sow. He can sit in the dark until the frost gets inside his fine leather seats."
"He's thirty years old, Margaret," David said softly. "He made a bad trade."
"He didn't make a bad trade, David," Margaret said, turning around with the wooden spoon trembling in her fist, her gray hair escaping its pins in wisps around her red ears. "A bad trade is when you buy a heifer that turns out dry. He sold his mother’s face to keep a job with an investment syndicate. That’s not a trade. That’s a foreclosure on his character."
The back door screen clicked.
Ethan stood in the small mudroom between the kitchen and the back porch. He had taken off his tuxedo jacket; it was draped over his left forearm like an expensive rag, the white satin lapels gray with road film from the highway drive. His shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, his black silk bow tie hanging in two limp tails down his chest.
He didn't look thirty. In the yellow light of the sixty-watt bulb hanging above the washing machine, he looked eighteen again—the boy who had backed my riding mower into the pond in nineteen-ninety-nine and spent four hours hiding in the hayloft because he couldn't bear the look on my face when I saw the oil slick on the water.
"Dad," he said.
I dried my hands on the roller towel beside the sink. The fabric was rough, linen-cotton blend, smelling of chlorine and well water.
"Your mother is asleep, Ethan," I said. "Marcus gave her two pills for the pain. Her wrist is stitched."
"I know," he mumbled, stepping onto the linoleum. He didn't take off his patent leather dress shoes; they left two shiny, wet ovals on the blue floor where Margaret had just mopped. "I called Marcus from the car. He told me."
"You called Marcus?" Margaret said, her voice rising an octave, full of the ancient, unsparing scorn of an aunt who had changed his diapers on the farm in Zanesville. "You called the doctor? Why didn't you call the ambulance while she was on her back in the clover, Ethan? Why didn't you pick up her spectacles when they were lying in the cedar mulch?"
"Aunt Margaret, please," Ethan whispered, his hands coming up in a small, pleading gesture that died almost instantly. "You don't know what happened. You didn't hear what was being said before the ceremony."
"I heard what she said into the microphone, Ethan," I told him. I pulled out the chair opposite David—the chair where Ethan had sat every morning for eighteen years to eat his oatmeal before the school bus turned the corner from Route 340—and sat down. "I heard her tell two hundred people that your mother didn't belong on the flagstones because the lace might spot."
Ethan dropped his tuxedo jacket onto the back of the empty chair. The heavy wool gave a dull, dead thump against the oak rungs.
"Camille’s father had four hundred thousand dollars in capital commitments from the men at those front tables, Dad," Ethan said, leaning his knuckles against the table edge. His voice was cracked, reedy, stripped of the polished, aggressive baritone he had developed since moving to North Carolina. "Four hundred thousand. The whole regional transport deal hinged on the appearance of stability. Mr. Bennett... Charles... he’s leveraged to his eyeballs on the Richmond terminal. If those investors think the family is unstable, if they think the wedding was a circus, they’ll pull their letters of intent before the clearing banks open on Monday morning."
"And that," David said from his corner, his voice like stones grinding in an iron hopper, "is why your mother had to eat dirt?"
"No! Of course not! It was an accident! Camille was... she was frantic! The wedding coordinator had lost the floral delivery from Charlottesville, the photographer had the wrong lens for the pavilion, and Mom kept coming up to her asking about where the church ladies were supposed to put their coats! Camille just... she reached out to move her! She didn't know the sod was that soft!"
"Ethan," I said.
He stopped. His chest was heaving under his white formal shirt, his collar points sticking out at odd angles, his neck dark with sweat and the red flush of a man whose arguments were failing even to convince himself.
"Yes, sir?"
"The check," I said, pointing to the manila envelope lying between the salt cellar and the butter dish, "was for eighty-four thousand, six hundred and twelve dollars."
"I know what it was for, Dad."
"Do you know where it came from?"
He looked away, his eyes darting toward the old calendar from the Southern States cooperative hanging beside the pantry door.
"It was your retirement distribution," he mumbled. "You told me you had the liquidity from the state pension buyout."
"I had seventy thousand from the state pension buyout, Ethan," I said, speaking slowly, ensuring that every syllable found its mark in his skull like a center punch on cold steel. "The remaining fourteen thousand six hundred and twelve dollars came from the sale of your grandfather’s four-acre woodlot behind the lime kiln. The one he left to your mother in seventy-eight. The one she refused to log when the pulp mills were paying forty dollars a cord, because she wanted you to have the timber to build a barn when you came back from college."
Ethan’s mouth opened. His jaw twitched twice.
"She sold the timber?" he whispered.
"She sold the land, Ethan," Margaret said from the sink, her voice vicious and cold. "To a quarry company from Roanoke. She signed the deed on Tuesday morning in the clerk’s office in Staunton while you were at your bachelor dinner in Charleston drinking forty-dollar martinis on your father’s Visa card."
Ethan stepped back from the table. His heel hit the metal threshold of the mudroom door, and he grabbed the door frame to steady himself.
"We didn't know," he said, his voice dropping into a register of genuine, sick horror. "Camille told me... Camille said you had three hundred thousand in the state teachers' credit union. She said her father had looked up your state service record on the public transparency database."
I stood up. I was three inches shorter than my son, but as I stepped toward him, he shrank against the white pine casing of the door until his shoulder blades were pressed flat against the wood.
"Her father looked up my service record?" I asked.
"He... he wanted to make sure the family could cover the hosting obligations before they signed the lease on Briarwood," Ethan stammered, the truth finally spilling out of him in a foul, greasy flood of corporate pragmatism. "He told Camille that people from the civil service have fixed pensions that can't be reduced by market corrections. He said it was safer to have you underwrite the physical contracts because you couldn't declare commercial reorganization if the weather went bad."
David let out a low, whistling breath through his teeth. "God almighty, Art. They didn't want a family. They wanted an underwriter who couldn't file Chapter Eleven."
"Ethan," I said, resting my hand on the back of his chair, feeling the expensive wool of his tuxedo jacket through my fingers. "Where is your wife?"
He swallowed. The sound was audible in the small kitchen.
"She's at the Boar’s Head Inn," he said. "Her father rented the presidential pavilion for the night. They’re... they’re meeting with Gidley right now. They’re drafting an injunction to freeze the First National account before nine o'clock tomorrow morning."
"Are you going back there tonight?"
He looked at me with his mother’s gray eyes—eyes that were hollow now, dark with the terrifying realization that the world he had traded his blood for was nothing more than an expensive stage set constructed out of borrowed timber and unpaid invoices.
"I don't know," he whispered.
"If you go through that door, Ethan," I said, pointing toward the gravel driveway where the rain was still drumming against the roof of his leased German coupe, "you take your tuxedo with you. You take the silver cuff links your mother bought you when you passed the licensing exam. And you do not bring that girl, that family, or their Richmond lawyers across the cattle guard on this road again while there is breath in my body."
May you like
He stood there for five seconds, his chest rising and falling, his hands hanging at his sides like lead sinkers.
Then he turned, pushed through the screen door into the wet night, and the screen banged shut behind him with the sharp, wooden crack of an iron trap closing on an empty leg.
