Jake, who’d been trying to make a sentence with his Alpha-Bits cereal, stirred the letters back into incoherence and said, “She’s mad at Dad.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing. But he’s God.”
“God? Dad? That’s crazy.”
“I mean for her he’s God.” Jake said this as if it should have been obvious then went back to making his sentence.
I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about, but I’ve thought about it since and I believe I understand. My mother couldn’t rail directly at God and so she railed instead at my father. Once again Jake had seen and understood something I hadn’t.
My father returned to the kitchen and Jake asked listlessly, “Do I have to go to Mankato today?”
This seemed to catch my father by surprise. He thought it over then said, “Yes. I’ll take you.”
So I was home alone that afternoon when the sheriff showed up looking for Dad. He knocked at the front screen door. A Twins game was on the radio and I was slumped on the living room sofa dividing my time between the game and one of Jake’s comic books. The sheriff was dressed in his khaki uniform. He took off his hat which was something folks did respectfully when my parents came to the door but no one had ever done it for me. It made me nervous.
“Is your father home, Frank? I tried the church,” he said, “but no one answered.”
“No, sir. He’s in Mankato with my brother.”
He nodded and looked past me into the dark at my back. I wondered if he thought I wasn’t telling the truth or if it was just something he’d become used to doing as part of his job.
“Will you do me a favor, son? Will you have him call me when he gets back? It’s important.”
“My mother’s at Emil Brandt’s house,” I told him. “If you want to talk to her.”
“I think I’d rather discuss this with your father. You won’t forget?”
“No, sir. I’ll remember.”
He turned and put his hat on and took a couple of steps and paused and turned back. “You mind coming out here a minute, Frank? A couple of things I’d like to ask you.”
I joined him on the porch wondering what answers I had that he could possibly want.
“Let’s sit down,” he suggested.
We sat together on the top step and looked out at the yard and the church on the other side of the street and beyond that the grain elevators mute beside the tracks. Everything was quiet in the Flats. The sheriff was not a tall man and sitting we were not that different in height. He spun his hat in his hands, fingering the sweatband inside.
“Your sister, she was pretty sweet on the Brandt boy, is that right?”
The Brandt boy? I thought. Karl Brandt had always seemed to me mature and sophisticated. Yet here was the sheriff calling him boy just as others called me.
I thought about Ariel and Karl and how well they seemed to get on. I thought about all they did together. I thought about the nights Ariel sneaked from the house in the dark hours and slipped back just before dawn. But I also thought about the question I’d posed to Karl Brandt the day Jake and I had ridden in his fast little car: Are you going to marry my sister? And I thought about how he’d backed away.
I finally said, “They had a complicated relationship.”
Which was something I’d heard once in a movie.
“Complicated how?”
“She liked him a lot but I think he didn’t like her as much.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He wouldn’t marry her.”
The sheriff stopped turning his hat in his hands and his face swung slowly toward me. “She wanted him to?”
“She was supposed to go to Juilliard in a couple of months, which was what she always wanted to do, but lately she was different. I got the feeling she wanted to stay here with Karl.”
“But the Brandt boy’s going off to St. Olaf.”
“Yes, sir. I guess he is.”
With his mouth closed he made a sound that stayed mostly in his throat and then he went back to spinning the hat in his hands.
“What do you think of him, Frank?”
Again I thought about the car ride and what had struck me as his refusal to marry Ariel but instead of replying I simply shrugged.
“You notice anything different about your sister lately?”
“Yeah. She was sad for no reason. And mad sometimes too.”
“Did she say why?”
“No.”
“Do you think it might have been because of Karl?”
“Maybe. She really loved him.”
I said that last part not because I knew it to be true but because it felt true. Or felt to me as if it should have been true.
“She spent a lot of time with Karl?”
“A lot.”
“Did you ever see them argue?”
I made a good show of thinking hard although I knew the answer immediately. “No,” I said.
Which didn’t seem to be the answer he wanted.
“Once,” I said quickly, “Ariel came back from a date pretty mad.”
“At Karl?”
“I guess. I mean, he was the guy she was on the date with.”
“Recently?”
“A couple of weeks ago.”
“Did she talk to you, Frank? Maybe tell you things she wouldn’t tell your folks?”
“We were very close,” I said trying to sound mature.
“What did she tell you?”
I realized suddenly that I’d made a trap for myself, suggesting a situation that wasn’t exactly true, and the sheriff was expecting something from me I didn’t know how to give, confidences Ariel might have shared.
“She went out at night sometimes,” I said in a panic. “After everybody was asleep. And she didn’t come back until almost morning.”
“Out? With Karl Brandt?”
“I think so.”
“She sneaked out?”
“Yes.”
“You knew? Did you tell your parents?”
This was getting worse by the moment.
“I didn’t want to rat on her,” I said, realizing even as the words tumbled out that it was probably not a great way to phrase what I meant because it sounded very James Cagney and I was feeling very Public Enemy.