Good medical advice.
Once again I’m sitting at my parents’ kitchen table, where I waited for Dr. Kirby earlier today. Mom is making sure Dad is settled in his bed. The kitchen smells of burned coffee, because she still keeps a carafe half-full all day. I think my mother has subsisted mostly on coffee since I was a little boy.
“Marshall?” she murmurs, padding into the kitchen in her housecoat. “Can I fix you some food? I have some étouffée in the fridge. Made it myself.”
“Where do you find time to cook from scratch?”
She rinses her coffee cup, the ancient one with blythe hand-painted on it, then refills it from the carafe. “Marty Denis brought us a mess of peeled tails today, so I just had to make some for your father. All I see at the store now is those Chinese crawfish, and I don’t even consider them real.”
Marty Denis runs a local bank that competes with Claude Buckman’s regional giant, Bienville Southern. He’s got Cajun heritage, but he spends most of his time on the country club golf course, not in his home state. “I guess Marty’s were seined out of some ditch in St. Martin Parish?”
She slides into the chair across from me with a creak of crepitus. “You know it,” she says with a smile. “I can taste the bayou in them.”
Looking into her exhausted but still handsome face, I remember Dr. Kirby telling me that she’s suffering from sleep deprivation. “You don’t have a sitter tonight?”
She waves her hand. “Duncan only likes one well enough to let her help at night, and she needed a night off.”
“Mom, you’ve got to take care of yourself. Money’s no object when it comes to that.”
She forces a smile. “Let’s change the subject.”
“All right. Do you know very much about the Bienville Poker Club?”
My question surprises her. “Blake Donnelly and that crowd?”
“I think Donnelly’s about the best of the bunch. Some of them are pretty shady.”
“Oh, that doesn’t surprise me. How many people really do honest work anymore? Blake’s just rich enough to live a little straighter than the others.”
“I figured Claude Buckman must be richer than Blake.”
Mom purses her lips and weighs what information she possesses. “Oh, I don’t know. Blake’s pumped a lot of oil for a lot of years, collected a lot of mailbox money. Either way, Claude is a slug. Can’t keep his nasty hands to himself. Never could. Ugh.”
We’re silent for a bit, and she sips her coffee in relative contentment.
“What did Dr. Kirby say before he left?” I ask.
She looks unsure whether to tell me, or maybe whether to be completely honest. “I just thank heaven for Jack. He’s been so patient. One of those younger doctors would have thrown up his hands over Duncan long ago.”
I nod but say nothing, leaving silence for her to fill.
“Jack thinks the end is getting close,” Mom says in a church whisper. “Duncan’s not going to stop drinking. I could empty all the bottles, but then he’d break his hip trying to get out to the car. Or, worse, run his wheelchair off the porch. I’m sure you judge me for letting him have it, but, Marshall . . . it’s the only thing that eases his nerves.” She raises her right hand and wipes a tear from one eye. “I know he’ll die sooner, but what’s the alternative? A few extra months of misery?”
I reach out and take her left hand. “I don’t judge you, Mom. You’re a saint to have come this far. Dad’s going to do what he’s going to do.”
More tears come, but I pretend not to see them. She takes a napkin from a holder on the table and dabs the corners of her eyes.
“When you’re in the house,” she says in a wistful voice, “I remember how it used to be, when you and Adam were boys. I don’t just remember it. I see it, every detail. I can hear your voices, see your little faces while you watched me cook or I worked on schoolwork with you. Not that either of you needed much help. Other than getting you started.”
I smile and listen to her weave her memories into words. Mom doesn’t usually wax nostalgic when I’m here. I guess the prospect that she may finally be facing life without her partner, whatever his flaws, has her looking backward rather than forward. As she goes on, I recall Max’s terrible tale of murder on Cemetery Road. After Mom falls silent and sips her coffee again, I take the opening.
“Mom, this afternoon, Jack Kirby told me about some things the Poker Club was involved with—violent things.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. They’re all about the dollar. And men like that quickly lose sight of right and wrong.”
At the last moment I hesitate, but I’ve got to know. “Max Matheson suggested that what happened to Dad’s first family wasn’t an accident. That some Klansmen from Ferriday might have been behind that wreck. Did Dad ever express any suspicion to you?”
My mother’s coffee cup has frozen in midair. Her eyes are wide and locked on my face.
“Mom?”
She sets down her cup and licks her lips. “I’ve never heard anybody suggest that before. I certainly never heard Duncan suggest it. And I don’t want you to ask him about it, either. No good could possibly come of that. Not after all these years. My Lord.”
“That’s why I’m asking you, not him.”
She looks at me for a long time without speaking. In this moment I feel I’m living up to the idea that children are a burden.
“Do you believe there’s anything to the story?” she asks.
“Max told me that it was a case of mistaken identity. That Dad was the intended target. The killers were waiting near that hairpin turn to run him off the road, and in the rain they couldn’t tell it wasn’t him.”
Mom closes her eyes, and her lips move as though she’s praying in silence. “Dear God, I hope that didn’t happen.”
“I do, too. But I fear that it did.”
She takes a quick sip of coffee the way a prisoner might, as though protecting it from a thief. The gesture makes me strangely anxious.
“When I met your father,” she says, “he was a wounded man. Losing Eloise and Emily is what started this whole nightmare of alcoholism.”
Eloise and Emily. To me these are but names. To my mother they were real people.
“Oh, he drank before that, but in moderation. I talked to a lot of his colleagues at that time, even to his mother. I started at the Watchman as a reporter, you know. I was twenty-two, fresh out of the W. Didn’t know a thing.”
She means the Mississippi State College for Women. “How many years did you work there?”
“Six. I was working the night of the accident. And nobody ever suggested it was murder. Because of the storm, I suppose. But I know this: losing his wife and daughter changed Duncan forever.” Her eyes are fixed on the table with unsettling concentration. “Once we started seeing each other, I threw my whole self into healing him. And he came a long way back to the world. After you and Adam came along—while you were both here—Duncan was whole again, or just about. Then . . .”
“You don’t have to talk about Adam. I’ve been thinking about him a lot over the last two days.”