Peter hopped back in the car, smiling. “God, that’s fast in there. I’ve got a whole pack. Can I light one up in here?”
“No!” Lindsay said cheerfully.
“Okay,” Peter said, then muttered: “I’ll cooperate fully.” A moment later, he brightened again. “I have a whole pack of Marlboros. You people are wonderful.”
* * *
Lindsay’s next stop that day, Matt’s home at the Citadel Apartments in Colorado Springs, was a small, no-frills place paid for with a Section 8 housing voucher. Never one to focus on his personal hygiene, Matt nevertheless maintained his home like the tidiest of hoarders, his towering piles of stuff always neat and organized. “I bet he’s got a fortune in collectible vinyl,” said Lindsay as she pulled into the parking lot.
Matt’s most prized collection was his stack of Clint Eastwood movies—DVDs and VHS tapes. Most of the time, when Matt was on the phone with his family, A Fistful of Dollars or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly could be heard blasting in the background. “I told him that Clint Eastwood is Republican,” Lindsay said, smiling. “That was very disappointing to him.” But he still watched all the movies.
Visits and phone calls with Matt were never predictable. Sometimes he’d rage about being labeled mentally ill, about his mother putting him on medication, about the millions of dollars he said the government owed him for building all of the roads and bridges in the state of Colorado, about how the mental health profession had killed his father and two of his brothers, Jim and Joe. “They might as well kill me!” he’d moan—he had nothing left to live for. But today, the day before his mother’s funeral, Matt was in a decent mood—not delusional, just glum, and, as usual, a little caustic. He’d been watching Hang ’Em High when Lindsay showed up. In jeans and a leather biker vest, he was a little imposing, tall and stout with unruly long hair, a scraggly beard, and the same deep-set eyes as his brother Donald. Lindsay’s kids, whenever they saw him, always remarked on how much he looked like Hagrid. Even his voice was a low, mumbly growl.
“Well, my shoulder couldn’t get any worse than what it is,” Matt said, sinking into the backseat of the SUV.
“You’ve got a doctor’s appointment, though!” Lindsay said, triumphantly. Seeing doctors had never appealed to Matt. For years, Lindsay had been trying to get him to get his teeth fixed, but he thought the dentist would implant something in his head.
“I’ve got an appointment over at Park View on the tenth of August,” he said, and then he started running through other old business, concerned about tying up loose ends from his accident with the truck—the one Lindsay had been helping him with just before Mimi’s death. Matt actually had been in the middle of a good deed when the crash happened. He was helping his friend Brody, a Vietnam vet who is a paraplegic, get to Denver to get a new bag for his catheter. They were on their way back during rush hour on a Friday night when Matt saw a car stopped in the center lane and slammed his brakes. He missed that car, but then the two cars behind him smashed into him, one after the other.
“They sent me a letter from the impound lot, saying it cost eight hundred and fifty dollars?”
“I know,” said Lindsay. She had spent hours on the phone with the police and the courts and the insurance company, sending copies of the power of attorney document that Matt had signed to show that she could handle everything on his behalf. “If they call you or anything, or write another letter, give it to me.”
“I just want to sort that out.”
“We will. It’s gonna take a long time, though, Matt. The courts, they haven’t even assigned a permanent case number to it yet.”
Lindsay tried to bring up tomorrow’s funeral, just as she had with Peter. Matt also didn’t pick up on that. Instead, over a sandwich at a nearby sub shop, he ran through a litany of his many injuries and wounds. “I had six separate teeth surgeries. And I had a blot clot removed from my brain in 1979, I was twelve and a half.”
“I was at that hockey game,” Lindsay said.
“It was at the Air Force Academy,” he said. “It was the league championship. We beat Mitchell. They had twenty-two players, two goalies, and a coach. We had eleven guys. You know what you say about hockey? Go puck yourself.”
Lindsay smiled. She was used to Matt’s jokes. Most were dirtier.
“Our team went to state,” he said. “But I couldn’t play because I broke my face. This guy picked me up under my butt and threw me into the boards.”
“I remember!” Lindsay said. “I sat next to you in the backseat of the car and your eyeball was hanging out of your face.”
He showed Lindsay a scar on the side of his face.
“I got a hundred and fifty-seven stitches,” Matt said, launching into his usual exaggerated version of the story. “I flatlined and they used the shockers. You know that ER show, with the shockers? They hit me ten times, and I flatlined for seven and a half minutes, and they said do it one more time. The eleventh time they hit me, they got a pulse, and I woke up two and a half weeks later.”
He reminisced a little about his college days at Loretto Heights—girls in the dorms, Frisbee in the hallways, all the hockey players he knew there. He remembered dropping out after a year and working at the bowling alley and having a newspaper route and living with his brother Joe for a while.
“When Joe died, me and Mark and Mike went out there and divided his stuff between the three of us,” he said somberly. “I got his TV.”
The subject of Joe propelled him into more difficult territory. “Donald just made my life a nightmare,” Matt said. “He took his anger out on the whole family. He smacked me across the floor.” The more he talked about his childhood, the more he descended into self-pity. It was never far from Lindsay’s mind that Matt—who had once been the coach of her soccer team; whom she once wrote an essay about, calling him her hero—really was a victim, just as she was.
“Donald, Brian, Jim all abused me,” Matt said—though, given this was Matt talking, there could be no way of knowing how true that was. “So I left the family for like eight or ten years. And I came back, and Jim had a heart attack, over there at Main Street. And Joe had a heart attack. And my dad died. And then my mom died. And I lost my family. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I’m here,” Lindsay said.
Her brother glanced at her. “It’s good to see someone still here.”
* * *
That night, Mimi’s house on Hidden Valley Road received a host of Galvins who had come to town for her funeral. Michael drove in from Manitou Springs with his wife, Becky, and one of his daughters; he was still unpacking the experience of taking care of Mimi as she left this world. “I told Mary that taking care of somebody like that, it’s really a privilege,” Michael said. “Because if you had to do it, you would. But because there’s enough money, most of us don’t have to.”