[39]

Redemption, 1995

Winter had a beef stew simmering in the Crock-Pot. She was making biscuits. John Whitehouse came up behind her, putting his hand on her back. “It smells good.” She felt his breath on her neck.

With a palm full of peanut M&M’s, he said, “A sweet for my sweet.”

She smiled. “Your sweet? You’re plumb out of your mind.” She loved John Whitehouse, the man her daughter rejected. She was seventy-four years old, and she loved him more than she’d ever loved Joe Pitank. She couldn’t much stand Joe—she could now finally admit.

After Abigail was born, he’d always favored his daughter over Winter. It’d been his idea to name her Abigail. Winter had thought Summer would be more appropriate—what with her own name being Winter. He hadn’t liked it.

Joe spoiled Abigail while Winter washed laundry, while Winter worked her fingers red and hard. She hadn’t much mourned his passing, she remembered. He died a lifetime ago. Abigail was another matter. For Abigail, she still felt guilt. She could have loved her more. Abigail might not have strayed and had a bastard child if she’d been a more attentive mother, but she saw Joe in Abigail. She could admit that now too. She was old.

As for Buckley, she wondered about him—what had become of him, if he was alive. She felt that she and John Whitehouse had done right by him. And off he’d gone, disappearing like his mother tried to do.

Sitting across the table from John in their same cinder-block house, he slid a letter to her. “I’ve already read it,” he said. “Couldn’t resist.”

The letter was from Buckley. She hesitated before pulling the stationery from the envelope.

He wrote, I’m living at the ocean with Padraig John—the man my mother loved. He wrote, I’m happy. Life is like a card game. You either play or you fold. I’ll never fold. Winter wondered what in God’s name Buckley was talking about. Playing or folding. He was as nuts as ever. Still, she was glad to know that he was happy. The letter continued: I’m never coming back to Mont Blanc. I plan to avoid the whole state of Arkansas. (Buckley had laughed when he wrote that particular sentence.)

He needed to say goodbye to the reverend and Winter once and for all. As long as they were ignorant of his feelings, he felt haunted by them; like they could come and get him anytime they wanted. He was a man now. He didn’t want to be afraid. He wrote: I don’t think either of you treated my mom with love or kindness, which is a shame, because I know now that the love she gave me in just fourteen years of life has sustained me.

Finishing the letter, Winter scratched her face. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

“Not really.”

She dug into her stew. “He’s a bastard,” she said, “and it sounds like he’s judging us. What nerve!”

Buckley and Paddy John sat across from each other eating Shake ’n Bake pork chops and applesauce on a red checked tablecloth, and Buckley said as nonchalantly as he could, “I know where Tide is living. It’s only two miles from here. What if we sent him to one of those drug treatment places?”

“Pass the salt.”

“Or we could have one of those interventions?”

“Tide is old enough to do as he pleases.”

It was hard for Buckley to watch anyone kill himself, let alone Tide, but Buckley was only a boy of thirteen when he’d first met Tide, and Buckley didn’t know then and he didn’t know now that up until he was five, Tide lived with his “unfit” mother, Judy, in a three-room dump. Buckley didn’t know that Tide remembered sleeping on a dirty Coleman sleeping bag while his mother, high on heroin, had sex with Big Lime, her supplier, in the next room. Buckley didn’t know that Tide ate dry cereal and cold Franco-American Spaghettios almost every day for a whole year and that he still remembered their metallic taste. He didn’t know that Tide, desperate for his mother’s love, sometimes went into the room while Big Lime was on top of Judy.

Big Lime grunted, and his mother’s eyes rolled up white, and Tide sat down beside her on the mattress, the coils squeaking, her breasts lolling one to each side.

Tide didn’t know enough not to be there beside her, and he still remembered the smoky, moist smell of her brown hair. He remembered Big Lime telling him to “get the fuck out,” but Tide kept coming back. Finally, Big Lime gave in and let Tide stay.

Even while Big Lime sweated and heaved and grunted on top of Tide’s mother, Tide held her hand.

Like Buckley, Paddy John didn’t know what Tide had seen, but he knew there was a time to let go of the past, and he thought it was well past time for Tide to let go of his.

In Galveston, Judy McGowan, fifty-four this month, still worked at Trina’s whore house. She took her methadone. Some habits you don’t break. You only replace. She no longer serviced Big Lime or any other man unless he paid cash up-front.

She didn’t want to see or know her son, Tide. She carried the guilt only a mother can carry, and she never wanted to confront it.