Through the Heart Read online

  She looked at me as if I had started speaking in a foreign language. “What do you mean, Mom doesn’t pay for anything?”

  “I mean I pay for the food and the mortgage and the bills. I pay for everything.”

  “Bullshit.”

  I shrugged.

  “Bullshit,” Deirdre said again with even more feeling. “How long has this been going on?”

  “For three years. Since right after I moved home. You know when she got sick she had to leave her job at the bank. And she told me she didn’t have the money, so I paid.”

  “That’s such crap,” Deirdre said. “She’s got to have something. I mean, I know she was just a secretary, but she was there for years. She must have gotten some retirement or something. Some savings . . . something.”

  “I don’t know anything about it except what she told me. Why don’t you ask her, if you want to know.” I suddenly felt exhausted. I sat down in one of the kitchen chairs.

  “I really need the money, Nor. Seriously.”

  I wondered if using my childhood nickname was unconscious or some sort of strategy, an attempt to call on the old times, old loyalties, old affection. Whatever it was, I matched her nickname for nickname.

  “I don’t have it, D. I’m sorry. But I just don’t have it.”

  “You want us to be out on the street?” my sister said, almost desperately. If it was an act, it was a good one.

  “You’re not going to be out on the street. Boyd wouldn’t let that happen.”

  “Boyd’s gone,” Deirdre said quietly.

  I looked up at my sister. Deirdre was standing there, looking lost. I’d never seen my sister look quite like that before.

  “He’s left before, and he’s always come back,” I said.

  Boyd was a binge drinker. He sometimes went months without drinking, he went to meetings, he did everything he was supposed to do. Then he’d disappear for a week, sometimes two. Once I think he disappeared for a month, and my sister was convinced he was dead somewhere. When he showed up, he was always full of apologies. He would promise it would never happen again. But it always did.

  “No,” my sister said. “It’s different this time. He’s not off drinking somewhere. He left me for someone else. Someone he met in AA. He says she understands him. She’ll help him stay clean, unlike me. Apparently I drive him to drink. And he never wanted the twins. He says he can’t be sober and handle the pressures of being a father.”

  “But he can’t just leave. He still has to help you. He can’t just abandon all his responsibilities.”

  “Oh, come on, Nor. Grow up. It’s Boyd we’re talking about. What else has he been doing all his life but abandoning his responsibilities? Sometimes I think he’s not even really an alcoholic. I think it just gives him an excuse to disappear, and that every time he leaves, he’s really secretly hoping I won’t take him back. That I’ll drop him like a hot potato, like what happened with all his jobs. His bosses—they could see the writing on the wall. Why couldn’t I? But no, I had to go have babies with him because I thought I could get him to straighten up that way. What a joke. Even before the babies, it was too much for him. He had to escape when it was just me. Why did I think that loading on more would make it better?”

  She paused for a moment, then she said suddenly, “You knew.”

  “Me?” I hadn’t seen this coming.

  “Yes. I still remember what you said to me when you first met him.”

  I had no memory of it. “What did I say?” I asked.

  “Well, you said he seemed fun.”

  “He was,” I said, recalling Boyd’s antics that first night I met him. He seemed to take special delight in making me laugh, no matter how outrageous he had to get.

  I also remembered how jealous Dan had gotten. He said he didn’t like Boyd, didn’t trust him, thought I should tell my sister he was bad news. And then, sometime later, he asked me why I never laughed at his jokes. That comment in itself would have been funny if Dan hadn’t been serious. But that was the thing—Dan was always serious. Then he said (and I remembered this later) that couples should laugh more than we did. I remembered that when he left me for Stacey the giggler.

  “But it was what you said after that that I’m talking about,” Deirdre said.

  “I liked Boyd. I don’t think I said anything bad about him.”

  “You said that he couldn’t sit still.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  It was true. I don’t think Boyd stayed seated in a chair for more than five minutes the whole night.

  “And you asked me what it was like to be in a relationship with someone who couldn’t sit still. I tried to forget about it at the time. After all, look at who you were with—you weren’t the best judge of men.”

  I thought of the encounter at the 7-Eleven the night before. For once I could wholeheartedly agree with my sister.

  She went on, “But I never forgot when you asked me that. And I can tell you the answer now. Exhausting. It’s exhausting to be with someone like that. But there were also times he could sit still, and that was almost worse. It was as if he’d run out of gas, and then he’d crash—for days sometimes. And he’d just sit in front of the television, and he wouldn’t move. He’d even sleep there. And you know how most of the time you couldn’t shut him up? Well, it was like pulling teeth to get a couple of words out of him when he was like that. And the more we were together, the more he seemed to be like that. The other was exhausting, but that . . . that was scary. And I knew it was me. I wasn’t fun enough anymore. I didn’t make him happy.”

  “D, I know everyone says this, but it wasn’t you.”

  Deirdre wiped her face almost angrily. My sister never cried.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said abruptly. “He’s gone now. And he’s not going to take care of what you call ‘his responsibilities.’ And if I don’t find the rent for this month, we’re going to lose the apartment. We’re already behind. I really don’t know what else to do. I wouldn’t ask you if I had any other option. I don’t like asking you for this, Nor, but I’m really desperate. I understand that you don’t have the money, but maybe you can take out a loan? I tried. They turned me down. My credit is for shit.”

  It was true, I suddenly realized—Deirdre had a hard time asking for things.

  I said reluctantly, “The thing is, I don’t think the bank would let me take another loan. I could try; since Mom worked there for so long, they might make an exception, but I think the rules about it have gotten really strict.”

  “Another loan?”

  “I had to take a loan back at the beginning of the year.”

  Deirdre looked as dismayed about the loan as I was whenever I thought about it. That’s why I tried not to think about it. The loan had seemed to be a good idea at the time. The interest rates on my credit card were outrageously high, and Mom seemed to be better, and I thought I might be moving out. It seemed to make sense to take out a loan to pay off the credit card and cover my expenses while I looked for a job. I had to fly back and forth to Chicago a few times while looking for a job, and after I found one, I needed money for the down payment on the apartment. Of course, that was just money down the drain when our mother got sick again and I let the job and the apartment and everything go in order to stay on here.

  “God, you’re such a sucker. And now you won’t help where it would actually do some good. I can’t believe you did it for her and you won’t do it for me.”

  “Come on, D, it’s not like that. It’s not like you both came to me at the same time and asked. I didn’t know this was going to happen. I didn’t know you’d need money.”

  “Whatever. You can try to sugarcoat it all you want, but basically you’re saying you won’t help me.”

  “It’s not that I won’t. I can’t. I swear, if there were anything I could do, I would do it. Why don’t you move home for a bit? I can cover most of the bills here. We can buy what we need from the store on the credit card. I can help out with looking
after the kids—”

  “Are you kidding me?” Deirdre said. “I would never bring my children into this house, with her. Never. I’d rather go to a homeless shelter than bring them here. In fact, I don’t know how you live here. I really don’t.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. I always tried to remind myself that she had been older and wilder, and she had taken the brunt of our mother’s moods when we were growing up. I remembered once when Deirdre was about nine or ten, our mother had started hitting her hard across the face—open-faced slaps that echoed with the sharp crack of force. Again and again and again. Our mother had hit us before, but this time Deirdre hit her back—and not just a slap. She delivered a dead-on right hook that gave our mother a black eye for two weeks. After that our mother never hit either of us again.

  I said, “Mom’s different now. She’s a different person.”

  Usually, Deirdre got angry when I said this. But this time she just shook her head. “She’s the same, Nor. She’s exactly the same. You just can’t see it.”

  “What do you mean, I can’t see it? I live with her.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You see what you want to see.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Never mind. Just forget I said anything about any of this, all right? It’s not your problem; it’s my problem. I’ll deal with it. I’ll get the money somehow.”

  I suddenly missed being kids, when we promised that we would always be there for each other—that we would always rescue each other. Life had shown us pretty clearly that rescue wasn’t always possible.

  “I’m sorry that Boyd left,” I said, feeling useless.

  “I’m not. I’m better off without that asshole,” Deirdre said. But I could tell she was lying. I could hear it in her voice—the difference between really believing something and wanting to believe something. Deirdre was trying to convince herself of something she didn’t feel at all. “You’re lucky Dan left you,” she said. “You’re lucky you’re alone. It’s better that way. It’s not worth it.”

  My sister was the master of the backhanded compliment. The thing was, Deirdre was only saying aloud what I had been trying to tell myself for years.

  After last night, I shouldn’t have trouble believing it. I had every piece of evidence that relationships ended in a mess, a car wreck of shattered trust and broken love. But sitting in the kitchen with my sister, with the smell of the coffee brewing and the quiet of the night outside, I finally told the truth. Before this I told myself I had given up, but I hadn’t. And now I voiced my hidden hope.

  “I could still meet someone,” I said.

  Deirdre snorted. “In this town? Yeah, right.”

  “You never know.”

  And later I wondered if that moment of belief was what drew him like a magnet to me. But if I believed that, I’d have to wonder about the tragedy that was coming along with him.

  Sometimes it is best not to know. I think that was why Tammy didn’t tell me more about what she’d seen. She knew that sometimes the veil God draws over the future is the greatest kindness he has to give.

  Timothy

  Timothy Arrives in Nebraska

  When I got off the jet in Omaha early Monday morning, I got a message from my assistant telling me that my meeting with Warren was not going to happen until Wednesday morning.

  I could have told the crew to turn around and take me back to New York so I could be in the office to follow the surging and plunging market. But then I thought again. In financial panics, people often overreact. I had made some bets the week before, and if I went back to the office I would only second- or third-guess them. I’ve found, over the years, that the initial gut reaction is the one that pays. I’d read a book about how that split-second gut reaction seemed to tap into some larger intelligence. On Wall Street there is reverence for the man whose gut can be trusted—for the man who has the balls to stand behind his hunches.

  My hunches were good, and people were starting to notice. The only reason I cared was that if enough people start listening to you, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You buy a stock, everyone who trusts you does the same, and like magic, the stock price goes up. Or you sell and dozens of people jump ship with you. Again you’re proven right, without even needing to be right.

  I decided, not only was I going to leave my bets in place, I wasn’t even going to look. So I wasn’t going to bother going back to New York. But I had been to Omaha before, and I knew I didn’t want to spend two days there, sitting in my hotel room or sitting in some restaurant alone eating steak.

  So I did what anyone would do. I rented a car. It was October, but it felt like a summer day, so I got a convertible, threw my bag in the back, and I started driving.

  Nora

  Nora Meets Timothy

  Finally, it was Monday—heart-attack Monday—and I couldn’t have been happier to go back to work.

  I worked at Starbox on Washburn. Not Starbucks but Starbox. There were fewer than thirty Starbucks in the whole state of Kansas, and they were mostly in the bigger cities. About five years before, at the height of the Starbucks craze, my boss, Neil, decided our town deserved a gourmet coffee shop too. When he designed the store, he used the Starbucks layout, the Starbucks menu, and (almost) the Starbucks name. The only difference was that with the name Starbox, he thought it would be cute to put stars on the ceiling of the store.

  I thought it was a miracle that he hadn’t gotten sued for copyright infringement. But, then again, there would have been nothing to get. It turned out that the gourmet coffee market was not a gold mine waiting to be tapped, at least not in our town. People preferred to go to Joe’s Diner and get a cup of coffee there for fifty cents, rather than coming into Starbox and paying three or four dollars for something that, as one town resident said, didn’t even taste like coffee but more like some kind of liquid dessert. The people in our town didn’t seem to have a lot of free time; they didn’t seem to have laptops they would want to work on while sipping lattes. They liked their coffee simple, and even if they came in to take a look, they just as often left without buying anything. Almost everyone asked me, “What does ‘Venti’ mean?” I had to explain that it was a large. “So what is a Tall?” they asked. And I told them that was a small. Then they’d shake their heads and ask, “Then why don’t you just say that?”

  That was a question I couldn’t answer.

  As a result, a whole hour could, and often did, go by without anyone coming into the store. Then it was just my boss and me.

  It was tough for the first year that I worked there. There were times I thought I might go crazy, but sometime in the second year I realized I had started to enjoy it. It happened almost without my noticing. Nothing actually changed, but somehow what had once made me miserable, now I found I enjoyed. I loved the smell of coffee. I loved the hush that descended on the store when it was empty. And I loved the big plate-glass windows that faced the empty lot across the street where the Arby’s used to be before they tore it down a few years back. Beyond the empty lot there was the parking lot for the bowling alley, and beyond that I could see the wheat fields that surrounded the town, short and shorn, the stubble a pale dull tan. Every afternoon, when the sun dropped low enough in the sky, the rays streamed in over those fields, sparkling off the roofs of the cars parked for the afternoon bowling league, straight through those huge plate-glass windows.

  I loved it, but the sun on those windows drove Neil crazy. He was always trying to get the glass perfectly, spotlessly, transparently clean. He was on medication for OCD, but it didn’t seem to be helping. He’d declare the windows clean in the morning, but once the afternoon sun hit, streaks and smudges suddenly appeared, like invisible writing illuminated under ultraviolet light. Neil seemed to think that if only he found the right product, that first wipe of the cloth could produce a pure arc of clarity.

  It seemed like every week Neil would come in with some new cleaning solution. This week was no different. T
hat morning Neil came in with yet another bag. He’d been up to Wichita over the weekend, to the Bed Bath & Beyond up there, because he read about a product called Perfect Glass. The label made the claim, “leaves glass looking perfect!” and he’d bought a special cloth that was designed specifically for glass cleaning, also guaranteed not to leave streaks.

  He was certain it was going to work this time.

  I was not so hopeful. But I didn’t mind. Trying to get those windows clean didn’t seem more ridiculous than anything else in my life. But by midday, before the sun got low enough to hit the widows, the clouds rolled in. Outside the window, the sky was an expanse of rolling bands of dark and light and dark and light, undulating into the distance as far as I could see.

  Even without the sun, Neil couldn’t wait any longer. He gave me the bottle and the cloth and told me to get started. The fabric of the cloth felt strange: it was soft and should have felt nice, but it gripped the skin of my hands in a strange way that made my stomach a little queasy. I sprayed a fine mist on the clear glass and wiped it down. The cloth didn’t exactly absorb the liquid. It seemed to just smear it across the glass, but with enough rubbing, it eventually dried. I sprayed again and repeated the rubbing. Neil stood behind me the whole time, with his arms crossed, his head thrown back, and his eyes in an intense squint.

  After a few minutes, he said, “I think it might be working. It’s definitely better. Don’t you think it’s better?’

  “Yes. Sure,” I said.

  “Are you just saying that, or do you really agree?” Neil asked.

  “I’m just saying it. Neil, it’s not sunny. We can only see the streaks when it’s sunny.”

  “But it could be working. It could be better. Don’t you think it could be?”

  “Yes. Sure. It could be.”

  “You’re not just saying that?” he asked, half-hopefully, half-suspiciously.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but I was spared from more when the bell over the door jingled.