Funny, he hadn’t thought about it until now, but he’d considered that disrespectful of her. And he’d resented her because of it since that day.
He shook himself back to the present. “We were raising money for the benevolence fund. Dad was supposed to be there.” Images of him and their father’s best friend, “Uncle” Aaron, pedaling like hell through Connecticut reminded him of how they’d both had anger to work out on those ribbons of asphalt through the countryside. “We made like fifteen hundred bucks for them.”
“I stayed behind.”
“You wanted to go.”
“I was a girl, I wasn’t allowed.” As anger tightened his sister’s features, he realized he’d rarely seen her without that expression hovering close by, a driver waiting to take the wheel. “You were supposed to be home the next night.”
“We decided to hang at the campground.”
“Yeah.”
There was a long pause. “So?”
“A woman showed up at the house the next afternoon. She was young. Pretty for a townie. She was frantic, so Mom invited her inside. When I heard the voices, I tiptoed down the stairs and listened out of sight. The girl was pregnant. She said it was Dad’s.”
A cold shaft went down Tom’s spine. “What are you— who the hell was she?”
“She was his girlfriend. That’s what she told Mom.”
“Jesus . . . Christ. What did Mom do?”
“She wasn’t surprised.”
“Excuse me?”
Anne shrugged and sat back in the lawn chair. “I gathered this wasn’t the first time this had happened. That a woman showed up at the house. Also got the feeling that the girl had been banking on a very different outcome than carrying the baby of a dead fireman. She was looking for money. For an abortion. She’d just turned twenty.”
Tom stared at his sister, looking for signs that this had been blown out of proportion, improperly extrapolated, falsely reported.
“I’d spent my life trying to impress that man,” she said. “And he knocks up a nineteen-year-old? And then Mom . . . she gave the girl the money. She didn’t even seem upset. It was like paying off a yardman for godsakes. I didn’t sleep all night. I just kind of was done with them both at that point. Mom, I’d never had anything in common with. She was always pushing me into these frilly, flowery dresses, and trying to get me to go to dance class. I’d been sick of her for a while, but after that? I just lost all respect for the woman. Like, yell. Throw things. Stand up for yourself. Leave the bastard. But don’t roll over like you don’t have a voice in your own life. It’s like she was just cleaning up a mess for him—how the hell could she live with herself?”
Nineteen? Tom thought. Nineteen.
As he did the math, he figured his father had been just two years older than he was. The thought of a relationship like that made his stomach roll.
“I just refused to buy into the lie.” Anne shook her head. “Dad was supposed to be this hero down at the station, this stand-up guy who rescued people and saved pets by running into burning buildings. All I’d ever wanted to be was him. And then Mom was this cardboard cutout of a woman, this pretty piece of fluff with no opinions of her own and no direction except for what he gave her. They brought me into this world. I guess I owe them for that. But I don’t like either as people, and wouldn’t choose to associate with them otherwise. At the end of the day, he fucked a teenager and she enabled him, and it wasn’t the first time. And that’s too ugly for me to bother trying to rationalize.”
Tom exhaled like somebody was standing on his chest, the breath leaving him in a rush with no inhale in the cue behind the expulsion.
“You had no idea, huh,” his sister said quietly.
He just shook his head. “Is it wrong to say . . . I liked the hero image better?”
“No, it’s honest.”
“Do you know who the girl was?”
“No. I’d never seen her before. And as far as I know, she never came back.” Anne cursed. “How many others were there, you know? I mean, you don’t just start there. That girl was the culmination of a pattern. Of a predator.”
Images of their father, tall and strong, in turnouts at the station came to him. Like Anne, Tom had molded a life on living up to those memories, and the fact that the man had been killed early had turned those recollections into legend.
Taken the man and made him a god.
The Bible had a point about not worshipping false idols, didn’t it.
* * *
When Anne finally left the house, she was nervous leaving her brother on that porch. He was too still, too composed, for the bomb she’d just dropped on his head.
Pent-up anger had made her speak, but as she got into her car, she wondered whether she’d done the right thing. There had never been anyone else to go to about it all, although now she wondered why she’d stayed silent. Didn’t that make her as bad as her mother, who’d covered up things? Looking at it like that, she should have told Tom long ago.
But she hadn’t. When would she have had the chance? Tom was just like she was, behind a fence of barbed wire when it came to things of a personal nature.
She’d finally done the right thing, she guessed. Pulled back the curtain. Cut the shit. Spoken the truth.
So why did she feel so goddamn awful.
Driving through familiar streets, she got caught up in the past, remembering running after her brother, being left out from things because she was a girl, looking up to her father. She had ended up sidelined with her mother, relegated to cheerleader instead of participant because of something she couldn’t change and hadn’t volunteered for.
And her mom had been perfectly fine with all that, content to raise a daughter in her image of pretty possession instead of equal partner.
Then again, to do it any other way would shine light on how fucking lame her own existence was. And we wouldn’t want to do that, especially not when there was furniture to move around and clothes to pick out.
That funeral of her father’s had been a somber display of firefighters coming out to honor one of their dead, and that was the last afternoon Anne had been proud to be an Ashburn. After the service at St. Mary’s, she and her mom and Tom had gotten in a Lincoln Town Car that had a pair of purple flags on either side of its front grille. As her mother had insisted that everyone have a Certs so that their breath was clean, they gone to the Catholic cemetery where the family plot was.
It had been a spring day, cold and bracing, the wind eating through coats and chilling ears and noses in spite of the sun in the sky. After disembarking from the limo with her minty-fresh breath, she had stood in her black dress, next to her mother in a black dress, by her brother in a black suit, in front of the black hole of the grave. The slow parade of men trooping by the grave site had been split into two halves, with the fire engine bearing her father’s coffin in the middle. The truck had been the one he had crewed, and it had been draped in black bunting.
Not one of those men had cried.
And so neither had Anne. Even as the men had shifted her father off that engine’s top deck and carried him over to the grave that was waiting for him, even as the little girl inside of her had wept and been lost, she had refused to break with the decorum that was all around her.
She had searched for women on the service. Been relieved to find four or five in the two hundred or so people in uniform because that meant that she had a shot.
Even Tom had cried. Not her, though. Not even after the priest in the black robes with the white scarf hanging down his torso had said words and then her father, her hero, the head of their family, had been lowered into the greedy earth.
And then the girl had shown up at the house.
She had stayed about an hour. Anne had tiptoed back to her room when the conversation had come to an end, the price of $582 given, the question of a check answered, her mother heading to the kitchen for her purse.
The windows by Anne’s bed had looked out on the front yard, and the crappy car parked across from the house had been one she’d never seen in the neighborhood.
The girl had left and walked over to it. She’d put the check in the pocket of her jeans as she’d gotten in, and as she’d turned around, Anne had seen her face. If it had been a put-on, then she’d been a terrific actress.