All-Day Breakfast (20 page)

The back of
the ambulance was quiet, though I couldn't imagine how more than two of them could lie down at one time. Or what their sleepless parents back in Burroughs County had to be thinking. Clint's brother lying wide awake in his hospital bed.

Eighteen inches to my right, thirteen hours after Doug had his brain spilled out, Colleen finally let out one brittle sob like she was choking on a cracker, her face against her knee. I squeezed her bony shoulder, and she sucked a mucousy breath up her nose.

“I can't be
hard
,” she whispered. “I can't. I'm so tired.”

I rubbed between her shoulder blades, steering with one hand down the highway, pin-straight as Josie's hair. I had rubbed Josie's back too, when their mom had died, and held little Ray in my lap, their faces wet and ribcages shuddering. Loss affects you structurally. My hand felt gigantic across Colleen's back.

The mid-morning sky
above southeast Nebraska was charcoal gray, like a saturated sponge hovering over us. Colleen slept sitting up, suspended by her shoulder strap against her cheek, snoring through the roof of her mouth. As I steered the ambulance onto the driveway, gravel crunching beneath our wheels, her eyes snapped open and she slapped her hands against the dashboard. Kids thumped in the back, empty bacon containers sliding around my feet.

“Who's house is that?” Clint muttered, throat sticky from sleep. “That your house, Mr. G?”

I slowed down between the blue-jay whirligigs and the umbrella clothesline.

“Shit,” Colleen said between her teeth. “Is this Hoover? Is this a genius, what do you call it, hiding-in-plain-sight thing? These people's lives in your
hands
, and—”

“This is Pawnee,” I said, peering at the front window's white curtains before I shut off the ignition. “This is my mom's house.”

Colleen wiped a kernel of sleep from her eye. “What does she grow out here?”

“Got a hundred acres that she rents out for hay. Not in shape to do it herself.”

“What about your dad?”

The curtains shifted six inches and, sure enough, Evadare's horn-rims peered out. I put the thing in park and turned the engine off, and without its rumble the world suddenly seemed so quiet that a section of my brain wondered if I'd finally fallen asleep.

“She's a widow.”

“Oh,” Colleen sighed. She fell back in her seat, though her hands were working on the seatbelt latch. I knew from experience that Doug couldn't have been out of her mind for long, but maybe she hadn't specifically thought
widow
too much.

“This looks like kind of a boring place,” said Grace. “Just saying.”

“Does she have chickens, though?” Franny asked.

The seven of us stretched our military-secret arms and legs as we navigated around the puddles—evidently it'd been raining out here. The non-ambulance air smelled fresh as daisies. The kids let us walk ahead, as kids will. A quarter-mile to the east, Sit-Stay Dog Food reared its gray roof, but I didn't bother to point it out. Franny brought her camera out from somewhere and asked us to turn around.

“You
could
leave them here for a while,” Colleen muttered. “We'd find Megan faster—nobody'd look here for them.”

“Not just them,” I said.

“Does she maybe keep rabbits?” asked Franny.

I went up the front step—most of the white paint Lydia had brushed on during her first pregnancy had been scuffed out of existence.

“Well, don't take it personally,” Amber said to Harv. “Just go in the bathroom when we get in, okay? Look if they have hair gel.”

The white door swung open, releasing the hybrid scent of split-pea soup and ammonia, a monstrous thing. Evadare, in sneakers and daisy-print vinyl apron, stood with the toilet brush in her hand—hadn't thought to put it down when she'd heard us drive up. She'd put on weight around the middle and trimmed her perm.

“Pete!” she said, twisting her legs in the doorway. “I never expect to see you!”

Evadare was some kind of Ozark name though she was Czech. This apparent contradiction was more than I could stomach at that moment, and the gentlemanly hand I'd put behind Colleen curled into a fist.

“This is Colleen Avery,” I grinned, “and these all are the collective pride of Hoover High, out on the junior class field trip! Everything quiet? All right if we come in and say hi to Mom?”

“Oh, yes, of course, do your best. Oh, sorry about this.” She flourished the brush like a tennis racket. “You know how a toilet gets!”

Though that would've been her doing alone, since Mom didn't use a toilet. One by one we slid past her.

“Oh, but I hear about Hoover on the radio—so many
fires
, isn't it terrible?”

“Yeah, maybe this isn't a bad time to be out of town.” I kicked my shoes off, like always, under the rack of gilt-edged State Fair plates. “I need to talk to you about that.”

“But don't the children worry about their parents, they want to be at home?”

“No, no, not at all.” Colleen flashed a smile like burnished steel. “Everyone's families are just fine!”

“Anyway, let the children come in and eat a meal. I always want potatoes with breakfast, will they have potatoes?”

Evadare addressed this to the kids but they were too busy staring at the crocheted afghans and driftwood clocks. The eternal blue-and-white palm-tree wallpaper.

“Oh, but your arm?”

“I was born this way,” explained Amber.

Clint dropped to the floor, pulled the
Life
magazines from under the coffee table. Sure, there was enough here to entertain them for a week, maybe two. Keep a low profile, but still do some work around the place—maybe repaint the step!

“Colleen, okay, then you can help me with the frying pans, it will be nice to have someone to talk to. They want toast too? Peter, you go to your mother—no, not down the hall, she is in the study now during the day.”

“Sure,” I said. “Then I'll need to talk to you. About a big favor.”

She turned in the doorway of the paneled kitchen, cleaning her glasses on the hem of her chiffon shirt. Her naked eyes looked vulnerable as egg yolks.

“I will be here whenever you want.”

The study was off the back of the living room, so I went through the bead curtain and straight to the love seat beside Mom's big recliner. She wore a plaid shirt and purple sweatpants that she filled as though she were made of bread dough. She'd been sleeping, and she flinched a fraction of an inch when she heard the curtain, but when she saw it was me she managed to flicker an eyebrow and make a sound in her throat. That was the most she could do, because the year Ray was born she'd been diagnosed with a degenerative disease of the nervous system—it was hard to know exactly what to call it. Most times I came through the door Evadare announced that now it was something else.

The acrid smell of sick person went up into my sinuses, distinct from that of a dying person—whether or not she wanted to, the last doctor said she'd stabilized, so there was no reason she couldn't last forever. Her hair was white now and stuck up like straw, and the shunt for the feeding tube made an extra lump on the side of her big belly.

“And how are you, Mom?” I squeezed her hand, and though I could feel the elastic strength running the length of her fingers she didn't squeeze back. “Josie and Ray, they're good. Send their love. I'm here with my school from Hoover, so they couldn't come. It's too bad.”

I spoke loud and slow, though there was no reason to think her ears weren't working. Her head twitched like maybe she was trying to get a clearer look at me, so I knelt beside her footrest and looked up at her.

“Maybe I don't look so good,” I said. “Been a hard trip so far.”

Her eyes were the same as they'd always been—boring into me, then a smile flashing across her green irises, then boring in again. The rest of her I could never have identified as the person she'd been in Knudsen.

“I guess I probably need a good wash. I'll ask Evadare for a towel, hey?”

But instead of showering I went on sitting, clutching those fingers. Her eyes darted over my face, seeking to comprehend something, and I wondered if maybe because of Pipe #9 I was as unrecognizable from my old self as she was, so I started talking about George Reid's classes at Hoover High and which kids were a pleasure and which gave me trouble. Her eyes settled on the side of my face. We sat quietly then, listening to the clatter from the kitchen and the kids' voices just beyond the curtain.

“Hey,
yeah
,” Grace was saying. “They wallpapered the light switches!”

“It's a valid design choice,” said Clint, “it's a free country.”

“No, c'mon,” said Franny, “if you've got to paper over
everything
, you're covering deep emotional crap. I mean, how far does it go—the toaster?”

A pause.

“You're right about the toaster,” said Harv.

“Oh, I've got to see that!” A floorboard squeaking under Franny.

“If you really think about it, though,” said Clint, probably tightening his scarf, “your whole life is one long design choice.”

“Ooh,” said Amber. “Deep like Jacques Cousteau.”

“Like, do you break your bro's leg or don't you?” Clint went on. “Decide.”

“That paper on the toaster's pretty singed around the edges,” said Harv.

“The stuff is everywhere!” cooed Grace.

I couldn't help but smile. Mom's eyes stayed on me.

“I remember,” I whispered.

When they'd moved into the Pawnee house she'd bought wallpaper that was five dollars a roll over their budget, with that seersucker pattern through it, and if there'd been three feet left over Dad would've locked her outside. So she'd even papered the shelf in the guest room closet.

Mom was falling asleep, her eyelids drooping like drawbridges—no, now they came up again, but slow as a sunrise. Meanwhile I was wondering what Evadare had been eating off that empty plate on the shelf—must've been plain toast, I'd have smelled it if it'd been bacon—then suddenly, inexplicably, I calculated how quickly I could get through the picture window once the house caught fire, and if it would even be physically possible to haul Mom out after me. Would any of those five kids be able to haul her if I wasn't there? Could Colleen? Because after a person got doused from Pipe #9, Old Man Penzler tracked them down, ran them over and set their house on fire, that was standard operating procedure. Maybe the odds were only one in a hundred that James Jones knew where we were, that he'd even narrowed it down to Pawnee County, but that still made it too risky to leave the kids with my mom and Evadare. That had been my plan, but as I held Mom's damp washcloth I could clearly see it wasn't a good one.

“If he won't let us find the Rob dude, we should frickin'
walk
there! Clint, sit the fuck down, man!” Grace's loudest stage whisper. “We can't wander all over, think how rude you're being!”

“Sorry, Ma.” My free hand wiped her chin with the purple washcloth. “They've kind of got tempers, these kids.”

English saddle
, she'd always insisted as we'd strolled around Lincoln.
I don't want you raising cowboys
.

“Okay,” Evadare announced behind me. “The breakfast is served. They asked for bacon, but I'll give you ham salad to take away. What did you want to ask about?”

I got up and put an arm around her shoulders. Her eyes widened.

“Changed my mind,” I said. “Forget it. After we eat I'll make a phone call.”

“Rob?” I tried
to relax my voice, so it wouldn't sound like the whole project wasn't on his shoulders. “Peter Giller here. Calling you back.”

“I'd been
wondering
about you—hey, three guesses what I'm doing right now!”

I stared at the side of the guest-room bureau, papered with blue palm trees. I couldn't feel my feet. Then I could feel them again.

“Playing golf,” I guessed.

“No.”

On top of the bureau, a cut-glass dish held fragments of bluish windshield glass.

“Eating bacon,” I said.

“Dang, you're not playing games. What do you want?”

“I'll be in Lancaster County in one hour.”

“How many are you?”

“Seven.”

“Superlative. All with the same problem?”

“One girl's lost an arm, everybody else, not so extreme. Though to be honest, it's our brains that need to hole up for a while. Been rough.”

“Oh, it's one and the same. Diet and attitude.” I pictured him waving a big hand back at Dockside, glorying in some esoteric contraption. “Where you coming in from?”

“Pawnee.”

“Tell your seven they'll need clothes, toiletries, but food's taken care of—oh, and as of now, we're confiscating cell phones. All right, you got a pen?”

“Hold on, before I forget, wait—have you got a girl named Megan Avery there? One of my students?”

“Avery.”

At his end, cutlery dropped onto a plate and I could hear him call out a question.

“She's learning the injector,” he finally said. “Megan. She's on shift until two. Eyeball trouble, if memory serves.”

When I came out of the guest room I heard Evadare's voice at a higher pitch than usual, and hurried into the living room to see her steering Franny out through my mom's bead curtain. The other four filed behind them.

“Hey, life doesn't last, Beanie Babies.” Franny grinned, her big bracelets clanking together, and tried to show Evadare her phone. “We got to document it, right?”

“Give her privacy,” Evadare snapped. “Her dignity!”

I slipped through the curtain.