Too Close to Home

“And Mrs. Langley started talking about how kids nowadays, how, you know, they’re more sexually active, and she started asking me whether I was careful, about getting a girl pregnant, and about diseases and stuff, and I told her that, technically speaking, I really hadn’t, you know, hadn’t actually done it yet.” He flashed me a look, like maybe I’d be disappointed, I don’t know. “I said I’d just done some stuff, you know, but not the actual thing.”

“Okay,” said Natalie.

“She asked me if I was nervous about that, about what it would be like the first time, and I guess I said maybe a little, and she said that she might be able to help me out with that nervousness.” He paused, working up to it. “She said, like, if I never told anyone, she could give me kind of a lesson, that it would be our secret.”

We’d been living next door to Mrs. Robinson.

“So you went up to her bedroom,” Natalie Bondurant said.

Derek nodded. “She. . showed me.”

Ellen said, “She raped you.”

Derek screwed up his face. “Not. . really, Mom.”

Natalie again: “Derek, did you ever tell anyone about this? Before now? Before this very moment?”

“No. Not anybody. Nobody.”

“Do you think Mrs. Langley told anyone? Do you think it’s possible that Mr. Langley could have found out about this somehow?”

He shook his head. “I kind of think he might have said something to me.”

“But it’s not something we can prove,” Natalie said. “And now we know how the DNA test is going to come back on that earring. We might have been able to come up with some sort of story of how it got there, but with your fingerprints on the dresser, you’re placed in that room. The prosecution’s probably already working up a theory, that somehow Albert Langley found out you’d slept with his wife, that there was some kind of confrontation that night, one that ended with all of them dead.” She paused. “The good news is-”

“There’s good news?” I said.

“It’s still circumstantial, and a whole lot of conjecture. But it gives the prosecution a much better motive than we thought they had.”

“I’m screwed,” Derek said.

“No,” Natalie Bondurant said. “We just have our work cut out for us.”

Derek looked at his mother, his eyes red. “I’m sorry.”

“We all make mistakes,” Ellen said.

Ditto, I thought.

“I’m never going to get out of here,” he said.

“You can’t think that way,” I said. “Ms. Bondurant, she knows what she’s doing. We’re all doing everything we can. I need you out of here. I can’t cut all those yards without you.” I hoped I could make him smile, but it wasn’t to be.

“I’m sorry I’m such a fuckup.”

“You’re not a fuckup,” I told him.

He shook his head slowly, looked off into space. “I’ve always been a fuckup. I got myself into this by being a fuckup. Even if, somehow, you and Mom manage to get me out of here, I’ll just end up doing something else, because that’s just what I always do. I always fuck up. It’s like the only thing I’m good at.”

Behind us, a door rattled. “It’s time,” said the guard.

Natalie Bondurant was on her feet, telling all of us she’d be in touch, and heading for the door. Ellen and I snuck in some quick hugs and headed for the door. Ellen had slipped out ahead of me when Derek said, “Dad?” I turned.

His eyes met mine. “You know your paintings?”

I thought, Huh? But I said, “Yeah?”

“I know you’ve been thinking about getting rid of them, but I don’t want you to.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I think they’re really good,” Derek said. “I don’t know whether I’ve ever mentioned that.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“If I have to stay here, like, if they keep me in jail a whole long time, like for a few years or forever, would they let me hang one of them in my cell?”

I managed to hold it together long enough to get back in my truck, out of Ellen’s sight.

TWENTY-FIVE

That night, they came for us.

The day itself wound down uneventfully after I got back from seeing Derek. Drew asked me how it went, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it.

At our last house, Drew was having some trouble getting one of the hand mowers to start. He yanked and yanked on the pull cord, pumped the primer button several times, yanked again, then wondered if he might have flooded the damn thing, then decided to give it one last pull.

He pulled so hard, he did something to the mechanism that retracts the cord, and suddenly he had four feet of it dangling over the mower.

“Well, shit,” he said when I walked over to see what had happened.

“No big deal,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said, holding the grip at the end of the cord, spinning the line around like it was a skipping rope. “It just came out.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“I could fix it. I could take it apart, see what I’ve done, rewind the cord-well, if I had the right tools.”

“I’ve got everything I need in my shed,” I said. “I can do it.”

“If you want, I could come over later tonight, after. . after I make my mom’s dinner. You’ve got enough on your plate, Jim, without having to clean up after my mistakes.”