Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

“I don’t want to go. But by then I expect you’ll be a grown woman as old as Mommy and Daddy are now with children of your own. You don’t need to worry about this, okay? I’ll stay as long as I can.”

“You promise?”

“I promise,” Ransom said, and his voice was suddenly husky.

“Daddy?”

“What?”

“I know a joke.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Orange.”

“Orange, who?”

“Orange you glad to see me?”

Ran laughed foolishly at this.

“Daddy?”

“What?”

And just that quickly, she was gone. As he reached across and turned the lamp off, he remembered Abner Gant coming up at his father’s funeral. “He never missed a day of work,” he said, and that was it, the one ray of light that escaped the black hole of Mel’s life. Lying there, Ran suddenly wondered what his little girl would say of him. What would Charlie? Claire?

Downstairs, she laughed a laugh he hadn’t heard in longer than he cared to think about, and Ran thought about the time she’d come to Killdeer right before the wedding. Mel, dying then and drinking harder than ever, asked her if she wanted one—like the leper in Papillon offering his cigar to Steve McQueen—and Claire DeLay from Charleston, in her sleeveless linen dress, with her yellow cashmere sweater tied around her neck, said, “Sure, why not?” and tossed back a shot of Chateau Shotgun Shack, said, “Ahhh,” and wiped her hand across her mouth. Mel’s eyes moistened like an old hound’s when its master walks into the room, slain by the same thing that slew his son. Mel opened up and told her about the farm where he grew up, about suckering and tobacco worms and riding a canvas drag of primed leaves to the barn behind Commander, his daddy’s mule, and Ransom, who had never heard these stories, never heard his father speak twenty consecutive words, listened from the kitchen, amazed, and finally hurt. He went out on the kitchen steps to smoke and stared at the old Thunderbird, still up on blocks, and when Mel fell asleep, Claire found him there.

“So,” he said, “I guess you’re going to tell me he’s not that bad after all.”

“No, he’s pretty bad.”

“So now you know.”

“Now I know.”

“It’s not too late to call it off.”

Claire laughed and Ransom studied her with his sad, soulful stare and understood she thought he was joking.

He’d always wanted to give his old man the kind of compassion Claire showed that afternoon, but the best Ran had been able to come up with was to write a check to have the Thunderbird restored. When he pulled it to the curb, the whole block had turned out to look, and Ran was nursing fantasies of Mel like a kid with a new bike, kicking the tires, dying to take her for a spin. Instead, his father walked around the car without a word, picked a fleck of paste wax the detailer had missed off the Continental spare, stared at it on his fingertip, then turned that haunted stare on Ran, not only without gratitude, but with more resentment than before. It took him a long time to understand that Mel, by then, was past the point of wanting the car fixed, if indeed he ever had, and that its brokenness was part, perhaps the most part, of what he loved, and Ran had taken that away. So Mel died, and the sort of simple interchange Claire had with him that day never passed between him and his son.

Remembering this, Ran realized that in the same way he’d forgotten or lost touch with his True Self, he’d also forgotten Claire’s, who she’d been that day without even trying. I think you make it awful hard on Claire—Cell’s words came back, and Ransom, with a heavy pang of ownership, realized it was true. And as he lay beside his sleeping daughter in her narrow bed, it came home to him, not as a thought, but as a stabbing pang in his left side, that what Claire and Cell had told him, the other thing, was also true: I am a racist, he thought. Somewhere, in some deep corner of himself, never fully challenged or expunged, he was, and having loved Shanté first, and maybe even best, did not exonerate him.

Yet it seemed to Ran that he could take this on as well, that along with all the rest, he could find a way to be a friend to Cell again as well as the father Hope and Charlie needed and the husband Claire deserved. Maybe it was not too late to be that other, better man he’d always believed he could be and had never actually been. And in the process, maybe he could write that hit song, too. As he lay there, Ransom’s heart was full, and he realized this was the answer to Claire’s question, the one she’d asked last night, Why are you here?

And he wanted to tell her this; it seemed important to do it now and not to wait. The first step was to come clean about his meds. He was on the landing, starting down, when he caught sight of them in the gilded foyer mirror. Claire and Cell were in the library. He was seated at the partners desk, reading from a book. Claire stood behind him, and as Ransom watched, she raised her hand and rested it lightly on his shoulder, just lightly, familiarly lifted it and left it there. There was nothing untoward in the gesture, yet Ransom tried to swallow and suddenly could not. And at that moment, the laundry hamper, the one from her story, caught his eye. For some reason, his glance was drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet. The wicker creel was full, and in the top of it were Claire’s hot pink underpants, the bold new lingerie upgrade he’d assumed was meant for him. The floor began to desolidify beneath his feet, and when Claire laughed again, it was a laugh he didn’t know, from some