Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [120]
Lewis and Barbara stayed with Libby so her parents could get some dinner. Lewis liked sitting in the dim, quiet room. At one point, when Barbara went out to call her boyfriend, he cried a little. He rinsed out another washcloth and held it to his own face until Libby spoke. “Lewis? Are you all right?”
He told her his version of the funeral. “The ceremony was a little short.”
She closed her eyes. Let out a long breath.
“I’m going to be okay, I think,” she said. “I’m going to carry this baby full-term and all of us are somehow going to be okay.”
Hearing this, Lewis’s chest started to jump. He couldn’t stop it. First, he made a high, soaring whine, then began to sob. He held the washcloth against his mouth as a kind of muffler—he didn’t want the whole hospital staff running in to see what all the racket was about. Libby looked on, tears streaming from her bright eyes. Lewis bent over, bellowed into his lap, and she touched his hair, his forehead, the edges of his arms, whatever part of him she could reach.
LIBBY’S refusal to go home with her parents caused some bad feeling, especially between mother and daughter.
Initially, she wanted to go back to her house on her property, but David and Lewis suggested she move into Red’s bungalow on the farm so they could keep an eye on her. After some consideration, she agreed. This caused further ill will: Evelyn was convinced that staying at Red’s place would be gratuitously distressing, while David and Lewis argued that Libby wouldn’t feel so isolated, and also she could work there, from the bed, once she felt up to it.
Lewis spent Monday afternoon at Libby’s bungalow catching her two young cats, then set up a bedside desk at Red’s with her computer and telephone. The next afternoon, Libby came home from the hospital. When Lewis stopped in to see her, Evelyn was in the kitchen unpacking groceries. “It almost killed her to walk in here,” she told him in a harsh whisper.
Hot with shame, Lewis tapped on the bedroom door.
Libby smiled, though her eyes and nose were red and her cheeks were wet. The cats curled like round pillows on the bed, one black, one calico. “Great desk setup,” she said. “And these monsters …” She scratched the calico’s head. “You haven’t seen Billie, have you?”
Lewis gave a short laugh. “Billie and I don’t exactly hang out much.”
“Not even in town or driving around? I’m just curious to know if she’s here or gone.”
“Here, I guess, unless someone else is driving her truck.”
Libby pulled the sheets over her face and he could see her body quaking.
Evelyn came in behind him. “Oh, honey, you can’t keep this up….” She sighed and turned to Lewis. “I told her it would be too emotional for her to be here.”
Every time Libby collapsed, Evelyn blamed it on her being in Red’s house, and spoke in sharp, hurried tones, as if a week of grief were already excessive. After three or four days, there was a scene and Libby asked her mother to leave. Barbara came up for the next ten days and Libby still cried frequently, but was less prone to wild bouts of self-reproach.
Together, everyone at Round Rock moved slowly out of a stunned lethargy. In retrospect, the first week following Red’s death—the huge nightly AA meetings, the funeral—seemed lit in rich, somber tones and executed in slow motion. Bit by bit, Lewis felt himself jerked back into the harsh glare of daily life with all its demands and the awful knowledge that Red would not be joining the staff for coffee in the mornings. He would not be telling stories while painting at the new house. He would not walk by on his morning rounds or clatter past in his old Ford truck.
The truck was at Harry Zeno’s junkyard, and Libby asked Lewis to decide whether it should be repaired, sold, or junked. The sheriff had brought in the groceries and new luggage that were strewn in the ditch at the accident, but nobody had gone through the cab.
The junkyard was a small field of wrecked