Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [80]
AT SOME POINT during the first year or two that my family was settled into the new house on Johnson Creek, a visitor came around. My mother opened the front door one day to find the same man she had seen six years before, seated at the diner in Sacramento. He was still thin, still well-groomed. Up close, Bessie saw that the man had light blue eyes and an attractive, close-mouthed smile, much like her husband. Yes, she thought, looking at this face that both scared and attracted her, this could indeed be one of Frank Gilmore’s missing sons.
“I’m here to see Frank,” the man announced.
Before she could answer, my father was standing by her side. “It’s okay, Betty,” he said. “This is somebody I’ve been expecting.”
My father took the stranger into his office and shut the door behind them. My mother had learned to accept her husband’s secretive ways—or at least she had learned that prying was simply a futile process; if Frank Gilmore didn’t want to talk about something, he didn’t talk about it. For too many years, though, she had lived with the burden of his secret without knowing the truth behind it, and her curiosity was too strong to resist. Next to my father’s office was the staircase that went to the upstairs bedrooms. My mother could sit there and overhear a good part of what was being discussed in the office without being detected.
The man and my father talked for about an hour. The man’s name, my mother learned, was Clarence. She couldn’t understand everything that was being said, but she heard enough to get a fair idea of what my father’s business with this man was, and what had kept him on the run for so long. I’ll never eavesdrop again, she thought to herself, as she moved from the stairs and went to sit at the kitchen table.
After the man left, my father found my mother sitting at the table, staring into her cold cup of coffee. He poured his own cup and sat down beside her. He looked suddenly ten years younger. “Well, that was some good news,” he announced. “That was somebody who came to talk to me about an old debt that I owed. But it’s all been settled now. We don’t have to move around anymore if we don’t want to. I think we can stay here and make Portland our home now.”
My mother kept staring at the table. “Frank,” she said, after several moments, “you can be as angry as you like, but I listened in on some of your conversation with that man. All I can say is, I wish I hadn’t heard what I just heard.”
For once, Frank didn’t seem angry. In fact, he seemed almost relieved. “It all happened a long time ago, Betty,” he said. “I was younger then, drinking more than you’ve ever seen me drink, and I was foolish. I suppose I was desperate, too. It all seemed so easy at first. By the time I realized what I was truly involved in, I was on the run. Running is all I’ve ever known since that time. Running, hiding, living under different names, trying to keep in touch with some people while also trying to lose others. All the time, I kept looking to find a way to make up for it.”
He sighed and sipped at his coffee. “Anyway, that visit I just had means that I’m finally free of it. We don’t have to worry about it ever again. And we don’t have to talk about it ever again.”
“Don’t worry,” my mother said. “I won’t ever say anything about it to anybody. Nobody would believe me anyway. But the next time you’re beating Gary for getting into trouble, you might ask yourself where he got all that from. I think he got the trouble from your blood, Frank. I think he’s your walking shadow.”
My mother kept her promise. Whatever she had learned that day about Frank Gilmore’s secret, she would never fully declare to anybody. One time, though, a few months after my father’s death, she had a phone conversation about the matter with my father’s attorney. Gary was in the house the night she received the call—it was during the last few days of freedom he would ever enjoy with our family