The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [31]
“There are no good deaths,” Gwen says, just to say something.
“Oh, no,” her father says, adamant. “There are some. You haven’t known any, yet. But I’m planning on one.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
Her father smiles. “You look so like your mother. You should keep that.”
Gwen glances down. She hasn’t registered the fact that she’s wearing one of her mother’s old cashmere cardigans, truly old, one she must have worn as a teenager, embroidered with pearls and sequins. When the doorbell rang, she was in too much of a hurry to take it off. Now she feels guilty, as if she’s been caught rummaging through things that are rightfully her father’s, not hers, waiting for the good death he has just promised her.
“I didn’t mean—I never realized there was so much of her stuff left, and I thought I might organize it.”
“You should go home, Gwen.”
“I’ll leave in a little bit. No use fighting the traffic.”
“I mean to stay.”
“No.”
“Nothing’s perfect,” her father says. “Nobody’s perfect.”
“Karl is. Haven’t you heard? Haven’t you seen his television alter ego, solving everyone’s problems?”
Her father sighs.
“You told me not to marry him.”
“I told you what it would be like to be married to a surgeon. That’s not the same thing. Now there’s a child. Think of her.”
“Maybe I am thinking of her.”
“When we were young, your mother and I—well, not young exactly, I was never young with her, but younger—and you were the only one left at home, there were so many divorces all of a sudden, so many parents who thought their children couldn’t be happy unless they, the parents, were happy. I’m afraid that’s simply not true.”
“You had a great marriage, Dad. It’s not fair to lecture others on marriage, when you had such a good one.”
Her father doesn’t answer right away. “I see your point of view,” he says, forever fair and evenhanded. Later, she will parse these words. Not: you’re right. But: I see your point of view. Was he trying to suggest that his marriage, like hers, might have looked better to those outside it than those in it? But, no, that’s impossible. Everyone knows that the Robisons loved each other madly.
Chapter Ten
Autumn 1978–Winter 1979
We would have quickly grown tired of Chicken George except for one thing: he turned out to be mysterious. At least, that’s the way we saw it: He cultivated mystery, excited our curiosity. He was vague in the face of all questions, no matter how benign. How he had come to live in this house, when he had learned the guitar. How old he was. (Go-Go asked the last one. The rest of us knew better than to ask a grown-up’s age.) He avoided all questions and had few of his own, other than: “What did you bring me?” Still, it would have been better, harsh as it sounds, if we had stopped visiting him. It’s nice to think so, at any rate, because if we had tired of him, then things might have gone differently. And this is a story about things we wished had gone differently. Aren’t all stories?
Anyway, Chicken George had a way of disappearing. The first time, it was November, and we assumed it was weather-related. The wind had started to kick up, the pleasant tang of October had given way to a steady dank cold. Weather was more reliable then. This is not memory, but hard scientific fact. The weather of our childhood was part of an unusually temperate time on our planet, with fewer extreme variations. The things we have seen in recent years—the events of just the past year, with almost a hundred inches of snow in Baltimore and floods, not to mention volcanoes and earthquakes, birds falling from the skies—might well be connected to climate change, the wear and tear that humans wreak on a planet. We are not here to argue science. But weather was more predictable then, and when it turned cold, it stayed cold, so cold the pond froze for days, even weeks of ice-skating. It made sense that Chicken George would disappear during such weather. Not that one could tell, by the look of the cabin, that anything had changed. It was