The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [56]
Sean will be OK, that’s a given. He’s got a shot at the National Merit Scholarship, which would be sweet. And maybe the little one will straighten out. He’s a mess, but Tim sees something of himself in Go-Go’s chaos, a too-big-for-itself energy that needs only to be organized and focused. Tim was the same way before the Marines put him together. He volunteered when he was eighteen, knowing he wasn’t going to get a deferment or exemption. But by volunteering, he had been free to choose the branch he wanted. The Marines suited a scrappy little bantam like Tim, who had learned to fight growing up in the Pigtown neighborhood in Southwest Baltimore. He also happened to catch a break, for once in his fucking life, got in after Korea and out before Vietnam started to escalate, then went to UB on the GI Bill. There’s another option for his boys. Volunteer, then let Uncle Sam pay for tuition. What’s the risk? There are no wars. Let those towelheads scream and gibber. They couldn’t organize a panty raid in an underwear factory.
He glances at his wristwatch, at Doris’s back at the sink, where she is moving a dishrag around with few noticeable results. A day is a hard thing to fill, especially in these gray winter months when he can’t throw golf clubs in the trunk, spend the afternoon at the public Forest Park course. Doris has to know he isn’t looking for work the whole day long, but she doesn’t dare question him. She doesn’t dare oppose him in any way. And it’s not like he’s ever raised a hand to her. With Doris, all it takes is getting loud, really loud, and she caves. She can’t stand the sound of a raised voice. She’s weak. The weakness in the boys—and there is weakness, a softness, in all of them, even Sean—that’s pure Doris, her blood and her ways. He should have taken a closer look at that family of hers, picked up on the fact that her prettiness wasn’t so much prettiness as frailty. Doris at eighteen was so thin and so pale she glowed, like one of those catfish in the Ozarks. He mistook that for class, breeding, when it was probably anemia and malnutrition. She can barely stand up straight these days. And that glorious, glorious red hair, which once promised to fulfill Tim’s every The Quiet Man/John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara dream of Ireland—it has faded to a pinky color, and you can see her scalp in spots. When he met Doris, her mother was dead and there weren’t a lot of womenfolk in the family, so he didn’t have anyone to study. He should have looked at the men, the most rabbity, watery, bucktoothed, swaybacked bunch of Irishmen he had ever seen in his life. But, like the song said, he only had eyes for Doris. Doris made him feel tender and protective, where other women just made him want to fuck, fast and dirty. Those aren’t the kind of girls you pick to bear your children.
Then again, a milky white, pink-haired rabbit of a girl whose uterus killed as many babies as it made wasn’t the best choice for motherhood, either.
He stubs out his cigarette and stalks out to the car, not bothering to say good-bye. He tells himself that he’s going to Security Square Mall or maybe Westview, drop off a few applications, see that guy he knows at Gordon’s Booksellers. But no one’s in, not at the first couple of places, and he’s at Monaghan’s when it opens its doors at eleven. Not that Tim is a drunk. He can’t afford to be. He nurses one beer, then two, all the way to happy hour, then asks for one more, knowing that the bartender won’t charge him for the third one. The bartender, Jim, is a good guy. He understands that Tim is looking