The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [96]
He was thirteen, too large to paddle, yet she paddled him anyway. And he slapped her. It was the most shocking thing that ever happened to Doris. Even Go-Go was appalled, bursting into tears. Doris sobbed, too, hugging him fiercely, something else for which he was too large, too old. He begged her not to tell his father, or even his brothers, about the slap. She had no desire to tell anyone. In Doris’s opinion, Go-Go was right to slap her. Yes, he had dropped the pitcher, but only because she yelled at him. No, he shouldn’t have picked it up in the first place, but it was a beautiful thing in a house with very few beautiful things. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to touch it, even if he had been explicitly forbidden to do so.
And Go-Go, unlike the other men in the house, noticed beautiful things, beautiful people. As he got older, he cared about his clothes, dressing better than either brother. He chose beautiful wives. Merely beautiful, unfortunately, with little else to offer, especially that first one. Terrible, terrible girl, and Doris blames herself for that choice, too. Lori wasn’t much better, in Doris’s estimation, but she didn’t pummel Go-Go, and she was the mother of two of Doris’s grandchildren. Lori has power over Doris, and she knows it. Vivian plays the same game. Just this afternoon, Sean, in his regular weekly call, admitted that he would be visiting alone for Easter because Duncan has other plans. He tried to disguise it as positive news—such a good cause, very valuable for his college application, who could be a better chaperone than Vivian. There’s a name for what her son is, and it isn’t very polite.
What Sean didn’t realize was that Doris considered it a case of good news/bad news. It is bad news that she won’t see Duncan, but very good news that she doesn’t have to see Vivian, who always enters the house on Sekots Lane as if it smells. True, sometimes the odor of cabbage lingers—everyone else in the family loves her cabbage rolls—but the house is pin neat these days, a perfect case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for. It is neat because there is no one to clean up after except herself. It takes Doris three days to fill the dishwasher, almost a week to have a load of clothes to run through the wash. If it weren’t for the dogs, she’d probably never have to sweep the floors. She remembers—not quite wistfully, but with a little more perspective—the days when she thought she would be found dead under a mound of boys’ underwear.
Yet there also is solace in being alone because her loneliness makes sense now: she is lonely because she is alone. Why was she lonely when the boys were here, when Tim Senior was still alive? Part of it was being the only female, the butt of every joke. Tim grew disenchanted with her for a time, and he let the boys see that. Doris Halloran, the enemy of fun. Now Doris believes she was born lonely. Lonely is who she is. If she had been born a man, she would have been a good priest, yet she didn’t think she was cut out to be a nun. Nuns were meant to function in groups. Priests got to run the show.
She had enjoyed the final years with Tim Senior, when it was just the two of them, with occasional rebounds, as they called them, from Go-Go. There is something to be said for lowered expectations. Tim mellowed a lot as he aged, especially when he saw how the boys turned out. It gave him a thrill when one of Tim Junior’s cases ended up in the news, and he endorsed Sean’s idea—really Vivian’s scheme, in Doris’s view—to leave journalism for a more lucrative field.
Go-Go’s fitful path through life was hard on them both, but Tim Senior himself had been in his midforties when he found the right professional fit, running a small handyman company. Funny, because he wasn’t particularly handy, but then he wasn’t the handyman. He was