The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [97]
For Tim Senior, the big secondhand revelation of running Mr. Handy was how—he blushed when he used the word in front of Doris—horny the women were, how often his guys were propositioned. They never said yes. Or at least they told their boss they never said yes. But here was the kicker: These women, in their power suits, married to men pulling down six figures, were gaga for guys with tool belts.
Doris and Tim could talk about sex because they were actually having it again. While her early menopause had seemed tragic at first, the end of her monthlies made it possible for her to have sanctioned sex with her husband with no more fear of creating life—or death. Doris began to take better care of herself and even used Rogaine for her hair loss. They found they could talk about all sorts of things that had once been taboo—the miscarriages, which Tim admitted he blamed on Doris, how cowed she had been by his temper. They could talk about almost anything. Except Go-Go. Any discussion of their youngest son either escalated into an argument or ended abruptly, as if they had run into something hard and unyielding.
So when Tim Senior, sitting in this chair, clutched his chest and fell to the floor and said “Go-Go,” Doris knew he believed himself to be dying. There is no other way he would have gasped out those two syllables. She hoped he was wrong, even as she tried to remember CPR, assuming she had ever learned it. But when she started to run to the kitchen phone to call 911, he grabbed her wrist, desperate for her to stay with him, to have someone there for his last few minutes of life.
And then he was dead. The story has become a legend in the family because it happened on October 9, 1996, during the Orioles’ play-off game with the Yankees, the one where a boy interfered with play and the Yankees won. It’s a good story, one that appears to make her sons feel better, and isn’t that what stories are for? Doris has no intention of telling them that the game had ended an hour earlier and that Tim Senior accepted the Orioles’ bad luck philosophically. There was a time when he would have broken something over a bad call, but those times were long behind them. In middle-verging-on-old age, Tim and Doris had found a rhythm together, contentment if not true happiness. And contentment is pretty good if you’ve never been particularly happy.
Only it turned out that Tim Senior wasn’t even content. That was the sad part, learning in those final moments what lay beneath the muted, restrained temperament of Tim’s last years. Doris thought his mild success had made life easier for him, but Tim had kept a secret all these years: “I killed that man. For Go-Go. I killed him.” Why did he tell her? Why should she have to know such a terrible thing, and what should she do with it? It made her wonder if the years she thought of as contented had felt different to Tim Senior, if he held his temper and treated her nicely because he considered it his penance.
For fifteen years, Doris guarded Tim’s secret, and she assumes the other men did the same, although she has her moments of wondering. She tries to remember her encounters with Tally Robison over the years, if she dropped any hints about knowing something, but the woman always acted superior to her, so her conceited manner was no clue. She never saw Rita again, although her daughter was