The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [61]
“Mine,” she said. “Jack was tone-deaf. But he liked rock and roll. And some of Mattie’s music — for the beat, I think. What about you?”
“Mine, too,” he said. “Although my ex-wife kept the sound system and most of the CDs. One of my sons has inherited an ear. He plays the saxophone at school. The other one seems to have no interest.”
“Mattie plays the clarinet. I tried to get her to play the piano,” Kathryn said, “but it was torture.”
Kathryn thought about all of the hours she had spent with Mattie at the piano, Mattie clearly not wanting to be there, exaggerating her nearly pathological reluctance by having obsessively to scratch her back where she couldn’t quite reach, or adjust the bench, or take an inordinately long time finding her fingering. It was an effort just to get Mattie to play a song once, never mind actually practice the piece several times. Often, Kathryn had ended up having to leave the room in a barely restrained rage, at which point Mattie would begin to cry. Before the first year was out, Kathryn could see that if she insisted Mattie keep on with the lessons, their relationship would be in tatters.
Now, of course, Mattie was almost never without her music — in her room, in the car, and plugged into headphones as if they delivered oxygen through the ears.
“You play?” Kathryn asked.
“Used to.”
She studied him and added a small detail to a portrait that had been forming since the day he’d entered her house. It was what one did with people, Kathryn thought, form portraits, fill in missing brush strokes, wait for form and color to materialize.
He dipped a piece of tail in butter and brought it dripping to his mouth.
“The night before Jack left for his trip,” Kathryn said, “he went into Mattie’s room and asked her if she wanted to go to a Celtics game with him on Friday night. A friend had given him really good seats. What I want to know is this: Would a man ask his daughter to go with him to a Celtics game if he planned to kill himself before he got back?”
Robert wiped his chin and thought a minute.
“Would a man who had really good seats to a Celtics game kill himself before he got to see the game?”
Her eyes widened.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “No. It doesn’t make any sense, not in any realm of human nature I’ve ever heard of.”
“And Jack told me to call Alfred,” Kathryn said. “He told me to have Alfred come on Friday to fix the leaky shower. If Jack wasn’t planning on coming back, he wouldn’t have done that. Not in the way he did it, almost as an afterthought as he walked to the car. And he’d have been different with me. He’d have said good-bye differently. I know he would. There’d be one small thing that maybe wouldn’t register at the time, but would after the fact. Something.”
Robert reached for his water glass and pushed himself slightly away from the table.
“Do you remember,” she asked, “when the Safety Board questioned me, they asked me if Jack had any close friends in England?”
“Yes.”
She stared at the bowl of discarded shells.
“I’ve just had a thought,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
As she climbed the stairs, she tried to recall if she had done that particular wash. She’d worn the jeans for two days and then thrown them in the hamper. But not her own hamper, she remembered, Mattie’s hamper. And Kathryn hadn’t done any wash at all of Mattie’s because Mattie hadn’t been there. Any laundry Mattie had needed had been done at Julia’s.
She found the jeans at the bottom of the pile of soiled laundry, buried beneath clothes Robert and she had tossed into the hamper just hours ago. She removed the handful of papers and receipts, which were slightly damp from a long-buried towel.
When she returned to the front room, Robert was contemplating the snowfall. He watched her as she pushed her plate away and unfolded the papers.
“Look at this,” she said, handing the lottery ticket to Robert. “I found these papers wadded up in the pocket of Jack’s jeans on the back of the bathroom door on the day he died. I didn’t think much of them at the time and just stuck them in the pocket of my own jeans.