Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [63]
It was after ten o’clock on a weeknight and she was driving Mom’s Toyota back home from Bradford. He was hitchhiking on Main Street in a leather jacket and faded jeans, his hair past his shoulders, sunglasses on at night. She said he’d looked like Neil Young so she stopped and picked him up, but he was wearing sunglasses because the glare of the headlights was too bright for a quaalude-head, a nurse’s aide who was in that line of work to steal drugs from hospitals and rehab.
He was high all the time, and she was with him for months. When they were at the house, they’d be up in her room, the door closed, Grand Funk Railroad playing, Pink Floyd, Robin Trower, the Stones. Up close you could see how sunken his chest was, how his long hair was thinning, and the skin of his face was more gray than pink, the stubble of his chin like some leveled ruin. I rarely saw his eyes because he never took off his dark sunglasses, and he was always asking Suzanne for a ride: To the hospital where he worked. To the Packy for some wine. To some low-rent neighborhood to cop some downs.
The night it happened I woke to the sound of arguing. A woman’s voice, then a man’s, Mom and Pop married again and I was nine, lying in my bed next to Jeb in that camp in the woods. But the voices were outside and three stories below, Suzanne and Kench. I was lying under covers in my attic bedroom. I heard the doors of Mom’s Toyota open and shut, Suzanne’s voice as the engine turned over and the gear shifted, the whine of the small motor as they backed out of the driveway. I had an electric clock now, and I sat up and squinted at its glowing numbers: 10:37. Where were they going this late? And why? Something felt wrong about it.
I lay awake a long time. I had no curtains in the windows, and I could see it was snowing outside, a slight wind blowing the flakes under the streetlamp. So many falling and falling, and I got tired of seeing the falling and closed my eyes.
IT WAS Suzanne who woke Mom the next morning. She called just after dawn broke. Thirty years later she told me why she waited this long but no longer, because she didn’t want Mom to be awake already, getting ready for work on a Monday morning only to see her driveway empty, her car gone, her oldest daughter still out from the night before, then get angry and be pissed off when the phone rang and start yelling before Suzanne could talk, because she knew Mom would feel guilty for that later, she’d feel guilty about yelling at her daughter on this Monday morning in February, so Suzanne called her early enough to wake her and spare her that feeling later. Save her from at least that.
She and Kench had driven forty miles to Boston for a drink. After last call, he got in behind the wheel and got them lost. They were somewhere in Dorchester or Roxbury on Blue Hill Avenue. There were row houses and broken streetlights, a few cars abandoned on the sidewalk. This was 1977, the forced busing riots still in the news, white men and women stepping in front of buses of black kids driving into their school yards, yelling, “Niggers, go home!” The previous summer, the bicentennial summer, there was a first-page photo of a white man trying to impale a black man with a pole, the American flag hanging