“Your sarcasm is absolutely lost on me.”
“Then let me lay it straight out for you. Bobby Jr. was your child. How could you just let him die?”
“It wasn’t like that!” she said, her voice rising. “You think it was an either/or choice? You think I didn’t love my son?”
“Words are easy, it’s the actions that are hard, Remmy. Like standing up to your husband. Like telling him you didn’t give a shit where he got the disease but that your son was getting treatment for it. It’s not like it’s that hard to diagnose, even back then. You put the kid on penicillin and chances are extremely good you’d have both your sons in your life right now. Did you ever think about it in those terms?”
Remmy started to say something and then stopped. She set her cup of coffee down and folded her hands in her lap.
“Maybe I wasn’t as strong back then as I am now.” King saw the glimmer of tears in her eyes. “But I finally did make the right decision. I took Bobby Jr. to all sorts of specialists.”
“But it was too late.”
“Yes,” Remmy said quietly. “And then the cancer came. And he just couldn’t fight it off.” She brushed at her tears, reached for her coffee but then stopped and looked up at him.
“Everyone has to make choices in life, Sean,” she said.
“And lots of people make the wrong choices.”
Remmy seemed about to make some biting comment, but King stopped her cold when he took a photo off the shelf and held it up. It was of Eddie and Bobby Jr. as children. She suddenly put a hand to her mouth as though to stifle a sob. She looked at him, the tears sliding down her cheeks now. “Bobby was a very different man when we first married. Maybe that’s the one I was clinging to, hoping he’d come back.”
King put the photo back. “I think any man who lets his own son die without lifting a hand to save him isn’t a man worth waiting for.”
He walked out and never looked back.
As King came outside, he saw a driver was loading Savannah’s bags into a black sedan. Savannah climbed out of the car and approached King.
She said, “I wanted to see you before I left. I heard some of what you said to my mother. I wasn’t eavesdropping. I was just passing by.”
“Frankly, I don’t know whether to pity or loathe her.”
She stared at the house. “She always wanted to be the matriarch of this great southern family. You know, sort of a dynasty.”
“She didn’t quite make it,” commented King.
Savannah stared at him. “That’s the thing… I think she made herself believe that she had made it. She hated my father in private and yet idolized him in public. She loved her sons and yet sacrificed them to preserve her marriage. It makes no sense. All I know is I’m getting the hell away. I’ll spend the next ten years trying to figure it out. But I’m going to do it from a distance.”
They hugged, and King held the car door for her.
“Best of luck, Savannah.”
“Oh, Sean, please tell Michelle thanks for everything she did.”
“I will.”
“And tell her I took her advice on my tattoo.”
King looked at her quizzically but said nothing. He waved as the car sped off.
King drove to the Wrightsburg Gazette and unwittingly sat at the same microfiche machine that Eddie had when he broke in that night.
King raced through the spool of back issues until he found the date he was looking for, the day Edwards had been let go. He didn’t find what he was searching for. Then it occurred to him that it might have happened too late to make the next day’s edition. He forwarded to the day after that. He didn’t have to read far. It was front-page news. He read the story carefully, sat back and then finally laid his head down on the desk as his mind began to creep into areas that were truly unthinkable.
When he rose back up, he noted the wall Eddie had written on. It had been cleaned off, but there were still traces of the word he’d written there.
TEAT
A few days before, he’d played with various combinations of the word: tent, test, text. Nothing seemed to work. Yet he didn’t believe Eddie would have written that word if it wasn’t important.