dead mother, whose shoes she filled. And her dead husband, his ghost on her back almost like Lafleur's own near-dead father.
His children, including one who had died—her step-grandchildren.
His estranged wife, Penny—her stepdaughter-in-law. And her friend, too. Penny came to visit more often than he did.
And himself, beset with such algebra: the idiot.
He looked into Jewel's clear gray eyes and traded with her on a subliminal, almost sexual level. He felt overpowered as if by sorcery. He had a glimmering of something coming, but he couldn't name it. He looked away, wondering, What now, where's this going?…Then she said, “Ned's charging your dad for the loss of his services. He says he'll stop if your dad puts something back into the company.”
Quite calmly—his calm surprised him—Lafleur replied, “And that's the squeeze?”
“That's the pinch. The squeeze is general. This is quite specific.”
“I see.”
“He has a point in a way,” she said. She turned and gazed at Gus for a moment, touching base with him, then to Lafleur she said, “Obviously your dad isn't working.”
“But he has the interest, the investment, the years put in to make that company float.” Lafleur paused, hearing his own voice rising. “Without him Blaylock would be nowhere.”
Jewel's body visibly gathered itself. “Yes.”
“I'm sorry,” he said. “God, I'm sorry you have to go through all this.”
“I know, Hank.”
“I'll talk to Blaylock. If we have to, we'll dig up some money somehow until we get it straightened out.”
She gave him a worried look, then they were quiet for a moment. They ate. Forks clinked on plates and Gus gurgled softly as he swallowed. Liquid trickled into his catheter bag. Lafleur served himself seconds on meat, potatoes, and bread. Jewel smiled, pleased to see him eat well.
She got up to fetch the coffee. He watched as she passed into the kitchen, her body erect. She held it so against the world. He ate and looked around the dining room, at the cracks in the spackled ceiling. A hutch stood against the opposite wall and on its shelves were knickknacks from both Jewel's and his father and mother's past—ceramic and stone figurines, vases, centennial plates. Among them were articles from Quebec—religious items and French glassware. The artifacts of two long lives brought together late had bred in here with muted passion. Everything in the room, and in the living room and kitchen, was clean and pure as snow, but old and worn.
The house had been toiled over, the yard outside was kept up, and three times a week Jewel had to get Gus out into the car and to the hospital for therapy and back again, and otherwise care for the old man, haggle with the insurance company, balance the checkbook, take the trouble over the last several months to treat him—Lafleur—with kid gloves because of his difficulties, and to counsel Penny, and somehow through all of that maintain her sanity and even the slightly forbidding quality of her strength. On the wall to Lafleur's right hung the household crucifix, glittering in the descending slant of light from the windows at his left.
At his back hung photographs of his family together and then the two children separately. Without looking, he could envision the two—the professional, retouched portraits in which his children, Tricia and Andy, had fixed smiles, gleaming teeth, and angelic, unreal-looking skin. They were quite unlike the kids he'd dropped off across town a couple of hours ago—today, Saturday, his day with them.
When he'd arrived at their place early this morning, the drape in the living-room window flicked back and the edge of a long form appeared: Penny, with whom he no longer came face to face. The kids came out, darting across the lawn. As they clambered inside the cab, the drape swung back and settled.
He tended to indulge the children on Saturdays—the races, the zoo, the movies, the museum—and to handle them as fragile articles. He loathed that part of himself, his remorse, which made it hard for him to treat them as themselves. Today, they'd eaten at Wendy's, gone to see The Temple of Doom, and as it was a fine, rare, early-spring day, they played Frisbee and fed bread to the ducks in the park. The parkwise ducks, the mallards and pintails, widgeons, shovelers, mergansers, and redheads bunched up near the bank, and then some came out of the water. Andy, who was six, tossed handfuls to one side and the other. The ducks crowded after the morsels and teemed around Andy's ankles. Tricia, who was eleven, moved off and stared pensively across the pond. Lafleur gazed with her. A pair of whistling swans patrolled the far rushes, their heads imperious and erect, their bills perfectly parallel to the surface of the water.
When he returned the children, the front door opened as if driven by an automaton. The children's arms and heads glistened in the sunlight as they ran back to the porch. Like sprites they vanished into the zone he could no longer touch, what seemed like a spectral region made half of recollection and half of what had come to twist darkly in his imagination. He had sat still in his pickup for a moment, saddened, and feeling then, too, like an idiot.
There was a third picture on the wall behind him, an enlarged family snapshot in which he might have seen himself and Penny, and a healthy Gus standing with his arm around Jewel, and three children in front, including the small figure of Nicole. That picture captured the whole, horrifying gap in Lafleur's life. He glanced up at Gus. Gus blinked and curled his lip. He looked crazed. Jewel returned, carrying the coffeepot. “What about the river property?” Lafleur said. “You two have that free and clear.”
“Sell it?” she said as she poured coffee, first into his cup, then hers, then into an insulated mug for Gus. Gus had a startled expression. She added milk to Gus's mug. “And just let the company go down the drain?” she said.
Gus lurched and tried to speak. His mouth twisted. “Naw!” he said. It came out a soft, high moan that sounded like the caw of a distant crow. His arms shook as he tried to bring his body forward. He struggled to say more, but Jewel sat down and spoke for him.
“No,” she said. “He has that for you and your kids.”
“But we don't need that,” Lafleur said, addressing his father, and at the same time thinking, Don't you see? Everything's come apart. It's all different, now. He turned to Jewel and said, “But you do. Use some of it to make whatever arrangements you have to with the partnership and keep the rest. You need it.”
Gus's arms had stopped shaking and he held himself erect. His eyes were bright and moist. His set face had the vestige of the look it always took on when he made flat refusals. He spoke again. It sounded just like a big crow flying away over the trees. “Naw!” he cried.
“Careful,” Jewel said. Gently, she let her hand rest over Gus's on the arm of the wheelchair. “He won't sell the house and property and he doesn't want you to, either. He feels the same way about the company. It's the future. He needs the future he spent his life working for. I need him to have a future.”
Gus, apparently satisfied with what Jewel had said, looked at Lafleur with glossy eyes. “Something has to give,” Lafleur said.
Jewel looked down and stroked the handle of her coffee cup. Then she looked up and said, “He can put you in.”
“In?”
“Not money. Not ours and not yours, Hank, not what none of us has. You.”
“Work for him?”
“With him.”
“I see,” he said, but he thought, Of course. It was obvious. The room was still. He became aware of the refrigerator humming way back in the kitchen.
“I'm sorry. I hate to do this to you.” She nodded at Gus. “It's his idea.”
He looked at Gus. The acuteness still edged the old man's eyes, and he had a knowing smile on his lips, or held what Lafleur took to be that smile, a kind of half-controlled smirk now, but poking through, as if from behind a fog of uncooperative musculature, the exact self-satisfied smile