If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls

SIXTEEN

AMENDS

Niall Dwyer was fucking Sonia Cormorant with an exquisite, quiet fierceness. When he bit down on his pillow and groaned while coming, the heel of his hand in her mouth, he turned over and the two of them lay on their backs, panting.

Of course no one knew Sonia was here. Her mother and father thought she was at a church meeting. Her family attended Evervirgin. People like that would believe anything.

Naked, Niall padded the floor of his bedroom and went to his chair. He began scrambling for a while. Sonia sat up sensing that her boyfriend was getting angry.

Niall turned to her enraged. She knew from practice there was nothing worse than coming out of good sex into the midst of perplexity.

“What the fuck?” he hissed, hopping onto the bed with the strength of a frog—or of a dancer.

“Did you misplace it again?” Sonia asked.

Niall’s beautiful eyes were on fire.

“I didn’t misplace shit. Someone’s coming in here and stealing my weed!”

 

For a while, Kristin had been turning the old man strange looks, and then he’d realized she really didn’t know who he was. Jackie had set her straight, and Kristin muttered, “I’ll be goddamned.”

“I told you,” Russell told Cody, “it wasn’t always a jamboree. that. This is what it’s usually like.”

“Goddamnit, she can’t marry him!” R.L. roared.

“And why not?” Kristin demanded for her mother’s sake.

R.L. threw back his head and let out a raucous laugh before saying, “Because the bitch is still married to me!”

Kathleen looked a bit taken aback by this. Mason, who had intended to be gallant, was taken aback too and stared at his intended.

“Oh, my God it’s true!” Kathleen realized.

“Muh-THER,” Kristin broke up the word. “You never divorced him?”

“She just got up and left,” R.L. said. “I came around one day, and no one was in the house—”

The little blond woman put her hands on her hips and cried, “Don’t you dare make it look like I left you, you son of a bitch!”

“You did, Katey—”

“Katey—?” Mason started.

“Don’t call me that!”

Mason wasn’t sure who she was talking to.

“To wander all over the place, picking up and walking off for years at a time, and then to be surprised when I finally get up and go—How dare you! And you couldn’t have wondered where I’d gone. It’s not like no one told you!”

“I knew you’d gone to your brother, but I just thought—that probably means she doesn’t want me anymore.”

“Well, you were more than probably right,” Kathleen said. “And it’s nice to know you gave such a damn that you finally bothered to come to Michigan twenty-six years later.”

Jason’s round eyes looked to Russell.

“These are your grandparents?”

Russell nodded.

“One hell of a reunion,” Cody said, taking out his cigarettes.

 He started to hand one to Russell, who shook his head vehemently.

“Mom doesn’t know,” he whispered.

Not thinking about cigarettes at all, but taking the measure of the room, Jason said, “We should go upstairs.”

Russell nodded and gestured for his younger cousins to follow as he heard his grandmother bellowing:

“AND THEN JUST TO WALK UP IN THIS HOUSE FOR THE FIRST TIME—”

“Oooh,” Russ said at the bottom of the stairs.

“Come,” Russell said, sharply to his little cousins. “Now.”

The three young men and the three little boys trotted upstairs.

“Katey—” R.L. started, then at the look in his... yes, his wife’s eyes, “Kathleen, this isn’t the first time I’ve been here.”

Kathleen wheeled around to face Thom, her green eyes flashing.

“Don’t bawl out old Tommy,” said R.L. companionably. “The little fellow threw me out, threw a fit and called me all sorts of sons-of-bitches before I left.”

“That’s right, I did,” Thom said darkly.

“Which leads to the question, Old Man,” Kristin cocked her head coldly, “of why you’re here?”

R.L. sighed, grunted and said, “Because late is better than never.”

Kristin could not be angry at her father. It was a shock to remember he was her father. He looked nothing like the R.L. she had last seen, and been glad to see departing when she was fourteen.

“If Jaclyn—whom you were never there for—can be compassionate…” Kristin began.

“Aw, Kristin!” Thom looked outraged. Patti put a hand on her husband’s shoulder. When he turned to face her she’d never seen him so angry.

“I don’t believe you,” Thom shouted. He turned to his sisters.

“Kristin, you’re just as bad as Jackie—”

“Thom,” Patti said at the same time her brother said, “Thom, man.”

“No,” Thom shook his head in disgust.

“You said you’d try to be decent—” Jackie reminded him.

“I know what I said, but to walk into my house and make camp after what he did.”

“You can talk to me, Tommy, I’m right here,” his father said.

“No! I don’t want to talk to you! And don’t call me Tommy. Or anything. Go hang out at Jackie’s since you’ve been visiting her for the last month anyway—”

“What?” Kathleen said suddenly.

From where she stood beside her pregnant friend, Abby Devalara said, “Maybe I’d better go.”

“You might as well stay,” Kristin said to her. “Like it or not, you’re about to be part of this family.”

“He’s been in Fort Atkins for how long?” Kathleen began at her daughter, “And you haven’t told me?”

“I didn’t think I could—”

“I don’t think you should have let him in—” began Kathleen.

Then suddenly, Jackie threw back her head and screamed.

Kathleen looked shocked. Patti stood up. Kristin looked at her sister and said, “Well, now honey there’s no need for all that.”

Jackie clutched her large stomach and caught the chair.

John, touched his wife’s hand and his eyes widened as Jackie’s blue eyes bulged.

 

A few minutes later Jason, Cody and Russell, who was trying to amuse Russ, Frankie and Tommy heard rustling and noise downstairs, a little shouting. They looked at each other, slightly panicked. There was a knock on the door and then Patti came in and said, “We’ll be leaving for a spell. If you could watch the kids it would be really helpful.”

 

In the Kandzierski apartment, Felice was doing her familial duty.

“Girl, this weave is fierce,” LaVelle told her sister-in-law.

“Ain’t it though?” Felice grinned.

Sharon came in the kitchen and said, “Felice, the phone for you.”

Felice looked puzzled, took the phone and then hung up and said in her foghorn voice, “Shit!”

“What?” LaVelle looked puzzled.

“It’s a good thing I just finished your hair,” Felice shouted going down the hall to get her jacket from Sharon’s room. “Jackie’s having her baby now.”

 

Shane and Jill sat on the porch. In the last half hour, only two cars had come down Colum Street.

Mostly he would kiss her, and then kiss her again, and then they’d sit close, their thighs touching. Shane settled for mauling her with his mouth. He wanted to make love to her. It had been a long time since he’d made love to anyone. But he didn’t suggest it because while they kissed, and occasionally talked, and he took up strands of her hair to smell their sweetness, Shane realized he’d never really made love.

“My dad was—is Max Barnard,” Jill said. “I don’t know what the hell happened to him.”

“Did you ever know him?”

“Not really,” Jill shook her head. “I know about him. He got my mom pregnant with Cody when she was about fifteen. He was really young too, so they didn’t marry. You’d never know how young Mom was by looking at her, would you?”

Shane didn’t answer and Jill commented to herself that this was wise of him.

“Then I came along a few years later. He stuck around for a long time. He had dreams and stuff, I know. I remember him always trying to go to night school, and trying to make Mom do the same. I remember even though I could have only been five.”

“Then, one night, I had come home from kindergarten—and I’m sure of that. They had this big fight and he called her a liar and said all these things about, “How can I trust you about anything, now?” And I wondered if that meant Mom was having an affair... but that wasn’t her style.... So he went upstairs. It was a different house. This one here belonged to my grandparents. He packed his stuff and walked out the door. He didn’t even look at me.”

“Weren’t you angry?”

“I was hurt,” she said frankly. “I thought I’d done something wrong. I didn’t know what. I spent a year asking Mom what I’d done with her crying and carrying on and telling me I hadn’t done anything. Then I began to assume that she was the one who had done something.

“I got angry later on,” Jill said, “and maybe somewhere inside I still am. I would bank on that. But it’s deep down, and I can’t find it right now. And I can’t be angry right now. Not when I’m with you.”