the parking lot in front of the apartment building, she stilled the truck and leaned to the door, keeping the motor running for the heater.
“Don’t do this to us, Lyle. I’m not very … strong right now. I’d like to be. I do feel a spark coming back in me with this job.”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody, but I can’t stay quiet. I think she visits me. She’s not doing very well.”
She cut the engine and placed her hand on the door handle.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “Everybody has a story like that. Somebody’s grandma comes back. It’s usually somebody’s grandma, right? Why is it always somebody’s grandma? Anyway it doesn’t always have to be a grandma, does it? I mean, does it?”
She popped open the door, heaved herself out of the truck, and ran up the staircase. After a moment, he went up into the apartment after her and tried her door. He heard her mumbling in prayer.
“I’ll yell for Craig if you try and come in here.”
“I didn’t want to scare you—only to talk. Can you open this?”
“I’ll yell for him. I will.”
“Is it really so weird that she would visit me? I thought you believed in that stuff.”
He rested his forehead where the door met the frame. She had gone back to praying.
His bedroom light was burning. On his bed he found a letter in Craig’s writing and a plastic bag. In the bag were a giant box of crayons and a John Wayne coloring book. One page showed John Wayne cracking a man’s jaw with his fist, the man flying backward in surprise. He read the letter.
Lyle. I found this stuff tonite. You never got to know dad before he was called home but he was a terranisorus wrecks. You don’t want to go his way. He used to hit mom. Mom prayed for him but he had his own devils to chase. Look at the second page. You colored outside the lines and mom wanted to teach you to do it right, you woudn’t listen, and dad yelled at her and threw a ashtray and broke a window. I know you have your own ideas about him but we wouldn’t have the problems we do if it wasn’t for him. Some of us got mom’s side and some of us got his. Your a Rettew by name. Mom and I would like to see you start acting like one. We believe in you.
He smelled the cigarettes on his fingers—his dad liked Old Golds, too—and sorted through the coloring book. There was fighting, shooting, riding. There was running at and running from. Old sights and noises crowded him. Once, when his mom drove the children to visit his dad at the tire store where he worked, he and Lila sprinted in there and wrapped themselves around the tires, not just smelling them but sucking the odor into their heads. His dad pulled him off one of them. Lyle was ashamed of the drool he had left on it. Another day, when his dad sat in his chair at home drinking little glasses of brown liquid, he let him and Lila smell his hands. Big and hairy, they smelled like cigarettes and tires, and his swollen knuckles were scabbed with bar fighting. His dad rotated his fists as though examining the process of their healing. After Lila kissed the scabs better, he took his hands back and drank his whiskey and smoked, gentle in the way he ignored them. Later, with many drinks in him, he corralled the three children into the dry shower stall and tickled them. The twins wiggled and screamed and laughed, while Craig, especially ticklish, bawled in misery.
His dad’s name was Jon Murphy. When the twins were six, he drove home from work and hit black ice, plunging into the river. His death kicked Lyle’s mom to the ground for a month or two. Then she told them his dad had been a wild, unchristian man. She changed their name to Rettew, her maiden name.
He tossed the coloring book and note into the rawhide trunk beneath the window. Studded with brass tacks, it had a wrought iron lock, and it slumped on one side, looking ready to collapse in dust. The thing had been in the Rettew family for five generations of ranchers. His brother wanted him to keep it in here, so that he would stay connected to their history.
His mom cried out in her sleep. Craig emerged into the hall and knocked at her door twice. Then he opened Lyle’s door, his eyes half shut. Above the white T-shirt his mustache looked very black.
“Did you talk to Mom when she got home?” he said. “Is she okay?”
“I think so. She was bothered about something, but I’m not sure.”
Craig nodded. “You get my letter?”
“Dad only hit people who fought him first, or deserved it. He didn’t go around picking fights. He stuck up for himself and other people.”
“Well, I think you got a pie-eyed notion of things when we were kids. No reason to go dwelling on those old days.”
“That time he threw the ashtray, I was having fun coloring and Mom went nuts because I wasn’t following the rules. Dad wanted her to leave me alone.”
“Keep your voice down. Tell you what, you got a screwy sense of things. People color inside the picture, that’s what it’s there for.”
“Not me.”
“That’s right. You’re different. You’re original. How do you expect to find a job with that kind of attitude?”
“So I can’t see an album from when we were kids?”
“Those ones are put away,” Craig said. “Now quit asking.”
The only album Craig ever let him see was the creaky leather one that showed the early Rettews. Old and fierce-eyed, the first Lyle Rettew looked like he was fighting an evil noise in his head.
“You were born a Murphy and so was I, and so was …” Lyle let go of that sentence.
“Jayzee, Lyle.” He shook his head. “You almost said her name.”
People at River Baptist said Jayzee instead of Jesus.
Craig came in and shut the door. He drew the curtains against the green-lit Dollar Store sign across the boulevard. On the floor lay a couple pairs of Lyle’s underwear. He kicked them into the closet and slid shut the door on its rail.
“Mom doesn’t need any reminders,” Craig said. “You understand? She was sitting in her chair working her jaw for two weeks and not knowing anybody’s name. You want to see her go back to that?”
“No, but … I want to see pictures of Lila. Where’s the urn?”
“You didn’t hear a thing I said, about your own mother. She was one step from the nuthouse. You even care?”
“I never heard about anybody getting cremated in Marshal. Not once. Isn’t it supposed to be a sin?”
“You don’t know a thing. Well, keep talking, fretting about your own self, and it’s back on the Haldol.”
Lyle shoved his hands in his armpits, tensed. He had few memories of those months, panicky revelations about being underwater and having no gills in his neck to help him breathe, and other waking nightmares.
“You got to take care—of yourself, and Mom,” Craig said. “You don’t need to be running in the dark. You get some rest now.”
“You said we were going to sprinkle
