Chapter 1 #21
Thank you, Lord, for the gift of this man, she prayed.
Through his mighty efforts, the world has been much changed.
He traveled far and wide, over every continent.
Praise that. Worked with so many different kinds of folks.
Amen. Was just terrific at, uh, taking a unit or division and, um, as she understood it, making it more efficient, or profitable?
By trimming things back, kind of ruthlessly, and, uh, getting rid of the, like, dead wood?
Which, come to think of it, was another group of enemies he might consider forgiving: those two hundred numbnuts he’d fired just before Christmas that one super-cold winter, who’d formed a sad little club and sometimes came over together, all wearing parkas, to picket their dang house.
She remembered that nice one, Wanda, who used to sneak little waves over at her and had once pulled her aside to slip her a Perfume Patty.
Lord, forgive him. For any and all mistakes he’d made.
Like when he was gone overseas for three straight months her senior year.
Or the way he’d kept snapping at Randy, her earlier-mentioned prom date, just because Randy had done his science fair project on electric cars and was sort of fired up about it.
Randy had been seventeen, Daddy. Was it so important that he be proven wrong?
On the night of her prom? Necessary for you to drag Randy over to the whiteboard in the kitchen and throw all those numbers at him and mock him out as he stood there sweating, nervously pressing her corsage so tightly against his rented ruffled shirt that he ended up crushing it, and then he’d slid that ugly flat thing on her wrist and they’d had a miserable time all night because he kept defending his original calculations?
Forgive him for all of that, Lord.
Also?
For all those questionable things he’d supposedly possibly done.
Per that stupid documentary.
That Fran had made her watch.
Daddy, remember Fran? From grad school? Super-nervous gal?
Owned a big old lake house? Or, used to?
Up in Minnesota? But then: two straight months of rain, in July, and here came the lake, rising, rising, and pretty soon: no lake house.
Or, less of one. After that, Fran had gone a little eco-wacky.
And had done this sort of intervention. On her (!).
In Vegas. On a trip that was supposed to be fun (!).
Fran had tricked her. Into watching that video.
Fran’d sat there watching her watch it. After, Fran had said that maybe she, Julia, might want to issue some kind of public statement.
Or post an apology on Instagram or whatever?
Or donate to an environmental charity? In her dad’s name?
As if.
As if, bitcharoo.
She’d broken with Fran. Fran was dead to her.
There was no way.
No. Flipping. Way.
That he’d done those things.
Or, if he had done them that he’d known they were bad.
Or, if he had known they were bad—
God, why did everyone have to be so mean about everything, anyhow?
Hello, he was in the oil business, Fran, dunce.
The business of oil. Okay? Finding it, getting it out of the ground or wherever, selling it.
How did you, Fran, physically get to the Minnesota lake house, when you still had it, dimwit?
How did you make your way out of Minnesota and across Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts that one autumn to see the Magritte show in Boston you ended up being so crazy about?
How did you get to that bat mitzvah in Palm Springs that was so “transcendent” it made you “rethink your ideas regarding the value of ceremony” or that wedding in Maui that had the fire jugglers, one of whom, supposedly, you made out with?
You drove, you flew, you kombucha-making hypocrite.
And yet.
And yet.
Daddy, she whispered. Do you have any idea? What people are saying? About you? On TV and the internet and in so many articles and books and podcasts lately? Is it true? All of it? Any of it? If so, maybe you were a darker, trickier bastard than I ever—
Not “bastard.”
Guy.
Not “darker.”
Complicated.
Not “trickier.”
Secretive.
A much more complicated, secretive guy than I ever—
If so, if you did know, and did it anyway? Which, if I’m being frank, I feel was probably, yes, the case? It breaks my heart, and I have to say, because I want, if we are really parting, for us to do so from a place of total honesty:
It disappoints me, Daddy.
Disappoints me greatly.
I just feel really let down by you.
I always saw you as someone who tried to do what was right, no matter what, so this is a truly hard pill for me to—
Pausing for a look down at my charge, she noted that his hair, badly in need of cutting, was, just a little bit, in the front there, shaking, or quaking, or whatever.
Just slightly moving with the motion of his frail old body.
Now the shaking stopped and he went completely still and it occurred to her that (good Christ) she’d killed him.
With this selfish last-minute bitchfest.
Then his lips slightly moved, as if he were trying to moisten them.
Oh, thank God.
Lord, forget it, they could talk about it later.
Or not.
She took the washcloth from the bedside table, dipped it into his water glass, wet his lips.
There you go.
There you go, sweetie.
She leaned over, kissed his head.
My charge, for the first time since I’d known him, managed to speak aloud.
Devil, he mumbled.
Say what now? she said. The devil’s not in here, Daddy. That’s just your meds.
Lady, he said.
Are you saying there’s a lady devil in here? she said.
From deep in his throat he managed a sound of affirmation.
Okay, she said. All right. What we need here is some rest, I think. Or wait, you know what? Let’s do this.
She brought her hands together.
Heavenly Father, she said. Help my daddy out here. Devil lady? Be gone. Any and all devils, be gone. Give my daddy some peace, y’all.
All the devils many wrong in here tonight, he said.
Alarmed, she rushed to the landing and called down to her mother to get up here, now, please, because, one, he was awake and talking, and two, from the sound of it, things were getting sort of—Could she, Momma, please get up here now, please, stat, pronto, thank you?
Hearing no response from her mother, she left the room and pounded down the stairs to find her.
—
Not a devil, I said.
He let out a low groan.
Actual groan.
Had his daughter or wife been in the room, they would have heard it.
More than anything that had preceded it (the bird onslaught, his interactions with the Pennsylvania girl, Miss Eva, his father, Ed Dell) this had stung him.
By this, his enemies had won. They’d succeeded in turning his only child against him.
They’d poured poison into her ear and she’d believed them.
She was his dear girl, constant defender, biggest fan.
And now, for the rest of her life, long as she lived, she was going to think of him like that?
In that way?
As that guy?
A darker, trickier bastard than she’d ever—
No.
Jesus, no.
What he needed to do was hop out of this bed and go downstairs and fetch the bag of black licorice stashed above the fridge and sit that gal down and say: Cupcake, whatever beef you’ve got with me, it’s because you had it all handed to you on a silver platter, which is why half the time you don’t have any damn idea of how things work out in the real world, angel, I’m sorry to say, and why you have, all your life, been easily misled by people who meant you no good and were trying to take advantage of your kind nature, sweet pea.
So, sit down, let’s talk this thing out.
He became aware of me again.
You reading my mind? he said.
Yes, I said.
I want you to stop it, he said.
No, I said.
You seem different, he said.
I am different, I said. I’m Jill. Jill Blaine. Jill “Doll” Blaine.
Weren’t you always? he said.
Not this much, I said.
From downstairs came the sound of his daughter crying hysterically, her mother comforting her, a glass breaking, a sudden silence.
What’s all that about? he said.
I smiled a sad smile.
No, he thought. This wasn’t it. Couldn’t be.
Not yet. His death was meant to take place in an ancient stone mansion.
A gray manse on a misty moor. In Europe somewhere.
Like in a 1940s movie. He’d always thought that.
Why had he always thought that? No idea.
He just had. All across the property his peasants would be weeping.
In the doorway a butler was trying not to cry.
Like that. The doctor with whom he’d aways played chess was racing to him by horse-drawn sleigh through a blizzard.
The village luminaries had gathered around his bedside.
He’d always been the best among them. Finally, they saw it.
It didn’t hurt. It was Death but it didn’t hurt.
He was just growing increasingly tired and philosophical.
Next stop, Heaven, where everyone would be waiting: Grandpa, Mee-Mee, Mother and Father, Uncle Theo; Norman, his older cousin and first confidant, killed in Korea; Bip Wren, crushed on a rig in Debolt County.
Well done, would be the consensus up there, great job, K.J.
, you were right all along, and even if some found you too overbearing/powerful/decisive, we, up here in Heaven, always approved of everything you did and were with you all the way.
You were always the grown-up in every room.
Sometimes babies need to be picked up and moved away from dangers they’re too idiotic to grasp.
Ditto with subordinates, underlings, the public.
There was a world to run, and you ran it, K.J.
Bravo, congrats, many thanks.