Chapter 12 The Girl Whose Perfume Is Skunky Weed Is Beset by Police #2
I took some small comfort from the fact that he had used the word reason and not motive. Had he used the latter word, I would have felt even more cornered, as if I were the perp in a cop drama.
“And, let’s face it, Miss Winston. You and I have a history because you kind of have this tendency to take things into your own hands. Like, you know, taking a golf club to a kid’s car window. And, well, wrapping your mom’s car around a stop sign.”
“She was never charged with a crime in the first case or cited for any sort of traffic violation in the second,” my lawyer reminded him.
“I know. I do.” He steepled his fingers of both hands together. “Who knows? Maybe the third time’s the charm.”
“What more do you want from my client?” my lawyer asked. “She’s given you her statement. If you have no further questions, let’s call it a night.”
“The charge could be a misdemeanor: reckless endangerment. Or it could rise to a felony: involuntary manslaughter,” the detective said.
I caught my mother’s eyes, and there was concern.
I had no doubt that my father and she had discussed this already—just as I was positive that my father and Mr. Barker had—but this was the first time that the detectives had raised this sword of Damocles over my head and hinted at how easily the twine could snap.
“No one’s going to charge this child with anything,” said Mr. Barker. “This will remain a civil issue that the country club and the manufacturer can sort out with the Foster family. You know that.”
Marino scrunched up his face and stretched out his neck muscles.
He bared his teeth as he shook his head.
“I kinda don’t know that,” he said, his face a wince of sorts.
“All I know is that a young boy was killed by a golf ball. An accident for sure. But he’s dead and—here’s a fact, in my very humble opinion—he wouldn’t be if someone hadn’t futzed around with the target on the net. ”
“That’s a fact like rainbows have pots of gold at the end,” said my lawyer, and he put his hands flat on the table and stood. “It seems to me you have dragged us all here for absolutely no reason.”
I looked at my parents, and they were rising, too.
My father spoke for the first time in a long time. “Mira,” he said calmly, “I think Mr. Barker is correct. We’re finished here.”
I got the message and got to my feet.
“Miss Winston,” said the detective. He was leaning back now in his chair, his arms folded across his chest. “If you remember anything else about that Monday…that Caddy Day…you know where to find me, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I know where to find you. Of course.”
“I understand.”
“And one more thing.”
He paused for dramatic effect.
“Don’t make me bust you for weed. Don’t waste all our time by smelling like a pothead the next time I knock on your front door.”
My parents looked at me as if they’d just seen my name on an adult movie marquee on Forty-Third Street, but it was an act: they wanted to look appalled because they thought they were supposed to.
They knew I smoked marijuana. We never discussed it any more than we discussed where I was those nights when I was not at my aunt and uncle’s, or the fact—and this was a fact—that I had been living with my aunt and uncle, in the first place, because I was a pariah in Tallmadge for sleeping with a married man.
In any case, there really wasn’t anything more to say to Detective Marino, and so I just nodded and then, along with my parents and my lawyer, left the police station.
I brushed Harvey before bed, painfully aware that in the time I had been living in Manhattan, he had become more my parents’ dog than mine.
He was certainly more my mother’s dog than my dog, because she was the one who had walked and fed him while I was away.
I was the one who had, in his deep canine eyes, largely deserted him.
Whenever I was home, as I was now, I had the sense that he wanted desperately to believe his person was back, but he knew from experience that once more I was going to break his heart.
And it was only going to get worse (or, at least, not get better) when I left for Smith that coming September.
I was far too young then to wrestle with ideas such as anticipatory grief, or feel the sadness that—unless I had one of those golf-balls-cracked-into-my-own-skull moments—I was going to outlive him.
But I had missed him when I was away and felt like a bad older sister now.
Of course, I usually felt like a pretty bad everything.
My father stumbled into my bedroom in his pajamas. I thought he was going to ask me how I was doing, because clearly some girls just never learn. I supposed he was going to reassure me that there was no way I was ever going to be a criminal defendant in this slow-motion nightmare.
Nope.
“Your brother’s on the phone,” he said instead. “You can take it in your mother’s and my room.” He slurred a few of his words, and he was a little unsteady on his feet, because he’d been drinking before we went to the police station and then when we returned.
“I didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“I called him.”
“How come?”
“I just did.”
I knew exactly the number of times my father had phoned me when I had been living in Manhattan (answer?
none), but I suspected my father called Spencer regularly.
Probably weekly. And, clearly, he would when there was a crisis such as a problematic kid sister now possibly facing reckless endangerment or involuntary manslaughter charges in the death of Kenny Foster.
I gave Harvey a hug and left him dozing on my bed.
My mother was reading in my parents’ bed, her face a white Kabuki mask of moisturizer.
The phone was on a vanity on the far side of the room.
She looked up at me and smiled vaguely. She had a scotch and soda in a tumbler on her nightstand.
Every time I had returned to Tallmadge from my aunt and uncle’s, I had been struck by how badly my parents now seemed to hold their booze.
Because I had been in Manhattan, no one had been around to water it down, and they hadn’t seemed to have noticed how much more potent their three or four or even five nightly cocktails had become.
Suddenly, the Johnnie Walker was the eighty proof jet fuel it was supposed to be, not the weak tea I had been crafting for them for years.
“I’ll take it in the kitchen,” I said to my father, who had followed me to his and my mother’s bedroom. There was no way I could talk to Spencer with our parents listening in. There wasn’t enough weed in Tallmadge for that. “Do you mind hanging up when I pick up downstairs?”
“Not at all,” he agreed, and I went to the kitchen. There I sat down with the extension in my hands.
“How you doing, Sis?” he asked.
“Sis? Since when do you call me Sis?”
“Since never?”
“Yup. Do you miss Harvey?” I asked.
He wasn’t expecting this. “Sure. Yeah,” he replied, though it was clear he rarely—if ever—thought about the animal. “But, I mean, I was only around for a year when we got him. Then I was at college. So, he was always kind of your dog and Mom’s. Why do you ask? He okay?”
“He’s fine,” I said. “I was just curious. I was feeling bad because I’m going to leave him again.”
“He’s a dog. He loves whoever feeds him,” he said, trying to make me feel better.
“His feelings go deeper than that.”
“Okay. Don’t go to college in the fall. Stay in Tallmadge for Harvey.”
“So, how’s the home stretch? Excited to go back to Washington in June?
” I asked, changing the subject because, of course, he was right.
He was in his last semester at Princeton and already had a job waiting for him as soon as he graduated.
He was going to be a staffer for Senator Jacob Javits.
Choosing to bring up the idea that he was going to be working for a U.S.
senator wasn’t my being considerate or a good conversationalist. I was just postponing having to weigh in on what seemed to me that night the absurdity of my interview at the Tallmadge Police Station.
Oh, I knew I was a terrible human being, and I knew that among my mistakes and misdeeds had been ranting to Harry Fallows that I detested the target on the driving range net.
But I also knew that I hadn’t taken it down.
I was being punished for fucking Theo Catton, and, if I had to guess, I knew more penance loomed—perhaps I even hoped more penance loomed—but the idea I might be charged with a crime still struck me as ludicrous.
I was nervous, even frightened, but I wasn’t terrified.
There’s a difference, and this is honesty, not bravado.
“Yeah, I am excited,” he admitted. “But they tell me to take it easy and not expect I’ll be hanging out with him or going to meetings with Jimmy Carter.
I gather it’ll feel, at least for a while, a lot like I’m still in college writing essays.
It’s just now they’ll be background papers on gas prices and seat belt standards.
Pretty dull stuff. But I know they’re important because they’ll affect policy. ”
“Dad says your office will be very luxurious.”
“Luxurious? Fuck no. When I was an intern with the Chamber of Commerce, my office had a door and a teeny window with a fan. In the senator’s office, I gather I’ll share this thing called a partner’s desk with two other guys and we’ll be really far from the air conditioner and the window.”
“But it is in a senator’s office. You will be in the Capitol building. That has to give you a rush, when you think about it.”
“Yeah, I guess. A little.”