Secret Vows

Chapter 4: Then Get Out

He put his shoulder to the door and went in.

"—and then get out."

His brother's voice, off the window side of the room, coming apart in the middle, still up in the air when he got both feet on the mat. First thing the house said to him.

Emmy was screaming. His niece, five years old, up in his mother's lap with both fists full of her shirt — mouth wide, nothing coming out of it yet.

"Enough. Enough." His mother's voice was wet and climbing. "Have you two not— is this over? Is it done? Because the whole street can hear you, Cody. They can hear it from the road."

Cody's mouth shut. His mother got a hand over her own mouth and rocked Emmy against her. Renee didn't move at all.

Trey took two steps in and something cracked under his shoe.

He looked down. Half a cup in three pieces, blue flowers on it, and a wet patch gone dark into the rug. A paring knife lying by the front leg of the couch, point toward the hallway. A cushion off the couch, face down. Two chairs and the little step stool over on their sides, and the coffee table flat with the magazines fanned out underneath it.

He looked up once, then back down. Cody was on his feet by the window with his arms crossed, shirt hanging loose, jaw working. His brother's wife, Renee, had her hand on the back of a chair at the edge of the dining room, hair down out of the clip on one side, and no expression on her that he could read.

Nobody said anything to him. He didn't say anything back.

He picked the cushion up first and put it on the couch, square. The knife he carried into the kitchen handle first and set in the rack. He picked the pieces of the cup off the rug one at a time and dropped them in the trash can under the sink. The stool went back on its feet. He stood the chairs up and pushed two of them back under the table where they lived. The coffee table he got both hands under and tipped up onto its legs, and he stacked the magazines on the lower shelf and put the remote back on top.

Then he went to the fridge.

There was a pitcher of tea in there, about two-thirds down, and he got the glasses out of the cabinet over the sink — five of them, one for each — set them on the coffee table and poured. His mother didn't want any. He knew that and poured anyway. It gave his hands something to do.

"Mom," he said. "Where's Dad?"

She wiped her face with the hand that wasn't holding Emmy. "In the bedroom."

"Yeah. Okay."

He went down the hall, knocked twice, and opened the door.

The lamp wasn't on. The only light was off the TV that wasn't playing and what came in from the hall, and the room smelled like cigarettes the way it always did, and like somebody had been sitting in there with the door shut a long time.

Dale was up against the headboard with his shirt open over his T-shirt and a cigarette going in one hand, and his color was bad. Gray in the face, the way it got when he'd been chewing on something for a while and not saying it.

"Dad."

"What'd you come back for?" His father didn't turn his head. "Their mess. What's their mess to you."

"So I could stay at the store and let them go at each other with a knife and one of them's in the ER by morning?" Trey sat down on the edge of the mattress. "Which one do you figure it'd be, out of those two?"

"Good," Dale said. "Let 'em go. Wouldn't be the worst thing."

"Come on."

"I mean it." He brought the cigarette up and pulled on it. "One of 'em goes, that's it. That's quiet. That's all I'm asking for. One of 'em gone, and I sleep."

"One of 'em goes," Trey said, "then who pays for it? Somebody's writing somebody a bill — the hospital, or a lawyer, or the county, one of the three — and it's your name on the check either way. That's the part I can't stand. All that money out of your pocket and the two of them still yelling."

His father's mouth pulled sideways. The cigarette jumped in his hand and the laugh came up out of him before he could get it back, two short ones through the nose, and then he shook his head at the wall.

"There," Trey said. "You laughed. Come out here."

"Come out where."

"You'll want to see this. Come on."

He got a hand under his father's arm. Dale complained the whole way — about his back, about being pulled, about not needing to be walked around his own house — and got up anyway, and mashed the cigarette out in the ashtray, and put a hand on Trey's shoulder in the hall where the floor dropped half an inch, and didn't say anything about that either.

The living room had the lamp on and the glasses on the table, and it was a room again.

Cody was where he'd been, at the window. Renee was still at the edge of the dining room with her hand on the back of the chair. His mother had her chin on Emmy's head, and Emmy had gone quiet with a fist in her mouth. The trash can under the sink had a cup in it.

Dale stopped in the middle of the room and looked at it.

Trey watched him do it — the chairs under the table, the couch, the wet place on the rug, the kid on her grandmother's lap — and watched the face close back down, the mouth flat, the jaw set in.

Nobody had spoken to him since he walked in. His mother was looking at the floor. Cody hadn't turned around. Renee reached out and took one of the glasses off the table and held it in both hands without drinking.

Trey stayed on his feet where he was and kept his eyes down, like the rest of them.