“I guess I wouldn’t turn it down. I’m losing weight just standing here.” He swiped the back of his hand over his sweaty forehead and took the bottle she’d opened for him. He took a long swallow, then tucked his tongue in his cheek. “So, is Nathan able to walk without a limp today?”
“Yeah, but I bloodied his lip.” She reached into the white ceramic cookie jar and dug out a chocolate-chip. “A brother with any sense of decency would have bloodied it for me.”
“You always said you preferred fighting your own battles. How in God’s name can you chase cookies with beer? It’s revolting.”
“I’m enjoying it. You want any help in here?”
It was his turn to experience shock. “Define ‘help.’ ”
“Assistance,” she snapped. “Chopping something, stirring something.”
He took another pull on his beer as he considered her. “I could use some carrots, peeled and grated.”
“How many?”
“Twenty dollars’ worth. That’s what you cost me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just a little wager with Lexy. A dozen,” he said and turned back to his shrimp.
She got the carrots out, began to remove the peels in slow, precise strips.
“Brian, if there was something you believed all your life, something you’d learned to live with, but that something wasn’t true, would you be better off going on the way you’d always gone on, or finding out it was something different? Something worse.”
“You can let a sleeping dog lie, but it’s hard to rest easy. You never know when it’s going to wake up and go for your throat.” He slid the shrimp into a boiling mixture of water, beer, and spices. “Then again, you let the dog lie long enough, it gets old and feeble and its teeth fall out.”
“That’s not a lot of help.”
“That wasn’t much of a question. You’re getting peelings all over the floor.”
“So, I’ll sweep them up.” She wanted to sweep the words up with them, under the first handy rug. But she would always know they were there. “Do you think a man, a perfectly normal man, with a family, a job, a house in the suburbs, a man who plays catch with his son on a Sunday afternoon and brings his wife roses on a Wednesday evening, could have another side? A cold, dark side that no one sees, a side that’s capable of doing something unspeakable, then folding back into itself so he can root at the Little League game on Saturday and take the family out for ice cream sodas afterward?”
Brian got the colander out for the shrimp and set it in the sink. “You’re full of odd questions this evening, Jo Ellen. You writing a book or something?”
“Can’t you just tell me what you think? Can’t you just have an opinion on a subject and say what it is?”
“All right.” Baffled, he tipped the lid to the pot to give the shrimp a quick stir. “If you want to be philosophical, the Jekyll and Hyde theme has always fascinated people. Good and evil existing side by side in the same personality. There’s none of us without shadows.”
“I’m not talking about shadows. About a man who gives in to temptation and cheats on his wife one afternoon at the local motel, or who skims the till at work. I’m talking about real evil, the kind that doesn’t carry a breath of guilt or conscience with it. Yet it doesn’t show, not even to the people closest to it.”
“Seems to me the easiest evil to hide is one with no conscience tagged to it. If you don’t feel remorse or responsibility, there’s no mirror reflecting back.”
“No mirror reflecting back,” she repeated. “It would be like black glass, wouldn’t it? Opaque.”
“Do you have any other cheerful remarks or suppositions to discuss?”
“How’s this? Can the apple fall far from the tree?”
With a half laugh, Brian hefted the pot and poured shrimp and steaming water into the colander. “I’d say that depended entirely on the apple. A firm, healthy one might take a few good bounces and roll. You had one going rotten, it’d just plop straight down at the trunk.”
He turned, mopping his brow again and reaching for his beer when he caught her eye. “What?” he demanded as she stared at him, her eyes dark and wide, her face pale.
“That’s exactly right,” she said quietly. “That’s so exactly right.”
“I’m hell on parables.”
“I’m going to hold you to that one, Brian.” She turned back to her grating. “After dinner, we need to talk. All of us. I’ll tell the others. We’ll use the family parlor.”
