Over Tumbled Graves (38 page)

Authors: Jess Walter

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BOOK: Over Tumbled Graves

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EPILOGUE

Caroline brought out the last box of clothing from her mother’s house and found her father leaning against the trunk of her car, holding a long silk glove that had been white but was now a neglected gray. When Caroline set her box in the trunk, he looked up as if he’d just noticed her.

“She didn’t still wear these?” He held the glove out for her to see.

“She was saving them for me,” Caroline said. It was surprising how little her father knew sometimes, the way he could pretend that his life hadn’t once been another life. She looked down at the open box, filled with slacks and sweaters and light blouses and on the top, the mate to this long, white glove, which her mother had worn at her wedding forty years ago.

Her father picked up the other glove. “Maybe we should save these,” he said, his voice unsteady.

“Okay.” Caroline looked up at his lined broadening face, his gray eyebrows. He was sixty. When he ran off to California he was thirty-six, Caroline’s age. Somehow that fact seemed crucial to whatever they would make of this now.

“Are you coming, Dad?” she asked, and put a hand on his shoulder.

“You go ahead,” he said. “I’d like to stay here for a while.”

From the car she watched him walk back toward the house, the gray gloves dangling from his thick fingers. She drove slowly through her neighborhood and stopped at every intersection. She still wasn’t used to the patch over her left eye, which limited her peripheral vision. It made her especially nervous when she drove.

She remembered waking up in the hospital after the surgery on her eye and seeing Dupree sitting by her bed, remembered him saying that he had moved back in with his family. “Anyway,” he said, “I didn’t get a chance to congratulate you.”

“Oh?”

“You and Joel in the hall that day. I saw the ring.”

In the hospital Caroline had felt the line of stitches for the first time, drawing her finger from her cheekbone across her eye to her hairline, along the four-inch gash that Lenny Ryan had given her. The doctor said she would have to wear the eyepatch for a month.

“So,” Dupree said, “have you set a date?”

There was no catch or hesitation in her voice. “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

She parked in front of the Bright Shining Day treatment center, grabbed the boxes of her mother’s clothes and carried them to the door. She leaned on the doorbell and a teenager wearing a Walkman answered, easing the earphones off her head. She stared at Caroline’s eye. “I have some things for Rae-Lynn Pierce,” Caroline said.

A few seconds later, the counselor she’d met before, Chris, came to the door and looked down at the boxes in her arms. “Rae-Lynn left,” he said. “Last night.”

Caroline nodded and wished she were more surprised. “Do you know where?”

The counselor just shrugged.

“Can I leave these anyway?” Caroline asked. “Maybe there’s someone else…”

The counselor took the boxes, thanked her, and closed the door.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These pages were puzzled over by some fellow writers and friends, chiefly Dan Butterworth, whose enthusiasm was inspiring, his criticism invaluable. Jim Lynch shared pages as well as angst, and Terry Morehouse researched my cop questions and took me skiing once.

My deep thanks and respect to Cal Morgan, the kind of incisive, insightful editor I’d heard doesn’t exist anymore, and of course to Judith Regan, for her energy, her vision, and her patience with flaky writers from remote corners.

Finally, I have the great fortune of being married to my favorite editor. Like everything I do, this book is dedicated to Anne, and to my children, Brooklyn, Ava, and Alec.

OTHER BOOKS BY JESS WALTER

Every Knee Shall Bow

In Contempt
(with Christopher Darden)

Copyright

OVER TUMBLED GRAVES
. Copyright © 2001 by Jess Walter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walter, Jess, 1969–

Over tumbled graves / Jess Walter

p. cm.

ISBN 0-06-039386-6