Introduction

Janet Peery’s first novel, The River Beyond the World, was a National Book Award finalist in 1996. Acclaimed for her gorgeous writing and clear-eyed gaze into the hearts of people, Peery now returns with her second novel, The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs.
On a summer evening in the blue-collar town of Amicus, Kansas, the Campbell family gathers for a birthday dinner for their ailing patriarch, retired judge Abel Campbell, prepared and hosted by their still-hale mother Hattie. But when Billy, the youngest sibling?with a history of addiction, grand ideas, and misdemeanors?passes out in his devil’s food cake, the family takes up the unfinished business of Billy’s sobriety.
Billy’s wayward adventures have too long consumed their lives, in particular Hattie’s, who has enabled his transgressions while trying to save him from Abel’s disappointment. As the older children?Doro, Jesse, ClairBell, and Gideon?contend with their own troubles, they compete for the approval of the elderly parents they adore, but can’t quite forgive.
With knowing humor and sure-handed storytelling, Janet Peery reveals a family at its best and worst, with old wounds and new, its fractures and feuds, and yet its unbreakable bonds.

Editorial Review

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Excerpt

One

Even a hundred years past the town’s founding a visitor to Amicus might guess it had been laid out by rival drunks. A flatland hamlet between the Chisholm Trail and the Santa Fe tracks, the place had no true center but was an array of storefront concerns and modest houses ranging over the six square miles that lay within its boundaries. A fitting figure for her family, Hattie Campbell sometimes thought, especially on days when she was torn among conflicting desires, by her husband and six children vying for attention or love or favor or whatever prize it struck their unfathomable fancies to vie for.

In this way had grown their helter-skelter prairie town. A stretch of melon field would open onto an outcropping of peeling clapboard bungalows and these would give way to a stand of cottonwoods. A mile or so away, past the Farmers and Drovers Bank, another clutch of houses, only a bit tidier, would appear, and then a stunted peach orchard, and then a pump jack dowsing crude oil up from bedrock. Yet another mile from these you’d come upon the grain elevator, the hardware store, and the water tower, so leak-prone that in a big wind water would sheet out like a gusher from a derrick. From the roadside billboard depicting the whitest of white hands clasped in hearty greeting and the words “Welcome to Amicus,” it was a good hour’s walk to the bermed-up boxcar that served as the civic tornado shelter. On the western edge of town the land opened up and the Great Plains began their slow rise toward the Rockies.

Haphazard and down on its heels as the place was, her family had prospered here, and Hattie liked it fine. Her husband, Abel, ran his law practice out of a low-roofed adobe building that had first been the land office and then a pool hall and punchboard dive. During Prohibition the structure, because of its thick walls, had been put into service as the jail. After repeal it was turned into a Phillips 66. This, too, she thought, was a fitting figure, at least where it concerned her husband, a man in whom the law was ever at odds. When Abel bought the building he had the gas pumps and the buried storage tanks removed. Out of wrought-iron rod he welded the letters L-A-W O-F-F-I-C-E, hung them over the arched doorway, and set up shop for what would be a long and satisfying practice. In later years he sat as town judge, a post that called for settling ordinance matters, presiding over civil disputes, and deciding fault in traffic offenses. Hattie was on the library board and served as treasurer for the Amicus Garden Club. She joined the women of Dorcas Circle in charitable works, played the piano for the First Presbyterian Sunday School, and sometimes led a lesson for the youth.

The Campbells were known and respected, and she had been proud of this, but in the past few years, with Abel’s retirement and the rise of the next generation, she’d begun to fear that their standing was slipping. No one had said anything outright, but from time to time she saw a crooked look pass across the face of someone she was meeting for the first time. “I’m Hannah Campbell,” she would say, using her softer given name to keep from having to utter the flat-sounding rattle that was the name she went by, but almost before she could add, “but call me Hattie,” there’d be that flicker, that shadow. The Campbell name had once meant respectability and a certain stature, but lately she wasn’t sure exactly what it had come to mean. Scofflaw, maybe. Wayward. Something not very good.

Often she shook her head in despair—or as close to despair as she ever came, which amounted to a sinking sense of bewilderment—at her children and their problems. Public intoxication (all four sons), drug offenses (three of them), DUIs (three), firearms violations (one son), speeding tickets (no firm count, as their father would fix their tickets), habitual lawsuits and embarrassing public confrontations (one daughter), foreclosures (same daughter, two sons), divorces (all of them, even Doro the good daughter), and the periodic estrangements that came if anyone mentioned their offenses. From the boys and the girls alike—those who were still alive were baby boomers past the early stirrings of middle age—the trouble she and Abel endured with all but one of their six offspring was almost biblical, and it was clear the felling blow would be dealt by Billy, the baby, now in his middle forties and wearing every misspent year.

For over two decades her youngest had lived under a sentence that had once meant death, positive for the terrible virus that left his immune system in ruin and would lead, in less time than any of them suspected, to his end. Many times during the ordeal that was his adult life, on any given night, he’d feared he might not last until morning, but of course he had. He was a firebird, his sister Doro liked to say, a phoenix. After every close call he went on living, sometimes in better shape than before, at least for a while. But eventually he would relapse. Those who loved him more or less coped, and Billy himself endured his fate with a shifting array of denial, humility, gallows humor, despair, and hope, but from time to time things could get dicey, for in addition to his precarious health he was an addict.

Painkillers, black tar, methadone, drink—any substance at hand. Cough syrup, cigarettes, codeine, cocaine. On a lean day even candy. He favored gigantic chocolate bars with high sugar alcohol content, and he claimed when his choices were limited, five big Butterfingers could at least give him a right smart buzz. From the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous he’d learned about the use of sugar to quell cravings, but he suspected his appetite for the huge bars probably wasn’t what Bill W. had in mind.

Hattie adored him, and she lay awake nights worrying that when she died—she was in her late eighties—there would be no one to care for him. His never-ending needs and habits had driven away all his old friends and most of his family. He lied, he stole, he worked angles. That he committed these acts with a loving heart and an infectiously bright spirit did nothing to diminish the seriousness of his crimes, but his habitual ebullience made it easier for her to overlook many of his offenses and to believe they were merely stumbling blocks on a path that would straighten out at any minute. But lately, even she had to admit that things were getting worse.

“He’s flat killing you,” her daughter ClairBell said. Had said on more than one occasion. ClairBell was known for stretching facts to the fraying point, but in this case she was probably right. Hattie had suffered a heart attack a few years before, a silent heart attack she’d thought at first was indigestion from the short ribs she’d barbecued for dinner or maybe gallbladder distress from the months-old peanut brittle she’d found when she was cleaning out the holiday cupboard. Thrifty to the marrow, she hated to see her good homemade candy go to waste, and so she’d stood there eating it, piece by sticky, stale piece. Later that night she’d had a bout of chest pain, for which she blamed the candy. She didn’t get around to looking into her condition until three weeks after the event, too late for a stent. Too late for anything other than to marvel that the infarction hadn’t killed her outright. An artery was ninety percent blocked.

Daughter of pioneers and ranchers, she kept going, weaker than before and with a new little throat-clearing cough that reminded those close to her of what she’d been through, but determined to carry out her mission of easing Billy’s way through the world, for she believed the Almighty had spared her for that purpose.

Caring for Abel in his dotage had taken a toll on her energy. On her nerves as well. Her husband had never been easy. He was what people used to call a man’s man, but even this description didn’t go the distance. He was a grab bag of contradictions, a dervish of crossed purposes. A sensitive, swaggering, foolhardy rakehell, a perfectionist, a savant, a daredevil with a penchant for recklessness, intolerant of incompetence, especially his own. How many times had she heard him mutter to himself when he did something that didn’t measure up to his exacting standards, “Stupid, stupid, stupid”? But he was far from it. The man knew everything under the sun. If he didn’t know the answer to a question, he would make one up, bluffing like a cardsharp to keep from having to say he didn’t know. His poker face was legendary, and even after sixty-two years of marriage he could fool her. Maybe it was true that she was easily fooled, but still. Half the time his humor went over her head, and often she couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious. “Oh, the tragedy of the literal mind,” he would say, simply to madden her.

Sometimes he was a stubborn old crotchet with strong opinions and precise specifications for the right way to do certain things—a ripe tomato must be sliced a quarter of an inch thick and the abomination that was Miracle Whip must under no circumstances be permitted in whiffing distance of a BLT, which should be made with butter and never margarine—but other times he was an affable jokester, a generous host and party wit, a hail-fellow-well-met. A midnight lover whose hands … oh, she blushed just remembering. But whether he was Genghis Khan or the Miller of the Dee or the Sheik of Araby, you never knew which of these he’d wake up as. And lately he seemed to be getting even more erratic. She needed no more stress—that much she was certain of. Billy was nothing butstress, his brothers and sisters told her for the umptieth time after an awful birthday celebration, Abel’s eighty-ninth.

For the event, Billy had taken the crosstown bus from his boardinghouse in the city, the county seat some miles north, to the bus stop nearest Amicus. In her pale blue twelve-year-old Skylark, Hattie had gone to pick him up. On the way home he had talked her into stopping at the phone store and out of the ninety-five dollars she had concealed, against such a possibility, in her pocketbook’s secret compartment. The deviation from her schedule as well as the confusing cash transaction Billy brokered—he could talk so fast!—had rattled her. In the past few years her thinking, it seemed, had slowed. She was frazzled by the time the other family members arrived for the birthday dinner.

The eldest at sixty, Doro had flown home from Boston, where she lived a life as far removed from the goings-on in Amicus as a librarian’s from a rodeo clown’s. By day she was an associate dean of students at a tiny liberal-arts college. By night and under a pen name she was a writer of western novels. She remained unmarried even thirty years after divorcing her doctor husband, and this caused Hattie to worry. Was her eldest too hard to please? Too modern? A feminist? She was certainly not a lesbian; there were her three grown children as proof.

Late as usual, son Jesse pulled his Silverado into the driveway just as dinner was called. Despite the home-to-work restriction on his driver’s license stemming from a DUI a few years back when he was still a roaring drunk, and his general testiness when faced with a social obligation that required him to take off his hat, he had chanced the two miles from his farm, a boarding stable and drywall operation in the bend of the Big Slough where it flowed into the Ark River. Jesse and his father had a strained relationship resulting from Abel’s ongoing campaign to improve him. That the evening’s occasion was his father’s birthday was grounds sufficient to cause Jesse to kick the truck’s front tire before he entered the big stone ranch house.

ClairBell and her new husband, Randy Billups, had driven over from their country place in their white Coupe de Ville. Randy suffered from a polio injury that left him with a limp and a brace, but he managed to work as a mechanical engineer to keep a roof over the heads of ClairBell and her grown sons and a backyard swimming pool under her buoyant body. As to whether Randy was a saint or a dupe, the jury was out, though his kindness and the affection in which the family held him—the man could manage their bristly ClairBell—would billet him with the saints. Hattie liked him very much, and often she had envied her daughter’s luck. What might marriage be like with a mild-tempered man?

All the Campbells save Gideon, who was living off the grid in a straw bale hut in the Sangre de Cristos and hadn’t been heard from for months, were gathered around the table. Toward the end of the meal, after the birthday song was sung by Hattie, Doro, and ClairBell and mumbled by Jesse, as the birthday cake was served, Billy began to monopolize the talk. Walleyed with morphine and Retrovir, he rambled from subject to non sequitur subject, and in the middle of a monologue about the correct way to say that one was sick to one’s stomach—Billy insisted that “nauseated” was preferable to “nauseous”—he had fallen asleep, his forehead coming to rest in his plate of devil’s food cake.

Jolted awake by a poke from ClairBell and called by his father to account for himself, Billy laid the blame for his drowsiness on his prescription medicines. He outlined the pills he required, their effects, and why no one should trouble to wake him if at the dinner table he nodded off. Even if he wobbled or swayed. Or breathed like Darth Vader. Not even if he drooled. Why no one should shush him if he talked too grandly. “Or too longly.” Billy tittered at his lunatic adverb, but no one else laughed.

“Oh, honey. How many did you take?” Hattie fretted, tucking a salt-and-pepper curl back into her French twist. Her tight permanent wave had gone bushy with the heat and exertion of preparing the birthday roast, and she worried that her head, because of the way she’d bobby-pinned her hair at the back, looked like half a blown-out dandelion. “If only you’d watch how many you take…”

Muttered Abel, balling his napkin, “Oh, for crying out loud.” He pushed back his chair and rose to full height, which now that he was an old man and had shrunk—his last VA hospital physical measured him at only five and a half feet—did not have the effect he’d hoped for. To make up for his lack of presence he made his voice gruff and inserted an epithet, “Happy dang-blasted birthday to me.”

“Papa, sit down and eat your cake,” ClairBell said, reaching over to tug at his hand. ClairBell alone could upbraid her father, and from her and her alone would he accept blandishments. Had anyone else told him to sit down or tried to cajole him, there would have been hell to pay. Hattie had long ago given up trying to manage him. He could not be managed. He resisted even the subtlest handling. Hints, pointed looks, coming sideways at him—none of these methods had worked. Not once. If he was in a balky mood there was no hope; he was a mule, a man-size lump of tar on a log with its arms crossed and its chin set.

His sisters had once told Hattie that when Abel was young they’d nicknamed him the Little King, after the ermine-robe-trailing monarch in the funny papers who insisted on having his way. Abel was the firstborn boy after a run of daughters and his parents had favored him. As a child he was a spoiled-rotten customer. A very bad hat, the sisters told her, a stinker. He pouted. He threw heroic fits over nothing, a nickel slug, say, or a licorice jellybean or a half-empty bottle of flat root beer. They shook their heads; how the Little King had become a second lieutenant in the United States Army, a war veteran, an attorney-at-law and officer of the court, a respected member of society, they would never understand. As a boy he had heeded no rules but his own. Now, at ClairBell’s word and another tug at his hand, the officer of the court sat down meekly, but taking care to affect a look that would promote the impression that sitting down had been his own most excellent and reasonable intention.

Insulted by his family’s scrutiny, Billy wiped his forehead of cake crumbs and got up from the table. He set a staggering course toward the bedroom wing. He meant to dramatize his angry departure with a flounce followed by a head toss, but his body—he was no taller than Abel and much slighter—would not oblige. His attempt to storm off looked like a crazed dance, a spasm.

Only ClairBell laughed at his failed display. Jesse and Doro sat silently, hoping that with Billy’s departure the meal could resume, that their father would calm down and their mother would be spared the storm they feared was brewing.

“Go to your room,” Abel barked needlessly after Billy, forgetting that his son didn’t live at home but uptown in an apartment, forgetting he was forty-six.

“Bark!” shouted Billy, unchained by the pharmacological storm in his system. “Bark, bark, bark!”

Hattie fled the table and took refuge in the living room. If only Abel wouldn’t bait him! If only he would be kind! If only Billy would watch his tone.

Abel rose from the table. Prepared to stand up for himself against his wife’s constant judgment of the way he dealt with his son, he went after her at a rapid hobble. He planned to tell her there were limits and then to outline precisely what those limits were.

Seeing this and feeling protective of his mother, Billy changed his coordinates and lurched after his parents.

Bracing for an altercation between father and brother, both parties known for blowtorch tongues and no fear of heat, especially if blame was the name of the game and Hattie was the prize, Doro and Jesse and ClairBell brought up the rear.

Randy Billups had learned from blistering experience to keep his opinions to himself when the Campbells squared off, and so he pulled up a stool at the kitchen counter and settled in with a toothpick and the Auto Weekly.

They seated themselves on couches and chairs in the living room. Billy took a stance with his back to the fireplace stones, gripping the mantel behind him, arms extended in a pose of crucifixion until he snapped out of a nod to declare, “For your information, ma chère famille, I know exactly what I’m doing.” Billy had been told, in Paris no less, that he had quite the accent. He took pleasure in strewing French phrases throughout his speech. He was hurt by his family’s constant monitoring, by the looks he saw pass among them, and he planned to show them how efficiently and carefully he could manage his prescriptions. Pulling an orange vial from the pocket of his thrift store blazer, he crossed the room to dump a pile of blue capsules into his mother’s aproned lap. Next he dropped in some peach-colored tablets.

“These, if you must know,” he said, warming to his subject in an adenoidal voice, the result of past abuses to his sinuses, “cannot be taken with food and must be spaced over the day not to exceed six in a twenty-four-hour period, O heaven forfend.” He grinned drunkenly, luridly.

Dropping white tablets into the mix, he shook the apron so the pills danced like jumping beans. “And these are Percocet and must be taken not to exceed two hours of the previous dose of the blue and peach. For my pain. Do you see?”

Hattie cocked her head, trying to focus her gaze on the tablets, but a cataract made a blurred spot and she couldn’t get the image she was seeing to make sense—the nest of tablets and capsules looked like the spoils from a doll’s Easter basket.

She and Billy were at one of their impasses regarding his medicine. Medicines plural, she should say. Out of her household account she had agreed to pay for those obligations that Medicaid and the Ryan White Foundation didn’t cover as long as he kept his drug usage down, as long as he took his prescriptions sensibly and as directed. But his habits were more than she could keep track of or handle. She knew he pulled the wool over her eyes on many occasions, but what could she do? It was so hard to tell what was pain and what was excess. She had determined to walk the fine line between doubt and belief, but mostly to give him the benefit.

The whole issue was especially troubling because her son and her husband were at odds. Billy couldn’t bear the way he claimed Abel treated her. “Sharia law,” Billy sometimes said, always under his breath. Her son refused to hear her explanation that this was simply their generation’s way and that she’d accepted the bargain when she’d taken the vow to love, honor, and obey. And little did Billy know, she’d often thought wryly, the myriad ways she’d learned to get around her seeming subservience. She could be foxy when she had to.

For his part, Abel resented the boy’s hold on his wife. He had tried, but he couldn’t get past his son’s—he couldn’t, he couldn’t say “gayness,” couldn’t say “homosexuality,” could barely bite out “proclivities.” It wasn’t so much the fact of the matter—he’d seen enough of humanity in his practice to understand and even to empathize—as it was his son’s flamboyance. Billy was a peacock. A showboat with flags and bunting unfurled, brass bands playing on all decks, grand feeling on parade. He made no attempt to tone himself down but rather, wherever he went, made a spectacle. Spectacle making in any form was roman numeral one on Abel’s unwritten list of everyday sins. And the way he went through money. And his froufrou French. And the way his mother doted on him.

Were Hattie forced to choose between the two men, husband or son, duty would see a tack toward her husband, but love would send her wandering back toward the opposite shore. She had long thrown herself between Billy and the world, not only to protect him from Abel, who could be dismissive and even caustic in his criticisms, but in the hope of forestalling the ruin Billy was bound for. Try as she might, though, she could not tell him, “No.” Oh, she wanted to. She knew she should. But she always felt like Pilate washing his hands, or Peter before the cock’s crow. It was easiest to smile and go along, to look on the bright side and to believe the best of people.

“And this big pink lovely is methadone, which I crush finely and then using a razor blade carefully form a line—” A bout of hiccups interrupted Billy’s spiel, but he forged on to explain how he cut and snorted the powder.

Abel, too, had been trying to track his son’s sleight of hand, thinking that somewhere in the display would be a clue to the beta-blockers he thought might be missing from his nightstand, but for all he understood of the recital, his youngest son may as well have been a sideshow grifter fast-handing walnut shells over a dried pea.

Bewilderment was Billy’s aim: if he baffled his elderly parents, his mother would say, “I give up,” and once again he’d have sole charge of his drugs, with none of her well-meaning interference. This had worked in the past. Had worked off and on since his positive HIV test at twenty-one; he had convinced his mother that any hitch in the ready cavalcade of drugs might signal his end.

He loved Hattie, but he also knew he could use her. He hated this dishonesty in himself, but the appetite that drove him had grown stronger than love. She would believe anything he told her, no matter how outré. While he was in her care the world was his and the fullness thereof, for she couldn’t bear it when he suffered pain. If he told her he needed to go to a ramshackle house in a sketchy part of town because some unspecified someone there owed him money, off they went in the Skylark, Hattie with her hands at ten and two as Abel had endlessly instructed, peering over the wheel, pocketbook by her side, as Billy had lost his license after a third driving-under-the-influence. If he told her that a prescription was accidentally flushed down the toilet, in her quavering voice she’d call his doctor to vouch, in her innocence repeating his apocryphal tale of the mishap in exacting detail. But this time, as she stared at the pile of pills in her lap, she sighed, and then she raised her head, turned to her older children, and said weakly, “This can’t go on. I’m old and I’m tired and sometimes I can’t even think straight. We have to do something different.”

“Well,” said Billy, trying for humor, “in that case I’d better take control of these.” He bent to scoop up his pills, clumsily dropping them into his pockets. A blue capsule fell to the floor. Everyone looked at it but no one would move to pick it up. Billy hadn’t seen it and when he turned to leave the room, he accidentally ground it beneath his shoe, leaving white powder on the nap of the dark Persian carpet.

Thinking to lighten the mood, ClairBell said, “Let me get that.” She mugged a greedy, salacious face, put index finger to nostril, and pantomimed a spectacular snort. She was hurt when nobody laughed.

“You would,” Billy said when he realized who was mocking him and why. He and ClairBell were often at odds. ClairBell had accused him of purveying drugs to her son Garrett. Billy had countered that it was the other way around, that Garrett was stealing from ClairBell’s stash of prescription painkillers and selling them on the street. No one who witnessed the argument could determine guilt or innocence. “It’s your chicken and your egg kind of deal,” Jesse was known to say.

Billy left the living room. When the rest of the family heard the glass patio door slide in its tray, they knew he had drifted outside into the south yard to light up a Maverick.

Hattie shook her head. “I don’t even know how to think about this.”

“I do,” Abel said pointedly, getting up to make his way to the back-room den where the History Channel was waiting, one mind-numbing click of the remote control away.

Hattie rose from the sofa and left the room. She went to the kitchen to survey the wreckage of the birthday dinner and get things put right.

In the living room the others discussed the new development. The dilemma was always the same and so was the conversation. They went over the outrages Billy put their parents through. Money, shame, legal quagmires, fear that he would be killed or that he would die of an overdose. But this time was different. This was the first time their mother had asked for help. So rare was the occasion that they decided to step in.

When they were agreed, Jesse called Hattie to the room and explained their intention.

“Leave it to us,” ClairBell said, cobbling her fingers through a bowl of Gardetto’s to pick out the rye chips. “We’ll get him on the right road.”

“Do you think you can?” Hattie asked dubiously. “I just don’t know…” Her voice trailed off.

“We’ll get it done, Mom,” Jesse pledged. “Don’t worry.”

For years Jesse had wanted to ride to his mother’s rescue, to relieve some of her misery. He was protective of her against his father, who dominated her, he thought, and against Gideon and Billy, who took advantage of her trusting nature. He’d learned during his last few years at the Sunset Limited AA group that Hattie was a classic enabler, and he’d tried to tell her she contributed to her own dilemma and to Billy’s habits. But he hadn’t been able to get her to see how she made him worse. She genuinely believed she was helping. Jesse sighed. The way he did with Patsy, his sometime lover, who drank herself to life every afternoon and into oblivion every night at the Pay Dirt.

Hattie went to the sliding doors and peeked outside. Billy slumped in a lawn chair on the patio where years before a swimming pool had been, now filled in with dirt and paved with flagstone. His chin rested on his chest, a forgotten Maverick burned between his fingers. Quietly she opened the door, tiptoed across the flagstone, and removed the cigarette from his hand. She stubbed it out and put it in the ashtray and then slipped back into the kitchen, where she started on the dishes.

As the eldest, Doro conducted the meeting to set the agenda for how to deal with what they had long called the Billy Problem.

“A mercy kidnapping?” she suggested, trying to wring some humor out of a situation that wasn’t really funny. She was disappointed when Jesse and ClairBell didn’t laugh. Among friends and colleagues she was known for humor. Back east she was considered a card. People thought she was funny, or at least amusing. She loved to liven up stodgy committee meetings. But here on the plains in her hometown it was as if she spoke another language, as if she were a washed-up comic, bombing in a hostile room. She pushed up her glasses, cleared her throat, and went on. “We need to get him some help,” she said, “before this gets worse.”

After a long discussion they decided that it was too late this night but that the next time Billy called expecting their mother to fetch him home for another Lost Weekend, a posse would ride. The posse would intercept Billy and take him to the ER.

“Haul his scrawny bew-tox to detox,” said ClairBell. She put her fingertips together and in a sinister voice said, “Excellent.”

Jesse laughed at their sister’s clowning, and Doro remembered—again—that when she’d moved east she’d made herself an outsider. She had to be careful not to come on too strong, too bossy. As it was, her brothers and sister thought she was a Goody Two-Shoes a know-it-all, and a meddler. She needed to watch her step and try not to offend them. She needed to remember that their refusal to laugh was their way of circling ranks. She knew they called her “The Coastal Elite.”

“Sounds about right,” Jesse said. “It’s way past an intervention. We’ve been down that road before.”

ClairBell said, “Speaking of roads, remember that time Billy ran Honky into the Forty-seventh Street ditch?”

“That sorry Chevette.” Jesse shook his head. “And we had to pull it out so Hizzoner wouldn’t find out…”

ClairBell picked up the tale. “… and there was old Billy Boysie, dressed in his waiter’s tuxedo, all bow tie and cuff links and that pleated thing around his middle, wandering down the road, chatting up those Hondurans who ran the cantaloupe stand and saying how they should wrap this fancy-ass bacon around a piece of melon…”

“Prosciutto,” Doro supplied without thinking.

“Gesundheit,” said ClairBell, smirking, giving Doro the side eye. “And we made him promise to stop drinking and he signed this pledge he wrote up and decorated to look like the Bill of Rights?”

“Might as well have burned it,” Doro said, hoping to move past her gaffe. She thought of telling about the time Billy called her from jail, sobbing that he needed bail money, but this would just lead them down their well-worn path of cataloguing his misdeeds and it would make her look like a jerk for refusing to post his bond. “So what are we going to do?”

After they talked out the difficulties they made a plan to commit him to a drug rehab facility so Hattie couldn’t undo with her endless forgiveness what had to be done in his, and of course her own—Doro had said this so often that Jesse and ClairBell sighed when they heard the words—best interests.

They concluded their business by electing Jesse to return Billy to his apartment later that evening. “That way, if he needs to be carried…” ClairBell began, but just then their father, having shaken himself from his post-dinner nap, presented himself to announce that he would be turning in for the night.

ClairBell hastened to fill him in on their plan. He nodded. At times of high feeling, Judge Campbell relied on sayings of the great English barrister William Blackstone, confounding to most hearers. “I have tried,” he said magisterially, “since time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary to effect this very change. But in vain. Oh, in vain since the ages ornate.” He meant that he had long tried to get Hattie to butt out of Billy’s life.

ClairBell petted his arm. “It’s all right, Daddy. We got you.”

* * *

The next morning after breakfast Doro sat at the kitchen table with her cell phone, making arrangements. She dealt with the county social services, with Medicaid. She worked out the details so that if she happened to be back east when the time came Jesse and ClairBell would have a protocol to follow.

As it turned out, they had to wait only a few days, and Doro was still in Amicus wrapping up her visit when Billy’s come-and-get-me call came. She mustered the others and they set off toward the bus stop in her rental Focus.

Jacked up on a brilliantly calibrated pill cocktail that unfortunately he couldn’t remember the recipe for, Billy stumbled down the steps of the crosstown bus. Hoping to earn a laugh from the greeting party—two silver-haired sisters and one graybeard brother, God woot!—he plucked a cheap advertisement sign from the weed-grown easement to flash over his head: “CASH MAGIC!” He cut a crazed jig and then flourished the sign like a courtier doffing a cavalier hat. “Monsieur et mesdames!”

He was funny, their baby brother, adept at self-parody, inventive, witty and sweet-natured, prone to displays of temper under only two circumstances: if someone showed disrespect for his mother, whom he loved without reservation, or for Doro, whom he loved madly despite her refusal to lend him money; or if someone maligned his intentions, which were always, he insisted, always good. But now his siblings didn’t dare to laugh at his antics or he would be encouraged to greater effort. He was flying too high. Even from a distance his pupils looked like dark pools. “Look at those eyes,” ClairBell muttered. “World’s Largest Hand-Dug Wells.”

Doro pulled the Focus around the lot, stopped the car, and into the backseat went their brother. Ray-Bans shielding her eyes and silver-gray chignon loose and whipping in the oven wind of August, Doro hit the gas and the car took off. ClairBell—shorter, plumper, cracking wise, her platinum clip-on wiglet a corkscrew cascade—rode shotgun. Straw summer Resistol cocked back on his head, Jesse manned the rear seat so he’d be on deck, ClairBell had whispered, in case the captive needed a body block by a silverback cowpoke with a bunged-up knee, ha ha, no offense. “None taken,” said Jesse.

Billy settled happily, not suspecting where he was headed. “My sisters, my brother, my saviors,” he said royally from the backseat as the Focus pulled onto the right-of-way.

“You don’t know the half,” ClairBell turned around to say, but Billy had nodded out.

As outlined in the plan, they stopped at a strip-mall pizza joint. “Let’s get some food on your stomach,” Jesse explained as he shook his brother awake. So wrecked was Billy on his cocktail of prescription as well as street drugs that he didn’t notice their grim expressions. At Papa G’s he flirted with a teenage counter boy in a ONE LOVE T-shirt. The kid lifted his lip in a languid sneer and rolled his eyes, but Billy didn’t notice.

Billy had once been handsome. He’d been told he looked like a smaller, skinnier Marco Rubio but with a buzz cut going gray and better politics. Or like Robert Downey Jr., smaller and more delicately made, but with the same dark, soulful eyes. He’d had good teeth and a dazzling smile, an endearing way of sweeping grandly into rooms, as his pitch for irony was perfect, tastes that ran to gold collar stays and French cuffs. But now he wore a soiled olive drab T-shirt and wrinkled madras shorts that hung on his thin hips. He was unshaven and hollow-eyed, and the effect of his licking his grizzled chops over the counter boy made him look, ClairBell said later, like the Little Bad Wolf.

As they piled back into the Focus, Jesse’s bad knee seized up. “Shit fire and save matches,” he said through gritted teeth, working out kinks that each year grew worse, the effects of the skywalker stilts he used to hang drywall. He was fifty-six but his body felt eighty.

Billy touched Jesse’s arm and asked in a slurred voice, “Can I give you something for that, brother? Vicodin? Percocet? Opana? It’s new.”

Jesse was tempted. If his sisters hadn’t been there, he’d have taken his brother up on his offer. He liked painkillers as well as the next person. Sure, not enough to go out and seek them, but if a pill or three happened to roll his way, he wouldn’t turn them down. But this didn’t seem like the right time. “It’ll pass,” he said, massaging his knee. “But thanks.”

ClairBell craned around, dramatically putting one hand to her forehead and cupping the other toward Billy. “Headache. Maybe I’d better have some.”

Billy drew back the hand that offered the pills. Doro pretended interest in the road and Jesse took off his hat and examined the hatband. The subject of ClairBell’s history with opiates was forbidden by threat of a ClairBell fatwa. Some years before, Doro and Jesse had tried to talk to her about her problem, but she’d cut them dead, citing her many illnesses, some real and some phantom. She concluded with an exacting audit of everyone else’s vices. Nicotine for Doro, who was forever trying to quit smoking, add booze and the occasional pill for Jesse and Gid, and for Billy all three, plus fentanyl patches, morphine, the kitchen sink, and whatever-addictive-else. Everybody was an addict, she said. Every last one of them. And at least she, ClairBell, didn’t smoke. The silent treatment she gave them had lasted from Easter until Christmas. No one spoke of her problem again and so it had ceased to exist. But the truth was that she could mimic diseases so successfully tailored to the drug she wanted that she never lacked for stores. She had undergone elective surgeries in the hope of doses. She was blackballed in two of the city’s emergency rooms and had recently begun to frequent the pain management clinic in the old bowling alley. People said the place was a pill mill—one of the doctors who staffed it had just been indicted. When Billy continued to ignore her, she turned around, crossed her arms, and slumped in her seat.

Next on their secret agenda was a shakedown for drugs Billy might try to smuggle into the hospital. “Why don’t you show me what you’ve got,” Jesse said, playing off his request as if he had reconsidered Billy’s earlier offer.

Billy obliged, and from his pockets spilled rainbow stores. While Doro explained what was to happen next, about the ER and the arrangements she’d made, Jesse collected the stash in a napkin.

Billy sighed, settling back in the seat. “I see how it is,” he said in the voice of Grover the Muppet, using the childhood pet name from when he was the beloved baby of the family. “It is detox for Boysie?”

Firmly, sadly, in unison, hearing in their answer the long-learned inflections of their father’s voice, the posse said, “It is.”

Again ClairBell leaned around her seat and held out a hand to Jesse, gesturing toward the confiscated pills. “You want me to take those home and bury them in the burn pile? Set fire to them, maybe? I’d be happy to. We can’t just drive around town with them. What if the cops stop us?”

Jesse said, “Better not, Bell. Some animal could get at them. Your coyotes and your raccoons and whatnot.” He dumped the take into the remains of cherry limeade, shook the cup until the pills dissolved, and then poured the pink slurry out the window to splatter onto the hot asphalt of East Harry Street.

“Litterbug,” said ClairBell. The rest of the way to the hospital she glared at the roadside, thinking dark thoughts. Nobody appreciated her. It was all Dean Doro Do-Right and Jesse the Beloved and the Prodigal Favorite, O Where Have You Been, Billy Boy? She, ClairBell, was the Forgotten Child. She tried to work up a few tears but could get none to fall. At least, she thought, she had Randy. Doro had run her husband off, even a medical doctor not perfect enough. Well, there was the matter of his drinking, but still—a doctor? ClairBell would have made a different choice, but Doro had to have things just right. Spoiled, she was, ClairBell thought. Prissy and spoiled and stuffed up like a Thanksgiving turkey with book learning, educated way past the need of any common everyday person to get along in the world. She, ClairBell, was salt-of-the-earth and she loved it. So there.

Jesse the Beloved’s wife had divorced him. Same reason: drink. Plus some ugly business with a shotgun that neither ClairBell nor the courts could figure out. Had Jesse turned the weapon on his wife or on himself or on the barn door he eventually shot full of holes? Whatever, he was nevermore allowed to own a gun in the state of Kansas, the United States, and possibly the universe. Despite his sobriety he was keeping company with Patsy Gaddy, barflooze extraordinaire. He thought he was hiding it, but everyone knew. Still, Jesse acted like the woman wasn’t shacked up in his spare room, cadging rides and smoke money and bleeding him white. One day when the rest of the family was out in Jesse’s tomato patch, ClairBell had sneaked into his house and she’d seen the piles of women’s clothing on the floor—little bitty raggedy cowgirl jeans and pink plaid pearl-snap shirts and the fringed vest Patsy wore everywhere. Oh, Brother Bear wasn’t pulling one over on ClairBell.

Gid’s latest common-law hookup was the usual hot Gideous mess, all crystals and chakras and incense and sweat lodges and New Age ugga-boo. Plus an aquifer of booze. Finally there was the Prodigal’s life partner, Leo, a retired Navy chaplain turned AIDS counselor Billy’d joined up with in what they’d called a commitment ceremony but which looked for all the world like a two-groom wedding cake with punch and shrimp cocktail in the basement of the Metropolitan Community Church. She’d liked to have died when the two grooms gave each other that Pac-Man tongue-kiss for a full minute in front of Daddy. Reverend Leo had beat feet west the second or third time Billy fell off the wagon, but not until after they’d taken a few trips to Europe and a cruise to South America. A half-life partner,ClairBell thought, cracking herself up. But seriously, only she was still married. Go figure.

When she thought of her first two marriages, she softened. Fact was, every last one of the Campbells was messed up from the bassinette on and every bit of it was Hattie’s fault; their mother played favorites. The order went this way: Billy first, always, foremost, followed by Jesse the Beloved. Their brother Nick probably would have been next because he was male, but he was long gone, dead at twenty-three of a sick heart, and so it was Doro the Exploro in third place, and then in fourth place Gid, who was a man-child so he should have at least beat out Doro, but somehow that part of her mother’s favoritism didn’t play in Gid’s case and Gid didn’t care about favorites anyway. This left ClairBell to waddle along at the tail end of the line like the last quacking duck in a wooden pull toy. A hot, satisfying tear brimmed over.

After Billy had gone through triage, to which he submitted docilely, supplying information about his consumption that widened the eyes of a student trainee, Jesse walked with him and the hospital attendant to the detox intake.

The sisters went outside to wait in the parking lot. They leaned against the car’s hood, Doro waiting for her heart to slow down. She’d forgotten to take her beta-blocker that morning and she felt a pounding in her neck and beneath her breastbone. ClairBell opened the car door, found the warm remains of a Reddi Mart Pepsi, and sipped through the straw. Her mouth was dry. She’d been ramping up on some of the oxycodone she’d snagged from her father’s top drawer, a prescription he had for the bouts of back pain he suffered even years after the war. She’d swallowed three while the others were at the intake desk. Feeling the buzz come over her, she watched the late afternoon light play like water on the chrome of the parked cars and thought, not for the first time and she hoped not for the last, how beautiful light could be, how refreshing wind could be, even if it carried a faint smell of engine oil and hot tar and maybe a whiff of the sewer plant on South Hillside, and how good life was, really, and how much she loved her dumpy, clunky-tribal-jewelry-wearing, know-it-all big sister, poor old Goody-Two-Orthopedic-Shoes, who was standing off a ways, gazing at a bus stop bench through her fancy Hollywood sunglasses with a queasy look on her face.

An elderly woman in a flowered headscarf waited for the bus on the bench beneath a redbud tree, shopping bags at her feet. The woman looked at her watch and then drew a cigarette from her fanny pack and lit it. The smoke blew their way. The cloud hit Doro like the divine afflatus, and she breathed deeply. She took an involuntary step toward the woman. She was on her third quit, she had told everyone about it as an insurance policy, and for the past weeks she’d been doing well. The day had been difficult, though. Despite all her hard talk about getting help for Billy, despite the danger he put their parents in, the financial drain his habits were, and the damage he was doing to himself, she felt as if she were betraying him. She would bum a smoke, just one. It would calm her. Only ClairBell would know. Then she remembered that whatever her sister knew, the world would soon know. Jesse would know. The clerks at Dollar General would know. Hattie and Abel would know, along with embellishments calculated to make Doro look worse. By the time ClairBell finished reporting the incident, the tale would be that Doro had scrounged through an overflowing ashtray frequented by lepers and lit a crumpled butt, spendthrift that she was, with a flaming ten-dollar bill. She took a step back.

“You okay?” ClairBell asked, looking at her sharply. “You look a little sick.”

“Good.” Doro took a deep breath. “I’m good.”

ClairBell snort-laughed. “Everybody knows you’re good,” she said. “I asked if you were okay.” She cut her eyes toward the headscarf woman and then back to Doro. “You looked like you were having a nicky.”

Doro pretended to notice the woman and her wreath of smoke for the first time. She knew she should admit to her weakness, her temptation, but she couldn’t. Something in her, a part of herself she didn’t like and was trying to work on, wouldn’t let her give ClairBell the edge. “No,” she said shortly. “I’m just tired.”

ClairBell rolled her eyes to throw shade on her sister’s pitiful excuse. “Right.”

In the barred room of the hospital basement where Billy was to stay for his detox, Jesse made his good-byes. “Thank you, my big brother,” said Billy. “Tell Doro and ClairBell I understand. I know you want what’s best for me.”

Of the Campbells, Jesse was most sentimental, and he was moved by his brother’s surrender. He loved the flighty little punk and it ripped his heart out to see him this way, sick and down. Not to mention that Jesse’d been there himself, but with booze, saved only by a sponsor who kept him straight, and his own banged-up white knuckles. He shook Billy’s hand, thinking not for the first time that if his brother weren’t such a high-flaring flame ball of the kind the barstool jockeys at the Pay Dirt would want to beat up, he’d like to have taken him, back in his drinking days, for a beer. They could have compared notes about what it was like to be sons of Abel Campbell—Attorney-at-Law, Municipal Judge, and King of Kansas. At this last unkind thought, he told himself, almost by reflex, Easy Does It. Keep the bitterness down.

When Jesse arrived at the car and relayed Billy’s message, ClairBell’s anger, simmering all day and muted only a little by her meds, boiled over. “That little skunk. What I really want is for him to pay me back for everything he stole. Last time he came over he kyped a bottle of Lortabs from my train case—which was locked, by the way—and a jug of quarters from the pantry. Not to forget Randy’s best Stetson he wore to gay rodeo night and did anybody ever see it again, yee-haw?”

As she carried on, Jesse and Doro pretended interest in the western sky, now piling up with thunderheads. When ClairBell made claims, it didn’t pay to question her word. The more far-fetched her accusations were, the more fiercely she stood by them. In this way she was like their father—every argument was a hill she was prepared to die on. Besides, they reasoned separately, silently, these particular charges probably hadn’t been fetched from that far away. Billy’s rap sheet was long.

On the ride home they were quiet. The sky darkened, lowering. A fresh, ozone-y wind came up. As the first gouts of rain splashed across the windshield, ClairBell quietly took up the ever-nourishing matter of her abandonment, Jesse considered the odds of a request to use Abel’s log splitter being met with a simple yes or no, with no dramatic reading from the List of Tool-Borrowing Offenses, and Doro reflected on how to pack for the next morning’s flight, on the relief it would be when the plane skimmed over the harbor and touched down at Logan and she was done, at least for this visit, with family matters.

At the house in Amicus, Hattie had waited for word, and when the party returned she asked for an accounting, sighing as they filled her in on the day. “So he’s safe,” she said. “For now.”

Copyright © 2017 by Janet Peery view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Is anyone to blame for the Campbell family’s problems? If so, who, and why?

What are the bonds that ultimately unify the Campbells?

This novel is about a family seemingly at cross-purposes with each other, their relationships often tangled and fraught. Of the relationships, which do you think are the most painful? Which ones are more satisfying? Why?

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