Among the Missing Read Online Free PDF Page B

said, after they had both been silently thoughtful for what seemed like a long while; he looked at her softly, as if she, too, had been having fond memories of Wendell. “I really miss him bad. I mean, it’s like this family is cursed or something. You know?”
    “No,” she said, but not so gently that Randy would want tobe patted or otherwise physically comforted. “It will be all right,” she said firmly. “I honestly believe everything will turn out for the best.”
    She gave Randy a hopeful smile, but she couldn’t help thinking of the way Wendell would roll his eyes when Randy left the room to get another beer. “He’s pathetic, isn’t he?” Wendell had said, a few weeks before he was arrested. And he’d lowered his eyes, giving her that look. “I’ll bet you didn’t know you were marrying into white trash, did you?” he said, grinning in a way that made her uncomfortable. “Poor Cheryl!” he said. “Tobe fakes it really well, but he’s still a stinky-footed redneck at heart. You know that, don’t you?”
    What was there to say? She was not, as Wendell seemed to think, from a background of privilege—her father had owned a dry-cleaning store. But at the same time, she had been comfortably sheltered. None of her relatives lived in squalor, or went to prison, or drank themselves daily into oblivion. She’d never known a man who got into fistfights at bars, as Tobe’s father apparently had. She had never been inside a home as filthy as the one in which Randy lived.
    But it struck her now that the trial was over, now that Randy stood, teary and boozy in her bedroom doorway. These men had been her husband’s childhood companions—his brothers. He loved them. He
loved
them, more deeply than she could imagine. When they were together, laughing and drinking, she could feel an ache opening inside her. If he had to make a choice, who would he pick? Them or her?
    •   •   •
    In private, Tobe used to laugh about them. They were “characters,” he said. He said, “You’re so patient, putting up with all of their bullshit.” And he kissed her, thankfully.
    At the same time, he told her other stories. He spoke of a time when he was being abused by a group of high school bullies. Randy and Carlin had caught the boys after school, one by one, and “beat the living shit out of them.” They had never bothered Tobe again.
    He talked about Randy throwing himself into their mother’s grave, as the casket was lowered, screaming “Mommy! Mommy!” and how the other brothers had to haul him out of the ground. He talked about how, at eleven or twelve, he was feeding the infant Wendell out of baby-food jars, changing his diapers. “Then, after Mom got cancer, I practically raised Wendell,” he told her once, proudly. “She was so depressed—I just remember her laying on the couch and telling me what to do. She wanted to do it herself, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t easy, you know. I was in high school, and I wanted to be out partying with the other kids, but I had to watch out for Wendell. He was a sickly kid. That’s what I remember most. Taking care of him. He was only six when Mom finally died. It’s weird. I probably wouldn’t have even gone to college if I hadn’t had to spend all that time at home. I didn’t have anything to do but study.”
    The story had touched her, when they’d first started dating. Tobe was not—had never been—a very emotional or forthcoming person, and she’d felt she discovered a secret part of him.
    Was it vain to feel a kind of claim over these feelings of Tobe’s? To take a proprietary interest in his inner life, to think: “I am the only one he can really talk to.” Perhaps it was, but they’d had what she thought of as a rather successful marriage,up until the time of Wendell’s conviction. There had been an easy, friendly camaraderie between them; they made love often enough; they both loved their children. They were normally happy.
    But