15 Addison

Addison's father had flat refused to go to the hospital.

Now it was nearly four and she was back at his town house in Germantown, Sara Caroline was at Libby's, and Preston was in the living room with her dad. Dad reclined in a hospital bed in the center of the room with the television tuned to Have Gun Will Travel. His caregiver Kiyana had called Addison not long after the meeting with the counselor at Hutch as Addison was winding into PDS to pick up Preston. (She'd have to return in a few hours for a soccer game.) Her father had chest pains, but wasn't making a big deal of it. Kiyana told Addison something she'd heard a thousand times: Your father is a very stubborn man.

"Would it hurt to get checked out?" Addison asked.

"My heart is the last thing I'm worried about," Sami Hassan said, shooing away the thought with an open hand. "That's like taking a car with a blown transmission in for a tune-up. It's probably Kiyana's food. She's trying to kill me with indigestion. How many times can a person fix beans and rice?"

Kiyana had worked for the family for more than two years, but Addison knew almost nothing about her life in Memphis or back home in Jamaica. The most intimate conversation they'd ever had was Addison telling her she'd listened to a lot of Bob Marley in college and smoked a little pot. Kiyana wasn't impressed, and Addison was rightly embarrassed for saying it, knowing that's exactly the kind of clueless crap the Hassans faced when they'd first arrived from Lebanon. Her grandfather and his brother opened up rival diners on Union Avenue, their kids born Americans but always struggling to assimilate. Her father had been bullied at Central High, although he'd never call it that, fielding jokes about being a camel jockey, that kind of thing. Dad always told them to suck his camel's pecker. Being bigger, tougher, and smarter than the bullies certainly helped.

When Addison was growing up, people would always tell her things like "you don't look Lebanese." Sorority sisters would compliment her tan with a meaningful look or say that her nose job looked wonderful. Which yes, she'd had, but never, ever admitted. So much shit she put up with as a blond Hassan until she married Dean and officially became a McKellar. Now the only thing she worried about was dyeing her roots.

"You look tired," her father said.

"Me?" she said. "What about you?"

"It's nothing," he said, waving his hand in dismissal. "A bunch of bullshit. I said I felt a tightness in my chest and she wanted to call the damn paramedics. Kiyana wants to be a hero so you and Branch will give her a raise. She spends half her day watching soap operas and calling home to talk to her sisters. She thinks I can't understand that patois. But I do. I took French in college. And yesterday, I know she called me a son of a bitch."

Addison used the remote to raise the back of her father's bed. The living room had taken on the feel of a triage, all her mother's knickknacks moved into a spare bedroom. The only decor remaining from their old house was hanging on the wall: a tacky print of her father's Ole Miss football coach, Johnny Vaught, alongside a framed oil of St. Charbel that he'd bought on a family trip to Lebanon. She hated this new house, hated the memories of watching her mother die here, and then watching it become some kind of museum to her and Branch's childhood. An entire guest room was filled with cheerleading outfits, prom dresses, and various sparkling numbers from her formals at Ole Miss. Branch's baseball and soccer uniforms, his letter jackets. She'd told her mother to trash it all when they moved into the town house, which was only two miles away from the spacious four bedroom/three bath she grew up in. Addison explained that getting rid of all that junk was the point of downsizing, but her mother wouldn't hear it. Now, she was gone, her cancer diagnosed before they ever even took that long vacation to Hawaii. The town house stuffed with a million pill bottles, two hospital beds, walkers, IV drips, and stacks and stacks of newspapers and magazines, her father saying he hated to read on the computer because you couldn't take it to the toilet. The entire house had taken on the same antiseptic, sickly smell as it had with her mother.

"The doctor said six months," her father said. "Now it's been eight. Maybe I should ask for my money back?"

"Daddy."

"I'm just trying to make you smile," he said. "I haven't seen you smile in a long time. How are things with Dean?"

"Don't you remember?"

"Of course, I remember," he said. "I have cancer, not dementia. Did you talk to Porter Hayes? What did he say?"

Addison told him everything since Wednesday, the run-in with Jimbo Hornsby at the Club, the phony secretary in Southaven and her stupid son, and what she knew about Mr. Hayes's meeting with Alec Dawson earlier that day. However, she decided to skip over any mention of the break-in and the one-armed man making a turkey sandwich before threatening her and his grandkids. Her father was listening but staring intently at the black-and-white image on TV, a man in a smoking jacket named Paladin sitting in his suite at a fancy San Francisco hotel and complaining about his salad to his waiter. A miser with the vinegar, a spendthrift for the oil...

"When are you going to file?"

"For what?"

"Divorce," her father said. "Did you make sure to get the police report?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can Porter establish a trail of all Dean's bullshit?"

"Yes, sir," Addison said. She still always addressed her parents and older people as sir or ma'am. Her father wouldn't settle for anything different.

"Okay, then," her father said. "What else do you need?"

"I would like to know whether the father of my children is alive or dead."

Her dad waved away the notion, continuing to watch this hero Paladin run down not only his hotel waiter but now a long-suffering Chinese worker named Hey Boy. God, this was all so terrible. Hey Boy?

"It's not what you think, Dad."

"What do I think?"

"That Dean is having an affair."

"Baby," her father said, turning to smile at her. "I hate to break it to you. But men are terrible creatures."

"You've said that all my life."

"They can't be trusted," he said. "They lie, cheat, and steal."

"What about you?"

Her father shrugged, a commercial coming on about the benefits of a reverse mortgage. Happy white-haired people talking about how draining their lifetime investment had worked out so well. They played a lot of golf and walked on beaches into the sunset where presumably they'd turn to dust and float out into the crashing waves as if no problems would remain. Getting old was such a fucked-up business. She thought she'd grow old with Dean, maybe selling off their big house when the kids were grown. But now what?

Addison stepped away and into what was once a dining room. She remembered celebrating just one Christmas there before it turned into floor-to-ceiling boxes and two different exercise bikes. Thank god it still contained her mother's lovely rolling bar cart filled with an array of booze in crystal decanters and colorful bottles. She lifted the plastic lid on her Chick-fil-A lemonade and poured in a good amount of Hendrick's gin, swirling it around the slushy ice. The first few sips were a relief, like letting go of some imaginary weight.

"Addison?" he said.

She walked back into the living room. "Yes, sir."

"If Dean isn't screwing around, then what is he doing?"

Before he launched into a coughing fit, Addison was about to explain to her father that Mr. Hayes was beginning to think that Dean wasn't exactly Dean and that everything about him seemed to be constructed on one massive lie after the next. Sort of like Preston's Jenga set. She wasn't even sure she knew what Dean did or where he went to make the money while she kept the kids pampered and fed and darting around East Memphis in her spandex and running shoes like the road warrior of Poplar Avenue, white-knuckled on the wheel, between Hutch and Presbyterian Day School. Stopovers at the soccer fields and consistent exercising. She'd turn forty in a month, and wasn't this whole exploding shit show a grand and glorious birthday gift?

Her father began coughing, almost gagging, before Kiyana ran into the family room and raised up the back of the bed more while she handed him a water glass. Preston looked up from his PlayStation Portable and watched open-mouthed as Kiyana whacked his grandfather hard on the back, helping him cough up something that might've very well been part of his lung. She wiped it off his chest and off the corner of his white-whiskered mouth. "Well, shit."

Addison grabbed Preston and walked him out the front door of the brick town house telling him that Grandad wasn't feeling well and to wait in the car. "Give me a second to say goodbye."

"Can't I say goodbye?"

"Later."

"We will see him again," Preston said. "Won't we?"

She felt a huge stone form in her throat just as her brother, Branch, decided to make a heroic appearance in his brand-new Land Rover, pulling up behind her Escalade and hopping out. Although it had been raining like hell, he looked as if he'd come straight from the putting green, wearing a bright blue golf shirt and stretchy gray pants, eyes wide and out of breath, as if he'd run all the way there. He'd never been able to keep hours at the restaurant as he'd been taught. "How's Dad?"

"Hard day at work?"

"Fuck you, Addison," he said, then glancing over at his nephew hanging out of an open window, "Oh. Sorry, Preston."

"He's inside," Addison said. "Don't worry, Branch. Dad hasn't changed his will. Not yet, anyway."

She could do this.

She could balance a rage-filled teen, a dying parent, and a missing husband all at the same time. Dr. Larry told her to just keep on her routine, keep to the same patterns of behavior where she found the most comfort. It was nearly six now as she fought through traffic to get back home, and she knew she needed to stop off at Fresh Market and grab something to eat. She could keep her head above water—the gin had definitely been a huge help with her perspective—but she damn sure wasn't about to go into her half-finished kitchen, tie on an apron, and play Martha Stewart.

"Why do you and Uncle Branch argue so much?" Preston asked, catching Addison's eye in the rearview from the back seat.

"Your uncle is older and thinks he knows more than me," she said. "I won't have him talking down to me. He can be a real jerk."

"When you went back inside to check on Granddad, he asked if you'd been drinking."

"What did you say?"

"I said we got lemonades at Chick-fil-A."

"Good boy."

"But I saw you adding liquor from Grandma's cart," he said. "Are you sure you should be driving?"

"I'm fine," she said, gripping the wheel tighter. "But I appreciate your concern."

"Uncle Branch also asked about Dad," he said. "He asked me if I'd heard from him."

"You?"

"Yeah," Preston said. "He thought maybe Dad had called home from London."

"Dad isn't coming for a while," she said. "And Preston, I have to be honest with you. You're a young man now. I'm not sure that when Daddy comes home that he'll be living with us anymore."

Preston was silent. Addison weaved in and out of the narrow three lanes along Poplar before taking a left, crossing the train tracks, and wheeling down into the Fresh Market parking lot. She pulled into an open space and killed the engine.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes."

"You're very quiet."

"Dad told me the same thing," he said. "Before he left. About not living at home anymore."

Addison didn't say a word, feeling her cheeks flush. She took a long breath in and tried to let it out slowly. A return to breathing like in her yoga classes, be still and at peace as a river flows past. "He said he might be moving away," Preston said. "For a long time. But that he'd always love me."

"You never told me that."

Preston unlatched his seat belt and reached for the door. "Because I promised," he said. "Dad said men don't go around talking about people behind their backs or getting all emotional over stuff."

"That sounds like Dean."

"You mean Dad?"

"Yes," she said. "Of course. Dad."

The hardest part was the waiting. Waiting to find out what happened to Dean. Waiting to find out the latest prognosis on her father. Even waiting around to see if any new sociopaths would be showing up in her kitchen, even though the police had offered to check on their house throughout the night. To be honest, the least thing that concerned her was Dean. Whether he decided to show up or not was on him. She couldn't control his actions. Another Dr. Larryism. She could only do the best she could for her children and for herself. That's why she was paying Mr. Hayes to do her checking for her, open up Dean's dirty little closet of deceit and misdirection and return to her with a nice, typed-up report that she could hand over to her attorney. (She didn't have one yet, but once the word was out that she and Dean were divorcing, the bloodsuckers from the Club would be calling nonstop.)

Addison picked up a roasted herb chicken and placed it in her cart, tossing in a container of mashed potatoes, and then doubling back for a salad. The least she could do was make a salad, although Preston wouldn't touch it. She thought she still had a bag of green beans in the freezer for him. "Preston, will you at least try to eat a salad?"

Preston was pushing the cart as mournfully as Sisyphus through the aisles of Fresh Market, classical music playing overhead and the store smelling of smoked bacon, coffee beans, and chocolate. The poor kid was being tortured.

"Who's that man?"

"What man?"

"The Black guy in the suit," he said. "The one pretending to be looking at the cheese."

"Don't say Black guy," she said. "Just say the creepy guy with the cheese."

"Who is it?"

"I don't know," Addison said. "Why should I know?"

"He keeps on staring," Preston said. "Maybe you shouldn't wear gym clothes to the grocery store."

Addison had forgotten she still had on leggings and a black tank top that boasted 30-a, (life's better at the beach!), wanting everyone to know she and Dean had a delightful little place on Rosemary Beach. Even her hat was a brag: telluride in green collegiate font. What was she? A fucking walking billboard? No wonder the man was staring. She was practically inviting it.

She told Preston to march on, moving on to the cereal aisle.

Preston turned to her, shoulders lowered, pushing the cart. "He's behind us," he said, under his breath.

Addison didn't answer. She just kept on looking for some homemade apple juice from Vermont and maybe some organic granola bars. She had to admit, there was something strange about the man wearing mirrored sunglasses inside the grocery store. But maybe he was handicapped. Maybe he was partially blind or something. Or, after the last few days, maybe she was just being paranoid and ridiculous.

"Mrs. McKellar?" the man said.

The man rolled his cart up to hers. There was nothing in it. Not even a block of cheese.

"I'd like to talk to you about your husband."

"And who are you?"

Preston looked up at the man and then back to his mother. She was pretty sure he'd also noticed the man hadn't picked up any cheese. He was smart like that.

"Sorry to roll up on you like this," the man said. "But this is of national importance."

If Addison had been drinking, she'd have spit halfway across the aisle. "Excuse me?"

"Can we speak in private?"

"This is my son," she said. "He can hear anything you have to say."

"First off," the man said, removing his sunglasses and then taking a deep inhale, "you both have my deepest condolences."

"Preston," she said. "Go get us some milk."

"What did he say?" Preston stared at the man in the suit, his voice starting to shake a little.

"Now," she said, raising her voice and gripping Preston by his shoulders, pushing him forward. Preston did as he was told. When he was out of earshot, she turned back to the Black man in the suit. "Now who are you and what the fuck are you talking about?"

"My name is Carson Wells," he said. "I'm a federal agent investigating your husband's business. I tried to find you at home, but—"

"Instead you decided to follow me to my father's house."

"How did you know that?"

"You drive a silver Ford sedan?" she said. "You're not very discreet."

The man didn't answer. He pushed away the shopping cart and stuck his right hand into his pants pocket, very casual against the rows and rows of healthy cereals and boxes of granola. "I need your help," he said. "Your husband was a very bad man."

"Was?" she said. "Why are you talking about him like he's dead?"

"Because he was killed four days ago in Paris, Mrs. McKellar," he said. "I'm so sorry. I thought you knew."

But she could tell by his sly little grin that the man wasn't sorry one bit. She left the cart, hot roasted chickens, cold mashed potatoes, Healthy Os, all of it, and rushed to find Preston, grab him by his little arm, and race out of the fucking Fresh Market.

"What about dinner?"

"We'll order pizza before your game," Addison said, suddenly feeling her voice cracking and tears run down her face. Goddamn it. "Pizza sounds good to me. How about you, buster?"

In her walk-in closet, Addison changed into a fresh pair of black leggings and looked for a hoodie that wasn't an advertisement for every damn vacation she'd ever had. Mustique. Vail. The ranch in Wyoming. Finally, she found her ancient bright blue Ole Miss hoodie, frayed at the cuffs, and slipped it on along with a trucker cap from Bluff City Barbecue. If the other PDS mothers didn't like her modified look, they could go straight to hell. She might very well be a grieving widow for all she, or they, knew. She'd cried a lot in the shower, composed herself with a Klonopin, and then made herself a tall thermos of gin and grapefruit juice and called up to Preston that they were running late for his soccer game.

A half-eaten Domino's pizza remained on the sad little island, the last part of the kitchen that hadn't been completely disassembled. She checked the doors to the patio twice and set the alarm before closing up and rolling out to the soccer game.

She didn't remember much of the game. There was a red team and a blue team. Preston was on the blue team. Go blue! And she sat off by herself, texting back and forth with Libby about picking up Sara Caroline on the way home.

Branch said you were drunk...

Branch is an asshole.

Are you?

I am half-drunk. Trying to get there.

Can Sara Caroline stay the night? She's worn out after what happened today.

I think Dean is dead.

...

OMG.

A federal agent stopped me at Fresh Market and gave me his condolences.

WTF? Does Preston know?

Apparently, no one knows.

And you went to his game?

Super Mom. I'm drinking gin and juice and trying to steer clear of Hannah Tracy. You were right. She did have her tits done.

I'm so sorry, Addy. I'm so sorry. I'm coming to you.

Goddamn it. The last thing she needed was a teary-eyed shit show. Addison poured out a little more gin and juice from her thermos and clapped at something that was happening on the field. Go team. Go Preston. Go Addison. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

She sat through the halftime in her folding chair under her dad's trucker cap and in her dark sunglasses. The night was already coming onto the soccer fields and bright lights clicked on overhead. The advantages of paying high-price tuition for PDS.

Hannah Tracy had gathered with three of the other moms down the field and they all waved to her. Hannah all smiles and pointy bosoms, holding up a fancy thermos of her own. Addison toasted her with her cup and watched as the kids retook the field. After an eternity, the game was over, and Preston had to come over and shake her awake from where she'd dozed off in her chair. Maybe with the sunglasses, no one noticed.

"Did you see my goal?"

"I saw all of them."

"I only had the one."

They walked back to her Escalade and she loaded her chair and her now-empty thermos into the rear. She hadn't eaten almost all day but didn't feel hungry in the least. Maybe she'd have the half-eaten pizza at home and fall asleep. They could do it all again tomorrow. All the fun and the laughs. She'd have to call someone. Who did you call when a federal agent told you your husband was dead? Porter would know. She needed to talk to him badly.

The house on the hill in Central Gardens seemed more ominous tonight, set up high with a patchwork of lights on. Hadn't she turned off the lights? Or had Libby already brought back Sara Caroline? Surely Libby wouldn't leave Sara Caroline there alone after the break-in. Maybe she was there, too, with Branch, ready to have a family meeting about what she'd heard about Dean. Even now, riding up the slant of the hill up to the garage, she had a hard time imagining Dean dead. Maybe it was better that way, everything Dean had kept secret for years remaining a secret forever. She'd be the Widow McKellar now. That's how they addressed women on her dad's old Westerns. She'd be poor Addison McKellar, so brave and strong, raising two kids on her own. At least she had money. She still had money? Right?

She punched the garage door opener and Preston scooted on inside, letting out ChaCha into the side yard, ChaCha barking and looping round and round. That crazy fucking dog. Addison didn't see Branch's or Libby's car and didn't give the lights much thought. Maybe Josefina had turned them on earlier and she hadn't noticed.

She left everything in the Escalade and headed upstairs to take a hot bath. A hot bath would make everything much better. She visited the bar in Dean's office and searched around for a good bottle of red. On Dean's desk sat an empty whiskey glass, still cold, with condensation running down the side, nothing left inside but a few melting ice cubes. She smelled cigar smoke.

"Preston?" she said, yelling upstairs. "Preston?"

She took the wide staircase upstairs, finding her son on top of his covers with his PlayStation in hand. "Are you okay?"

He didn't answer as she headed into her bedroom to look for the shotgun she'd aimed at the one-armed man. The bathroom door was closed and she heard the water running. She was about to call 911 when she saw a black leather carryall on the bed. The DRM monogram near the handle. She pushed the bathroom door and walked inside the steam. The water shut off and she watched, frozen in place, as Dean emerged from the shower, wrapping a towel around his waist.

She was suddenly a teenager, lying in front of her console television with both of her parents watching the season finale of Dallas. Patrick Duffy scrubbing his back and turning to his wife, Pam, or whatever her name was and saying, Honey, what's the matter? You look like you saw a ghost.

Jesus Christ.All she could think to say was, "You fucking asshole." And then she slapped him hard across the face. She tried to slap him again, and he reached out and grabbed both of her wrists and yanked them downward, motioning with his head back to the shower. Blood spattered across the white tile wall and circled down the drain.

Dean had horrible punctures all along his side, as if he'd been stabbed by a pitchfork. A bloody bandage lay by the shampoo bottles.

"Stop it," he said. "Just stop it. You need to be quiet and listen to me, Addison. I was in a terrible accident."