Chapter 6--The Righteous Brother
The Westford Cove Care Center was a three-story white Victorian on the corner of Sawtelle Road and Route 33, the main access road onto the peninsula that held South Barnham. The lawn was still brown and bald in patches, but a wire-fenced memory garden brightened the landscape with tulips and daffodils, the red-tipped buds on a Japanese maple. A low granite bench sat like a station on the labyrinthian path—he imagined the patients walking around and around it, without end.
A numbered electronic keypad controlled entrance and exit. Inside the home was clean and bright, the institutional odors faint beneath the smells of fresh cotton sheets and cut flowers. A sign in the foyer reminded visitors to secure the door behind them.
Mack wiped his feet on a mat woven from rope, and as the door snicked shut behind him, pushed down his anger that Arthur was allowed to recuperate so comfortably here, while the seven children who’d been in his care no longer lived at all. What responsibility did his cousin feel for that, if any?
Darby Colton smiled up at Mack from behind the desk in the reception area, decorated with wood paneling, antique furniture, and flocked floral wall paper, all of which seemed to suck in light. A wall of pigeon-holes for mail framed a small stained-glass window and a broad weathered woman in her forties sat by another window that overlooked the salt marsh. Her eyes were dull as stone and he shook his head at the cruelty of early onset Alzheimer’s.
“I guess I don’t need to ask who you’re here to see.” Darby rotated a ballpoint in her fingers.
She was nicknamed Pudgy, an instance of that reverse verbal jujitsu that calls a giant Tiny. She was built of sticks, not an ounce of excess flesh. Karin had been helping out the volleyball team at the high school this winter and Pudgy had been the libero, the team’s roving troubleshooter on the court.
He wasn’t surprised she knew who he was. You could not overestimate how fast gossip passed in this town.
“Is he even talking to anyone?”
“He might speak a little, but he hasn’t been making much sense.”
That ran against type. Of the three brothers, Arthur had the gift of gab.
“He never made a lot of sense to me,” Mack said, then regretted the shot at his cousin.
Pudgy bit her lower lip, as if he’d disappointed her. She was a kindhearted soul and probably believed in families who got along.
“Well, it shouldn’t take you too long to talk to him, then. Lunch is in half an hour.”
In high school, Arthur was the bad boy type: surfer dude haircut, Mexican hoodie pullover, slow stoner smile. Any number of the freshman and sophomore girls bought the act, maybe because it hinted he knew about life outside South Barnham. Mack had no idea who he was these days.
Arthur was standing at the window with his back turned when Mack walked into the sun-filled room. Mack saw the tendons on the back of his cousin’s neck tighten, though he didn’t turn.