Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

Author:Wells Tower
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374292195
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

DOOR IN YOUR EYE

My daughter, the very first night I was in her house, she wanted right off to put me in a state of fear. I was not even through with my soup when she came out, very excited, with a stack of photographs. She had them in a plastic Baggie so they’d be safe even in a flood. What was in those pictures she needed to be so careful about? Somebody lying dead in the street in front of Charlotte’s apartment, shot in his chest, a black man about eighteen years old. “See, Dad? Right in here? See the blood dripping out of his mouth? That’s how fresh he was when I found him.”

“So what?” I told her. “It’s a dead man. Do I know him? There’s not enough terrible stuff around, I have to look at this?”

But my daughter was so excited about her photos, she made me go through every single one, all the way until we hit the pictures where the police and ambulance drivers arrived and spoiled her angle with their barricades. “After here it’s no good,” she said, pulling down her mouth. “You can’t see anything. They blocked me out before I could actually see rigor mortis.”

“You saw too much already, Charlotte,” I said. “You never should have seen it, and then you turn around and show it to me. Some idea of how to make somebody feel welcome.”

She knocked the stack of pictures hard against the tabletop to even them up. Then she slipped them back into the plastic bag. “I’m just saying it’s not like Pottsville. You have to be careful here.”

“I’m not afraid of this place,” I said. “I’ve seen some things. I’ve been around the track a few times.” If anything, I was afraid of my daughter, a grown woman who when she finds a dead man, the first thing she does is take a hundred photographs. I said nothing. Charlotte is a single girl, though she was married once. We threw her a big foolish wedding with tailcoats and a white limousine and a bagpiper walking around. Her marriage held on for ten months. Since then, Charlotte has gone to one school after another, hoarding up degrees, this latest one in public health. I didn’t see her getting married again. She was forty-one. Her face was still a little bit pretty, but she’d turned into one of these girls who carries a big load under her belt.

“I hate to say it, Dad, but you’re naive,” she said. “Things happen all over this city, and you never know where. This is a risky place.”

“So what? I just stay in the house all day, afraid for my life?”

“Of course not. There’s plenty of good places for you to go. There’s the Mintz Center on Nashville Street. They have games there, and cards, and I think they’ll give you lunch and they don’t charge.”

“I’ll go see about it,” I said. “What kind of girls are there?”

“Old ones, I guess,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

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