The Favor Read online

  “Sometimes I dream I’m young again,” she said. “I dream I’m a girl. And then I look at my hands, and I know I’m really an old, old woman.”

  Janelle didn’t know what to say to that, but when Nan squeezed her fingers and smiled, she realized that sometimes nothing needed to be said.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “I SAW YOUR brother at Mass last weekend.” Marlena Tierney’s red hair had gone gray long ago, but in the past few years she’d started dying it again.

  The color was garish, unnatural. Clown-red. It matched the bright lipstick she still insisted on wearing. The nail polish. She wasn’t an old woman, but time hadn’t been particularly kind to her, and she knew it.

  “He sends his love,” Gabe’s mother continued. “Said to tell you to make sure Andrew gets to church. You, too.”

  Mike probably included their dad in that, but Marlena would’ve stuck her hand in a jar of angry wasps before she mentioned Ralph’s name. Gabe leaned forward to light the cigarette she held up. She gave him a coy smile, the way she always did, but refrained from cupping his hand the way she would’ve if he’d been another man and not her son. He knew her ways, all right.

  “You should tell him we need to see him more often,” Gabe said, knowing it made no difference. “Andy misses him.”

  “He’s very busy. He’s got an active congregation, you know that. His parishioners need him to be there for them. It’s not,” she said, “like he can just go on vacation or something any time he wants to.”

  Since Gabe knew for a fact that his brother had indeed gone on a vacation, a cruise to Mexico and the Bahamas, no less, this argument held little weight with him. Gabe hadn’t taken a vacation in years, not unless you counted the hunting trips to camp, which he did not. “We live less than three hours from him. He could make a day trip more than once every six months.”

  Marlena shrugged and drew in the smoke, holding it for a few seconds before letting it stream out the side of her mouth. She looked at him through squinted eyes. “You could go see him, too, you know. He’d love to see you. It wouldn’t kill you to go to church, either.”

  “It might.” He smiled.

  After half a minute, she smiled back. That was the mother he remembered best, or at least wanted to. The one who smiled and laughed and got down on the floor with him to play with Matchbox cars and LEGO. Not the one who sat and wept at the kitchen table or locked herself in the bathroom for hours. Not the one who’d left them. And not this present-day crone who’d asked Jesus for forgiveness plenty of times, but never her own sons.

  “How is your brother?” Marlena asked after the clock’s second hand ticked in silence one time too many. “Andrew.”

  “You could come see him yourself. Find out.”

  Marlena stubbed out her cigarette only half smoked. “You know that’s not a good idea. What with the...problems.”

  They’d been over this before, a dozen times over the years. Gabe guessed he’d go over it a dozen more without any expectation her decision would change. Marlena had come to the hospital to see Andy after the accident, when he was still unconscious. She’d stared at his bruised and bloodied face for a long time without a word, then turned on her heel. Gabe had followed her to the parking lot, where she’d fumbled with a cigarette and leaned onto the hood of her car as if she might be sick or faint.

  “I never wanted it to be like this,” she’d said without looking up at him. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  Gabe, who hadn’t eaten or slept more than a few minutes at a time in the four days since the accident, had pulled his lighter from his pocket. It was the first time he’d lit her cigarette, and that time she had cupped his hand to hold the flame steady. Her fingers had been cold, the flirtatious smile she gave him warm before it slid from her face and left her expression blank.

  “Nice lighter,” she’d said.

  “It was a present.”

  Marlena had nodded as if that made sense. He remembered how greedily she’d sucked at the cigarette, as if the smoke was oxygen. The sun had turned her hair to fire.

  “Don’t you understand? I thought I was doing the best thing,” she’d told him.

  Gabe knew the smell of bullshit. Whatever his mother had thought when she decided to leave her husband and three sons behind without so much as a forwarding address, he didn’t believe it really had anything to do with anyone but herself.

  “We all thought you were dead,” he’d told her, just to see if she looked surprised.

  She hadn’t. “That was your father’s idea. Not mine.”

  “But you let him do it.”

  That was the first time he’d seen her smile. “Don’t you get it? Nobody lets Ralph Tierney do anything. He does what he wants, how he wants it, and you’d better do it, too, or else....”

  “Or else you end up almost dead or wishing you were,” Gabe had said.

  That was when she got in her car and left him there.

  Years had passed, but nothing changed. Andy woke up, forgetting most everything in his life. They never told him his mother was alive. Mike had sided with her on that one, and Gabe hadn’t had the heart to fight them. Mike knew Andy better, after all. As for their father, when he heard his wife had gone to see her son in the hospital, all he’d done was spit to the side.

  “It’s not his problems that are the issue,” Gabe said now. “It’s yours.”

  Marlena scowled. “If you’re going to talk to me that way, Gabriel, you can march yourself right out of here. I don’t need a lecture from you on how to live my life.”

  “Surely the blessed Father Mike would tell you the same thing.” Though he couldn’t have, because if the hallowed priest-son had told their mother to visit with Andy, she’d have done it. With bells on.

  “Michael agrees with me that it would be too much for Andrew at this point. It would be too confusing, too hurtful. It’s better this way,” Marlena said stubbornly, but without looking Gabe in the eyes, as if he might use some secret laser power to force her to agree.

  Gabe sat back in the chair. “Right.”

  She gave him a narrow-eyed glare. “You’re so much like your father.”

  It was the easiest way to get him to leave, comparing him to the old man, and she knew it. Gabe didn’t give her the satisfaction. He crossed his ankle over his knee and leaned back with a small smile.

  “You even look like him,” she said. “I’m sure the ladies just eat you alive, don’t they, Gabriel? I bet you have them lined up for blocks just waiting to get a piece of you. And yet here you are, almost forty years old and not married. Not even a girlfriend. I’ll never have any grandchildren, at this rate.”

  “You’ll never have any grandchildren, period.”

  She looked sad; he even believed she was. “I guess it’s just as well, since if you had any kids I’m sure you wouldn’t even allow me to see them.”

  “I see you,” he pointed out.

  “Once every few months, and then you come and sit for a while and berate or insult me.” Marlena sniffed and delicately pulled another cigarette from the pack. It hung from her bottom lip as she spoke, gesturing toward him. “Light me up.”

  He did.

  “I see you’re still using that old lighter.”

  She’d given him a new one for his birthday a few years ago. Shiny, silver, engraved with his initials. He had it in a drawer at home. He flipped the lid closed on this one and tucked it back into his pocket.

  “Michael tells me she’s back in town. Living with her grandmother again. She has a son....”

  Gabe got up from the table. “Don’t. Even.”

  Marlena fluttered her hands, doing her best to look innocent. “What? What?”

  She knew what. Gabe grabbed his coat from the back of the chair, already reaching for his keys. “Tell my brother he should come and visit his other brother more often. Andy misses him.”

  “I just want to see you have a family, Gabriel. A wife.” Her words caught him at the back