AFTER MY VISIT TO JESS’S MARKER, I WASN’T READY to face my empty house. I called Jeff, my son, and asked if I could swing by for a visit.
“Sure,” he said. “We’re just about to grill some burgers. Come on out—I’ll throw one on for you.”
“Hmm, charbroiled meat,” I said, picturing my recent nighttime experiment. “I’m not sure I’m all that hungry.”
“Have you seen a doctor yet? You must be ill. I’ve never known you to turn down anything cooked on the grill.”
“Long story,” I said. I realized that my need for company outweighed my aversion to the smell of searing flesh. “I’ll tell you over dinner.”
Jeff’s house was about fifteen miles west of downtown Knoxville, in the bedroom community of Farragut. Compared to Knoxville’s other bedroom communities, Farragut tended toward bedsheets with a higher thread count. Named for a Civil War hero born nearby, Admiral David (“Damn the torpedoes”) Farragut, the town was a sprawling collection of upscale shopping centers, golf courses, and subdivisions with names like Andover Place and Berkeley Park. There was no downtown; the “town center” consisted of a municipal building that housed a library branch and a county clerk’s office. Across the parking lot was a post office, a bank branch, and a couple of restaurants. Farragut wasn’t my idea of a town, but it seemed to suit a lot of people, because it was the fastest-growing part of Knox County.
Jeff and his wife, Jenny, and their two boys, Tyler and Walker, lived at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, the sort of place where parents still let their kids roller-skate and ride bikes in the street. Maybe that was the appeal. Maybe in some ways Farragut was a town, or pieces of a town, the way towns used to be, back before the streets became places of peril.
I saw a wisp of smoke curling up from behind their house, so I let myself in the wooden gate to the backyard and circled around to the patio. Jeff was just spreading out a glowing mound of charcoal briquettes. His hands were smudged with soot, and his face glistened with sweat.
“Glad to see you haven’t gone over to the dark side and switched to gas,” I said.
“Never happen,” he said. “You taught me well, and I’ve eaten too many tasteless burgers at my neighbors’ houses.”
“You know, of course, it’s the carcinogens that give the good smoky flavor,” I said.
“Actually,” he said, “not necessarily. Apparently some researchers at Johns Hopkins did a study on this very thing. The carcinogens form when you let the fire flare up—for some reason that particular temperature causes a chemical reaction that creates the carcinogens. So you don’t want to cook the meat over open flame—just hot coals. Close the lid, hold in the smoke, keep the fire low, and everything’s okay.”
“I’ll sleep better knowing this, son.”
Jenny came out the back door with a platter of burgers. “Hey, Bill,” she said. I liked it that she called me “Bill” rather than “Dad” or some other in-law title; it allowed us to relate as equals.
“Good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too,” I said. I noticed their boys peering out the glass of the storm door. Tyler was seven, and Walker was five. Both were wearing the baseball uniforms they seemed to live in all summer long.
Jenny followed my gaze. “Guys, come on out and see Grandpa Bill,” she called, a little too cheerily.
They did as they were told, but they hesitated, and that hesitation nearly broke my heart. It had scared and confused them when I was charged with Jess Carter’s murder. Their friends had said cruel things to them, as children will do, about Grandpa the killer. A parent can do a lot of explaining, but it might still take years to restore the openness and easy trust my grandsons had once felt with me. By then, of course, they wouldn’t be five and seven anymore.
Jenny set the burgers down on the patio table and came up to give me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. The warm greeting was partly for my sake, but partly for the boys as well—a message to them that yes, I was still their grandfather, and yes, I was someone safe to love.
Jenny looked searchingly into my eyes, and this part, I knew, was just for the grown-ups. “How are you?” she said.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Mostly.”
“I think about you all the time,” she said. “I’d give anything if I could undo all the things that went wrong last spring.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Sometimes I feel lonelier than I did before Jess—or maybe I just notice the loneliness more now. The trial starts next week, and I figure that’ll be hard. But maybe once it’s done, I’ll feel some closure. I want to hear sentence pronounced on him. And I want it to be a harsh one.”
“Would you like us to be there when you testify?”