The Last Death of Jack Harbin by Terry Shames

“I’m just going to have a cup of tea.”
    â€œMarybeth, come on over here and sit down.”
    â€œJust a cup of tea. I’ll just . . .” She looks over at me, and my solemn face. “Okay, I’ll get it later.”
    I sit down on one of the armchairs and she perches on the arm of the sofa, like a sparrow. Her smile twitches on and off. I wonder, not for the first time, if she takes some kind of medication.
    I tell her about Jack, and for a few minutes I’m not sure she’s taking it in. She nods vigorously, chewing on the side of her mouth like a school child struggling with a perplexing math problem. People react in different ways to news of a death, but Marybeth doesn’t seem to understand my words. Her eyes flit from me to the TV and back. Finally she jumps up and paces around the room, hugging herself. “Thank you for coming all this way to tell me.” She stops in the kitchen long enough to set the kettle on to boil, then starts moving again. “Does Curtis know?”
    â€œI reached him in Dallas. He said he’ll be at the house sometime tomorrow.”
    â€œCurtis hates Jackie,” she says, in an off-hand way, as if talking to herself. She takes shuddering breaths.
    â€œI doubt that.”
    â€œOh, he does. He hates me, too. He’s not a very nice man.” Suddenly she stops in front of me. She has peculiar look on her face. Defiant? That’s a first. “And you know what? I never liked Curtis. That’s a horrible thing for a mother to say, but from the minute he came out, I didn’t like him.”
    I’m jolted by a flash of anger at Marybeth. I think about how my brother, Horace, could never do anything right in our mamma’s eyes. She had no patience for boys or men in general. But she singled out Horace for her wrath. Horace and my daddy took to the bottle to soothe the hurts she inflicted. Being the younger son, I was cushioned a bit.
    Maybe Marybeth did the right thing by leaving Bob and Jack. Maybe my brother and I and our daddy might have been better off if my mother had realized that she wasn’t suited to the job and left.
    â€œListen, you don’t need to open those old wounds.”
    It’s like she didn’t hear me. “Jack made me feel the opposite. The second he was born, I said, ‘He’s mine.’ That’s why I had to leave after he was hurt in that war. My heart just plain cracked in two every time I looked at him.” She paces back to the window. “It was selfish, I know that. But better than me there crying all day, every day. And I knew Bob could handle it. He was like a mule. You put him in a harness and he just plodded along getting the job done. Me? I’m . . .” She stands wringing her hands. “Oh Samuel, how could someone have hurt my sweet boy?”
    I feel trapped in her tiny place. “Let’s go get something to eat.” I walk over and turn off the kettle.
    â€œEat?” As if it’s a foreign concept. “Yes, that would be okay.”
    We go to a cafe and I order a hamburger. Sitting there with Marybeth is a hard slog, with her picking at a salad and starting sentences she doesn’t finish. But what little food she gets inside her brings some color back to her face, and she sits a little quieter.
    â€œMarybeth, somebody needs to go over to the house and figure out what to do with Jack’s and Bob’s things, find out if there’s a will, and make funeral arrangements.”
    She puts her fork down and shrinks back in her seat. “Curtis will do all that.”
    â€œIsn’t there anything you’d like to have from the house? Photos? Anything?”
    She chews her lip. “There might be pictures of Jackie, from before. I might like those.”
    â€œIf you want, I can take you over there. The house probably belongs to you now.”
    She puts a hand to her mouth and starts to shake. “I think I have to go