What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories

friends, these killers. You can't tell."
    "I have known that child since she was a little girl," the woman says. "She used to come over and I'd bake cookies for her and let her eat them in front of the TV."
    BACK home, Stuart sits at the table with a drink of whiskey in front of him. For a crazy instant I think something's happened to Dean.
    "Where is he?" I say. "Where is Dean?"
    "Outside," my husband says.
    He drains his glass and stands up. He says, "I think I know what you need."
    He reaches an arm around my waist and with his other
    What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
    hand he begins to unbutton my jacket and then he goes on to the buttons of my blouse.
    "First things first," he says.
    He says something else. But I don't need to listen. I can't hear a thing with so much water going.
    "That's right," I say, finishing the buttons myself. "Before Dean comes. Hurry."
    The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off
    I'LL tell you what did my father in. The third thing was Dummy, that Dummy died. The first thing was Pearl Harbor. And the second thing was moving to my grandfather's farm near Wenatchee. That's where my father finished out his days, except they were probably finished before that.
    My father blamed Dummy's death on Dummy's wife. Then he blamed it on the fish. And finally he blamed himself — because he was the one that showed Dummy the ad in the back of Field and Stream for live black bass shipped anywhere in the U.S.
    It was after he got the fish that Dummy started acting peculiar. The fish changed Dummy's whole personality. That's what my father said.
    What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
    I NEVER knew Dummy's real name. If anyone did, I never heard it. Dummy it was then, and it's Dummy I remember him by now. He was a little wrinkled man, bald-headed, short but very powerful in the arms and legs. If he grinned, which was seldom, his lips folded back over brown, broken teeth. It gave him a crafty expression. His watery eyes stayed fastened on your mouth when you were talking—and if you weren't, they'd go to someplace queer on your body.
    I don't think he was really deaf. At least not as deaf as he made out. But he sure couldn't talk. That was for certain.
    Deaf or no, Dummy'd been on as a common laborer out at the sawmill since the 1920s. This was the Cascade Lumber Company in Yakima, Washington. The years I knew him, Dummy was working as a cleanup man. And all those years I never saw him with anything different on. Meaning a felt hat, a khaki workshirt, a denim jacket over a pair of coveralls. In his top pockets he carried rolls of toilet paper, as one of his jobs was to clean and supply the toilets. It kept him busy, seeing as how the men on nights used to walk off after their tours with a roll or two in their lunchboxes.
    Dummy carried a flashlight, even though he worked days. He also carried wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, friction tape, all the same things the millwrights carried. Well, it made them kid Dummy, the way he was, always carrying everything. Carl Lowe, Ted Slade, Johnny Wait, they were the worst kidders of the ones that kidded Dummy. But Dummy took it all in stride. I think he'd gotten used to it.
    My father never kidded Dummy. Not to my knowledge, anyway. Dad was a big, heavy-shouldered man with a
    The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off
    crew-haircut, double chin, and a belly of real size. Dummy was always staring at that belly. He'd come to the filing room where my father worked, and he'd sit on a stool and watch my dad's belly while he used the big emery wheels on the saws.
    DUMMY had a house as good as anyone's.
    It was a tarpaper-covered affair near the river, five or six miles from town. Half a mile behind the house, at the end of a pasture, there lay a big gravel pit that the state had dug when they were paving the roads around there. Three good-sized holes had been scooped out, and over the years they'd filled with water. By and by, the three ponds came together to make one.
    It was deep. It had a darkish look to it.
    Dummy had a wife as well as a house. She was a woman years younger and said to go around with Mexicans. Father said it was busybodies that said that, men like Lowe and Wait and Slade.
    She was a small stout woman with glittery little eyes. The first time I saw her, I saw those eyes. It was when I was with Pete Jensen and we were on our bicycles and we stopped at Dummy's to get a glass of water.
    When she opened the door, I told her I was Del Fraser's