Trust Your Eyes Read Free

funeral.
    “Yeah, well, I gave it my best shot,” I said. “He wasn’t really sick.”
    “I figured.”
    “I tried to talk him into it, but it was pointless.”
    Peyton shook his head sympathetically. “Your father, he tried to do his best by him. Just like when your mother—Rose, God bless her—was still with us. How long’s it been?”
    “She passed away in 2005.”
    “After that, it must have been even more difficult for him.”
    “He was still with P&L then,” I said. Prentice and Long, the printers. “I think, maybe, after he took that early retirement not long after that, it got tougher. Being there, all the time. It got to him, but he wasn’t the kind of man to run away from something.” I bit my lip. “Mom, she found ways not to let it bother her, she had a way of accepting things, but it was tougher for Dad.”
    “Adam was a young man, really,” Harry said. “Sixty-two, for Christ’s sake. I was stunned when I heard.”
    “Yeah, well, me, too,” I said. “I don’t know how many times Mom told him, over the years, that cutting grass on that steep hill, on the lawn tractor, was dangerous. But he always insisted he knew what he was doing. Thing is, that part of the property, it’s way back of the house—you can’t see it from the road or any of the neighbors’ places. The ground slopes almost forty-five degrees down to the creek. Dad would mow along there sideways, leaning his body into the hill so the tractor wouldn’t tip over.”
    “How long do they think your father was out there before they found him, Ray?”
    “Dad probably went out to cut the grass after lunch, and wasn’t discovered until nearly six. When the tractor flipped over on top of him, the top edge of the steering wheel landed across his middle”—I pointed to my own stomach—“you know, his abdomen, and it crushed his insides.”
    “Jesus,” Harry said. He touched his own stomach, imagining the pain my father must have felt for God knew how long.
    I didn’t have much to add to that.
    “He was a year younger than me,” Harry said, wincing. “We’d get together for a drink now and then. Back when Rose was alive, we’d play a round of golf every once in a while. But he didn’t feel he could leave your brother on his own for the time it took to play eighteen holes.”
    “Dad wasn’t very good at it, anyway,” I said.
    Harry smiled ruefully. “I’m not going to lie. Not a bad putter, but he couldn’t drive worth a shit.”
    I laughed. “Yeah.”
    “But once Rose passed, your dad didn’t even have time to hit a bucket of balls at the driving range.”
    “He spoke highly of you,” I said. “You were always a friend first, and his lawyer second.” They’d known each other at least twenty-five years, back to when Harry was going through a divorce and, after giving his house to his ex-wife, lived for a time above a shoe store here in downtown Promise Falls, in upstate New York. Harry used to joke that he had a lot of nerve, offering his services as a divorce attorney, after getting taken to the cleaners during his own.
    Harry’s phone emitted a single chime, indicating an e-mail had landed, but he didn’t even glance at it.
    “Last time I talked to Dad,” I said, nodding at the phone, “he was thinking about getting one of those. He had a phone that would take pictures, but it was an old one, and it didn’t take very good ones. And he wanted a phone that would be easy for sending e-mails.”
    “All this new high-tech stuff never scared Adam,” Harry said, then clapped his hands together, signaling it was time to move on to why I was here. “You were saying, at the funeral, that you’ve still got the studio, in Burlington?”
    I lived across the state line, in Vermont.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Work’s good?”
    “Not bad. The industry’s changing.”
    “I saw one of your drawings—is that what you call them?”
    “Sure,” I said. “Illustrations. Caricatures.”
    “Saw one in the New