“You mean you honestly don't know?”
“No, Chuck, so why don't you tell me because I'm getting nervous here.”
Chuck looked confused. He waved over one of the other men, an acne-faced guy in overalls.
“Lenny, notices went out, right?”
The guy looked at me and looked back to Chuck and said, “Yeah, of course. At least three went out.”
“And there's been no objections?”
That's how I found out that plans had been issued and approved and that Commerford Road, a road where my family had lived and done business for two generations, was going to be cut off. “Truncated” was the word Chuck used. Here's the thing: Crandy Manufacturing was halfway through building a new plant about three miles north of me. And the township had decided to bypass Commerford Road. They were going to take Dunn Road and build it into an overpass. The planners figured it would better serve the tractor-trailers hauling to and from the new factory. Besides, there was nothing much on Commerford Road except for my home and business, a couple of houses, and an abandoned soybean farm.
There was an old widow named May Bennett down our road about a quarter-mile. She was our closest neighbour. My boy Rusty used to cut her grass in the summer. She'd flip him five bucks for his trouble. Once Rusty got older and more interested in stealing and busting skulls around town young Travis took over. My wife, Wanda, would bring her baked goods once a week and would even clean up her kitchen now and again. We helped May out as best we could. May was losing her marbles, though. She chased her cats with a broom, called my sons by different names all the time, and wore a tattered old housecoat all day, every day. I knew she was awake because I could hear her nail-on-chalkboard voice yelling at one of her cats. I wandered down there and said hello, and she took a moment to figure out who I was. Her eyes seemed glazed, and I caught a whiff of her sour odour from two feet away. She complained that her kids were out of control and costing her money. She grumbled about having too many children.
“What children are we talking about here, May?” I asked.
“Those ones,” she screeched, pointing at two scruffy-looking cats crouched like oversized hamsters near her mailbox.
I changed the subject, asked her if she knew about the plans to rebuild Dunn Road and bypass our place. She went inside and came back out with a notice from the township. She handed it to me and said that her eyes were getting bad so she hadn't read it. She told me her son had warned her about the changes. I felt a knot form in my gut as I looked at the notice. There it was in black and white.
I stormed back to the house. I'll admit that I was fuming. I kept my eyes on our front hallway light, which was on. I tripped and stumbled into the ditch, I was walking so fast. That just got me wound up even more. I damn near ripped the door off its hinges rushing inside. Travis hadn't seen the notice before. I could always tell if Travis was lying to me, and he was clean this time. I asked where his brother was and he pointed upstairs. I took the stairs two at a time and pushed my way into Rusty's bedroom. He was on his back, lying on the floor wearing ripped boxer shorts that showed part of his business just hanging there. He was smoking a cigarette and listening to the headphones. I plucked them off his head and they got tangled up in his hair.
“Hey, old man, that fucking hurt,” he told me.
I told him to watch his mouth, buy some new shorts, and go to the barber. And then I held the notice right in front of his eyes.
“Recognize this, boy?”
He took it and studied it. A smug little grin appeared across his face.
“No, first I've seen of it.”
“If I find out you're shitting me, Russ …”
He gave it back and swore up and down he'd never seen it, hadn't collected the mail in ages. That added up. He'd become a lazy bastard the last few months. The effort of walking to the mailbox would've been too much for him.
Wanda was standing in the hallway, near the top of the staircase. I closed Rusty's door and waited for her to speak. She was still a very pretty woman: her long brown hair had taken on just a strand or two of gray, and her solid farm girl face had taken on a fair bit of weight, but remained fresh and wholesome despite her weak heart. She didn't speak. She looked at the floor instead, gripped the top of the handrail until her knuckles went white. I knew by the look on her face.
“For God's sake, Wanda, why? Why would you keep this from me?”
She told me she was worried that it would kill me. She dreaded a long and ugly fight with the township. She stood there, close to tears, arguing her points: business at the service station was slow, Travis was playing more and more games, and maybe we needed to move closer to a larger town or city. She sniffled and said that she felt isolated, had hinted as much recently, but I had ignored her or just didn't clue in. There was a letter from the township on the way outlining a compensation package, and once she'd gotten the details she had planned to sit me down and show me the offer. She was confident it would be a generous one. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out two notices from the township. I hit the roof. I mean I really unloaded. I called the whole thing deceitful and pounded my fist on the wall. There I was busting my ass and trying to make the business work and my family was running interference, rolling the dice with our future. Russ came out of his room and stood between Wanda and me. Russ had taken to doing this sort of thing, poking his nose in where it didn't belong. He knew damn well I'd never hit his mother, but he'd always shove his nose in and act like he was protecting her. In return, Wanda would go to bat for him regardless of how much he fucked up. They'd become a team. I realized it as I stood there shaking my foolish head that day.
“They're rerouting the road that brings in the traffic, our business!” I said.
Rusty said, “What business?”
I stepped toward him and flashed him a warning with my eyes and teeth. Wanda wedged herself between us.
“It was my idea, Bert. Please, let's sit and talk like adults.”
When the smoke had cleared Wanda and me sat and drank coffee at the kitchen table. I'd originally searched the back of the kitchen cupboard and found some whisky. I kept it there as a “just in case.”Wanda said there was no such thing as just in case, once you quit that was it. And she said she hid those notices for that very reason. She figured I'd hit the bottle for a few days upon getting the news, and then I'd dry up and become obsessed, run myself into the grave over getting vengeance on Bascomb and his idiots at Town Hall. I put the bottle back in the cupboard and we brewed coffee. She cried her eyes out, told me she felt really stuck, that it turned her stomach to keep a secret from me, especially one that would leave me looking like a fool. She pleaded for me to roll over, put my hands up in surrender because there would be a good chunk of change from the township. There was no way in hell I was leaving my home and business. She'd always talked about moving to the city, and I guess she saw this as her chance. Things had been slow, and I think Wanda thought that I'd see the compensation offer and say what the hell. She saw the whole mess as a chance to have the decision made for us.
There