We shook hands and she said pleased to meet you. Close up, I could see she wasn’t a child. Lines around her eyes and mouth—smile lines. That was a good sign.
“Pleasure’s mine,” I said. What I always said when I met a woman. But I knew that was wrong. There wasn’t any pleasure in that room.
She sat back down, and I worked my way around the table to get a glass of water. Mostly to have something to do. I didn’t want to look at my poor mother’s face. It was so tight in there Louise had to wedge her chair in to let me by. Her hair smelled like some kind of flower, I wanted to know what.
My mother told me my father was in back, which meant I was supposed to go see him. I made some small talk with Louise first, asked her how her trip went, because I didn’t want to be dismissed like a boy in front of her. I was thirty years old, for chrissakes, and my mother was telling me where to go the minute I walked in the door.
Louise said that Walt and me had a nice room growing up. You-all. You-all had a nice room. Some southern accent.
“She’s staying in your old room,” my mother said, in case I couldn’t follow the conversation on my own. Then she stood up and turned her back to us and held onto the edge of the counter. I remember hoping she wouldn’t start crying, not because I was sorry for her, but because I didn’t want to have to comfort her. That’s the truth. So I just nodded to Louise and walked out the back door.
The old man had put down some limestone scrap in a path alongside my mother’s flowerbeds. It crunched under my feet like bones. It hadn’t been good between me and him for a long time. I’d idolized him as a kid, but the night those two jokers came to our door while he was out of town, that was when I stopped thinking his ass was gold. Pretty soon he figured that out and he stopped caring what I thought.
Walt was just like him, a worker and a drinker. He didn’t bowl, but he played all the other sports—football, basketball, baseball—so he didn’t compete with the old man. After high school, he’d left every morning with my father for work, both of them in their blue shirts, while I was still sitting there eating my toast before school. Walt would sneer at me as he walked out the back door to the car. He thought I was a waste of time. He and Dad went drinking after hours, buddies all around. When he enlisted, my father went around hangdog for months. Sure, he was worried for his son. But he also missed his buddy at work and at the bar.
Sometimes I thought my father only wanted one son. Walt and me shoved together. One son who played tough on the field and worked and drank, like Walt. One son who loved bowling, but who never wanted to be any other place in the world than this town, and never got better than his father.
In the shed, he was hunched on a low metal stool, toolbox between his knees, wiping down drill bits with a rag. He still had on his coveralls. He picked up another bit, worked it over, dropped it back in the bin. His face was spongy. His hair was thinner, and his hands shook, rubbing that rag.
He dropped the last bit in the case, clanged it shut. Took his time speaking to me. “You even give a shit?” he finally said. He looked up at me then, hands on his knees.
I turned and ducked my head under the door frame, looked back at the way I came. I could see my mother and Louise through the kitchen window. My mother was working at something at the sink now, and Louise was looking out, not at me, but at something, like as if she might try to bust through that glass. I couldn’t blame her.
I heard the scrape of the stool behind me. My father stood up slowly, wiping the rag on his hands. Wringing it. He took a stiff-kneed step. “I’m sick,” he said.
Times like that, I think women do better. A daughter might have gone over there, patted him while he cried. No shame in that. All I did was stand there. “Let’s go in,” I said finally.
He turned and put the palms of his hands on his work table. Like my mother hanging onto the kitchen counter. He shook his head slowly, his neck sunk down between the swag in his shoulders. He lifted one hand and waved me off. And I was happy to go.
After the news that night, Louise got up and said she was too tired to hold her head up anymore (mah head, she said), and she went straight into that room with Walt’s old model planes still hanging from the ceiling and my comic books slumped on the shelves, and she didn’t come out again until morning.
When she did get up, I was dead asleep on the couch. I opened my eyes, not sure where I was, just as she rounded the corner from the hallway into the kitchen. She was wearing that blue dress again, hair pulled back. It was like as if she was floating past my feet where they were propped on the couch arm. I sat up and rubbed my face. I had to piss but I didn’t want to wake up my parents. I hadn’t had to sneak to talk to a woman in a long time.
I found her opening cabinets quietly, one after the other.
“Help you find something?”
Her shoulders jerked up; I’d spooked her. She turned around and looked at me for a second, the way women do, sizing you up for whether you’ll be trouble for them or not. Maybe she could read it in me, the want rolled up like too much cash in my pocket.
“Looking for a coffee cup,” she said. Not smiling, but not nervous. Careful.
I got around the table, reached past her, and pulled down two.
“Thanks.” She turned on the faucet and filled up the teapot that had been sitting on the stove.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
She looked up at me, and I could see the fine hairs around her forehead and cheeks were damp; she’d washed her face and her cheeks were pink from it. And those eyes, bluer still because of her scrubbed skin. She said, “Boiling water for instant.”
“I don’t know if there is any.” I pulled the percolator and a can of coffee from the cabinet next to the sink, where my mother had always kept it. Amazing how things come back to you. I couldn’t remember what city I’d been in a week ago, but I knew where the damn coffeepot was in my parents’ house. I scooped the coffee into the metal cup, poured the water, and plugged it in.
She watched the coffee burble in the glass nub on top. “We drink instant on the base.”
“Where’s that?” I asked, and she glanced at me, like as if she didn’t quite believe that I didn’t know where she and my brother had lived, but that was the case.
“Fort Carson,” she said. “Near Colorado Springs. And how about you?”
“Pretty much all around.” I ignored the look she gave me, damn near rolling her eyes, like as if she was tired of hearing answers that didn’t tell you anything at all. I had to piss so bad I wanted to cross my legs. “So what’s it like out there?”
“Cold. It’s right at the base of the Rockies. The air is real fine and the snow is great for skiing, and it’s clear all the time,” she said. “Not like here.” She looked out the window—another gray day with the clouds hanging on the branches. No snow at least.
I heard that accent again. “Where are you from?”
“Arkansas. Pine Bluff. My daddy worked at the arsenal there.” She’d folded her arms like she expected me to question her on it.
Arkansas was one of those places with no shape for me. She could see it on my face.
“It’s near Little Rock. You sure don’t know your geography for a guy who’s been all around.” She raised an eyebrow at me, gave a hint of a smile. So she was in there somewhere, sense of humor and all.
“I don’t get south much.”
“They have bowling down there, you know.” She smiled again and bit her lip and looked down at her feet. She was wearing navy blue pumps and hose. I felt sorry for her, all dressed up in her schoolgirl