“Where's your shoe?” Grace demanded, as though the health and safety of her brother’s feet really mattered to her.
“In the back.”
“You have to put it on.” She sounded just like a mother.
“No I don't. I like wearing one shoe.”
Robin backed down the path of the school driveway, turned up his music station to where “ashes of love, cold as ice” overwhelmed the endless drone of "No I don’t, yes you do.”
“That's stupid, you can't wear just one shoe. Daddy, Timothy is only wearing one shoe.”
“Daddy threw it in the back so mind your own business.”
Robin heard his name registered in shrill, high tones, blasting over Kelly Clarkson’s latest. Sometimes, the back and forth of their diatribes rocked them into a kind of submission, an exhausting lullaby, and all it took was turning up the radio a decibel or two to quiet them down.
None of this was his idea, not the marriage, not the pregnancy, and then the second one, also her idea. Every child should have a sibling, Cynthia had insisted. He knew only one thing: if she wanted to leave her children because some guy tells her she has ‘healing hands’ she could go to hell.
“You said a bad word Daddy.”
Grace had been listening to him. She surprised him that way more and more lately, seeming more like an adult than a kid.
“Sorry honey. Guess I’m thinking out loud again.”
“What's thinking out loud?”
She was starting to annoy him. Asking questions Robin didn’t have the energy to answer.
“Just when you have words in your head and you say them out loud even when you don't mean to."
“Like when you dream in the middle of the day?” Grace ventured.
The girl's too smart for me, he thought, careful to keep it to himself this time. He ruffled her hair with his free hand, let his fingers get caught up in her soft brown waves. She smiled up at him, clearly loving how the two of them understood things that Timothy didn’t. They sat knee to knee, and at the stoplight, Robin bent down to smell the sweet shampoo of her hair. "You're my big girl,” he whispered, as if that made up for having a mother who didn’t gave a shit about her.
“How many mailboxes to Grandpa's?”
“Seven” said Grace, it was the same number every time and this game was getting too easy for her. But she still enjoyed winning, enjoyed how Timothy still wasn’t fast enough to say seven first.
“Seven,” said Timothy in automatic echo, and Grace rolled her eyes up toward her dad’s, and he recognized briefly the smug self-assurance of his ex.
“Let's count, to see if you’re right.”
The counting game united them for the short distance ahead. Mailbox number one said Livingston, marked by a sheet metal gray box riddled with bird droppings. The Livingstons may or may not have inhabited the place any time during the past century. The mailbox was always empty, the name barely distinguishable from the bird blotches surrounding it. There were no other life traces, but it was hard to know with the long and twisted driveways and weed covered asphalt.
Up a ways and to the left was the newest mailbox — huge circled letters announcing The Daschle Family, twinkling with moons and stars and nonsensical stickers that they must have bought on sale at Highway Hardware. What kinds of people decorate their damned mailboxes, Robin wondered. The fancy mailbox wasn’t the worst of it. The new neighbors had installed a lawn and white picket fence that made the place look like a tornado had picked the house up from some suburban housing development and dropped it mercilessly in the middle of this godforsaken stretch of road. Poor suckers. Robin and his Dad were convinced that Lundale had sold the new owners a bill of goods. “An up and coming neighborhood,” Robin imagined Lundale telling them.
After the Daschles, the road narrowed a bit, branches of sweet birch and scrub oak slapping at the sides of the truck. Grace reached across her brother to roll up the window so the branches wouldn’t scratch his arms. Next came the mailbox series, three in a row, utterly abandoned, the likely remains of a cluster of mobile homes that had dropped there in the late ‘60’s and dissipated over time. Timothy kept track on his hand, number 3, number 4, number 5 this came to, one of his hands was now finished and he set his other hand on his lap to prepare his last two fingers to reach number 7.
Pete's mailbox, to the right about 200 yards further on, was over-sized regulation green. P.S. was scribbled on the outside of the mailbox as an afterthought, its wide throat slung open like a hungry bird that perpetually retched out catalogues, envelopes, wrinkled wads of mail. Come spring the mailbox would be mercifully hidden by a dramatic display of day lilies, iris, and columbine. But in early November, only a mass of prickly thorns jutted out from the thick mulch of junk that heaped higher year by year at the mailbox’s base. Pete the garbage collector. You didn’t have to know Pete to know him just the same.
One more to go, they were bracing themselves for the scream SEVEN! Grace bounced up in her seat, readying herself for another win, but Timothy saw it first, across from Grandpa's, just past where the magazine man lived.
“Look Daddy, there's someone in the bushes.”
Robin stopped the truck a few yards shy of his father’s driveway, cranked his head up over the two little heads, and saw sure enough, a sign of life. The property across the road from them hadn’t been inhabited for years, not since he was a kid. The idea that life was stirring again on Ray’s old place caught him off guard.
The place had been deserted for so long, it was as though none of those years had happened. Every once in a while Robin would think about snooping around to see if any of Ray’s old owl carvings were still around.
Timothy was right. Robin could see what looked to be mounds of dark fresh dirt scattered across the gravel driveway. He leaned across the kids, rolled the window down, strained to see if anyone was in the bushes but saw no one. He thought about getting out to take a look, but not with the kids, not now.
“Daddy, I think I saw a baby stroller.”
“No you didn’t,” he refused her, putting the truck back in gear, jerking forward toward his father’s place.
6.
THE TERRIBLE SOUND of Winston’s brakes announced his arrival, but no kids came running to greet him, like they often did. They must be out back somewhere, he could hear their voices through the trees.
He found Robin sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. Pale. The gray pall of age settling around his son’s eyes, taking the years away too soon. Not a boy any more yet not quite a man, he was coming up on thirty. Vera gone already fifteen years. While she was ailing, the boy was just starting to break free of her hold, finding the legs to stand on his own. Of course Winston didn’t pay much attention to the boy in those terrible months, but he seemed to be fine, going his own way. And then teetering over, crashing at the loss. Winston could almost put his finger on the boy’s problems, started early but sealed when his mother passed. And maybe he could have done something different. Been a better father. But how?
No use figuring it out anymore. What was done was done. Robin was a father himself now, saddled with the two kids and still a kid himself, that scraggly hair of his still in his eyes. Look at him, Winston thought, studying the figure slumped at his kitchen table, wearing a man’s hard boots, tool belt spread across the table top, no woman around to object.
“Tired, son?”
Robin was too tired to answer, but nodded. Winston knew. He saw plenty from the sidelines. If it were up to him, he’d have insisted the mother take her share of raising the kids but Robin didn’t even know where the woman was. Off to