When the boys and I moved into the house Ray Burke provided for us at the end of the dirt road above Bainesville, the last tenants were still packing their things into a Ford pickup truck. Boils of rust spread from the tire rims. The paint had long since faded and worn to what must have been the primary color of all cars, the scoured tint of a secondhand teaspoon’s dish. In contrast, I felt like a movie star, wearing my sunglasses in my husband’s Supersport Impala convertible as I watched my two almost-grown sons jump out of the car and immediately claim the porch of the house. The children of the evicted tenants cowered at the edge of the stairs behind boxes of blankets and plates.
I knew Ray Burke from the time I had dropped out of college, before I had even met my ex-husband, Art. Ray and I had hung around the same people in Seattle in the midsixties. Fifteen years later, he still mailed the odd letter or Christmas card to Mom’s address. Now, retreating East away from my mother and my husband, I had followed the return address on Ray’s last card all the way to Bainesville. Ray had drawn Magic Marker blue smoke trailing from Archangel Gabriel’s trumpet, transforming it into a huge hash pipe. Gabriel had been foil-stamped onto handmade paper; the odd mix of middle-school humor and class was classic Ray.
When I knocked at his family’s old house, he slammed open the door and grabbed me, hugging me in his loose-armed way where he just left his arms on my shoulders. He cried a little. I noticed a faint sound coming from deep inside him like the whimper of a puppy locked in a box. He wore the same black T-shirt, blue jeans, and stupid grin he had worn years ago. “You haven’t changed,” I said. “It’s great to see you.”
“Not a day older,” he said.
Around the house he had rented to me, the second-growth pine leaned into the hot August sky. The small pasture, the swampy field across the road, and the bright green propane tank, everything, seemed a little too perfect. Nothing was ostentatious about the place—its bubbled wainscotting had to be at least fifty years old—but the steep roof and the lack of any neighbors whatsoever were too good. Everything was ideal except the family Ray had displaced in his incredibly huge welcome to me, a minor character in a crowded scene from his past. Maybe it was because I was the only person in this entire valley who remembered him from before he owned the biggest farm, the apple orchards, the rangeland, and even the packing plant. I was the only person in on the joke of how ridiculous it was that an old hippie like him was in charge.
The evicted father smiled and pumped Ray’s hand. The man wore a white T-shirt that swelled over his extended belly. His thin legs were as thin as two frayed garden hoses. “How do you do, Mr. Burke?” He bowed slightly, keeping his mouth cracked in a wide grin over his square teeth. He didn’t even glance at me. His wife, who was pretty and brown and pregnant, already sat in the truck. She brushed a lock of black hair away from her eyes. The gear knob rose between her knees like a rubber-knobbed flower. The three smallest kids sat next to her. The two older boys sat on top of the tightly packed boxes and furniture heaped in the truck bed.
“How do you do, John?” Ray grabbed John by the neck and said something into his ear.
“Please forgive me for the time it took to pack. Sudden notice and all. I had to pack all the kitchen things. I had to drag the kids out of their rooms. I had to trap the cats and pack them up in cardboard boxes.” He said this to me and smiled and shook his head. “You don’t know good memory until you tell your kids to find their toys in a hurry.”
“Let’s check it out,” Ray said. “Let’s see how you left the place.”
A sofa sat in the living room, kittywampus to the wall. I didn’t know how old the sofa was, but the fibers had started to unravel like a gigantic ball of yarn. “You’re not leaving this here, are you?”
“What? You don’t want the sofa?” John asked.
“I don’t think so, John,” Ray said.
“I’ll take it, Mr. Burke. I’m very glad to keep it. My entire family has grown up on this sofa. My two youngest children were born right in this room on this sofa in the winter of ’79 and ’80. Both terrible winters. If they can’t grow up in this house, then they’ll have the sofa they were born on. But I have to be honest with you, Mr. Burke, this was your sofa.”
“Look, John, you’ll take it with you. Boys, give him a hand.” Ray didn’t move to help Dillon and Milton lift the couch. “Let’s check the rest of the house for anything you might have left behind.”
They walked up the stairs, leaving my sons to struggle with the sofa. “Lift with your legs,” I said, but already Milton had hefted the couch up. Milton angled it up so that the weight pushed down on Dillon.
“Heh,” Dillon said and dropped the couch. The house shook and the windows tittered.
“Watch the hardwood floors,” Ray called from upstairs.
“Keep it up, or you’re a pansy,” Milton said to Dillon. They staggered across the room. Milton’s face started to get red and as bright as the coil of the Supersport’s cigarette lighter. “Don’t make me carry the whole thing.”
Dillon tried to hurry out the front door, through the tight space of the landing. The sofa didn’t quite fit through the first door frame, but the boys struggled and turned it and finally moved it through the door, leaving deep gouges in the soft layers of enamel coating the frame. The second door was even narrower. Milton kept pushing and Dillon pulled. Finally a hollow crack ripped out of the sofa and it slid through the two door frames like a Kleenex coming out of its box. The back of the couch had gone limp, but Milton pushed the sofa into Dillon and Dillon had to run across the lawn to keep from falling. Finally he tripped and the whole thing landed on him. “It’s broken,” he said.
“It’s not,” Milton said.
“Toss that thing in the truck,” Ray yelled from an upstairs window.
“Let me help,” John called.
“There’s not enough room,” Milton said.
“Move those boxes out of the truck,” Ray yelled again.
Milton jumped up into the truck and handed the first box to Dillon. Dillon reached up and then his entire body followed the box down into the grass. The box landed solidly on the ground. He lay next to it for a second and then slowly hauled himself up and stood with his hands on his knees, swaying a little.
“Let me help,” I said.
Milton started hurling the boxes onto the lawn. Dillon asked him to hand him the ones with glass in them. “How can I tell if they have glass in them?” Milton kept throwing the boxes out.
Dillon rushed around and checked the fallen boxes. “This one had glass in it.”
“You’re such a dick, Stickbutt.”
“Milton, get off that truck now and go inside. I told you not to call him Stickbutt anymore.” Milton used to call Dillon Stickbutt all the time. At first it had been sort of affectionate. He’d say, “Can Stickbutt come with me?” But then it turned into this thing where he’d ride Dillon until Dillon tried to hit him, and then he’d wrestle Dillon to the ground and rub his face with mud and dirt.
“You can slow down,” I said.
Milton didn’t stop throwing the boxes out. “I’m almost done.”
John came out onto the porch carrying a box of green and brown beer bottles. He stood next to me, sweating long rivulets that had plastered his T-shirt into two patches under what I can only call his breasts. Wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, he looked at me. “There’s no rush.” That didn’t slow Milton down.
When he’d thrown out the last box, Milton asked Ray, “So should we toss the couch in? You’ll have to help me because Dillon isn’t strong enough.”
Ray rolled up his sleeves and they hauled the couch into the bed of the truck. It barely fit, so they propped it up on the tailgate. When they were done, Ray said, “I need a glass of water,” and went inside and Milton followed him.
I helped John and his wife look through the boxes. The water glasses had survived, but a box of large brown ceramic plates had landed on a fist-sized stone, cracking every plate. They packed the box with the rest of their things. “Thank you,” John said. “I appreciate your help.” He climbed into the truck.
Ray slammed the door behind him. He circled one arm around my shoulders and squeezed me to him. “Hey, John, see you at the house Monday morning? A lot needs to be done.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Burke,” he said.
Ray hugged me and said, “Sorry. They were supposed to be gone already.”
John’s two oldest boys, still several years younger than Dillon, climbed up onto the pile of loosely secured furniture in the back of the pickup and waved at me and the house where they had been living as they drove away.
As the truck rolled down the tar-and-gravel road along the river toward Bainesville, I noticed a sort of white noise had vanished and I could hear the leaves in the poplars across the road. The wallpaper remained dark in the places where their furniture had been, and the rest of the wall had bleached from pale green to almost white. Dust lay on top of the fresh, healthy squares of carpet where cabinets and the fruit-crate bookcases had been. There should have been more indications of the family’s life in the old building. The empty walls and dust balls didn’t say much about the people who had just been living in the space. I didn’t know how long they had been here. Walking through the empty rooms, I attempted to remember the houses where I had lived when I was a child, but I hardly recalled the cities where I had lived, much less the homes or rooms. As a child, the furniture had remained constant but the houses had retained the alien odor of the previous tenants’ cooking even after my father had polished the bookcases with the antique wood oil he ordered from the back of Smithsonian. With each move, I expected to arrive at a better life instead of weekday meals of hot dog slices floating in a macaroni-and-cheese bath and a bowl of canned peaches. Whenever we moved to a new house my parents filled it with the familiar old furniture and soon the familiar old arguments started again.
The kitchen had plenty of room to store anything I wanted to eat. A streamlined fifties Frigidaire squatted in a corner of the room. Tall cupboards with beveled glass panes and a narrow two-burner gas range packed the rest of the kitchen. The entire house matched the description of my ideal place, something Ray and I had discussed almost twenty years before. The living room looked over the valley and the back windows looked into a backyard stuffed with knots of wild grass and patches of broken brown glass and a fire pit filled with the charred remains of Budweiser cases. Beyond the yard, the columns of second-growth pine grew sparsely enough that foxglove and daisies grew between the gray trunks.
On the back landing, I found a homemade doll that the previous tenant’s kids might have left. Bushy hair grew out of a stuffed ball anchored to a burlap potato-sack body. It wore a denim patch for a vest and two long seams defined its toes at the end of overstuffed legs. I realized then that someone had spent a long time working on the head. What had seemed like haphazard sewing had created a face that reminded me of Ray. The doll had the same cleft chin and pinched eyebrows. A long knitting needle skewered the doll almost through the middle of its chest but a little off to the left. One of its black button eyes had come off. From the hole, cotton stuffing spilled loose. I tried to push the white fluff back but the minute threads caught a hangnail and I drug out a thin line of cotton.
“What do you have there?” Ray pressed my body into the wall of the narrow hall.
“One of the kids left this doll behind.”
“It will give them a chance to make a new one. By the looks of this one, they’ll need as much practice as they can get.” Ray laughed.
He held the doll in his hand, and I looked from the doll’s face to Ray’s face. “It looks just like you. A voodoo Ray doll. Doesn’t everyone you ever knew carry one of these?”
“It doesn’t look like me. Why do you have to say things like that?” I followed him through the house until he stopped in front of the mirror in the bathroom. His fingers combed back his hair. He stood straight and turned to squint at himself. He caught me standing in the hallway, watching him. “I don’t look anything like that doll.”
“We should take it back to them.”
“If they wanted it, they would have kept it. Besides, maybe someone left it here before they lived here. It could belong with the house. Really, I’m pretty sure it belongs to the place. Any of the old tenants could have left it. A lot of stuff has happened here.”
“How old can this place be, Ray? We should take the doll back to them.”
“They can get a new one. We all know we wanted a G. I. Joe or Barbie even if our parents stuck us with handmade garbage like this.”
“Maybe they can’t afford G. I. Joe or Barbie.”
“How much does a fucking Barbie cost?”
“You know, Ray, you have changed.”
He thought that was hilarious. “Sure I’ve changed. But you haven’t. Shit, you look great.”
He sat on the tub. “I wish I had never gotten involved in owning anything. I was in Moscow a couple of weeks back and in the parking lot of the truck stop, I stopped to listen to these three kids playing guitar while they sat on the fender of a black van with cheesy Beat Bartlett’s Quotation sayings hand-painted on the sides. ‘The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,’ yadda yadda yadda, ending with ‘you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”’” Ray smiled.
“I’m too old for that sentimental crap now. It’s patently ridiculous for people to run around shoving their hearts in people’s faces. That is old age. I mean, let’s face it, that doll looks a hell of a lot better than me. I’ve got the worst case of midlife bloat I’ve ever seen.”
I hadn’t seen Ray since the summer of 1967, after the spring when he had been pretending to go to classes at the University of Washington. While listening to the second side of The Doors album over and over again and staring into a wrinkled Camel wrapper after dropping an eyedropper of lysergic acid, Ray had a vision about an electric guitar, the Second Coming, and uniting everyone across the globe for a massive, communal bong-a-thon. He had this startling vision on Valentine’s Day, and by the first day of spring he could play four chords and holler reasonably well into a microphone. He and several like-minded dropouts started to cover old blues songs. Sometimes they would slip their own material between “Walking Blues” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” and then the sailors and longshoremen, the prostitutes and dealers would slip into the alley behind the saloon where the band had managed to get a permanent gig. People would crowd the bartender. When Ray would belt out the Jim Morrison version of “Backdoor Man,” the bar crowd would slip back onto the floor.
The bartender had encouraged them to play their songs. “You know, they’re heavy and I don’t think they’re for everybody, but it gives the patrons time to refresh their drinks. I really like the long number where you’re all on that groove and then you start to scream at the end. Real cool.”
When Ray received his draft notice, he just disappeared, which wasn’t odd at the time. People disappeared almost every day. They would either get drafted, and then actually go to The War, or they would leave for Canada. Years later, long after I had met Art and had had kids, and was working in Fall City, I received a letter from Ray telling me about his adventures and how he had left Seattle for his Dad’s orchards in Idaho. His Dad had looked at his draft notice and thrown it into the kitchen oven. “It’s settled. I have a little farm in Canada that needs better care than the tenants are giving it.” Ray turned the farm around by concentrating his crop on cucumbers and zucchini and became the largest organic supplier in North America.
Ray came back from his car with a case of Olympia beer and a tub of fried chicken from the deli in downtown Bainesville. “Welcome to the new house,” he said. He sat in the middle of the hardwood floor. Milton and Dillon squatted down next to him. He passed out paper plates. I stood at the window, looking out at the tops of the fir trees. The timberland stretched for miles. The mountain behind the house rose steeply to the Laughing Horse Reservoir.
“Mom?” Milton asked. He held up an open beer can.
I glanced quickly at Dillon. He didn’t have a beer can. Ray had suddenly become very interested in distributing the chicken.
“You like white or dark meat, Janice?”
“Dark. Milton, do you even want me to respond to your question?”
“I am asking.”
“Do what you will, you’re fifteen now.”
“Sounds like yes to me,” Ray said.
Milton laughed. “Come on, Stickbutt, drink up.”
Dillon pulled a can out from behind his back and opened it up. We watched as Milton drank a long drink, like he hadn’t had a drink in months. Milton wiped his lips; his eyes squinted from the bitter flavor. He set the can down. “So fine,” he said.
Dillon took a small swallow and then set his down. I sat on the hard floor with Ray. We all silently ate and sipped beer. “This is good chicken,” I said to Ray.
“Bainesville’s finest deli,” he said.
“You own that too, Mr. Burke?” Milton asked.
“Call me Ray,” he said. “What do you say after we finish eating I take the boys out and show them the acreage while you get set up?”
“That sounds really nice,” I said.
Milton finished his beer and reached for another one.
“Don’t you think that sounds fun, Milton?”
“Heh?” he said. He slipped back, letting the can roll back into the case.
“Don’t you think that sounds like it would be fun?”
“Yeah, sure. Can I have another beer?”
They came back toward dusk, the three of them laughing and shouting. I didn’t know this when they left, but Ray had taken a .22-caliber rifle with them and they had shot a pheasant.
Milton insisted on calling the bird a peasant. “We shot a peasant,” he said.
“A peasant’s a person,” I said.
“Well, we shot one,” he said.
They cleaned the bird, wrapped it in tinfoil, and left it in the empty freezer. “As soon as I get a chance, I’ll be back over to cook it up with your boys,” Ray said.
Ray didn’t come by to cook up the bird, but we saw each other a lot and the days settled into a routine before I was really certain that I even wanted to stay in Bainesville. Ray found me a job at a truck stop thirty miles down the valley highway, pouring coffee for truckers. I started work late in the afternoon after a long day sunbathing in the quiet woods or playing records and reading in the living room while the kids were out in Ray’s orchards working against the first frosts. The house remained clean, and during the day I was bored and happy. At night I chewed gum and talked to the truckers while the warm summer air hung heavy in the parking lot under the false daylight from the nests of arc lights perched on long steel poles.
One Sunday, at home in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water from one of the green plastic cups that tasted faintly of rubber and the hard mineral soil, I wanted to fill my head with enough marijuana smoke that everything would slow down.
I opened the door and smelled the pitchy odor of the pine trees. I looked back at the house and it looked like a comfortable place in the middle of the clearing, with the gravel road gently curling up to its front porch. I walked into the sparse forest, examining everything. The flat, lichen-covered stones housed a colony of black ants that hurried to pull their capsule-shaped eggs into their tunnels. I ran my hand over the grooved bark of the pine trees. My hand smelled like matchsticks. In a space where the boughs thinned enough that broken sunlight lit the forest floor and the grass covered earth, I lay down and stared up through the branches into the clear Montana sky, or was it Idaho, or Canada? I didn’t know. But lying down, I felt drowsy in the scent of sun-heated rabbitbrush and thistles.
Lying in the hot, loose soil in the middle of the pine forest, I wished that I could just be one of the plants, foxglove or a knot of yellow daisies. Dope was a way for me to sort of loosen myself from my duty and life as a mother, even the stress of being a waitress; it stripped me down to skin and nerves, and all that mattered was the smooth texture of a glass windowpane or the minute variations in the shadow of a telephone pole; all that mattered when I was stoned was the contrast between one moment and the next, the slippage of seconds, which normally trickled by as constant as a dripping faucet into a bathtub.
Dillon once brought home a pamphlet called “Straight Talk About Drug Use.” He left it in the tin pan Art used to roll his weed. After work that evening, I scooted the pan out from under the couch and found the pamphlet. I rolled a joint and smoked it while I looked through the booklet. It certainly was straight talk. According to this bit of literature, drugs were pushed by older kids as a sort of initiation rite. The drugs themselves had unpleasant and somewhat gruesome effects that no straight person would want to undergo. The booklet failed to recognize how secretly entertaining marijuana was. When I first smoked it, my friends and I had been talking about it since Monday. Jill’s older brother worked as a longshoreman and didn’t mind buying vodka for us. He sold her a joint for a dollar; we marveled at how cheap that was. We thought, maybe it doesn’t do that much. All week we made stupid jokes about being beatniks. “Hey, man,” asking for a pencil in study hall, “could you slip me that graphite jam tool?” Friday, at dusk, we met at the elementary school and climbed into the big cement playground pipes and lay against the cool walls, coughing and wheezing on our first bone. “You’re not holding it in,” Jill said. “James showed me how to do it,” and soon we had slipped into that comfortable space where we weren’t responsible for our bodies and one thing did not necessarily follow the next.
The little booklet described the weed-induced paranoia as being so intense it would cause people to completely drop out of society, and I suppose with Art that had been the case. He didn’t like policemen and would mutter “pig” under his breath whenever he saw a cop. His overall paranoia, what he thought of as his calculated act of civil disobedience, had more to do with his addiction than with any political stance. I guess, toward the end of my marriage to him, that was how I felt about our whole back-to-the-earth thing. I worked as a waitress, for Chrissakes, flipping hamburgers created from an animal whose collective ass pumped enough methane into the air to raise global temperatures; everything that we did seemed geared toward supporting Art’s comfortable isolation, a secure place for him to get utterly fried.
Coming back to the little house, I realized that I had spent a good deal of the morning out wandering in the forest. I made up my mind that I was going to get high. I didn’t go into the house but started the Impala. My personal deal was that I would drive until I found a gas station or a church. At the gas station I would ask where I could get some pot, and I would forget about the church. At the church, I would sit through the service and forget about the pot.
About four miles down the road, where the gravel joined a paved residential road, stood a small church with a big lot. I drove right past it and told myself that the deal had been weighted too heavily toward the church. A little community like this would be top-heavy with churches. If I had been in Seattle, I’d have run into a source more quickly than a church and I’d have, in all fairness, tried to give God another chance.
Another two miles down the road I came to a second church, a long hall with a tall steeple. A few cars were already in the lot. I parked, put on my sunglasses, and walked into the old place. The electric space-heated air smelled like stale coffee and fungus. The mildewed carpet, the fake oak veneer side panels, the thicket of hardened cobwebs in the rafters were familiar from my mother’s occasional bouts of religion. A few older women sat in pews toward the front. Over the church entrance, a backlit picture of Jesus glowed benevolently across the entire congregation. His hair was slicked back and fell to his shoulder in greasy biker locks. I grabbed a typewritten schedule for the sermon. I paged through the paperback chorus books and settled down in the hard pew, wishing I had found the trace of a dealer.
Finally the pastor made his entrance. His coterie of old women shook his hand and helped him across the room and up onto the podium. He took his place, adjusted his papers like a college professor and spoke about the world as a temporal and borrowed place. “You are all here for a brief transition in the complete life of your immortal soul. You pass through this place like visitors in an old inn, and have the people that were here before cleaned up? Have they left the rooms in a decent condition for your visiting soul?”
After the sermon, an older woman in a yellow sweater with thick sunflowers knitted into a floral breastplate clasped her hand on the crook of my arm. “How do you do?” she asked. “My name’s Marigold Greer.”
“How are you?” I asked.
“Excellent,” she said. She stared into the air in front of her when she said this, then nodded her head to confirm her answer and looked back at me. “Just excellent. Where have you driven in from?”
“I live at the end of Mason Road.”
“At the Greer farm? Ray Burke owns the place?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I used to live there,” she said. “I am a Greer.”
She drifted away and joined the line of people at the dessert table. I followed her through the line, but she kept one step ahead of me. Finally I cornered her outside, chewing on a brownie and washing it down with a cup of weak, lukewarm coffee. We found ourselves alone on the bench by the tire swing outside the Sunday school, in the warm afternoon heat. “We all know about you, you know,” Mrs. Greer said. “Mr. Burke has done all this before.” Mrs. Greer glanced around, suddenly aware that we were both outside, alone. Her hand shook as she teetered the china cup to her gray lips.
“Before that family lived up in the house, a woman Mr. Burke had met in Rock Springs lived there. One night she ran along the back road and threw herself into Laughing Horse Reservoir. After they pulled her from the water, a hunter said he had seen her running through the early morning woods, just a flash of white nightgown and her blue feet. That is the part that always gets my thoughts turning. Have you ever gone walking through the woods without your shoes on? It’s difficult. But once you get into this way of thinking, you hop over the sharp branches, the briars and nettles almost like you’ve become a jackrabbit or something. And it’s very pleasant. Each bush, each tree bough becomes a complete living thing. I feel the little ridge that runs down the center of each pine needle. I feel each one as it brushes my face and my arms. This girl was doing all this on the way to the water to drown herself! What grief! The hunter who saw her thought he was dreaming because the woman waved at him and laughed. ‘Hey, good-looking,’ she called out to him. The next time he saw her, she was real and in The Bainesville Chronicle, a photo some editor had copied out of her high school yearbook.”
We stared into the trees, and I imagined this woman Ray had brought to the little house in the forest. I felt the solidity of the house, the security I had felt listening to the rain rattle and roll off the roof, fade then. It was a borrowed place, and I had forgotten how far I had come since leaving Art in Soap Lake.
“I live in an apartment in downtown Bainesville now,” Marigold Greer said, “in the place that used to be the only hotel back in the gold rush. We had a gold rush here. Lasted about a year and a half. Well, the business from the rush lasted a year and a half. Reb Hawkins’s old goat passed a nugget the size of an apple. When the prospectors figured out that the rush was blown out of proportion they stuck around anyway and Bainesville was a good-sized town for many years. We never did get a railroad spur, so we just died.” She took a sip of coffee and grimaced. “Cold coffee, I can’t stand. I grew up in that house. I learned to swim in that little lake that they’ve turned into the reservoir. My father built that house when he moved out from Ohio before I was born. Nice place, don’t you think? He did a real fine job. Someday, I’d like to ask Mr. Burke to let me just sit in it for a while. It’s been a long time since I’ve lived there. Long time. A peaceful place, don’t you think?”
“It is,” I said.
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Greer said. “But I’ll be needing to return your plates to the kitchen.” She stood and absently took my cup. She turned to me and extended her hand. I quickly grabbed it, not shaking it, but just feeling its weight in my hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Do you know, Mrs. Greer, if you would like, I don’t have any plans this afternoon. If you’re free, you could come over and have some coffee and sit in the living room of the house.”
“Are you asking me over for a visit?”
“Would you like to sit in the living room of the house where you grew up?”
“Well, the opportunity presents itself, and I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you decide on the way to my house?”
“I’ll have to get my umbrella.”
When the men came out of the pews they stood directly behind their women, hands guiding wives by their elbows. When the children, excited to be outside, started to speak in loud voices, their fathers issued commands for the children to wait in the cars while they gathered under the trees to smoke. I knew a couple of these men from the truck stop, but here I could tell from their stiff backs and sloping shoulders that they were with their families. The fathers stood in a group under a sagging hemlock. They wore faint baby blue or green or yellow dress slacks, the polyester cut rough enough that it caught the sunlight coming down like shattered glass. One man wearing a ragged cowboy hat cupped his cigarette in the palm of his hand. He stared at me and glanced at Mrs. Greer. He said something and they all darted their eyes toward me and laughed. I ushered Mrs. Greer into the passenger bucket seat. She buckled her seat belt and lay her umbrella across her lap.
She tapped the window with the hard crook of her pointer finger. “That’s my Mercury Comet. You’ll drop me off back here, won’t you? Those men are laughing at you, you know.”
“I assumed that. But I’ve had problems with being too paranoid. That kind of stuff just slips off my back.” Really, I wondered how quickly Ray would turn me into one of the wives waiting in the passenger seat of a parked sedan.
“That’s what I’m talking about. Spending too much time on your back. A man only knows you for three things.” Mrs. Greer coughed and covered her mouth with her fingers. Her nails had been shorn so short that not even the white tips of them showed. She talked through her fingers. “He wants an ear hole to hold every little thought that crosses his mind, a water hole where he can drop his dirty dishes and they’ll come out clean, and a knot hole where he can spend himself.” She folded her hand around the curved end of her umbrella and looked out the window.
I tried to smile, but she wasn’t even looking at me. I just drove along for a while. “That’s a real nice way of putting it,” I finally said. When we pulled up to the house, I caught myself hoping that Dillon and Milton would be gone.
“It hasn’t changed, really. The wallpaper’s different. My father lay down a real cheap carpet over these hardwood floors, but it’s all pretty much the same as I remember it.” Mrs. Greer ran her hand down the front of the refrigerator. “This is the fridge my father bought six months before his death. He sold his Pontiac to a collector in Walla Walla and came home with this brand-new refrigerator. He had two ice trays. He set them inside the freezer here, and we all sat and talked and talked. He used to tell long stories, let me tell you, and they only had a lick of truth. And finally he opened the thing up and those trays had ice cubes. It sure seemed like something then.”
My boiling pan of water started to roll with large bubbles. I slopped water into two mugs and dropped in tea bags.
“It’s very nice of you to let me see the place again. Funny thing, you know. I remember every detail of this place. I wonder if you will remember it, you know?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I didn’t grow up here.”
“You remember your childhood home. You’d go back in a second. You would.”
“I don’t think I’d like to go back.”
“When you get to be my age, you’ll want to go back. But if you actually had the chance, I don’t think you would because there’s all that life between. If I could skip the bad bits, just pass into a coma or something like that when it got too tough, I’d go back.”
“So, tell me about the woman Ray had stashed here.”
“You know, Mr. Burke would never let me come here. I’ve been asking him for years. Upstairs, there’s a cabinet.” Marigold Greer set her teacup on the edge of the counter and set her purse, a triangle of Naugahyde, in the middle of her lap. She started taking things out, her worn leather glasses case, a silver tube of lipstick, a creased and folded airline ticket, and finally a long metal key with a piece of faded red ribbon knotted around the handle. “You know, this opens the cabinet in the attic.”
I waited for her to tell me what was there, but she didn’t. She took another drink of tea and smiled at me. “Thank you for letting me come over.”
“Are you going to open the cabinet?”
“I might, but I don’t remember what’s inside it. What if it’s nothing? I didn’t expect I’d ever get the chance to get to it. Which is silly, because I carry this key around.”
“Well, today’s your lucky day. If it’s gold bullion, though, I get a cut.”
“Fifty-fifty.” Marigold Greer laughed.
I followed her up the stairs, and she asked me to move a rusted aluminum coatrack. A dozen old coats clung to it. I pushed it aside and against the wall. Flush to the surface, I could see the faint outline of the cabinet under a layer of paint. Someone had puttied in the keyhole.
I took a jacket down and removed the wire hanger. I unfastened it and used the thin point of the wire to loosen the plaster plug from the keyhole. Mrs. Greer inserted the key and turned the lock. It snapped free, but the door was still shut under layers of old paint.
“Oh damn,” Marigold Greer said. “It figures it wouldn’t open after all these years.”
“I can try to pry it open,” I said.
“You can try, but it’s really no use. Just being in the house is good enough.”
“We have to open it now,” I said. We stopped to listen to the driveway gravel crush under car wheels. “Someone’s here,” I said.
“We don’t have to open it,” Marigold Greer said. “But I do want my key back. I’ll leave the cabinet unlocked in case you ever want to open it.”
As Mrs. Greer and I walked down the attic steps the front door stood open. Ray came out of the kitchen with a beer bottle. He watched as I helped Mrs. Greer down the last step. “Hey,” he said. “You have company.” He set the beer bottle on the floor and followed us outside. “Mrs. Greer, now I suppose you didn’t tell Janice that I told you not to come around here. My father bought his land from your father. The deal is done.” Ray turned to me. “Why’d you let this old lunatic come here? What’s she told you?”
“Nothing, Ray. I ran into her at church.”
“Janice Graham in church? That’s horseshit.”
“And I invited her to come over and have some coffee and sit in the living room. She grew up here, you know?”
“Yeah, I know. Is that all she told you?”
Milton ran out from the woods where he’d been playing, building something or more likely burning something. “Hey, Mr. Burke,” he said.
“I told her about Amanda, Mr. Burke. I also told her about growing up here,” Marigold Greer said.
“Janice, it’s blown out of size. No one knows that she lived here with her boyfriend.”
“Her boyfriend was you, Mr. Burke.”
“It’s all very confusing, Ray. Anyway, it’s your past and I don’t really care much about that. God knows I’ve got one.”
“This man has several, Mrs. Graham.”
“Mrs. Greer, I’ve told you several times that if I caught you snooping around the house, I’d call the sheriff,” Ray said.
“I grew up here, Mr. Burke. I have some entitlement to visit, especially if I’m invited.”
“You are not entitled to anything on this property. Come on with me.”
“Ray, I can have whomever I want visiting me.”
“It’s my house.”
“Mom, you should listen to him. Do you know this lady? She looks crazy to me.” Milton sat on the porch, twisting a long braid of grass around his middle finger.
“Your son is right, Janice. Do you even know this woman?”
“You’re listening to Milton? Who’s crazy here? Ray, you’re not hearing me.”
“I’ll take her home.”
“When she’s ready to leave.”
“Janice, this isn’t Seattle, for Chrissakes. You’ll take Mrs. Greer off my property, or I swear I’ll do something drastic.”
“No need,” Mrs. Greer said. “I was just leaving.”
“You can stay here with Milton until I get back. You left a couple of beers in the fridge, unless Milton’s drunk them. But he wouldn’t drink his buddy’s beer, now would he?”
“You drank them,” Milton said.
“I found one,” Ray said.
Mrs. Greer clutched her umbrella and followed me back to the Impala. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know he’d be so mad. I once asked that girl who lived here if I could come over, and Mr. Burke himself called and said I should never come to the house.”
“Well, I invited you,” I said.
When I returned home, no one was in the house. I could hear the poplars across the street swaying in the wind that picked up in the late afternoon. “Dillon?” There wasn’t a sound except the constant, almost-mute creak of expanding and contracting floorboards, the flap of a jagged tear in one of the conglomerate roof shakes. We had arrived here without a stick of furniture and I had gradually acquired eight pieces from the secondhand store in Bainesville and the Goodwill in Moscow, but still most of the rooms had only a chair.
In Milton’s room I could tell that we were just visitors. I hadn’t made this place a home. Which didn’t help bring Milton back from the months when he had run away. Milton said he liked his sleeping bag. His bedroll lay over a blanket spread over a mat of cardboard boxes. He kept his things packed into a fruit crate and his frame backpack propped against the wall. The rest of the room was empty. The floors were dusty near the walls. In the far corner, an apple core had lain long enough to grow a beard. I looked through his things—a motorcycle magazine; a half-sized toolbox with metallic space-age tape clotted around the screwdriver handles; a battered portable cassette player; some cassettes without labels; a couple of studio cassettes of bands I had faintly heard of somewhere, maybe just from reading spray-painted bridges: AC/DC, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest.
“Mom, this is my stuff.” Milton squatted down and started arranging his things back into whatever order he had them.
“I was just seeing what you had.”
“Are you looking for drugs? Because I don’t do that shit. It makes you stupid.” Milton grabbed the cassette out of my hand.
“I thought we’d have a big family dinner together, you, Dillon, me, and Ray.”
“He left because he was so mad about that woman. You shouldn’t force anything on him, Mom. You’ll just fuck it up. You always do.”
“That’s not true. I’ve had a great many successful relationships.”
“When?”
“Before you were born.” I picked up one of his cassette cases and looked at the Civil War cannon printed on the cover.
“You’re not with any of them. You’re not even with Dad.”
“I didn’t mess that one up.”
“Someone did.”
I looked at Milton. I tried to run my hand through his hair. I suppose he was trying to have the kind of conversation I would have had with him if he was running through girlfriends.
“I think one person who wants to make it work can make it work,” Milton said.
“That’s a mouthful for a fifteen-year-old kid. I’ll call Ray and he’ll be glad to come for dinner. You want me to do that?”
“He comes by enough without you asking him.”
“I want this time to be special. Formal and nice.”
“Fine,” Milton said. He grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair and hurried down the stairs. I listened to his body crash into the wall at the bottom of the stairs and then the deep thud of the front door slamming closed.
Ray’s phone rang and rang, and finally he answered, breathless and cursing. “What is it?” He said he had been outside playing baseball and drinking. “Excuse me, I’m a little drunk. This is Janice?”
“Ray?”
“Janice, how’re you? How come you’re not here?”
“Look, Ray,” I drew his name out like the sound of a tin can lid squealing open. “I was wondering if you would like to have dinner with me and my kids sometime this week?”
“Is that like a family thing?”
“It sure sounds like a family thing.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “Okay. I think I’m up for a family thing.”
For several years after Dillon was born I hardly worked at all, spending most of my time caring for the two boys. I woke each morning to Dillon crying in his crib. I heated his milk in an enamel saucepan with avocado-colored flowers peeling from the rim. The milk never heated quickly enough to quiet Dillon. My first sensation every morning was the sound of his thirst. The panic of the whole day came to me, exaggerated by my lack of sleep after waiting for Art to come home from his night job as a janitor. Even so, I count most of those days as among the best of my life. They were often long, raining days when the boys played in front of the gray windows, or summer days so hot and dusty they would sit under the trees in the cool forest among the sword ferns, drinking Cokes and building cities for their green plastic army men.
On one particular morning, I woke and Art lay as he did every morning, but I just slipped my flat-soled canvas shoes on and walked down the dirt driveway while Dillon cried in the boys’ room. I walked down the gravel road. Above me the clouds had just started to break up and the trees were black and jagged silhouettes against the rising light. The air held faint wisps of the evening’s dampness but I could tell from the brittle clatter of the gravel snapping under the soles of my shoes that the day was going to be hot. At the bottom of our hill, I sat in a strawberry field, way out in the middle of the mounded rows among the green berries and little white flowers and large clods of soil. I looked around as the sky grew light, just enjoying the morning, and I felt just like myself, not like a mother or a wife.
When I returned home, the door still hung open. Dillon had stopped crying. Milton sat directly in front of our black-and-white TV eating Cheerios with a wooden mixing spoon from a round Tupperware bowl. “Hi, Mom.” He lifted the paddle smoothness of the spoon with its thin coating of milk and Cheerios.
In the bedroom, Art had rolled to one side, exposing a single hand, as lifeless as that of a ten-story suicide jumper under a police blanket. I crawled into the bed, which was warm and smelled of his musky night odor and the aftershave scent of his late-night drinking. If I had left, I’d be so gone I’d never even have been there in the first place.
I asked Dillon and Milton to set the table and find some chairs before Ray came for dinner. The roast had been in the oven all day and the house smelled warm, like roasted onions and garlic and beef. I cut the greens for a salad on the chopping board while Dillon walked back and forth from the kitchen to the main room where we had the long, battered table set up. He carried out a stack of earthenware plates and silverware I had bought at a fire sale a couple of weeks before. He carried out a handful of odd-shaped mugs. “Take glasses,” I said while I chopped up the red onion. “We only have two, Mom,” Dillon said. Finally I checked on the table, and they had forgotten the tablecloth, leaving the old peeling-paint surface exposed like the cracked skin of a dry lake bed, and we only had three full-sized chairs. One person would have to sit in one of the short grade-school chairs I had bought at the same fire sale.
“It looks nice,” I said.
Milton sat in the smallest chair and leaned against the wall. “When does your boyfriend get here?”
“In a while. Why don’t you get your tape player and we can listen to some records?”
“I don’t want to listen to Crystal Gayle,” Milton said.
“We can listen to something you like.” And that was it. I could hear him running up the stairs.
“What can I do?” Dillon asked.
“You could peel the potatoes.”
“Isn’t it a little late to be making potatoes?”
“No, Mr. Ore-Ida,” I said. “We have about forty minutes before the roast is done, in which time we will have coffee, then salad and wine, and then dinner will be served.”
I could hear Milton’s music coming out of the other room, deep ringing church bells followed by tinny guitar screeching. Milton slid back into the kitchen and smiled at us. “Hey, hey, Stickbutt, no need to peel the potatoes,” he said. “The skins are good for you.”
“Good,” I said. “I used to not peel them when I was young, à la hippie.”
“They taste better that way,” Milton said.
I pulled the cake out of the refrigerator.
“A cake—” Milton said. “Whose birthday is it? It’s not yours. It’s not mine. It’s not Stickbutt’s birthday.”
“Don’t call Dillon that.”
“What should I call him? Roy?”
“Hey,” Dillon said. “Roy’s a good guy’s name.”
Milton started to laugh. He sat at the table and laid out the paper napkins. “You crack me up, Stickbutt.”
“Boys,” I said.
“I could—” Dillon started to say something, but Milton stood up and said, “You could what? What?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s all sit down at the table and have something to eat while we wait for Ray to come.”
We sat quietly for a minute listening to Milton’s tape.
She was a fast machine. She kept her motor clean,
Was the best damn woman that I ever seen.
She had the sightless eyes telling me no lies
Knocking me out with those American thighs.
“Do you like this?”
“Sure,” I said. And then we all started to laugh.
Ray came with a bouquet of tiger lilies, Indian paintbrush, and stunted ferns. I grabbed the plants, not sure if we even had a vase. In the kitchen, I laid them on the counter and flung out the dregs from the green plastic juice pitcher. I filled the pitcher with sink water and twirled back into the dining room. It didn’t seem like anything had gone wrong yet. I planted the pitcher in the middle of the table. Fluffs of wild cottonweed and spindly strands of grass scattered over the table. Both Dillon and Milton smiled and then laughed when I noticed that Ray had sat in the child-sized chair. “Ray, that’s my chair.”
“What’s cooking?”
“Let me at least get you a pillow.” I grabbed the pillow from the middle of the living room floor where Dillon watched TV.
I handed Ray the pillow. When he stood up, I swiped the chair away from him and quickly sat down.
“Mom,” Milton said. “That’s Ray’s chair. Give it to him.”
“She can have her chair,” Ray said.
Milton stood up and pulled the chair away from me. “Here you go, Mr. Burke. Mom’s just fucking with you. Excuse me, I mean she’s just playing with you.”
Ray looked at me. “Thanks, I guess. Call me Ray.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Burke.”
“Call me Ray.”
“Sorry, Ray.” Milton took a drink of water and looked at me.
“How come you’re afraid to say ‘fuck’ in front of Ray, but you have no problem swearing when I’m around?”
“Mom, that’s not true,” Milton said.
“You don’t listen to your mother?” Ray asked. “That is not a good sign.”
“I do listen to her. I’m a very… ” Milton looked around the room, searching as fast as he could for the right word, and finally he hit pay dirt: “Obedient son.”
“Obedient. I would definitely say that’s Milton,” I said. “Go ahead and dig in.”
We ate and Ray kept making moaning noises that made Milton and Dillon laugh. “This is so good.” Ray started to ham it up. “Janice,” Ray said in a deep, husky voice. “Your cooking is pure ambrosia. Okay. I do. I marry you.”
“You can’t,” Milton said. “You don’t even know her.”
“Milton, he’s just screwing around,” I said. “Lighten up.”
“Fuck you, Mom.”
“Now that seems out of line,” Ray laid his fork down. “Don’t you think, Milton?”
“No, you don’t know my Mom the way I do. She’ll just screw with you until you get so mad you don’t know what to do. I’m sure she does that to you, Ray.”
“I’m Mr. Burke to you. How can you say something like that to your mother? Didn’t your father beat any manners into you?”
We ate in silence then, and I knew that the moment I had worked all afternoon to get to had come and gone. “This is good, Mom,” Milton finally said. “But I’m stuffed. Can I be excused?”
“Can I be excused as well?” asked Dillon.
“Sure, you two can leave.”
When they had gone upstairs, I started to pack up the leftovers.
“Janice, leave it. The boys or I can pick it all up tomorrow. I want to thank you for inviting me. It was a marvelous meal. I brought a bottle of wine but left it in the car. Should I go get it?”
“Get it.”
When he came back, I asked him, “Why do you treat my kids like that? They’re my kids.”
“You just don’t seem able to defend yourself. Sorry. I was out of line. I’m sure they’re not a complete waste. I can sort of see myself in Dillon, when I was his age. I drank a lot of beer. But I didn’t go to work as drunk as he did last week. He passed out in the middle of the field. A criminal would go to work that drunk. I’m responsible for this community, and I’m not going to let these kids push me around just because I’m dating their mother.”
“That really clears your name, doesn’t it? ‘I’m responsible.’ You’re the one who dodged the draft. You dropped out of school. They’re just kids, and they’re my kids, and you’re telling me they’re no good. That’s bullshit, Ray. You’d treat yourself like shit if you met your twenty-year-old self. Your forty-year-old self would blow your head off.”
“I’ve learned some things. That’s all. But I’m basically the same guy I was at nineteen. I listen to the same music. I date the same woman.”
“I’m not the same woman.”
“What are you talking about? Look at you, brown hair, not a strand of gray, legs like—”
“I dye my hair.”
“Two, maybe three wrinkles around your eyes and they’re from laughing. You even weigh less.”
“I’m fat. Who are you trying to kid?”
“You’re even better than young. We’re basically the same people.”
“Ray, I’m a thirty-seven-year-old woman who spends too much time drinking and smoking dope or thinking about drinking and smoking dope. I have a fifteen-year-old son and a ten-year-old son. And I’m running away from my drug-addicted husband.”
“Art’s an addict? I thought he smoked dope?”
“He does.”
“You can’t be addicted to hash. A physical impossibility.”
“You’re not twenty years old. Neither am I, and I don’t want to be.”
“Sure you do.”
“I can’t be. I’ve got two kids upstairs who you treat like shit. What would you do if I treated your kids like you treat them?”
“They’re punks, Janice. Get rid of them. Live with me.”
“How would I get rid of them?”
“I can take care of them.”
“You will?”
“I can have my foreman drive them out to one of the logging roads. It’ll solve all your problems.”
“Like a litter of cats I don’t want?”
“Exactly, just like a litter of cats you don’t need. And then we can be like we wanted to be when we were twenty in Seattle. I’ll read you poetry while you sit in my work shirt by the stove drinking hot chocolate.”
“You are a sick man,” I said. “But you don’t even know how tempting that is.” I leaned over the table, grabbed the neck of the wine bottle and poured myself another glass. “Really, you don’t mind the boys. Because it looks like you’re going to kill them.”
“They need that.”
“I don’t think so. They’ve already had that and it hasn’t done any good.”
“I can handle them.”
“Ray,” I said. “There’s been something else bothering me.”
“You’ve been thinking a lot.”
“Tell me about the woman who lived here.”
“We dated for a long time,” Ray said. “Years. She wouldn’t marry me, but she talked me into letting her move into this house. Did we bring that bottle of wine up here?”
“Are you trying to change the subject?”
“I could use a glass, is all.”
“Did you like her?” I asked.
“I loved her, but she was really moody. I just assumed that all women were moody. But it turned out she was crazy. Really. It wasn’t the kind of thing I noticed. She started to swing, one week giddy, one week under the weather, one week bouncing off the walls, next week she wouldn’t get out of bed. She wouldn’t let me come over sometimes. She demanded that Marigold Greer come out, but not me. So I told Mrs. Greer she couldn’t come over. She came anyway, because Amanda had told Mrs. Greer that she had been her mother in a past life. And I guess Mrs. Greer believed her, or wanted to believe, or whatever. Amanda also told Mrs. Greer that I beat her, all kinds of stuff. I should have taken her to the hospital, but I was afraid of losing her. You know how it is in the movies. They always cut out the best part of a person in those hospitals. And sometimes being with Amanda was better than I could imagine and I wouldn’t change that. I’d come out here and she’d have a bucket full of ice and cold tea out in the field with a starched linen sheet for shade, and she’d sing old songs she’d learned from her father in Rock Springs. And it was something I felt I couldn’t risk losing. I mean the bad times didn’t seem that bad on days like those. And then they found her floating in the Laughing Horse. Almost eight years ago now. Then John’s family moved in. I suppose a lot of people have been here over the years.”
I lay my head on his chest. He held me for the longest time. Finally, I led him upstairs, and I slowly took his clothes off, but I didn’t feel like messing around, or maybe he wasn’t able to have sex in this house now. It felt like I was her, Amanda, doing it to him. “I’m sort of creeped out,” I told him.
“It’s okay,” he said. He held me, and I fell asleep. His body felt cool and solid next to mine. I took a breath and another breath and then for a long space of time I didn’t hear a thing from him and finally he took a breath. And the whole bit started over again. He held me next to him, and I knew if I stayed with Ray that was how it would be. He would hold me so that he knew he was with someone who understood where he had come from, not because he really wanted me there. Anyone who found herself in Bainesville at his door, whom he had known all those years past, could have been in this spot. I wondered how this woman had felt with him. I wondered if, when she spoke, Ray listened to her.
In the morning I woke when he slid out of bed, letting the covers slide off my legs, exposing them to the cold air. It felt good on my knees, and I thought for a second about getting out of bed and making coffee for Ray, but then I pulled the covers back on. “Why do you have to go? Stay in bed with me.” I watched him standing in the early morning sunlight. Though the room was bright with it and Ray stood in a patch of light, his typing-paper-white feet on the wood floor, covered in sunlight, I could see his breath and the way his skin constricted and goosebumped on his chest
“I have a ranch to run,” he said.
“Stay. If you were twenty, you’d stay.”
“Not if I had to work.”
“I remember a time when you didn’t even call in sick to stay in bed with me. You just never went back to work.”
“Well, I can’t do that now. I’ll be back, okay?” Ray tucked his shirt in and crawled onto the blankets. He rolled them around me, tucked them under me, and brought his morning-beard-sharp face up against my cheek. He kissed me and then left. As soon as I heard his truck go down the driveway, I slipped out of bed, suddenly confused about everything. I didn’t shower or anything. I found my nightgown bunched on the floor.
I rinsed the butcher knife in the kitchen sink and went up into the attic. Faint morning light came through the round window in the far wall. I ran my finger around the cabinet and then edged the knife blade in until I could insert the metal between the frame and the door. Then I slid it into the wall and popped the cabinet open. For a second I could see only the black cavity of the cabinet’s interior, and then I made out a shoe box that had started to come apart. Balls of paper had sloughed from the edges. A box camera sat on its side, covered in a film of webs and dust. I opened the cardboard box and found hundreds of photographs whose faces and expressions were meaningless to me, except that they all had the same sloping forehead and the same Sunday smile. The faces all looked like variations of Mrs. Greer. From the sharp, hard handwriting on the back, I could see that several of the photographs were even older than this house. I had always wondered if my mother kept a box like this somewhere, the old family photos; somehow I didn’t think they existed. We had moved too much, and we had lost all contact with her family. I closed the door, leaving the photos as they were because Marigold Greer at least knew they were here.
I wanted to get out of the house. Downstairs I put on my tennis shoes and jacket and I went outside and started walking into the forest. Under the trees the sunlight hadn’t come yet and it seemed like evening. Turning around in the meadow, I looked up into the tops of the trees; they rose up into the sky like long fingers keeping the dark shadow-night next to the ground. I ran through the forest.
Halfway up the hill, I took off my shoes and ran like Marigold Greer said Amanda had run. I felt the sudden intensity of each step because the ground held the crinkled edges of the Oregon grape and the dry mat of pine needles, and then the damp, grainy soil under them. Suddenly this mundane and obvious chore of running through the forest became an ordeal as the distance between where I was and where I had left my shoes expanded. I finally arrived at the top of the ridge, my feet throbbing and cut. I came out of the woods at the marshy edge of Laughing Horse Reservoir in the morning sunlight. I turned to look down the steep slope to the valley where our house sat and then back to the mountains above the water. And I knew what I wanted; I couldn’t live here anymore. I knew I would leave the house. Too many things had happened there, and plenty more things were going to happen there.
An American home is a raw place with ghosts so new that the flesh hasn’t even rotted off their buried skeletons. I couldn’t take being alone in a place with any history. I’d be alone as soon as Ray drove my kids away. My kids would toughen but I didn’t want them to get too tough. I’d at least have my kids without Ray. Kids don’t have any history. Blank slates, right? Except all the nicks and scars they get from people handling them.
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This is part six of the eleven stories in The Remains of River Names, a novel in linked stories. The book will appear this month on Necessary Fiction. Of the collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.” The book will be re-released in a new edition from The Publication Studio this fall.