Call Me Home (27 page)

“I'll call you. Or use this number. The woman – Mary – will take a message.” How many shamed men had been dogged by their wives here? Mary's wasn't even a booze joint, but you could see the booze joints across the street. If you were at the Longhorn the bartender would lie for you, but Mary might just spot you through the glass.

“All right,” Randy said. “Hey, man, this'll be great!”

“Yeah,” Jackson said, and he
did
feel that way, because there was a life out there, someone who knew him who would still know him in a different town, and who did not know Don. How easy it was to let your world get tiny. “Hey,” he said, and his voice sounded ridiculous. “Have you seen my dad or anything?”

Randy paused. “Once in a while,” he said.

“Randy. Lydia's not there, is she?” God, if she was – !

“No, no.” Randy was quiet again. Jackson breathed out through his nose, pushed some egg around on his plate. “They're not here. I've seen your dad around once or twice. Nothing seemed different.”

Meaning, Jackson thought, same old asshole. Probably the same old asshole with a new girlfriend. But still – they weren't
there. As much as he wanted to know where they were, he wanted even more for them to be gone. “Thanks, Randy,” he said.

“Hey, talk soon,” Randy said, and they hung up, and Jackson passed the phone across the counter again to Mary, and she didn't charge him for his toast or the breakfast, and he walked out feeling better.

He would go to work, he thought, and see if he still had a job. As he made his way toward the work site it happened again – he thought he saw his mother. This time it was a woman, an older woman in sweatpants and a dark coat buttoned high around her throat, and as soon as it happened it was over; it wasn't her. There was no pattern to these moments, except that he had come to expect them, even to welcome them, and at the same time this did not diminish the surprise in it. It embarrassed him, the simplicity of what it represented – a simple, forgiving reunion – and afterward he would feel hurt and angry at himself, at the way that he could dream for such a clear impossibility.

He would be walking from the work site, or past the row of new houses, and a dog might run between the trees, or a carpenter would be stooping in a pile of useful debris, picking out nails or reclaiming his scattered tools. However unlikely, these ordinary articles would assemble themselves into the form of his mother – his mother at her most gallant and admirable, wearing a dress that he had seen only in the occasional photograph that surfaced from the early days of his parents' marriage. It was his mother as he had never known her, picking her way over sawdust and twisted lengths of orange construction tape, walking toward him. His mother as she would have looked down at some road-house in Texas, where the plank boards were treated with beer to a dark shine. His mother with none of the stiffness or disappointment of his mother now. She would approach him near one of the work trucks, elbow on the rusted bed. “Oh,” she would say, “Oh, Jackson, it's all been fine, you know, it's been just fine.”

He would grasp, then, when he shook his head a little and the dog became a rangy mutt or the carpenter straightened with
his arms full of tools, just what exactly he was going to lose – his mother's past, her present, all of it. The times that had so captivated him as a child – the times before he existed at all – were even farther from him. Somewhere far from him, she was going to grow old. He wanted so badly for her to materialize, to come out of the woods in that old dress, the one he remembered from when he was young, the one he had maybe even created in his mind. He would tell her, he thought, that he had been wrong, more wrong than he could have ever imagined, and instead of acknowledging that he had done her in, had not treated her as a son should treat his mother, but more like an enemy, and she would just lean against that truck and smile.

“Oh, well,” she would say, “we go on, don't we?”

The woman kept walking; the wind picked up. He kicked through the leaves to the work site, to the day that was waiting for him. The day he was late to. He tried to imagine, for a minute, that Don didn't exist at all.

Amy

Fannin, Texas, 2010

AMY STOOD OUTSIDE ON A GRAY TUESDAY HANGING LAUNDRY
on the frayed line. The back door of the little Fannin house opened onto the same thatch of grass, the gravel road leading out to the same sparse field. Had anything changed in the years since she'd left and come back? There was a line strung from an eyehook above the door to a narrow, anemic tree just over the wall. It was cutting through the bark, bleeding a weak sap down the trunk. Slips the color of flesh; her mottled, threadbare bathrobe; Lydia's shirts housed the wind, arms lifting and dropping. The wind was pinning leaves to the siding. The smell of hot stone in the air, a match struck – somewhere a neighbor was burning leaves. When she turned, her mother was standing in the doorway.

“Will you come in here?” her mother asked. “I need to talk to you.”

Her mother was the same and different. She seemed content, Amy thought. At peace, in a way that Amy had never seen her before. She had welcomed them home, brought them in as though it had only been days since Amy left. Amy put the clothespins down in the grass and followed her mother. Inside, there was a stack of old spiral notebooks.

“I want to give you these,” her mother said. “They were your father's.”

Her father's old notebooks, the pages marked in even lines, fading pencil: “500 yd dash, 2 mile run, short sprints to Pancake House. Build new fence, 5′ × 12′. Stop smoking. Become a better
person.” He must have been what, she thought, nineteen? All of these tiny wants, these good intentions.

Her father. The storied boy. “He was brave, very brave,” her mother had told her when she was a little girl. She imagined him, swinging like Tarzan through the jungles, the tangled vines. And when that war started to assemble in her mind, she imagined blood, and noise – noise everywhere, even the silence growing loud, weighted with what might be coming. They were lucky, everyone said, to have him home. Only later did Amy start to wonder what it must have meant for her mother. To spend thirty years shaving your husband's face with a straight razor in Fannin, Texas, far from the cities where people stood and waved signs against LBJ and Vietnam, and then against the next war, and the next, and to look your neighbors in the eye when they called your husband a hero, to wave and smile when they went back to their own homes, far from the shaving cream and straight razor and everything else that waited for you.

“You never showed me these before,” Amy said.

There were so many other things she meant to say: I'm sorry. I love you. I loved him, and I'm sorry I wasn't here.

“Amy,” her mother said. “You need to make a life again.”

She thought of her mother's life, how small it had been. Did her mother wish she could have done it differently?

“Do you wish you'd left Daddy?” she asked.

“No,” she said. “He kept his promises to me. I did the best I could. I don't wish that any different, but I wish I'd come for you.”

“I wasn't here,” she said. “When Daddy died.”

“You have to forgive yourself,” her mother said. “Start with this.”

“I don't deserve to be forgiven,” she said.

“You didn't invent feeling that way,” her mother said. “Did you think you invented it?” It didn't sound angry, just a question.
Did you think you invented it?

Amy lay on her back on the floor and looked at the ceiling. She thought maybe she had.

She went the next week to see Jennifer. “You should go see her,” her mother had said. “She lives in Lockhart. I'm sure she's in the phone book.” She drove her mother's car. She still needed to trade their old car – she couldn't believe she hadn't done it yet. There was something safe about being in Fannin that she hadn't counted on. All of this time, she had thought it was the last place she should go.

Lockhart was the same as she remembered it – barbecue joints, the ornate buildings like Viennese cakes facing the square. Jennifer's little apartment was across from a city park with a gazebo. There were kids on a patch of concrete shooting baskets. It was nice, Amy thought. She tried not to be nervous.

The door swung open before Amy could knock. “Holy fucking shit,” Jennifer said. She'd gotten heavier but she was still pretty. Her hair was still big, Amy noted. She still smelled like lilies, like cheap perfume. “Let me look at you!” Jennifer put her hands on Amy's shoulders. “You're so thin, you bitch,” she said, leading Amy inside.

The house was compulsively sunny – the kitchen was painted yellow, bordered with a parade of sunflowers – and it smelled like burnt coffee. There were photographs everywhere, on the walls, framed and propped on the counters. The mirror in the living room was wedged full of snapshots. Amy walked around the room, picking out things she'd forgotten: she and Jennifer at homecoming, when they'd worn matching dresses patterned with black and white triangles and pinned three-pound mum corsages to their waists to stop the mums from dragging down their décolletages; Jennifer drunk at the Watermelon Thump in Luling giving the finger to a parade float. There were wedding pictures of Jennifer in a waterfall of white lace, Scott in a blue suit with a pink carnation in the buttonhole. I should have been there, Amy thought.

“Janie's in her room,” Jennifer said, gesturing down the narrow, wood-paneled hall. “Janie! Come meet my best and oldest friend.”

The door opened and the girl flounced down the hall. She
was Jackson's age, Amy thought, maybe a year or two younger, sixteen or seventeen. Her dark hair was chopped short on one side and she'd lined her eyes with black liquid that was smudged at the corners. She was beautiful, Amy thought. She looked like Jennifer. It was like looking at her old friend, twenty years ago.

“Hey,” Janie said. “Nice to meet you. Mom, I'm going out.”

“What, you're not even going to ask?” Jennifer said. She tilted her head toward Amy. “You see what kind of a mother
I
am,” she said. “She just does whatever she likes.”

Amy smiled. She watched Janie pick up a little beaded purse from the counter. “Be back later,” she said, and went out the screen.

Jennifer went to the pantry. “Well, now that she's gone,” she said, pulling out a bottle of wine, “let's stop being old.” She pulled down two coffee mugs from the cabinet. “Take a seat,” she said, waving one hand at the kitchen table with its sunflower placemats. She opened the wine and tipped it into the mugs.

“Where's Scott?” Amy asked, taking one of the mugs from Jennifer.

“Oh, God, don't even say his name!” she said. “I just call him The Motherfucker. He doesn't even call Janie.” She sipped from her cup and winked at Amy. “I told you I'd have a girl and name her Jane. You would not believe some of the shitty names people come up with these days. Not me.” She picked up the ends of her hair and assessed them for split ends. “That bastard ran off with some skank in Luling. Whatever. He called and wanted me back, but there's no way I'm going near that, especially after where it's been. But I'm sleeping with two guys now.” She leaned forward. “And one of them has a horse dick, hand to God.”

Amy laughed. She felt a pull toward Jennifer, the easiness of it, as though no time had passed. At the same time, her other life, what she thought of as her whole life now, was still there, heavy inside of her.

She tried, as best she could, to tell Jennifer what had happened. She couldn't, though, not completely, but she tried. It felt
good, Amy thought. Never, in all those years, had she talked to anyone about Gary.

“I worried about you,” Jennifer said, holding her coffee mug between her palms. “I told myself: Amy is either very happy or she is in trouble out there, but I'm going to say she's happy, because what the hell else can you do?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't even know where Jackson is, and Lydia is so sad, Jennifer. I can just see it on her. What all this has done to her.”

“The best thing you can do for your daughter is to get yourself a life, girl. You're a good mama,” she said. “But get a life!” Jennifer laughed. “For God's sake.”

Amy laughed. Nothing was right, she thought, but in that moment, across from Jennifer in the butter yellow kitchen, it seemed like she might be able to make something of what she had and start to try to live.

IT WAS ALREADY
dark when she pulled up; she was later than she'd meant to be. “Mom?” she called. “Lena?” The house was too quiet. “Lydia?” Maybe they'd gone out to dinner. She went to the kitchen and turned on the light.

There was a note. “L. didn't come home –
DO NOT WORRY
, I've gone to look for her in town. Wait here in case she calls or comes home.”

Somehow she made it to the sink before she started to retch, the pounding behind her eyes just
No. No. No. No.
She ran out onto porch and looked out at the field. She was dying, she couldn't breathe, she was
dying
. If he had come back. If he had come back. She was dying. She retched again. She knelt on the ground with her hands in the dirt.