Call Me Home (32 page)

Lydia

Fannin, Texas, 2010

JANIE, JENNIFER'S DAUGHTER, DROVE ME TO GERONIMO
, where my father's ranch once and maybe still was, on October 22nd, the day after my fourteenth birthday. It felt like we were just two friends, driving the dusty roads with the radio turned up. “An arrangement,” my mother said, because of the time I ran away, and the time that Janie's mother caught Janie riding in a truck on the back road with a man who was much older than high school. Even though it was an arrangement, I didn't mind. I felt older with Janie, and more exciting. We'd dyed my hair, too. I liked how it looked. Reddish, darker. Glamorous, I thought. I wanted to feel different, like I wouldn't catch my father's eye. I imagined being face-to-face with him on the street and he wouldn't recognize me. I dreamed I walked right past him.

The fields we drove past were burnt brown. Here it was late fall and still hotter than any summer I remembered before. There were summers in Washington that passed so quickly I only remember the edge of the Sound pulling in and out, the water over my feet; the sun slanting through the thin curtains; an ice cream from the Lake Goodwin stand. A field that burned down the road, and the way my mother and father took the neighbor's call and drove the truck fast, kicking up a cloud of dust that mixed with smoke, and then beat the fire with blankets. Jackson and I ran after them, watching from the road, the smoking stinging my eyes, the rough taste of it in my throat.

“Wow, what a birthday present,” Janie said, winding down
the window and letting the hot air rush in. I'd asked her to take me on a drive for my birthday. I said it was what I wanted, as long as it was secret. It took me a long time to find the address. There were two Hollands in Fannin, but that wasn't right. “Which city did my dad come from?” I asked my mother one day, as if I'd just forgotten. “I mean, which city was the ranch in?”

“Geronimo, don't worry, it's a ways from here,” she'd said. There was only one Holland in the Geronimo phone book, which the Fannin library kept under the front counter.

It wasn't really a ways. Half an hour, maybe more. “Slow down,” I said, when I knew we were getting closer, and I watched the empty dirt lots, the driveways, and the houses move past. When the numbers were close, I saw a sign on a fencepost painted
Holland
. My skin prickled. “Slow down,” I said to Janie, touching her arm, and she looked at me but slowed the car. I knew what our moms were doing, making us watch each other, but just then I didn't mind.

The house was small, a trailer house like the house in Washington. There was a red truck parked out front. There was a chicken coop and a sign that said
Eggs 2 dollars
. There were three sheds, all leaning. They looked like our shed in Washington. I wondered if my father had built it, and the prickling came back over my skin. Once there were bees in the wall of our shed, so many that we could hardly get inside without being stung. My father stuffed the wall with fiberglass insulation that shredded their wings. After they were gone I would reach my hand into the dark space and bring out black honey on my fingers. It tasted sweet and rotten. I knew the bees couldn't stay there, but still I felt bad, the way it ended.

I hadn't known what I would do before the sign. “I need to get some eggs,” I told Janie. “Can we stop?”

She pulled the car the rest of the way to the shoulder, then she looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Eggs?” she asked.

I had a feeling that if I sounded certain enough she would agree to believe me. “Yes,” I said, “Come on, Janie.”

She looked at me again, then sighed. “I'm not going to regret this, am I?” She pulled the car out and made a U-turn, then turned into the driveway. She put the car into park next to the red truck and turned off the engine. She pulled her cigarettes out of her purse. She was smiling a little. “You're not going to run off with a boy or something?”

I smiled at her. “No way,” I said.

She shrugged her shoulder. “Fine,” she said. She slid her seat back and put her legs up on the dashboard. “I'll wait here.” She tapped a cigarette out of the pack. “Don't tell,” she said, waving the cigarette at me, and winked.

“You don't, either,” I said.

There were flower pots on the porch, full of roots and dirt. A wind chime of rusted forks and spoons that knocked together but didn't make a noise. A plastic lawn chair with a broken back. My heart beat like it was trapped in a tiny cage, trying to burst out. I knocked on the screen door.

“Yes?” the woman asked. She had her gray hair up in a blue scarf. There was a television on loud behind her.

“I just –” I was looking at her, trying to decide if she looked like my father. If she looked like me. Her eyes were an icy blue, not like ours at all. “I wanted to buy some eggs.”

The woman smiled. “Well!” she said. “Well, that's fine. What brings you all the way out here?”

“I saw your sign –” I said. The woman looked past me at Janie, who was sitting in the front seat with her cigarette hanging out the window. Janie held up a hand. “And – we stopped.”

“Your sister shouldn't smoke,” the woman said, but she was still smiling. “We don't get a lot of people buying our eggs, but we always have so many. It's a shame. So many go to waste.” She held the screen open and I followed her in. There were roses on the wallpaper, big faded blooms. She went into the other room and turned the television off. “Anita Holland,” she said when she came back in, holding out her hand. I shook it. “Janie,” I said, because it was like I'd forgotten my own new name and even saying it would
have seemed like telling too much. I could see Janie through the kitchen window and now with the lie in front of me I hoped she'd stay where she was, smoking and fiddling with the radio.

“Well, Janie, how many you want, you said a dozen?” The refrigerator was mostly empty, except for milk and orange juice, some casserole dishes, and four brown eggs in a shallow bowl. “You caught me being lazy.” I started to say that four was enough, but then, I thought, she'll just send me on my way and I won't know a thing. “Come with me,” she said. She pulled two empty cartons from a cupboard. “You got good shoes on?”

The coop was full of feathers and the sound of the chickens. “If we got more people coming out, I'd get them ready,” she said. “But we don't.”

“Do you need the money, though?”

She laughed and it sounded big and warm and it made me think of my father when he was good.

“Well, everybody needs money,” she said, very serious, as though she was afraid I would think she was laughing at me. “But these eggs are just an extra thing.”

She ducked into the coop, under the metal roof, and came back with a handful of eggs. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “we would go to the railroad station for our chicks. They let you know when the chicks were coming and you would bring a flat box for your shipment.”

“They came in on the train?”

“Yes,” Anita said, wiping one of the eggs on her shirt and handing it to me. “We had a little shed with a light to keep the chicks warm, and chick feed, water, you had to watch them, before you turned around they'd start molting and the fluffiness would turn into feathers and pretty soon you'd have pullets and roosters. You only needed one rooster, so you'd use them up as they got good to eat. Then you'd get little pullet eggs, small like bird eggs. My mother would say, ‘Oh, you're little, you get the little egg.' You could decorate teensy eggs at Easter and then as they got older, the eggs got bigger and bigger. They only really lay in the spring,
summer, and fall months. Winter – they were getting older, we'd eat them.”

“You ate them?” I asked.

“My mother would make such good chicken and noodles. You'd have broody hens, trying to keep their eggs, so you'd have to get the eggs out from under them. My grandmother, I'd follow her through the hedgerows and look for hens, try to bring them in. Sometimes the eggs would be good, other times they'd be so old and rotten. You'd find a hen that'd laid herself a big nest of eggs and you didn't know what would happen. Some would be fertilized, some would be pretty near hatched, some would be rotted.”

I tried to hatch a bird's egg, once, under a light bulb in my closet. Jackson and I tried doing ESP, telling it to hatch, but it didn't. In secret, after three weeks, I cracked it open and a plain raw egg slid out, smaller but still with the same yellow yolk.

“What are you going to make with all these eggs?” Anita asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “I haven't decided yet.”

“Well, these eggs are a few days old, so they'd be good for an angel food cake,” she said. “If you're going to make an angel food cake by hand, you need twelve eggs or so, and you need to keep them out. A fresh egg that's just laid will not beat up. They need to be three days old or so, then they'll beat.” She pointed to the back of the coop, where the roof was low. “Would you go check around back there? They like to bury them, and I'm too darn old and fat to get back there.”

I crouched down in the back of the coop and sifted through the sawdust until I turned up an egg with a mottled shell, and then another. “You're not old and fat,” I said.

Anita laughed. “I sure feel it,” she said. “How old are you, now? Just a baby.”

“I just turned fourteen,” I said, “two days ago.” On the night of my birthday, my grandmother made tamales, wrapped in corn husks and foil, and my mother poured me a glass of wine thinned
with 7-Up, and we kept toasting to nothing, to Fannin, to fourteen, to the best tamales this side of the San Marcos, to the San Marcos.

“Oh, these are the salad days,” she said. “Don't ever get old.”

I kept sifting through the sawdust, passing eggs to Anita. She was stooped under the chicken wire, puffing a little from the walk, and I felt brave. “Didn't you have any kids?” I asked.

“Ah,” she said quickly. “No, no.”

Lie, I thought. Anita looked flustered. She dropped an egg and crouched down to pick it up. “Ah, never mind me,” she said. “Always clumsy.” She had a dark face when she said it. She ducked out of the coop and brushed herself off. “That's about how many we need, isn't it? A dozen for you and a few for me.”

I followed her back to the kitchen and she put the full crate into a grocery bag.

“How much are they?” I asked, and she shook her head.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, waving her hand. “A birthday present. And for keeping an old woman company.” She turned to the counter, where there was a bowl and a jar of mayonnaise. “I'm making a crab salad, if you and your sister are hungry.”

“I said I'd be home for dinner.” Another lie.

“You sure are pretty,” Anita said. “You have those nice dark eyes. I've always loved dark eyes. I wanted a daughter.”

“Why didn't you have one?” I asked. My mouth shook around the edges of the question.

“Oh, honey,” Anita said. “Me and my husband –” She stopped for a minute, holding one of the eggs in her hands. “Me and my husband – he's out working now – a place like this will just work you to death. We did have a son – I don't know why I said that, just now, that I didn't – you just caught me off guard. He was the joy of my life, and then – he just went away from me. He and his father – they were just oil and water to each other, and as he got older he was so angry, just mad at the whole world. Something changed in him.” She wasn't looking at me, just holding the egg. “It broke my heart.”

I could see the kitchen fan pointed at me, its purring blade,
but I couldn't hear a sound. Sweat ran down my back. “What happened?” I asked.

Anita looked tired. “I sure don't know, honey. I've asked myself that and I'll keep asking myself that every day that I walk this earth.” She opened a drawer and shut it again. “The delight of my life, and then he turned thirteen, fourteen, and it was like he was gone from me.” She looked at me and then away. “I'm talking too much,” she said. “You don't need to hear an old lady's sob story.” She shook her head.

I smiled. I wanted to say something important. I wished I could give her something but I didn't know what, and she was opening the drawer again, turning away, looking through the cupboards. “Thank you for the eggs,” I said finally.

“You come back,” Anita said. “And remember, keep your eggs three days old. People talk about putting them in the icebox, but don't listen.”

It was in her voice, in the way she talked and talked. A sadness like that is as clear as your name.

“
WHAT ON EARTH
do you need a dozen eggs for?” my mother asked, but we made the cake that night, with a recipe from my grandmother's
Betty Crocker
. I felt happy. Lighter, even if I didn't know much more than I had before. My grandmother Linda had pulled out a cardboard box of old photographs and she was going through them while we baked, holding up one photo and another. “Just look at this,” she would say. “Look at what a doll your mother was. And your grandfather! That was back when men were still handsome.”