Dwelling Places (15 page)

“Not always.”

“Sometimes they go a little crazy.”

“Well, I've already been crazy, so the prospect doesn't scare me so much now.” He sees her immediate disapproval and laughs to indicate that he's joking. “Mom, I'm doing all right.”

“You're sleeping well?” There's that mother tone that is so hard to resist. “You still have an appetite?”

“I'm sleeping and eating just fine.”

Her eyes mist over then, and she reaches up and pecks him on the cheek. Then she pulls away fast and goes back to her car. Mack wishes he'd taken that moment to give her a hug, something she probably needs more than she would admit. But she flashes that strong smile and a little wave, and drives off without looking back.

Mack goes back to the house and sits on one of the two chairs left from an old dinette set, his feet up on the daybed. He's arranged it so that he can sit like this and look out the window and into the woods. He does this often, and many minutes might go by before he notices or changes position.

Jodie

“This is a bad idea. A really bad idea.”

In the privacy of the truck cab, Jodie tries to entertain common sense. She's had so many discussions with herself in this junky space that she may as well just tape the set of speeches and replay them when appropriate. There's the speech reminding herself that even obnoxious teenagers grow up and into nice people eventually. And the one about the home repairs that would be nice but are not urgent. It is three in the afternoon, and the sun is hitting her right in the eyes and turning the dust on the windshield into a bright murkiness that cuts visibility to nearly nothing. Pop cans roll in the floorboards among the fast-food trash. The dash and passenger seat are cluttered by stiff work gloves, some loose and dusty books on tape, four weeks of church bulletins, and a plastic grocery bag full of canned diced tomatoes she was supposed to have delivered to Rita.

During the past couple of years she has reentered the adolescent stage of imagining elaborate scenarios in which she will somehow, in the course of her regular and grueling life, happen on to one of her favorite actors. Perhaps John Cusack will have a flat tire while wheeling
across the state of Iowa on his way to some offbeat film festival. Or Harvey Keitel will stop at the house, wanting directions to the colonies of Amana or the bridges of Madison County. Jodie has allowed herself rampant fantasies; she doesn't even feel embarrassed about them anymore.

Back when this started, Mack was keeping her up nights with his pacing. His agitation put them all on edge. That, and the anger that would flash out of him when he made the slightest error or couldn't put his thoughts together fast enough. The worst times, though, were when he wandered between the house and outbuildings, or just stood in the alfalfa, looking frightened. When he did manage to lie down and try to sleep, and when Jodie lay beside him, her heart clattering almost audibly, it had been such a relief, such a break from her mind's real work, to fantasize about romances that would never happen.

Foolish fantasies work better than allowing panic to fill the bedroom. They work better than praying to the God she no longer trusts to protect her family. And while pastors and Sunday School teachers always warned about the sinfulness of such daydreams, this season of Jodie's life has revealed to her how little she concerns herself with right and wrong anymore. Her remaining virtue seems to be the will to survive. If imaginary diversions can help her get through another few hours, then God will simply have to cut her some slack.

But at moments like this, driving along in a filthy pickup littered with the family's trash and chaos, if Jodie were to see John and Harvey
in the same car,
stalled right in front of her, she would step on the gas. She has stopped checking the rearview mirror to see if, in the past week, the tiredness has emptied from her face, to glance at the little lines forming around her mouth, the diminished eyes and lifeless hair. She wears jeans stained with either paint or spaghetti sauce, she can't remember which. Twenty years ago her oversized flannel shirt would have made her look cute, but now it just adds weight to her natural baggage. She doesn't even want friends and neighbors to see her anymore, let alone some handsome guy looking for an afternoon romance.

The truck makes its automatic way into town. She watches her hands, her dry-looking, forty-something hands, grip the steering wheel and look as if they were expert at something. She glances a second time at the wedding band. Dull with time, but sturdy as ever.

She has agreed to meet Terry Jenkins for coffee at the Lunch Hour, that's all. He will walk over from the school, after gathering materials from his classroom. It isn't unusual for Terry to be at the school on a Saturday. He heads up one or two faculty committees and is involved in some extracurricular activities with students. He asked Jodie to help him organize a local history tour for his social studies classes. Jodie is friends with Naomi Muller, who is one of the several senior citizen curators of Beulah's small but growing museum. That's what Jodie and Terry will talk about over coffee at the town's only café. They will meet in the daylight where everyone can see them, and they will make plans for a series of tours during the dreary winter months. Within several counties are nearly as many museums, most of them housed in old buildings or otherwise vacant storefronts along near-deserted main streets. Most are piled high with items that testify to the way people lived in every era of the past 150 years. These museums have no official guardians or professional curators, just old folks who want to preserve the history of their communities and have little else to do. It will be a good way to spark the interest of a few bored kids in the middle of February.

Jodie is aware of other sparks that might ignite as well over this innocent coffee. She has been out of circulation for years where flirtation is concerned, but right now her gut apparently knows more than she is willing to admit. She remembers Terry's longer-than-normal gaze in the parking lot weeks ago. And the chemistry between them has become palpable enough that she makes an effort to avoid seeing him or talking to him directly at school—or, depending on the day and her mood, she does make the effort to do so. While she tells herself with perfect logic that this is just coffee, her palms get sweaty.

She pulls up to the café beside three other vehicles she recognizes. Terry's isn't one of them. He rents a small house three blocks away.
Since moving back to Beulah eighteen months ago, he has adopted the town's shrinking core as his home space. His parents still farm a few miles north of here. Terry went to college right after he graduated, about the time Mack and Jodie were getting married. Jodie is two years older than Terry and can remember him vaguely from school years. When people are under the age of twenty, two or three years' difference in age separates entire worlds. So when Terry returned, after years of teaching in other places and a short, childless marriage, Jodie noticed his presence on the faculty but didn't give it a second thought.

There he is, at a table in the window, coffee in hand, a pile of papers in front of him. When she steps onto the sidewalk, he looks up and smiles. That same smile—innocuous enough, but shining at her almost daily for the past several months.

“Hey,” she says lightly. Settling on the other side of the booth, she is acutely aware of her sloppy jeans and shirt, her drab face. At least he can never accuse her of trying to encourage anything.

“Hey, yourself. You look tired. Sure you're up to this?”

“Oh, yeah. Once the weekend gets here, I feel obligated to try to catch up on everything at home. You'd think I'd learn.” She offers a smile.

“I hate to see you so tired all the time. I feel guilty for asking your help on this.”

“Oh, this'll be fun. Something different.”

He looks at her a bit too long, just as he's been doing for weeks, allowing his eyes to remain on hers just a second past what would be normal for acquaintances. She knows he is waiting for her to decide one day to not disconnect their gaze. She shifts hers now to the papers. “Grading, I see.”

“I never finish.”

“Like my housework.”

“Mine too, if I gave a rip about housework.” He laughs. Those eyes. Marble green.

“What plan do you have so far, about the tours?”

“Nothing official. First we need to set them up with each museum, get a tentative schedule, then get that approved. Shouldn't be hard.”

“I know they've cut way back on school trips.”

“We've got no budget. But Pepperdell will scrounge up the gas money if he sees the value of the trip.”

“What do you need me to do? These are just field trips.”

“I'd like another adult along, especially with the eighth-graders. I'm convinced that half of them will be incarcerated within five years.”

She laughs and sees immediately how much that pleases him.

“Anyway, a parent volunteer is always welcome on field trips.”

“But I don't have an eighth-grader.”

“You have connections to the museums.”

“One museum, the one six blocks away, that you can all walk to.”

He slumps over his coffee and leans closer, speaking softly. “Maybe I just want the company.”

She does it finally, looks right at him and keeps looking. He doesn't blink but warms to her gaze, and somewhere an invisible door swings open.

“If you want company, you should talk to someone who's eligible,” she says.

“You're not eligible for friendship?”

She closes her eyes, then turns and opens them to Main Street.

“I think you need a friend too, Jodie.” His voice is still low, although the three other customers are at the snack bar, yards away.

“Well, I need a lot of things, but it's not so simple.”

“I'm just offering a day or two away, chaperoning some kids and nosing around some history.”

“I don't think it's a good idea.”

“Then why are you here?”

She trains her gaze on the tip of the grain elevator two streets over. She wants to do this, and they both know it. She makes a little shrug. “Sounded like an interesting idea.”

“How's Mack?”

This startles her enough to look at him. His gaze doesn't flicker.

“He's okay.”

“I heard he's moved out.”

She tries to hide the surprise at his bluntness. “He's home, just not at the house. We see him every day.”

“And you're still exhausted.” He shifts, and she can tell he wants to reach across and grasp her hand. She's never been sure of that, during other incidental discussions between them. But now he appears to clutch the coffee cup with both hands to keep from reaching for her. “I just hate to see you hang on to something that can't work.”

She leans toward him, pretending to sip her coffee. “You shouldn't be saying these things to me.”

“Okay.” He seems alarmed at the tone she's taken. “I'm sorry. Didn't mean to insult you.”

“I know.”

They both lean back, for a deeper breath.

“I care about you, Jodie.”

These are the words her imaginary lovers have said over and over again. It is the one thing she has hungered to hear. And now someone has said it aloud, and it is the wrong person at the worst time.

Terry goes on, not realizing what he's just accomplished. Now he sounds almost nonchalant. “Why don't you forget this field trip stuff. It's a bad idea.”

She feels the backs of her eyes heating up. The prospect of letting go entirely of this small possibility makes her throat hurt. She blinks so that he won't see her tears. “No. I want to help. If you really want this to work, then I should go to each museum and work out with them a real schedule, you know, make sure they pull out the stuff that's interesting to junior high kids instead of parading them past twenty quilt patterns.”

His face fills with relief. For now at least, they have some days ahead, during the long winter, to help each other through its loneliness.

She feels much better, driving home. For one thing, the sun isn't in her eyes, and she's run a couple of errands between her talk with
Terry and the drive back to the farm. But mainly, she feels so much at home with herself after just an hour of conversation with this man. Chatting with him for a minute or two when he goes by in the lunch-room line makes her feel that she is indeed her former, okay self. He brings her health. She knows this. She struggles with this fact. This is wrong, even this comfort without sex, without a handhold or a kiss. But she senses that each small exchange of words, no matter how inane, brings them closer to a real embrace.

“I'm a grown woman. I know how these things happen.” She listens to herself argue as the truck bounces through potholes in the orange-tinted evening. “But the minute we're in the same room, I am so comforted. Lord, it's the only comfort I know.”

It is something like a prayer, but not really. For a long time now her only prayers have been asides to herself, in closed-up places like a locked bathroom or a pickup truck. She will throw in “Lord” just in case God is happening through her world at that moment.

Which is about as likely as Harvey Keitel ringing her doorbell.

Mack

When Mack told George about his move out to the stone house, the man displayed no surprise or worry, but merely asked Mack what he did with his hours out there. Mack tried to explain about sitting and doing nothing, about the methodical work of clearing branches, and George's eyes gleamed a little, but he simply said, “You may be right. Sometimes a person needs stillness that can't be found in a house with other people. Are you deeply sad out there?”

“No. A little lonely is all. Mostly I feel like I'm just soaking in everything—the trees and the creek. Time slows down, but it doesn't feel bad.”