House of Steel (9 page)

He had arrived driving the pickup truck
Delaney remembered from the picture her mother had taped to the
dashboard on the day they had left. By then, the picture had been
worn around the edges with a large crease down the middle. For one
thousand ninety five days, without fail, Delaney had stuffed the
picture of her father into the tiny pocket of her jeans, right next
to the torn piece of paper that counted the number of days of his
absence. For this reason, she had refused to wear anything except
clothing adorned with pockets. As an adult, she still kept true to
this ritual.

The trees of early October had littered the
grass and cracked driveway with fallen leaves. The warmth of the
day had succumbed to the coolness of the autumn night and the
darkness had closed in on the once-blue sky, now partially lit by
the glow of streetlamps. Delaney had sat at the family dining table
situated in front of the home’s large bay window facing the street.
Her cousin Levi, then eleven, had sat across from her when she
caught the flicker of a light out of the corner of her eye. She had
peered outside to see the street flooded with slowing headlights.
The shine of the rusted pickup truck turned into the bay window and
straight into Delaney’s clear blue eyes.

One large silhouette had come into sight
behind the steering wheel along with two small outlines next to
each other. Delaney had pushed the chair back, sliding the legs
along the wooden floor with a scratching noise. Inhaling a deep
breath, she had moved to peer against the glass of the window as
the man behind the wheel turned off the lights. Michael Jones had
walked back into Delaney’s life on the driveway of the two-story
brick colonial just as he promised every day. Delaney knew then
that her dad was the most honest man she would ever meet.

The six-year-old Delaney had pushed past her
cousin and yelled to her mom as she sprinted into the cool night.
She had hesitated on the front porch as she waited for her father
to move toward her, tears welling in his deep brown eyes. As soon
as he was close enough, Delaney jumped into his outstretched arms
and buried her head into the nook of his neck to breathe in his
smell of hay masked with Ivory soap and Old Spice. “Delaney, girl,”
he had said, “I can barely lift you.
You’ve grown
.”

“Dad, I think
you’ve grown,
too. Look
at the picture,” she had replied. He had more lines around his face
than she had remembered and more hair than what her picture had
captured. She had slid her hand into her pocket and retrieved the
tattered picture.

“You still carry this? I’m so happy to see
you. Where’s Mom?” he had asked as the passenger door of the truck
opened.

“Who’s that?” Delaney had asked as she
looked around her father toward the truck. Two boys had stood close
to the pickup truck, next to each other, waiting to move forward.
Each had worn tucked in flannels and cowboy boots; the taller boy
had placed his hand on the younger boy’s shoulder.

“Come on, guys, meet your sister, Delaney,”
Michael Jones had said. The taller boy had stepped forward first.
His dirty blonde hair had looked as though straw had been plucked
from a nearby field and adhered to his head strand by strand. The
lean body had moved forward with a fluid motion to stand next to
Delaney, who had scrambled down to stand on the driveway to get a
closer view of her father’s passengers. Delaney’s head had reached
his chin.

“I’m Mark, and this is Ben,” the taller boy
had said. The shorter boy had stood behind his brother, peeking
around the lean framework at the mention of his name. Unlike his
brother, Ben had a thicker and stockier framework as if he was a
perpetual hay bailer in-training. His waves of thick, blonde hair
curled behind his ears and poked recklessly at his collar. Delaney
had stood face to face with Ben.

“Michael” Ann Jones had cried as she came
pouring onto the driveway, embracing her husband for the first time
in three years. Tears had wet Michael’s face as they held each
other. Slowly, Ann had pulled away to set her eyes on the two young
boys standing next to Delaney. “Michael?” she had asked.

“Ann, meet Mark and Ben,” Michael had
replied before adding, “our sons.”

“Our sons?” Ann Jones had stood immovable
next to her husband of ten years, chained in place like one of the
cattle back at the farm. She had finally released a smile,
stumbling toward the ten-year-old Mark and five-year-old Ben,
bending down to give them a closer examination. She had rubbed her
dress flat and moved the hair from her eyes, smiling at Ben as he
slid further behind his older brother to kick a stone with the tip
of his cowboy boot. The tip had been so worn that his toe was
dangerously close to peeking out the other side.

“Well, Ben, we’ll have to do something about
those old boots, won’t we? It’s nice to meet you,” she had said.
She grazed the tip of his boot with her index finger and gave his
pants a playful tug. She had held out her hand for Ben to shake.
The boy had moved around his brother and reached out to Ann,
feeling the warmth in her hand as it closed over his own. He had
looked into Ann’s blue eyes, wrinkled around the corners and had
smiled.

Ann had stood up and looked closer at Mark’s
face, deeply bronzed from the warmth of the summer sun. “And you,
Mark, it looks like you could use a haircut. Good thing you came
when you did, otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to see anything with
that straw hanging in your eyes,” Ann had said as she brushed the
hair that hung low on his forehead. Embarrassed, Mark had shook his
head and pushed back his hair with his hand. She had given his
shoulder a small squeeze.

Uncle Walt had led the dinner prayer, as he
always did, and had thanked God for the gift of a second chance.
Delaney, who instead of bowing her head, watched as her father and
uncle exchanged a silent understanding. She hadn’t known, as they
did, that a second chance like this was only for the lucky few.

Mark and Ben had told their stories of how
Michael introduced them to farm life, teaching them the daily
chores, but never allowing them to milk the sixty head. Ben had
moved his hands up and down, making a sucking noise to emulate the
milkers for Delaney, which resulted in a swift elbow from Mark who
was seated next to him. Michael had glossed over the quiet years
spent in the trailer before the arrival of Mark and Ben. “Business
as usual,” he had said, spending time hammering and fixing up the
barn and looking for a potential buyer.

It was only when the kids had retreated
upstairs that Michael recounted how he had first met Mark and Ben
back in an adjacent town’s hardware store. “Old Hank” behind the
counter had told Michael about his grandsons, Mark and Ben, who
were working in the back of the store. Old Hank had been taking
care of Mark and Ben for the past four years since their dad,
Hank’s only son, had passed away from liver cancer. In Hank’s
words, it was the “slut of a mother’s” fault that his only son was
driven to drink and subsequently developed liver cancer.

According to Hank, his son’s future coffin
had been sealed the day she took off with another man in a Mustang
and turned over both Mark and Ben to the care of her ex-husband,
who was jobless and heart-broken. The last they had heard was that
she was in California, living on a beach and working in a tattoo
parlor. Old Hank had taken in his son and two grandsons, then two
and six.

Without the help of his wife, who had
“graced him by leaving this earth” five years earlier in a fatal
heart attack, Old Hank’s feeble attempts to occupy Mark and Ben
while their father drank himself to death were futile. The boys had
spent endless hours in the hardware store sorting nails, hex nuts,
and washers, as well as, sweeping floors and cleaning the store’s
front window. During the summers, the two young boys would set up
their lawn chairs, drinking Ting on the sidewalk, watching one or
two cars pull into the hardware store each day. They rarely saw
their father, except at night, when Old Hank brought the boys back
to the house to sleep.

Their father’s funeral was held exactly four
years later on the anniversary of their mother’s escape with the
man in the Mustang. According to Old Hank, the rains had poured all
morning until the exact moment in which his coffin was lowered into
the ground as if God turned off the sprinklers. The forgiving April
sun shone the remainder of the day. It was only one month later
that Old Hank had his first heart attack that left him weak, yet
still “ticking.” Without any other family, Old Hank had been
looking for someone that could take them in to keep them busy and
out of trouble without all those fees from the crooked attorneys.
“Because God knows, they’ve had enough trouble,” he had said.
Michael had left that day with his hinges to fix his shed door and
two young boys in his pickup truck. Ann had signed the papers to
adopt Mark and Ben, making Delaney the middle and sole biological
child of the family of five.

***

Mark pulled his truck in front of the
craftsman ranch, braking to a stop before pulling onto the side of
the street. Eight inches of snow had collected into a heavy,
undisturbed blanket on the driveway. The truck idled as they both
first looked at the driveway and then each other. He pulled the
truck into park and pulled out his cell phone. In twenty-five
years, their father had never left the driveway unplowed. Often he
had his own driveway plowed and the two neighbors’ driveways on
either side cleared before anyone else along the street even
attempted to begin the snow removal process. Delaney’s phone rang,
prompting her to look down to see her mother’s face looking back at
her.

“Mom, where are you?”

“Delaney, it’s Dad. We’re at Froedtert,” he
replied. He cleared his throat, attempting to cover the strain in
his voice.

“Froedtert?” Her small voice sliced through
the air as she looked at Mark who had already shifted the truck
into drive and pushed down on the pedal heading to the
hospital.

“Mom was real out of it this morning after
her chemo treatment yesterday so I brought her in. She was admitted
this morning. You might want to leave Appleton now that the storm
is done.”

“I’m here with Mark. We’re not far. Do you
need anything from home or anywhere else? Do you need me to call
Ben?” Her voice cracked. The wedding was tomorrow.

“We’re good. I’ll call Ben. You didn’t get
my message about the storm, did you?” he asked.

“I did. We’ll see you in a bit,” she
replied, looking at the windows of the buildings passing by. The
gas station. Walgreens. The hospital’s landscape came into view.
Mark followed the signs leading to in-patient care, although he
hadn’t needed the signs. They both had been there before, only a
few short months ago.

Walking into the hospital suffocated her,
the smells of sterilization laden with human ailing and bodily
fluids only worsened with the fact that Ann Jones was here. An
oncology nurse had once told her that it would get easier, the
wounds would sting less with each visit.
She was wrong
. The
pain of losing her mother to a slow, unyielding death was
excruciating for her, for everyone. She looked at Mark walking
along side of her. He would stifle his agony, bury it deep to stay
strong for the family, just like their father.

“Delaney Jones?” A voice called across the
lobby. Delaney and Mark stopped; their wet shoes both slipped on
the entry floor as they turned their heads to the sound. A man in a
brown jacket and bright red scarf moved toward them, maneuvering
between chairs and waiting people. Delaney leaned forward, taking a
closer look at his olive skin and brown eyes. His height, the
build. Her stomach dropped.

“It’s James,” she said under her breath, her
stomach twisting with each of his steps.

“James Anderson?” Mark asked. “When’s the
last time you saw him?”

James smiled and waved that same half-wave
he had displayed the first day they had met in the library at
Xavier Academy. Delaney, frozen in the entrance of the hospital,
would recognize that wave anywhere. The sound of the automatic
doors opening behind them startled her. She moved forward into the
lobby, glancing at Mark as James approached.
James Anderson. Not
now.

“Delaney Jones.”

“James Anderson.” Her heart pounded as she
thought of the last time she had seen James. It was spring break of
her sophomore year of college. She had booked a ticket that day
costing her four hundred eleven dollars and an empty bank account.
Six years of built up tension had brought her to the
unreasonableness, or at least that’s what she had told herself. She
had decided that she couldn’t let James go.

She had hopped in a cab for the first time
and showed up on the doorstep of his fraternity house unannounced
on a Sunday night in the warm California spring, telling the cab
driver to wait - just in case. A girl with long, platinum hair and
deep bronzed skin clad in her underwear and tank top had opened the
door. Her chest had bulged out of her top, waiting to spill over
with the slightest movement. She had hung on the door, flashing her
white smile at Delaney when James had come stumbling behind her
asking how much they owed. A pizza guy. James had mistaken her for
the delivery man. As he tugged the girl’s underwear, he had moved
his eyes up to Delaney’s. The color had drained from his face.
Delaney had turned on her heels and climbed back into the cab,
telling him to drive. The cab driver had sputtered something her
mind didn’t register before she had yelled. James had followed her,
calling her name as he ran onto the lawn of his fraternity house in
his underwear, but she had never looked back, not once to see him
running after her as she traveled down the street headed back to
Wisconsin. She had to call Mark to buy her another ticket back; he
had conceded without an earful, much to her surprise.