Miller's Valley (5 page)

W
hen Tommy came home for a visit after basic training, he'd turned into a grown-up. I didn't like it much. It took some of the old shine off him. His hair had been buzzed down so far that you could see the raw pink of his scalp between the bristles, so that it looked kind of like a baby's head. I'd seen a picture of him in what my mother called his dress blues, although between the hat so low on his forehead and the serious expression it could have been any guy in a fancy uniform. So I was surprised that he came home wearing the old plaid shirt and tan work pants that he'd left in three months before.

We weren't really sure exactly when he would show up but I came in from the school bus and there he was, sitting at the kitchen table and drinking a beer. I threw myself on him and he patted me on the back and said, “I brought you something.”

I acted happy when he pulled a doll out of his duffel, a weird little doll made of corn husks and clothespins. But it made me wonder whether, while he was becoming somebody else, he thought I had, too. I guess I figured that that's what it's like when people go away. Donald's mother had stopped at our house three days after the funeral, and she'd told my parents that she was moving to California and with her mother gone Donald wouldn't be visiting anymore.

“We'd be happy to have him here when he visits again,” said my mother. “He's absolutely no trouble.”

“He's a fine young man,” said my father. “He can stay with us anytime.”

“California is a long way away,” his mother said.

I don't remember Donald saying a word. It was like he was sliding away the longer he sat in one of the living room chairs. I figured if I ever saw him again we would barely recognize one another, that we would both be so different we might as well be strangers. But as they were heading out to the car, he and his mother, he all of a sudden turned to stand in front of me, with his back to her.

“I'm coming back,” he said, like he was daring me to disagree.

“Okay,” I said.

“I mean it.”

“You promise?”

“Promise,” he said.

“We need to get on the road,” his mother said. “I've got a lot to do.”

“I'm coming back,” he said again. “Don't forget.” Then he got in the car and they drove off.

Even still I was a little surprised that he wrote me so often, although they weren't really letters, just postcards of Knott's Berry Farm or the La Brea Tar Pits or places like that, with maybe two sentences. Donald had always been a person of few words, and writing only made that more so. We have a pool behind our house. I went to Disneyland. There's an orange tree in our yard. I stuck the postcards in the corner of the mirror over my bureau. I liked Grauman's Chinese Theatre the best. It didn't look like anything I'd ever seen before. A berry farm didn't seem like much even with a Ferris wheel.

My father had been out on a job when Tommy showed up, fixing the clock in the tower of the old train station that hadn't been a train station in years. He came into the kitchen looking beat and then clapped his hands together once when he saw my brother.

“Son,” he said.

“Sir,” said Tommy.

Then they shook hands, which was what men always did that made me feel like they must be lonely, or at least that made me feel that way. My father scrubbed his hands at the sink with a piece of fine steel wool and some Lava, and then they shook hands again.

“You look good,” my father said.

“The food's lousy,” Tom said, and my father said, “Your mother's made a nice dinner, believe you me.”

It was true. My mother had made a pumpkin pie, and some scalloped potatoes that could be heated up, and she had two roasting chickens all ready to go in the oven. It was a kind of Thanksgiving dinner even though Thanksgiving was two weeks away. My father called her at the hospital, and she got someone to cover the last few hours of her shift.

“Oh, Tom, you're skin and bones,” she said when she hugged him.

“You're blind, Miriam, the man's all muscle.” That was the first time my father'd ever called Tom a man, I think. Tommy had brought my father a knife with a pine tree engraved on the handle, and my mother a box of saltwater taffy. He brought my aunt Ruth a little crab made out of seashells, and he cracked another beer and carried the crab up to her. “Tell her I'll send her a plate when we're done here,” my mother said.

“I wish she would have dinner with us just for tonight,” I said.

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” my mother said. To this day I'm not sure exactly how that makes a lot of sense, but my mother said it anytime anyone wished for anything. She said her mother used to say it. Ruth said she couldn't recall that at all. She said their mother used to say “Don't trouble trouble,” which honestly seemed even dumber to me but no way would I ever say so.

When the chickens were out of the oven and on the stove top under a dishcloth Tom came into the kitchen and put his arms around my mother's waist from behind. “I got an idea,” he said. “Why don't we have dinner at Ruth's?”

“Does she have something better in the oven than this? Because somehow I doubt it.” So did I. Ruth could make three things: toast, scrambled eggs, and grilled cheese. That was okay because she and I both liked those three things, although sometimes she would put sweet pickle slices in the grilled cheese and I would squeeze them out. Pickles shouldn't be warm. That's just not right.

“We could carry everything up there. It'll be nice.”

“Nice for her,” said my mother. “Besides, I already had Mimi set the table.”

“I didn't do it yet.”

Tom picked up the roasting pan. I picked up the stack of dishes. My father came downstairs. “What's going on here?” he said.

“We're all going to eat at Ruth's house,” Tommy said.

“That's a nice idea,” my father said.

“Nice for you,” said my mother. I could tell she wanted to balk in the worst way, but Tommy was smiling his Tommy smile at her, his head on one side, and even without the bangs dropping down on his forehead it worked. “If you drop those chickens you'll be in trouble for sure,” my mother said to him.

“This is so nice,” said Ruth. I set out to go back for silverware, but Ruth said she had plenty, and she took a big mahogany box out of the bottom drawer of a chest against one wall. The box was filled with tarnished silver.

“I never knew how you wound up with that,” my mother said.

“My mother gave me this for my hope chest,” Ruth said to me, as though her sister hadn't said a word. “She started piece by piece when I was thirteen. Your mother was in nursing school and she said, Ruthie, your sister is going to be a professional woman, she'll never marry. I'm going to give this to you for when you make dinner for your husband. It just goes to show.”

“Did you want it?” I asked my mother.

“I don't see the point, to be honest. Stainless is easier. When we were kids all these women would spend a whole day with a chamois cloth and baking soda polishing the silver. They never used it anyway.”

“Mother used hers for holidays.”

“I stand corrected. They used it three times a year. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter.”

“Birthdays, too,” said Ruth.

“Your grandmother was a fine cook,” my father said to me.

“Buddy, you are so right about that. She appreciated you, too. When you first started coming down, when Miriam wasn't the least bit interested in you—”

“Oh, for pity's sake,” said my mother.

“—she would always say, That Buddy Miller, he appreciates a good meal and he's got that big farm, Miriam should be nicer to him—”

“I appreciate a good meal,” said Tommy. “I haven't had one in more than two months. Everything in the mess hall is the same color. Rice, meat, vegetables, it's all the same color as our uniforms.”

“—and then when George Lesser left—”

“Mom, this is not only the best meal I've had since I left, it may be the best meal I've ever had,” Tommy said, very loudly, and I giggled. My mother got up and put her arms around his neck and hugged his bristly head to her chest, hard. “Thomas Alan Miller, you don't fool me one bit,” she said.

The Langers came over next afternoon, and that was nice, too. My father and Mr. Langer were friends in that way that men are who get dragged into a friendship by their wives. But they got along fine. They would sit in the living room and drink Iron City Beer and watch baseball or football on the TV. Cissy and my mom would sit in the kitchen and have cups of tea and vanilla wafers. Mr. and Mrs. Langer didn't have any children, so they always made a fuss over us. You'd hear people talk about them, how Henry was on disability from the foundry and ran a bait shop out of his garage, how Cissy made dolls and sold them at church bazaars and fairs, and then suddenly the voices would drop, and you'd know that they'd gotten to the kid part, those poor people, God's will, and so on. When I was a kid it seemed like God's will was always that bad things happened, mostly to nice people. When Eddie got his scholarship, when LaRhonda's father started to make a lot of money, nobody ever said that was God's will. With Mr. Venti they mainly said it was dumb luck.

“I was there when your brother was born,” Cissy said. She was heavier than my mother, and softer, too, with scented talcum powder caught in the creases of her arms like a dusting of snow. When she was happy, which was most of the time, her whole body jiggled. “I was there, out in the waiting room. I can't lie, I wanted a little girl after Eddie, but if I had known how Tommy would turn out I wouldn't have been like that.” I saw my mother throw her a look. Sometimes I thought that was how they'd probably been in sixth grade, too, Cissy giggling and jiggling, and Miriam looking at her sideways. Salt and pepper.

“But then we got you, Mimi,” Cissy said, raising her voice a little as though I was eavesdropping. Which I was. I figured that most of being a kid consisted of eavesdropping, trying to figure older people out and understand what they were going to do next, because whatever they were going to do next was surely going to have some effect on you.

I went down to the other end of the hallway to listen to what the men were saying in the living room, but all I could hear was the guy on television saying somebody needed to punt because it was a fourth down. “That's for sure,” Mr. Langer said, and they all went silent.

Men silences could last forever, so I went back down the hallway to hang around outside the kitchen again. My mother and Mrs. Langer had a big bag between them and were emptying it onto the table next to their teacups. There were swatches of fabric, bright flowered stuff, polka dots, plaids. My mother was sorting them into piles.

“You don't like that navy print?” Cissy said.

My mother rubbed the fabric between two fingers and frowned. “It won't hold up,” she said.

That was probably what they'd been like in sixth grade, too. My mother was the practical one. Even choosing material for doll dresses, she was on the lookout for something that wouldn't wear thin in a year or two. My mother had never bought me a dress that didn't have a hem three inches deep so it could be let down, with a tidewater mark that showed where the old hem used to be.

“I've got a new line,” said Cissy, reaching into another bag. She always said that, like she was running a big doll factory instead of sitting in a tiny back bedroom of her house, hand-sewing button eyes and a thick zigzag of red embroidery thread for a mouth.

My mother turned the doll over in her very clean, very large hands. My mother had a nurse's hands. You could eat off her palms. They were almost big enough to hold a full meal, too.

“Cis, I could be stating the obvious, but this is a pig.”

It actually was pretty clever, how she'd done that. Cissy usually made a doll face with a soft white sock, and somehow she'd puckered and pulled with thread so the doll had a little snout with pink floss nostrils and lips. The pig had pigtail hair and shoes that looked like little hooves with black felt triangles. Cissy sure knew how to make a cute doll. My mother said that if you figured how long she worked on each one, she was making about a dollar an hour. I was still young enough that a dollar an hour sounded like real money to me. I made that selling corn.

“I think people will like them. The three little pigs, but girl pigs.”

“Hmmm,” my mother said, like she did when I gave her a composition to read and she was going to tell me to take another shot at it.

I went back to the living room. I could tell by the television sound it was halftime. “It's not going to amount to a hill of beans,” my father said.

“I wouldn't be so sure, Bud,” Mr. Langer said. “We been down this road before. They can come right in and take your place. Imminent domain.”

“They still working on that water deal?” I heard Tommy say.

“It's the damn dam,” said Mr. Langer.

Tommy laughed.

“What's so funny, son?” said my father.

“Nothing, sir.”

“He calls me sir now that he's in the service,” my father said to Mr. Langer. “I'm his superior officer.” I didn't need to see my father's face to know he was smiling.

I'm not sure I'd ever seen my mother happier, either, but it didn't last. After a few days Tommy didn't seem to know what to do with himself. My father would say things like “I guess they work you men pretty hard,” and Tom would say, “They sure do,” and then they would read the newspaper until my father said, “There must be men there who don't have the kind of firearms experience you have,” and Tom said, “Some, that's for sure.” Tommy had never been a hunting fanatic the way my father and Mr. Langer were, mainly because it required being up at dawn, which Tommy only managed when he'd been out all night the night before. Then he never got a deer anyway. I think half the time he fell asleep waiting in the blind.