The Lost Husband (7 page)

“Sounds like a pretty good life,” I said.

“It’s a great life,” he said.

He slowed under an oak tree near the house, and that’s where he told me I needed to make a run to the feed store for him. He handed me a list of supplies, along with an envelope of cash to use.

“Save the change and the receipt,” he said.

“Am I like your assistant, then?” I asked.

“Kind of,” he said. “Though you can call yourself an ‘apprentice’ if you like.” He tossed over the keys, which I didn’t manage to catch, and told me I could take the farm truck.

“Is it open today?” I asked. “I mean, do people work on New Year’s?”

“People work every day in the country.”

I got the feeling he was teasing me. “So the store is open?”

“Nah,” he said. “Not on New Year’s Day. But Tom’s left a bag of feed for us by the back door. Just drop a twenty through the mail slot.”

Drop a twenty through the mail slot. Of course. “How do I get the receipt?”

“Write one up.”

I wanted to take the minivan—if for no other reason than to be back in my own space for a little while. But I got the feeling I was supposed to do things the way they were done. So I found the truck—powder blue, parked by the old barn—and, after pausing to read the bumper sticker that said
EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED
, I got in. The truck had a bench seat and no shoulder belts, and the windows, which rolled with a crank, were already down.

I pulled out onto the road and hung my arm out. I tried to remember the last time I’d driven anywhere by myself, sailed along an open road with my hair blowing, or spent a morning with so many furry animals—farm manager included.

I’d needed to change my life for a while. And even though this wasn’t what I had imagined or wanted, there was no denying that this was different. I wasn’t sure if I’d made things better or worse, but there was no question I had made a real change at long, long last.

Or maybe, in truth, Jean had done it for me.

Chapter 5
 

And so we stayed. Though I didn’t make a decision to stay as much as I made one not to leave.

It wasn’t exactly a seamless transition. The kids, for example, did not like Aunt Jean’s food. She didn’t dine on squirrel burgers, which was a relief, but there was no sugar in the entire house. With the exception of her world-famous pancakes, she ate only homegrown meat, vegetables, and fruit because, she said, “carbs will kill you.”

So no bread and no pasta, but lots of butter. Which tasted good—I’d forgotten
how
good. At my mother’s house, there had only been margarine. And Olestra.

Anything different from life at my mother’s had to be beneficial, I told myself, by definition. I told myself the same thing about the sudden disappearance of TV, which was also a shock to my children’s systems.

TV had been our go-to transition activity in the city, as well as our go-to time killer. Not to mention babysitter, cheerer-upper,
and put-to-bedder. Suddenly, here we were doing all those things on our own, wobbling through our daily activities like someone had stolen our training wheels. Because keeping busy is a learned skill. As are: exploring, playing pretend, and running around outside. Jean just expected my kids to know how to do all that stuff. That first week, she’d say, “Go outside and play,” and they would dutifully troop outside. But then I’d watch them stand around in the yard, not quite sure what to do next. I’d give them a few minutes, the way you do with a fussy baby, and when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I’d go out and give them a suggestion.

“Why don’t you water the garden?” I asked over and over in those early days. Before long the rain barrel was empty. “Why don’t you feed the chickens?” I suggested next.

“Mom,” Abby said, “Jean says only one cup of pellets per day. We don’t want them to become obese.”

Our third night there, which we called our three-night-aversary, Jean let the kids set off firecrackers in the farmyard, since we’d missed New Year’s Eve. We bundled up tight in our parkas and knitted hats and stayed out until we got too cold.

Abby worried about the goats. “Won’t we scare them?”

“Nah,” Jean said. “They know humans are crazy.”

Afterward we went inside to warm up and roast marshmallows for s’mores in the fireplace.

The same week, I got the kids enrolled at the giant public elementary school that served three counties at the point where they all intersected. I had been imagining a little one-room country schoolhouse for the kids à la
Little House on the Prairie
, and so the sight of the prisonlike 1960s structure of concrete bricks was disheartening. Also disheartening: the student-teacher ratio of thirty-seven to one and the budget cuts that had eliminated all teacher assistants, art classes, and music.

I fretted in bed until three o’clock the night before the kids started their first day. Tank would be okay, but I worried about Abby. Her leg was officially healed. We’d finished physical therapy a year before. She had a scar that ran down the side, but that was easy to cover up with pants. But she still limped just the tiniest bit when she walked. Sometimes I thought it was noticeable, and sometimes I didn’t. It wasn’t bad enough to keep her from doing anything, but it was bad enough to keep her from doing many things well. The issue surfaced more and more as the kids got older and stronger, and I heard Abby criticizing herself for being slow.

I didn’t know what to say to her about it. How do you tell a kid that she’s always going to have to work twice as hard as the other kids to be half as good? I didn’t have the words for that. All I knew was that watching your children survive their childhoods was so much worse than surviving your own.

Thrashing in bed, I beat myself up for pulling them out of a city school that wasn’t perfect but where, at least, they were settled. Now they’d have to go through it all again—meeting new people, finding new friends, figuring out who to talk to on the playground and what to play. And I didn’t know what kids wore here or what toys were cool, or have any other insights that might help them fit in. And how would a teacher give them any help or attention with thirty-seven kids to manage? It felt like I was just turning them loose in an empty pasture to fend for themselves.

The day-to-day plan was for Jean to pick them up after school and watch them in the afternoons until I was done with the evening milking. On that first day, though, I just had to race out and check on them as soon as I heard the minivan pull up.

The animals and I all surrounded them like paparazzi as they
got out, and I expected to see them stressed and shaken from a whole day’s worth of everything new.

“How was it?” I asked, peering most closely at Abby.

Abby’s reply was a generic “Great.” Then, to Jean, she asked, “Can we play with the kittens?”

At Jean’s nod, both kids took off, leaving me behind, shouting, “Was it great for you, too, Tank?”

No reply.

“I’ll assume it was great,” I said to Jean.

“They seem good,” she confirmed.

Of course, seeming good and actually being good are not the same thing. Unlike grown-ups, who register and process struggles as they happen, kids often don’t seem to notice until much later.

“They seem good for now,” I said to Jean, quietly refusing to unclamp my heart. Maybe I’d relax in February, when we were settled. Or maybe I’d wait until summer, when we knew our way around. Or maybe I’d just wait until we were really in the clear. Like after they’d graduated from college.

Until then, I’d just try to remind myself that I could only control what I could control. Like my goat-milking efforts. Which maybe were not A-level just yet (I’d gotten one caught in the metal milking harness that week) but were improving steadily under O’Connor’s tutelage.

“You really need to relax,” he told me somewhere around week three as we both sat down at our milking stations.

“I am relaxed,” I said.

“The girls can feel that tension,” he said. “And it makes them nervous.”

“I’m making the goats nervous?” I said. “How can you even tell?”

O’Connor shrugged. “Body language.”

“Mine?” I asked. “Or theirs?”

“Both, actually,” he said.

“I haven’t really spent a lot of time around animals,” I said. “Other than a box turtle I had as a kid. Briefly. Before my mother ran over him in the driveway.”

O’Connor nodded as I tried to coax one of the goats up onto the milking platform. The more I pulled, the more she pulled back, until we created a full-fledged standoff.

“Hey there,” O’Connor said. “Take it easy.”

“She’s the one being stubborn.”

O’Connor studied the pair of us, then came around and gently led the goat up onto the platform, latching her into the milking harness in one graceful motion. Easy.

“Show-off,” I said.

A few minutes later O’Connor glanced up again. “Here’s what you do,” he said. “Sing to them.”

“Sing what to them?”

“Anything. Whatever you like. The Beatles. Show tunes.”

“Sing show tunes to the goats?”

“I sing them love songs,” he said. “Since they’re all in love with me.”

I tried to decide if he was kidding or not. It was hard to tell with his face hidden under all that hair. “Well,” I said at last, “I can’t sing.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Can’t
and
won’t.” I looked over at him. “I never sing.”

“You don’t even sing in the car? Or the shower?”

“Nope.”

“What about when it’s someone’s birthday? Do you sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to them?”

“I mouth it.”

“Why?”

“Because I stink at singing.”

“But, I mean, who cares?”

“I care,” I said. “And you would care if you had to hear it. Plus the goats would take off running to the far pasture.”

O’Connor regarded me for a moment. “Now I just really want to hear you sing.”

I shook my head. “Not going to happen.”

Over the next few weeks, I decided that he was, generally, much more agreeable than he’d seemed at first. He did whatever Jean asked, quickly and precisely—and she wasn’t kidding about how handy he was. From painting signs to working a bulldozer to repairing broken tractor engines, he could do absolutely anything.

He frequently caught us fish from the pond to cook for dinner, which both delighted and disgusted Abby and Tank as they watched him do the gutting. He seemed to have a natural ease with kids, too, and it wasn’t long before he was calling Tank by a whole host of nicknames, including “T-bird,” “Tornado,” and, somehow, “DJ Raptor.” Abby got just plain “Mamacita,” which made her beam right away every time she heard it.

So there it was: instant intimacy with the first adult male to even skirt the sidelines of our lives in three solid years. I, of course, was still hanging back like a pro. If my kids couldn’t reserve their judgment, then I’d just be reserved enough for all three of us.

We’d been there about a month when O’Connor showed up at the back porch one evening during dinner.

“There’s something strange out in the yard,” he said to Jean.

She frowned before she read his face. “Something strange?”

“Two strange things, actually,” he said with exaggerated concern. “Maybe the kids could help me figure it out.”

At the words, Tank was up and out the door. Abby, though, turned to me and said, “Can we go?”

I nodded and got up to follow, too.

I was not even outside before I saw what it was. Out on the biggest oak tree in the yard, two old tractor tires hung from the tree’s fattest branch.

In seconds, the kids were swinging and twisting on them, and O’Connor was pushing them, too. Jean showed up beside me in the yard.

“That was thoughtful,” I said.

“Yes,” Jean said. “He’s thoughtful.”

“And handy,” I said.

“Very handy,” Jean agreed.

“And you’ve known him since he was little?”

“Oh, yes!” Jean said. “The two of you—” but then she stopped herself.

I looked over.

“The two of you are exactly the same age,” she went on.

“You were friends with his mother?”

“Yes,” Jean said.

“But not anymore?”

“Well,” Jean said, “she moved away.”

“Oh,” I said. “Did his dad move away, too?”

Jean turned to face me. “It’s tricky for me to talk about these things because I know so much about people’s business from their visits to my office.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Maybe you should ask O’Connor,” she suggested.

“Okay,” I said, though of course I wouldn’t.

We watched quietly for a minute. Then Jean said, “That boy sure needs a haircut.”

“Who? Tank?” I asked.

“No,” Jean answered. “The other one.”

And before I really thought about what I was doing, I said, in a voice that sounded like an offer, “I’ve got clippers.”

“You do?”

“For Tank,” I explained.

I could feel her about to suggest that I use them on O’Connor, and it’s safe to say that I had no desire to cut—or even stand anywhere near—his hair.

And yet I’d brought it up.

I tried to backtrack. “You’re welcome to borrow them if you like.”