Miller's Valley

  “Sometimes I wonder why you’re paying for college,” he said, lying beside me in a sleeping bag on the breezeway floor, both of us stripped to our underwear and smelling of sweat and spackle. “With two of us we could make twice as much money on this. We could clean up.”

  I didn’t say anything. My mother had ordered a sheet cake for my graduation party that said GO GET ’EM MIMI! which for my mother was pretty whimsical. I knew it didn’t mean GO GET THAT OLD TOILET OUT OF THE BATHROOM AND PUT IN A NEW ONE!

  “That young man of yours is a keeper,” said Cissy Langer, fingering the heart around my neck and listening to Steven tell Mr. Langer about an apartment building that he was really itching to get his hands on if only he had the cash. She leaned in and whispered, “He is good-looking, too.” There was no question. The black curls, the dark eyes, the broad mouth. I still wasn’t sure why he’d chosen me. That was another thing that made me hang on to him.

  “Mary Margaret, bring me a piece of cake,” Ruth called. “A corner piece, with one of those big frosting flowers.”

  “I’ll take it to her,” my father said.

  “You stay where you are, Bud. I asked your daughter and that’s who I want.” Good thing my mother was across the grass talking to the Ventis, whose big party for LaRhonda at the steak house wasn’t until Saturday night. “I’m closing the whole place for you kids,” Mr. Venti had said. “Do you know what kind of a loss I’m taking doing that?”

  “Oh, Daddy, don’t start,” LaRhonda had said. Her father talked all the time about how much college was going to cost him and how LaRhonda was just going to waste it by getting married anyhow. “Give the girl a ring and save me a whole lot of money,” he was always saying to Fred. LaRhonda kept saying she was mainly going to State to spite him, but she also kept talking about the sororities, spent most of my party sitting over in a lawn chair talking to Ed’s wife, Debbie, who had been a Kappa, which was what LaRhonda wanted to be, too. Fred was next to her, empty beer cans lined up in a nice neat row at his feet. He’d given her a wallet for graduation. “I already have a wallet,” she’d said. “Not one I gave you,” he said. “Take a look inside.” There was a picture of Fred and LaRhonda in the photo compartment, and a hundred-dollar bill in the bills compartment.

  “He’s a decent guy, but he does not know the way to a woman’s heart,” Steven said, running his hand up my arm and nodding at my neck, then putting one finger in the frosting on the piece of cake I was holding. “That’s mine, young man,” Ruth called.

  “Just testing it to make sure it’s good enough for you, ma’am,” he called back as I went inside.

  “I haven’t decided yet if he’s trustworthy,” Ruth said, taking the cake from me.

  “When will you know?”

  Her mouth was full; she looked like a squirrel storing nuts, like the sheet cake on the table wasn’t big enough to feed half the county, and another sheet cake in Ruth’s refrigerator because my mother had run out of room in hers, what with the Jell-O molds and the potato salad.

  “Don’t get smart with me,” she finally said, a blob of frosting on her upper lip. I reached over and took it off with my finger.

  “What am I going to do without you around?” she said, and she started to cry, really cry, like she had finally said out loud something that had been eating at her for a long time.

  “I’ll only be two hours away,” I said. “I’ll be home all the time.”

  “It won’t be the same,” she said, shoveling in some tearstained cake and licking the plastic fork.

  From Ruth’s window the party looked fuzzy, like maybe it was a mirage, but with plenty of balloons. I could see my mother talking to Mrs. Farrell. “You invited a teacher to a party?” LaRhonda had said when she saw her. My mother and Mrs. Farrell had become friendly, united in their determination that I better myself. My mother was holding the gifts that my father had given her, a sweatshirt and a hat from the university. The state university took itself so seriously that all its stuff had a big S on it for State, as though there weren’t forty-nine others out there.

  “Dad did the same thing when I graduated,” said Ed, who was standing by the cake when I went to get Ruth another piece. I think he was happy that I’d left him the only family valedictorian. “You’re too young to remember.”

  “I remember.”

  “Mom invited Mrs. Farrell?” he said, squinting.

  “Wasn’t she your teacher?” I said.

  “She was just starting out,” Ed said. “Maybe she’s a better teacher now.” I laughed, just a little. “What?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Where’s our brother?”

  I shrugged. Steven was talking to Mrs. Farrell’s husband, who worked at a bank. I could see his face freezing while Steven talked. My mother put the State hat on Clifton, who started to strut a little bit, that way little kids do when they think they’re really something. I looked around and it was like I was seeing everything frozen into a still photograph, like I was seeing my whole life but in one of those shots you look at later and think, Yeah, that’s what it was like, once upon a time. Once upon a long time ago.

  Time passed, and I had a chicken leg and some of my mother’s quick pickles, which were really just cucumber salad. I didn’t really care for bakery cake, but I had one of the homemade cookies Cissy brought with her, chocolate chunk and coconut. There were all those conversations you have at a party like that, about when I had to leave for school and what I thought the chances were for the football team, which any idiot knew you were supposed to say were good. Every once in a while one of the adults would stuff a bill in the patch pocket of my dress. My white patent heels got dusty, and finally I put them on the back steps and walked around barefoot, hoping my mother wouldn’t notice.

  Some people started to leave, LaRhonda’s parents, Donald’s grandfather. He’d brought me a package from Donald. “He was trying his darndest to come, Mimi, but it’s real expensive, flying from out there, and it’s too far to drive,” he said. Inside the package was a lacquered jewelry box. When you opened it the blue fairy from Pinocchio popped up and “When You Wish Upon a Star” played, tinkly little notes you could barely hear over the sound of people talking in the yard. I knew that Donald had sent it because his grandmother had taken us to see Pinocchio when I was ten and Donald was eleven. LaRhonda hadn’t come with us that day, and afterward she made her mother take her, and spent two weeks saying it was the stupidest movie she’d ever seen. But Donald and I loved it. We both started to cry a little bit when Pinocchio died, and Donald’s grandmother had put her arm around me.

  “What’s he think, you’re twelve?” said Steven, poking the blue fairy with his finger. I knew what he meant, but he was wrong. It was the perfect gift, and just the kind of thing the Donald I’d once known would think of, not something that would impress other people but something that would send a message just to me, that he hadn’t forgotten.

  “It’s great,” I said to Donald’s grandfather. “I’ll write and tell him so. Now I have a place to keep my necklace.”

  “Hey, hey,” Steven said. “Don’t take that necklace off.”

  “That’s some gift,” Donald’s grandfather said, about the necklace, not the music box.

  I think a fair amount of time passed between that moment and when the state police pulled up. But when I thought about it that night, after I went out and had a couple of rum and Cokes with Steven and found myself staring at the cracked ceiling of a stuffy room in somebody’s apartment, feeling like I was going to throw up the quick pickles and the cookie, it all ran together. My shoes, the cake, the bills in my pocket, the blue fairy, the glass bowls with the last spoonfuls of potato salad, the chicken bones that had fallen underneath one of the tables, the pink paper tablecloths flapping a little, and then police car cherry lights. No sirens. Thank God no sirens. My mother’s face got white enough when she turned and saw the car.

  “You stay right where you are and take care of the guests,??
? my father said in his low voice, and he and Mr. Langer walked over to the troopers together. We didn’t have local cops out where we lived. The Miller’s Valley police only took calls in town proper. Otherwise it was the staties, who came from miles away, so that everybody who lived in the valley said that before you called the police about someone breaking into your house you’d best call your closest neighbor with a gun. My father had taken more than a few of those calls over the years, although usually the burglar turned out to be a bear trying to turn over a trash can.

  The men standing by the police car were talking low, but everyone else had stopped talking, so we could catch a word here or there. Clifton ran to my father, and my mother tried to catch him as he went by. But he got past her and threw his arms around my father’s leg, and my father absently picked him up, although he was getting so big that his legs dangled halfway down the length of my father’s body.

  “Dear God, no,” said my aunt behind me, but I knew she couldn’t hear a thing and was just offering up some general bad-news prayer. Then there was some shaking of hands and nodding of heads, and the two state police guys got back in their car and drove down the road.

  “Everything’s okay,” my father called, but the party broke up pretty fast after that and there we were, sitting in the yard on lawn chairs, waiting for my father to spill it.

  “They’re looking for your brother,” he said to me and Eddie, and Debbie put her hand to her mouth. “He beat somebody up pretty bad last night.”

  “So they say,” said my mother.

  “Oh, come on, Mom,” said Eddie.

  “Don’t you ‘come on’ me, Edward. The police have been known to accuse all kinds of people of all kinds of things they didn’t do.”

  “That’s right,” said Steven.

  “Dad, you want me to go look for him?” Eddie said.

  “Let them look, son,” my father said. “They’ll find him, or they won’t. Then they’ll put a warrant out, or whatever they do. We can’t do anything until they find him, and talk to him, and charge him.”

  “Maybe charge him,” said my mother. “Maybe not. We don’t know.”

  “Miriam, if it wasn’t this it would be something else. Everyone in the county says he’s dealing drugs, and he’s torn up the tavern twice, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some other girl turns up here in trouble, and who knows what else.” He looked around suddenly, but Clifton was across the road, talking to the cows. “Be realistic.”

  “You give up on your own son, you do it alone, Bud.” She went inside, the screen door slamming. My father called over his shoulder, “Ruth, if that boy is in your back bedroom again, you better come clean about it right now. Don’t make me search your place.”

  “He’s not here, Buddy, I swear.” She sniffled, loud enough to be heard outdoors.

  “Maybe I better go looking for him,” said my father wearily, using both arms to push himself out of the chair. “Mimi, you stay here in case he shows up, but don’t go soft and let him leave. Ed, you’ve got a ride ahead of you. Get on the road so you’re home before dark.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Best not.” And Debbie stood up, too, looking as though she couldn’t wait to get out of there. She gave me a big hug. “I can put in a good word with the Kappa rush chair for you, Mimi,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. What else was there to say? I just wanted to sit by myself somewhere and let my mind go blank. “Why don’t you go to your place and see whether anyone has seen him?” I said to Steven. “It would mean a lot to me.” The fact was, I just wanted to be alone for a while.

  That was when people still believed that one thing caused another to happen, when someone would have a heart attack and the guys at the Elks would say it was because his daughter had just come home with a hippie boyfriend with girl hair, or someone would have cancer, which no one called cancer because apparently if you said the word it would make things worse, and the women at bridge club would nod and say she’d been worried about her husband losing his job for six months and now look what happened.

  Because my mother was a nurse she was always having to argue with people about stuff like that. I remember, when I was eight, listening to her rant all through dinner about a woman whose baby had been born with a port-wine stain on one cheek and who swore it was because she ate strawberries during the summer.

  “What’s a port-wine stain?” I said, but my mother just kept on ranting. The woman could rant when the occasion demanded.

  I’m probably the last person who should say this, given my work, but I think maybe there was some truth to what people thought, although no baby gets a birthmark because of anything its mother ate or saw or dreamt, that’s for sure. And maybe it was just coincidence that a week after they arrested Tommy I heard Ruth screaming my name and I came out the back door in my pink waitress uniform to see my father lying at the foot of her front steps. He was crumpled up like a pile of old clothes and so damp that it felt as though he’d been there all night and was covered with morning dew. My mother had pulled an early shift because of taking off for my graduation, and either he hadn’t been lying there then or she’d missed him in the dark.

  “You couldn’t even come out of that goddamned house to help him?” I screamed, and Ruth just wailed back without words, useless, useless as always. I was mad because I was scared, too, scared as I’d ever been.

  The good thing about a small town is the same thing that’s a bad thing about a small town, and that’s that everybody knows your business. So it wasn’t long after I came through the emergency room with the rescue squad guys, my hand clamped on the gurney, that someone said something to someone in the diner and Dee knew I was going to miss my shift, and somebody said something to somebody on the site of the addition to the middle school so Steven knew to come after work to the hospital. Although knowing Steven, I was pretty sure he was wondering whether he had time to put in a couple of hours on the house he was working on, which already had an interested buyer.

  Maybe the latest news would even make it to Tommy in the holding cell, and Ruth in her little homemade prison. My mother called Eddie and told him to stay put until we knew more. But she took one look at my father on the gurney in the elevator and said, “Stroke.”

  People were so nice to us that first week. Henry Langer came over every morning to let the cows out, clean the barn, make sure there was water in the trough, check on all the fences. Our refrigerator was full of food, ground beef casseroles and chicken pies, the counters crowded with zucchini bread and blueberry muffins and angel food cakes. Cissy said she’d taken some out to Ruth, although she said she didn’t think Ruth was eating and she mainly just cried. My mother and I were of one mind about poor Ruth and her crying, and turned hard-faced and turned away. Ruth had the leisure for tears. The two of us had work to do.

  Dee switched me to a four-to-midnight shift at the diner, and I went to sit by my father in the ICU before and after. My mother worked six to six. She spent her lunch and dinner hour in my father’s room. I took over the farm. At dawn I’d be opening the barn doors and checking that the culverts weren’t jammed with branches and leaves. The barn cats were wild, nobody’s idea of a kitty on a pillow on a couch, but they always came running when I showed up with the food. Sometimes I sat on the barn floor, my back against the wall with splinters picking at my spine, the bowl between my knees so that I could run my fingers over their fur. I was good with being alone, always liked it, but there’s something about doing a job alone that you’ve always done with someone else that just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it’s like making Christmas cookies by yourself. There’s nothing wrong with it in theory, but you’re really supposed to be doing it with other people, and not just any other people.

  “Your brother should be here helping out,” Ruth said, and I just spit out, “Well, you could give me a hand, too.” But I knew that there was no one else, that I was on my own.

  I think that was when I really began to like hospi
tals. There’s an orderliness to them. Your life is a mess and there they are, clean, organized, white as white, each bed in each room in the same place, everyone with a clipboard and a job to do. I hear what people are saying, when they complain about the nurse who comes to take your blood pressure at six in the morning even though you’re having a terrible time getting any sleep, complain about the lousy food and the tinny intercoms and the smell of disinfectant. They’re right about all that. But what I liked was that there were a series of problems, and the hospital figured out what they were, and how to solve them.

  That’s up to a point, and up to a point is what they did for my father. They got him a bit better, and then they sent him to a rehab place, and then they sent him home after Steven and some friends of his built a ramp up the steps and moved a rented hospital bed into the middle of the living room. They taught my father to walk, but he walked like Tommy only worse, like the right side of him was the sidecar on a motorcycle. I brought him home while my mother was at work, and when he saw the ramp and the bed he started to cry. I don’t know that I’d ever seen him really cry before, even when Tom was under that tractor. But he cried all the time now, and that was terrible. So was the fact that when he talked he made no sense, but you could tell he thought he did. Usually he repeated the same word over and over. One day it was bat. Another day it was rattle. He said shit a lot, too, which upset my mother so much she would leave the room, although his mouth was such a tangle that unless you knew what the word was you might not figure it out.

  Usually once a day I’d get him into the truck and ride him around the valley. It was a production, walking him out to the drive, heaving his one side into the passenger seat. I couldn’t even tell if he liked it. I would see him staring out the window, his head turned from me, looking at the old house where my mother and Ruth had grown up, the turnoff for the river and for Andover, the high school where he’d played football, the Dairy Queen and the Presbyterian church and the cemetery where everyone we knew who was dead was buried, and I’d figure he was watching his whole life passing in front of him, bit by bit, building by building.