Miller's Valley

  “I wish I’d gotten a deal like that,” said Ed, while Edward Miller Junior yelled in the background. I figured Debbie’d be asking me to babysit for him and the new baby by week two at college.

  “I’m as proud as could be,” said Ruth, crying. She cried a lot in those months. Anything could set her off: a divorce on the soaps, a housewife who lost everything when she picked the wrong door on one of the game shows, Clifton eating his Jiffy Pop one kernel at a time and saying, “I miss Gramps.”

  “Mom says she’ll look after you,” I said.

  “I’ll be fine. I’ve got the TV, my magazines. As long as she drops off the groceries I’ll be fine.”

  “I’ve never even met a lady doctor,” said Mrs. Venti, and LaRhonda sniffed. She had a patch of baby barf on her shoulder shaped like the continent of Africa. I’d met a lady doctor once, at that clinic in New York. I’d never forget her.

  The first time I ever went to the movies I went with LaRhonda. Her mother took us to see Cinderella when we were nine or ten. We had sodas and popcorn and Junior Mints, and I threw up out the window of Mrs. Venti’s Cadillac because I was embarrassed to tell her I felt sick until it was too late to do anything except roll down the window. It was a good thing that their car was the first one I’d ever been in with power windows or it might have been worse.

  Just before I left for school I felt like that part of the movie when they scrub Cinderella up and turn her into a princess with an updo and a little crown and a Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo. My mother bought me a suitcase and new sweaters and a gold pen and pencil set and a clock radio. She bought me a red winter coat and a pair of leather gloves so thin that they were a joke for doing anything around a farm or really keeping your hands warm. It was like she was buying things for someone I would become as opposed to who I really was. It was ninety degrees out and I had an angora hat and scarf.

  Eddie came and picked me up even though Debbie was annoyed that they’d had to take the baby stuff out of the wagon to make room for my things. My mother had asked him to do it, and lying in bed I tried to figure out whether it was because she didn’t want Steven to take me, or whether she didn’t want to do it herself because she thought the new Mimi shouldn’t have a mother like her. But then I figured it was mainly because she hated to drive on the highway. She said entrance ramps made her nervous.

  The waitresses at the diner had given me a set of striped sheets with a matching quilt and pillows. “Don’t forget us when you’re a big shot doctor,” said Dee.

  “If you start practicing now,” I said to Ruth when we had lunch together, BLTs for a special treat, “you could be ready to come to my graduation in two years.”

  I don’t know whether she was chewing or thinking, but after a while she said, “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  When Eddie moved me in you could tell that he was worried. He gave me a fold-up map of the city and pointed out neighborhoods I should avoid. One of them was the neighborhood where the university was.

  “This will be an adjustment, Mimi,” he said, like he was sixty and I was ten. “I’m a country girl,” I’d told Mrs. Farrell about why I’d be better off at State. Like a lot of other things I’d always taken for granted, it turned out it wasn’t exactly true. I liked living in the city much more than I’d expected. After a couple of months I figured out that it wasn’t so much trees and birds I’d always liked in the valley as it was the feeling of being alone. I guess most people think that since the city is so crowded you don’t feel that way, but I did from the very beginning, maybe even more so than I had at home. Crossing the street with as many people as had been in my high school class made me feel even more alone because I didn’t know any of them and none of them knew me. I hadn’t crossed a street in Miller’s Valley in my whole life next to someone who didn’t know me, who didn’t know something about my parents, something about my brothers.

  “You come out here any time, Mimi,” my sister-in-law liked to say. “You must be lonesome.” I was, I guess, but that wasn’t why Debbie was asking. She was asking because she’d popped out two babies pretty fast, one after the other, and she knew that when I walked in she could hand me one. It seemed like a lot of the girls I knew did that, had a baby and then a second baby, as though they were trying to get the whole thing over with. Or maybe not. “That second one must have been a mistake,” my mother said on the phone Sunday nights, after the rates went down.

  “I bet your mother thinks Kimmy was a mistake,” Debbie said, trying to put frozen lasagna in the oven with one hand while she held the baby with the other. Sometimes I spent the night with little Eddie and Kimmy so Debbie could go out with her friends. Unlike Callie, she didn’t offer to pay. Ed brought it up once, and Debbie said, “It’s not really babysitting when it’s your family, right, Mimi?” Ed didn’t push it. I think he was still annoyed that I was getting a free ride at an Ivy and would have an MD after my name at the end of it. The pullout sofa in the living room of their house was uncomfortable, but no more uncomfortable than the twin bed in my dorm room.

  I was lonesome, but I figured that made sense. I got to college two years after everyone in my class. They already had friends and routines. I had to study pretty much nonstop just to keep up. Being a straight A student at Miller’s Valley High School and Mountain County Community College turned out to be different than being a straight A student at the University of Pennsylvania. My biochemistry professor offered me extra help with a graduate student he knew, but the grad student wanted to get paid and I didn’t have much money except what I’d made in tips at the diner over the years. My father was dead, my mother was a hundred miles away, my aunt wouldn’t leave the house, my best friend from grade school thought I was a sinner, and my boyfriend was busy. On paper it wasn’t the best time of my life. Except for the first time in a long time, I felt like I was getting somewhere. I wasn’t standing still anymore, I was moving. Now that the Scheinman scholarship meant I was going to medical school, I figured out that I’d been planning to be a nurse because it was what girls like me did. My mother was never one of those nurses who complained about the doctors, but when I listened to her talk about me becoming a doctor myself I figured out pretty quickly that I was paying her back for years of feeling like she’d come in a distant second.

  “How do you feel about blood?” Debbie had asked me with a little shiver.

  “Nobody really feels good about blood, Deb,” my brother said, reading the sports page while little Eddie sat on his lap and tried to eat it.

  “I’m fine with blood,” I said.

  “Ugh,” Debbie said. She’d put on at least twenty pounds in the last two years. “She’d better watch the baby weight,” my mother said at Thanksgiving, when Debbie had insisted on having dinner at her house for both families. The cornucopia centerpiece and the napkins covered with autumn leaves were pretty, but the turkey was kind of a disaster. Everybody drenched it in gravy, which my mother made standing at the stove, stirring like it was her job. She didn’t know what to talk about with Debbie’s parents. Her father asked about my courses and Ed talked about the development in Miller’s Valley and Debbie talked about teething and my mother and Debbie’s mother both said they put whiskey on our gums when we were babies, and Debbie said that was crazy, and that just about took care of the conversation. Ed drove the two of us back to Miller’s Valley because I wanted to spend the rest of the weekend with my mother. “How hard is it to make a decent turkey?” he said, and my mother said, “Ed, a man doesn’t criticize his wife to his mother, that’s rule one.”

  “What’s rule two?” I said.

  “Don’t sass your mother,” she said. “Don’t they teach that in your fancy college?” She loved saying that, too: “your fancy college.”

  “You’re about a year from the state declaring eminent domain in the Valley, and then you’re going to have to take what they give you,” Ed said.

  “Let’s not talk business on Thanksgiving,” my mother said.

  “Your mother n
eeds to sell her place soon,” said Steven the next morning. “Being the last holdout in one of these deals isn’t the way to go.”

  “Donald’s grandfather will be the last holdout,” I said.

  “Not to be crude, but I think the state is figuring that by the time they’re ready to flood the valley, that old guy will be dead and they can just take his place.”

  “They don’t know his grandson.” Maybe I didn’t, either. I hadn’t had a letter from Donald, a real letter, for a long time. He sent a note when my father died, but it was to all of us. He used the word condolences. Maybe he was a completely different person. Maybe I was, too. The guys who worked for Steven now still thought I was going to nursing school. “Love me a nurse,” the plumber said. “Those damn white uniforms.”

  I just walked out. “Asshole,” Steven said to the plumber, who was only saying what every guy I’d ever met thought.

  We went out the Friday night after Thanksgiving to one of the bars on the highway. It was a big weekend, all the kids home from college. The regulars complained that there were no spots in the parking lot. Fred was on a stool near the door, watching football on the TV behind the bar.

  “LaRhonda says you should come by,” he said. “I think she’s kind of bored.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “No, really, she is. Take it from me, she’s bored out of her gourd. That’s what she says every day.”

  “With two little kids?” I said.

  “Her mom spends a lot of time taking care of the kids. That and eating. Don’t tell her I said that. Your brother’s here.”

  “What?”

  Fred jerked a thumb toward a back corner of the room.

  All this time, all the bad stuff, and you could still tell which booth was Tommy’s because there were so many people gathered around it. If he’d had a ring you would have thought someone would be kissing it. The courtiers were the kinds of guys who were the backbone of Miller’s Valley, the guys who had flamed out first year at college, the guys who thought going in the first place was a waste, the guys who didn’t want the job or the life their old man had but hadn’t come up with anything different yet and never would, who spent their time smoking pot and getting drunk and bitching about how they’d never gotten a fair shake, whatever that was. And the women they got pregnant and then married. Tom was still their leader, but he was a different Tom now, with half-closed eyes and hair to his shoulders. He looked like Jesus if Jesus was hungover.

  I was all the way to the table before he raised his sleepy lids and saw me. His face going from slack to smile seemed to happen in slow motion, like he wasn’t used to it.

  “Little girl,” he said. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  “It’s Thanksgiving weekend. I’m off from school. I’m home with Mom.”

  He patted the fake leather seat next to him but I stayed standing. His hand moved in slow motion, like it was going through water. I leaned on the table and got right up in his face. It had been so long since I’d talked to him last, and I didn’t know when it would happen again, so I figured I should go for it.

  “Where have you been?” I said. My voice shook like I was going to cry, even though I never cry in public.

  “It’s a long story, kid.” He smelled like bourbon and beer.

  “That’s what people always say when they really don’t want to talk about something, or when they’re dying to talk about something.”

  “You’re a smart girl,” he said. “I always knew that, that you were smart.” He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke to the side so it wasn’t in my face. His words were in slow motion, too, like the tape in a tape recorder whose battery was going bad. “You did good, kid. I’m happy for you. You’re the American dream, right? You are. I always figured you’d be okay.”

  “How do you know I’m okay?”

  He smiled, but his eyes didn’t. “I can tell by looking,” he said. A tall skinny guy came right up to the table and stood beside me. “Hey, sweetheart, what’s happening?” he said, putting his hand on my back.

  “My little sister,” Tommy said, coming alive. He made the words sound like a hammer coming down three times, and the skinny guy backed up with his hands in the air, the way they do on TV when the sheriff pulls a gun.

  “No idea, man, none, so sorry, really,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything, swear to God.” Then he was gone. The whole crowd of guys around Tommy had disappeared, as though I’d made some sort of force field that drove them away.

  “Come home,” I said. “Mom will cook for you.”

  “Naaah,” he said. “That’s not a good idea.”

  “She misses you.” I wanted to say, I miss you, I miss you so much my heart hurts, but that sounded like one of those stupid greeting card things to say. Plus when you’re premed expressions like that don’t work for you anymore. Broken heart, gut feeling. You’re too literal, at least in the beginning, at least until you learn that a broken heart is a real thing.

  “I bet she misses you, too,” he said.

  “Yeah, but I come home sometimes. You should, too. You owe her that much.” I shouldn’t have said that. The mean look Tommy had given the skinny guy came back, and his eyelids came down, and the smile was gone.

  “I owe her not to have the cops show up at her house again,” he said. “That’s what I owe her.”

  “What about me?” I said, and it was like all the times I hadn’t said that sentence during my whole life were there when I said it that one time.

  “What about you?”

  “You let me down.” And now I was crying, not even trying to hide it or rein it in.

  “No I didn’t. Look at you. You’re not down. You’re up. I just left you alone. Best thing I could have done, leaving you alone.”

  “You could have—” But I couldn’t finish. There are some sentences you just can’t finish. Shouldn’t finish. I don’t know what I would have said anyhow.

  Tommy took his time lighting another cigarette from the butt of the last one, like he didn’t want to look at me, like we were done. I’ve never been sure, but I think as I was walking away he said, “Have a good life, corncob.” But maybe I just made that up to make myself feel better or worse, I’m still not sure which.

  The next morning my mother was standing at the stove and I thought about it awhile. Then I said, “I saw Tommy last night.”

  “Where?”

  “That bar on the highway? It’s called the Plugged Nickel.”

  She nodded and took a couple of strips of bacon out of the cast-iron frying pan. “I know the man who owns it. I don’t care for you going to a place like that.”

  “He was asking about you.”

  My mother nodded.

  “He seems good.”

  We found an osprey once behind Ruth’s house when I was a kid. It’s a big bird, three feet tall, with those mean little black eyes those hunting birds have. He was pressed up against the back of the house like he was hiding. He had one wing out to the side dragging in the dirt. Even if you didn’t know anything about birds you could tell his wing was broken.

  “Go get the long gun, Mimi,” my father had said. LaRhonda put her hands over her face, then peeked from between her fingers.

  Sometimes you see things that seem so not-right that you never forget them. That big bird of prey, standing on the ground, at our mercy, was like that. So was my mother when she sat down and looked at me. She looked old and beaten, like she might never get up from that chair. There was a little bit of Ruth in her eyes.

  “You’ve always been a terrible liar, Mary Margaret,” she said. “Worse even than your father was.”

  I can’t tell you exactly when my brother disappeared. It seemed like it was near the end of my senior year in college, right after spring break. I hadn’t seen him since that run-in at Thanksgiving, but Steven had talked to him at the same bar the following fall, and LaRhonda said her father had seen him at the diner right after the big snowstorm that cut off power to the valley
for close to a week. She remembered because her father said he didn’t want him there. LaRhonda didn’t care about hurting your feelings, never had. Come to think of it, she didn’t even really know when something she said would hurt your feelings. I felt sorry for her kids.

  If Tom had been one of those men who had a mortgage and a car he bought on time, a wife and two kids and a boss waiting for him to sit down at his desk at nine in the morning, in other words if he’d been Ed, it would have been different. You’d go to the police and say to them, Mr. Dependable parked in the lot on Tuesday and hasn’t been heard from since. But Tommy Miller wasn’t Mr. Dependable, and he wasn’t someone whose absence the police would worry about. He disappeared the way Aunt Ruth had gotten housebound, or the way my father stopped talking after his stroke. He did it by inches so you couldn’t figure out exactly when it started. I only really noticed myself after he missed Clifton’s birthday party. That had happened before, but even when he was in jail he got some sketchy guy to drop off Tinkertoys and a card signed “Love, Daddy,” although it wasn’t in his handwriting. Clifton didn’t know the difference.

  But when I got to Callie’s mom’s house and there wasn’t even a present things looked bad to me. I’d brought Clifton a tape recorder and a bunch of tapes because he liked to make up stories and act them out with different voices. I told him the tape recorder was from his dad, and he was traveling on business which was why he had me bring the present. Callie’s boyfriend made a big fuss over the tape recorder. He was such a nice guy that I didn’t even mind so much that after he married Callie he was going to move her and Clifton fifty miles away. Callie said she would still bring Clifton to see my mom, and they’d be closer to me at school so I could visit all the time.

  “She deserves some happiness,” my mother said. Also Clifton was coming to stay for a month in the summer. My mother had already arranged to take three weeks off work. It was like Donald all over again except with a good mother this time. Same father situation, though, although Donald had never talked about his father and Clifton talked about Tom a lot.