The Breakdown Lane

  That got his attention. We were in his study in ten seconds. It did have a really great view of a ridge topped by trees. “Gabe,” Leo began, “you’re not really old enough to understand this. But I’m going to talk to you man to man.”

  “Talk to Caro man to man also,” I suggested. “She was the one who figured out how to find you.”

  “That’s my girl,” our father said, beaming. “You’ve got a good head on those shoulders, Caroline. You’ll make a lawyer someday.”

  “Whatever,” Caroline said, picking at the tapestry on her chair.

  “Well, it’s a matter of passion,” he told us. “I felt all the passion had drained from my life. Julieanne is a terrific person. She’s a wonderful mother—”

  “Save it,” I said, noticing for the first time how I towered over him.

  “But her life was you, Gabe. You and Caro and Aurora. And appearances. The right thing to do. It was what Romberg calls an ‘apparent’ marriage, not a soul-completing relationship. We appeared happy. We appeared to have attained the American Dream. But I was miserable, Gabe, since before Aurora’s birth. I felt like a man in prison. The challenge had gone out of my work, and my personal life, my life as a man, was completely eclipsed. I told you, it made me near psychotic. The desire to get out of the law department. There would be people who would say I should have been more honest, but wouldn’t that really have just been—”

  “There would be a lot of people like that. Including your own parents,” I said.

  “Well, I expected you to be angry. I want to honor that.”

  “Will you please talk like a person?” I begged him.

  “When I found out that Joy was pregnant,” he began, “I…”

  “As a result of…” I interrupted.

  “Our last visit,” he said, “that month, last year. I had to make a choice. She’s a very honorable person, Gabe. An alive, energetic, seeking person. Happy, congenitally happy. She wants to fix the world’s problems, Gabe. She knows that’s impossible, but she runs on hope. And she would not violate any bond between your mother and me until I could assure her that the bond was irrevocably broken…so we waited,” he said.

  “You waited?” I sneered, pointing in the direction Joy had gone with Amos. “Why didn’t you wait until you assured Mom the bond was irrevocably broken?”

  “She should have known that!” Leo burst out, getting up to do his attorney’s pace. “I tried to tell her over and over, but she wouldn’t accept it. I tried not to be cruel. I tried not to say, ‘It’s not there for me anymore, Julie.’ But she just kept dancing her way through life….”

  “Don’t worry. She’s not wasting a lot of money on ballet lessons anymore,” I said.

  The room felt like a hothouse, probably because every flat or hanging space was filled by some sort of plant. I took off my coat. “All I want from you is this. First, you have to get us home, and second, you have to come and tell Mom this yourself. We’re not going to carry your dirty laundry, Dad.”

  “I know that. I intended to come. It just seemed, well, kinder, not to keep up a pretense….”

  “Kinder how?”

  “Kinder to Julie.”

  “Like you so care. I told you she had multiple sclerosis and you acted like I was just trying to fuck up your day.”

  Caroline asked then, “What about us? Are we supposed to go on taking care of Mom, if you stay here? Are you going to support us?”

  “You have your college funds, and I can break those trusts easily given the fact of your mother’s incapacitation. Can she still work?” he asked.

  “She can still work. In fact, her column was syndicated,” Caro said, lifting her chin.

  “Well, there you have it, and with your trust fund money—”

  “You know we aren’t supposed to have that until we’re twenty-five, and Mom isn’t going to let you break into our trusts for her sake,” I told him.

  “That’s a little unreasonable, Gabe. That’s what breaking trusts is for.”

  “Yeah, but she has a mental problem, Dad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s a decent person.”

  “I can see I’m not going to convince you of anything,” Leo said, summation over. “I didn’t expect to. But I do want you to stay here as long as you like….”

  “We have to be back in school in three days,” Caroline said.

  “Well, I’ll have to take you home then, though that’s complicated, because Joy and I are right at the stage of approving the blueprints….”

  “You’re building a house?” I asked. The guy was un-fucking-believable.

  “Well, Joy is…pregnant, again,” our father said. “We didn’t think that was entirely possible, given that Amos is only four months old and she’s breast-feeding. But as she said…”

  I finished for him. “Miracles do happen.”

  “And I’d hoped you’d want to spend time with me here, you and Aury and Caro. We have to have a place with at least four bedrooms. I never wanted you out of my life. Look.” He opened a folder of letters, addressed to Caroline and to me. He gestured to our photos on the shelf. “I tried to explain, but I knew I would have to come back to do that, and I was trying to find a good time; then we learned about the pregnancy….”

  “You’ve really got yourself a full plate here, Dad.”

  “I do, but there’s a major difference. The difference is, I’m not expected to do anything. Joy is completely grateful for whatever help I give her, and completely self-sufficient. She’s told me, over and over, she’s entirely capable of raising our children within the community, without a formal marriage. She doesn’t want to bury me. I can do as I wish, study what I wish, work when I want to.”

  “Well, goody for you, Dad. I don’t know if I speak for Caroline,” I said wearily, “but I’d rather sleep on a barbecue grill than spend a night in this house, so if you’ll direct me to a quaint inn somewhere, I’ll leave now.”

  “I want to stay tonight,” Caroline said, in a meek voice. “I’m too tired to go anywhere else.”

  “Gabe, however you feel about me now, I am your father.”

  I said, standing up, “Don’t blame me.”

  “Gabe, I’ll drive you to Amory’s Inn. She’s got rooms. We don’t get the tourists here until May. But I wish you’d stay here.”

  “I’m not asking you for anything,” I said. “I’ll take the ride. Caroline, give me the cell phone.” She did. “I just have to ask you one thing. Why did you have a gun? The gun in your drawer?”

  “It’s not mine,” Leo said. “I found it in the acoustical tile when we redid the bathroom. It looked old, like an antique, so I kept it. I don’t even know if it works.”

  “We met your friend, India Holloway,” I told him. “You know. The grandmother of the excellent would-be sister raper.”

  “India’s a special woman,” Leo said.

  “Did you hear what the hell I just said?” I hissed at him.

  “Leave it, Gabe,” Caroline told me.

  “Look, I admire your self-reliance, guys, but this wasn’t a very mindful thing to do.”

  “You should know. Can we please leave?” I asked him.

  And finally we did. Caro’s face was a little white disc at the window.

  Ten times, that night, I dialed home, and ten times I didn’t press the

  SEND button. What would I say? What did I owe Mom to say? Did she need preparing for what would be a helluva shock (but, my God, she couldn’t be so dim she didn’t know he wasn’t coming back, when we already did, at least subconsciously)? Was I the one to do this?

  Was I the one to do any of this?

  I didn’t relish the prospect of assuming permanent guardianship of my little sister. I didn’t relish the prospect of…like, dropping out of school and working at ABS or someplace to help Mom make ends meet. It was sort of old Jimmy Cagney–movie semi-appealing, but also appalling. It also made me want to shake my mother, actually. Since this whole thing
began, I don’t think I’d had an uncharitable thought toward her, probably because Caro had so many. But at that moment, I envied old Leon, with his soul flown through the open door of the cage. Paying boarder or not, Cathy was only Mom’s friend. I couldn’t expect her to take on the role of full-time helper if my mother had spells or switchbacks or whatever. And though I had never raised the subject with her, I knew she would never agree to take money from Grandfather Gillis’s trust funds for us; she’d rather have died.

  I decided to drop out then. I wasn’t sure exactly when, but school was so over.

  In fact, childhood was so over. It had been for a while.

  It was like some stupid pop song. Drop out, get a manual labor job and a fast car. I decided to drop out when I turned sixteen, take the GED and go to school later, like when our trust funds matured. Or maybe they had special scholarships for idiots who could write advice columns. There would be no choice if Leo went through with this. The thought of never having to see any of the goateed assholes at Sheboygan LaFollette cheered my misery considerably. The thought of never having to see Mrs. Kimball again after a few more months about made me have an erection. I lay on Mrs. Amory’s perfectly soft and nice mattress and searched for sleep without any luck. I saw the red numbers flip over to one, one-thirty, two. I wanted to call Tian or at least Luke and say, Get this.

  But there was no one to call. I almost wished I’d stayed back in Sunrise Holler with Caro. At least then I’d have had someone to compare notes with. I wondered what they were talking about now, Joy and Leon and my sister, over a dinner of lettuce and water.

  I finally got up at six o’clock and took a walk, my shoes having dried a size smaller next to the woodstove. I found a diner. The pretty girl with the auburn hair, the sister of Joy, was a waitress there. I didn’t recognize her at first, because all her hair was pulled up. “Hi,” she said when I sat down. “You’re Leon’s kid.”

  “His name is Leo,” I told her. “His name is Leo Steiner, and he’s a lowlife piece of shit who left my mother and got involved with your sister—who I’m sure is a nice person—without telling us.”

  “I kind of gathered that,” she said. “You want coffee?” I tapped my cup. “Food?”

  “Yeah, the whole left side of the menu,” I told her. She brought me the eggs and toast I ordered and some waffles I hadn’t, and she sat down with me for a minute.

  “You know, Joy really is a nice person,” she said. I remembered her name then: Terry, short for Easter. I was in the county of the Land of Oz. “She’s a little bit trusting, though. Leon’s a lot older than she is. She’s twenty-eight; she’s the oldest, and she’s never really been involved for long with anyone before.”

  “How old are you?” I asked her.

  “Twenty-one,” she said. “I love my sisters and my mother. There are three more of us. I have a sister who’s eighteen, Liat—that’s from some musical….”

  “South Pacific,” I said. “The girl was Tonkinese.” I thought of Tian.

  “You know a lot about history!”

  “I don’t really consider musical theater history.”

  “And there are Kieron and Grace, who are both older than me and have three kids each. We all live in the yellow submarine. But not me, not for long. I’m getting out of the valley.”

  “How come?”

  “Just, it just creeps me, everyone always on top of you, and I want to have a life of my own, live on a New York street like any other single girl, go to school, quit weaving like the miller’s daughter in the fairy tale….”

  “What if you couldn’t leave?” I asked. “What if your mother was stone sick?”

  “I’d find someone to take care of her, or I’d find her someone to live with who’d take care of her in exchange for rent. But I’d take care of her, too, when I could.” She gave me a straight-alley look. “I wouldn’t give up my life.”

  “What if she’d given hers up…like, for you?”

  “What? Did you have a terminal illness and she gave you bone marrow?”

  I thought, What the hell, I’ll never see this person again, so I said, “Yeah, I did.”

  “Then you owe her more. You owe her to have more life for yourself. Like, see my mother? She’s a cool person, but she’s completely into the idea that the sun rises in this valley because she came here. And Joy buys that. Our father named her for his mother, Joyce? She changed her name to Joyous. Joyous Devlin. And I was Easter?” She pointed to her name tag. “My mother did this to me when I was eight? Easter’s over. The second day I’m out of here, I’m Terry again.”

  “I can see you better that way.”

  “Well.”

  “Well, I’m outta here in the morning, if not today,” I said.

  “Good luck, and listen up. He didn’t want that second baby or the first.”

  “Who?”

  “Leon. Leo. Your loser dad. I heard them. I used to stay over there? And I heard them. He was like, I’ve done this. I wasn’t good at it.”

  “He can say that again.”

  “So consider yourself lucky, kid. You got one sane parent. Sick or not sick.”

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “He died. He…died after my mother left him.” She looked up at the acoustical tile. I didn’t want to ask any more details. “I don’t even remember him. Just that he used to feed me bacon off his plate when he came in, in the morning. He worked the graveyard shift.”

  “Where?”

  “At the graveyard,” she said. “I’m not kidding. He was a night watchman at a graveyard.”

  “How do you get that job?”

  “Well, he wasn’t all bad. I don’t remember. But I know this. Not wanting to live in trees doesn’t make you all bad.” I put money down on the table and gulped when she stuck it down her bra. “Every little bit helps. Next time you see me, I’ll be gone.”

  With that thought, I trudged up the road to where the sign turned left at the Breakdown Lane. Caro was still looking out the window. She reminded me of somebody’s dog. When she saw me coming, she threw open the front door. “He’s taking us home today. He has to take Amos. He says Joy is too sick. Funny, huh? He wasn’t that worried about Mom being sick.”

  “Well, she is sick,” I said. “Joyous is.”

  “I thought she had to feed the young prince twenty times a day.”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Why Joy’s sick?”

  “No. Look, I could so not care if she had Lou Gehrig’s,” Caro said.

  “She’s not a bad person.”

  “Oh, yeah, I can see that from her behavior.”

  “It wasn’t all her idea. What about our very excellent father?”

  “But why does he have to bring the baby? Talk about insult to injury. What about her mother and her dozen clone sisters?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t feel like explaining. My father came out of his office and I jumped. He looked like his normal self, in a turtleneck shirt and a sport coat. He had his old duffel over one arm and a diaper bag as big as our trash used to be under the other. The baby was strapped to his front, asleep. He looked like a bomb ready to go off.

  “Let’s go,” he said, touching Caro under the chin. He looked at me. “Where’s your stuff? Still at the inn? We can pick it up on the way.”

  Joy wouldn’t come out of the bedroom.

  “She’s tired,” Leo explained. “The early months of pregnancy are hard.”

  I tried for Caro’s sake to pretend that he meant the early months of raising an infant. Or I must not have wanted to hear him say one more inexplicably despicable thing. But I heard Caro gasp. And I snapped.

  “I thought that the beauty of Joyous Devlin—yeah, I know that’s her name—is she doesn’t make you do anything. I thought,” I said, “that she was perfectly capable of raising him and his successor in this community without a formal commitment.”

  “Go get in the car, Gabe,” he said.

  T
WENTY-THREE

  Amos

  EXCESS BAGGAGE

  By J. A. Gillis

  Distributed by Panorama Media

  Dear J.,

  Six months ago, my sister borrowed ten thousand dollars from me. Okay, it was because her husband was laid off and she didn’t have enough money to buy a car that her two boys and new baby would fit into, or Christmas presents. I didn’t tell my husband. I took it out of my own bonds, which I got for college graduation. Now, she tells me her husband bought her a fur coat because he felt so bad that he was laid off at Christmas and he can’t pay it off. So she’s asking me for another thousand just until they “get their feet back under them.” I said no, and she started to cry and rant and rave and say I was a hard and vengeful person and that she felt soiled by taking my money. I told her, well, feel clean again, give it back. She threw a Tupperware container she’d borrowed at me and nearly hit me. What do I do? She’s my only relative.

  Broke in Boston

  Dear Broke,

  Some days, I don’t know why they pay me to do this job. You know the answer to this question. One of the people in your letter is a user. One is a loser. One can certainly change, by closing her purse and turning off her phone. One may not be able to. You guess which is which.

  J.

  I sat up when I heard the baby’s wail.

  And then, before I could even slip into my flip-flops, there was Leo. Leo, standing in my doorway.

  “Lee! It’s you? For real?”

  “The very same,” he said, and sighed. “It hasn’t been that long, Julie.”

  “It feels longer. Time has been sort of fungible. I got sick….”

  “I heard.”

  “How’d you hear? You disappeared.”