Home Leave: A Novel (3 page)

And then the surprise—as the car rolled off, as the tangerine sunset hit my naked walls: the lightness. I always thought I’d want to be a house that was occupied, even if it meant being haunted by homeless people or teenagers looking for somewhere to have sex or get high. Instead I felt a huge burden shrug off of me, and it felt good when the mold started growing and the rain began moisturizing my interior. That’s something Caro can’t understand; she urges me to stop slouching, reminds me that the For Sale sign out front won’t ever go away if I don’t make more of an effort.

Some houses have generations that pass under their roofs. Some see several family cycles. I only had my one, and there’s something beautiful in that, too. Ada. How I envy the simple path her body took: out of breath, then underground. I felt it when she died, even though she was all those miles away. It mimicked the feeling I used to get when the power went out.

Given my strong brick and my storm glass, I’m not going to fall apart anytime soon. But I find I am entering a state I thought only possible for humans: I have begun dreaming. I drift most of the time; I see deep summer thunderstorms in winter and then it’s Charles at the dinner table and the chicken and dumplings not being ready yet. I only stir, briefly, at Caro’s insistent chatter, and then I doze off again. I will wake one day, I suppose, to my eventual disassemblage, or, Sleeping Beauty–like, to the kiss of new heartache repairing me, moving the unspeakable back inside.

A
high school kid calls up, asking is Chris Kriegstein still in town, or nearby. They’re doing a “Chariton High Athletes: Where Are They Now?” feature in the school paper,
Tiger Tracks
, and he needs to know how can he get in touch.

“Aren’t you on summer vacation?” I ask.

“Summer school,” he says, and sounds so down about it that I give him Chris’s cell phone and office numbers and email address, even though Chris and Elise have repeatedly asked me to keep them private. I warn him that Chris is pretty hard to track down; half the time he’s in Saudi Arabia or China or God knows where. The kid mumbles his thanks and hangs up, just as I’m about to ask him about our team’s chances for regionals this fall.

“Frank,” I yell from the kitchen, putting down the phone, “where’s Chris this week, you know?”

“Dubai until Thursday,” yells Frank. He always knows. He gets these updates on our email from Chris’s secretary, and he reads them as close as the weather and the obits. You want to know who died of what and how Tuesday’s gonna be and which time zone his son is in, you just ask Frank.

I join him on the patio outside, carrying two frosty Diet Cokes; he’s watching across the street, where the county fair is in full swing. “Best seats in town,” Frank likes to say when anyone calls, asking us how it is to be living at Wittenberg Village. If they’re friends of ours, still living in their own houses, they sound smug. If they’re our kids, they sound guilty. Tomorrow will be three weeks since we left the farm.

It must look strange to anyone who pulls into the parking lot: all of us out here on our tiny porches, staring out across the highway like we’re at a drive-in movie. Most of us in bathrobes, though Frank and I are still wearing the clothes of the living, as I like to say. Frank doesn’t like it when I make jokes like that, and I think his forced cheer about moving out here is bullshit. But the anger that used to rise up in me at him has lulled now; before, when we were young and he’d say something to rile me, it would be like a rattlesnake in the room, something I had to either kill or escape from. Now it’s just like an old fly buzzing around in August that you tolerate because you’re too hot and lazy to get out of your chair.

All of northeast Indiana has had a terrible drought this summer, and the fields fringing the fair are a tawny brown. Frank frets about it, even though we sold off our corn- and bean fields shortly before we moved here.

“Only chance is winter wheat,” he says to me now. We sit in quiet after that, sipping our Cokes.

My stomach rumbles and pretty soon his does too. We’re both hungry, but we’re putting off going to the cafeteria for lunch; meals are the most depressing times of the day. Vegetables for vegetables, I call it, another joke Frank doesn’t appreciate.

When his grumbles for a second time I say, “Why don’t I just heat up some Campbell’s? We have a stove.”

“The meals are already paid for, Joy,” Frank says, with a dead determination in his voice.

“You got a point,” I tell him, because you can only contradict your husband so many times in one day without starting to feel like you’re on your own, and Frank and I need each other now, badly.

Three days later, the kid calls again, sounding whiny and desperate. It turns out the article’s due tomorrow and if he doesn’t get a quote from Chris he’ll fail the assignment and have to repeat tenth grade.

“Well, there’s no use asking me to make up a quote about him,” I say sternly, going into recess monitor mode. I performed that duty for twenty years at the elementary school, and I never liked it, making kids play nice. He’s silent on the other end of the line. I start feeling bad for him again.

“I can tell you about Chris,” I say. “What do you need to know? You got the records of his best season?”

“Yeah, I got that,” the kid says, grumpy. “It’s posted on the plaque outside the cafeteria.” As if I should know.

“You want a picture?” I ask.

“Can you scan it?” the kids says.

“Can I what?”

“What do they want?” Frank hollers from the patio.

“Something about Chris playing ball at Chariton,” I yell back, covering the receiver. The kid starts explaining scanning to me, and then Frank’s in the kitchen, waving a newspaper clipping in my face. It’s the one he always carries in his wallet about Chris’s senior basketball season. I’ve got the kid yammering about resolution something in one ear and Frank shouting about regional high scorer in the other until I yell, “I get it!” and they both shut up.

I hear the kid rustling some papers and then he says, very softly, “Could you at least tell me what he’s doing now, please?” And I hand the phone over to Frank because the truth is I don’t really know what my son is doing.

Frank takes the phone and barks “Frank Kriegstein” into it, as though he were speaking to the president of the United States. “Who wants to know?” he says next, suspicious, and then calms down when he hears it’s just the school paper. “He’s the CEO of a company called Logan,” Frank says proudly. “What do they make? Instrumentation. Well, if you don’t know what that means, get a dictionary.”

I realize, for the first time, that Frank doesn’t understand what Chris does, either, which gives me no small satisfaction.

“Send us a clipping when it comes out, will you?” Frank is asking, more pleadingly. And then, stiffly: “We’re at Wittenberg Village. No, it’s not a nursing home; it’s assisted living. Across from the fairgrounds. We’d like a couple copies.”

He hangs up, looking pleased with himself, which is how he’s always looked when Chris was getting credit for something. From the time Chris was in middle school, I worried the boy’s success would take him away from us, and I was right. First the basketball, which took him down south, to the University of Georgia. Then Elise, who kept him down there. Now work, which has him hopping countries like James Bond, and worries me sick.

“It will be a fine article,” Frank says.

“He could have at least had the decency to write the boy back,” I say.

“He’s in Dubai,” Frank says, all touchy, as though I were accusing Frank himself of being absent.

“Even so,” I say, trying to picture Dubai. I can only summon Jerusalem, where we went on a church trip in ’83, where I ate the best food of my life.

A week later, we get the article, not from the kid, but from my fifty-five-year-old unmarried daughter, Beth, who works as a part-time librarian in the high school and who missed her train, as far as I’m concerned, when she broke off her engagement with Sam Lehmann, the high school geometry teacher, in 1975.

Beth brings it by with some potato salad and ham sandwiches, and we take the newspaper out to the patio, putting down pickle jars to keep it from flying off in the wind. It’s shorter than I expected.

Below is a fuzzy black-and-white picture of Chris in the air.
Indiana’s Best Jump Shot
is the caption. It’s a beautiful photo, one so familiar I can summon it when I close my eyes. I’ve always been astonished that my own child could look so graceful, like someone from another world.

After reading the article, Beth snorts and spits out Mountain Dew, she’s laughing so hard. “I always underestimated that Jim Laurence,” she says.

Frank is so upset he can’t speak. As usual, he waits until Beth leaves to explode.

“Saudi Arabia! What did you tell the kid?” he fumes at me. I haven’t seen Frank so mad since the church bulletin accidentally wrote his name as “Fran” under the list of ushers.

“Instruments!” he continues. “It sounds like he’s making bombs, like he’s bin Laden’s personal assistant.”

“Bin Laden’s dead,” I point out.

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Frank says testily. “And what’s that bunk about a smaller gym? What’s the kid’s last name? Who’s his father?”

“Laurence,” I say.

“Sounds Catholic,” Frank says, and I say, “Oh, come on, Frank.”

He stews all afternoon, doesn’t even get cheered up when we sit on the porch and watch the swings swirl and the roller coasters pitch.

“Chris can’t see that,” Frank says suddenly, later, lying in bed, long after I think he has fallen asleep.

“He won’t,” I say. “And besides, he wouldn’t care.”

“He deserves better,” Frank says, sounding kind of choked up.

“For chrissakes, Frank, it’s a dumb article, not his tombstone.”

Then I can hear Frank crying. “Tombstone” was not the right choice of words. I used to wish all the time my husband would be more sensitive. The one time I tried to bring flowers from the fields into the farmhouse, shortly after we’d married, he yelled at me for bringing wild carrot under his roof, as if the limp white blooms were going to turn into vines and choke him in the middle of the night. To be fair, they did wreak havoc on the soybeans.

“In some places it’s called Queen Anne’s lace,” I’d shouted back once he’d slammed the door, and cried into the strawberry jam I was making.

Things like that. But about five years ago, Frank started tearing up a couple times a day. Just a thin streak leaking from his eyes, soundless. It took me a while to catch on to what it really was. At first, I worried he had an eye infection, but he got so gruff and defensive when I asked that I put two and two together. He would cry at the most obvious, embarrassing stuff on TV: sappy airline commercials where families get reunited, or after the Hoosiers lost a ball game.

The crying at night is a new development, since we moved here. I’m worried about him. I’d like to bring it up with Beth, but it’s hard to get a second alone with her and I don’t want to embarrass Frank. So I just pretend I don’t hear him. Our first night at the Village, when I put an arm on his shoulder in the dark and asked him about it, he jerked away. The next morning he wouldn’t look at me, like nights in bed years earlier when he’d been a little rough. I’d always liked those nights, and I’d like his new, crying self, if he’d just let me share it a little with him. Sixty-one years of marriage: What’s there to be private about?

The next morning, after breakfast, Frank begins writing a letter to the editor. I’ve never seen him work on something so hard, not even when he had to give a county commissioner campaign speech. Meaning I have to sit alone, outside, on the best day of the fair. It’s the last day, when the kids are awarded 4-H prizes, just like ours were, just like we were. I call to Frank when the kids start spilling out, clutching blue and red ribbons, and he glances up but stays inside, pecking at those keys. So I reminisce by myself, remembering Beth and her turkeys, Chris and his calves, the awful day when Chris’s calf died the day of the fair, how I always suspected Beth of poisoning it with stuff we kept in the barn for rats, but I never said a thing. I picture the little pond we built for the kids to swim in, in the summer, in front of the barn; the neat rows of tomatoes I tended; my favorite spot to sit on the porch, where it was always shady.

But thinking back on the farm is a mistake, something I promised myself I wouldn’t do when we moved out here. The first meal we ate at the Village, when we were just visiting the place with Beth, all the talk was farm talk. How the crops were doing, corn prices, pesticides. To hear it, you’d think that all the men were taking a lunch break from field work, and that as soon as they emptied their plates they would be back up on their combines, the women in the kitchen, keeping an eye on a mean thundercloud, hedging bets on how long there was before we needed to grab the laundry from the line. That kind of nostalgia depressed me, and I decided to inject some hard truth into the conversation.

“We sold ours off to Nesbit,” I said, referring to the farm conglomerate that had bought our land a month earlier. “They’d been bugging us for years. I almost miss talking to James Yancey on the phone each week, telling him no.”

The others laughed ruefully, and Frank scowled at me. It was an unspoken rule that James Yancey’s name not be said aloud in polite conversation, and my misdemeanor was swiftly punished with silence and the sad scraping of forks, the way I had once punished kids who said “goddamn” on the playground by sticking them on the time-out bench. Most of the Village residents had sold to James Yancey too, long before Frank and I had. The few lucky enough to have passed their farms down to sons or sons-in-law now beamed silently at me down the table: I’d done them the favor of broadcasting their good fortune.

At the end of lunch, Beth strode into the cafeteria clutching several folders, having finished her meeting with the director. “You guys ready?” she asked, hovering over Frank and me. “Wow, Mom, that brisket looks delicious.”

“It’s not bad,” I replied, employing the phrase that everyone at the table, and everyone in Chariton, has relied on for years to complain without risking offense, a statement that summarizes our beliefs more neatly than the Nicene Creed. We didn’t expect anything in the first place, it implies, so how could we be disappointed?

Once the prizes are given out, they pack up the whole county fair in a mere twelve hours, and it is just another empty lot across the way. That isn’t bad to stare at either, even though all our neighbors go back inside.

The following evening, Frank asks me to read the letter he’s written to the newspaper editor. I’ve never really read his writing before, aside from what he’s signed on Christmas cards, plus his letters to me during the war, when he was in the Pacific.