Homesick Creek (29 page)

Now, in the warm light of her sewing room, Bunny brought out a last Christmas gift she was making for Crystal, a family of rabbits. Almost as soon as she began working, though, she heard Crystal wake up, as she often did, crying in the dark with an odd, dry, hopeless keening that Bunny took to be grief. She dimmed her work lamp and padded down the hall that always looked different in the dark, as though she’d never made the trip before. She lifted Crystal gently and settled them together in a big soft chair Hack had bought on sale at Meier & Frank for a steal. Crystal tucked her head under Bunny’s chin and, slumping, fell deeply asleep again, a warm, damp, breathing weight safe in Bunny’s arms.

As she had been doing lately, Bunny closed her eyes and listened to the hundred small sounds of her household. There were the obvious ones like the refrigerator’s hum, Hack’s light snores, Crystal’s tiny sighs, the rasp of numbers turning over on the cheap digital clock at her elbow. But beneath those noises there were others that were older, fainter, vestigial: the thousand remembered sounds that Vinny had made within these walls; the whistle Anita used to make when she blew cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth; the curses and jokes that Bob and Hack had made over sixteen years of work on cars and trucks and dirt bikes in the garage. The remembered sounds of Bunny herself as she had moved through her empty house, trying in all the wrong ways to fill it. And now she had become this woman who used her belly and arms and bosom to keep from harm a little girl who was not her own; who was somehow more than her own. Vinny had always reached out and taken what she needed, secure in the knowledge that in most things she came first. Crystal had none of Vinny’s strength or confidence. Crystal had learned very young what it was like to be left out, left behind, left alone to coax her own pale green shoot from parched and barren ground.

Honey, there are two kinds of people in this world, whole people and
damaged people. People like Bob and Warren, they’re the damaged ones.
God made them take on more than was fair, and I don’t claim to understand why. I just know that they’re laboring under a mighty load of scars
and shortage. And here’s the thing, Bunny, that nobody ever gets: The damagedones, the ones like them, work at love the hardest.

Bunny was getting used to hearing Anita here in the dark.
Hack?

Hack, yes.

You never told me.

Would you have believed me if I had?

I don’t know. No.

And now?

Crystal stirred, pushing free of Bunny’s encircling arms. Bunny tucked her into bed again with a goodnight kiss she would never remember receiving, her small head damp and smelling of Barbie shampoo. Bunny closed the door softly and went back to her sewing room, picking up where she had left off an hour before. She loved this part of the work, pairing up legs and arms and seeing the small bodies take final shape in her hands.

Do you believe me about Hack?

Bunny thought.
That he’s damaged?

Yes.

I do now. I didn’t, before.

Then you weren’t ready before. Or he wasn’t.

It’s an awful story.

They’re always awful stories. That’s why they’re hardly ever told—
sometimes only once in a lifetime, sometimes never. You have to be ready to
hear them, and they have to be ready to tell them.

It had taken Hack nearly two hours on the cabin steps beside Homesick Creek to tell her about Cherise and the Katydid and Minna Tallhorse, and half that time he hadn’t been talking at all, only thinking he was talking; Bunny could tell it from his eyes. And the whole time he never looked at her once, not really, not until he was finished. Then he’d looked at her all right, and his eyes had been like holes in the universe, places where you could drop all the way through to oblivion if you didn’t hold on, and then it was over. But in that time Bunny had seen things she’d never dreamed of and would never forget. Pain, suffering, recrimination. Rage, not all of it spent. She had knelt in front of him, wrapped her arms around his head, and said,
I’m so sorry.
God, I’m so sorry
. He had held on to her like someone afraid of dying, scaring her so badly she had had to get up and go pee, and when she came back, it was over and they’d gathered their things, closed up the cabin, and gone home.

See? You think you know all there is to know about someone, and then
it turns out you didn’t know a damn thing.

Nita, all those years, and it was never about Vinny at all.

Evidently not.

I should have known. Shouldn’t I have known?

No, because he didn’t want you to know, honey. People protect their secretslike birds incubate eggs. Bird spends all her time sitting and waiting,
making sure so no one can get at them until it’s time. Well, it wasn’t time.

I feel like a fool.

You’re not a fool.

I miss you, Nita.

I know you do, honey.

I love you.

Well, that’s how it begins.

How what begins?

Everything.

How many times had she and Anita sat here together laughing about some dumb thing while they sewed Halloween costumes and cheerleading skirts, baby quilts and holiday crafts, the two of them peering like blind men through cigarette smoke so thick it made them cry? In this room they were the best they ever were, making things for people they loved, no matter how imperfectly. Now, enveloped at last in a silence as deep and pure as forgiveness, Bunny leaned alone into a pool of light, stitching together a family with a million pieces of love and remembrance, stuffed only with soft things, pliable things, things that could cushion a fall.

homesick creek

DIANE HAMMOND

A Reader’s Guide

A CONVERSATION WITH DIANE HAMMOND

Q: How did you first come up with the ideas or stories for
Homesick Creek
?

A:
My books always start with characters rather than plots. In the case of
Homesick Creek
, I began with Bob and Hack, about whom I knew just one thing apiece. Hack had been responsible for the death of the one person in his life he loved completely, and Bob, who was married, had had a long-term, clandestine homosexual affair from which he’d contracted AIDS. Neither Bunny nor Anita, their wives, knew either of these things. One of them never would know.

Q: Why those two events?

A:
Most of us experience a defining moment, event or circumstance that we then spend the rest of our lives integrating, processing, getting over or running from. For a sixteen-year-old girl in my hometown years ago, that defining moment was a car accident in which her younger brother and sister were killed. The girl was driving, and had had her driver’s license for just one week. I’ve never forgotten her. How would you move on from something like that? How
could
you? I gave this dilemma to Hack.

In the early 1980’s, a distant relative-in-law of mine who lived in the country’s heartland died of pneumonia after a year-long, wasting intestinal illness of unknown origin. It didn’t seem to add up—he was only in his late thirties—until I remembered that when this man and his family had visited my husband and me in Washington, D.C. several years earlier, he had left his wife and children in a motel room each evening and ventured forth alone “to explore.” What if he had been seeking out gay men on the sly and had contracted AIDS? The disease was just emerging then; it was possible. From that departure point the dilemma grows and grows. How do you tell your spouse, if you are deeply closeted?
Do
you tell your spouse? If you do, awful things may happen. If you don’t, awful things may happen. I don’t know whether or not this was actually the case for my relative, but out of such speculation Bob was born, and with him, a set of harrowing choices.

Q: How could you let Bob keep his HIV status a secret from Anita when he knew it would kill her?

A:
I had always assumed that at some point Bob would tell Anita about his HIV status and what had led up to it, but in the writing I kept putting it off. I finally realized that that was exactly how Bob would deal with the problem, too. The soundtrack playing behind most of his adult life was a love song to Anita, a nearly-beautiful woman who had chosen him over other men. He knew he was weak and ineffectual: he drank too much, he couldn’t hold down a job, he disappeared regularly. And yet, she stayed with him. He didn’t fear his own death—or Anita’s— nearly as much as he feared the thought that Anita might die seeing him for what he really was. In his own words, he “couldn’t have that.” So instead he arranged for her a death of transcendent beauty in a house that was, if only for a few hours, her own. In the late 1980s, AIDS was not only a death sentence, but the death itself usually followed protracted and terrible illness. By handling things as he did, Bob spared her from knowing what she faced, and ensured that the end came fast and with dignity. Are these acts of cowardice or strength? Do they damn or redeem him? I don’t know.

Q: Houses are very important to the characters in Homesick
Creek
. Why?

A:
It’s probably not coincidental that houses loom large in
Homesick Creek
, since I was looking for a house myself while writing it. In fact, the majority of the book was written on my laptop in the front seat of the car while my husband and I drove back and forth between Bend, Oregon, and Tacoma, Washington, hunting for a house and then painting and readying the one we found.
Homesick Creek’s
characters see their homes as fortresses, status symbols, and spiritual refuges. Anita suffers from house-envy; her rentals become increasingly rundown until Bob gives her a home of her own. Hack, who grew up in squalor, raises the pitch of his double-wide’s roof so that anyone seeing it will assume it’s a classier, stick-built home. Bunny seeks solace in her sewing room, and finds redemption in the sounds of her house at night.

Q: Who are your favorite Homesick Creek characters?

A:
Oddly, they’re both bit players: Bunny’s mother Shirl, and Minna Tallhorse. Though otherwise very different, they’re both strong, plainspoken women with an unflinching view of the world around them, women who’ve come by what they have the hard way. The antithesis of Shirl and Minna is Hack’s mother Cherise, a morally bankrupt woman who in nearly every case chooses the easy way out. Cherise is the closest thing to a villain I’ve ever created, but even she was more sad than evil.

Q: Do you believe in good and evil?

A:
Categorically? No. I believe in varying degrees of kindness, confusion, devotion, misery, and exaltation. It’s just too easy to define someone as good or bad. Good people—and I think nearly all people are, to some degree, good—commit acts of meanness, cruelty, and indifference all the time, and sometimes it’s on purpose and sometimes it isn’t. They also commit acts of grace and gratitude and kindness. And that gray area is where the really interesting things happen, for me. Call me morbid, but I’d rather write about the devoted father who left his infant son in the car all morning in the blistering sun because he forgot the child was there than about the dedicated coach who has led his boy’s Little League team to victory.

Q: So what’s next—will your next book be set in Hubbard, Oregon, too?

A:
Probably not, though it will almost certainly be set somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. I find the sometimes fierce nature of the region echoes the sometimes fierce nature of the people who live there. And what could be more evocative than that?

READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. How would you explain Hack’s relationship with Bunny’s daughter Vinny? How does it compare with the relationship he had with his sister Katy?

2. Bunny feels that her charms, in Hack’s eyes, were mainly sexual. Is she right?

3. In what ways do Bunny and Hack look after Anita and Bob? Does their help come from deep affection, or pity?

4. What is Bob’s relationship with Warren based on—sexuality, love, weakness? Why is it so important to Bob that it be kept a secret?

5. Does Rae Macy really threaten Bunny and Hack’s marriage, as Bunny feared?

6. Why does Hack turn away from Rae when she offers herself to him?

7. Does Bob’s decision to hasten Anita’s death redeem or damn him?

8. Is Bunny’s mother, Shirl, a wise woman or a foolish one?

9. Minna Tallhorse allows Hack and Katy to remain on their own. Is she right to do so, or does she contribute to the events that culminated in Katy’s death?

10. Why does Hack decide to get in touch with Minna Tallhorse after so many years?

11. Hack finally tells Bunny about Katy. Why does he keep it secret for so long?

12. In the end, Bunny finds reasons to go on with her marriage. Is her decision one of resolve or weakness? How would you have handled the situation if you were Bunny?

13. Why do Bunny and Hack decide to raise Crystal? Who drives the decision, Hack or Bunny?

14. Is
Homesick Creek
a love story or a tragedy?

15. In a marriage, are there times when keeping secrets is okay, or is it always wrong? Do you keep secrets from your spouse? Why?