The Lost Husband (3 page)

“Well,” I said, “I think I’m going to take her up on it.” The words, even to my own ears, sounded like a plan to go live at the city dump. A lifetime’s worth of anti-Jean propaganda flashed through my memory.

“What?” My mother put her hand out for the letter. “You can’t be serious.”

But I pulled the letter in toward my chest. I couldn’t explain it, and I knew I might be making the wrong call. But something about that word
rescued
was shining a light on my heart. Would I like to be rescued? Hell, yes. I sure would.

“There’s not enough room for us here, Mom,” I said. “We’ve been here two years.”

“And this is how you thank me?”

“Mom!” I said. “We’re driving each other nuts.”

“Untrue,” my mother said.

I smacked myself on the forehead. “Oh! My! God!” Did I have to remind her that, not two days before, she had announced to all of us that she “could not take it anymore”?

Yes. Apparently I did.

But my mother wasn’t having it. “You can’t leave me for Jean.”

I tilted my head at her. “I’m not leaving you for Jean. I’m leaving you for—”

I stopped. I didn’t know what to say. Because no one whose life was even tolerable would read a one-page letter from a near-stranger/eater-of-rodents and decide to move in with her. There was no way to argue it. I wasn’t leaving her for Jean. I was leaving her for anyone. Anyone at all.

At last I said, “You should be delighted!”

But she wasn’t. No matter that Jean’s offer solved most—if not all—of our problems. No matter that my mom had wanted to get us out since the day we moved in. It was clear she’d rather keep us all miserable forever than let Jean get hold of her daughter and grandkids.

She turned her eyes toward the window, even though the blinds were closed, and let out a loud, dramatic sigh.

“What is your problem with her?” I demanded.

“She got everything,” my mother said, “and now she gets you.”

“She doesn’t
get
me, Mom,” I said. “I just need a place to stay.”

But she wasn’t listening. She was busy gearing up for this pronouncement: “If you go there,” she said then, “you are no longer my daughter.”

I waited for some gesture of self-awareness, some acknowledgment of the craziness. But it didn’t come. I said, “Do you hear yourself talking?”

“I’m dead serious.”

And in that moment, my decision was made. Rodent burgers or no, my only choice was to move in with Jean. If for no other reason than to avoid any more conversations exactly like this one.

“I’m going to call her in the morning,” I said.

“I guess that’s it, then,” my mom said, turning toward her bedroom. She was leaving in the morning for a New Year’s week in Cabo with Jerry. She had packing to do, she told me, and she wasn’t going to stand around and argue. “Just be out of the house before I get back.”

The next morning, I let my kids watch cartoons while I called Jean to get the scoop.

“Aunt Jean?” I asked when she answered on the seventh ring.

“This has to be Libby.”

“It is. Hello.”

“Sweetheart, I can’t believe you’ve been living with Marsha this whole time.”

“Well,” I said, “I lived with her my whole childhood, so I’ve had some practice.”

“I lived with her
my
whole childhood,” Jean said, “and I never got the hang of it.”

“It’s not for the faint of heart,” I said.

“I bet you’re tough as nails,” Jean said.

“Not really.”

“Here’s my idea,” she went on. “Unlike your mother, I’m getting old. I’ve got arthritis in my hands, and I can’t milk my goats like I used to. And there are a million other farm chores I just can’t get done. I need a helper, if you’re interested. I can offer you room and board and a small salary, and I’d be happy to look after your kids.”

I knew there were many questions I should ask her about the farm, what exactly I’d be doing, what our living quarters would be like, and what that “small salary” would be. As the only remaining parent for my little family, I ought to be making slow
and circumspect decisions. But I just couldn’t think of how any situation could be worse than the one we had now—me standing full days at a bank window with my toes crushed into the points of my brown pumps, the kids in aftercare until six every day, my mother harping on me to get my eyelashes dyed.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes to all of it.” I felt a tiny sting of anxiety. It was without a doubt the rashest decision I’d ever made.

“Terrific!” she said. “Why don’t you come out on Saturday?”

It was Friday. “Do you mean tomorrow?” I said. “New Year’s Eve?”

“Is the year over already?”

“It is.”

“Tomorrow, then!” Jean practically sang into the phone. “Just don’t bring your mother.”

My mother, in fact, had just marched out with all her suitcases, slamming the door behind her. “I don’t think you have to worry,” I said.

Looking back, Jean might have meant she wanted us to come out Saturday for a
visit
. But that’s not what I heard. Within an hour of hanging up, I had quit my job, had notified the kids’ schools that they wouldn’t be back after vacation, and was fighting an urge to hop in the car right that minute.

It took less than a day to load up everything we needed. Most of our furniture was still in storage, anyway, even after all this time. And the ease of our getaway forced me to wonder if I’d been half expecting this all along: that a moment would come when I would not just want, but absolutely
need
, to take flight.

Chapter 2
 

Just minutes after almost killing that girl Sunshine, I was back in the minivan, creeping at ten miles an hour around the town square and swearing up and down to be more careful. It was New Year’s Eve, for Pete’s sake. I was starting over. At the very least, I could manage to
not
kick off the year with vehicular manslaughter.

The square was so cute, it was almost cutesy—but I kept my eyes strictly on the road. Until we passed a sign that read,
WELCOME TO ATWATER, TEX.! POP
.
12,001! WE’RE GLAD YOU’RE HERE!

“We made it,” I told the kids, wondering who the “1” out of 12,001 might be. “What do you think of our new town?”

“Fancy,” Abby said.

“Do you know how many people live here?” I asked.

“How many?” Tank asked.

“Twelve thousand and one,” I said.

“I wonder who that ‘one’ is,” Abby said, and I felt that bittersweet flash of seeing yourself in your children.

“And they’re glad we’re here,” I added, just to make sure we all felt welcome.

“All of them?” Tank asked.

“All of them,” I confirmed.

“Except maybe for that lady we almost just killed,” Abby added.

I didn’t want to think about “that lady”—or what she’d said. I pushed her out of my mind with an ease that should have been alarming, even to me.

We fell silent for a minute as we turned onto Broken Tree Road. We were almost there, and we could all feel it.

“Where am I supposed to turn again, Tank?” I asked, already knowing the answer, as we neared the spot.

“At the red barn!” he shouted, kicking the back of my seat.

Jean’s directions were perfect. Next came the rusty windmill, then the rusty water tank, then the famous broken tree—which really was broken: an oak split in half by lightning but still going strong. And right after that, the gate. I’d barely even met the woman, and I knew right away it was hers. Starting with the purple wisteria growing on the entry posts—somehow magically in bloom in the middle of winter.

Abby knew, too. “This is it!” she shouted. “This is definitely it!”

We pulled over a cattle guard and up a gravel drive.

Tank yelled out, “I see the goats!”

Before I had even set the parking brake, the kids jumped out of the car. I felt an urge to say something ridiculous, like
“Don’t let them kick you with their pointy hooves!”
But then I changed my mind. How often do you get to run toward a new life with such abandon? As I watched them both tear across the yard, my gaze fell on Abby and the tiny limp left in her gait from the accident. Was it
noticeable? Would I see it if I didn’t know to look for it? I couldn’t tell. Like with anything you’ve studied too hard for too long, I couldn’t see it clearly anymore.

Of course, I didn’t really care about a tiny, almost imperceptible limp. I was just using Abby’s body as a measure of her heart. What I really wanted to know, and checked over and over impatiently, almost compulsively, was this: Had we put our sorrows behind us yet? Or would we carry them with us forever?

I heard a screen door slam and looked up to see Aunt Jean coming out of the side of one of the barns.

I knew her right away. She did not look filthy. She was not missing teeth. And she certainly wasn’t
“fat.”
Not the way my mother had said it, at least. She was more like
“plump.”
Or
“womanly.”
Or some other, kinder word. Her hair was white, cut in a short bob and tucked behind her ears. She had a round, cheery face with crinkles at the eyes, and if she’d had a poofy red dress, she could have passed easily for Mrs. Claus. She wore overalls and possibly the same straw hat I remembered from fifteen years before.

As soon as I saw her, walking across the farmyard in her muddy farm boots, I wanted to march up and give her a hug. But she beat me to it.

“You made it,” she said, squeezing me tight. She smelled like oranges.

“Thank you for rescuing us,” I said.

“It’s a bit overdue,” she said, explaining that a childhood friend of theirs had bumped into my mother over the holidays and gotten the scoop. “I’d have invited you here ages ago if I’d known.”

“Well,” I said with a shrug, “we’re here now.”

She gave me another hug. “At last.”

We walked toward the barns, where the kids were now wading through a mosh pit of goats.

“I see they’ve found the ladies,” Aunt Jean said.

“They’re not penned in?”

“The girls? Lord, no!”

“They just roam free? Don’t they escape?”

“No,” Jean said. “They like it here.”

I looked at the goats’ long, solemn faces, smooth and brown with enormous eyes. I’d been expecting the Billy Goats Gruff—little beards and conical horns. But these were smooth-haired and hornless, with long ears that flapped down past their chins, almost like overgrown bunnies. Except for the hooves, of course. And the enormous, exaggerated udders bouncing between their hind legs.

“Nubians,” Jean said, watching me watch them. “Creamiest milk in the world.”

“Abby warned her brother not to expect them to be wearing little human clothes like in Richard Scarry,” I said to Jean. We both let our eyes fall on Abby as three goats nuzzled her at once. “Which makes me think she was kind of hoping they would be.”

“No human clothes,” Jean confirmed. “But that’s not a bad idea.”

The farm had a whole collection of barns, ranging from tumbledown and rusty to brand-new and powder-coated. A wooded hill rose behind the farmyard, but the yard itself was a big clearing with a pond, a pigpen, and more enormous pecan trees than I could count. And, of course, farm machinery and animals everywhere.

From where I stood, I could see piglets, at least ten dogs of all different sizes, five or six cats, chickens galore, ducks, turkeys, some other birds I couldn’t identify, peacocks, and, of course, the goats.

“You sure have a lot of pets,” Tank called to Jean.

Jean smiled. “On a farm,” she called to him, “we just call them animals.”

She turned to me. “Everybody has a job here,” she explained, gesturing around. “The cats keep the mice away. The hens lay eggs. The dogs protect the chickens from the coyotes. The goats make milk.”

“What about the turkeys?” I asked. “What’s their job?”

“Their job is to be eaten,” she answered.

“What about those cute piglets?” I asked.

“Their job is to eat the whey that’s left over from making cheese.”

“Oh,” I said, a little relieved.

“And then to be eaten.”

“Oh,” I said again, making a mental note to keep the kids away from
Charlotte’s Web
.

“They won’t be nearly as cute by then,” she added.

“When will that be?” I asked.

“About two hundred pounds from now.”

Jean kept going, pointing at one group of birds and then another. “The peacocks’ job is to look pretty, and the guinea hens’ job is to drive me crazy.”

Tank started chasing a rooster that was almost as tall as he was.

“Tank!” I shouted. “Leave the bird alone!”

But Jean said, “That’s Dubbie. He can take care of himself.”

Now waist-deep in goats ourselves, we started making our way toward the kids. The rooster took off with a scrabble of wings, leaving Tank in the dust.

“What’s Dubbie’s job?” I asked.

Jean frowned at me for a second, then said, “His job is to make the sun come up every morning.”

Once we reached the children, we made formal introductions. Abby waved shyly at Aunt Jean, and Tank held out his hand to shake, the way he’d been taught in preschool. As we headed toward the vegetable garden, I explained to the kids that Aunt Jean had bought quilts for each of them when they were born.