Ask Him Why (28 page)

“Longtime dream, though.” His hands stopped moving. Just froze there, one holding a pan. One braced on a countertop. His gaze was stuck on the back patio. “Is that Hammy out there, wrapped in that blanket?”

“The one and only.”

“Talking to Mom?”

“I know. Weird, huh?”

“How long have they been doing that?”

“Probably close to half an hour now. I have no idea what’s going on.”

“Let it,” he said. “Whatever’s going on, just let it. Hammy has a way of winning people over.”

“I’ll say.”

I watched him register my comment. Take it in. But he didn’t address it.

He stared at the back patio for a moment longer. Then he shook his head. Like he was shaking cobwebs away. His hands moved again. And just for a minute, he was my big brother. I saw him that way. The way I’d seen him before all this happened. The way I’d looked up to him.

I thought about Luanne saying he was my brother, even back when I didn’t want him to be. I thought of that e-mail from Joseph, when he said the same thing.

Now I had to go back and reframe all those years when I thought he was gone. And no relation to me. I hate reframing. Always have.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked. Knocking me out of my own head. My own past.

“About what?”

“You going to stay in school?”

“Oh. That. I’m not sure. I really want to take a month or so. Since I’m not working, anyway. Just get away. You know? Get my head together. Especially after . . . you know. All this.” I tossed my head in the direction of Mom on the back patio. Joseph was part of “all this,” of course. Maybe the biggest part. But I didn’t toss my head in his direction. “Not sure where I would go, though. I don’t have a cent. I’ll be lucky if I can put enough gas in the bike to get home.”

He didn’t answer. At least, not for a long time. Long enough that I didn’t figure he had an answer. And why would he, really? It was my life. If I couldn’t figure it out, why should he?

He pulled the hot potatoes out of the microwave with his bare hands. Not bothering with oven mitts. Even though mitts were hanging a foot from his shoulder. That seemed like something I would do. One by one I watched him drop them, fast, onto the wood cutting board.

“You could come spend a month on a horse ranch in Colorado,” he said.

I didn’t answer for a long time.

Finally, when the silence was just about to swallow me, I said, “With you?”

“Well, it’s a big place. We wouldn’t be under each other’s feet all day long. But yeah. Basically. Yeah. The pay sucks. But at least it pays enough that you could afford to be there.”

“I’d have to think about that,” I said.

Which I figured was the most polite way to say no. Or at least not likely. I heard Ruth and the baby coming down the stairs. Heard Maya’s little morning coos. I knew I was almost out of time to talk to Joseph.

So I said, “Thanks for asking, though.”

He looked over his shoulder at me. As though there was somebody back there he hadn’t met yet.

“Open invite,” he said. “At least, as long as I’m there.”

Then Ruth and the baby were in the kitchen. Standing behind Joseph. Looking over his shoulder. And then Sean was there, too. Out of nowhere. And whatever moment we’d just had, Joseph and I, was gone. And I felt like I probably should have made more of it while it lasted.

“Hope you don’t mind that same breakfast as yesterday,” Joseph tossed over his shoulder. To exactly who, I wasn’t sure. Not me, though.

“Mind?” Sean said. “It’s all I’ve been able to think about.”

They sat at the table with me, and I took Maya onto my lap. And Sean and Ruth drank the rest of the coffee I’d made. And said it was good.

They didn’t notice that Mom and Hamish were still out back, lost in conversation. Or, likely, that they’d ever been. They didn’t ask where those two were.

Another twenty minutes or so passed in small talk. But I didn’t have to make any of it. Which was a relief.

That breakfast didn’t just throw itself together. It wasn’t like cereal poured into a bowl. Maybe that was part of the point of it. The ritual. The time to settle in with the company at hand.

Before he put the eggs in water to poach, Joseph ducked out back to see if Mom and Hamish were eating. That’s the first Ruth and Sean realized. The first they saw the little miracle on their back patio.

“How long has that been going on?” Ruth asked.

“Nearly an hour,” I said.

“Any idea what they’re talking about?”

“None.”

Then Joseph came back and shook his head.

“They’re going to keep talking,” he said. “I promised to save them some bacon and potatoes for reheating.”

We all looked at each other. Then, like anything else that can’t be understood, that can’t be influenced, we let it go by. We turned our attention elsewhere and just let it be.

It was nearly eleven a.m. when my mom came back inside. Joseph had gone off to take a shower. Sean had long since gone to work. Maya was down for a nap.

Ruth and I had been sitting together in the kitchen, mostly watching. Just watching that back patio in wonder.

When our mom came to the door and slid it open, Ruth and I sat up straighter. Looked only at each other. As if we’d been caught cheating. Leaning over and looking at the wrong paper.

“Hey, Mom,” Ruth said.

“Good morning, dear,” she said in return. She seemed relaxed.

“You two have a good talk?” I asked.

“We did. It’s very hard not to like that man. Even if you’re trying.”

A silence fell. Surrounding the obvious question. I wasn’t sure if I should ask it. So I breathed a sigh of relief when Ruth asked for me.

“What were you two talking about all that time?”

“Oh, everything,” she said. Helping herself to a mug of coffee from the morning’s second pot. “Just about every aspect of being alive. But mostly we talked about the opposite. You know. Dying. I have cancer and he’s ninety-six. So we have that in common.”

“Thought he was ninety-five,” Ruth said.

“Well, I’m sure he was, dear. But now he’s ninety-six. Anyway. It was nice to just put that dying thing out on the table. I feel ever so much more settled about it now.”

Just then, Maya woke up from her nap. We could hear her crying from upstairs.

“Oh, let
me
, dear,” our mom said, and hurried out of the room. Abandoning her coffee. It was probably pretty old.

Ruth and I just looked at each other. Then we shook our heads.

Ruth said, “Ham told me once that the problem with people is that we forget that something unexpected can happen at any time.”

I thought the last couple of days had been a pretty good example. I didn’t say so.

All I said was, “I’d better go help him back inside.”

I sat with Joseph in the kitchen while he cleaned up after their late breakfast. Sat with him on purpose. I should have offered to help. But I was frozen, and it never occurred to me at the time.

I wasn’t talking. I wanted him to ask a question to open me up.
Penny for your thoughts?
Something along those lines. But that was stupid. A day earlier, I might’ve decked him for a question like that.

If I wanted to talk, I was just going to have to do it.

“Know what I was just thinking?” I asked at last. My voice sounded a little shaky. To me. I wasn’t sure how it sounded on his side of the kitchen.

“No, but I hope you’ll tell me.”

“Remember that first letter I wrote to you in prison?”

“Very well. I read it a dozen times. At least. I still have it.”

I could have paused. Ridden the emotional shock waves of that moment. I didn’t. I plowed forward.

“I absolutely promised you I was never going to judge anybody without knowing the whole story.”

“Yeah, you did,” he said. With no further commentary.

“That turned out to be kind of a joke, didn’t it?”

“I noticed even at the time that you were judging other people for judging. But, hey. You were thirteen.”

“But now I’m not,” I said.

“No. Now you’re not.”

Nobody said anything for a long time. I got up and grabbed a dish towel and helped him dry. Nearly shoulder to shoulder like that. We were almost exactly the same height.

“I’m not sure the message is to kick yourself for making the mistake,” he said after a few plates.

“What’s the message?”

“You should ask Hammy. That’s more or less his specialty.”

We washed and dried in silence for a few minutes more.

Then he said, “Maybe that the things we tend to criticize in other people are actually pretty easy mistakes to make. Maybe it’s just something we see them falling into in that moment. And maybe we’re not above doing the same. Maybe it’s just our turn to fall into that mistake some other time.”

“I wasn’t trying to. I didn’t set out to be judgmental. I think I was just trying to protect myself.”

“Maybe nobody sets out to be judgmental. Maybe everybody’s just trying to protect themselves. From one thing or another.”

I didn’t answer. Because I didn’t know what to say.

We washed and dried the rest of the dishes in absolute silence. But not a particularly uncomfortable one. We didn’t try to repair the world. Forever mend that flaw in human nature. We couldn’t, so we just let it be. As far from ideal as we both knew it was.

We just figuratively nodded at it. And then we finished the dishes.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Ruth

The weirdest thing happened on the actual day we hosted Thanks-giving.

It went fine.

Sean and Joseph and Aubrey ducked in and out of the kitchen, providing backup services to the cook, who was me. On an informal rotating basis, one would take Maya and play with her and keep her happy while the other two chopped onions and celery and peeled potatoes and basted the turkey every few minutes.

I don’t mean to make it sound idyllic, because it wasn’t quite like that. Ham was exhausted and weak and barely moved—just sat in the living room and waited for the meal to be served. Sean had the football game up too loud so he could hear it in the kitchen, and I think it might have bothered Hammy, but he was too polite to say. Aubrey was a little sullen—not combative and not openly hostile to anyone, but a little too quiet, as if lost in the landscape of his own brain.

Probably the biggest flaw of the day was Mom, though it wasn’t her fault and I have to give her credit for doing her best. She would try to be involved—sit in the kitchen and talk to me while I cooked, for example—but then she had to excuse herself and lock herself in the bathroom every few minutes. The sounds that emerged were strange and upsetting, like a cross between coughing and choking, and it was very clear to everyone who heard them that her health had significantly changed just in the three days since she’d showed up here. It was alarming, to say the least.

But the meal was terrific. Mom only had to excuse herself twice. Maya fussed because she didn’t want to sit in her high chair, so Joseph lifted her down and took charge of her, letting her sit in his lap all through dinner and feeding her yams and mashed potatoes, and a little bit of buttered roll.

It was just like anybody else’s Thanksgiving dinner, I figured, just like so many of them all across the country that day, only I guessed it was better than the majority. Nobody took the conversation in any controversial political directions. Nobody got on anybody else about their job or relationship choices. Nobody raised their voice.

We just came together with all our flaws still intact and managed to spend a few hours without using them as weapons against anybody else, keeping their sharp edges in where they wouldn’t draw blood from anybody near.

Like a family.

Which felt weird to me. I guess I’d always had this loose image of what a family might look like, or how one might function, but I never imagined it had any particular relevance to my life. I knew better than to believe a family was anything like the ones you saw on TV, and my own experience was disaster oriented at almost all times, but I knew—if only from the family I’d begun to form with Sean and Maya—that there was such a thing as people functioning together. Maybe not every minute of every day, but long enough to form a decent holiday. Maybe even a decent life.

I looked over at Ham, who barely looked strong enough to hold his own fork aloft, and remembered asking him if I would screw up my kids the same way my parents had done to me. He’d said it wasn’t mandatory. That I could heal myself first. I didn’t think I was fully healed, not for a second, but I must have been somewhere on that road, because I loved Maya and she knew it.

It’s that second part that really counts.

Near the end of the meal, Ham weakly raised his glass of wine and tapped it with a butter knife, and we all gave him our attention.

“A toast,” he said, and everybody’s wine glass lifted—everybody
joined him except Maya, even though we had no idea where he was going with this. “To those of us who are here today . . . who won’t be here next year at this time.”

I watched my mom from the corner of my eye to see how she felt about all that honesty being dragged out onto the table, but she seemed fine.

“Hear, hear,” she said, and took a long drink. She was on her fourth glass, which might help explain her easygoing attitude.

Then the moment passed, but the conversation never resumed. The toast plunged us into a moment of awkwardness, and nobody knew how to talk through it. I was thinking about my mom, only about my mom, and the sadness of knowing how little time we had left with her. Difficult though she may have been, with Brad long gone away, losing her amounted to orphan status for Aubrey and me.

Oh. And Joseph. Sorry. Not sure why I forgot to include him in that. Though, I must say, I thought it would be a much greater shock to Aubrey and me. I think Joseph had been feeling like an orphan for years.

It never occurred to me that Ham’s toast was intended for anyone else but my mom. Looking back, that seems naïve. I’m not sure why it never broke through to me that his toast might have been aimed at both of them.

I guess you mostly see what you’re ready to see.

“I’ll help you clean up this mess,” Joseph said as we pushed back from the table, “but then Hammy and I have to get back on the road.”

“Oh,” I said, stunned by my own disappointment. “You’re not staying?”

I’d been enjoying our weird moment of normalcy, and not realizing it intended to break itself up so soon.

“Can’t,” he said. “Sorry. Have to drive all night again. I fly back to Colorado in the morning. I have a guy filling in for me at the ranch. I’m lucky he has no family he particularly wanted to see, but I told him I’d be back the day after the holiday. It’s a lot for him to do all by himself.”

Aubrey spoke up, which surprised everyone. Well, I know it surprised me, and it seemed to surprise everybody else, too, because Aubrey had been unusually silent throughout the day.

“You can take off,” he said to Joseph. “I’ll help Ruth get this all cleaned up. But then I’m heading back tonight, too.”

I looked at my mom, not sure what I was hoping to hear her say.

“Mom?”

“Yeah, I think I’ll drive back tonight, too, honey. Don’t think I don’t know that three or four days is a lot of me. It’s time I got out of you kids’ hair.”

But I knew we wouldn’t let her go that night. Not after four glasses of wine. Sean would corral her and get her to go to bed in the guest room, because Sean was good with my mom, and she would sleep it off and head home in the morning.

“I’ll help you clean up,” Sean added. He knew I was off balance now—I could tell.

“Don’t tell me
you’re
leaving,
too
, after that,” I said to him.

Everyone laughed, though maybe a little nervously, and then the room more or less emptied out. Aubrey began to clear the table. Joseph and Ham and my mom went off to get their belongings together.

Sean hung by my side for a moment, knowing I needed some reassurance.

“Don’t worry,” he said when we had the room to ourselves, “I’ll talk her out of driving tonight.”

“Thank you,” I said, and pushed into the safety of his side as he put his arm around me. “That was weird,” I added.

“I know it ended kind of suddenly—”

“No. All of it. The whole day was weird.”

“I thought it went really well.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

He chewed that over for a few seconds. Then he said, “Yeah. I guess if you look at it that way, it
was
kind of weird.”

Aubrey and I were standing shoulder to shoulder at the sink when Joseph came down to say good-bye, Aubrey washing and me drying. Joseph came up behind Aubrey and gave him a bear hug from behind, pinning his upper arms to his sides, and I wondered if he had purposely chosen a moment when Aubrey was not prepared to resist.

Aubrey had no particular reaction that I could see—he didn’t welcome the embrace and he didn’t resist it.

When Joseph let go, he handed a piece of paper over Aubrey’s shoulder—held it there until Aubrey could see what it was. I could see it, too, though I couldn’t read every word and number, but it was clearly Joseph’s address and phone number in Colorado.

Aubrey only nodded in silence, dried his hands, and stuck the paper deep into his jeans pocket.

Then Joseph turned his attention to me. I faced him and took the embrace head-on, holding him tightly in return—feeling how much I had lost ten years ago, really only understanding the loss now that I had him back.

“Come out and say good-bye to Hammy,” he said into my ear. “He’s exhausted and I’m trying to save him all the steps I can.”

I pulled out of my big brother’s arms. “Think he’ll be okay riding in the car all night?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Nothing puts Hammy to sleep like a moving car. He’ll sleep like a baby all the way home.”

We walked together to the front door, where Ham leaned on his cane, looking more stooped than I’d ever seen him.

He held his arms out to me and I gathered him up, and held him up, and we locked into each other in that singular exchange I’d never experienced until the first time I said good-bye to Ham at age fifteen.

“Ruthie,” he said into my ear, and his voice sounded small and a little bit sad. Wistful, at least. “Dear, dear Ruthie. Remember the last time I bid you good-bye? I said you weren’t shut o’ this old man just yet. Wish I could say that again, my dear girl, but I’m thinking this might be it for us, so let’s make it good.”

I just held him, as instructed, feeling his words sink in. Feeling a tingle along my arms and legs as I processed the loss of him. Not that I hadn’t had plenty of time to see it coming.

“I won’t see you again?” I asked sheepishly, and I sounded like a child to myself—like a little girl, whining just slightly, whether she meant to or not.

“Well, maybe I’ll be wrong,” he said. “It’s been known to happen before. But one way or another, I’ll see you again, Ruthie. I’ll see you on the other side, if nothing else.” Then he pulled out of my embrace and pointed a bent old finger at my nose. “Just promise me you’ll keep me waiting a very long time.”

Then he reached out for Joseph, who took him by the arm and supported his nearly nonexistent weight all the way out to the car.

I waved.

They both waved back.

Then they were gone.

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving when I had the dream, only three days after everybody packed up and returned to their very separate lives.

I dreamed I was walking south on a high cliff over the ocean—not the exact high cliff Ham lived on, but a stretch of coast very much like it—with the two-lane Highway 1 off to my left. Sometimes the road would pull farther away from my path on the cliff, and other times the two practically ran together.