Autumn Blue (2 page)

With a deep sigh, she blew a strand of blond-streaked hair from her eyes, dropping her head back as if hoping to see the answers
to all her questions through an open window to heaven. Instead she saw the dark crack that ran along the peak of the double-wide
mobile home’s ceiling. The house was coming apart at the seams—literally. And yet, she couldn’t complain. It was better than
their apartment in the old Victorian mansion in town on the corner of Elm and Prentice. At least here she had her own washer
and dryer and the kids had a big yard to play in. They owed the move to the dog. The decision was actually made by their former
landlord in response to complaints of a constant pounding—the sound of Duke’s heavy tail beating against the wall in Tyson’s
room.

Sidney had been thrilled to find this house. Miraculously, it didn’t cost that much more than the apartment and it was better
for all of them, only a couple of miles from town and with a new stretch of woods for Ty to explore right from their backyard.
The house itself would never grace the pages of
Traditional Home
despite Sidney’s talent for interior design. That was her intended major in college, before she got pregnant and dropped
out to have Ty. No, about all she could afford to do with this place was keep it clean and try to have matching towels out
for company when they came.

She should have married Jack Mellon when she had the chance. That might have changed everything. Surely it would have. Jack
and Ty had really hit it off, right from the start. Had it been two years since she broke up with Jack? He used to take her
son to baseball games and taught him to fly remote-control airplanes in the pasture across from the elementary school. There
were other boys Ty’s age there too, mostly with their dads, and they all met down at the Pizza Barn afterward. Jack was a
nice guy, a butcher. Looking back, Sidney realized there had been a sparkle in her son’s brown eyes that she couldn’t remember
seeing since.

The thought had been nagging at her for months now. So what if she hadn’t felt any chemistry with Jack? Was that a valid reason
for depriving her son of what he needed more desperately than protein or vitamin C or a good night’s sleep? What was it about
her that wouldn’t allow the chemistry to happen? Was she waiting for another bad boy to come along? A man like Dodge? Someone
who would keep her living on the edge? She shuddered. If she had it all to do over again, she’d marry Jack in a heartbeat.

She remembered Tyson as a small boy, the delightful sound of his giggles, the way he adored his baby sisters. He had been
content to play alone for hours. Even while other children played tag nearby, Ty seemed to prefer the cavelike hollow beneath
the big rhododendron outside their kitchen window, where she could hear the boy-sounds of rumbling truck engines while she
peeled potatoes for dinner. Once she had waited for him at the edge of a stand of trees while he followed a brown rabbit into
the underbrush. She heard him thrash through the dry leaves for some time and then a momentary silence before his tiny voice
wafted through the low branches. “Mommy, where are me?”

But Tyson was really lost this time. It was as if he had been swept out to sea beneath her very nose. It all happened so gradually
that she hadn’t noticed how dangerous the undercurrent really was. By the time she realized how far her son had drifted, there
seemed to be no lifeline long enough to reach him. He had slowly become a mere speck on the horizon—and then she couldn’t
see him at all.

M
ILLARD BRADBURY’S EYES
opened at precisely 7:45 A.M., right on schedule and without the benefit—or the curse—of an alarm. He swung his feet to the
hardwood floor, where his leather slippers awaited, parked side by side like a couple of polished brown sedans nosed to a
curb.

At the bathroom sink he shaved the face of a stranger. Pouches had formed under the blue eyes, and lines arced away from the
corners and down his cheeks like streams from a fan sprinkler. The mouth sagged downward as if it might soon slide right off
his chin. He forced it up into a smile, searching the image in the mirror for any sign of the man he once knew. Gone. Not
even a glimmer of recognition in the old man’s eyes.

He dressed and made up the bed, fluffing the fat shammed pillows and leaning them against the headboard along with a smaller,
decorative one just like Molly used to do. His floor exercises were next: the back stretches his doctor had prescribed, some
leg lifts, and a few push-ups. After a cup of instant coffee (why brew a pot for just one person?) and a banana sliced onto
a bowl of crunchy Grape-Nuts (at least his teeth were still good) he retrieved the
Winger County Herald
from the front porch.

There was a slight nip in the air but the sky was blue. He leaned against the porch rail and dropped the paper to his side.
A red-winged blackbird emitted its liquid warble from the deep ditch at the edge of a vacant field on the west side of the
house. From the woods beyond, other bird voices twittered and sang. Molly could have identified each of them by their voices
alone. She would have made him stop to listen—if she were there. He scanned his lawn as he did every morning for any sign
of an invading dandelion having successfully parachuted over the picket fence into his territory while he slept. His grass
remained like carpet, the plush, expensive kind, with precision-cut edges curving along neatly landscaped borders where perennial
shrubs shaded broad-leafed hostas.

The winesap apple tree strained under the weight of its dappled-red fruit. Hah! He had been right about pruning it back to
only a small umbrella two seasons ago. Molly had wrung her hands and whined the whole time, warning that he was butchering
the poor thing. Gave it a good military haircut, he did, and it was better off for it. What he would do with all those apples
was a worry to him, though. His pantry shelves were still lined with jars of cinnamon applesauce and apple butter, his freezer
stuffed with zip-closed bags labeled Pie-Fixings in Molly’s flowing cursive hand.

A door slammed across the street. That lady from the trailer-house had emerged, arms full, bending at the knees while trying
to lock the house up as her two girls headed down the steps and got into the car. He had met her at the mailbox not long after
the family moved in and the For Rent sign was yanked out of the yard. She was a nice enough young lady, he guessed. No husband.
Not much meat on her bones, but she dressed neatly and wore her dark blond hair like she put some effort into it. Not at all
like her yard, which was a downright eyesore to the neighborhood with patches of grass and weeds growing down the middle of
the gravel driveway, a couple of scraggly half-dead azalea bushes clinging to the cementlike dirt, and a bent downspout hanging
off one corner of the double-wide house.

She had a boy, too, a boy old enough to be out there mowing those patches of grass and getting up on a ladder to secure that
downspout. But on rare sightings the kid had clattered down the blacktop road on a skateboard, baggy pants at half-mast, his
tufted hair, even from a distance, looking as mangy as their lawn. Millard blew out a disgusted sigh, remembering how he had
hoped the kid’s pants would slip down and hog-tie him. Why, when he was that age, every boy he knew had chores after school,
and there was no fishing or pasture baseball games until the chicken coops were clean, eggs gathered, firewood cut, fences
mended, and anything else that needed doing done. He shook his head, turning to go inside. Punk kids nowadays. Wouldn’t know
how to do an honest day’s work if their life hinged on it.

He shook the paper open, pulled his reading glasses from his shirt pocket, and sank into the worn blue recliner by the picture
window. First he perused the obituaries (seemed like the only contact he had with old peers anymore, their entire lives summed
up in a few neat paragraphs). He then worked the crossword until his daughter’s pale blue Chevy pulled into the drive. She
pushed through the front door with a grocery sack in each arm. “Hi, Dad. How are you feeling?” She bent to kiss the top of
his forehead. “You should be wearing a sweater. It’s not summer anymore. Where’s your gray cardigan?” She proceeded to the
kitchen to begin her weekly ritual. He heard cupboards opening and closing. “Nicole has her first cheerleader gig Friday night—first
football game of the season. I hope this weather holds. You know those girls are going to freeze their little tushies when
it gets colder. And they just hate to bundle up and cover their cute little outfits.”

“I need a six-letter word for ‘jump.’ Starts with a
p
.”

He heard the suction-release sound of the fridge opening. “Prance?”

“Pounce.” That’s right. Why hadn’t he thought of it? He penned the letters into the appropriate boxes.

“You haven’t even touched this squash, have you, Dad?” She sounded hurt that he had not appreciated her boiling and mashing
the disgusting gourd’s flesh into a stringy pulp. “You know you need the vitamin A, Dad. It’s good for your eyesight. What
are you going to do when you can’t see anymore? No crossword puzzles, no
Wheel of Fortune
. That won’t be any fun, will it?”

Nine across had him stumped. He gazed out the window. Seven letters with a
d
in the middle, meaning “inner substance.” “I just saw a starling drop a bomb on that shiny blue car out there,” he said.
The splat on Rita’s windshield was purple. It was a good year for blackberries. They hung like grapes from tangled vines on
the far side of the field next door. He might go out and pick another coffee can full if he felt like it that afternoon.

Rita came around the corner and peered out the front-room window as if she didn’t believe him. She clicked her tongue and
shook her head. “Nasty birds.

“Well, don’t take anything for granted,” she continued. “Not your eyesight or anything else. At your age every day of good
health is a gift.”

“Oh,” he said, “and everyone else’s is under specific warranty?”

“You need to take care of yourself, Dad. That’s all I’m saying.” Once Rita was on a certain track, she was not easily derailed.
She headed back to the kitchen and he heard her loading this week’s supply of frozen dinners—leftovers from her family’s meals
divided into sections in plastic containers—onto the freezer shelves. “Which reminds me, Dad. It’s time to get your prostate
checked again. What was your PSA count last time?”

He slapped his pen to the newspaper in his lap. So, his life had come to this. “I don’t remember.” Of course, he knew the
moment the words escaped that they were grounds for suspicion of the onset of Alzheimer’s. “I peed twice today so far. It
was as yellow as lemonade and I flushed both times. My bowels are regular, blood pressure maintaining at 125 over 80. Is there
anything else you’d like to know?”

Rita came out and stood over him, her arms crossed, her face pinched. His pretty little girl was beginning to look middle-aged.
Her throat had become minutely wrinkled like the pink crepe paper hung for her birthdays back when she was a child and he
was clearly an adult. Had it been so long since the feet she stomped wore little Mary Jane shoes? She tilted her head defiantly,
clamping her hands on her full hips. “I’m sorry, Dad.” She certainly was not. “But these things need to be discussed, whether
you’re comfortable with it or not. If Mom were here, she’d be the one asking, not me. But she’s not here and I’m all you’ve
got. This isn’t easy for me either, you know. I lost my mother, but I’m not sitting around moping and giving up on life. And
it’s not like I don’t have anything better to do. I’m in charge of the Girl Scouts craft projects this fall. I’ve got play
costumes to make, soccer practices, piano lessons, you name it.” She sighed, looking down at him like he was a hopeless cause.
It was the resigned, dutiful sigh of a martyr bravely accepting her fate.

Giving up on life. What was there to give up? “Then don’t worry about me,” he scowled. “I told you before that you don’t have
to dote on me. I can make my own suppers, for Pete’s sake.”

“But you won’t. You’d live on bologna sandwiches and corn dogs if I let you.” She sat on the edge of the sofa, leaning toward
him. “As long as you live here in this big old house all by yourself, I’m just going to worry about you, Dad. I wish you’d
reconsider about going to Haywood House. It’s a nice place. You get your own little apartment, so you’d have your treasured
privacy, but there are other people just like you there. You can get to know them in the dining room at mealtimes, maybe meet
some friends that like to play chess or put together jigsaw puzzles. And wouldn’t it be nice to know that there are doctors
and nurses right there on staff?”

It would take the self-imposed pressure off her, anyway. He wished she would go now. Leave him before the last hull of manhood
was shucked away, exposing only a withered pea, a nothing, with no higher purpose than to put together cardboard jigsaw puzzles
until he returned to the dust from which he came. He already knew this about himself, of course. But it was a truth better
left untouched, unexplored. It was best to keep to the rhythm of his daily routine, biding away the hours with pleasant distractions
and the self-imposed orders of the day. His battles were no longer fought against Soviet MiGs, but airborne dandelion seeds
that dared invade the airspace inside the perimeter of his picket fence. Gone were the glory days of coaching the wrestling
team at Silver Falls High School over in Dunbar—state champions six years out of ten. Not bad for a hick-town farm-boy team.
But now his greatest mission was to solve the before-and-after puzzle on
Wheel of Fortune
before anyone bought the last vowel.

He glanced at his watch and pushed up from his chair. “The mail should be here now.” He paused when he passed her to touch
Rita’s soft red hair. “I’ll be good,” he promised, “as long as you don’t make me eat any more of that baby-puke squash.”