Friendswood (39 page)

S
HE
STOPPED JUST ONCE
on the way to Denison, at a Stuckey's to use the bathroom and buy the praline candy that Jack used to love. She lingered in the souvenirs aisle. When they used to stop on their long car trips, the three of them would browse those cluttered shelves. There was a cowboy doll with rope legs, a longhorn steer with a lamp glued to his forehead, shot glasses picturing the shape of Texas centered on a yellow rose. Lee preferred the old-fashioned souvenirs—the bronze lasso, the small replica of the Alamo. In front of the shoe-sized fort, tiny men with guns and knives. She bought that one for Jack.

On the highway, she drove past the billboard with the scolding faces of newscasters, three in a row like the fates, past the sign for the
FRIENDLIEST TOWN IN THE WOR
LD
, and past the telephone poles racing beside her. She was listening to an old-time country radio station, Hank Williams's jokey, yodeled songs.

Before she left, she'd waited for weeks for the phone call, for the police to show up at her door. Wesley White had come to her house in his squad car a few days after the explosion. He was nearly apologetic for having to ask her where she was that night, and then, relieved, when she told him she'd been home, sending out emails, and then he was eager to ask her questions about what she knew about Taft. But she hadn't assumed that was the end of it. She thought they'd have come for her by now—that the
boy would have relented under questions and told them the truth—but somehow the urgency of what to do with Banes Field seemed to have dulled the will to find anyone to blame besides Avery Taft. In the days since that night, even seeing her old Rosemont neighbors on the news (Michelle Smalls grinned at the camera, Maisie Rodgers pointed a finger down at the ground), Lee had not felt much triumph. That all seemed beyond her now. Cully (and this was a mystery in him that she wondered about) had stuck to his story, insisted he'd seen a group of men scatter right after the explosions. He even mentioned a baseball cap, the hood of a sweatshirt.

Lee drove past a sign that said
CAN YOU HEAR HIM?
GOD IS TELLING YOU S
OMETHING,
and beyond it, a billboard with a picture of a young Latina smiling slyly with a cigarette in her hand. She passed a long field of slow cows with unseeing, pale heads, and then a train sped beside the highway, the bright rectangles shuddering past. For now, she had this day and the next, and maybe all of them. She checked the dashboard. In forty miles, she would be there.

She turned into the subdivision with the green rectangular sign
PINE GLEN
, and drove in circles through three cul-de-sacs before she found his street, situated on the edge of things, an open lot in the back of it filled with the trees, the house made of white stone with a large gold star pressed into the brick by the front door. It had been ten years since she had seen him, and she was skinnier now, more drawn in the face, a lot more tired. She stood at the door, hands shaking, her heart running around in her chest.

When he opened the door, the first thing she noticed was his head—all his hair gone except a silvery feather over his right temple. His eyebrows were gone too. He wiped his hand over his tan baldness and grinned.

“Get in here,” he said, and kissed her. His breath smelled like dirt, but she liked it.

He led her through the living room, and into the TV room behind it, where he sat down on a threadbare orange couch.

“I brought you some things.” She put the paper bag and box on the ground and took out the candy, the boxed souvenir, the record player and records.

With his long ears and thin cheeks, Jack looked like a handsome alien. She gave him the candy first, and from his expression, he liked the sight of the gold box, the muscles of his forehead moving where his eyebrows would have been if he still had them.

“Good to see you, babe. I look old, don't I?” He opened the box of candy, took a bite, and chewing, put the piece back into its wrapper.

She saw how tired he was. “And then I brought you the record player and these old things. Where can I plug it in?”

“Oh, somewhere around here.”

She set up the record player on a card table with a green leathery top that was pushed against the wall. She knelt down and found the outlet behind the table leg, inserted the plug, stood up, put on the record, and then went to sit next to him.

“Old Ernest Tubb,” he said, settling back into the cushions. He patted his chest and lowered his eyes. “Eight more weeks of treatment,” he said. “I guess I can't eat a thing except candy.”

“I brought you a miniature Alamo,” she said.

He studied the picture on the box. “Remember the Alamo, huh? Keep up the fight.” One by one, he took out the pieces, the fort that was also a sanctuary, the tiny figures. His finger traced the arched line of the roof, and he shook his head, smiling. “She had one of these, didn't she?” A faint pink streamed into his cheeks. “That trip we took to the hill country and then over to San Antonio.” He rearranged the small, metal figures, took more from the box and set them on the table. “Are you thirsty?” He got up and started to head for the door. “Let me get you some water.”

She might have him with her only for a short while. They didn't have any plans. “Come over here,” she said. “Come back.”

S
ATURDAY MORNING,
light waving through the curtains into the kitchen, where they'd set up the souvenirs from their trip, the Alamo fort carved out of cheap wood, the metal figures of Jim Bowie and Sam Houston and their men. The brass horse. The barn dyed red, with its tiny cows with suede hides. The Mexican adobe village.

Jack had taken Jess, six years old, out on her bike with the training wheels earlier, and their faces were still flushed and shiny. Now Jess sat between them, moving the pieces from one side of the table to the other with her fat fingers, setting up a city, talking for the soldiers, talking for the cows. “Do you like the city I made?” They were all a family. They were all going to have a party.

Years later, when Jess learned the story of the battle for the Alamo mission, the standoff, the cannonball fire, Bowie's collapse, and the line Travis drew in the dirt to separate out the traitors, she recited the story again to whoever would listen. Each time she told it, it was as if it were new. She used the Alamo model for her history project, and kept it safe on her dresser. All that year, she loved setting the wooden pieces in their places, then taking the scene apart.

The new Alamo sat on the table now in the window light, the tiny flag the size of a Band-Aid, the rough arches and mock-stone walls painted in detail, the little men with their rifles and knives drawn up to strike. There was a pioneer woman too, in a long skirt, with one arm reached up in the air, the other wrapped around the shoulder of her child.

First, I want to thank my agent, PJ Mark, and my editor, Sarah McGrath. I'd also like to thank Meagan Brown, Sarah Stein, and everyone else at Riverhead Books who helped bring this book to publication.

Early in my conception of this novel, I was inspired by reading Barbara Rossing's
The Rapture Exposed
,
and I'm indebted to Mark Schwehn for recommending it to me. For conversations that helped me find my way to the story, I'm grateful to all of my old friends in Friendswood, especially Diane Benson, Denise Hearn, and Dannielle Thomas, and also to my East Coast friends, Walter Cummins, Ariel Levy, Meredith Rollins, Darcey Steinke, Karen Wunsch, and Stephanie Paulsell.

For their careful, generous readings of this novel in its many incarnations over the years, I owe immeasurable gratitude to: Jennifer Werner, Minna Proctor, Dannielle Thomas (again), Martha McPhee, Elizabeth Mitchell, Natalie Standiford, Jena Salon, Thomas E. Kennedy, Ira Silverberg, Robert Polito, Craig Marks, and Rita Signorelli Pappas. For space, food, country music, and endless edits, a huge thanks to the Masonville Collective, Rebecca Chace, David Grand, and Ken Buhler.

I'm grateful to Fairleigh Dickinson University for providing released time and in other ways supporting this project, and I'm thankful to all of my students, particularly Gloria Beth Amodeo, who assisted me early on with research, and Warren Denney. I'm also especially indebted to the amazing students and faculty in the MFA program.

For their support and inspiration, thanks to my parents, Peter and Kelly, and to my siblings, Tim, Krista, and Matt. And most of all, thanks to my son,
Porter.