Good Hope Road (24 page)

Nate turned his face away from me and raised his arm, laying it across his eyes. “Tell him not to call me that again.” His voice trembled as he spoke.

I knew it wasn’t the pain that had made him cry.

I sat on the side of the bed, stroking my hand up and down his arm. “Ssshhhh,” I whispered. “Ssshhhh
.”

Drew came back with a pain pill and a glass of water. Nate was almost asleep, but he sat up and took the medicine, then lay back and closed his eyes. I stayed with him, my hand on his chest as his breaths grew long and slow. Drew waited in the doorway.

Finally I stood up and walked out of the room with Drew. He crossed the living room and went out the door to the front porch, as if he couldn’t stand to be in that house. I stood uncertainly by the sofa, old feelings dripping over me like thick black ink. I understood why, once he had broken free, Drew didn’t want to come back to this place.

I followed him onto the porch.

He didn’t turn around, just stood with his hands braced on the railing, looking past Mama’s oleander bush, toward the hay fields. “Looks like the electric is still out, but there’s plenty of water in the storage tank, so it ought to feed into the house all right. Go ahead in and get something to eat and a shower, if you want to. I’ll go out and feed Daddy’s cows.”

I wondered why he wanted to get away from me. “I promised old man Jaans I’d feed his cows and look for that old white bull of his,” I said. “He’s been running loose again, getting into trouble ever since the storm.”

“I’ll go on down there and take a look around, then come back through our pasture and feed Daddy’s cattle. I’ll be back after a while.” He pushed off the porch rail and hurried down the steps and across the lawn, without looking back.

Just like before
. A note of panic went through me
. Just like the last time he left.

I walked to the yard fence and closed the gate behind him as he climbed into his truck. Even though I knew he was coming back, deep within me was the fear that he would leave Good Hope Road behind again.

My hand touched a piece of paper tangled in the rusty wire of the gate. I pulled it free and stood looking at it. The handwriting was different, not lacy and feminine like that of the first letter, but the paper was familiar, old, yellowed by time.

It felt crisp and brittle in my hands as I unfolded it and read the words, whispering them into the silent air.

The letter ended there, as if he had never finished it, or didn’t know how to, or didn’t want to. Had he left it for her? Had she found it, or had it been waiting hidden somewhere when the tornado came, and she wasn’t supposed to find it yet?

I read the letter again, whispering the words into the still afternoon air
. You led me forward, a single step in faith, and then another, and another, until I had walked far from the shadows of the past
. Was it possible to walk, one step at a time, away from the past until it didn’t matter anymore?

Somewhere in the distance thunder rumbled, like the growl of something old, and black, and ugly. I folded the letter and hurried into the house. Dropping the letter on the table, I checked on Nate, then went to the bathroom, slipped off my clothes, washed up, and put on clean jeans and a T-shirt.

I stood in the doorway of Nate’s bedroom, watching him sleep. Leaning against the doorframe, I looked at his clothes strewn all over the room, his baseball cleats hung on the bedpost, his football trophies covered with the collection of dirty, ragged ball caps he would never throw away.

Every inch of the room whispered of Nate and his silly, disorganized, seat-of-the-pants way of living. Nate never brooded or got angry like Drew. He never got afraid and quiet like me. He never tried to think things out ahead of time, or to plan for what might happen, or to try to steer clear of trouble. Nate dove in headfirst without checking to see how deep the water was. No rules, no fear, no worries.

Even Daddy’s rages didn’t seem to bother him. He’d stand there while Daddy hollered and carried on, told him how stupid and worthless all of us were. Nate could turn it all off. He’d shrug and say, “He’s just drunk,” like that explained everything. I always wondered how Nate could do that. I wished I could be like him.

The rumble of a diesel engine coming up the road rattled the edges of my consciousness.
Shad’s truck
. Tires squealed, rattling the glass in the front door as I slipped my shoes on and went outside.

Shad’s truck was shuddering to a halt in our driveway with a flatbed trailer carrying a bulldozer fishtailing behind it. Shad threw the door open, climbed out, then slammed it shut so hard it hit the side of the truck and bounced open again.

Something inside me tightened into a knot. He looked just like he used to back in high school, jealous and possessive, angry most of the time. I’d thought he was different since he came back from Montana. He’d been quieter, less rowdy, less interested in running around drinking with his friends, easier to talk to.

Now he had that wild look in his eye again as he stopped on the other side of the yard fence. “You could let me know where you’re gonna be! I went back to the armory to pick you up, and they said you weren’t there no more.”

“I’m sorry.” What was I apologizing for? Just as in the past, I felt I was to blame for every argument between us
. Just like Mama and Daddy . . .

Something pink blew by and I picked it up. A napkin from somebody’s wedding last June.
Steve and Jenny, two hearts, one love . . .

Shad glanced at the napkin in my hands. “Just leave that stuff in the ditch. It’ll blow away in a day or two.”

“I don’t want it to blow away,” I said. “I’m picking up pictures and other things to take to the armory, so that people can come and find some of what they lost.”

“Doubt if anybody gives a rat about that stuff when the whole town’s been tore up.” He grabbed playfully at the scrap of pink tissue, and I held it away.

“It matters if it’s all you’ve got left.” I folded the napkin and stuck it in my pocket.

Shad let out a sarcastic laugh. “You’re ignorant sometimes. You sure you didn’t get knocked in the head yesterday?”

Heat boiled on the back of my neck and spilled into my face, but I didn’t say anything. He knew I wouldn’t.

“Let’s go to my place. My electric’s out of Hindsville, so it’s still on.” He started toward the truck.

“I can’t.”

Surprised, he stopped with one hand on the truck door, turned back, and looked at me. He crossed the distance between us. “You know, that’s the second time I come to get you and you didn’t want to go. You’re not actin’ normal, Jenilee. You sure you’re all right?”

I didn’t feel normal anymore. I wasn’t sure what I felt. I knew there wasn’t any way I could explain it to Shad.

“Drew’s here,” I said finally, looking up the road toward Mr. Jaans’s place. If Drew came home and found Shad, there would probably be a fight. Shad and Drew had hated each other for as long as I could remember. If Drew found out that Shad was back, and that we were seeing each other again, he’d probably have a fit. “We just brought Nate home from the hospital.”

Shad’s eyes burned like the coils on a stove. “I’ll come check on ya tomorrow.”

I crossed my arms over myself. “It’s probably not a good idea. I’ll call when they get the phones back on, in a day or two, all right?”

“I’ll stop by
tomorrow
,” he said, turning and walking toward his truck, punching a fist into his hand. “Tell Drew I said hi.” Then he climbed into the seat, squealed the tires, and threw gravel against the fence as he left our driveway.

Tell Drew I said hi
. I knew what he meant by that. He wanted to start trouble with Drew.

Thunder growled again in the distance. The gathering storm was coming closer. Everything left outside tonight would get drenched.

I ran to the tractor shed, grabbed an empty feed sack, and started picking up mementos among the debris. I hurried across the yard, out the gate, and into the ditch, where more papers had blown in since the day before.

Drew’s truck topped the hill and rattled slowly up the road, drowning out the faraway thunder. He pulled up beside me, put the truck in park, and leaned out the window. “You look better. Did you get something to eat?”

I shook my head. “I’m not hungry right now,” I said, not wanting to go back to the house. “It sounds like rain’s coming. I want to pick up as much of this stuff as I can, just in case. All these papers and pictures will be ruined if it rains tonight.”

Drew turned the truck off, climbed out, and started walking with me, picking things up and looking at them as he talked. “Nate all right?”

“Sound asleep,” I answered. “I imagine he’ll stay that way for a while, after taking that pain pill.”

Drew dropped a bunch of papers into my bag. “Some fences got knocked down at old man Jaans’s place. I ran his cows back in and put the wire up the best I could. Looks like his house is still all right. The wind knocked over that old garage of his and made a mess, kind of scattered things around. It blew open the doors to this house, too, and made a mess inside.”

“That’s too bad, but at least he’s still got his house. I feel really sorry for Mrs. Gibson.”

Drew looked up the road toward the Gibson place. “Yeah. Place sure is torn up.”

“She says she doesn’t care about the place being ruined,” I said, trying to blot out the horror of those moments after the storm. “She says all that matters is that her grandkids and her kids are all right, and she wouldn’t care if she lost ten houses as long as she doesn’t lose them.”

Drew shrugged. “It’s just a house.”

“I guess. But she’s spent almost her whole life there. It’s got to be hard for her to lose everything.”

I thought of our own house. The things that had happened there defined who we were. In some ways, I wished the tornado would come back and take the house away—so that all the old definitions would be gone.

But I didn’t imagine that Mrs. Gibson felt that way about her house. Her home and her yard had been filled with the sounds of people—dinners on Sunday afternoons, Easter egg hunts with bunches of grandkids, church socials on Sunday, old ladies coming by for tea and cribbage. Even from a half mile down the road, we could hear their laughter drifting on the warm Missouri wind, reminders that just a stone’s throw away, life was good.

Drew’s eyes met mine for a moment before he bent and untangled a picture of a high school cheerleader from the weeds. “Well, all I can say is that when I heard about the storm, I didn’t call to see whether it got the house or not. All I thought about was where were Darla and the kids, and were they all right. Not much else mattered. I guess that’s pretty much how Mrs. Gibson feels.”

I nodded, surprised. I had never thought of Drew as caring about someone that way. He always seemed so hard, so far out of reach.
If you love them that much, why are you fighting?

I didn’t have the courage to ask. Instead, I made small talk as we came closer to the Gibson farm. “Mrs. Gibson asked me to look around her place for some notebooks of hers. She was really worried about losing them.”

“All right,” Drew said, but squinted doubtfully at what was left of the house. “It’s going to take a miracle to find anything here.” He picked up a soggy wad of old newspaper, then dropped it in the ditch again. “Did she say what the notebooks looked like?”

“Just plain spiral notebooks, I think. Sounded like she had things written in them, stories or something.” A sense of guilt came over me. We didn’t deserve to have our house right down the road with pictures still on the walls while Mrs. Gibson’s house was in shreds.

Pink tinsel glittered near my feet. Tears prickled in my throat, because I could remember the tinsel wrapped around Mrs. Gibson’s porch railing at Easter time. But there wouldn’t be any more Easter egg hunts here.

It was hard to imagine not having Mrs. Gibson down the road anymore. She had always been there, a constant in an unpredictable world. We never knew what would await us at home as we stepped off the school bus and walked down that gravel road, but we knew Mrs. Gibson would be sitting on her porch. She’d watch the bus as if she expected her kids to still be getting off.