Miller's Valley (14 page)

“Everything's okay,” my father called, but the party broke up pretty fast after that and there we were, sitting in the yard on lawn chairs, waiting for my father to spill it.

“They're looking for your brother,” he said to me and Eddie, and Debbie put her hand to her mouth. “He beat somebody up pretty bad last night.”

“So they say,” said my mother.

“Oh, come on, Mom,” said Eddie.

“Don't you ‘come on' me, Edward. The police have been known to accuse all kinds of people of all kinds of things they didn't do.”

“That's right,” said Steven.

“Dad, you want me to go look for him?” Eddie said.

“Let them look, son,” my father said. “They'll find him, or they won't. Then they'll put a warrant out, or whatever they do. We can't do anything until they find him, and talk to him, and charge him.”

“Maybe charge him,” said my mother. “Maybe not. We don't know.”

“Miriam, if it wasn't this it would be something else. Everyone in the county says he's dealing drugs, and he's torn up the tavern twice, and I wouldn't be surprised if some other girl turns up here in trouble, and who knows what else.” He looked around suddenly, but Clifton was across the road, talking to the cows. “Be realistic.”

“You give up on your own son, you do it alone, Bud.” She went inside, the screen door slamming. My father called over his shoulder, “Ruth, if that boy is in your back bedroom again, you better come clean about it right now. Don't make me search your place.”

“He's not here, Buddy, I swear.” She sniffled, loud enough to be heard outdoors.

“Maybe I better go looking for him,” said my father wearily, using both arms to push himself out of the chair. “Mimi, you stay here in case he shows up, but don't go soft and let him leave. Ed, you've got a ride ahead of you. Get on the road so you're home before dark.”

“I'll go with you.”

“Best not.” And Debbie stood up, too, looking as though she couldn't wait to get out of there. She gave me a big hug. “I can put in a good word with the Kappa rush chair for you, Mimi,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. What else was there to say? I just wanted to sit by myself somewhere and let my mind go blank. “Why don't you go to your place and see whether anyone has seen him?” I said to Steven. “It would mean a lot to me.” The fact was, I just wanted to be alone for a while.

T
hat was when people still believed that one thing caused another to happen, when someone would have a heart attack and the guys at the Elks would say it was because his daughter had just come home with a hippie boyfriend with girl hair, or someone would have cancer, which no one called cancer because apparently if you said the word it would make things worse, and the women at bridge club would nod and say she'd been worried about her husband losing his job for six months and now look what happened.

Because my mother was a nurse she was always having to argue with people about stuff like that. I remember, when I was eight, listening to her rant all through dinner about a woman whose baby had been born with a port-wine stain on one cheek and who swore it was because she ate strawberries during the summer.

“What's a port-wine stain?” I said, but my mother just kept on ranting. The woman could rant when the occasion demanded.

I'm probably the last person who should say this, given my work, but I think maybe there was some truth to what people thought, although no baby gets a birthmark because of anything its mother ate or saw or dreamt, that's for sure. And maybe it was just coincidence that a week after they arrested Tommy I heard Ruth screaming my name and I came out the back door in my pink waitress uniform to see my father lying at the foot of her front steps. He was crumpled up like a pile of old clothes and so damp that it felt as though he'd been there all night and was covered with morning dew. My mother had pulled an early shift because of taking off for my graduation, and either he hadn't been lying there then or she'd missed him in the dark.

“You couldn't even come out of that goddamned house to help him?” I screamed, and Ruth just wailed back without words, useless, useless as always. I was mad because I was scared, too, scared as I'd ever been.

The good thing about a small town is the same thing that's a bad thing about a small town, and that's that everybody knows your business. So it wasn't long after I came through the emergency room with the rescue squad guys, my hand clamped on the gurney, that someone said something to someone in the diner and Dee knew I was going to miss my shift, and somebody said something to somebody on the site of the addition to the middle school so Steven knew to come after work to the hospital. Although knowing Steven, I was pretty sure he was wondering whether he had time to put in a couple of hours on the house he was working on, which already had an interested buyer.

Maybe the latest news would even make it to Tommy in the holding cell, and Ruth in her little homemade prison. My mother called Eddie and told him to stay put until we knew more. But she took one look at my father on the gurney in the elevator and said, “Stroke.”

People were so nice to us that first week. Henry Langer came over every morning to let the cows out, clean the barn, make sure there was water in the trough, check on all the fences. Our refrigerator was full of food, ground beef casseroles and chicken pies, the counters crowded with zucchini bread and blueberry muffins and angel food cakes. Cissy said she'd taken some out to Ruth, although she said she didn't think Ruth was eating and she mainly just cried. My mother and I were of one mind about poor Ruth and her crying, and turned hard-faced and turned away. Ruth had the leisure for tears. The two of us had work to do.

Dee switched me to a four-to-midnight shift at the diner, and I went to sit by my father in the ICU before and after. My mother worked six to six. She spent her lunch and dinner hour in my father's room. I took over the farm. At dawn I'd be opening the barn doors and checking that the culverts weren't jammed with branches and leaves. The barn cats were wild, nobody's idea of a kitty on a pillow on a couch, but they always came running when I showed up with the food. Sometimes I sat on the barn floor, my back against the wall with splinters picking at my spine, the bowl between my knees so that I could run my fingers over their fur. I was good with being alone, always liked it, but there's something about doing a job alone that you've always done with someone else that just doesn't feel right. Maybe it's like making Christmas cookies by yourself. There's nothing wrong with it in theory, but you're really supposed to be doing it with other people, and not just any other people.

“Your brother should be here helping out,” Ruth said, and I just spit out, “Well, you could give me a hand, too.” But I knew that there was no one else, that I was on my own.

I think that was when I really began to like hospitals. There's an orderliness to them. Your life is a mess and there they are, clean, organized, white as white, each bed in each room in the same place, everyone with a clipboard and a job to do. I hear what people are saying, when they complain about the nurse who comes to take your blood pressure at six in the morning even though you're having a terrible time getting any sleep, complain about the lousy food and the tinny intercoms and the smell of disinfectant. They're right about all that. But what I liked was that there were a series of problems, and the hospital figured out what they were, and how to solve them.

That's up to a point, and up to a point is what they did for my father. They got him a bit better, and then they sent him to a rehab place, and then they sent him home after Steven and some friends of his built a ramp up the steps and moved a rented hospital bed into the middle of the living room. They taught my father to walk, but he walked like Tommy only worse, like the right side of him was the sidecar on a motorcycle. I brought him home while my mother was at work, and when he saw the ramp and the bed he started to cry. I don't know that I'd ever seen him really cry before, even when Tom was under that tractor. But he cried all the time now, and that was terrible. So was the fact that when he talked he made no sense, but you could tell he thought he did. Usually he repeated the same word over and over. One day it was
bat.
Another day it was
rattle.
He said
shit
a lot, too, which upset my mother so much she would leave the room, although his mouth was such a tangle that unless you knew what the word was you might not figure it out.

Usually once a day I'd get him into the truck and ride him around the valley. It was a production, walking him out to the drive, heaving his one side into the passenger seat. I couldn't even tell if he liked it. I would see him staring out the window, his head turned from me, looking at the old house where my mother and Ruth had grown up, the turnoff for the river and for Andover, the high school where he'd played football, the Dairy Queen and the Presbyterian church and the cemetery where everyone we knew who was dead was buried, and I'd figure he was watching his whole life passing in front of him, bit by bit, building by building.

To fill the quiet in the car I'd talk about the price of beef cattle, the straw someone had dropped over to our barn, who'd been into the diner. I took him to the diner for lunch one day, and all the guys at the counter crowded around our booth, the big booth we weren't supposed to give to anything less than a party of four but Dee had put us right there as soon as we came in, me holding the door, my father holding up the people coming in behind us. “Bottle,” my father said, leaning across the table surface toward me. “Bottle bottle.”

“We'll both have iced tea,” I said. “With some straws.”

“What's he saying, Mimi?” said Mr. Jansson, which was the kind of question that made me tired and angry at the same time. He's saying “bottle,” which makes no sense, which is the way he is now. Instead I said, “He's still working on his speech, Mr. Jansson. It takes a while.”

“Bottle,” my father whispered.

I ordered chocolate pudding for both of us because my father couldn't chew and swallow real food anymore. No hot dogs, no pork chops, no ham and egg on a bun with a piece of American cheese melted on top. There's not a lot of food for grown-ups that doesn't have some heft to it except for pudding and soup, and because the one corner of his mouth still hung low the soup was a disaster. The pudding wasn't a whole lot better, and after he knocked over his tea and leaned his elbow in the wet spot I took him home. There were chocolate blotches on one shoulder of his shirt, and a wet area on the front of his pants that made me shiver, looking at it, until I realized it was tea. My mother helped him get dressed in the morning, thank goodness, and I figured it wasn't going to kill him to have some iced tea on his fly until it dried there. After I helped him out of the truck in our driveway, I took his hand in mine, and he whispered something.

“What, Pop?” I said.

“Bottle,” he said, and as I turned toward the house he moved away from it, down the path to Ruth's place. The truth was that since he had gotten home that was where he seemed most settled, sitting in Ruth's front room in front of the television. No ramp, no hospital bed. She'd moved the furniture around so that there were two chairs side by side, with a little end table in between. Ruth would talk nonstop the way she always did, going on about nothing, Bob Barker's female assistants, the evening gowns on a masked-ball episode of
The Guiding Light,
who should get picked on
The Dating Game.
My father seemed to recognize some of the people—Mary Tyler Moore, Merv Griffin. Sometimes my mother came to get him for dinner and he would pull away and she'd leave him until it got dark and she wanted to go to sleep. A couple of times I noticed she let my father stay there, sleeping in the chair in Ruth's living room. I would look in the screen door after I was done with the cows and the culverts in the morning, and he'd be asleep, his head thrown back, his mouth open, an old afghan tucked around him even in the heat. Ruth would be sitting at the dining room table with a cup of tea and a copy of
Life
magazine. She'd put her finger to her lips, and I'd go into our kitchen and make myself a second cup of coffee, and put my head down on my arms and cry.

“We need to talk,” I said to my mother one day at the end of July. We were never in the same place at the same time. When she was at work, I was at home, and when she was at home I was at work or in an empty house somewhere with Steven. I noticed that there were two times when my father and my brother Tommy weren't going round and round in my head. One was when I was asleep, and the other was when I was having sex. I had a lot of sex that summer. “Babe babe babe,” Steven would repeat over and over, and I would close my eyes so that he wouldn't sound like a sex version of my father, repeating the same stupid word over and over.

“I have to go grocery shopping, Mary Margaret,” my mother said. “I had to throw half those casseroles out and now there's barely anything to eat in this house.”

“I'll go with you once we talk.”

“I don't want you leaving the two of them over there all on their own.”

“Mom,” I said, loud, and she put both her hands down on the kitchen counter and dropped her head. Then she hammered on the counter with her palms, one two three, hard hard hard.

“I talked to Mrs. Farrell the other day,” I said. “It's all taken care of.” She beat on the counter again.

“I wanted better for you,” she said, and her voice sounded like she was trying not to cry. She never cried, either. I don't even think she cried in my father's hospital room, or maybe she did when she was alone, when there was no one to see, like that thing about a tree falling in the forest. If Miriam Miller cried and there was no one to see it, were there really any tears?

“It's not the end of the world. I'll go to the community college for a year or two until he gets better. Mrs. Farrell says she already talked to one of the deans at State and they can just hold my admission for a year. She talked to him about what courses I can take at the community college so I won't get behind.”

My mother shook her head back and forth, but she still wouldn't turn to look at me. “Mom, I can't go away right now. It's just a fact. I have to be here. You can't leave the two of them alone all day. When Dad was here to look after Ruth it was one thing—”

“Oh, to hell with Ruth. To hell with Ruth. I'm not having her ruin your life, too.”

“Nobody's life is getting ruined,” I said, strong and even, like I really believed it. “I'll take classes and in between I'll look in on the both of them. I'll take him to his appointments and he'll get stronger and then we can make other arrangements.”

I'll remember the quiet in that kitchen for the rest of my life. It felt like it went on and on, filling the room from floor to ceiling, almost like it was a gas or a fog or something. It had weight and mass.

“I have to get to the supermarket,” my mother said wearily.

“Get a lot of tomato soup,” I said. “It goes down easy and he seems to like it.”

“Callie's bringing Clifton over to see him later.”

“Get Clifton some Fudgsicles.”

“Maybe he can spend the night. Your father seems to like that.” We used the word
seem
all the time because we couldn't really tell what was going on inside his addled brain. Bat. Bottle. Shit. Who knew what he thought when his grandson showed up and yelled “Gramps!” Maybe he didn't even know what that meant, or who that was.

My mother took her purse from next to the phone and fished out her car keys. As she left she put her hand on my shoulder and I felt a shaking go through her and into me. Then she was gone to town.