Suburban Renewal (19 page)

1994

I
took my first full-time teaching job at Brightwood Elementary in Lumkee. There were better paid, more interesting and innovative positions elsewhere, but I chose my hometown. It wasn't because I was tired of the commute, but that I worried about being away from home.

After the summer shock in California, Nate continued to feel empowered somehow by doing exactly what he wanted whenever he wanted. Especially if it scared us, annoyed us, embarrassed us. I couldn't tell how much of his behavior was normal teenage rebellion, how much of it was following the example of his paw-paw or how much was actually a genetic predisposition to be a slimy, low-life snake.

The last was a postulate that I never uttered aloud. Nate's genes were our genes, and although he looked like a throwback to Floyd Braydon, we had to believe that there was more of us in him than his grandfather.

He still spent way too much time sitting in front of the computer. I talked to one of the Computer Studies grad students, who gave me some pointers on monitoring his Internet usage by using a cookie-trail software that could show me every Web site he visited.
That worked okay for a while, until I began being shocked and horrified. Fortunately I realized that he knew I was trailing him and was probably (I hoped) visiting the bomb-making sites and the violent porno just to get to me.

Although Sam had told him that he would be paying back the money he stole from us by doing chores, he never did anything unless Sam was with him. I wasn't sure if this was a streak of pure laziness on his part or just more of his “because I can” philosophy. Because there was so much tension between the two of us, I was trying to pick my battles. To stand my ground only on those things that I thought were really critical. Taking out the garbage and washing dishes didn't fit into that criteria.

Lauren complained that he wasn't doing his share.

“I don't do bitches' work,” he told her.

Lauren slapped him hard enough to make his ears ring.

I wanted to applaud but instead, of course, I was forced to get between them and stop the confrontation. I couldn't allow any physical reprimand with Nate. I felt as if I were handling nitroglycerin. If we weren't careful with Nate, he might blow us all to kingdom come. The same traits that made him look like Floyd and talk like Floyd might make him a woman batterer like Floyd. That was my greatest fear. That my sweet little son would become that evil old man.

It was my worry about nature over nurture that skewed the direction of my graduate study. Instead of following an administrative track, I turned my attention to school counseling. I wanted the psych courses and the socialization theory. I needed help and reassurance that Nate was going to be okay. I was espe
cially interested in nurture over nature. I wanted to create the best kind of environment, one that would enhance the positive in my son's life.

Occasionally I saw Riv on campus. He always smiled and acted like he was glad to see me, but we never ate lunch together, we never sat down for a conversation.

I don't think he really missed it. I saw him a few months after our “breakup” sitting with another woman at
Hamlin & Mimi's.
I hoped that it was his wife, but I had my doubts as I watched them holding hands over their grilled lemon
Tawook.

I wish I could say that I felt nothing. That I'd completely come to my senses and realized what a better man Sam had turned out to be, and how much better suited I was to him. But I still felt the painful tug and the longing for what might have been.

In the fall, there were some new developments with my son that I thought might be, surprisingly, good. As he entered high school, the solitary, loner guy in front of the computer with no friends or social skills just blossomed. In some way, Nate's experience with taking on the world gave him a weird kind of confidence that the other kids at school found attractive. He would never be in Lauren's little group of the social elite. But he was outspoken and well liked, by the students, if not by the staff.

I was called down to his school by Mrs. Isenhart, Nate's homeroom teacher. She was beside herself. She had administered the trial for the standardized tests that sophomores are required to pass.

I assumed that Nate had failed the test, otherwise I wouldn't have been called in. I was prepared to advo
cate for my son, point out that it was only the trial, that he would get another chance.

Mrs. Isenhart wasn't disappointed in Nate's performance—she was furious.

“He didn't even try,” the woman told me angrily. “I explained to the entire class how important these tests are, not only to them but to the rating of the school system as a whole. He didn't care. He didn't make any effort at all. He just went down the score sheet and made
x
's. He got every answer wrong.”

I eyed her curiously as she pushed the paper in front of me. I glanced down. Sure enough, every answer was wrong. I turned it over. Every answer was wrong on that side, too.

“Nate is always just on the edge of disrespect for me,” Mrs. Isenhart said. “But I've tried in every way I know how to be open and helpful to him in class. And this is how he repays me! He doesn't even try!”

The woman was so upset, she wasn't even thinking straight.

“Mrs. Isenhart,” I told her, “I don't think we can accuse him of not trying. Just think how hard it is to get every answer wrong. If he'd done what you're saying and just marked
x
's down the page, statistically he'd get at least get some right. In order to miss every question, he had to know the correct answer, then deliberately mark it wrong.”

If we'd ever had questions about Nate's intelligence, we didn't after that.

We tried again to get him into therapy. That was a waste of time and money. We tried four different doctors. If a patient doesn't cooperate there isn't much anyone can do. I talked to Dr. Muldrew about it.

Dr. Muldrew had never treated Nate, he'd become
far too close to the family for that. But he defended the boy.

“Corrie, he's not drinking and he's not on drugs,” he said. “These days that's the definition of a good kid.”

He spoke too soon.

Halloween night Nate just walked out the front door without a word about where he was going or when he might be back. He returned home in the wee hours of the morning, drunk and stumbling around. I met him at the front door.

“Where have you been?” I asked him, standing my ground.

He laughed. “It's Halloween,” he told me. “I've been out chasing down my own ghosts.”

“You've been drinking.”

He shrugged. “A few beers,” he said.

“You're only fifteen years old.”

“Paw-Paw told me once that the earlier a guy starts to drink the better he can hold his liquor.”

“This bit of wisdom from a man who knew a lot about getting drunk,” I said.

Nate's eyes narrowed and he shook his finger at me.

“Don't you say a word against him,” he warned me.

“I don't have to,” I told him. “You can get poor opinions of that man on any corner in this town.”

He shook his head. “That's not true,” Nate said. “Everybody liked him. He was
the man,
the life of every party he ever showed up at.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” I said sarcastically. “And that's why he had twelve people at his funeral and half of those only showed up because they had to.”

He drew in a sharp breath and I knew I'd wounded him. I wanted to take the words back. Nate was my baby. I didn't want to hurt him. But I knew I had.

“Paw-Paw loved me,” he screamed. “He loved me and you drove him away. You made him unwelcome in our home.”

“He made himself unwelcome by his bad behavior,” I countered.

“You never liked him, he told me so. You caused trouble between him and Daddy and you tried to keep me from him altogether.”

“He was a bad influence,” I said. “I was doing the right thing.”

“It wasn't fair! It was never fair! He loved me!”

Nate raised his fist. I knew he was going to hit me. I was trembling. Floyd Braydon's anger and abuse came out from behind the mask with the help of alcohol. I was scared, so scared, that in that, too, Nate might be like him. I was not just afraid that he might hurt me, which he could. He was as tall as Sam now and beginning to show some sinew of muscle on his long, lean frame. But the danger of any physical damage paled behind the reality of what would happen emotionally to our relationship if he struck me.

As he swung his fist, I closed my eyes and raised a hand in protection.

A loud bang to my right popped my eyes open.

Nate had put his fist through the Sheetrock of the wall beside me. I just stared at the dent in the wall and my son's still-clenched fist.

“What's going on?”

Lauren had come running into the living room, dressed in flannel pajamas, her hair mussed from sleep.

“Get out of my sight, bitch!” Nate screamed at her.

“You can't talk to me like that, you stupid jerk-off!” she responded.

“Stop it! Both of you!” I said loudly. “We're all going to bed. Right now. Not another word from anyone. We'll talk about all this tomorrow.”

I don't know if it was the tone of my voice or if they could sense that I was near hysteria, but after exchanging dirty looks, they each went to their own bedroom.

I stood there, shaking. I made my way over to Gram's old rocker, which was back in its place now by the window, next to the mantel. I couldn't do this by myself. If I was a single mother, then I guess I would have to, but I wasn't single. I was married. I had deliberately chosen to be married.

It was only a little after midnight in California, but I knew that with the hard days that Sam put in, he'd already be asleep. I called him, anyway.

“Hello,” he answered groggily on the fourth ring.

“Sam, it's me,” I told him. “You've got to come home. You've got to come home for good.”

1994

C
orrie needed me. She asked me to come home. After living through all those years of unemployment, I was not particularly keen on giving up a good job that paid well and returning home to Lumkee to explain to people who knew me why I was once again content to allow my wife to support me. But I did.

Cy Walker had been good enough to give me a job when I needed one, and I didn't feel right about walking out on him, leaving him in the lurch. The first phase of the steam-flood pilot was scheduled for completion at the end of '94, so I talked to him, let him know that if a second phase was approved, and it looked like it would be, I would not be available. I fudged a little on my excuse, suggesting that I was trying to line up the financing to start up my company again. I wasn't. I was pretty sure that I couldn't. But it was a good camouflage for the truth. In the oil business, a guy can't just say that he's leaving for personal reasons. Oil companies don't want to know that you have personal reasons. It was never good to even hint at the suggestion that you didn't want to be away from home. Being willing to go to wherever the work happened to be was a part of the industry on just about
every level. This year it was Bakersfield, next year Alaska, after that Thailand. If you weren't prepared to do that, then you should be looking for another line of work.

I didn't know any other line of work.

My family was having a crisis. Corrie needed me at home. I was willing to do that, but I wanted to be sure that I didn't burn any bridges behind me. I was hoping that in a few months things would settle down with Nate. If I couldn't get my job back with Cy, he at least would give me a recommendation to work with someone else.

I don't know how I expected to explain why I hadn't started my company back up. The way things turned out, I didn't have to.

The first week of December, Corrie called to tell me that her father was in the hospital. Doc had collapsed in the drugstore. One of his customers had called EMS.

“The doctors say it's a stroke,” Corrie told me on the phone. “He's holding his own right now. The way I understand it, every hour that he's still here, his chances of surviving get better.”

“Do you want me to fly home?” I asked, though I'd already grabbed my duffel from under the bed and had begun throwing things in it.

“No,” Corrie said. “Mom and I are all right, I think.”

“It won't be a big deal if I leave a couple of days early,” I assured her.

“Well, come as soon as you can, but not any sooner than that.”

I called Cy, and he was very understanding. I worked out the rest of my schedule with the guys on the crew. By the next afternoon, I was flying into Tulsa.

Lauren met me at the airport. I was really surprised
to see her. She'd grown into such a pretty girl. She had hair like her grandmother's and the same warm hostess-with-the-most-est smile. But she was long and lean, like me. She looked more so that afternoon. She was wearing what looked to me like workout sweats. But I was fairly certain that nobody went to the gym with those big, boxy high-heeled shoes.

She'd just gotten her driver's license and this was her very first trip on the expressway into the city. Apparently a trial by fire.

“It was really scary,” she admitted to me. “There were these humongous trucks and people zipping past me on both sides at like a million mph. I mean, I am absolutely the worst in-the-traffic person in my driver's ed class. And I wanted to say, no way that I'm driving my first time to Tulsa all alone. But then, I just reminded myself that for Grandpa, having this stroke was having to face new, scary things. And that Grandma, worrying about him, was dealing with some all-new stuff. And then, of course, you and Mom. So if I'm going to be like almost an adult, too, then I'm going to have to face some crap I don't want to. So I said, ‘Mom, you stay with Grandma. I'll go get Daddy.' And I said to myself, ‘Lauren, get out there. Stay in your own lane and drive.'”

To support this newfound independence, I let her drive back home, though I was white-knuckled most of the way as she crept along through the five o'clock rush hour at a snail's pace, infuriating the honking drivers around us.

We pulled into the driveway. I had more a sense of coming home than I could remember in years. Gram's house was my house, the house my family was growing up in. Somehow that felt so right to me, that I once
again refused to get into the mental gymnastics that always accompanied my ownership of the house. Gram had left me the house, but I gave it away. I wouldn't have gotten it back if my father hadn't died. But my father had died. And Mike's suicide bottle was in Cherry Dale's trash.

I pushed all those thoughts away. Someday, when I had time and energy, I'd sort it all out. But today there were things to do, people to take care of, obligations to be met.

I carried my duffel into the house. The first thing I saw was the smashed-in drywall in the living room. I'd heard about it, of course, but it was bigger than I expected. And I didn't really expect it to still be there.

“Where's Nate?” I asked Lauren.

She shrugged. “If he's here, he's probably locked in his room.”

She was right. He was lying on the bed, eyes closed, listening with his headphones to his CD player.

“Nate!”

He opened his eyes, sat up, turned down the music and pulled the plugs out of his ears.

“Hi, Dad,” he said. “I didn't know you were coming home.”

I was surprised that he seemed so uninformed with what was going on in his own house.

“You know your grandfather is in the hospital?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, sure,” Nate said with genuine concern. “How's he doing?”

“I don't know, I'm just now going out there.”

He nodded.

“What's the deal with the wall in the living room?” I asked.

His eyes widened.

“Didn't Mom tell you?”

“Yeah, she told me you got drunk and knocked a hole in the wall,” I replied. “But that doesn't tell me why it's still there.”

He just looked up at me, clueless.

“This is
my
house, young man,” I told him. “You knock a hole in
my
wall, then you go to the lumber yard, get some gyp board, replace the drywall, tape it, float it and repaint it. That's what men do when they screw up, they go back and they fix it.”

His jaw fell open.

I didn't bother to explain any further. I walked out of the room, went back to pick up my duffel which I carried out to the sunporch. It wasn't much of a master bedroom, but it was all we had. I felt like I was covered with some kind of travel sludge and decided I had to shower before I went to the hospital. I put away my clothes as best I could, wrestled some clean jeans out of the little armoire that Corrie was using for a closet and walked back through the house to the bathroom. The door was closed. I knocked.

“Leave me alone!” Lauren responded.

The response was so mean, I assumed it wasn't for me.

“Sugar, I need to take a shower,” I said through the door.

“Oh, Daddy,” she responded, surprised. “I thought you were Nate. I need fifteen more minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes?”

“I'm doing my bikini zone and I just put the hair remover on. I can't move for fifteen minutes.”

“I need to get to the hospital,” I pointed out.

“Sorry, Dad, but I've done this before,” she answered. “It takes the full fifteen minutes.”

I just stood there for a long moment staring at the door. Then I shook my head. I walked back into the front of the house, through the living room to the sunporch. I tossed my clean jeans on the bed. Picked up the car keys and headed for the driveway.

It took me twenty minutes to drive to the hospital, another ten to find a parking space, and even longer than that to locate the floor that Doc was on. I almost missed Corrie as I walked past a little alcove with an angle of uncomfortable-looking chairs that resembled box crates with seat cushions. She was all alone.

“Hi!”

Corrie looked relieved to see me and even jumped up and hugged my neck.

“I got here as soon as I could.”

She nodded. “You still smell like an airplane,” she told me.

“I wanted to shower,” I told her. “But there was some kind of bikini emergency and I couldn't get into the bathroom.”

She was sympathetic. “It's that time,” she said. “Two teenagers in the house is always a challenge. But getting used to one bathroom is an adjustment.”

“How's Doc?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “His color is a little better, I think. He's conscious most of the time now. He can't move his leg at all and his arm only slightly. But he tries to talk. The nurses say that's a good sign. Mom's in with him now. The room is so small and there's only one little seat, so we take turns. We don't want to leave him alone. The doctor told us that at this time, his attitude is everything. He has to want to get better. I know that
scares Mom. He hasn't really seemed interested in anything since Mike died.”

“At least he reopened the drugstore,” I told her. “I didn't think he'd even do that.”

“He's just letting it drift away,” she said. “He's not fighting for customers, he's hardly trying to stay afloat.”

“Sometimes you just lose hope,” I told her. “It happened to me. When I wasn't working, I had to force myself to get up every day. I just lost my way. It happens.”

We sat down and she leaned her head over on my shoulder. I wrapped my arm around her.

“And now I've asked you to do it all over again,” she said. “Once again you're hanging around Lumkee looking for a job.”

“At least this time it was our choice,” I told her. “And there are more jobs to be had now. I'll find something. Maybe something I'll like a whole lot better than being gone all the time.”

I pressed a little kiss on the top of her head. She looked up at me and smiled.

“It's good to have you home,” she told me. “Did you see Nate at the house?”

“Yeah, I told him to fix the hole in the living room wall.”

Corrie glanced at me curiously. “He doesn't know how to do anything like that,” she pointed out.

“Then I guess he'll ask for help or read a book or look it up on the Internet,” I said. “He's a smart kid. He can figure it out.”

“How did you decide to handle it that way?” she asked me.

I shook my head. “I didn't really decide,” I admitted.
“I just saw the damage and I thought how displeased Gram would have been if she'd seen it. And then it just sort of followed, how would Gram have handled it, if the culprit had been me. It was almost like she was speaking through me. I wasn't angry and I didn't take any of the weird guilt stuff I feel about Nate in the room with me. It was just Gram and her words and how she would have handled Floyd Braydon's boy.”

“And it worked?”

“I think that remains to be seen,” I told her. “But at least we're heading in a new direction.”

In a few moments Edna came out. I hugged her and she clung to me. “I can't lose him, too,” she told me. “What will I have to live for?”

I could have reminded her that she had a daughter who stood by her through everything and two healthy grandchildren, but I was sure she didn't mean it as a real question.

“Hang in there, Edna,” I told her instead. “Doc is going to need you. You can't fall apart.”

Immediately she raised her chin and straightened her shoulders, as if infused with determination.

“You're right, you are absolutely right,” she said. “What good will I be if I turn into a sappy puddle? I despise women who are all heart and no gumption.”

In that spirit it was decided that she should go home and rest. I insisted that Corrie go with her.

“Doc and I can handle tonight by ourselves,” I assured them.

I introduced myself to the CCU staff and they directed me to one of the narrow, glassed-in rooms that ringed the nurses' station. It was a small space made more so by all the equipment built into the wall above the bed.

Doc looked old and frail as he lay there. He was always so neatly groomed and dressed. Now he was tied into a rumpled hospital gown, his thin hair was mussed, revealing a lot of previously hidden balding, and without his glasses, his face looked sharp and bony.

His eyes were open.

“Hi, Doc, how you doing?” I asked him.

“Sam?”

I could clearly make out that word. And the surprise in his tone.

“I know you didn't think you were going to see me until Christmas,” I told him. “But I just finished up and came home early.”

He took that statement in, examining it for a long time before responding.

“I'm going to die, then? They sent for you because I'm going to die?”

It took me a minute to understand what he was saying. His words were slow and slightly slurred, but I listened carefully and finally understood him.

“No, no,” I assured him. “I came home because the family needed me.”

If it had been my mother-in-law lying there, or Corrie, I probably would have left it at that. But my time with Mike had convinced me that men prefer the truth. Once we've got a handle on that, we can deal with whatever it's going to mean.

“The doctors don't know yet if you're going to be all right,” I told him. “So far, so good. They say twenty percent don't make it through this part. That means eighty percent do.”

He gave me a weird, slightly off-center grin.

“When I talk to them,” I said, “I'll tell them to be straight with you.”

“Thanks.”

He closed his eyes as if the conversation had exhausted him. There was a small metal chair on one side of the bed, near the privacy curtain that could be drawn across the glass. I walked over there and seated myself.