Home Sweet Home

by April Smith

  “Before you leave, can you fax the plans for the waterfront park to my office?” Jo asked. “They’re in a file on my desk.”

  “It’s Christmas, nobody’s working.”

  “I know, but next week we have a meeting with the city, and I might still be out here.”

  “Sure,” said Warren. “Of course. I’ll do that.”

  “Thanks, sweetheart. Hang on—the nurse is here.”

  “Go,” said Warren. “Call me back. I love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  The nurse said, “Miss Kusek? There’s someone to see you.”

  Jo hung up and turned around. A middle-aged man with short gray hair was watching her. His face was rounded at the chin, and behind the tinted aviator glasses his eyes were puffy and tired. He wore chinos, hiking boots, and a big orange waterproof jacket with a hood.

  “Robbie?”

  She froze. It was surreal. There was Warren on the phone and her high school boyfriend standing right in front of her, world-weary and aged.

  Their eyes met and Robbie Fletcher’s face contorted with tears. Arms outstretched, he came forward and they embraced. Jo clung to him and let herself cry for the first time since leaving Portland.

  “I’m so sorry about Wendy,” he murmured in her ear.

  She nodded silently, clutching the downy folds of his jacket.

  “How are Lance and Willie?” he asked.

  “Unstable,” she said, not letting go. “They’re doing tests.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I know.”

  After a while they both began to breathe again and broke apart.

  “How are you?” she asked, wiping her eyes. “It’s been way too long.”

  “I’m fine. Everyone’s fine. Not important.”

  “How’d you get in here?”

  “Used my creds.” He pulled a press pass from his pocket.

  “From the Rapid City Journal?” Jo asked. “Lance told me you’re a reporter. He sees your byline all the time.” She stepped back warily. “Are you here to write a story?”

  Robbie shook his head. “No, not at all. That would be a conflict, and besides, I’d much rather be here as your friend than a journalist. If that’s okay.”

  “Of course it’s okay. I’m so glad to see you.” Jo guided him to a seat beside her in a burgundy chair. “Do you see much of Lance?”

  “Not on a regular basis. We run into each other in town.”

  “How are your parents?” Jo asked.

  “They moved to Arizona.”

  “Really? What are they doing in Arizona?”

  “Oh, my dad’s writing a book. Mom’s doing her thing.” Robbie leaned forward, adding urgently, “They’re on their way here. They’re sick about it, Jo. Everybody is.”

  Jo’s back stiffened. “Really? Someone tried to kill the dirty Reds,” she said mockingly. “Rid the town of Communist spies. I thought there’d be dancing in the streets.”

  “This has nothing to do with that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s a robbery that went horribly wrong.”

  “That’s what they’re telling us.”

  “Don’t go paranoid on me,” Robbie said half jokingly.

  “Why not? Everyone else is.”

  “Let’s be logical. The Cold War is over, for all intents and purposes. The Red Scare is history. Your dad’s trial was way back in 1963. You and Lance were kids at the time. Someone would have to hold a pretty crazy grudge to take it out on his son two decades later.”

  The nurse interrupted. “Miss Kusek? You can see your brother now.”

  Jo stood uncertainly. Robbie assured her that he’d wait.

  In a slow nightmare waltz, she followed the nurse through the security doors. Inside, the unit was larger than she expected. It was a regional hospital prepared for a catastrophe and there were many beds. After the low-key waiting room, the lights seemed excruciatingly bright and the temperature was freezing; nurses were wearing sweaters and seemed to glide along in an orderly, positive way. Everything spoke efficiency. Jo made sure not to look at the other patients. She was frightened of what she might see, especially when they got to Lance’s bed, but the tubes had been cleaned up and the only bad shock was the enormous bandage around his head. His eyes were closed and his face very pale from loss of blood, but there was no respirator. He was breathing on his own.

  “Just for a few minutes,” came the nurse’s voice. “It’s all right. You can hold his hand.”

  Jo hadn’t held her brother’s hand since they were little children. It felt almost indecent to be touching the inert, clammy skin.

  “Lance? I’m here,” she said. “It’s Jo.”

  Another nurse brushed past, explaining that she had to check his vitals. She thumbed his eyelids back and Jo reluctantly noticed that the pupils were huge and black. A moment later the neurosurgeon joined her. All she was capable of taking in was that his name was Dr. Pataki. He had coffee-colored skin and black wavy hair and wore green scrubs.

  “You want to know how your loved one is doing,” he said.

  Jo nodded.

  “Your brother’s condition is grave.”

  “But look—he’s breathing!” Jo said. “Before they said he was on a ventilator and now he’s breathing on his own.”

  “Yes, that’s true. Respiration will keep going because the back of the brain has not been affected,” the doctor explained gently.

  “Why are his pupils black?”

  “The pupils are dilated. They do not change according to the light. They both came in that way. The boy, too. He’s still being assessed.”

  “What about Lance?”

  “We’re monitoring him carefully. You should understand that if the heart rate slows, the breath will need to be artificially enhanced.”

  “You mean put him back on a respirator?”

  Dr. Pataki nodded.

  She had to ask again and again, like a child or someone going out of her mind. “And then what?”

  “Wait and see. Give nature a chance.”

  When Jo came out of the ICU, Robbie Fletcher was waiting for her, a question in his eyes.

  TWO

  HOPE

  9

  What is time? How long does a butterfly live?

  Jo looked at her new glow-in-the-dark Cinderella watch and saw that it was four o’clock. Her mama had come to wake her even though it was still night.

  “Rise and shine, children!” she’d called. “Today is branding day!”

  The second hand passed serenely over Cinderella’s blue dress. Jo watched it carefully. Was this what they meant by time? When you wound up the screw, did the little wheels inside, which she’d seen in old-fashioned clocks, did they manufacture time? Was it the watch that produced seconds, minutes, and hours, the way the big wheels in the community mill could grind wheat kernels into different kinds of flour? But that meant time itself had to be made of something. The problem was, the minute you thought of it, it would disappear; for example, she couldn’t remember her fifth birthday last year, when she’d gotten her red cowboy boots because she could walk, trot, and lope on Pete. Maybe time was invisible, like air—or maybe there was no such thing at all. Now that it was fall, dozens of monarch butterflies had appeared, clustered in the cottonwood trees near the creek. They huddled very close together, like brown clumps of autumn leaves. Jo asked why they came, and Mama said, “Because it’s time.”

  Jo could read now, and always went to bed with a library book close by so she could climb into those big black curious letters that made words that had a story inside. This book had a yellow cover and was about a school for cats. Jo had just opened the first page when the overhead light went on with glaring whiteness. One, two, three blankets were stripped away, exposing her body to frigid air.

  “Let’s go. Pajamas off!” Mama said, a lot less cheerfully. She tugged on the sleeve of Jo’s flannel nightgown as if she were trying to pull her arm off.

  �
��I can do it myself!” Jo cried.

  “Then do it. They’ll be here in half an hour,” Mama said, and left the room.

  Through the doorway Jo could see that all the lights were on in the house. There was noise—the radio—and the smell of sweet dough baking. She forgot about the book, eager to be part of everything. Jo had the top bunk because she was oldest. The ceiling was flat and cold, and so were the walls. They didn’t have big wood logs like their old house. She kept her clothes with her because it was too cold to climb up and down in order to change. She pulled on an undershirt and jeans and closed the snaps on the paisley cowgirl shirt she’d chosen the night before, and scrambled down the ladder. Despite the glaring light and her mother trampling in, her brother was still asleep, lying on his stomach, so Jo pulled his covers off and pajama bottoms down and began slapping his bare bottom like the hindquarters of a horse.

  “Get moving, you!”

  He kicked out, wildly yelling, “Stop it!”

  “Get up, dopey!” Jo let the waistband snap. “Don’t you know it’s a special day?”

  Two years had passed since Betsy and Cal, using all their savings, had bought the four-hundred-acre Lucky Clover Ranch that had been owned by Stell Fletcher’s mother. The six-room Queen Anne–style home that had been shipped out on a train in pieces from Sears was renovated top to bottom, starting with indoor plumbing and hot water. With just their four hands and the occasional hired man, the work was hard enough to undermine anybody’s pioneer spirit—but not theirs.

  “Baby steps,” Cal kept reminding Betsy.

  In retrospect, they should have just taken the whole thing down and started over, but once they’d proudly told Doris and Dutch Roy that they’d found a new place and were moving on, the offer of welcome to the Crazy Eights Ranch was reeled in as fast as a rotting walleye, dead from one of those fish kills for which nobody knows the cause. From that time on, everything about the relationship between the Kuseks and the Roys began to stink. The young family moved out of the cabin and onto the dilapidated property as fast as possible, rather than withstand the cold wind of resentment coming from their former benefactors.

  Each of them had reasons to feel offended. Dutch, because he’d expected Cal would be the son he could be proud of—as well as a fine attorney whom he’d planned to make executor of his will—instead of his real heir, Scotty, who cared more about riding bulls than keeping up the family legacy.

  For his part, Scotty knew that Cal was tight with his dad, but what he envied was that Cal had the freedom to get out from under his father’s thumb, which pressed harder each day against that hollow spot at the bottom of the windpipe where a person breathes, as if by threatening to cut him off, Scotty would wake up and die right, give up his dream of following the bull riding circuit—Jackson, Las Vegas, Myrtle Springs, Cheyenne—and spend the rest of his life riding a hay mow in his own backyard. Cal had been his commanding officer, and Scotty still held him in respect because of that. Despite their disagreements, deep down he longed for Cal to see him as a worthy friend.

  But when it came to retribution, it was Doris Roy who held the sharpest knife, because the departure of the Kuseks caused her the deepest wound. Like it says in the Bible, “Paul laid a bundle of sticks on the fire and a viper came out of the heat and bit him on the hand.” When her husband told her that despite his offer of giving them land and a place in the family, the Kuseks had bought their own property—from the liberal Democrat Fletchers of all people—she felt poisonous fury seep into her soul. It caused her to shake and her heart to beat strangely. Her vanity had been assaulted. Her generosity had been rebuffed, which alerted all the memories of all the slights she’d ever suffered as a teenager, the humiliation of coming from illiterate, dirt-poor Pentecostals and not finishing sixth grade because she had to help her parents on their dirt-poor claim, driving the pickup when she was fourteen, Dad pitching hay off the back. The whole thing caused such a state of distraught indignation that she’d written a half-crazed letter to Betsy Kusek, accusing her of “takeing my recipies” and “recking our home.” She’d skipped the housewarming party at the Lucky Clover Ranch, but would not miss, Dutch insisted, the couple’s first branding.

  Over Doris’s objections—because this was business—he’d sold Cal Kusek a hundred cows and a Lee Brothers bull at a good price, and now he favored a look at the calves. Besides, helping a neighbor was a Christian duty that went beyond social graces. With this, Doris had no argument. She’d always thought of herself as a charitable person. If the Roys didn’t show up, there’d be talk. A black mark would go against them, and rightly so.

  It was the first branding of the first group of calves that had been born on Kusek property—an exciting ritual that would mark their true ownership, as well as acceptance into the ranching community, and Betsy was under a lot of pressure to pull it off. Cal had a crew of men to round up the cattle, but Betsy was single-handedly responsible for creating a hospitable atmosphere and making sure everything went ahead right on time. That included minding the children and preparing a parade of meals from scratch, although she did cheat on the homemade biscuits, which she still hadn’t mastered.

  They’d worked out a schedule: 4:30 a.m. first breakfast, 5:00 a.m. saddle up, 5:30 a.m. move the cows in from the south pasture to the pens. By nine they’d be separating out the calves, and then women bearing covered plates would start arriving for a potluck lunch, after which more folks would arrive for the traditional social hour—which could last all afternoon—of coffee, cookies, and homemade ice cream.

  Getting seventy-three calves vaccinated and branded and back to their mothers by the end of the day was serious business, but there was a sweet part to it, and that was the partnership that had developed between Betsy and Cal. Two years of physical labor had honed their temperaments as well as their bodies. They ate less and grew stronger. Work and sleep went by the sun. They learned patience with things that were beyond their control. The clothesline now held eight pairs of Levi’s Saddleman jeans in different sizes and washes, all hanging upside down with the pockets turned out to dry. Although Cal had passed the South Dakota bar, he dressed only in work clothes now, and his long Scandinavian Polish face was sunburned and deeply fissured. However, he still struck the figure of the stubborn individualist. He wore a fedora as often as a cowboy hat, and disdained the hand-rolled cigarette for a White Briar pipe: the contemplative rancher.

  Both Kuseks had become easy in the saddle and good with hammer and nails. There were no jobs, really, either one couldn’t perform. They’d achieved a kind of domestic democracy, a triumph of having moved west: it was possible to live the life of their idealistic vision. But social justice was still a prime concern. The 1952 election was less than a month away, and while everyone was predicting Dwight D. Eisenhower to win by a landslide, the Kuseks were unapologetic in their support of Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson.

  Cal had written a series of letters to the editor of the Rapid City Journal attacking the lies of Richard M. Nixon, Republican candidate for vice president, and his cohort in character assassination, Senator Joseph McCarthy, calling them “a threat to our civil liberties,” which made him famous—at least in the eyes of two Democratic friends in town, Nelson Fletcher (whom they’d nicknamed “Fletch”) and Avery Saugstad, M.D., dedicated general practitioner, former county coroner, and current representative from Pennington County in the state legislature, whom everybody called Doc Avery.

  Fletch had invited Cal to join his law firm, and Betsy sometimes filled in at Doc Avery’s office. Together, Fletch and Doc Avery had become the center of the Kuseks’ lives in South Dakota. Their professional practices and personal connections opened doors for the new couple—so when Betsy would enter the home of a housebound patient, she’d be welcomed into the family. She also saw some amazing things, like an eighty-one-year-old widow confined to a wheelchair who continued to mine her dead husband’s claim, using a soup spoon and a strainer to pan inch by inch for
gold. The doctor himself was a country original—a scrawny, white-haired old bird with slumping shoulders who sang in a barbershop quartet and also found time to raise llamas as a hobby. But his true love was medicine, which he practiced with superhuman devotion. His patients came first, which his wife, Maryanne, understood. Their only sadness in life was that they had no children.

  Every morning Cal and Betsy parted with a kiss, but on branding day they were too preoccupied. The kitchen was steamy and Betsy’s face was flushed from the heat of the oven as she took out batch after batch of Ballard’s Oven-Ready Biscuits, the kind that come in a can. The dining room table was piled with dishes they’d put out the night before. Jo took an apron from the hook and tied the strings twice around her waist with a bow in front, just like her mom’s. The stiff canvas came down to her ankles.

  “Fry up some bacon,” Betsy told her.

  “All of it?”

  “Yes, and while it’s cooking, start cracking eggs.”

  She pushed a big ceramic bowl Jo’s way. There were four cartons already on the blue-checked countertop. Jo stepped up on her special stool and opened the first one. The eggs were not just white but also pale shades of lavender and lightly speckled brown. Every day she collected them in a red wire basket, rinsed them under running water, gently scrubbing off the gunk, and then set them in a dish rack to dry. Afterward she’d disinfect the sink with Lysol. They were her eggs, harvested from hens that Papa said were her project, so she could learn how to manage money. She’d already bought two new chicks with her first quarter. Jo was proud and careful as she cracked each egg cleanly with a knife and spilled it into the big mixing bowl.