The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  The baseball game droned. The thunder boomed, right overhead now, then the loudest part of the storm passed over and the rain came on harder. Anita reached up and turned her light off. She rolled herself up in the covers with her back to Jeff. He turned his light off also and lowered the volume on the television to a buzz. It was a routine neither of them had to think about.

  Anita wasn’t yet asleep. The rain sound was carrying her away. Jeff’s leg moved against hers. Then the nudging pressure of his hip and shoulder. The television was off and the room was dark. Had he done it on purpose?

  He knew she was awake. They knew each other’s breathing, their dream speech, their restless turnings. Anita kept still. His hand cupped her shoulder. He said, “I don’t know if I can do anything. Without the drinking.”

  Anita rolled over enough to cover his hand with hers. She left it there a moment, then withdrew it, and after a time Jeff also turned away back to his side of the bed.

  The telephone went off like a bomb. Anita’s first, swimming-to-the-surface thought: the kids. But both of them were home. Or her parents. Or Jeff’s. The phone shrilled again. She reached it on its third ring. “Hello?”

  “Anita?” A woman.

  Next to her, Jeff fought with his pillow. “Whas?”

  “Go back to sleep.” She lifted the phone from its cradle, took it into the bathroom and shut the door. “Rhonda? What’s the matter?”

  Rhonda laughed. It came out skittery. “Son-of-a-bitch bastard.”

  “Tell me what happened. Are you all right?”

  “Could I get a ride?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Out in the rain like a damn wet cat.”

  “Tell me where you are and I’ll come get you.”

  Rhonda gave her directions to a 7-Eleven on the far side of downtown. The store was closed but she was using the pay phone. Anita said, “Are you all right there? Should I call the police?”

  “I flushed his car keys down the toilet. He’s not coming after me.”

  Anita said she’d get there as soon as she could. She got off the phone and went back into the bedroom. The clock on the bureau said it was one thirty. She slid her hands through the bureau drawers, found her jeans and shoes in the closet. When she’d finished dressing, she shook Jeff by the shoulder hard enough to wake him.

  “I have to go out. I’ll be back in a little.”

  He groaned, staring up at her in the dark. She said, “I have to go help somebody, it’s an emergency. It’s OK, go back to sleep.”

  Downstairs she found her coat and purse, then went to the linen closet and took a couple of towels. She left a light on in the kitchen and went out to the garage to start the van.

  The rain had settled into a steady drizzle. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out this late. She was wide-awake, all nerves. The strangeness of it all fueled her. Her neighborhood was laid out in curved boulevards, each house lit by an electric carriage lantern in the front yard. It wasn’t hard to believe she was the only person awake for a mile in any direction.

  The streets shone with rain. A traffic light reflected blurred red on the pavement. She headed south through the silent downtown, then east, away from campus. She had some idea of where Rhonda lived, a neighborhood of little cottages set close together, dog pens in the backyards, cars parked with their tires up on the curbs, a district of Dollar Stores, muffler shops, a place that sold day-old baked goods, a VFW. The rain made everything look broken, dissolving.

  She couldn’t find the 7-Eleven at first. The sign was off and only the security lighting was on inside. Anita slowed, unsure, and that’s when Rhonda ran from around the corner of the building and pulled at the passenger door.

  Anita pushed the unlock button and Rhonda climbed inside. “Take off, hurry up.” She was wheezing. Her hair dripped water. “What are you waiting for, an engraved invitation?”

  Anita hit the gas and the van bucked forward. “What happened, talk to me.”

  “Goddamn his stupid drunk ass.”

  “Bill P.? I thought he left town.”

  “No, no, Bill H.! The one who hadn’t had a drink in eighteen months, or so he said.” Water pooled in the seat around her. Anita handed her a towel. “Stood up in meetings and testified up and down, how he was blood-bought and sold out to his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who kept him on the sober path. I’m thinking Jesus got a raw deal.”

  Anita was driving around and round the block in widening circles. She didn’t know where Rhonda wanted to go. “What happened?” she said again. She figured she might have to keep saying it for a while. The rain had picked up again. Veils of it blew across the road.

  Rhonda scrubbed her face with the towel. Her long hair had gone limp and draggled and she tried to set it right with her hands. She opened her handbag, looking for a comb. “I came home from the meeting. He was out in the garage. What did I say about them liking the garage? First I set eyes on him I knew, but I didn’t want to know it. That little alarm buzzes in you. The way he says hello, all loose and breezy. I went back into the kitchen, I started in on the dishes. He comes up behind me while I’m standing at the sink and starts fooling with me. You know how they grab all over you when they’re drunk?”

  Anita knew. Rhonda said, “I pushed him off me and said, ‘You’ve been drinking,’ and he acted like that was funny. A funny drunk.”

  “I’m sorry. Why did he start? After all this time?”

  “Because it’s Tuesday. Because he couldn’t find his blue socks. It’s alcohol, it don’t need a reason.” Rhonda hugged herself and Anita passed her the second towel. Rhonda wrapped it around herself. “We had us an argument then. It got kind of lively. I threw some stuff from the refrigerator at him.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Frozen corn. Frozen peas. Frozen spaghetti sauce. That was in some Tupperware.”

  Without looking at each other they started giggling. Indelicate snorting laughter. It bent them double. They laughed until their ribs ached.

  “Oh Lord.”

  “Too much.”

  Anita pulled up to an intersection with a stop sign and idled there. Moisture was condensing on the inside of the windshield; she rubbed it away. Main Street stretched in front of them: the coin shop, gift and china shop, H&R Block, a photography studio. Jeff’s bank, a brick-and-glass cube whose architecture, he had told her, was meant to express both financial solidity and customer service. Fog was moving in, blurring the streetlights into hazy moons. “So,” Anita said, as a way of asking, Now what.

  “Either he finds a new place or I do. What do they call it when you see stuff you already saw.”

  “Déjà vu.”

  “He’ll wake up sorry and make his promises and then the whole shitslide starts all over again.”

  “You can come to my house.”

  Rhonda didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. “Huh. How would that go over with the old man.”

  “If he doesn’t like it he can build himself an actual doghouse out in the yard.”

  “Maybe just for tonight. Or what’s left of it.” Rhonda used the towel again on her eyes. Her makeup had been rubbed off, and without it she looked like she’d just woken up. “By the way, thanks.”

  “Sure.” Anita flipped her turn signal, then flipped it off again. They hadn’t yet seen another car anywhere downtown. “Force of habit,” she explained.

  “You crack me up.”

  Anita glanced over at her. “No, really,” Rhonda said. “Here you are, Miss Lady, running the streets with the down-and-out.”

  “It can get pretty down-and-out at my house too, Rhonda.”

  Rhonda stayed quiet on the drive back to Anita’s neighborhood. While she’d been talking she was the same as she always was, quick with an answer for everything. Silent, the worry looked to be piling up in her. Anita could imagine most of it. The disruption of moving, or of having to get Bill H. to move. Money. The guy you shared a bed with and all that fed-up love.

 
“Here we are,” Anita said, pulling into her driveway and letting the door roll open to the brightly lit garage with its tool bench and bicycle rack and tidy shelving. Their garage, her son used to say when he’d been in the habit of talking, was so big, a few third-world families could live there. He had a sense of humor that Anita just couldn’t follow.

  She and Rhonda got out and Anita led the way into the kitchen. She listened, but the house was quiet. “Are you hungry?” she asked Rhonda. “Or, you want coffee?”

  Rhonda still had the towel wrapped around her. She took a few steps then stopped in the center of the kitchen, as if she’d run out of forward momentum. “Not now, I guess.”

  Anita pulled out a chair. “Here. I’m going to make up the guest bed.”

  “You have one of those?” Rhonda asked, with a little of her old spirit. “Where am I, the Holiday Inn?”

  “Sit,” Anita told her, and went out into the hall. The guest room—it was a little grand to call it that, with its piles of junk and broken computer—was next to Matt’s room. His door was open and she closed it, then located the sheets she needed in the linen closet.

  When she was finished, she went upstairs. It took her a while in the dark, but she found an extra bathrobe, wondered what Rhonda would like to sleep in, pajamas or a T-shirt, scooped up both. Took an extra toothbrush and a new bar of soap from the bathroom. Jeff stirred and she waited to see if he’d wake up, but he turned over again and was still.

  Back downstairs she heard voices from the kitchen. Her first thought was that Bill H. had followed them, broken in somehow.

  Her son sat across the kitchen table from Rhonda. A bag of pretzels was open between them and they were both drinking from cans of Coke. “Hi Mom,” Matt said.

  “Oh, honey. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “It’s OK.” He looked rather unsurprised about encountering a strange woman in soaking clothes in his family’s kitchen.

  “This is my friend Rhonda.”

  “We already met,” Rhonda chimed in. “You never told me your boy was a musician.”

  Matt shrugged. “She asked.”

  “That’s nice,” Anita said, wondering just what Rhonda had asked. She sat down between them. “Rhonda’s spending the night.”

  “Yeah. She told me.”

  They sure seemed to have broken the ice in a hurry. “Rhonda, you don’t want to sit in those wet clothes. I brought you a robe and some things.”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “If you get changed, I can run your clothes through the laundry. The bathroom’s down the hall.”

  Rhonda finished her Coke, stood up, and gave Anita a damp, one-armed hug. To Matt she said, “Your mom’s a total sweetie, you know that?”

  Left to themselves, Anita and Matt were quiet. They heard the shower start up in the bathroom. Anita said, “You should go back to bed.”

  “Yeah, in a little.” He was still wearing the T-shirt and shorts he’d had on earlier. His legs and arms looked unaccountably large and manlike. She was used to her children’s sudden shifts and lurches in growth, but she marveled at each one.

  “Rhonda’s had kind of a bad night,” Anita began.

  Matt reached into the bag for more pretzels and sorted them according to some principle Anita couldn’t fathom. “She said her boyfriend got drunk and they started slugging each other.”

  “Did she.” It was true that Rhonda had a lot of AA practice talking about such things. “Well, she doesn’t need us asking her a lot of questions and making it worse.”

  “I don’t see how we’d be the ones making it worse.”

  Anita held up her hand for quiet. There was the sound of feet on the stairs. Marcie came in, blinking in the light. “What’s going on?” She wore an oversize nightshirt and her hair was in a frowsy ponytail. Her slippers had long-eared bunny faces on the toes, and a white pom-pom at the heels, meant to represent bunny tails.

  “One of Mom’s drunk-meeting friends got thrown out of her house.”

  “Matthew.”

  “She’s not the drunk, her boyfriend is.”

  “God, Mom.”

  “Both of you, just put a lid on it.” The sound of the shower had stopped. “You can go back to bed, it’s none of your business.”

  “Why was she taking a shower? Is she dirty?”

  “Quiet,” Anita hissed. The bathroom door opened. Rhonda padded into the kitchen, holding her wet clothes in a bundle. She wore a pair of Anita’s blue-flowered pajamas, too big for her, and a white terry-cloth robe. Her hair was wrapped up in a blue towel. Next to the children in their peculiar nighttime costumes, she looked like a model for sleepwear. “Where do you want these? Oh, hi. I’m Rhonda.”

  “This is my daughter, Marcie.”

  Rhonda said Pleased to meet you. Marcie said something that might have been “Yeah.” Anita took the clothes from Rhonda and stepped into the utility room to start them in the washer. She couldn’t believe both the kids were awake. Usually they could sleep through a bomb going off. She wanted some privacy, a chance to talk to Rhonda.

  But when Anita went back into the kitchen, Matt and Marcie were still there, sitting at the table. She guessed they didn’t want to miss any of the dramatic goings-on. Rhonda was rubbing her hair dry with the towel. Her hair was an ashy blond, and wet like this you could see the gray next to her scalp.

  “Rhonda, I’ve got your bed made up, you can go lie down anytime.” It was almost 3:00 a.m.

  “Thanks. Still a little wound up for sleep.” She looked tired, but maybe she didn’t want to start sorting through everything that had happened yet.

  Marcie said, “You know what would be great? Some hot chocolate.”

  Her brother said, “Yeah, too bad you broke your leg and can’t get up and fix some.”

  Any other time, Marcie would have started in on him. But probably due to Rhonda’s presence, she just gave him a dirty look and got up to put the kettle on.

  Everybody but Anita said they wanted hot chocolate. She was on one of her diets again. Sometimes she thought she’d been dieting her whole life.

  The four of them sat around the table. There was that middle-of-the-night feeling, when whatever was said had a heaviness to it. Rhonda said, “You could fit the whole of my house into this kitchen. My ex-house. I’m moving. I decided.”

  “You can do better than him,” Anita said. There didn’t seem any point in trying to keep the conversation private.

  “Of course I can. Anybody could. I felt sorry for him. See where that gets you.”

  Anita had seen Bill H. at meetings. He wouldn’t have been anybody she’d feel sorry for. A big man with a beat-up face and hands like shovels. Rhonda said, “At least I didn’t marry him. So there won’t be that mess to undo.”

  Matt and Marcie were trying not to look fascinated at all the real-life grown-up stuff available for viewing. Matt cleared his throat. He said, “You could make him leave. You wouldn’t have to move. Especially if he’s the one who started the fight.”

  “Well that’s sweet. But he wouldn’t see it that way. It’s not how a drunk thinks. Nothing’s ever their fault.”

  They hadn’t heard him, but they looked up from the table to see Jeff in the kitchen doorway, his face sleepy and confused. “Rhonda?”

  Rhonda opened her mouth, shut it. When she opened it again, she said, “Well I’ll be damned, Jeff.”

  Anita gaped. Rhonda said, “Coffee.”

  “What?”

  “He comes in for coffee every morning. At the Hot Spot. That’s where I work,” she explained to Matt and Marcie, who were staring, stricken. “We do breakfasts and lunches.” To Jeff she said, “I had some trouble at home tonight.”

  “So, what do—”

  Anita said, “We go to Al-Anon together.”

  “Jesus H. Christ.” Jeff sat down in the extra chair at the end of the table.

  “Small world,” Rhonda offered.

  Marcie spoke up. “So you gu
ys go to your meeting and talk about Dad?”

  Anita said, “It’s supposed to be anonymous. It’s supposed to be confidential.”

  “It still is,” Rhonda said. “We’re just having a little bit of a moment here.”

  Jeff said, “Don’t anybody take this the wrong way, but I could use a drink.”

  “Not funny, Dad.” This from Matt. He was fidgeting with the pretzel bag, crumpling it with one hand.

  “It was meant as a joke, OK?”

  Nobody said anything to that. Jeff tried again. “So, a guy goes into a bar—”

  “Don’t,” Anita told him.

  “I’m not a bad person,” Jeff said. He started crying, right there at the table. His face bunched up and turned red.

  “Oh, right,” Matt said. “Go ahead and feel sorry for yourself.”

  Marcie was crying too. “Why is everybody being so horrible?”

  Anita and Rhonda looked at each other. Rhonda said, “Maybe me calling you wasn’t the best idea I ever had.”

  “You know none of this is your fault.” Anita couldn’t remember the last time they’d all been in the same room together. At least that was something.

  Jeff blew his nose on a paper napkin. “I’ve been sober a month now.”

  Rhonda said, “All due respect, Jeff, but you’re not sober yet. You just don’t stink so bad.”

  The idea came to Anita fully formed. As long as Rhonda didn’t wake up with a changed mind about moving out. But then, none of them looked like they were going to get to bed before sunup anyway.

  Somebody to help smack sense into Jeff. Listen to Matt’s music and draw him out. Maybe even shame Marcie into being a little less spoiled. If Rhonda got her car back from Bill H., she could give Jeff a ride in to work mornings. The spare room would have to be set to rights.

  Her idea branched out, set forth shoots and leaves, details, questions, strategies, all the things she was more than capable of managing. She felt a surge of energy, even optimism. She would be the engine, the driving wheel. So clear was her vision of this future that it seemed as if it had already come to pass.