The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  There would be persuasion needed, with assurances made all around, how Rhonda would be the one doing them the favor. Which was perfectly true. There were times when a family needed an orphan.

  Veracruz, Mexico

  OCTOBER 10, 1996

  Hey man,

  I got your new address from my folks, they said you’d moved. I guess if you have the kids, they have to have a place to ride bikes and dig in the dirt and all that kid stuff. Well that’s great. Tell them Uncle Chip says hi. Yeah, I gave up that fight. To the home folks, I’m always going to be Chip.

  Notice the funny stamp? I got my sorry ass down to Mehico. It’s a long story. It always is. There were some business opportunities. It’s nothing I’d put in a letter. But it all worked out pretty sweet. There’s times I’ve had money and there’s times I’ve had no money and I’m here to tell you, one is better than the other.

  Veracruz suits me fine. I been a couple of other places this side of the border and this is the best one I found. It has all the old-timey stuff like the cathedral and the Zocalo, that’s like a plaza with places for dances and domino games and hanging out all night drinking cervezas. You imagine doing that back home? Acting like every day was a party? But it’s also a big dirty city, sort of like Detroit with palm trees, so that keeps the tourists down.

  Veracruz is where Cortes landed in 1519 and everybody’s luck started to run out. More and more I like reading about history and historical events. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s all written down so I don’t have to worry about forgetting it. (Ha ha.)

  So if I’m 45, I guess that makes you 40. Whoa Nelly, like the old folks used to say. Except now we’re the old folks. Blows my mind.

  Boy I don’t know if I’m old yet, but parts of me sure are. There’s things I worry about.

  You should come visit. Just say the word. I’ve got a nice place, actually it’s my girlfriend’s but she is very big on family. She would knock herself out cooking and cleaning for all of you and think it was a big treat. She’s different that way. Her name is Mayahuel.

  There’s a phone number, I’ll put it at the end. If Mayahuel or one of her kids answers, they don’t speak a lot of English. Just say, Llame Senor Ray. That’s me. What a trip.

  Sincerely yours,

  The Old Gringo

  Iowa

  APRIL 1997

  It was Torrie’s moving day and the last thing you could expect was for it to go smoothly. Everybody would see to that. Blake only wanted to get it over with.

  There had been a little rain overnight, just enough to make puddles and clear the air. This morning he was looking at a blue sky, a good twelve hours of daylight, and a whole string of jobs backing up on him. Calls to return, somebody wanting an estimate on a room addition, somebody else needing a rental property repaired and needing it now. Supposedly, he was his own boss.

  He threw the last of his cigarette out the truck window. The whole world wanted him to quit smoking. The world was going to have to wait.

  It was only a ten-minute drive to his parents’ house, tops, but he took his time, the last piece of the day he could call his. His coffee mug in the cupholder, the radio tuned to the PBS station nobody ever believed he listened to. The roads he’d just about worn a track in by now, into town past the abandoned high school somebody was going to have to either fix up or tear down someday, past the used-to-be-a-gas-station-bakery-insurance-agency-barbecue-joint.

  Once he reached town, he went out of his way to go down Main Street. He wanted to look at the brickwork one more time. The old bank building, his contribution to civic pride, and Torrie’s new home. The mall had just about killed off the last of downtown. The bank project got everybody all excited about the revival of the business district, which always seemed just about to happen but never really took off.

  He slowed and went around the block. He’d worried about the brick, but he’d ridden the mason’s ass until they got it right. The downstairs spaces, which were meant for commercial use, were just roughed in, waiting for somebody to sign a lease and decide what they wanted. Torrie’s place, upstairs, was the only real finished part.

  There wasn’t an inch of the place that hadn’t fought him. The old gas piping had to be dug up and sealed to suit the inspector. The celings had to be dropped an extra six inches to fit the ductwork and that had thrown everything off. Next time somebody asked him to rehab a pile of ancient batshit and asbestos, he’d say no thanks.

  Except next time, he’d know how to do it better. There ought to be some way of learning things that didn’t take the hide off you piece by piece. And he’d done good work. Anybody with eyes could see that, if they thought about it in the first place.

  The night before, his mom had kept Trish on the phone for most of an hour, going on and on. His mom was all bent out of shape and Trish was the only one who’d put up with it. Blake would walk into the kitchen for a beer and Trish would still be sitting at the table with the phone up to her ear. He’d raise his eyebrows, a question, and Trish would shake her head. “Of course not,” she said. “Sure.” A laundry basket was in front of her and while she talked, or rather, listened, she was folding towels.

  He went back into the den. Friday night. His daughters were out running the streets, his son was planted in front of the television. Blake stood and watched the show, trying to figure it out. It was one of the Star Treks, but he didn’t recognize any of the characters.

  “What is this?”

  “Deep Space Nine,” his son answered. Which explained exactly nothing. There seemed to be an effort under way to show more black people in outer space. Good luck with that one.

  He had paperwork to do but he waited until Trish hung up the phone. Then he went out to the truck for his ledger and receipts. In the kitchen Trish was loading the dishwasher. She said, “They want you over there by ten.”

  “Yeah, OK.” He sat down at the table and opened the ledger. His business checks were laid out in notebook style and he didn’t always fill out the stubs. Another bad habit, like smoking. Once he had the ledger straightened out, Trish would enter it all in the computer. He still wasn’t much of a computer guy. “How was Mom?”

  “She’s convinced that something horrible’s going to happen to Tor.”

  “Something horrible already did happen to her.”

  “And you’re all aiding and abetting.”

  “She’ll get over it.” His mother and Torrie drove each other crazy. The move was the best thing for everybody. It was just going to take some prying loose on his mother’s part and she wasn’t very good at that.

  Trish moved around the kitchen, setting things to rights, then she went into the laundry room to start the next load. She worked twenty-five hours a week at Farm and Fleet. It felt like neither of them ever quit working. They could barely keep three kids on two salaries when his parents had raised four on his dad’s job alone. The math of the world had got screwed up somehow.

  The phone rang. Trish picked it up and tried to find a place between the squalling noise of the dishwasher and the laundry, gave up, and handed it to Blake. “It’s your brother.”

  “Hey Ry. Hold on a minute.” The noise drove him out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. He closed the door, lay down on the bed with his beer balanced on top of a newspaper on the nightstand. “OK.”

  “How are you, man?”

  Everybody said he and his brother sounded exactly the same, you couldn’t tell the difference between them on the phone. Maybe if he made about ten times as much money, this was what he’d sound like. “I’m good,” Blake said. “Friday night and the beer’s cold.”

  “You talk to Mom yet?”

  “No, but Trish did.”

  “She still on the warpath?”

  “Yeah, you’re evil.” Ryan had bought the old bank building, an investment, he called it. Another big idea from the idea man. Then Torrie had jumped all over it. “How’s everybody at your house?”

  “Great. Crazy, but great. Sam’s
a pistol. His new thing is arm wrestling. One of these days he’s gonna take me.”

  Blake said you could count on that. Silence. He wanted a cigarette but he’d have to go out in the garage for that, and he figured he might as well wait for whatever his brother really wanted to talk about.

  Ryan said, “You think I should have told her she couldn’t.”

  He hadn’t asked it as a question. “No, I think it’s a good thing. Or will be, once the dust settles.”

  “Thirty-five years old, for Christ’s sake. I figured, this is the only way it would work for her. Something with a lot of support systems.”

  “True.”

  “Mom and Dad aren’t going to last forever.”

  “You don’t have to pile up a lot of reasons to convince me.”

  Another silence. Then Ryan said, “I should call Mom.”

  “Probably.”

  “Call me if there’s anything funky. And thanks.”

  “No problem. This time tomorrow, it’ll be a done deal.”

  He hung up the phone and went out for his cigarette. It hadn’t occurred to his brother to be here himself.

  Torrie was going to live there rent-free, part of what would make it all work, and that was generous of his brother, a good thing, and buying the old bank in the first place was another good thing, one that got him into the newspaper. It was a more complicated kind of good thing for Ry to ask him to do the rehab. It was a paycheck for him and the two or three guys he could take on. Winter work, you were always glad to have that.

  But his brother didn’t understand that if it was anybody else but family, he could have set his bid a lot higher, really made it pay off for him. And Ryan wasn’t going to have their mother in one ear and Anita in the other, giving him grief. And Trish, the one they’d decided they were going to look down on for all time, would still be fielding their phone calls, because they’d decided she was good enough for that. Ryan didn’t understand any of this because he didn’t live here and hadn’t for a long time now.

  • • •

  Torrie was already outside waiting for him. A dozen plastic storage bins were lined up on the driveway. When she saw the truck pull in, she began dragging one of them toward it.

  “Whoa, Tor. Let me do that.”

  She straightened up, puffing a little. She was strong, but she wasted a lot of energy flailing around. “So, you excited about moving?”

  “Yeah, excited.” She grinned and punched him in the arm.

  “Well, I’ll go see what the old folks are up to.”

  “Ha,” Torrie said. Wise-guy style.

  Ha it was. Blake walked into an empty kitchen. Crap. He went farther back into the house. “Mom? Dad?”

  His dad was in Torrie’s room, taking apart the bed frame with a wrench and a screwdriver. The mattresses were leaning against the wall. His dad didn’t swear, but he looked as if he would have liked to. “Ah, these bolts,” he said.

  “Let me give it a shot.” Blake took the wrench from him and worked the bolt until it loosened. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Resting.”

  That meant she was pitching one or another kind of fit, but if they were lucky, she’d stay put until they got the truck loaded.

  Today they were moving the little bit of furniture Torrie was taking with her, plus her clothes and whatever his mom and Anita had put together for a kitchen. Not that either of them believed Torrie was capable of cooking a meal or keeping herself fed. Blake had already picked up most of Torrie’s photography equipment, mostly to keep his dad from doing it himself. His dad didn’t like to think he was slowing down, but he was almost seventy and didn’t need to bust himself up for no reason.

  Somehow, Torrie’s moving a dozen blocks away was some kind of epic event that brought out everybody’s peculiar side.

  Torrie even earned a little money these days. She’d started making different things out of her photographs: cards, calendars, even T-shirts. She sold them at the gift shop at the mall, and a guy in Seattle had them for sale out there too. She’d found him on the Internet. Every so often Torrie took a box of her stuff down to the post office to send to him. It was hard to understand why anybody normal would want to look at one of Torrie’s pictures on a daily basis. A whole calendar of them? That would make for a real strange year.

  He and his dad got the bed frame outside and slid it into the truck, then propped the mattresses next to them, then braced everything with the clothes dresser and some of the storage tubs. Torrie kept coming out with different odds and ends: pillows in a plastic garbage bag, a milk crate filled with her old schoolbooks. A lamp with its base in the shape of a cartoon owl.

  His dad straightened up from where he was working in the truck bed. “You know, Tor, you can leave some of your stuff here if you want.”

  Torrie just laughed and stumped back inside for more.

  Blake said, “She’s really cleaning the place out.”

  “Yeah, it’s going to feel a little empty.”

  They made room for the rest of the plastic tubs, trying to get the load square. It would be too much to hope for that he’d get it all in one trip.

  “You and Mom ever think about moving? Get some place smaller?”

  “Ah, your Mom wouldn’t want to. You know how she is.”

  Blake said he knew. He was pretty sure that if he asked his mom, she’d say it was his dad who was set on staying put.

  He didn’t like thinking about his folks getting old. Older. As long as Torrie still lived under their roof, everything had stayed the same. In a sad sort of way, because in other, normal circumstances, his sister would have moved out years ago. They’d had to be parents for way too long. Blake was fond of saying that when his kids turned eighteen, they were each going to get a handshake and a new suitcase.

  They just about had a full load roped in when Anita honked at them and pulled up along the curb. She’d driven the Mazda, which meant she wasn’t intending to haul any furniture, but she’d brought his nephew. At least now he’d have somebody besides his dad to get the heavy stuff upstairs.

  Torrie, who had been standing in the driveway, turned and made a beeline for the house.

  Anita picked her way along the street in her sporty shoes. The Shoe Queen, Trish called her. Among other things. “Hi guys. Dad, I told you Matt was coming, you didn’t have to do anything.”

  “We’ve got it under control,” his dad said.

  Matt looked like he didn’t much want to be here, and who could blame him. It was his spring break and probably all his friends were off on a beach somewhere, having drunken college-boy fun.

  “I brought some curtains,” Anita said. “The ones we used to have in the den. If Torrie doesn’t want them, I’ll take them back. Does she have enough towels? I have an extra set, blue and white stripes. Matt, tell your grandfather not to climb up there, you’ll do it. Where’s Mom?”

  Anita went in through the kitchen door. She seemed to leave a little space of stunned air where she’d been. Matt put his hands in the pockets of his jacket, then took them out again. “Hey Uncle Blake. Hey Grandpa.”

  “Hi Matt. How’s college treating you?”

  “It’s OK. You need me to do anything?”

  “Not this exact minute.”

  Blake figured it was a good time for a cigarette, as long as they had to wait for the women to tell them what to do. Smokem if you gotem. He leaned back against the truck, exhaling into the blue sky. “You smoke, Matt?”

  Matt said he didn’t. “Do yourself a favor and don’t start,” Blake told him. He figured the kid did all the usual college druggie stuff. He went to school out in Arizona. Studying history, which to Blake’s way of thinking was a waste of time, since everything about it had already happened.

  “How’s your father these days?” This from Blake’s dad.

  “He’s good,” Matt told him. This was how people asked after Jeff. Good meant, Not Drinking. There had been some bad times. A stint in the Drunk Hospital. He’d had to
change jobs.

  But Anita had him towing the line now. You had to give her credit, she hadn’t given up on the sorry son of a bitch. She was all about AA now. She went all over the place for conferences. Organized meetings, wrote newsletters. She was back on top of her game, like it was high school all over again. There was usually some down-and-out character living at their house. No wonder his nephew had run off to Arizona.

  Jeff sure seemed to know he was licked. Anytime you saw him, he had that hangdog look. It almost made you want to sneak him a drink.

  Blake’s dad said, “I’m wondering what the holdup is. You think we should just head downtown?”

  If you had to ask the question in the first place, the answer was no. His dad seemed to realize this and sat down on the open tailgate. He said, “I saw on television where a rocket was going to take some dead people up in outer space. Their ashes. Shoot ’em out the window.”

  “Yeah?” Blake hadn’t heard about that.

  Matt stirred. “One of them’s Gene Roddenberry. The guy who created Star Trek.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, really, he wanted to be buried in outer space. You know. The Final Frontier. He wanted to be part of it. It’s not so weird. Outer space is where people always thought heaven was. Or maybe they still do. You know another guy they’re taking up in the rocket? Timothy Leary. He invented LSD.”

  “You’re kidding,” Blake said again.

  “LSD,” his dad said. “I thought that was illegal.”

  Matt, who had just said more than Blake had heard from him in about the last three years, seemed to be done talking. He sat down in one of the old dining-room chairs Torrie was taking with her and zipped his jacket closer around his neck.

  Blake’s dad said, “You can’t count on anything to stay the same anymore, can you? Every time I read the paper or watch the news, I have to learn some brand-new thing.”

  Blake didn’t know if that was all bad, but he kept this opinion to himself. His dad was in one of his moods and you pretty much had to give him the floor, so to speak.