by Reed Karaim
She zipped up the bag a little too hard.
“Like I said, you’re lucky.”
“It’s just a job, Emily. That’s all it is.”
She shook her head impatiently. “Think about it, Ricky.”
I followed her to the front door. She hesitated and gave me a quick, bony hug.
“I’m not going to call, you know.”
“I know.”
“All right. Hey—”
“Hey—”
I did stand in the window and watch her get in her car and drive down the street, and I can’t say it was without sadness or a sense of loss. Life seemed filled with people disappearing, and she was right: it hadn’t been bad. It just hadn’t been enough. I moved the stool back beside the counter and grabbed a sponge and wiped down the counter, and then I straightened the furniture and the books and found a rag under the sink and dusted everything, which I can’t be certain but I believe may have been the first time I ever dusted in my life. I stood, at the end, in the middle of the small and barely furnished room, flooded with an unfamiliar and comforting sense of possession. My place.
Chapter 22
ANNA’S KIDS SOMETIMES CAME TUMBLING into the office at the end of the school day, Stephen always serious and respectful, as if he was conscious of disturbing a place of work, Sam loud and happy. She loved to sit down at an empty typewriter and clatter away until I had to fight off the urge to grab her by the seat of her pants and throw her back out the door.
She had a routine with Louise whenever they bumped into each other.
“Sign that kid up,” Louise would say, fixing Sam with her solar eye. “She’s a natural!”
Sam would stare happily back into the eye as if it were a portal into a funhouse dimension and pound even harder on the keys. When she was particularly inspired she would utter phrases she had either picked up on the evening news or heard her mother mutter under her breath. My favorite was, “Deadlines deadlines deadlines.”
Louise would nod gravely and disappear into the back, always returning a second later with cans of Orange Crush for both kids.
“Drink up!” she would order Sam. “You need the energy if you’re going to work at this paper, young woman. We have fun, but we work hard around here!”
“Say thank you,” Anna would gently prod her daughter with a look of quiet affection, and this is something I want you to understand: The scenes that happen off-camera in Anna’s story are overwhelmingly scenes of love. She was a mother, first of all, and her children were the largely unseen center of each day. I think about that now, and I think about how hard it must have been. A single mother. Not much money, never enough, really. A life like millions of others in America, equally off-camera. Imagine her tending to a thousand small things in her small house on the sere edge of town—tennis shoes, textbooks, homework, stomach flus, birthday parties, bills—and you have the part of her story we don’t see. This was Anna’s heart, and that makes the mystery of her end even harder to understand because she loved them fiercely, protected them with every ounce of her will every day. I am sure of this.
Yet in the end it wasn’t enough and, with apologies to Robert Frost, the question is not fire or ice; they are both a kind of beckoning flame; the question is how the gentle, sustaining light leaks out of life.
• • •
IN MY MEMORY the days now fly toward winter. Football season starts and I spend part of each Friday driving past combines crisscrossing ripened fields, heading toward a rectangle of dying grass at the edge of another small town where teenage boys in faded jerseys and battered helmets pummel themselves black and blue under lights that lend the scene the stark, judgmental quality of crime scene photos. Anna didn’t care for the game, didn’t understand its rules, hated its violence, so I returned to my first job as a sports reporter, standing on the sidelines, shivering as the sun went down. I still had all my other work, of course, but I found I didn’t mind surrendering my Friday nights to the games. The smallest towns didn’t even have stands; the crowds bunched around the fields, cheering fiercely to stay warm, the sound tribal, ancient, and somehow reassuring.
This parade of days slows down twice. The first time came early in the fall when Todd and I were shooting baskets on a Sunday morning in the park. A handful of high school kids joined us and after I made a nice fade-away shot, I heard one of them say to a buddy, “Not bad for an old guy.”
I had turned twenty-one a few days earlier, a birthday I couldn’t celebrate properly since I had been drinking illegally in the Buffalo Bar for months. Hearing the kid, I felt that I had stepped across a line drawn on the court and committed myself to the team on the other side. The feeling only grew stronger after the kids left and Todd and I were idly tossing the ball toward the hoop.
“I think I’m engaged,” he said.
I had been about to shoot, but I let the ball fall.
“What? Really?”
“Yeah.” Todd shrugged, as if admitting he had done something sort of silly, like painting a room purple.
“Okay. I mean . . . What?”
“Christine and I were talking last night and, well, I guess, she asked and I sort of . . . you know . . .”
I knew they had been seeing a lot of each other. I knew she was at his place a lot, and I knew it seemed to be working for both of them, but I hadn’t thought of it working quite that well.
“Wait a minute. So she asked you to marry her and you said yes?”
Todd picked up the ball and tossed it to me.
“She didn’t propose. I’m not that lame, man, that some girl has to ask me to marry her. Christine asked me what I thought about us, how I thought it was going, and we were just lying there talking and it sort of, you know, got to that point.”
I tossed the ball back at him.
“So you proposed?”
“Well, I didn’t get down on my knees or anything. I mean, we were already lying there and, you know, naked, so it would have been kind of awkward.”
We sat down on the bench beside the court.
“I just kind of said, you know, I thought it was good, really good, and she said she thought so, too, and she asked me if I ever thought about having a family someday, and you know, I like kids, and, well . . . I’m kind of engaged, I think.”
We contemplated the red and gold trees on the periphery of the park.
“This isn’t like the vacuum cleaners, is it?”
He squinted at me. “What do you mean?”
“Something you think you want to do until you do it.”
“No. It’s not like that at all.” He kicked the ball. “It’s not like that. But it is a big thing. It’s kind of scary.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah, but, you know. You can’t just live like a single guy forever. It gets old.”
I nodded.
“So, if I am engaged, you wanna be my best man?”
“Yeah, no, sure. I mean—it’s an honor.”
“Cool.”
I stood and chased the ball down, tossed it toward the basket. Todd followed me.
“You should have gotten down on your knees.”
Todd caught the rebound and banked it back in, the ball falling through the net with that beautiful sound.
“Man, the floor in that room is freezing.”
I saw Christina that noon in the café.
“Congratulations . . . I think.”
She held her coffeepot up, ready to dump the contents in my lap.
“You better be happy for us, Ricky.”
I held up my hands. “I am. I’m just a little unclear on the details.”
“We’re getting married in November. It’s going to be a small wedding. At Grace Lutheran. You and Todd will be wearing dark suits, not tuxedos. We’ll have a reception in the back here. Appetizers and drinks. I’ve talked to Rosie and she’s going to give us the room for free, but we’ll have to pay for the booze. It’s going to run from eight to midnight and then we’ll leave on our honeymoon. I h
ope we can go to San Diego. I’d like to see the ocean. I’ve never seen the ocean.”
“Okay,” I said. “That does clear things up.”
She lowered the coffee a couple of inches.
“You have a suit?”
“I have a suit. I’ll have to go home and get it, but I have a suit.”
“Good. Great.” She set the coffeepot on the edge of the table and I could see she was on the edge of crying. “It’s going to be wonderful.”
• • •
THE OTHER THING that slows the rush of days is the change in Anna. It happened over time, but I think it started early, the first day I was back in the office after my brief vacation out West. Louise wanted to know how it had gone—my healing trip to a lake in Minnesota. I told her the fishing had been fantastic and proceeded to go into detail. I was somewhere in the middle of a story about fighting a ten-pound walleye for twenty minutes on a reel with five-pound line when I saw Anna shaking her head at me. The fish promptly spit the hook and escaped into the Minnesota wilderness, the way all the best fish stories end.
“Where did you really go?” Anna asked when we were pasting up the paper.
“Your neck of the woods,” I said, “or rather, neck without woods. Medora. Teddy Roosevelt National Park. I saw a buffalo.”
She looked as if she was trying to decide whether to believe me.
“You went west? . . . A buffalo?”
“Big one. Smelled like an old rug.”
“Smelled? How close did you get?”
“A couple of feet.” An acceptable exaggeration, I thought, after willfully surrendering a ten-pound walleye to her caution.
“You stayed in the car, right?”
“Nope.”
Anna shook her head again. “Sometimes you’re like twelve years old. You could have been gored or trampled, you know.”
I thought briefly about trying to explain how it had been. How it had been a living breathing creature that was like a mountain or a sky filled with majestic clouds, a thing that told you the world was what it was and you and your sorrows didn’t matter that much, really, in the face of what was maybe simply a great uncaring, but also a great beauty. But of course I didn’t really think all that, at least not clearly—I only think it now, many years later. At the time, I only knew I felt somehow better, maybe even a little smug.
“Yep. It was great.”
“It was?”
“Yep.”
“Did I say twelve? Maybe ten,” she said. “How did Emily react to you taking your life in your hands?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She left.”
Anna had been about to set a strip of copy onto a page. Her hand stopped in midair.
“She left?”
“I asked her to leave. Move out.”
I was trying to keep my voice light—trying to hold on to my newborn sense of release from the dull weight of the last months—and maybe I came across as too flip because I had thought she would be pleased: I was taking steps, I was moving on, I was not settling. But her tone was brittle.
“Just like that. You sent her on her way.”
“I guess, I mean . . . yes, just like that. Sort of.”
“And that was easy.”
“Well,” I said too brightly, “it had to be done, right?”
Anna resumed laying the copy on the page, the same careful movement I had always seen, and yet there was a vagueness, a sense of confusion as her hands came off the table, returned, straightened the story, lifted it, tried again. She picked up another strip of copy, set it down, and walked without explanation into the front shop, where she was gone much longer than necessary.
That was the start. Her mood darkened as the days shortened, which makes it sound like it makes sense, but the autumn in North Dakota is the best of seasons: The afternoons swell with diffused light, the trees are kaleidoscopes, the sky cracks gently along the edge, and all the colors spill into early evening. It’s a time when the unexpected perfection of a particular day can stop you in midstride, when your thoughts slow down to take on a renewed clarity and you make a series of small resolutions to do better from here on out as you turn up your collar against the approaching winter.
I recall that autumn as particularly bright and mild. For Anna, though, a reef of clouds seemed to be building on the horizon. It wasn’t an all-at-once change, but a shading away from the woman I had known. I was still facing my own dark moments—it wasn’t like the placid disregard of one buffalo in the Wild West had swept them clean—so I was slow to accept the difference. I felt it but avoided thinking about it. Anna stood only a few feet away on Thursdays, still ordering the news of our little world into neat columns, and if she was quieter, sharper, or impatient, more often absent, I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. I tried to chat the way we had, told the kind of jokes that once made her smile. Everyone needs to believe in at least one adult, and she was mine. I made myself believe nothing had really changed.
So it was a surprise when Christina called me after ten one evening, her voice unsteady, and asked if we could meet at the Buffalo Bar. I crossed the street thinking something had happened between her and Todd and that I was absolutely the wrong person to be turning to for condolences or romantic advice, since I was lousy at the first and had nothing but failure to draw on for the second.
Christine was sitting alone at a table by the door.
“Anna won’t be my maid of honor.”
I looked at her blankly.
“It’s like the best man for the bride, you idiot.”
“Oh . . . What? . . . Really?”
“She said she doesn’t do weddings.”
This was all coming a little too fast. I wished I had gotten a beer from the bar before sitting down.
“She doesn’t do weddings. What does that mean? It’s not her wedding. It’s mine.”
“I don’t—”
“I thought she was my friend. I thought we were best friends.”
Howard, the bartender, was staring uncertainly at our table, and I realized Christina was crying. This had somehow escaped my trained journalistic powers of observation.
“Listen. Hold it! Hang on. She is your friend. I know that. I don’t . . . I don’t know why she won’t do it, but I don’t think it has anything to do with you. I don’t think it has anything to do with being your friend or . . . whatever. I think it has to do with her. Her own life. There are things she’s scared of. I mean, things she just can’t . . .” As I was saying all this, I was seeing it myself, seeing the men Anna had turned away, seeing the body language that held her carefully apart, remembering the way she stood in the back, near a door, at birthday parties or any celebration, really.
Christina brushed her tears away so roughly I thought she was going to leave scars. She slid her beer across the table toward me and I realized I had somehow managed to say the right thing.
“I know that, you idiot. I know all about that asshole and everything he did to her. But I thought . . . for my wedding. I mean, Todd, too. For our wedding—”
“Would you like me to talk to her?”
I had never really noticed, but Christina, tough-girl haircut and all, looked about twelve when she smiled.
Chapter 23
BUT I DIDN’T TALK TO ANNA. The next day the high school principal resigned and there were rumors of missing money and an office romance, a secretary who had gained a suspicious amount of weight before disappearing on an extended leave. Small towns come with a hardwired rumor circuit that trips in and operates at light speed in such circumstances, and Edith, who drew on people she had known for a hundred years, and I both spent day and night trying to sort through the ever more bizarre stories buzzing through Shannon.
I had one good source on the school board and I was finally able to determine that the secretary’s leave of absence was, indeed, a pregnancy, but had nothing to do with the principal. Stolen money wasn’t an issue, although there had been an ongoing disagreement between the chairma
n of the board and the principal about the budget. The real reason the avuncular, balding man in badly checked sport coats, whom I’d considered the embodiment of a small-town school administrator, was leaving was that his wife had stomach cancer, and they were moving to Arizona so she could pursue alternative treatment. She didn’t want anyone to know she was sick because she didn’t want to be a bother.
The night they agreed to talk to me about this, they asked that I park down the street and come up the alley to their house. “Everybody knows your car,” the principal said, and I felt strangely notorious. The school board member who had first tipped me to the truth was waiting inside with them. The principal’s wife insisted on serving coffee and putting out lemon cookies while I listened to her husband and realized from the defeat in his eyes that he didn’t believe in her decision and thought she was going to die.
His wife sat down on the overstuffed couch beside him. “It’s all become too much of a commotion,” she said, picking at a thread on the cuff of her loose-knit sweater. “You’ll have to tell people, I guess, but could you just tell them I’m sick and we’re going down for treatment? I don’t want to have to go over all the details with every nosy nobody.”
I walked back down the alley and sat in my car on a street of neatly kept pillbox houses all nearly identical to theirs. A small-town street at night. Yellow porch lights above concrete steps. Shadows of life moving behind curtained windows. Silence like an old, comfortable sweater. I wondered how many of her friends had noticed how thin she had become and not said a thing, or asked so obliquely that the question had been as easy to set aside as a teacup. I sat in my car thinking about a woman who viewed dying as an embarrassment, and the fragile peace I had made with my own grief unraveled. My heart simmered and then raged at the inbred reticence of the people in this state, the reflexive politeness that said nothing, the vapid declarations about weather and last night’s game used to build small, neat pillboxes of emotional shelter. I wanted someone to tell me they had no idea what they were doing. I wanted someone to say they were scared to death. I wanted someone to say they were going out of their mind trying to cope. I wanted someone to get too loud, to start shouting and not be able to stop.