The Fifteen Wonders of Daniel Green

by Erica Boyce

  I shrink back in the face of the bald bitterness in her voice. “But what if…” I can’t finish the thought.

  She looks at me and smiles the softest, saddest smile. “Even if things went south for your father, what do you think would happen with both of them under one roof?”

  I’d called Charlie on speakerphone as I drove back home a couple weeks ago. “I think something’s wrong with Dad. Really wrong.”

  He sighed. He always knew exactly which bush I was beating around. “So you’re going out there to find out for yourself. Don’t you think we should wait until they’re ready to tell us?”

  “To hell with that. Mom waited way too long last time.”

  “Okay, so you’re going out there to do what?” He was really pretty annoying.

  “To find out what’s wrong, to be there for them. And I think you should be there, too.”

  Even as I said it, I pictured every holiday he’d come home for, the sharp set of my dad’s face, Charlie’s fingers coiled in his fists like secrets. He was silent on the phone, and the road murmured beneath my tires for a moment before he said, “Do you really think that would help?”

  My mom watches me think. “You see? There’s no point in forcing a reunion. At least not yet.”

  * * *

  No point. No point? It’s all I can think about over the next couple of days. How could that be? It’s like neither one of them has any idea they’re actually the same person, separated by twenty-something years and three thousand miles. Right down to the way they order dinner, scanning the menu, folding it, and ordering the BLT. I used to walk in on them on spring mornings, comparing notes about the previous night’s Sox game over bowls of cereal with little stale marshmallows in it. I would scurry to pour myself a bowl of it and pretend to give a shit about baseball.

  Whenever the conversation turned to the farm, though, Charlie ducked down deeper into his breakfast. I’d be the one nodding along to Dad’s never-ending quest to live in sync with the sun. And soon enough, I learned what he was talking about. Farming became more than just churning through chores, arguing with my brother about whose turn it was to do the milking before the school bus came. I learned what it was to look at a freshly tilled row at the end of the day and know that I did that. Me. And I started talking back during my Dad’s morning ramblings, his hands dancing to the music of his plans.

  All that time, though, it was supposed to be Charlie. We all knew that. Every farm in town, run by the son. You stuck with it, because if you didn’t, there’d be no one else to take your place. And then what?

  Us girls, meanwhile, had a couple of choices. We could get pregnant in our childhood bedrooms, laughing into our pillows while our boyfriends snuck out our windows, then waddling around trying to get high school diplomas over our full-term bellies. Reuniting in the bright brutality of the local Stop & Shop at the same time every week to plan Fourth of July parties and meal trains for whoever got pregnant, sick, or laid off.

  Or you could go to college and get a new life. Come to town for bonfire reunions between semesters and then less and less once you’d graduated and your real life began. The rule was, you got married to someone in a city and did something else, maybe teaching or litigating. Only when you reached your forties and started thinking wistfully about everything were you allowed to come back, buy a plot of land, start your gray-haired back-to-basics farm, and struggle to sell rutabagas from an honor-system stand at the lip of your driveway.

  My decision—to go to college in order to come back, to do the work my brother hated—is an odd one. I can see it in the particular cock of eyebrows when people ask what I’m up to.

  That’s one reason why Shawn and I are so close: he’s never really cared. And I’m reminded of that lovely fact every time I climb into his truck for our regular drives around town.

  “Where to tonight, Loch Ness?” he says as I kick aside the Dunkin’ Donuts cups and Happy Meal toys littering the passenger side floor.

  “I’m thinking over to the lake? Supposed to be a meteor shower tonight, and that’d be a great place to watch it all from.”

  “You got it. As long as I’m home in an hour.” He backs up our driveway, gravel kicking out from under his tires as he accelerates. This is the deal he’s somehow struck with his wife, Melissa: one night a week when I’m in town, after their son’s in bed, he can go hang out with his female best friend. As long as he’s back in their bed by the time she rolls over to turn the light off. I can’t necessarily blame her; it’s a little weird, I’m sure, to have your husband driving around town at all hours with another woman. I wish she believed what every gossip in town knows—Shawn and I go way back, and any romantic potential died a quick and painless death before it began.

  The first few minutes of the drive, we just watch the headlights slice through the night. Then, eyes still fixed on the road, he says, “Did you hear about Tim Mahoney?”

  “No, what about him?”

  “He died a couple nights back. Heroin. They found him in his car, parked in his driveway.”

  I start to make those nondescript mumbles people do when they don’t really know the deceased, but then an image of him flashes before me, baseball hat tipped sideways and kind and humid eyes. “I worked on a group project with him once junior year,” I say instead. “Smart kid. Jesus.”

  Shawn lifts his hips slightly off his seat, his foot pressing the accelerator as he shifts his weight, and runs his hand down over his beard.

  I flick the lock on my door back and forth, once, twice, then again, one two three four five, and the clicking is a constant until we pull up to the lake.

  “Have you figured out anything more about your dad?” he asks as I slide up onto the hood of his truck. He leans back against the front bumper and lights a cigarette. The smoke filters the moon. I wonder if Melissa wants him to quit.

  “Yeah. Stomach.”

  He winces. “That’s not good.”

  “No.” We sit in silence again. Bats swoop down over the water, commas against the sky. When we were kids, teachers always frowned over Shawn’s name on their attendance list. He sat in the back, huddled over his desk, never taking a single note or raising his hand. He could always tell just what was simmering under your surface, though. We met at recess one day, sitting on the sidelines of a four-square game, sifting through the grass to find bugs. We used to spend almost every weekend at this lake, avoiding the practiced chaos of high school parties, sitting and talking.

  “What are you going to do?”

  I drum my fingers against the hood of the truck, warm like an animal under my hand. “I don’t know. I’ve tried to corner my mom again a couple times since I found out, but she either pretends everything’s okay or looks like she’s about to fall apart. She refuses to tell Charlie.”

  He nods, the tip of his cigarette bouncing. “So, you have to do it.”

  “I guess so. The last time I did, he barely blinked before rattling on about the possible pathways a tumor can take through the body. That’s how he said it, too—not ‘my dad’s body,’ but ‘the body.’ The weirdest thing.”

  “It’s how he copes, with distance. Always has.” He takes another inhalation of smoke, then says through it, “He still needs to know.”

  “I just wish he would come out here and see for himself. Maybe it would be harder with him here, but maybe not.” We used to cross our eyes at each other at the dinner table and stick up for each other from opposite ends of the school bus. Charlie, with his green eyes always clouded, with his thin careful fingers, was the other end of me.

  Shawn stubs out his cigarette into the sole of his shoe and says what I’ve been thinking all along. “Why don’t you just go get him? Look him in the eye and tell him. He’ll come then.”

  There are a thousand reasons I haven’t done this yet, but the main one is this: “Is that selfish of me?” I say. “To br
ing in the one person who can break my dad’s heart, and to force that person to come back to a place where he doesn’t feel comfortable, just because I need him here? It seems like it’d create so much drama, and it’d be all my fault.”

  “Ness.” He turns to look at me straight on, gripping my shins to steady me. “He’s your brother. You all need him here.”

  * * *

  A couple of days later, I see Daniel at the general store. As a general rule, we are stilted and stiff around each other in public, not wanting to give the impression we spend late nights together but not really knowing how not to, either.

  I walk up behind him where he’s studying brands of bandages and tap his shoulder. “Hey,” I say.

  “Jesus! I didn’t see you there.”

  I smirk. All those years of sneaking around on other people’s private property have made him jumpy.

  “Listen, I need you to come by our house later this afternoon. There’s something I want to talk to you and Mom about.”

  He glances over his shoulder down the empty aisle. “I usually minimize time at clients’ houses during the day,” he says.

  “Oh, please. We’re the only unmarried people younger than forty in this town. People will just think we’re dating.” I laugh as his face downshifts into a grimace. “Just come by at four, okay? It won’t take long. I promise.”

  * * *

  At 3:55, Daniel sits at the kitchen table, his hands clasped in front of him and his feet tucked behind the front legs of the chair.

  Mom, following just behind me, stops short at the sight of him. “Daniel. Can I get you something? Coffee? Soda?”

  He shakes his head, and I guide her to another chair and sit down in a third, planting my palms on the table. “Actually, there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you guys about.” I clear my throat, and it feels like I’m asking their permission. “I’m going to go get Charlie.”

  Mom deflates. All she says is, “Yes. I suppose it’s time.”

  My hands start to shake, and I grab the edges of my seat. Daniel stares at me, his mouth drawn into one corner. I meet his eyes. “And I was thinking maybe you could help me drive out there. It’d be so much faster with two people taking driving shifts, you know?”

  I can hear his double take. “Drive? But wouldn’t it be easier to fly?”

  It’s not the question I expected. I thought he’d be worried about leaving his circle, not about how we’d get from point A to point B. The compelling arguments I’d come up with to get him to come along all whisk away.

  “Nessa doesn’t fly,” Mom supplies, a line she’s said with authority over and over again to protect me from unanswerable questions, so I don’t have to explain. I nod, and Daniel slowly starts to move his head with mine, pretending to understand.

  “But,” he asks softly, rolling the question across the table, “do we have time?”

  “Yes,” my mom tells herself. “We have time.”

  Chapter Ten

  Daniel

  I couldn’t really tell you why I agreed to it. I’ve never left a job midstream, not ever—and if I did, I wouldn’t come back. Too many questions to answer, too much attention. And I couldn’t tell you why she chose me, out of a town full of people who remembered what she looked like as a toddler.

  But she did. Pick me. And it felt like it’d already been decided. I could barely get a word in edgewise, much less deny Nessa and Molly their plan. They schemed and cracked cans of soda while I sat there silently and figured out how I would cover things up. Make sure no one found the circle while I was away, pinned it on me. There was no way I could start pressing before I left, that was for sure. But what if the paint wore away in the meantime? I wasn’t sure how durable the stuff was. On second thought, maybe I’d better hope it’d wear off. I didn’t know if I could trust Molly and Sam to come up with an explanation if anyone happened by at night and saw the paint when I wasn’t there.

  “You should tell the Shannons the truth,” Molly said. “You’re helping Nessa retrieve Charlie.”

  Nessa and I nodded. We needed an explanation for the two of us going and coming back at the same time.

  Planning it from the safety of their kitchen was one thing, though. I decide to wait until the next morning to tell Connie Shannon, when Earl’s already left the house, wordless as always, to get things started in the barn. This is the worst part of every job, letting down a family that was counting on your help for another season or two.

  “I see.” She sits down in stages, setting her hands on the kitchen table before dropping into the chair. “You’re leaving with Nessa. And are you coming back?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say, “definitely. It should only be a couple weeks, over to California and back with Charlie. It’ll be faster with the two of us driving. I asked if she could just take a plane, but Nessa—”

  “Doesn’t fly. Yes.” She fiddles with one of her earrings. “Sam must not be doing well.”

  It’s not a question, but still, I clear my throat. There’s nothing I can say here that wouldn’t get spun out and redrawn with her friends.

  I go with what we decided on. “Sam can’t know what we’re doing. He might refuse to see Charlie or call him and tell him not to come, or—you know.”

  Her mouth turns up a little. “He is stubborn.”

  “And we don’t want people in town to know, either. It might get back to Sam. The story is a big early frost hit Nessa’s old farm down in Georgia, and they need everyone to come back and help. And I’ve always wanted to see what the farm’s about, so…”

  “You’re going with her.”

  This is the plan: make Connie part of our secret to distract her from what a strange story it really is. Her farmhand running a cross-country errand with a woman who, as far as Connie knows, I’ve only met a couple of times in the grocery store. It felt a little ridiculous and maybe a little scary, watching Molly’s eyes twinkle at this part of the plan.

  But it works. Connie firmly agrees. And smiles while she tells me a story about when she and Earl were new in town and Sam and Molly were the first to visit, with pasta salad and unsolicited farming advice. “Earl and Sam were shouting at each other for a good thirty minutes, and I thought poor Molly was going to sink straight into the floor, but by the time they left that night, the two of them were slapping each other’s backs like we’d known them for years.” She laughs, shakes her head. “It’s nice of you to do this for them,” she says.

  I look down at my lap. “I’ve become a good long-distance driver working like this.”

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s why,” she says, and I could swear she winks.

  This might be the first actual wink I’ve gotten. Usually, a woman in town will tow me over to some girl after church or at a holiday party and proudly announce that we both studied science in high school, or like the Beatles, or breathe oxygen. Then, she’ll slink off to “check on the cheese and crackers.” And the girl, who’s definitely been through this more times than I have, will either try to make conversation for a few minutes, or she’ll sigh, shrug at me like I’m in on the joke, and chew viciously on her cheese and crackers.

  When Claire was here, it was all different, obviously. We were a package deal, a couple making our way across the country, farm by farm, duffel bags stacked in the back seat. She would come with me to those parties and church sermons, touching my waist in a way that felt completely foreign and welcome at the same time. She would grin slyly when our hosts asked when we were getting married, tapping the edge of her paper plate of swiss and cheddar. We were in no rush at that point. Nothing was rushed.

  * * *

  For a long time, Claire and I were just making crop circles together, nothing more. She was my partner from the very first project I ever worked on. She showed me where to stand to get the best view of the field, how to distribute my weight on the presser so I did
n’t lose my balance. Every time she touched me—on my shoulder or my arm mostly, but sometimes on the back of my neck—I felt it leave a mark, a shadow. But even though I’d driven hundreds of miles with her already, I couldn’t make myself cross the space between us.

  One day, the daughter at our cover job found me at the kitchen table. It was hours earlier than she usually woke up. She might’ve even been wearing lip gloss. She made herself a bowl of oatmeal and sat down next to me. She started asking where I was from, how I’d gotten into farming, and I gave her all the vague answers Claire and I had come up with. She giggled at everything I said, even when I wasn’t trying to be funny. She took a bite of her oatmeal, and the spoon took all the lip gloss off.

  After a few minutes, she pushed her bowl away and said, “Hey, do you want to go see a movie some night with me?”

  I swallowed a glob of oatmeal whole and coughed around it, my eyes watering. “Um, I don’t know. I have to be up pretty early in the mornings.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, halfway between teasing and begging. “That’s the benefit of having two farmhands, right? That girl can handle herself for one single morning. My dad could hardly believe his luck with you guys, two helpers for the price of one. And I couldn’t believe my luck, either.”

  I snorted into my coffee, and she laughed. I sighed. “Okay. Maybe.”

  “Cool,” she said and floated back out of the kitchen, past Claire, who was standing in the doorway. Claire, whose eyes were, maybe, a little narrowed.

  * * *

  That night, I was almost asleep when the door creaked open and Claire slipped in. She ran across the floor in her bare feet and slid into my bed next to me. Without a word, she kissed me long and deep while my hands gripped her shoulders.

  “You’re mine, you’re mine,” she whispered into my neck hours later. And I was. She rolled over onto her back and stretched her tanned arms over her head. “You know,” she said, running one finger over the bridge of my nose, “I knew I liked you the minute I saw you.”