She stared off into the black distance. All future crises would have to wait until tomorrow afternoon, when she returned to her hometown on the Northern Plains.
Chapter Two
THE THIRTY-SEATER BUCKED and lurched toward Teddy Roosevelt Regional, but Karen continued to study her computer screen, assessing the plusses and minuses of Wes’ latest cost-cutting scheme. Only once did she pause, grasping the laptop to keep it from sailing to the floor, but she never stopped, even when the attendant warned the passengers to return to their seats and buckle up. Like most CEOs, Wes had been using the Great Recession as his excuse to slash staff to the bone, thereby showing positive growth on the company’s balance sheets. Anybody who managed to creep up the salary ladder was fair game. Age was a target, too. The older employees were tossed onto ice floes and shoved off into the dark waters of the frigid economy.
At fifty years old and the top of the pay scale, Karen would not let that happen to her.
The plane jerked hard and a papery hand shot across the aisle to grab her arm. Karen glanced up. “Don’t worry. We’ll be down safe in a minute,” she said, the vernacular of the Plains already reasserting itself.
The old woman peered at Karen through her trifocals. “Are you one of the Schulers?”
“No. Sorry.” Karen looked out the window. Far below, her home town of Dickinson, North Dakota sat like a fat hen in the middle of a checkerboard. Crops fanned out to the horizon in every direction, divided into sections by narrow strips of road. Tomorrow, the cortege would follow one of those roads to a newly-turned grave, put her mother in the ground, and Karen would officially become an orphan. Except at her age, she had lost the right to consider herself such, and she wondered when was the cutoff. She hadn’t been warned. It didn’t seem fair.
She returned to her work. One more memo, one more critical task to finish. When the flight attendant tapped her on the shoulder, Karen slid the laptop into its case next to her ticket for tomorrow’s return. She would make her escape right after the funeral. Otherwise, the vast web of her extended family would ensnare her, trying to draw her back into the fold. It happened every time she visited, although she’d returned less and less in the past few years.
For a moment the plane leveled off and floated above the runway in that sickening pocket of silence before the wheels hit. It landed hard, bounced once, and braked. As it slowed, she opened her eyes to see the old woman smiling at her. Karen smiled back. “See? We made it. Enjoy your visit.”
“Oh, I’m not visiting,” the woman said as the plane jerked to a stop. “I’m home.” She stood, her back crooked with age, her thin sweater rucked halfway to her shoulders. Karen reached over and gently pulled it down.
Outside, a man in a reflective vest and ear protectors wheeled a metal stairway across the tarmac to the door of the plane. At the exit, the wind painted Karen’s scarf across her face, blinding her.
She followed the small group to the terminal, where she spotted her cousin, Lorraine, and wrapped her in a hug. For a moment, Karen was lost in Lorraine’s perfume, reminiscent of summers when they piled into station wagons headed for Patterson Lake, baked their taut brown skin under a sheen of cocoa butter, and impressed the boys with graceful dives from the floating swim dock.
“Where’s Steve?”
Karen blinked, lost in her memories. “He’s not here. He couldn’t come.”
Lorraine reached for a suitcase. “Is everything okay?”
Karen stopped what she was doing and looked Lorraine in the eye. Around them, the terminal cleared as North Dakotans headed for town. I think we’re getting divorced.”
“Oh, no. I’m so sorry.” Lorraine hugged her. “I don’t know what to say.”
Karen shrugged and got in the car. What else could Lorraine say? They hadn’t seen each other but a couple of days in the past thirty years. “Thanks.”
Lorraine placed the suitcase in the back seat and sat watching her cousin. “How long has it been since you decided to separate?”
“He moved out a few months ago.”
“That’s so sad.” Lorraine stared through the windshield a moment before starting the car. “It’s weird. The same thing happened to two of my friends just in the last six months. Both of them had been married for like, thirty years. It’s like an epidemic among old people.”
“Steve’s just having a midlife crisis. Not too original,” said Karen.
“Well anyway, you still have us. And I have no doubt you’ll be fine. You’ve always been the strong one.” Lorraine reached across and squeezed Karen’s arm. “Are you ready for tomorrow?”
“Ready as I can be.” As much as Karen dreaded the thought of the funeral, almost more foreboding was the thought of her childhood home filling with mourners. She would play hostess for the bereaved, wearing her game face for the family and friends, but only until it was time to leave. “Can you do me a favor and bring me back here tomorrow afternoon?”
“Seriously? You just got here.” We never see you. What’s the big hurry?”
“Work.” Karen snuck a look at her Blackberry. One hundred fifty-seven new emails since she boarded the plane this morning. She wished she could shut the stupid thing off. Once she had even tried, right after a wellness seminar on keeping your life in balance, but learned her lesson after seeing the resulting load of messages in her inbox. Wellness would have to wait.
Lorraine turned onto the highway. Thanks to the oil boom, new subdivisions sprouted on the outside of town, new banks and restaurants within. Karen saw what looked like car dealerships, but the showrooms were filled with shiny green tractors and farm implements. North Dakota had sailed through the Great Recession with full employment and was enjoying a wave of reverse migration, with young professionals swarming in from the godless coasts to rear their children in the bosom of the heartland. Or what was left of it, with all the fracking.
“There’s the new rec center.” Lorraine pointed at a two-story structure occupying an entire block, and the parking lot was packed. They passed a strip mall where a new rib joint offered local beers. Next-door stood a yoga studio where you could burn it off. Lorraine slowed for the bridge over the Heart River. Placid and golden in the afternoon sun, it seemed not to have changed since Karen was a kid. Cattails waved on both banks, the tough shoots decorated with red-winged blackbirds. The highway narrowed as they approached the old part of town, where tattered businesses marked the passage of time since her birth. She saw a brick two-story, where a friend–what was her name? Marla? No, Marlene–had lived above a furniture store with her parents and brother. Karen wondered whatever happened to Marlene and the rest of the kids from the neighborhood. Had they left the state too?
A boarded-up gas station sat in the middle of a stretch of blacktop, where weeds and sunflowers grew up through the cracks and a giant elm threatened to settle onto the building. The neighborhood seemed smaller and shabbier than she remembered, and the loss weighed on her. Everything was diminished, but she had been warned. The past is a fantasy, her father used to say. Memory gets distorted over time, and pretty soon it’s no longer true. Karen didn’t want believe it. If you couldn’t count on your memories to tell you who you were, where did that leave you?
They turned a corner onto her old street, where shade trees formed a canopy over the road, and a wave of nostalgia washed over her. “Do you remember riding bikes? Every day, morning to night, all summer long.”
“Yeah, right behind the mosquito spray truck.” Lorraine turned into a grass driveway, centering the tires on two cement strips.
Karen opened the car door, and the smell of creosote and diesel hit her, roiling the deep sediment of her memory. The lawn in front of her childhood home had thinned to dirt in places. A blue fir tree, planted early in the last century, towered over the house. The cement still bore tiny imprints of her hands, the fading impressions almost half a century old. How small the porch seemed now, and how inadequate the wobbly handrail. The screen door was hand- made, the mes
h rolled out tight and tacked down under wooden strips.
“Hey Mom, it’s us.” Lorraine opened the door without knocking. Karen trailed after, struck dumb by the familiar aroma of beef stew and freshly-baked bread.
“Lieb kind.” Aunt Marie wore a floral shirt tucked into the elastic waistband of a pair of polyester slacks.
Karen embraced her, trying not to crush the woman who looked to have shrunk a foot since her last visit. Aunt Marie held her at arms’ length. “You’re thin.”
Karen studied back. Her aunt still wore her gray hair braided and wrapped around her head like an elderly version of Heidi of the Alps. Her face was lined, and her frank blue gaze required no explanations.
“The calves aren’t going to feed themselves. I have to go.” Lorraine kissed her mother. “See you tomorrow, nine-fifteen.” The screen door banged shut behind her.
Aunt Marie’s knobby fingers tapped Karen’s arm. “Did you eat? I made supper.”
“I had a snack on the plane.”
“You have to eat. You know an empty potato sack won’t stand.” Aunt Marie led her into the kitchen where two chairs nudged up against the old Formica table. On the table sat her mother’s tin salt and pepper shakers, half a century old. A dish rack stood empty next to the sink, waiting for the next load, just as she remembered. The varnished maple cabinets shone as if Marie wiped and waxed them monthly, the same as her mother had. Karen grasped the back of a chair to steady herself.
Aunt Marie ladled stew from a Dutch oven into a yellow Pyrex bowl. “Should be good and done. I started it this morning.” She clanged down the heavy cast-iron cover and set a loaf of round bread on the table next to a jar of dark purple jam.
Karen pressed the wax down on one edge and popped the round seal out of the jar. She almost couldn’t resist licking it. “Chokecherry!”
“From the trees out back. Go ahead and eat before it gets cold.” Aunt Marie wiped the counters, rinsed and wrung the dish cloth, and hung it over the neck of the faucet to dry.
Karen sunk a battered spoon into the stew and raised it to her mouth. At the taste, her eyes stung with unshed tears, and she choked down the warm broth. Of course her aunt would make it the same way her mother had.
Her mother’s tools still decorated the kitchen walls. A wood and metal washboard hung by the back door, and a metal rug beater next to that. These weren’t curios from an antique store. They were family history.
Aunt Marie set a plate of apple strudel in front of Karen. “A little sweet to help you digest.”
Karen tried a taste, but found it impossible to swallow around the lump in her throat. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to finish if you’re too tired. Come. I’ll help you get settled.”
Karen carried her suitcase to the bedrooms at the end of the hall. In her old room, the twin bed was covered with a white chenille bedspread. A narrow chest of drawers, the one she had used as a child, stood on one side of the bed. On the other, the night stand held a glass lamp on a crocheted white doily. Across the room stood her mother’s treadle-foot Singer on which Karen had learned to sew. The polished wood pedestal looked almost new, except for a missing knob on one of the drawers. Her mother had refinished the surface every ten years or so; the last time, Karen had helped, scrubbing away with steel wool until she thought her fingerprints would disappear, but she loved the machine with its determined needle and insistent foot pedal, and the free-flying hum of a long, straight seam. All during her teenaged and young adult years, she made her own clothes. She remembered how the hours passed, her mind at peace as her foot worked the treadle, her fingers easing the fabric toward the needle. She didn’t sew anymore, but Karen still knew which way to press a dart, and that a dry bar of soap worked better than tailor’s chalk to mark stitch lines.
A card table stood cluttered with pieces of cloth, a glue gun, and various notions. Karen picked up a piece of felt. It was cut in the shape of a rabbit. “Her crafts for the church...”
“Lena was always working on something.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“You’re so tired. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Would you mind telling me now? If it’s not too hard.”
Marie settled into the rocker. “I was watching TV in the living room,” she said, the floor creaking as she rocked. “Lena was working on her crafts. I heard her call out. I got scared and ran in here.” Marie’s fingers worried the plastic pearl chain attached to her reading glasses. “She was in that chair over there by you. She said she couldn’t catch her breath. I called for an ambulance, but she was gone too fast. They said it was her heart.”
“I should have been here.” The words scratched Karen’s throat.
“There was nothing you could do.”
“Still.” Karen looked away from her aunt. The near wall was covered with family pictures, the tarnished gold frames picked up at yard sales, ten for a dollar. In one, her father stood beaming in his army uniform, hugging a young Lena. Another showed him standing by his work truck, his tank-like body ramrod straight, brimmed hat pushed back on his big, round head. Dakota Gas, the sign on the truck said. There was a black-and-white snapshot of the three of them, Frank and Lena in their Sunday best, holding baby Karen in her baptismal gown on the front steps of St. Joe’s. “I didn’t know she was sick. Whenever I asked she said she was fine. The only thing she admitted was that maybe she was a little tired.”
“I don’t think she knew either.”
Karen walked over to the window. A single street lamp illuminated the tree on the front lawn, its branches fanning gently. The street was quiet. At seven thirty on a Saturday night, all the residents were inside, finishing supper, watching TV, or maybe working on a favorite quilt.
Marie brought an extra pillow from the linen closet down the hall. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day. You should sleep.”
TIRED AS SHE WAS, THOUGH, Karen couldn’t sleep. She lay in the light of the street lamp, breathing the familiar air of her old bedroom and suffocating with guilt.
Three decades ago, she had abandoned her parents and boarded a plane to California, returning only for short visits. Even when her father died, she stayed only two days and then hurried back to the west coast, worried about her job.
After a period of mourning, though, her mom had done fine. Lena wasn’t one to slow down, not even for grief. Right after the funeral she invited Marie to move in, and the two sisters went about the business of widows, making themselves useful to church and community. Karen tried to be a good daughter from afar, calling often and remembering birthdays and holidays, but her gifts and phone calls were a poor substitute for her actual presence, and she and her mother had aged separately, half a country apart.
Now she pounded her pillow into different shapes, none helping to bring sleep. She wished tomorrow was over, and felt bad for the thought, but how does a girl get through a funeral Mass for her own mother? She would try to remain stoic in the German tradition, but like everyone in her family, she had overactive tear ducts. And after all, it was her mother. No one would judge her if she collapsed, wailing, on the church floor.
And oh God, the Mass, with its choreographed standing, kneeling and verbal responses–rituals familiar only to the regulars. Karen would be outed as someone who no longer attended. She would embarrass Aunt Marie and Lorraine, and sully the name of her poor mother, burdened even in death with that selfish daughter from California.
She remembered her dad’s funeral, and the grief that had overwhelmed her. Tomorrow, strangers would surround her, crying and hugging her and saying how much they missed Lena. To bear the pain alone was hard enough, but to see other folks trouping into church–to see them grieving for Lena–would slay her. It would be too much.
Karen rolled over, mopping at the sudden deluge of tears with the edge of the scratchy, line-dried sheet. She wished she could have stayed in California, dealing with the pain in her own way, buried in work, caffeinated and stress-driven. At least t
here she would function normally, familiar in her routine, running hard to keep her job, ignoring all the evidence of her poor excuse for a life.
She punched the pillows, trying to get comfortable. Outside the window, an owl hooted softly.
Chapter Three
KAREN STARED AT THE full-length mirror in the corner of her old bedroom, and the mirror stared back, thankfully without laughing. Clearly, she had forgotten how to dress for prairie funerals. With its gold buttons and white piping along the edges, the expensive pantsuit seemed gaudy.
Aunt Marie stuck her head in. “You look nice.”
“Is it too much?”
“You’re from California, so people understand. And you never know what the weather will do. It might be sunny, or you can get a thunderstorm. Last summer when we buried Amos, it snowed.”
Karen hung the jacket back on the hanger. “How long do we have?”
Marie glanced at her watch, a big, round black-and-white job with a fake leather strap. “Lorraine should be here in a half hour.”
At the kitchen table, Karen opened her computer to the memo she had tinkered with on the plane. Reading the words made her mad all over again. Wes wanted more cuts, but her staff were so burned out it was affecting their home lives. As the director of human resources, Karen had listened to many closed-door tales of crumbling marriages, kids doing drugs, and employees barely holding off nervous breakdowns. She had become so adept at finding good treatment and counseling services for her staff that she felt like a social worker. At least she was able to help. That part made her feel good.
But it wasn’t just her staff that was burning out.
“You work too hard,” people told her. “You worry too much.” Those people were stupid. Karen was running hard, both figuratively and literally, because the company she worked for had been sold four times in the last dozen years, and she needed to be even sharper than usual. She got up before dawn each day to run on her home treadmill, and after a ten-hour-day and a microwave dinner at the office, she often stopped by the gym.
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