“No, Renee, I wanted to be a minister.”
“There are plenty of Presbyterian churches between here and Washington State,” Mom pointed out.
“You wanted to live out there?” Dad asked, surprised. “And that ‘tinkering’ comment?”
“You know what I mean. When you avoid something, you get far away from it. I don’t believe distance heals, and I’m beginning to wonder about time healing all wounds. Look around you. Other people are wounded, too.”
“I think I’ll just excuse myself,” Matt said with a sarcasm that exceeded both parents. He picked up his plate and started for the kitchen.
“You can sit right back down and finish your meal, young man,” Dad commanded.
“Why?” Matt called back. “So I can listen to the two of you argue about whether or not to go to church?” He faced Dad. “Who needs it, anyway?” And with that Matt turned his back and headed for the kitchen, where he dropped his plate in Mom’s sink full of hot water and walked out the back door, which slammed like an exclamation point on the end of his sentence.
It was all my fault. I never should have said anything about the parsonage.
Now I had that nervousy-sick feeling. Would Mom cry? Would Dad call Matt back? Dad shot Mom a look of blame and Mom’s eyes said it was his fault, and then I knew I would be sick even though I didn’t eat the sweet potatoes. I didn’t ask to be excused; I just ran upstairs to the bathroom as quickly as my stomach allowed.
My stomach now empty, I splashed water on my face, then dried it without looking in the bathroom mirror. I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw. I shook out my arms and stamped my feet. The tingling was uncontrollable. My mouth tasted terrible. Then I went to my room and spread out on my bed. Why did they fight about that stuff? I flicked on the radio and heard “Vietnam.” Always Vietnam. I changed the station to some unfamiliar song that could drown everything out.
“Abby?” I heard Mom say from outside my door, her hand on the knob. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” I lied.
The door handle seemed to hesitate and then turn, but not open.
“Abby, the door’s locked.”
“I just want to take a nap, Mom. Okay?”
“I’m sorry, Bee,” she said weakly. “It wasn’t a great Thanksgiving.” Sometimes her voice invited a discussion. Sometimes she would have said, “Can we talk?” But today she sounded tired, like she just needed to cry, but not in front of a fourth grader.
“Not right now, Mom,” I said. “Please.”
I didn’t help with the dishes or come down for dinner. When Matt came home later that night, he knocked the “one-two-three” knock and I opened the door. He smuggled up two plates of stuffing and mashed potatoes and the puzzle Mom had bought for this Thanksgiving.
“You shouldn’t have run away,” I said, picking at Mom’s creamy mashed potatoes. “But I know why you did it,” I added. “You just wanted everybody to get along.”
“Abby, you don’t get it. You just do everything perfect.”
“I left, too,” I defended. “But I had to throw up.”
Matt looked down at my plate of food, the new spoonful in my mouth, and then backed away.
“It’s okay.” I swallowed quickly. “I feel better now.” I forced down another bite to prove that I was good.
“Go get us some salad,” I begged. I wanted him to leave and then I would flush the food down the toilet. “You forgot the marshmallow stuff.”
“And the pumpkin pie with whipped cream,” he said.
“Punkee pie with whoopin’ cream,” I corrected, remembering how Joel pronounced his least favorite Thanksgiving dessert. Mom would have made Joel apple pie à la mode.
“Man, he really wrecked everything by dying,” Matt said suddenly.
“Joel didn’t ask to die.” I didn’t want salad or punkee pie anymore. I crawled up on my bed and stared at the ceiling, waiting for Matt to say something. He just lay there on the floor, then pulled out a cigarette and started to smoke.
“Matt, you’re gonna get in trouble.”
“No, actually, I’m not.” And he was probably right.
I hated the smell and it made me even queasier, but he seemed to relax and I didn’t want another fight.
“What do you think’s gonna happen?” I said at last.
“Who knows?” Matt answered more as a statement than a question and took a long draw on his cigarette. He obviously knew what he was doing.
“It scares me,” I whispered.
“I know,” Matt said, and I didn’t know if he meant he knew I was scared, or if he was saying he was scared, too.
“Why doesn’t Dad go back?”
“I think he’s mad at God.”
“God didn’t kill Joel,” I said.
“But He didn’t stop him from being killed.”
Matt had a point.
“Dad’s so different now,” I said.
“Maybe he’s mad at us, too,” Matt wondered out loud.
“We didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly. But maybe somehow we should have done something,” Matt said, his voice soft but heavy with guilt.
“Maybe we’re not enough,” I said, and Matt didn’t set me straight.
“What about Mom and Dad? Do you think they still love each other?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“They might still love each other, but they sure don’t like each other.”
“The Hanleys got divorced.”
Matt was quiet. He had no reassuring words.
“Where’d you go this afternoon?” I asked, wondering where anyone would go on Thanksgiving afternoon when everybody has a home, and a Thanksgiving dinner, and a place card with a name at a special plate.
“Around.” I waited. I didn’t know where around was, but it probably wasn’t good.
“Can we finish my volcano tomorrow?” I blurted out, taking advantage of our sudden bond.
“It should be dry enough tomorrow so we can paint it.” He rolled my throw rug aside, dumped out the puzzle box, and began turning over the pieces.
“What is it this year?” I asked, grabbing for the box lid.
“It looks like Switzerland or something,” Matt answered. “All that white snow is going to be hard.”
The variegated whites and blues were near blinding. We’d need to make separate piles of blues and whites. I started the only way I knew how. I grabbed the smooth flat edges and tried to build a frame around nothing.
THIRTEEN
Thanksgiving night was our first big snowfall of the season. It doesn’t matter how much snow we get in Ohio, the first snowfall always feels new. I opened my bedroom window to feel the chill as I let out the smell of cigarettes. The snowflakes danced in the glow of the streetlights and called me beyond the front porch, where I stood and caught snowflakes with my tongue. I didn’t care how cold it was; I sat down on the bottom step and watched the snow cover the dirt and dry leaves of autumn with a clean, fresh blanket of white.
The front door opened and shut and Mom sat on the step beside me.
“Feeling better?”
“Yeah.” I wanted to say it was something I had eaten, but I couldn’t lie. Mom traced a line in the snow with her foot. “Maybe it’ll snow enough to make snow ice cream. I know I’ve got some condensed milk,” Mom suggested. “And Hershey’s sauce, too.”
I nodded. We could do it if it was deep enough to skim off the top and then scoop out a clean layer.
“Do you want to talk about this afternoon?”
I stuck my tongue out and caught a few more flakes. They felt refreshing on my face.
“Sometimes it just doesn’t help to talk about it. I mean, nothing really works,” I said.
“Try me.”
I sighed. I wasn’t getting out of this.
“Well, everybody says to ‘start over.’ But how do you ‘start over’ when nothing seems ended?”
“I don’t know,” she said, too honestly. “I don’t know if we
’re beginning something new or trying to finish something old.”
There were things that troubled me worse than that. “Do you ever wonder …,” I began and then stopped. I almost told her how many times I relived the event, trying to come up with ways to make it not happen. I almost told her I had a recurring nightmare about that blue car driving without stopping. Mom shivered as if she could read my thoughts and tightened her coat around her chest, then jumped up and returned with a quilt off the front porch. She didn’t say anything, so I continued without finishing my first question. I couldn’t even bring up my guilty feelings.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever stop crying about all the little things that remind me of him. And that makes me worry one day I won’t feel sad anymore that he’s gone and then I worry maybe I’ll feel guilty I’m not sad.”
Mom nodded and traced a circle with her foot.
“Somebody said it would be so hard at first, and then it’d get easier, but that’s not true. In some ways it gets harder because nothing really changes, except us.” Mom added a smiley face and two eyes. She tried so hard. Something in that drawing reminded me that maybe she had lost more than I had.
“Losing Joel meant losing a part of me and finding a new me,” she said.
“You’re still you to me,” I said, as if that might comfort her. Except, suddenly, I knew it wasn’t quite true. She was my mom, but different than she was the seconds before Joel was killed.
“On the day you were born, I studied you closely, memorizing every detail.” Mom pressed my nose as if it were a button. “I tried to figure out if you got Daddy’s nose, or my eyes, or if you’d ever grow hair!” Her hand cupped my face, a face so unlike hers. “I wondered what you’d look like all grown up.” Mom paused and took a shaky breath. “I’m so glad I have that with you, but I won’t with Joel. I don’t know who he would have been.”
“He would have grown up to be a good kid.”
“I think so, too,” Mom agreed. “A lot like Matt.” We were quiet. As if that were a heavy thought. The goodness in Matt so obscured beneath layers of cold snow.
After five layers of clay and three days of drying, the day after Thanksgiving Matt finally let me paint my volcano with red and purple and a white snowy top. Dad kept me company as he worked on an anniversary clock in silence until a knock at the top of the stairs signaled another client. My handwritten CLOCK Doc sign was still tacked at the top of the stairs. Dad’s basement business was growing by word of mouth, obviously filling some void in Dad as well as in town. Just how many broken clocks could Bethel Springs have—sitting around not telling time?
Today’s guest visitor was Bruce Hanley. Mr. Hanley repaired cars and lived a block down the road. We didn’t know him because he didn’t have children, except on the weekends when he was always driving in and out of his driveway with two kids in the backseat. His daughter looked to be about my age, and I thought it’d be nice to play with her. Somebody explained that Mr. Hanley was divorced. He was the only one on our street who lived alone.
Mr. Hanley came down the stairs and shook hands with Dad almost apologetically. “I know you don’t see me much at your house. I mean the other house.” He looked my way and nodded a hello. Dad’s clients included a lot of people I’d never seen at Bethel Springs Presbyterian Church.
“Don’t worry about that, Bruce. I haven’t been to the other house much lately either.”
“And you won’t see me. Not my style. But I heard you were fixing clocks.”
“I’m trying,” Dad answered. “What do you have?”
“I have this clock of my dad’s. I think it might have been his grandfather’s. I’ve never had anyone check it out. But now I was wondering if you could take a look at it. It used to run for a little bit and then just stop, but now it doesn’t run at all.”
“What kind of clock is it?” Dad asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Is it a wall clock or does it sit on a table? Or is it a grandfather clock?”
“It used to hang on the wall before it stopped working.”
“Do you know the name on it?”
“I can’t remember. What’re you thinking might be wrong?” Mr. Hanley asked.
“I won’t know until I take it apart. It could just be dirty. Could be a broken spring. Do you want to bring it by?”
“I have it in my truck.”
“Then bring it in. I can’t work on it right now, but you can leave it.”
Mr. Hanley returned, carefully taking each step, carrying the clock in a cardboard box.
“Maybe it’s unrepairable,” Mr. Hanley said. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head, correcting him—irreparable. “But then I thought how nice it’d be if Grandpa’s clock could be fixed. It being so old and a part of my family.” He took the clock out of the box and set it on Dad’s table. “Maybe one day I’ll give it to one of my kids.” He shrugged. “It’d be nicer if it worked.” Mr. Hanley blew the dust off and then stepped back as if to give it another look.
When Dad whistled through his teeth, I knew he would start work on the clock right then and there.
“It’s an Ansonia Regulator A with strike on the hour and half hour!” Dad was obviously impressed. “I didn’t get to see many of these back in Washington. There are fewer old clocks out west, except for family heirlooms. But this”—Dad pointed at the clock—“this is a piece of work.” Dad reached into his toolbox and took out a screwdriver. He began unscrewing the back. “This could be part of the problem,” Dad said as he tapped a spring. “Looks like the mainspring. And of course, there’s quite an accumulation of grease and dirt.”
“But you think it might be okay?” Mr. Hanley looked like it was important to him. You’d think he was talking about a patient. I glanced back at my volcano. I had been listening so long, a stripe of paint had dripped into an unusual streak.
“It’s well made. It’ll work again,” Dad diagnosed.
Mr. Hanley smiled. Dad didn’t look up; he was already cleaning pivots with something that looked like a toothbrush.
“You see this right here?” Dad pointed to a part. “That’s a click spring.” Dad took out a C-clamp and fastened it to the spring. “If I don’t put on this clamp to hold the spring, the whole clock could just …” Dad’s hands suddenly separated, as if the spring were a bomb.
“Is that so?” Mr. Hanley said in amazement, now bent over the clock, blocking Dad’s light, absorbed by the inner workings of the clock.
“The mechanism is all wound up. It’s under tension. You release it the wrong way and the spring just explodes.”
“And you want to work on that?” Mr. Hanley asked, skeptical.
“I’ll take a look at it.”
“So these hands are in good hands?” Mr. Hanley laughed. I didn’t think the joke was funny, but Dad smiled anyway. I could tell Mr. Hanley liked Dad.
“I’ll let you know about it in a few days.”
“That’d be great, John,” Mr. Hanley said. “I wrote my phone number on this piece of paper.”
“Don’t you have a daughter Abby’s age?”
“How old are you, Abby?” Mr. Hanley handed the slip to Dad.
“Nine. Almost ten.” I applied red streaks to the cracks and bumps on my volcano.
“Jennifer is ten. Almost eleven. Maybe you could come over some weekend.”
“Sure.”
“Not this one. She’s with her mom for Thanksgiving.” Mr. Hanley looked uncomfortable, almost embarrassed. “But maybe weekend after next.”
“Just let us know.” Dad nodded.
“Will do.”
“Do you fix watches, too?” Mr. Hanley asked.
“No, my grandfather stuck to clocks.”
“I heard there’s a watch that went to the moon,” Mr. Hanley said. “I think Neil or Buzz wore it on the Apollo 11.”
“The Omega—the watch the world has learned to trust,” Dad explained. “The Omega and the Patek Philippe will run till the end of ti
me,” Dad said with admiration.
“But who will be fixing watches then?” Mr. Hanley added with a laugh.
Mr. Hanley left, and before my paint job could dry, I sprinkled sand over it. I wanted to put in some trees and grass, but Matt said it would look fakey. Then he said we had to wait for the volcano to set. I could hardly wait to see it blow.
“Come downstairs, Uncle Troy! The surprise is almost ready,” I called out when he arrived. His timing was perfect.
Uncle Troy slowly descended the narrow wooden stairs, carefully holding on to the wobbly railing.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding out,” Uncle Troy said to Dad, but with a smile.
“I wouldn’t call it hiding,” Dad corrected. “But it is my workshop.”
“Where’s this secret you want me to see?” he asked, and I led the way to the back corner. When Uncle Troy saw the monstrosity, he whistled. “Now, that’s something else.” He shook his head. “You did this by yourself?”
“No, Matt’s been helping me.”
“Good job, Matt!” Uncle Troy said proudly, looking over at Dad as he said it, but Dad had on his special clock glasses and was fixated on a few small pieces. “And just what is it made of?”
I ran my hand over the surface. “You wouldn’t believe it, but it’s just flour, salt, and water. It hardens like this.”
“That’s something else,” Uncle Troy repeated and then cleared his throat. He looked back over at Dad’s table and back to me. “I can’t stay long, Abby,” he said softly. “I kind of need to talk to your dad.”
“Okay.” I suddenly remembered he hadn’t come over to see a volcano. I slipped up the stairs, looking back as Uncle Troy made his way to Dad’s table.
“I wonder if I could talk with you before I leave.”
This was one conversation I didn’t want to hear, and so I clicked the door shut behind me and headed outside.
That night after dinner, Dad was back to working on Bruce Hanley’s clock while I added black streaks to the volcano. I had even picked up some cotton balls to add near the top to make it look like it was blowing up. Matt didn’t like it but I didn’t care.
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