To See the Moon Again

by Jamie Langston Turner

  Carmen laughed. “I get it—heads or tails. Who won?”

  “Bobby got tails,” Pamela said. “To this day he still talks about it. Says it was bad enough being a jackass, but it warped him for life being a jackass’s . . . well, rear end.”

  Butch gave a snort of laughter. To this point he hadn’t contributed a word to the conversation, of course. Ensconced at the head of the table, he was hunkered over, his hairy forearms flanking his plate. He was attending to his corn now. Ignoring the special little holders beside his plate, he simply picked the corn up with his hands and rolled it around on top of the butter in Pamela’s fancy butter dish.

  For being so untidy, however, he proved remarkably neat and systematic as he swiftly mowed his way down each row with a great deal of noisy crunching, always returning to the same end to start again. Julia kept imagining the ding of a typewriter bell. He stopped midway to take a long swig of his tea before getting back to work. By now his mustache and beard were flecked with bits of corn.

  “Did I ever tell you how thrifty Kendra is?” Pamela said to Julia, and off she went, telling how Kendra made her own soap and baby wipes and granola.

  When Pamela went to the kitchen for more rolls, Carmen took the opportunity to ask Butch a few questions: what kind of work he did, if he liked to read, where he grew up. Julia was surprised at his answers—he sounded far more intelligent than she had ever given him credit for.

  When the meal was finally finished, Pamela looked at her watch and sighed. “It’s already after six. This is so frustrating to have you for only a few hours! We’re going to play a game after supper, then have dessert later. I sure wish you’d gotten here earlier.”

  “Some people wish their lives away,” Butch said.

  Pamela ignored this. She picked up some dishes and started for the kitchen, calling back, “I tried a new recipe for dessert. Something called Chocolate Satin Decadence. Don’t even ask how much butter it called for!”

  Butch looked at Julia and Carmen. “That means she’s getting ready to tell you.”

  “Snuff out the candles, Butch!” Pamela shouted from the kitchen. “And put on some music! We can listen to it while we clean things up.”

  • • •

  AS Butch rose from the table, Julia knew exactly what kind of music it would be. And she was right. Soon a twangy song could be heard from another room, quite loud, with the repeating phrase “a hundred years from now.” Julia didn’t like to think of herself as a musical snob, but she knew she probably was. In her opinion, a little bit of bluegrass and country went a long way. Some of the titles were ridiculous. “All My Exes Live in Texas,” for example, and “Satan’s Jewel Crown.”

  As they worked, Carmen made the mistake of asking some questions about bluegrass music, and soon the dishes were forgotten. Pamela dragged out two shoeboxes full of photos taken at festivals and concerts they had attended over the years and spread the pictures out over the kitchen table. Before long they were all seated again as she and Butch told story after story, interrupting each other frequently to argue over details.

  Carmen said, “What about this one?” and held up a photo in which a much thinner Butch and an obviously pregnant Pamela stood with their arms around each other in front of an elevated platform with a banner across the back that read Sugar Pop and the Honey-Hill Express. “Oh, I was a running joke that whole night,” Pamela said. “We were sitting right down front, and after every song Sugar Pop would point at me and say, ‘Hey, you still hanging in there, little lady?’ He even asked if there was a doctor in the house just in case, and there was—but only a dentist.”

  “A chiropractor, not a dentist,” Butch said.

  “No, it was a dentist.” They debated this at some length.

  Pamela picked up another photo. “This one was on our very first date—Pete Chisholm and the Mighty Fines. I’d never had such fun in my life. It was like a brand-new world after all those years of listening to nothing but folk songs plunked out on a piano.” She rolled her eyes at Julia. “And, of course, Mother had those favorite hymns of hers, too.” She paused. “Which she sang only when she could get away with it.”

  “I wonder if those were the same hymns Daddy used to sing to me,” Carmen said. “He knew all the verses. And a lot of folk songs, too.”

  Pamela put both hands over her heart. “Oh, sweetheart, your daddy had a voice like pure liquid gold. I always knew he could’ve made it big as a singer if he hadn’t . . .” She suddenly looked as if she might break down and cry.

  Butch laid a finger on one of the photos on the table. “This gal right here,” he said, “she could whistle. She did these bird trills during ‘Wings of Bright Feathers’ that made you think you were inside a dang bird sanctuary. Remember her?” He pushed the photo toward Pamela.

  Pamela picked the picture up and held it close. “Oh, it just tore my heart out,” she said. “Absolutely tore my heart right out.” Julia assumed she was talking about the woman who did bird trills until she added, “I was only fourteen when he left home. It was like he died. And that’s what I wanted to do, too—just shrivel up and die. I cried myself to sleep every night.” She dropped the photo among the others on the table and buried her face in her arms.

  During the silence that followed, a question hit Julia hard: What had she done to comfort her little sister in the wake of their brother’s disappearance? Well, she knew the answer to that. Nothing. The real question was why. And she knew the answer to that, too. She had been too busy thinking of herself. She had gone back to college a few weeks later and had stayed away for the next nine years. She tried to imagine now what it must have been like to be the only child left at home, in such a home as theirs.

  Butch patted Pamela’s arm and picked up another photo. “And this here is Horace Pitts,” he said loudly. “He sang tenor with the Mountain Laurel Boys, and their encore was always ‘Fly Away Yonder Where the Wind Blows Sweet.’ On one whole stanza Horace would hum and whistle at the same time in two-part harmony.”

  Pamela’s head snapped up, and she glared at him, her eyes filled with tears. “What in the world are you talking about? You must be losing your mind. Benny Bellis was the one who always sang ‘Fly Away Yonder,’ not Horace Pitts. You’re thinking of ‘Tread Soft on My Bruised Heart’—that’s the one the Mountain Laurel Boys always ended with.”

  The dispute didn’t last long, for Butch soon conceded—so quickly, in fact, that Julia felt sure his error must have been intentional. Butch handed the photo to Pamela, who studied it briefly. “That Horace Pitts was sure a handsome man,” she said. “He was engaged to be married, but he got hit on his motorcycle a week before the wedding. He wasn’t wearing a helmet.” She proceeded to quote some statistics about helmets and motorcycle fatalities, then pushed the two shoeboxes over to Butch and said, “Here, put the pictures back in.” She stood up and clapped her hands. “Okay, chop-chop, let’s finish getting things cleaned up so we can play some Rook!”

  • • •

  BUTCH and Carmen disappeared to the dining room to clear the rest of the table. Thankfully, the music had stopped by now. Julia heard Butch talking. Carmen laughed and said something, and then they both laughed.

  “It’s funny,” Pamela said. “Butch doesn’t usually warm up that fast to strangers.” Julia was tempted to point out that he didn’t warm up to people who weren’t strangers either, like his own wife’s sister. But she knew the logical response to that, since his own wife’s sister had never shown the least interest in him. Over the years she had exchanged maybe a dozen words with him, the few times she had called Pamela and he had answered the phone. Until Carmen asked him about his job tonight, Julia hadn’t even known what kind of work he did except it had something to do with computers and he had an office at home.

  The only things she knew about him came from comments Pamela had made, mostly about unfavorable aspects of his character. At least those were the comments Julia had stored away. She thought of something now Matthew to
ld her once, during a rare argument over something she couldn’t remember: You always hear what you want to hear.

  “I sure hope you’ve given some thought to Carmen’s education,” Pamela was saying. “She can’t do much of anything unless she at least has a high school diploma. She could get a GED without much trouble. You can probably get those online now.”

  As usual, Pamela seemed to think she was the possessor of knowledge no one else had thought of. “We’ve already talked about that,” Julia told her.

  “So is she going to do it?” Pamela said. “If I were you, I’d get her started on it as soon as you get back home from this trip. The longer she puts it off, the harder it’ll be.”

  “She knows it’s important,” Julia said. “She plans to do it.” She knew she should go ahead and tell Pamela they had already paid the money and gotten Carmen enrolled in an online course of study, that it had been Carmen’s idea to begin with, that she intended to take the test by spring, but she didn’t say any of that either.

  They worked in silence for a while. More music started in the other room.

  “Turn that up a little!” Pamela called. “Hey, you two, is everything off the table?” The music got louder, and she started singing along as she put up leftovers: If blue is the color of lonesome, all the way through to the end. And left me to cry all alone.

  It still seemed like such a contradiction to Julia that her sister, so cautionary and well-armed with practical tips, so quick to spot error, could give in to such trite mush in her music and reexperience the same sappy, banal scenarios time and again. But then, maybe it made a certain kind of sense. Maybe it was simply Pamela’s way of acknowledging that the circumstances of life couldn’t always be corralled and managed and that when the severest blows were dealt, as they so often would be, the time for advice was past and all one could do was mourn with the mournful.

  Eventually the supper things were cleared away. Butch dug the Rook cards out of a drawer in the kitchen, and they all sat down at the table. Maybe things would have proceeded calmly if Pamela hadn’t said, “Did I tell you that everything we had for supper was one of Mother’s recipes?”

  And if Carmen hadn’t said this: “She must’ve been a good cook.”

  A simple statement that could have been answered with a simple yes or no, but naturally Pamela couldn’t stop at that. She started listing all her favorite dishes among the ones her mother cooked, many of which Julia couldn’t even recall. “Oh, and she made this chicken spaghetti I just loved,” she said. Her smile suddenly vanished. “But Daddy didn’t—at least that’s what he told her one day after she’d been making it for years and years. She served it for supper that night, and he knocked his plate off the table and told her it tasted like . . .”

  And suddenly, another hairpin turn of emotion. Before they knew what had happened, Pamela was in tears again. “Oh, she had such a hard, sad life!” she said.

  We all did, Julia wanted to say. She said nothing, though, nor did she cry.

  Pamela continued. “She told me once that she always felt responsible for Daddy’s accident. He woke up sick that day, but she talked him into going to work since he didn’t have any more sick days left and they needed the money. If he had just stayed home, everything could’ve been different. But he didn’t and she . . .” Fresh tears followed.

  Julia took this in. Here was something she had never known, something their mother had for some reason chosen to tell only Pamela, and Pamela for some reason had never told her.

  Butch stared at the table, chewing on the inside of his mouth, occasionally reaching over to pat Pamela’s hand, as if this were a play they had rehearsed many times and he was listening to her lines again. Carmen, her eyes full of commiseration, apologized for bringing up a touchy subject.

  “But you didn’t, honey, you didn’t!” Pamela said. “I set myself up for it, going through all her old recipes like I did. And wearing this again.” She fingered the piping around the bib of her apron. “It used to be hers.” At last she wound down and took several deep, shuddering breaths. With her red eyes and short mop of tight curls, she looked like an overgrown child, vulnerable and a little foolish.

  There was a long silence, and then Carmen said, “I didn’t know any of that. Daddy never told me much except that his relationship with his father was . . . acrimonious. He called his mother a few times—I remember once when he put me on the phone and told me to say something. I must’ve been seven or eight. So I told her all about some dinosaur bones somebody had just dug up near Painted Horse. But she never said a word back. Daddy said not to feel bad, she was probably crying, but I didn’t see how dinosaur bones were anything to cry about.”

  At that Pamela broke into laughter—the giddy kind that went on too long to be real. “Well, goodness, I sure know how to be a wet blanket, don’t I?” She wiped her eyes and waved her arms about. “Here, let’s clear the air of all the doom and gloom. Okay, now, does anybody want to play Rook? I warn you, Butch and I are really good.” Her voice was thin and bright, like something breakable. “Maybe we should split up so we’re not partners, but whoever gets Butch, whoa, watch out. He’s a maniac when it comes to bidding. You remember how to play, don’t you, Jules?” She was talking breathlessly now, and Butch was watching her, no expression on his face.

  Julia nodded. Rook sounded much safer than sitting around talking, running the risk of another cloudburst of emotion. It was decided that Julia and Pamela would team up against Butch and Carmen. Butch reviewed the rules aloud while Pamela went to get a pencil and scorepad.

  • • •

  IT was almost ten o’clock when Pamela stood up and, with a dramatic flourish, laid down her last card, then emitted a whoop of victory. She had saved the right color, yielding a windfall of all the remaining points plus the kitty, not only setting Butch, who had taken the bid, but also pushing the score for herself and Julia to 505. “We did it, we did it!” she cried, raising her palm to Julia for a high five. “We took them down!” She pushed her chair back and did a little jig, which rattled the dishes in the china hutch against the wall.

  “Careful, you might rupture something,” Butch said. “My fault,” he said to Carmen. “I flubbed up when I trumped in on that measly fourteen in the third hand.” He went on to review each hand after that, ending with “And she knew my off-suit was black, so she saved her high one.” He turned to Pamela, who was still bobbing around in a circle, waving both hands. “You must’ve had a ton of black.”

  “I did, I did!” She started a modified cancan, though lifting her foot only a few inches with each kick. Her sweat pants were a size too small so that more was jiggling than just the dishes in the china hutch. “Time for a celebration!” she said as she danced over to the refrigerator to get the Chocolate Satin Decadence.

  Later when Julia and Carmen were getting ready for bed in the guest room, they clearly heard Pamela say to Butch across the hall, “You can’t shower till morning. I don’t want them running out of hot water tonight.” And Butch’s answer was just as clear: “I told you that dinky hot water tank wasn’t big enough when we bought it.” Then he said, “Hey, what’s wrong, sugar? Your feet hurting again? Here, come to Daddy. Lie down and let me rub them for you.” And there was a soft click as their bedroom door closed.

  Carmen nodded, smiling. “I suspected all along they liked each other a lot more than they were letting on. But you probably already knew that.”

  Julia said nothing. She was too busy wondering how a twenty-year-old could read between the lines so much better than someone in her fifties with a PhD.

  • • •

  THEY got away after breakfast the next morning. On the front porch Carmen hugged both Pamela and Butch. “I never had aunts and uncles,” she said. “Not real ones. Or cousins either—I really want to meet Bobby and Kendra sometime. And Cody and Starla and Eleanor and little Jesse.” As they pulled out of the driveway, she called to Butch, “That was just a fluke last night. We’ll win the next Ro
ok game!”

  “Oh, no, you won’t!” Pamela said. “You just wait and see—right, Jules?” She gave a little yelp, then swung her hip sideways and bumped against Butch, who grimaced and pretended to be hurt. He was wearing a bright orange T-shirt with a big black question mark printed on the front and a pair of pants held up by suspenders—pants so roomy that it suddenly made Julia wonder if he used to be even larger.

  Julia slowly backed out into the street, then allowed herself one last look. Pamela’s round face had fallen, and she was holding her apron up against the corner of one eye. Something pulled at Julia’s heart, seeing her sister standing there, wearing the same tight sweat pants as last night, her springy curls hugging her head like a nubby knitted cap. Butch moved closer and put an arm around her.

  Carmen twisted herself around and waved to them until they were lost to sight. After a moment of silence, she sighed and said, “I sure like them.” She laughed. “Aunt Pamela is sort of . . . mercurial, isn’t she?”

  Already the image of her sister standing on the porch of the small brick house had begun to fade in Julia’s mind, yet off and on throughout the rest of the day, for some reason, she kept seeing the big black question mark on Butch’s shirt.

  • chapter 15 •

  RUGGED OPTIMISM

  It was a cool day. High in the pale blue sky, small lumpy white clouds were laid out in long rows, as if someone had run a wide rake through them. The hillsides in Virginia were showing more fall color than in South Carolina, though it still wouldn’t peak here for another couple of weeks.

  Somewhere on the freeway in Virginia, Carmen chose a CD of Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite to play, but first she took the insert out of the CD case to read about the piece. “Okay, listen to this. Here was his inspiration.” And she read aloud: “The richness of the land and the rugged optimism of its people fired my imagination. I like that,” she said. “Rugged optimism.” She said the words slowly, distinctly. “And this is nice, too. Listen. But this music is your music, and mine only in the highly technical sense that a copyright has been filed away with my name on it.” She turned to Julia. “Don’t you just love that? Doesn’t it show what a big heart he must have had?”