“All over the freaking place. Always out in the boonies. I was so little. I don’t really remember. I’ll bet Tina does though. Her and Mark are out looking now too and Troy’s home with Steffi.”
He called Tina. “Turnip Hole and Alum Rock,” she said. “And the Turkey City area too. But where we went most was down where Grandma and Grandpa used to live. Where Mom and Rita grew up.”
“Right. Right. I’m almost home. I’m going to go there right now.”
“This isn’t a good sign, Seth. Her taking off like this.”
“We’ll talk about that later. Let’s just find her.”
Cherry Run hadn’t changed much since Seth was a boy. The most notable change was that the two gas stations that had once framed the town—the Pennzoil and the Texaco—were long gone and replaced with a Convenience Center and the ever popular Dollar Store. In between those two, hung the town’s single red light. The handful of businesses all looked pretty much the same, though most of them had all shut down and been reopened and renamed a time or two, usually by an out-of-work local taking a desperate and usually ill-fated shot at being their own boss.
It didn’t take Seth long to get “out in the boonies” where there were even fewer changes. He slowed down to look at what used to be his grandparents’ old place. It was looking bad. Paint peeling. Junk in the yard. The old garage that his grandpa had built himself had fallen in. Seth considered stopping to ask whoever was living there now if they had seen his mom’s car but she wouldn’t have drawn any attention to herself and she certainly wouldn’t have stopped. She would have slipped right past like a ghost, unseen, unnoticed.
This area was called Blue Goose, he remembered, though there never had been and still weren’t any signs saying so. He felt sure she was somewhere around here. He came to a crossroads and stopped. When they used to come to a crossroads on the Sunday afternoon rides he’d joined in on, Mom would always say, “Which way, kids?” And one of them would shout out a direction or point one way or the other and that’s where they’d go. “Which way, Mom?” Seth said, waited a moment and turned left.
After passing Wildcat Hollow Road, he stopped and backed up. Though there was a crooked, rusted sign warning, “No Winter Maintenance,” the narrow, snow-covered road had a set of tire tracks going back it. They didn’t appear to belong to a truck and only someone who wasn’t thinking, someone whose mind was “a million miles away,” would attempt it in a car.
He put the SUV in four-wheel drive and started back the road. Driving past an empty field and a frozen pond that dipped into a hollow of huge, dark trees, he remembered taking the road on one of those long-ago Sundays. He was pretty sure that it ascended to a peak that offered a great view of the area before winding back down the other side. Moving through the bottom of the hollow, he saw his mom’s little red car sitting broadside, blocking the road in the distance where it made the sudden, steep incline. Along with relief, he felt uneasy because the car wasn’t running and the windows were fogged so he couldn’t see if she was inside or not. He stopped and got out.
“Mom!” he said, walking toward the passenger’s side, which was facing him. Just as he reached for the door, they saw each other and she leaned over to unlock it. He got in and before he could say a word, she threw her arms around him. It was clear that she’d been crying. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head no. “I shoulda known better.”
“How stuck is it?”
“Really stuck. Tires just spin. Won’t budge an inch in either direction.” She shook her head, discouraged. “Your sisters and your dad already think I’m outta my tree and this’ll add fuel to the fire.”
“They don’t think that. Not at all.”
She eased out of the hug and looked him in the eyes. “Then why are they always trying to make me go to the doctor and get checked?”
“They are just worried about you. They love you.”
“Well, I ain’t going.”
“Okay. That’s fine. No one can make you go if you don’t want to go.”
“Cotton-picking right, they can’t,” she said, wiping her eyes with a wadded up tissue. “Just because a person forgets things now and then don’t mean they’re losing their mind.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
“When a person gets older, they forget stuff sometimes. That’s just natural.”
He nodded that it was and said, “What do you say we get out of here? Me and the guys will come back and get your car later.”
“Can’t we just sit here and talk for a little bit?”
“Sure. But do you mind turning on the car to get some heat going? It’s cold.” She turned the engine on. He’d been right about the pink coat and jeans but wrong about the boots. She had on tennis shoes. “I have to call Gail and let everyone know that you’re okay. They’re all worried.”
“Tell them I’m sorry for being such a dough-head.”
He smiled. There wasn’t much of a phone signal. Stepping outside the car helped some. With a lot of loud talking and repeating, he was able to let Gail know the situation and assure her that everything was fine and they would be home in a little bit. She said she’d let everyone else know. Getting back into the car, he said, “We could drive into town and talk over pie and coffee.”
“I’d rather sit here for a while.”
Seth turned the heater down a notch. “Good heater.”
“You bet,” she said. “It’ll roast you right out.”
“So what the heck are you doing all the way out here?”
“Just driving. Lots of good memories on these old roads. Me and Rita used to love the view from the top of this hill. I shoulda known better than to try getting up there in the winter.” She sighed. “For Pete’s sake, I wasn’t gone that long, was I?”
“I was already on my way home when Gail called. So, a couple, three hours maybe.”
“That’s not very long.”
“No. She called shortly after she noticed you were gone.”
His mom looked startled. “I told her I was going to go for a drive.”
“She said you didn’t.”
“Well, I did. We picked out Rita’s dress at the nursing home—”
“Who picked it out?”
“Me and Gail. We picked it out and I asked her if she’d take it to the funeral home, that I wasn’t up to it and that I was going to take a drive.”
He looked down at her tennis shoes. An ugly fear and a deep, heavy sadness started to choke him, but he couldn’t afford it so he pushed through it. “I thought you picked the dress out yourself and met Gail at the funeral home?”
He could see her processing the information the way a child would when something was explained to them. “Yeah,” she said and turned her gaze outside. “That’s what I meant. I just got balled up there for a minute. But I did tell her I was going for a drive.”
The fear came rushing back and he felt sick but if he let it take over, his mom would know and then she’d be worried and that would only make things worse. Besides, it was too early to worry. There may be nothing to worry about. Rita’s death was hard on her. He said in a voice that was both reasonable and strong, “Maybe Gail didn’t hear you.”
“Must not have.” She turned back to him then. “How’d you know I’d be back in here?”
“I didn’t. I just had a feeling you were somewhere down here.”
“My boy,” she said and touched his face. “So smart and handsome. How’s Megan?”
Did she forget that he and Megan were no longer a couple? Hadn’t been for a long time? Or was she simply asking because she knew he and Megan still talked on the phone once in a while? “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her in a few months.”
She smiled sadly. “You’ll find somebody and she’ll be one lucky girl, let me tell ya.” Then, she said, “Do you think I should get checked out?”
He shrugged like it was no big thing and said, “What would it hurt?”
“Nothing, I guess. It’
d get everybody off my hind-end, if nothing else.” She shut down the engine and took the keys from the ignition. “Do you still want to go for pie and coffee?”
“I’m always up for pie and coffee.”
Sunday afternoon found Seth and both of his sisters trudging through the snow-blanketed woods behind their parent’s house in Cherry Run. They had changed out of their funeral clothes; Seth carried a bottle of wine and three plastic cups. They were on their way to a place that they called “The Spot.”
Gail said, “It’s freezing out here.” Her cheeks and nose were already a bright red. “Couldn’t we have caught up at a cozy restaurant or something?”
“I needed to get out,” Seth said. “Get some fresh air.”
“The Spot” was about a mile and a half trek and was the site of what had once been a small house or cabin built on the edge of a precipice giving a spectacular view of a seemingly endless forest, one hill rolling into the next and a green river winding through the valley below. All that remained of the foundation was a stone fireplace and chimney which stood perfectly erect and completely intact. Seth had discovered it as a boy and managed to clean out the leaves and old bird nests. While growing up and on his visits home over the past many years, he came here to write or think and sometimes would invite one or both of his sisters to join him for a fire and conversation. They used to imagine who had built the house that once stood there and what had become of them. When they got older, they knew they could have found out by going to the county courthouse and checking public records, but they never did. It seemed more fun to imagine.
“It’s colder than Kelsey’s arse out here!” Gail complained again, repeating one of their father’s common comparisons as they crunched along through the snow. She blew into her cupped hands to warm them.
“Why aren’t you wearing gloves?” Tina asked.
“Steffi was playing with them before I left for the funeral this morning and couldn’t remember where she put them.”
Seth took his gloves off and handed them to her. “Here. Quit your whining.”
“Thanks,” she said, wasting no time putting them on. “How in the heck did you talk Mom into going to the doctor’s?”
“Mom would jump off a bridge if Seth told her too,” Tina said.
“I didn’t tell her to do anything,” he said. “She asked me if I thought she should get checked and I said it wouldn’t hurt.”
“She asked you?” Gail said. “Unreal.”
Tina looked up at the trees as they walked. “Too bad Dad couldn’t have come along. He loves getting out like this.”
“He’s not going to leave Mom alone after her disappearing act on Friday,” Gail said, “and he shouldn’t, though she’s been perfectly fine ever since.”
“And she may be,” Tina said, sounding like a therapist, which she was. “Stress and grief can take a toll on a person, make them behave in some very odd ways. But if it’s more than that, we need to know.”
“Why?” Seth blurted and both of his sisters looked at him, shocked. “I mean, there’s nothing they can do except give her a death sentence. A long, torturous, god-forsaken death sentence.”
“That’s a real positive way to look at it,” Gail said.
“There are things they can do,” Tina countered. “Medications. Mental exercises.”
“To slow it down a little bit. Not to stop it. Not to really change anything.”
“Are you okay, Bro?” Gail asked.
“Yeah,” he said, though he hadn’t been okay since the talk in his mom’s car the other day. “I just hate funerals.”
They walked along in silence for a while. “Aunt Rita looked nice,” Tina said. “Didn’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Gail said. “Peaceful.”
Seth didn’t comment. He didn’t see anything nice or peaceful about the aged, painted remains in the casket nor could he connect them to his aunt, a woman who used to be known for a shrewd sense of humor or raucous laughter. What he saw was indisputable proof of how harsh and unfair life could be, how ruthless and random. He saw a good woman, who, for no apparent reason, had been cheated out of a good death.
“Did the prodigal son have any interesting conversations at the showing last night or the funeral this morning?” Tina asked, referring to the image some of the pious relatives had of Seth’s itinerant lifestyle.
“Pretty much the same ones I had at the last funeral. Betty hit me with her usual inquisition: ‘When are you getting married? When are you having kids? Have you made any money as a writer yet?’”
“You should have punched her,” Gail said.
“Yeah, that would have gone over well.” Seth’s extended family—with the single exception of his Aunt Rita—had thought he was a chump when he left Cherry Run, all dreams and no means. They were sure he’d find out pretty directly that boyhood ideals rarely, if ever, meshed with the cold realities of adulthood. Then they stood in awe when he started showing up in the weekly paper, several times over the years, working his way through college, top of his class, Cherry Run’s first and only published writer, living in Los Angeles, taking a crack at the big time. But the last few years, with Seth not becoming rich or famous and his sole supporter outside of his immediate family deemed crazy, the relatives were starting to get that “told-you-so” look about them.
“What’d you tell her?”
“That I preferred living in sin, have no kids that I’ll admit to and that I’ve made a ton of money writing, but prostitutes and heroin dealers got it all.”
“You should have,” Gail said.
“I thought about it, but I was afraid she would start praying for me.” He wasn’t entirely kidding. He considered Betty’s prayers to be an exercise in misplaced passion. They were more like a prayer in reverse, surrounding one in negative energy rather than positive. While she prayed for a “sinner’s” deliverance—a sinner being anyone who believed differently than she did—her focus was vehemently on the sins she imagined rather than the absence of them.
“No wonder she’s weird,” Tina said. “Could you imagine having Reverend Wells for a father?”
“I can’t believe he’s still alive,” Seth said. “He’s been spewing fire and brimstone as long as I can remember.”
“Speaking of,” Gail hit Seth on the shoulder, “I saw you sneak out of the service when he started crying ‘Repent!’”
“He’s lucky I didn’t throw my chair at him,” Seth said, as they reached their destination and he uncovered a stack of several logs and kindling that he’d collected last summer and kept dry under an old tarpaulin. “Aunt Rita was barely mentioned. It was all sinners gnashing their teeth, praying for death and never dying. The man is a sadist. I swear he gets off on scaring people.”
“Never miss an opportunity to inject some good old-fashioned guilt and fear,” Tina said.
“As if everyone in that room wasn’t already riddled with them.” Seth filled his arms with wood and carried it to the fireplace just as Gail finished clearing it of snow.
“Why didn’t you write something,” Tina asked her brother while retrieving and setting up the wooden benches that had also been kept undercover and protected from the elements.
Seth dropped the wood in front of the fireplace and began laying pieces on the rusted grate. “I tried,” he said. “I wanted to write something about how much fun she used to be and her crazy-assed laugh but I couldn’t find a way in. I felt guilty for not visiting her enough when I’d come home and remembering the times I did visit her was even more depressing. Then the chance that Mom could be heading in the same direction—”
“We don’t know that,” Tina said. “That’s why she’s getting checked. We don’t know that at all.”
“Right,” Seth said. He hadn’t yet told his sisters how their mom had completely misconstrued the course of events on Friday or that she’d asked about Megan as if she was still his girlfriend. He’d intended to tell them today, but now he didn’t want to talk about it anymore a
nd though he knew it was irrational, recounting that story felt like talking about her behind her back, a betrayal of sorts. What did it matter now anyhow since she already agreed to see the doctor? “Anyway, when I tried to write something hopeful or positive, it came out forced and false. It wouldn’t have done her justice.”
“It couldn’t have been worse than what she got from Wells,” Gail said, “and at least it would have been about her.”
“Way to make me feel better, Gail,” Seth said, carefully placing the sticks and small pieces of bark between the stacked logs.
“Sorry.”
Tina separated the three plastic cups and lined them across one of the benches. “Wine opener?”
Seth took it from his back pocket and handed it to her without taking his attention from the kindling which was already starting to burn.
“Were you guys there last night when Mom was telling the story about how her and Rita were playing around in the strip cuts when they were kids and started that bulldozer?”
“Yes,” Gail said and they all laughed at the image of two little girls taking a giant bulldozer for a joyride.
“Then they stalled it out on the main road and couldn’t get it going again,” Seth added. He thought of his mom all dressed up at the funeral home, her eyes red from crying but shining as she shared that funny, old memory with everyone. How long will she be able to reach for a good memory and find it? Any memory at all?
“You know,” Gail said, “now that I think about it, ‘crazy-assed’ is a pretty accurate description of Rita’s laugh.”
“Mom’s laugh is pretty strange too,” Tina said, filling the plastic cups with wine. “Once those two would get going, everyone else would be laughing at their laughter.”
“Rita’s was definitely worse,” Gail said. “It was like compulsive sneezing.” She imitated it, “Ah-che, ah-che, ah-che…” until it gave way to her own laughter, with Tina and Seth joining in.
Then the laughter subsided and it got quiet.
Too quiet.
Tina raised her wine. “To Aunt Rita.”
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