by Warren Read
“Excuse me.” Bobbie edged her cart alongside Lyla’s.
Lyla looked up from her list, hand on her hip, her green eyes expanded behind owlish glasses. She said, “Oh.” It was almost a whisper, a quick breath of recognition and a sour lemon pucker as she glanced down at Bobbie’s cart.
There was a dance of sorts next, a do-si-do of shopping carts as they both tried to clear the aisle enough to allow passage. Bobbie said, “These stupid things. They never work the way they’re supposed to.”
Lyla said, “It’s the wheels.”
“They need to replace them altogether,” Bobbie said.
“They won’t.”
Lyla moved past, her arm brushing Bobbie’s as she did so. She bristled at her own error, keeping her gaze straight ahead and Bobbie could see some of Hank in that profile, in the even slope of the nose, and the skirt of the jaw line. Even the hard stare was almost identical, but where Hank’s showed a kind of strength and quick determination, Lyla’s was just cold.
Bobbie pushed her cart to the end of the aisle, to the vinyl-covered chairs opposite the pharmacy counter. She took a number and then a seat, and listened to the old woman at the window ask question after question about her blood pressure, and the gout in her hand, and why her Medicare did not cover everything.
All along the back of the grocery, people politely stepped around one another, or lingered at the ends of aisles with carts abandoned in the middle of the floor. A few stood with hands on cart handles, making small talk. Smiling. It was like they had all come to this place not just to shop, but to see one another, or just be in the presence of other humans.
“I can’t sleep though to the morning!” The old woman at the pharmacy leaned into the open window. She stretched to her full height, chunky heels lifting off the floor.
“The medication is keeping you up at night?”
“No,” she said. “They’re giving me bad dreams. Like someone’s chasing me in the woods.”
Bobbie often had nightmares, never about being chased, though. In her dreams, she’d be driving her car up the mountain with the windows down and the air hot against her face. She’d drive until the incline bent to vertical and the roadway disappeared behind her and the car would begin to slide backward. Sometimes she made it up over the top of the ridge, but more often than not, she would lose her grip and fall, plummeting down the face of the mountain. Always, she would wake up then, her tee-shirt stuck to her chest, and she would lie still, feeling her heart beat in her temples and stare out of the window as she breathed deeply, watching the fingers of tree branch shadows ripple against her drapes.
Hank (Henry) Kelleher
Their mother’s wake had been crowded into her own home, in the very house that Lyla and Jonas now shared with that son of theirs. Overall, the whole thing had been a disaster and Hank wanted nothing less than to be able to completely wipe the entire day from both his and Lyla’s memories.
When she’d called him to talk about the wake, she had been standing on the line between control and collapse, a precarious balance that Hank didn’t come to appreciate until much later. Her voice hummed like a violin. She was rambling on about photographs and keepsakes, and a guest list that swelled so large that Hank could feel the claustrophobia from weeks away. He pressed the phone to his ear, the earpiece sweating against his head.
“I don’t have any need for something like that,” he’d said to her. “I don’t understand why this has to be laid at my feet.”
“Everything’s not about you, Hank,” she said. “She was our mother.”
The entire gathering had been a collection of ascending incidents, one smeared over another, the finer, important details misplaced in his memory over the years. He remembered that the house had been so goddamned hot, that someone had built a fire in the stove. It was November. Hank recalled the feeling of near suffocation, the heat and the grief, and the weight of guilt, guilt over his inability to bring himself across the room to his own sister, who seemed sentenced to spend the whole afternoon standing at the window, just staring out at the street. And Jonas in and out of the kitchen, always eating, and people touching Hank on the arm, or the shoulder, or the small of his back, all the while kids ran in and around the legs of adults. Eugene, the worst of the lot, as always. Spoiled, squat and demanding, Eugene the undisciplined animal, constantly clamoring for attention.
Hank should have gone over and talked to Lyla, but it seemed like there had been no clear path to her. Looking back, there had perhaps been a moment when it was possible, but then suddenly there was Eugene in the kitchen. Jonas said something in hard tone and Eugene gave a belligerent shout, and then came the overturned table. And just like that, a tear of anger flashed within Hank that had been too quick to rein in. He was there, and his hand jerked from his side, an impulsive, backhanded swat, landing someplace on the boy that had been unintended. It was a spot that was hard against his knuckles and, God help him, it felt so good.
The people scattered like pigeons then, cars flew from the curb in droves. He had gone to the kitchen to begin cleaning, but Jonas had taken the dishtowel from his hand and suggested he leave. When he said it, his eyes met Hank’s with a curious look of understanding, and his hand pressed the back of Hank’s arm like a gentle escort.
And so when the snapshot of him and Lyla appeared in his school mailbox some days later, the photo of him leaning close to her ear, her turned away, smiling gently and staring into the empty air, the weight of that afternoon fell right back upon him, along with an added blanket of confusion. So many times he had slipped the photo into a drawer or a cabinet, when the reminder had begun to crawl beneath his skin. But then the details would dig at him, and the photo would find itself on the shelf again. When? he’d wonder. When were we standing like that?
Hank leaned back in his chair so that the cedar shingles scratched the nape of his neck. He tipped the mug against his lips and watched the last drips of coffee run in black rivulets, down the pearlescent walls to his tongue. At the far side of the drive his old pickup truck sat waiting. A lame mule.
“It’s like it’s having fits half the time.” He pulled the phone cord and it scratched along the door frame. “I’m worried it’ll leave me at the side of the road somewhere in the middle of nowhere.”
“Well,” Benny said. “If you can get her down here we’ll take a look at her.”
“You don’t think you’ll need it all day, do you?”
“Now Hank, you know I can’t answer that till you get her in here,” Benny said. He didn’t sound as optimistic as Hank had hoped. “But you know, it ain’t likely it’ll be a twenty minute turnaround.”
Hank hung up and lifted the receiver again to make the second phone call. This number he dialed more slowly, and he brought the phone inside where he could sit while he talked to her.
“I’m not sure how long, Lyla,” he told her. “Maybe an hour. Maybe longer. I don’t know.” He fingered the cord and studied the tiny brass-framed photo on his shelf, the pale, faded snapshot from the wake.
“You could probably go down to Reid’s for a haircut,” she said. “You must be due.”
“I don’t need a haircut.”
There came a heavy sigh at the other end of the line. “Well I guess that’ll be fine,” she said. “I can’t commit to the whole day though. I have things.”
Hank filled Toby’s bowl and gave him one last scratch between the ears, then locked the house down tight before climbing into the pickup. It was the time of mud and muck and creeping molds, the kind of season that sent a good many Ash Falls folks into a spiral of gloom and regret, the mobile ones to Arizona or Baja. But for Hank, the dankness of autumn could hold a certain thunderous romance, if only for those winding drives into town, where he would find himself stealing glances in the rearview mirror to watch the glorious rooster tail of yellow and red billowing wildly behind him. Not enough people appreciated that. The turning maples and dogwoods that hovered cathedral-like over the roadway, racin
g down the snaking mountain highway, flanked by the breathtaking gauntlet of granite and basalt cliffs and the intermittent rush of late summer melt forcing its way down the slope toward the chugging Stillaguamish. Most times, it was the only thing that made that coming down the mountain worthwhile.
Gravel sprayed from the tires, and the Chevy bucked hard as he steered from his drive out onto the highway. Just as quickly it stopped, and a few errant chunks of firewood launched themselves against the cab as he wrestled with the gearshift. He peered up the roadway, eyeing the point at which it disappeared past the culvert, and he tried to force the rod to first, but it kicked back, knocking into his bony knee. His heartbeat rolled up into his head, and his whiskered neck began to dampen under his collar.
“You sonofabitch.” He cursed at the rod, but even more he cursed at the stony old hands that seemed never to do what he wanted anymore. He knocked the stick in and out of the pathways of the big H, and his palm was sweating, and his knuckles were rusty, and he imagined that he might be able to push the truck back off the roadway if it wasn’t for his back, the dull aching that seemed to a constant companion now. He gave it one more shove and there was a connection of sorts that rolled through his arm. The pickup shook violently, and Hank’s left foot numbed from the grinding beneath the pedal. An acrid odor crawled in from the floor and the truck rolled slowly forward. It strained against the gentle slope of the roadway until it reached the crest, then it finally settled itself on the downhill grade into town.
Hank trembled his hand across the dashboard, leaving a black swipe through the layer of dust. “All right then,” he said. “Let’s just get into town and all will be forgiven.”
As the truck choked into the garage parking lot, Benny West lumbered through the office door and waved Hank into an empty bay. Benny was a man who led with his giant belly, and a toothy grin that stayed put whether he was actually smiling, listening intently for a rattle in the engine compartment, or just thumbing through the sports page at his desk.
Hank rolled into the bay and cut the engine. Benny walked around the front end of the truck, and Hank wound down the window, halfway. There was a worker at the far side of the garage hunched over a screaming grinder, a spray of yellow sparks shooting outward from his hip.
“Damn, Hank,” Benny shouted over the noise. “You burning toast under that hood or what?” He wiped his hands off on a scabby rag he’d pulled from his coverall pocket. His lips stretched tighter, and the edges of his gums appeared in thin, pink stripes. Benny’s version of a genuine grin.
“It’s been awhile since we’ve seen this old girl.”
“It’s been fine till now,” Hank said.
“Yeah well, we’ll see about that.” He winked at Hank. “You got someone to take you back home? Just in case?”
Hank drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and gazed at the dashboard gauges and lights. The clock read 9:47. His mind spun the hands forward, passing over a list of walking errands that was way too short.
“You really think you’re going to have to keep it beyond today?”
“Well Hank, I have to get under there so I can see what we’re looking at first.” Benny’s fingers rested on the edge of the open window. He pressed his lips together but the teeth still strained against them from behind, and for the first time Hank thought how strange it was that Benny must work to do that, to cover up those big, grinning teeth.
Benny extended his hand through the open window and Hank gave up, laying the keys into his open palm. Benny opened the door like a valet then, and led Hank into the tiny office carved into the side of the tin building.
“I’ll be as quick as I can with her, Hank,” he said. “Where do you want me to call you?”
“I should be at my sister’s,” Hank said.
Benny stopped and turned around, slack-jawed, eyes wide. He dangled the keys out from his round stomach as if they were something offensive, a used tissue left on his desk, a remnant of some anonymous customer.
“You’re going to Lyla’s?” he said.
“I believe so. Yeah.”
“All day?” He shifted his eyes from Hank’s, to focus on a spot beyond the office, someplace in the garage, maybe. “It’s been awhile since you’ve done that.”
Hank considered the collage of papers thumb-tacked to the walls of Benny’s office. There were framed certificates, lily white behind grease-smudged glass, and cartoons of men fishing, and men hunting, and men crowded around a muscled hot rod with a big-breasted woman perched behind the wheel, the captions all too small to read. Behind Benny’s desk hung a window-sized framed photograph. It was a picture of Mt. St. Helens, before she’d blown her top. A turquoise lake, clear as glass, fronted the regal mountain like a jeweled necklace. It was a place he’d always intended to see in person. It was too late, now.
“You really think you’ll need to keep it that long?” he asked.
Benny walked around his desk and sank into the chair, leaning forward and reshuffling the mess of papers spread out before him.
“If it’s the clutch,” he said, “I could probably have a new one in her by this afternoon. If not, and I have to keep her overnight, I’ll drive you home myself. And I’ll come on out in the morning to bring you back.”
“No.” Hank dug his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “I don’t want you to do that.”
“Hell, it’s no problem. I don’t mind the drive.”
“No. I’ll ask my sister if I have to.”
“Yeah,” Benny grinned. “You’ll ask Lyla all right.” He slid a bowl of pistachios across the desk to Hank. “Here, take a handful of nuts with you. I can’t stand ‘em.”
“Why don’t you throw them outside for the squirrels?”
“Cause I hate the squirrels more.”
Hank left the garage and walked up the street until he hit Main, then cut right and took the sidewalk under the blistered awning of Henning Jewelers, and the crusty ferns that hung in front of the fabric store, past storefronts plastered with starburst advertisements until he reached the rows of clapboard bungalows where the townies lived. At Shale Street, he hooked left and walked to the cedar-shingled house with the Japanese Cherries across the street.
The sedan was parked in the carport, jug-eared with its doors wide open, a water bucket crowded against the fender. Lyla Henry’s slippered foot stretched from the passenger side, her rear end rocking back and forth as she worked feverishly at something inside.
He stopped at the curb and took his billfold from his pocket. He thumbed through his cash, then looked up again. Lyla stretched her body over the bench seat, her leg extended past her cuff and kicked behind her. There was still time. She hadn’t yet seen him. He’d call her later and apologize, tell her that it turned out he didn’t need to stick around in town after all. She shifted her weight and brought a bucket of water from the floor to the pavement. He put his wallet away and walked up the driveway toward her.
“Hello Lyla.”
She bolted upright, sending a scrub brush sailing from her hand to the fissured concrete. Her legs wound beneath her body as she tried to turn and face him. To Hank she was a landlocked mermaid, dark water stain pooled around her feet, her body twisting on the bench seat like a trout.
“Darn it, Hank,” she said. “You about scared me out of my skin.” She climbed out of the car and stood up, and pressed a hand into the small of her arching back.
“Jesus Lyla,” Hank said, looking past her at the sudsy carpet on the passenger floor. “Something die in there?”
“No, something didn’t die,” she said. “Jonas dumped a whole thermos of cocoa. And then like always he left it for me to clean up.” She craned her neck to scan the street. Her head moved in fits and jerks. “What’s the deal with your truck?”
“It’s with Benny for a while. Said he’d call.” Hank reached down and picked up the scrub brush. “I can finish that up.”
“No you won’t.”
“I got nothing else to do.�
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She decompressed, sifting her breath through her teeth and shaking out her fingers. “It’s clean enough.” She walked away from him. She took the porch steps hard and without turning back said, “You might as well come in. I’ll put on a pot of coffee if you’ll drink it.”
Hank’s own home was tidy, and he preferred to keep it that way. But his sister’s reeked of the kind of order and almost unreal, unshakable consistency that a person would see on display behind a glass case. Potted plants and fanned magazine displays, and fringed throw pillows were exactly as they had been on his previous visit. Their mother’s old crystal hanging lamp, the one that had cost two year’s pin money to have shipped from Chicago, hovered alone over an end table. It stretched its dim light over the chevron-patterned afghan quilt that Lyla had crocheted in those months after her surgery.
He’d asked her for details on the procedure. She said it was a private matter. But there were comments between the layers, words about waning motherhood, and of choices made late in life. So Hank made assumptions. The whole afghan was draped over the sofa back like a saddle, its tassels combed neatly against the upholstery.
They sat across from one another at the living room coffee table, he at the sofa and she in the recliner. It had been like this so many times over the years in this house, the two of them on opposite sides, their mother positioned between them, the weary referee. Lyla gave a rattled sigh and pressed her knees to one another, and kneaded them softly with her twiglike fingers. Her smile was pinch-lipped.
Hank started. “So how are things?”
“Fine. Just fine.”
“And Jonas?”
“He’s good, too.” Her eyes darted cooly around the room.
“The place smells like vanilla. Something in the oven?”
“No,” she said. She rubbed at her eyes and crossed one leg over her knee. “It’s one of those popup things. They were two for a dollar at the Red Apple. I thought I’d try them.”