All the Roads That Lead From Home

by Anne Leigh Parrish

Years after the bucket is lost you eat a TV dinner in your father’s dark apartment. There’s a game on the black and white set, the antenna off kilter, the picture in and out.

  Who scored? he calls.

  Pittsburgh, you’re happy to say, knowing the teams at last.

  He stands in the low kitchen doorway, a can of beer in his hand. He says he’s getting married again soon. You nod. Mom told me, you say.

  The final quarter is underway, Pittsburgh reaches Miami’s 10-yard line, and still in the doorway your father says, I want you to know that I won’t have any more children. You’re the only child I have, the only one I want to have.

  Years later you call up to say you just got married. A silence falls on the line. In the background there’s a game playing, and you have to wonder if it’s football. I wish you’d told me, Dar. I would have liked to give you away.

  You finish your drink. Something within you shifts, then drops like a single flake of snow. You put the glass down, and sit a little longer in the quiet of your father’s empty house.

  You find the checkbook in the bedroom. Inside bears your father’s neat, square hand. You take it along to look at later, and realize how very glad you are you made the trip.

  For the Taking

  Angie needed a drink and had already waited ten minutes for Fran to offer her one. Finally she went into the kitchen, found a glass, and returned to the living room. She joined Fran on the soft leather couch and helped herself to the whiskey from the crystal bottle on the coffee table.

  The funeral had been long. A lot of people Angie didn’t know gave voice to her father’s good deeds, I remember when he taught Bess to play her first scale, and He guided Collin through his first recital. Fran was the last to speak. She cried as she described their seven lovely years together—a second marriage for us both but even better than the first—then closed with your music is silent now, my love, though for you my ear remains keen.

  To Angie, it was a big bore. She’d given up on her father years before and was only there to get something for her trouble, something she could take away and hang onto.

  “Find out about insurance,” Kevin had said as Angie boarded the bus to Ann Arbor. “An old guy like that, he’d have insurance.” He didn’t, though. He didn’t have a will, either.

  “Because he wasn’t planning to die,” said Fran, when Angie asked why not. “Don’t you think he’d have put his affairs in order, otherwise?”

  Angie sipped her drink. Her father was only sixty-two. He’d been a piano teacher. Angie’s mother had been one of his students. Their marriage was four months older than Angie, a last-minute arrangement, she was always told. Angie was five when her mother ran off with another man, and she remembered nothing of it, though her father said she’d been right there, watching the car drive away. What Angie did remember was her mother’s absence, the sudden silence in the house, and then a postcard from Montana saying, I made a mistake. Her mother didn’t write again, she didn’t come home, and went on living with her mistake, Angie hoped, until word came of her death from pneumonia in an Arizona hospital three years later.

  “There are a few photo albums you can have, and some costume jewelry of your mother’s, although I don’t know why he kept it, under the circumstances. Oh, and you can take the ashtrays. You know how he loved those,” said Fran.

  And the bars he lifted them from, with Angie on the lookout, those many nights when staying home was no comfort at all.

  In the beginning they were turned away. What are you thinking, trying to bring a child in here? In time they were allowed to stay. And stay they did, through the lunch crowd, the after-lunch crowd, the happy-hour crowd, smoke and laughter taking them towards night. Everything I ever learned, I learned in a bar, Angie had told Kevin more than once.

  What she learned was how to use silence and wide eyes to get pretzels and soda, sometimes a sandwich, sometimes a sweater or a pair of shoes that no longer fit the bartender’s son or daughter. People gave you what they thought you needed easily enough. The trick was getting what you wanted.

  “What about that old piano?” Angie asked Fran.

  “The one in storage? Goodness, I’d forgotten all about it.”

  Angie’s father discovered it in the basement of a church where he’d woken up after walking the streets and screaming at the violet sky. Angie had spent the same night alone in their drafty house, with only the television’s gray-blue face for company. Later at the church she held her father’s sweaty hand, thought of how hungry she was, and looked at the piano. Tiny painted roses decorated the closed keyboard lid. The finish was dull and scratched, something her father pointed out while he haggled with the Father.

  You’ve a keen eye, the Father said. I can see you’re a man of taste. If I weren’t a good Christian I’d drive a harder bargain, but the truth is that this room’s to be converted, and we’ve no more need of it.

  Then the Father asking her, Can you see yourself here, playing those fine, round notes all up to Heaven? His hand in her hair, on her neck, then under her shirt because her father was gone then, off to the bank for the money, and the Father said he’d give her breakfast because it looked like she could use it, but all he did was tug her forward why don’t you and I just sit here a bit, on this nice, fine bench? What a shame it is to let it go.

  “Well, it’s yours for the taking. I suppose you’ll want to sell it,” said Fran.

  Angie didn’t know what the piano was worth. Maybe a thousand dollars. That would be a lovely windfall. She could get that leather coat she’d had her eye on, and that silver-and-turquoise bracelet she and Kevin saw at the mall. The rest she could bank for that rainy day that always came along so fast. Kevin, though, would want to put it up his nose. His cocaine habit used up all the money his father gave him. There was more money to be had, but his father had become difficult and cut off his allowance.

  “Good plan. Better to sell it here, though, don’t you think?” Angie told Fran. That way Kevin wouldn’t have to know a thing. Listen, Babe, things didn’t work out so well. That Fran, she’s got things tied up tight. Must be how my old man wanted it, leaving it all to her. Figures, doesn’t it?

  “Suit yourself, only I’m leaving first thing in the morning,” said Fran.

  “Really, why?”

  She spoke of a brother out in Santa Barbara and needing a change of scene. It occurred to Angie that she could do with a few more days away from Kevin. They’d come to that hard point between lust and love and spent more and more time on their bare mattress, a mattress she’d like some sheets for to cover the brown stains of her period, and the yellow stains of her sweat.

  “I’ve got enough for one night at the motel, but after that I don’t know,” said Angie and glanced at Fran, who stared firmly into space.

  “I can stake you to a second night.”

  “Oh, you’re sweet! But don’t you think it would be easier if I just stayed here? After you’re gone, I mean. Don’t like to be underfoot.”

  Fran turned her leaky eyes on her. “I’m sorry, honey, you can’t.”

  Angie had visited last year with Boomer, Kevin’s predecessor. When they left Fran found herself missing a silk scarf, a pair of gold earrings, and a fountain pen she’d won in a church raffle. Angie sometimes wore the earrings and scarf. The pen she’d never used. When her father called to report the loss, Angie blamed Boomer. She said he was a recovering heroin addict (he wasn’t), and that he’d spent time in jail (he hadn’t done that, either). Her father believed her. Obviously Fran didn’t. Boomer, who knew nothing of the theft or the phone call, moved out several weeks later when he realized Angie had been helping herself to his wallet.

  Fran offered to ship the piano down. Ann Arbor to Dunston was a pricey distance, a fact Fran regretted with a lift of one eyebrow. Angie wasn’t moved. There’d be no distance if Fran had stayed put. When Angie struck out on her own at seventeen, with no desire to finish high school, Fran pulled up stakes and dragged her father back to h
er hometown so they could float on the sale of her late husband’s grocery store chain, forget the past, and begin again.

  Angie wrote her new address on the back of a museum flyer Fran had on the coffee table by the whiskey. The French Impressionists. February 4th - March 31st. Gauguin, Renoir, Cezanne. Angie couldn’t imagine her father going to see that kind of nonsense, but then with Fran her father always thought he was better than he was.

  “Well, then. I’ll call a mover. They’ll let you know when to expect it,” said Fran, and drained off her glass of whiskey. She stood and tugged the jacket of her stylish black suit into place. Angie got up, too. She towered over Fran. Angie was five foot ten, skinny as a boy, with size-ten feet. She’d stuck out at the funeral with her torn jeans and red linen jacket. She looked down at the white roots running through Fran’s dyed black hair and kissed her hard, right on the top of her head. Outside, the heels of her cowboy boots banged on the wide brick steps. Above her the sky was a tender blue, the yellow clouds a dream.

  Fuck, she thought. It would have to be a beautiful day.

  ***

  The piano was an upright, not a grand, and because a ramp had been built for a handicapped tenant some years before, the movers were able to get it inside Angie’s apartment without loading it onto a dolly.

  Angie shoved it around the coffee table, which she realized later could have been pushed aside, to the wall by the kitchen. The wheels gouged the wood.

  “Cool,” said Kevin when he came in. Then, “Look what those morons did to the floor.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Better not lose my damage deposit.”

  He smelled of cigarette smoke, which meant he’d been with Ramon again. Ramon was where Kevin got his coke. If he had any now, it would have been on loan, because Kevin’s father was still being a jerk. Angie had met Ramon only once. He was so short she could have put her chin on his head. He worked as a car mechanic and promised to get Kevin hired on to do oil changes. Of course nothing had come of it.

  Kevin went to the kitchen and made himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Marta, his German shepherd, clacked across the floor and sat politely in front of him. He offered Marta some sandwich, then pulled it back just as she opened her mouth to take it. After the fourth time, Angie said, “Stop being such a mean fuck and give her some.” His blow sent her sideways into the kitchen counter. The blood tasted like metal and made her suddenly remember falling on the school playground. Kevin stared at her. He was still chewing. The hand he’d hit her with had opened from its hardened fist and was poised in mid-air, fingers bent, like an old man’s.

  On the street, without her coat, she shivered. Her lip went on bleeding. She could feel it swelling. The Chinese restaurant smelled of hot grease as she passed. Bits of paper lifted in a gust of wind, swirled, then floated back to the sidewalk. At the corner a homeless woman sat on the steps of the church, her garbage bag below. She wore new track shoes with silver laces.

  They looked at each other. “Somebody got you good,” the woman said to Angie. “Somebody with good aim.” Angie stood with folded arms. Her lip throbbed. Behind a square glass pane on the wall by the door the message “I AM THE LIFE EVER AFTER” stood in white letters, advertising the sermon that coming Sunday. “You go on in, clean yourself up,” the woman said. She drank from a tall plastic coffee cup, then looked at her wristwatch. Not homeless, Angie realized. Just sitting there.

  “What you doing, girl?” Angie asked.

  “Name’s Yolanda. Waiting on a guy. Coming to get a donation.”

  “Of what?”

  “What you think? Clothes. Food.”

  “In a bag. You put it in a bag.”

  “You got something better?”

  Angie went up the stairs. Inside was dark and smelled of dust and wood. The daylight leaked through the stained-glass window. The ladies’ room down the hall had a scent of bleach. Angie examined her lip in the small mirror over one of the two porcelain sinks. She felt her teeth. None were loose. On her way out a bulletin board with squares of bright paper caught her attention: Babysitting, call Clair. Moving? call Jerome. Yardwork. Home Health Aide. Used van for sale. Wanted, upright piano for Church Basement/Nursery School.

  Angie took the long way home, down the street towards the record store and dry cleaners, then past the park where the children were warmly dressed. She kept walking until she was too cold to walk anymore, and then she went home.

  ***

  Kevin watched her across the candlelit table. The sky had given in to snow and the power had gone out. Angie wore long underwear beneath a cotton skirt. On top she was naked but for a jean vest of Kevin’s she’d grabbed in the bedroom. They’d had sex for hours. He’d dug inside her until she was as dry as dust.

  “God, you have great tits,” he said.

  “For a skinny girl.”

  “For anyone.”

  Kevin leaned back in his chair, his arms folded across his bare chest. Angie admired Kevin’s arms, his shoulders, too. Sometimes she pressed her teeth there, and sucked up the salt on his skin.

  “Know what I think?” asked Kevin. “I think you’re the kind of girl who can take a whole lot of a guy.”

  “You’d know.”

  “Maybe you can take some more.”

  “Maybe.”

  She sipped icy vodka from the coffee cup. In four days her lip had healed a lot.

  She’d been hit by men before. Not by Boomer, whose real name was Brad. The nickname had come from his mother, because he’d been such a loud baby. He wasn’t loud when Angie met him. He never once raised his voice to her, except when he found out about the money she’d taken from his wallet. He called her a cunt, which hurt more than she thought it would. Before Brad there was Toby, a bicycle messenger. He didn’t hit her, though she’d hit him for cheating on her with their downstairs neighbor. Before Toby was Pat, and Pat had blackened her eye when she wouldn’t get him another bottle of beer.

  Kevin looked at the piano. He asked her again about selling it because now Ramon was pressing him for the two thousand he owed. Kevin’s father was out. The last time Kevin called his father said, It’s time to face facts. All the money in the world’s no use to you. And when are you going to get rid of that slut? Angie didn’t think that was the word his father would have used, and that Kevin had chosen it for effect.

  “I’ll get on it,” she said. She thought of the ad she’d seen, and of the piano returning to a church, going back where it came from, like ashes to ashes and dust to dust. She laughed softly, then with a harder edge. Kevin went on watching her with his blue marble eyes.

  ***

  Ramon sat at the far end. Angie waited for Noreen to get him, but it wasn’t Noreen’s station and Noreen knew it, so she let him sit.

  He had the fidgets. One thick tattooed arm jiggled on the bar, one leather-clad boot danced on the bar rail.

  “Hey,” said Angie, and put a clean square napkin down in front of him. “Where’s Kev?”

  “Thought you could tell me.” He pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head.

  “He said he had a job interview.”

  “Not likely,” said Ramon.

  “No, probably not.”

  He asked for a scotch and soda. She mixed it and brought it to him. He stirred it with the red plastic stick she’d dropped in.

  “When you see him last?” he asked, looking at her tits. She saw herself in his eyes. The blonde dye she put in three months before had slid down and left a wide cut of black. Her pink tank top and the cold in the bar brought her nipples up like two ripe olives. Kevin’s words, not hers. Angie had never eaten an olive in her life.

  “This morning. Why?” she asked.

  “He owes me money.”

  She leaned over the bar. “You’ll get it.”

  “I better.”

  He drank his drink and she pulled back, towel over one shoulder, held by what he was about to say. And when he did she didn’t have to agree. That’s how it worked
when you were there for the taking. Nothing had to be said.

  ***

  “Ramon says he’ll drop it to a grand and call it even,” said Kevin. Angie went on washing the dishes. In the dark window over the sink he stood reflected, hands on hips. He was a handsome man, with a fine square jaw, not at all like Ramon. Ramon’s nose was broken, his skin was pocked, and his nails were filthy, but he trembled when he held her, even once cried out her name, and then talked of bad dreams, bad things remembered.

  “That’s good,” she said, looking at the tall image behind her.

  “I just don’t get it, though. He was so hot for me to pay up.”

  “I know.”

  “He even went looking for me, down where you work.”

  “I was there.”

  He shifted his long, lean weight. She had to move fast, before he added it up. She turned off the water and rubbed her wet fingers on her worn-out jeans. The blood rushed in her ears, down her back, all the way to the soles of her feet. She’d crossed more than half the distance between them by the time he caught her by the shoulders. They made it all the way into the bedroom with her mouth pressed into his.

  ***

  Kevin had a plan. He knew two things: where Ramon kept his money, and where he kept his coke. “Cash in a coffee can, right there on the shelf. And the coke’s sitting loose in an old box of laundry soap.” Ramon also had a gun which he kept in his bedside table drawer, and another one in the kitchen, inside an empty fruit bowl on the top of the refrigerator.

  “Sounds risky,” said Angie.

  “Only if I get busted, so I don’t lift the coke. The cops won’t ask about the money if they find it on me.”

  “Still.”

  “Come on, he’s got at least a couple of grand. Plenty to go somewhere new. By the ocean, maybe.”

  “He’ll know you took it.”

  “That’s just it. There’s this girl he used to live with, this Marcy something, and she’s bad news, let me tell you. She comes in and helps herself to everything. He’ll have to figure she took it. She’s always after him for something. Major sleazeball. No surprise there, given the kind he likes.”