After the Leaves Fall

by Nicole Baart

  It was only when Parker asked the one question that had been poisoning the space between us all night that I finally understood.

  “So,” he began, lifting the last egg roll from a pagoda-shaped box and holding it up for my consent.

  I nodded.

  He took a bite and continued. “So, this Walker family Thanksgiving … are they old friends of the family?”

  “Something like that—we’re neighbors,” I said and was on the verge of explaining how my friendship with Thomas had sort of brought us all together when the source of Parker’s peculiarity suddenly seemed clear. He had read Thomas’s name on the e-mail that day in study group. He was wondering if this Walker Thanksgiving would include a certain Thomas Walker. I had to suppress a surprised smile at the thought. Was Parker feeling threatened?

  I didn’t dare say any of my thoughts aloud for fear of offending him, so I took a more moderate approach. “I’ve always loved the Walkers. I’m an only child, but they have this big, beautiful, crazy family—there’s always something going on.”

  “Lots of kids?” Parker asked.

  I nodded. “Five. There’s Maggie—she’s the baby—then Emily, Jacob, Simon, and Thomas.” I stole a glance at Parker as I said the last name. He had been watching me and looked quickly away to busy himself by rearranging his chopsticks. When he didn’t say anything, I went on. “Thomas is six years older than Simon so the last four are still pretty young. I think Maggie is eight.”

  “So Thomas is about your age,” Parker asserted casually.

  “A little over two years older,” I confirmed. “We were good friends.” I waited for Parker to say something, to bring up the e-mail that in a roundabout way had brought us together. When he didn’t, I decided to make it easy for him. “Hey,” I said as if it had just occurred to me, “I think you e-mailed Thomas once! You’re practically friends with him too.”

  “Oh, is he the e-mail guy?” Parker acted as if he were just now putting two and two together.

  “One and the same.”

  Silence stretched between us once again as Parker tried to settle on the best course of action from here. I let him take his time as I selected a fortune cookie and cracked it in half to extract the little piece of prophetic paper. You will have good luck in relationships was typed in fading ink on one side. The other side contained a single word in Chinese. I ignored both and rolled up the paper so tiny and tight it was the size of a small, white bean. I waited for Parker.

  Finally he said, “Are you done?” and motioned to my plate.

  A part of me relished the attention and Parker’s obvious discomfort, but the peacekeeper in me didn’t really want the conversation to be over until it was resolved. However, he had obviously moved on. “Yes, thank you,” I replied, trying to keep any disappointment hidden beneath my voice.

  He stacked my plate on top of his own and got up to take them to the kitchen. We were sitting on pillows around the coffee table in the living room, so when he began to clear things away, I pulled myself up and joined him because I didn’t want the distance of an entire room between us. I surveyed the takeout boxes and, deciding that there were not enough leftovers to save, piled them all together with our used napkins and empty soy-sauce packets. I crammed everything into Parker’s already overstuffed garbage can while he loaded the dishwasher.

  The room felt taut, as if the tension between us could be plucked like a steel guitar string and resonate deep and sad throughout the house. I would have done anything to alleviate it if only I could think of the right thing to do.

  In the end, it was Parker who once again made everything okay. The kitchen was clean, and he flipped the light off so we could go back into the living room to watch the movie we had rented. We reached the doorway at the same time, and instead of letting me walk through it, Parker took a step with me, put his hands on my shoulders, and turned me to face him so that my back was against one side of the doorframe and his pressed to the opposite. He leaned into the wood and studied me, one foot in the kitchen, the other in the living room. “Did you date Thomas, Julia?”

  It was much more direct than I had expected him to be, and while I was thankful that we were dealing with it, I found that I was also uncomfortable going into detail about my history with Thomas. “No,” I said.

  Parker heard something more beneath it. “But you wanted to? He wanted to?”

  “I wanted to,” I admitted slowly. “Thomas was there for me when no one else was. I guess I sort of fell for him because he saved me in a way.”

  Parker looked sad. “Julia,” he began, shifting his weight forward so that his face was inches from my own, “he didn’t save you.”

  “Yes, he did—”

  “No, he didn’t,” Parker interrupted. “You’re tough and determined and strong. I’ve seen it in you—you don’t need saving.”

  It was what I had always wanted to believe about myself but what I had always known was nothing more than a carefully constructed facade. Had I changed? Was I who Parker thought I was?

  Parker studied my face for a moment, then closed the space between us, resting his hands on the doorframe above my head. “You … don’t … need … saving.” He punctuated each word with a soft, inviting kiss on my lips.

  I wrapped my arms around his neck. “I don’t?”

  “No. It’s one of the reasons I’m so drawn to you.”

  We were quiet for a moment, and he slid his arms around my waist so that we were pressed together. “Do you still have a thing for Thomas?”

  I laughed and it wasn’t at all forced. Standing here with Parker— with the words he said to me and the way he looked at me—how could I want anything else? “Are you crazy?” I asked, looking directly into his gunmetal blue eyes.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Then I’ll let you go home for Thanksgiving,” Parker said with a little affected condescension.

  “You’re so gracious,” I murmured, and then I covered his mouth with my own.

  A part of me was reluctant to leave Parker for the weekend, but when Friday afternoon rolled around, any hesitation was replaced by a soaring excitement that I was going home.

  I threw some clothes and toiletries into my laundry basket and unenthusiastically added my backpack to the top of the pile. I couldn’t go an entire weekend without doing homework, yet I was loath to take it along when I had so few hours with my grandmother. “If there’s time,” I told myself, knowing that there wouldn’t be time and realizing that I would regret it come Monday.

  The road home required all of two turns, so I set my cruise control on sixty-two. When I met the odd late harvester ambling down the road on its way to a field of dry corn, I honked and passed it with a wave and a smile. I had told Grandma to expect me around suppertime, and she was making my favorite: homemade vegetable beef soup stocked with fresh vegetables still crisp and new from her own garden. She never overcooked it, knowing that I loved my veggies with a little firmness in them, and she argued that the second day of soup was always better than the first because the flavors had simmered together but nothing was soggy or overdone. I had to stop myself from overriding the cruise control and weighting the gas pedal with my foot on more than one occasion.

  I had been gone for only a couple of months, but somehow I expected everything to be changed. When I crested the hill above our farm, I held my breath in anticipation and was surprised to see that all seemed to be exactly as I had left it. The grove of maples, elms, and oaks flanking the house on the northwest side of the property was nearly bare, and I could see the brown leaves blanketing the ground almost two feet thick in some places. The crops in the surrounding fields were mere remnants of their earlier bounty, and Grandma’s garden was nothing more than vacant, black earth. Other than the fact that what had previously been green was now brown, everything was the same. I couldn’t decide if it was comforting or disheartening.

  Grandma must have seen my car from the window over the sink be
cause as I pulled into the driveway, she came out of the house. She was wearing a tan dress with her red gingham half apron tied around her waist. There was a towel tucked into the apron at her side, and she was drying her hands on it as she watched me drive up. She was smiling at me with her lips pressed together, and although I couldn’t tell for sure from this distance, it looked as though she choked back tears. I did.

  “You’re here,” Grandma said when I stepped out of the car and enfolded her in a hug on the front sidewalk. It was a soothing statement, an acknowledgment that wherever I may be after this moment in time, for now at least I was home.

  I swallowed a sob and smiled broadly at her. “It feels good to be here. I missed you.”

  “I missed you, too,” she whispered as if it were a secret. “I’ve been thinking about getting a computer so I can do that electronic mail thing with you.”

  I giggled at the thought of my grandmother trying to navigate the World Wide Web. “Maybe we should just call each other more often,” I suggested.

  “Good idea,” she agreed. “I’m too old to start thinking about all that stuff. Do you know Ellie tried to talk me into getting one of those new convection ovens? What would I do with all those buttons?”

  It was a natural and happy feeling to be joking with my grandmother on ground that felt so much a part of me that I was sure I was more myself just standing on it. Even on the front porch I could smell the soup and the fresh bread baking, and somewhere in the back of my mind I tried to convince myself that life would be better if I just never went back. The engineering college at Brighton was a world away from here. It was a thought I wouldn’t even seriously consider for a second, but being wrapped in the solace of my home was more than a little intoxicating—I felt warm and safe and drowsy in the dearest, most satisfying way.

  “I washed your sheets so they’d be nice and fresh,” Grandma was saying as we made our way into the house, “and there’re peanut-butter cookies in the cookie jar and a jug of that chocolate milk you like in the fridge.”

  “Grandma!” I chastised tenderly. “You didn’t have to make me cookies or buy me chocolate milk.”

  “I know,” she said, waving away my words as if bothersome flies buzzed around her head. “But I wanted to. Go put your stuff upstairs. Supper will be ready in a couple of minutes.”

  It looked like Grandma hadn’t touched my bedroom other than to clean it every few weeks. Even the empty bottle of perfume that I had left on my dresser because I liked the shape of the curving glass had not been moved an inch. I touched a few things as I walked around the room, letting my fingers brush against the dangling beads of my lampshade and the stuffed bear on a little chair in the corner. The bed looked smaller to me somehow, and I lay down on it to make sure that I still fit. As always, my feet rested a few inches from the edge. I curled up on my side with a sigh, taking in the air of my home and exhaling it slowly through my mouth as though cleansing something deep within.

  I waited for Grandma to call me down to dinner, but minutes passed and she didn’t. The sounds of her setting the table drifted up the stairs, and I knew we were ready to eat, but still there was no request from the kitchen. It dawned on me that she would not call me down until I came on my own. She saw me as a guest. A wanted guest, a beloved guest, but a guest all the same. It was no longer my job to set the table. It was no longer her place to tell me it was time to eat. Supper would wait until the guest was good and ready.

  A fist had closed around my heart by the time I descended the steps into the kitchen. I breathed shallowly, reminding myself that this was the natural course of things: girl grows up, girl moves out, girl gets life outside her old life, and life moves on. We were simply participating in the round, and this was nothing to get emotional over. And yet there was something in me that wanted to cry— the bitter of the bittersweet seemed slightly overpowering in this moment when I felt very alone in the world.

  Grandma didn’t seem to notice that anything was different. “Does your room look okay?”

  I cringed because although I knew the comment was nothing 45 more than a reflection of my grandmother’s expansive gift for hospitality, it was also what the manager of a hotel would ask his paying guest.

  “It looks great, Grandma,” I said, looking over the table and seeing there was nothing left for me to do. “I could have set the table,” I offered.

  “You work hard enough at school,” Grandma scolded. “Relax when you’re home. It takes me two minutes to set the table.”

  “Well, I get to clean up then,” I asserted, trying to find somewhere to fit in this new dynamic.

  Grandma regarded me for a second. “We’ll clean up together,” she finally said. “It’ll give us a chance to talk.”

  I acquiesced.

  The meal was wonderful, and everything was just as I remembered it. Grandma’s vegetable soup was thick and full of tomatoes, and I shook pepper on it until the surface was dusty with black. I had two bowls, and when I had scraped what I could with my spoon, I took the buttered crusts of my bread and dragged them along the bottom and sides until everything was smeared clean.

  “I love cooking for you!” My grandma laughed. “It’s so much more fun than cooking for one.”

  I looked at her forlornly, and she realized her mistake instantly. “No, no, no,” she cautioned. “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. Nothing in all the world could make me more happy or proud than having you go to college and get your degree.” She peered into the soup pot and assessed the leftovers. “Don’t you worry about me. I cook for different people in the church twice a week—shut-ins, new moms, people who are sick. … I’ve got the house to take care of, and there’s Prayer Circle on Wednesdays and Ladies’ Night Out on Thursdays and church twice on Sundays.” She leveled me with a serious look, leaving no room for discussion or debate. “Julia, I’ve got lots to do.”

  “It just feels funny,” I said. “We’re supposed to take care of each other.”

  “We are taking care of each other,” Grandma declared. “We are taking care of each other by letting God work His will out in our lives.”

  The certainty with which she said it made me feel sheepish. I wasn’t letting God do any such thing in my life and had in fact let Him go so ignored in my heart and mind that I had nearly forgotten I was supposed to believe in His existence. It seemed strange to be thinking of such a childish fairy tale when my life had become so significant, so grown-up.

  Grandma must not have noticed that I had frozen a bit because she cheerfully began to push everything to the far side of the table so she could make room for her Bible. Family devotions were another thing I had almost forgotten about, and it made me feel the tiniest bit grimy and exposed—like I had done something mildly shameful and was about to get caught—as she opened her Bible now. She would read and then she would want to pray, and she would ask me if I had anything weighing down my heart. I quickly ran different possibilities through my mind and then dismissed them all as hurriedly as I thought them. What could I say that was neither too revealing nor trite?

  My thoughtfulness was mistaken for concentration, and when Grandma was finished reading aloud, she said, “It really makes you think, doesn’t it? How can God make beauty from ashes?”

  I stopped myself from saying, “Huh?” and nodded sagely instead. It looked like she wanted to say more, like she wanted to discuss this passage with me, so I jumped in before she had a chance to dig deeper. “I have a prayer request.”

  “You do?” she asked, leaning forward slightly.

  “I had a big test in statics on Wednesday, and I studied like crazy but it was really hard. …” I trailed off. “I’m just hoping I did okay.”

  “Statics? What’s that?”

  I was relieved that I had diverted her from more Bible talk. “It’s one of the required classes for my engineering major,” I explained. “It’s mostly formulas and math and applications.” I stopped when I saw the slightly awed look in her eye. Grandma had c
ompleted the eighth grade and been unable to attend another single day of school as there were baby brothers and sisters to take care of and a farm to run. She had been needed at home. “It’s no big deal,” I hastily clarified. “I just hope I did okay on the test.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sure you did,” Grandma assured me, patting my hand. “But we will definitely pray for that.”

  She folded her hands and prayed right then, and I gave up trying to pay attention after a moment. God felt like an estranged acquaintance, someone I had once known marginally and, after learning more about Him, now had no desire to know. Someone who was far less than He had purported Himself to be. But He meant so much to Grandma that I was silent and still and smiled sweetly at her when she was finished and we were cleaning up the dishes together.

  “How is life at school going?” she asked.

  I had to search myself for a moment to find the answer. It had been awful at first but was looking up now, and as I thought about Parker and the test that I had nailed, I found that I could tell her with almost complete honesty that it was going very, very well.

  “It was hard at first,” I said, “but I think I’m really getting the hang of it.”

  “Are you making good friends?” The same question was insulting from Thomas, but it was simple and straightforward from Grandma—there was only loving consideration behind her words.

  For once, it was easy to know how to answer. I couldn’t tell her that friends were hard to make when my classes absorbed nearly every minute of my time, but I also couldn’t lie to my grandmother. I would walk the delicate line in between. “There are lots of great people in my classes, and I really like my roommate, Becca.” I did like Becca, I told myself, and it struck me as funny that she still believed that my mother was a cordon bleu chef. I laughed and covered it up by saying, “She’s really funny.”

  Grandma was drying dishes, and she looked at the plate in her hands as she carefully asked, “Any special friend?”

  The way she said special left no doubt as to her meaning. I debated with myself whether or not I wanted to tell her about Parker and finally decided that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to at least warm her up to the idea. If we stayed together, I didn’t want him to come as a big surprise. “Well,” I said, equally as carefully as she had phrased her question, “there’s this one guy. …”