Dakota Blues

by Lynne Spreen

  The screen door squeaked and Lorraine sat down next to her. “I thought I’d find you out here. They can get to be too much.”

  “They mean well.” Karen leaned toward the greenery, broke off a piece of dill from a leggy plant, and inhaled the tangy fragrance. She performed this ritual whenever she found fresh dill, and it always brought her back to this garden, this yard.

  But this time, I’m really here, she thought, inhaling deeply, her eyes closed. I’ve been gone so long, and I don’t know when I’ll be back.

  “Aunt Lena was a hero in this town,” said Lorraine.

  “I’ve heard nothing else for the last hour. It’s horrible she’s gone, but at least I got to hear how much everybody loved her. She was happy at the end, and I’m proud of her.” Karen stood and stretched. Her bones were aching from sitting on the hard cement.

  “You’re really going to leave?”

  “I’m sorry, Cuz. I wish I could stay.”

  “I saw you talking with your old friends. You looked like you were having a good time.”

  “It was great to see them again. They’re wonderful people.” Karen was surprised at the sudden ache of longing in her chest, but she had meant the comment as a simple platitude and brushed the emotions away.

  “Denise is planning a picnic out in the country next week. Why don’t you stay a few more days and hang out with us? It would be good for you. For us, too.”

  “No, really. I can’t. But I promise I’ll try to visit more often.”

  Lorraine stood up and faced Karen. “Mom misses you. She’s told me a hundred times how much you remind her of Lena. If you run off, she’ll have that much more to grieve. And how many years do you think she has left in her?”

  Karen lifted her chin, trying to pretend she wasn’t drowning in guilt. “I really will come back around the holidays.”

  “That’s months from now. What difference would a couple days make?”

  “With my job? It’s life and death. I mean, I hire doctors and nurses.”

  “You’re so dramatic.” Lorraine grasped Karen’s arm. “Every time you visit, you run right home, but this time it has to be different. Now that your mom’s gone, I know we’ll never see you again.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. Once you leave, you’ll never come back. This is the time, Karen. Don’t have regrets.”

  Karen shrugged off Lorraine’s hand. “I need to get back. I really do. I’m sorry.” Head down, she walked to the bedroom and closed the door, leaning against it in relief at the relative privacy. Did Lorraine think she had no feelings? Karen was grieving, too, but she had to stay the course. Real life offered no alternative. Lorraine’s talk of Aunt Marie and Lena and the old relatives didn’t change reality. All her load of guilt produced was another knife-twist in Karen’s heart. Just being here in this house was tearing her up, so little had it changed since she was a kid. The afternoon light had mellowed, gilding the furnishings in the small room. How was it possible that this room, and in fact the whole house, still felt the same, even smelled the same, as when Karen grew up here? On top of the dresser, her mom and dad grinned at her in black and white. Between them they held up a big watermelon from the garden. She remembered that picture. She had taken it, on a day when her teenage friends called to her from an old Chevy station wagon, waiting at the curb for Karen to finish humiliating herself. Like most teenagers, she disliked her father most of the time and ignored her mother as much as possible, just to make a point. She knew it was nature’s way, but at the moment the memory seemed unbearably cruel.

  God, so many years lost. What would she give now to be able to hug either one of them?

  Her suitcase yawned open from its spot on the floor, waiting for last-minute items, like her toothbrush and toiletries, and a pair of shoes in the closet. She hung her jacket over a chair and sat on the bed, sighing. The thought of the long flight home practically made her nauseous. First a puddle jumper would take several hours to crab its way out of North Dakota to Denver. After a two-hour layover followed by almost three hours on the California leg, she would collect her luggage, find her car, and drive home. The house would be empty and silent.

  Her back ached from hours of standing, and she felt lethargic. How good it would feel to take a power nap, just a half hour–long enough to get her energy back?

  Just to be safe, she set the dual alarm on the nightstand clock. Her shoes fell off as she lay back, sighing into the pillow. In spite of the pain of losing her mom, the service had been cathartic. Father Engel had done a good job. The readings were personalized to Lena’s life, something that would only be possible if he knew and cared about her. Karen made a mental note to send a donation to the church as soon as she got home.

  Chapter Five

  But the next morning, she was still in North Dakota.

  In the bright light of mid-morning, two boxcars thundered together down at the freight yard, dragging her back from her dreams. In that middle place between awake and asleep, Karen sensed she was wrapped in her designer pantsuit and covered with a quilt.

  She writhed out of the shroud and reached for the clock, but its face was dark. The plug had fallen out of the outlet. A bad fit, an unreliable alarm, and disaster in Newport. She could feel it.

  She found her watch. It was barely seven in California. Maybe she could still do damage control. In a few minutes, she would call.

  The small house was so quiet she could hear the faucet dripping in the bathroom. Karen hung the pantsuit in the closet and put on her mother’s robe. She padded down the hall, looking for her aunt. In the kitchen, Felix the Clock hung over the stove, swinging his metronome tail and laughing silently at her. How soundly she had slept, setting a new record of fourteen hours. Her back and neck felt stiff. On the chipped grey laminate table, Aunt Marie had left a note, a scrap of paper propped against the salt shaker. “Cereal above sink,” it read. “Dinner at noon.” Nothing on the note about why she had let Karen sleep through yesterday’s flight.

  She found her phone and dialed the airline, only to find that Great Lakes had no flights out of Dickinson today. The next flight out wasn’t until Tuesday, unless she caught a cab to Bismarck, one hundred miles east.

  And leave a note for Aunt Marie? Something along the lines of Sorry, had to run! See you in a year!

  She glanced at the date on her phone. Wes wouldn’t come in today. On Fridays he sailed out past the jetty and into open waters, a fact Karen knew from his bragging about it every flippin’ Monday morning, how he’d moored at Catalina or headed north toward Santa Barbara. Karen had never taken him up on his offers to skip work and sail with him, and he’d long ago stopped asking.

  Maybe Stacey would be in. Karen dialed her assistant, who answered on the first ring and immediately offered to rearrange Karen’s appointments. “Your family needs you and you need them. Take a few extra days,” she said.

  “It’s just today and the weekend. I’ll be home Monday.”

  “That’s what I’d do.” Stacey yawned. “I hate this place. Last night I went home and told Jason we weren’t eating unless he took me out. We went to Bayside. It was awesome. I’m a little hung over.”

  “How’s Peggy?”

  “She’s unhappy, same as everybody.” Stacey lowered her voice. “I could be wrong, but I really think I smelled alcohol on her breath this morning.”

  “Can you transfer me to her office? I need to talk to her.” Karen examined her nails while listening to Wes’ latest brainstorm, canned commercials for health insurance, while she waited on hold. And then she had an idea.

  Peggy picked up. “Why aren’t you here?”

  “I missed my flight last night. But listen, isn’t Wes going to be in Chicago all next week?” Karen waited while Peggy flipped a page on her calendar.

  “You know what? You’re right.”

  “That marketing group, right?”

  “Right. He’ll be gone all week. Hallelujah, cue the dancing boys.”


  Karen grinned. This might just work. She had her laptop. She could work from anywhere. “I’ll be back a week from Monday.”

  “Monday’s a holiday. Fourth of July, remember?”

  Karen had forgotten. Holidays didn’t mean that much to her. Usually she worked, but this would give her an extra day. “Okay then. Tuesday.”

  “You deserve a break, honey. It’ll be good for your mental health. If I need you I’ll call. See you July 5.”

  “What about you?”

  “Hell with it. I built this place and I’m going to see it through. They want to get rid of me, they’re going to have to haul me feet first.” Peggy took a drag on a cigarette. “You, though. When you get back, you should look for another job. I’m serious, I don’t care how bad it is out there. Life is too short. Go be happy.”

  Karen glanced up at Felix, who laughed at her. “Maybe in a few years.”

  “Listen, it gets harder, the older you are. Don’t wait until you’re my age.”

  The bathroom floor was covered in gray-and-white hexagonal tile. The stark white sink, its pipes in full view, had a separate faucet for hot and cold. She chose cold, rinsed the sleep out of her eyes and dried her face with a white towel, scratchy and sweet-smelling from yesterday’s clothesline. The bathroom had no shower so she took a bath. Weird to sit in a tub in the morning, a luxury usually reserved for that rare evening when she got home from work early, determined to have a life.

  She dried off and found a pair of shorts and a top in her mother’s dresser. In the kitchen, she filled a bowl with cereal and milk and went outside. It was already after ten and she could smell the garden in the warming air. Sitting on the back steps munching corn flakes, Karen watched a jet cut a trail across the deep-blue sky.

  She contemplated the garden at her feet, a study in Midwestern Zen. Long wooden planks, their edges rounded from weather and footfall, served as paths between rows. A wider set of boards, lying two by two, formed a walkway from the porch to the alley. Forty years ago, Karen and her friends raced up and down the planks, playing hide-and-seek behind the tomato plants. They picked peas and ate them right off the vines, winced at tart chokecherries, and spit seeds at one another.

  Her mother taught her how deep to bury seedlings, how much water they needed, and how to thin the growing plants so the strongest thrived. Every inch of the back yard was planted in rows of vegetables and herbs. By the end of the summer, their neighbors avoided eye contact so as not to receive yet another box of zucchini. Before she finished sixth grade, Karen knew how to can vegetables and preserves. The warming earth, well rested from a winter under snow and ice, pushed up bachelor buttons and morning glories. The tomato plants were covered with yellow flowers, and the squash and cucumbers already threatened to take over. The yard ended at a wire fence on the other side of which ran a lane, unpaved in her youth but now blacktopped.

  A lawn mower started up in the distance, recalling memories of playing outside in the summer, charging barefoot across a wet lawn and through the cold water arching from the chattering sprinkler. When she was older, she spent most of every day hanging out at the community pool with her girlfriends, flirting with boys, and showing off the cute new swimsuits she made herself. Life was so simple then.

  She took the empty bowl inside, rinsed it in the sink, and wandered around the house. In the living room, the front left window still stuck, and the floorboards in the hall creaked in exactly the same place they had when, as a child, she tried to watch TV instead of going to bed. The house seemed tiny now, almost more like a cottage, with two small bedrooms, one bathroom, and a root cellar.

  She ran her fingertips over a painted white wall, the plaster finish cool to the touch. One hundred years ago, her great-grandfather packed dirt into the gap between the interior and exterior walls. The primitive construction made for good insulation through winters severe enough to make her ancestors wish they had chosen Siberia, and how many summer tornadoes had threatened this poor structure? Yet in the start of the twenty-first century it still stood, defiant.

  Old homes–older than this one–lined the block. Instead of knocking them down and rebuilding, as was the practice in Southern California, owners here simply remodeled a bit on the inside, or kicked a wall out into the yard if they needed space. North Dakotans had a reputation for repurposing objects longer than anyone else in the country. A leaky hose became a garden drip line, an old tire became a planter, a glass insulator a doorstop. How well she remembered her parents admonishing her for tossing out a pair of ripped sneakers. “They can use these at the poorhouse,” her mother explained while fishing the shoes out of the trash can.

  Karen flopped on the sofa. Aunt Marie’s selection of reading material ranged from TV Guide to Readers Digest. The TV offered only game shows and the crop report. The house closed in on her. She jumped up, her chest constricting.

  Leaving the back door of the house unlocked, she went through the wire gate into the alley. At the end of the street she turned right and found the old path that ran next to the railroad. As a child, Karen and her little buddies rode their bikes along this path, darting like mosquitoes around the ruts and rocks and broken bottles left by hoboes. Yelling though the underpass, their voices echoing powerfully, the girls zipped up to Villard Street, intent on the five-and-dime with its rows of nickel candy. If they were short of coinage, they’d peer through the back door of the café until the cook noticed and slipped them freshly-cooked donuts.

  Following the map in her memory, Karen hiked eight blocks east through neighborhoods that seemed to have shrunk in the past thirty years. Clapboard homes stood alongside small bungalows, some dilapidated, others fiercely meticulous. The century-old sidewalk was cracked and buckled, turning back into aggregate in places. Except for an old woman sitting on her porch, the streets were deserted, the residents having left for work.

  She found the community park, abandoned in favor of the new recreation center. A chain link fence surrounded the swimming pool, now drained and peeling. The playground equipment stood rusted, the monkey bars a mottled red-brown. Swing sets lacked swings, grass grew in the sand boxes, and weeds carpeted the tetherball court. When she climbed on the merry-go-round and pushed, it screeched in complaint but turned, rough and slow at first and then faster, as if remembering how. Once she had it going she lay on her back, hands under her head, feet braced against a crossbar. The clouds whirled in circles overhead.

  A hundred yards to the south, the Heart River flowed silently past, the wind rattling the cat tails. Karen inhaled the new-oxygen smell, like putting her nose in a freshly-opened bag of potting soil. She and her friends played in and around the river, over the years graduating from making mud pies to sneaking smokes and kisses in the tall grasses along the banks. After school they skulked along the river, scuffing their Catholic saddle shoes in the dirt, their uniforms riddled with foxtails.

  Nothing stayed the same. This abandoned lot started out as prairie, but with the oil boom, contractors would soon scrape it off to build a new condominium or strip mall. Karen whirled around under the blue and white sky. The merry-go-round creaked and groaned. The funeral was a cloud with a thin silver lining. Instead of racing home, Karen could visit with long-lost relatives and old friends, fill her lungs with clean air, and rejuvenate. She could use the next few days in Dickinson as a retreat, meditating and resting. Having lost mother, father, and marriage, some downtime might be helpful. Wes would never know. By the time she saw him again, she would have a new attitude, her spirit renewed. Everything would be all right.

  Chapter Six

  Aunt Marie stood at the edge of the garden, watering seedlings with a faded green hose. She turned off the faucet when she saw Karen. “Come, I have something to show you.” Pulling a key from her apron pocket, she unlocked the creaking double doors of the wooden garage.

  The sweet, musty smell of old wood and yard equipment, baked in summer and frozen in winter, enveloped Karen. She had played in this garage, hidden in it,
swept and cleaned it, and shared endless hours working on projects within it. There on the far side stood the workbench where she made a wooden table for her Barbie doll. Toward the back wall, the overhead shelf still bore tacks from the sheets she and her girlfriends hung as curtains for the plays they produced. An ink-stained wooden desk bore a hand-written note. “Saved when they tore down school,” said Lena’s graceful cursive.

  Atop the desk stood the wooden poppy seed grinder, handmade by a distant relative. Karen blew on it, launching dust into the dry air. As a kid she had watched her mother crank the silver handle until the ground seeds, as fine as black sand, fell through the blades into a petite wooden drawer. Then Lena would empty the drawer into a bowl and mix the seeds with sugar and melted butter. She troweled the mixture onto a rolled-out sheet of pastry and rolled it up, a black swirl decorating the side of the roll. After brushing the top with melted butter and sugar, she baked it. Karen would always associate the sweet, earthy taste of the seeds with this place, with North Dakota and her simple beginnings. “Do you still have her recipe?”

  “I’m sure somewhere,” Marie said. She opened a folding chair and sat down. “You can have the Singer, too. I never use the thing. I like things electrical. The old days are good to remember from time to time, but I don’t miss them.”

  Karen picked up a box of Ball jars and set it aside for the Goodwill. She did not see herself canning vegetables in California. A plastic tarp covered a mound in the center of the floor. Pulling it back, Karen found handmade quilts passed down from long-dead aunts and grannies, albums of black-and-white photos anchored on each corner with black chevrons, sewing patterns from her 4-H class in high school, and a collection of ceramic trinkets.