The Mourning Hours

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  “Really,” I said. It wasn’t a lie if it was said for the sake of politeness, right? Didn’t we always compliment Mom’s casseroles, even as we shifted the food around on our plates without eating it? Besides, to repeat the truth would be rude: She’s just some girl.

  Stacy grinned at me. “Well, tell him hi back.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  After she returned her book and left, smiling at me over her shoulder, I went to the checkout counter where Miss Elise, the librarian, was stamping books with a firm thud. “Can I check out that book?” I asked, pointing to the one Stacy had just returned.

  “What, this one?” Miss Elise said, holding up Pride and Prejudice. “Are you sure? Might be a little hard for you.”

  “I think I’m ready for it,” I said.

  She smiled, handing the book over, but she was right. I wasn’t ready for it; I gave up after the first page. But I liked knowing that Stacy had held this very book in her hands, that her fingers with the perfectly painted nails had turned these very pages.

  And, of course, I saw Stacy in the stands at every softball game for the rest of the Haybalers’ short season. At our second game, Stacy walked right up to where Mom and I were sitting, and I said, “Mom, this is Stacy Lemke. Remember, I was telling you about her?”

  “Of course,” Mom said smoothly, standing. They shook hands politely.

  “I go to school with Johnny,” Stacy explained.

  The Haybalers took the field just then, and there was a general roar from the hundred or so of us in the stands.

  “Well, I should probably find my seat,” Stacy said.

  “Good to meet you,” Mom said a little dismissively. She turned her attention to the game, and Stacy winked at me. I winked right back, glad I had perfected the technique during a particularly long sermon last winter. It felt as if we were secret agents with the same mission: to get Johnny to fall in love with her.

  With Stacy for me to watch, softball was much more interesting. She sat next to a friend or two, girls who seemed boring compared to her. I couldn’t help but notice how Stacy watched Johnny while she pretended not to, distributing her gaze equally among all the players, and then homing in again and again on Johnny at shortstop. When he was up to bat, she joined the crowd in chanting, “John-ny! John-ny!” She cheered when he broke up a double play at second and whooped with pleasure when he crossed home plate.

  During the game, Johnny was all focus, an athlete’s athlete. He had always been a competitor, no matter what the sport. It was clear, watching him, that he had a natural talent—he could hit farther, run faster, field better, throw harder than anyone else. He also took failures more personally than anyone else, cursing when Dad dropped a throw to first, kicking divots in the dirt to shake off a bad swing. If he noticed Stacy Lemke watching him, it didn’t show.

  It was Stacy who approached him first after that second game. I know because I was watching, holding my breath, clutching my fists to my side like the freak Emilie always said I was. If asked, I couldn’t have explained why their meeting was so important to me, but maybe it had something to do with ownership. In a way, I owned a part of Johnny Hammarstrom, who was star athlete for the Lincoln High Shipbuilders, but my own brother, too. And since I’d met Stacy first, since she’d sought me out under the bleachers that day, I felt I owned a part of her, too.

  Stacy had walked right down the bleachers, not on the steps but on the seats, confident. She moved with purpose around the chain-link fence and out onto the field, her legs creamy white in her short shorts, a checked shirt pushed up past her elbows. She was headed right for him, and Johnny must have realized that at some point, too, because he froze, his cheeks flushed with sweat, his jeans filthy along the left side from a slide into third base.

  I don’t know what she said to him and what he said back to her, but my mind filled with a million possibilities, talk of baseball and school and plans for the rest of the summer and deep dark secrets. Well, maybe not that—it was hard for me to imagine that Johnny, who most of the time seemed as complicated as a June bug, could keep any kind of secret. But something was being said, and something was happening between them. At one point Stacy gestured to the stands—to me?—and Johnny followed her gaze, scanning the crowd. Before she walked away, Stacy reached out her hand and touched him on the arm, just lightly, such a small and insignificant touch, but I reeled, gasping. This was flirting. This was something.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Emilie asked, joining me in the stands.

  I shook my head. Nothing. Everything. The way I was sweating, it might have been me out there, falling in love.

  Mom turned from the conversation she’d been having with an internist from the hospital and studied me. “I think you’ve been having too much sugar, Kirsten.”

  “No, I haven’t—” I protested, and by the time I looked back, Stacy was gone and Johnny was standing with the guys in the dugout.

  It was like this at every game for the rest of the tournament. Bud Hirsch led the team in a cheer for the competitors, and the men worked their way through the line slapping sweaty hands: “Good game”...“good game”...“good game.” Then Stacy and Johnny began a slow, purposeful wandering toward each other while I held my breath. Even Mom had started to notice, and the two of us would watch them together, Mom shaking her head, and me grinning like an idiot.

  With everyone else packing coolers and blankets and finding rides home, Johnny and Stacy stood in a little bubble of quiet, whatever words they said meant for each other alone.

  “Don’t stare, shrimp,” Emilie nudged me once when I was lost in their romance. “Isn’t it past your bedtime, anyway?”

  I followed her to the car, kicking against the grass with the toes of my tennis shoes. When I looked back, Johnny and Stacy were still talking, and his truck didn’t pull into our driveway until we’d been home for twenty minutes.

  five

  It was a hot, lazy Wisconsin summer. In the barn, flies descended by the thousands onto the backs of our cows, but it was too warm for them to protest with even the simplest flick of a tail. It was too warm in our house, too—upstairs, Emilie and I opened our bedroom window one day in June and didn’t bother to close it for weeks. We woke up sticky in the mornings, the humidity coating our bodies like fur. It seemed to me that the whole world was taking a break, holding its breath, waiting for Johnny and Stacy to fall in love.

  Aunt Julia rescued us on weekday afternoons, inviting us to cool off in her aboveground pool. Emilie and I traipsed the half mile down Rural Route 4 to her house, our beach towels draped over our shoulders. I lagged behind, pulling at fuzzy cattails and listening to mosquitoes swarm over the stagnant water in the ditch. Toss a stone through their midst and they would part like the Red Sea letting Moses and his people cross, then swarm back in a rush. Emilie marched ahead, preening for the service vehicles that lumbered past on the road.

  Aunt Julia, older than Dad by almost twelve years, was my favorite aunt. Her husband, Uncle Paul, was a general manager for John Deere in Manitowoc, and their son, Brent, only a few years older than Johnny, was training to be a firefighter in Milwaukee. Emilie and I were the girls she’d never had. Uncle Paul had built them a fancy deck around a four-foot Doughboy, and she loved to serve us Popsicles and sugary glasses of lemonade and lay her wrinkly, too-tan body on the deck while we swam. Sometimes she smoked cigarettes, too, although about this we were sworn to secrecy. “I’m supposed to be quitting,” she had explained, although she never seemed to try all that hard.

  “What’s new, girls?” she asked from beneath a broad sun hat.

  “Unfortunately, nothing is ever new around here,” Emilie said, splashing dramatically onto her back. “That’s the problem.”

  “Well,” I said, staying close to the deck, “I think Johnny has a girlfriend.” Suddenly Johnny had been asking
to use the phone every night after dinner. On weekends, he showered after the last milking and disappeared in his truck.

  Aunt Julia’s eyebrows rose over the tops of her sunglasses. “I think I’ve heard that myself.”

  “Really? From Mom?” I asked.

  “From everyone in Watankee, more like it,” Emilie scoffed. “He took her on the youth group rafting trip last weekend, and they’re going to a movie tonight. In Watankee terms, they are officially a couple.” She lifted her hands out of the water to put air quotes around the word.

  Aunt Julia laughed. “So what do you think? Do you like her?”

  Emilie made a sound like “ehh.” She wobbled her hand in the air in a so-so motion.

  “I like her! She’s really nice,” I said. In Stacy’s defense, I splashed in Emilie’s direction, but the water landed a foot short of its mark.

  Emilie laughed. “You don’t even know her.”

  “I do, too! You don’t know who I know.” I did know Stacy. She had visited our house twice now, and each time she’d asked me about what I was reading, what I liked to do during the summer. She and Johnny and I had walked out to the barn, and I’d convinced her to let a calf suckle two of her outstretched fingers. She’d squealed at first and then got used to it and started stroking the calf behind its ears with her free hand. This felt like the most essential thing to know about a person.

  There was a familiar hissing sound as Aunt Julia struck a match to light her cigarette. “What don’t you like about her, Emilie?”

  Emilie considered for a moment. “She’s just so clingy, you know? She hangs all over him.”

  Aunt Julia blew some smoke out of the side of her mouth and gave a little chuckle. “Seems like she’s the kind of girl who likes to have a boyfriend. Plenty of girls like that.”

  “I think it’s pathetic,” Emilie pronounced. “She spent the whole past month just trying to catch his eye—”

  “She did not!” I sputtered defensively. Of course she hadn’t. She’d only been at that softball game because her Dad was playing; she’d only talked to Johnny in the first place because I’d passed on her message. “You’re just jealous because you don’t have a boyfriend.”

  Emilie shrieked with laughter. She tipped her head backward into the water and came up again, her hair lying sleek against her head. “Oh, puh-lease. Plus, ask anyone at school. She was dating this guy last year and she just about drove him insane, she was so needy.”

  I flopped onto my back, kicking my legs angrily in her direction. She skimmed her arms across the surface of the pool in response, serving up an impressive wall of water that splashed onto the deck.

  “All right, girls.” Aunt Julia sighed, a gray strand of smoke curling out of her mouth.

  “I’m only saying,” Emilie smirked.

  “Well I like her,” I announced.

  “I do, too, sweetie,” Aunt Julia said. “And I bet Johnny’s big enough to handle himself.”

  Emilie rolled her eyes but let it go. “I’m going to start a whirlpool,” she announced, kicking off from the edge of the pool.

  Aunt Julia laid her head back, closing her eyes, and I flopped back onto an inner tube, letting the momentum from Emilie’s vigorous one-person whirlpool spin me in lazy circles. Every now and then I splashed water onto the inner tube to cool off my legs. The sunscreen that had been slathered on me only an hour before had melted away with the heat, and I could feel my skin pinking from head to toe.

  That night, with barely any warning, a thunderstorm rolled through on dark, menacing clouds that hung low on the horizon over our still-fragile cornstalks. It was still blazing hot, eighty degrees but dripping with humidity so thick that the air seemed to splinter and shape itself around us as we moved. Dad and I were coming back from the barn when the first bolt of lightning split the sky in two. We were drenched by the time we made it to the back door. Upstairs, Emilie and I sat on her bed, watching while rain swept the fields and battered the house. Suddenly, there was a crack; the oak tree on the front lawn had been hit by lightning. I screamed when a large branch hit the ground, shaking the house and all of us inside it. In the morning, Dad and Johnny dragged the limb across the grass to the side of our shed, where it lay like a carcass, its sad branches splayed to the side.

  six

  One night that August, Stacy Lemke showed up unannounced at our back door.

  Johnny was in the living room practicing moves with some of his wrestling friends, Peter Bahn and Erik Hansen. Johnny was always conditioning—hefting feed bags and doing chin-ups at a barn in the hayloft, but he saw these nights as serious training sessions. Dad was there, of course, and Jerry Warczak had stopped by to talk with Dad about some new fencing he would need help installing. Grandpa took a seat in one of the out-of-the-way recliners and cheered at all the wrong times. Somehow, despite watching dozens of Johnny’s matches, he’d never figured out the scoring system.

  Johnny’s coach was there, too; he liked to stop by from time to time to check in with Dad and throw around words like “scholarship” and “state title.” Coach Zajac was Johnny’s height but twice as wide, his shoulders straining the seams of the warm-up jacket he wore year-round, no matter the weather. His ears were puffy, bulbous even, like an early version of human ears, before God ironed out all the kinks. Cauliflower ears, Dad had explained to me once. “It’s just fluid that gets trapped in there.” But every time I saw him, I was reminded of the jar at Wallen’s Pharmacy, where people dropped their spare change to help end birth defects.

  When Stacy arrived, I happened to be in the kitchen, helping myself to a glass of lemonade. I didn’t recognize the white sedan that dropped her off, but there was Stacy, striding across our lawn as if she’d done this a million times before.

  “Oh!” Mom said, opening the door but standing in front of the doorway, as if she wasn’t going to let Stacy inside. “You know, this might not be the best time, honey. Johnny’s in the middle of some wrestling with the guys.”

  “I know,” Stacy said, smiling sweetly. “I came over to watch.”

  Mom didn’t respond; she just stepped out of the way. Stacy gave me a little wave, passing right through the kitchen into the living room, as if she belonged there. I saw Mom raise an eyebrow; she didn’t approve. It wasn’t personal, but as far as she was concerned, Johnny was too young to have a serious girlfriend.

  I followed Stacy into the living room, noticing the way her jeans hugged her thighs, the way her hair floated over her shoulders. She didn’t fit in here, I realized. Everything we owned was shabby, from Mom’s hand-me-down furniture and the worn carpet that had been here since Dad was a boy and the peeling wallpaper we always meant to take down. Everything about Stacy was new and fresh, as if it had just been invented that day.

  The men in the doorway stepped back to let Stacy into the room, and Grandpa looked up from the recliner. Dad looked from Stacy to Johnny and back, as if he was trying to figure out the joke. Only Johnny and Peter Bahn, wrestling in the middle of the floor, didn’t notice her right away. I said loudly, “Stacy’s here,” and Johnny froze, his glance drifting over his shoulder. Peter took advantage of the moment and flipped Johnny over, pinning him. Grandpa clapped. Johnny swore.

  “Got you,” Peter said, laughing.

  Johnny rolled out from under Peter’s grasp, his chest heaving. “Caught me off guard,” he panted. “That’s no fair.”

  Peter shrugged. “Fair’s fair,” he said, pushing himself up to a standing position.

  Johnny stood, too, scowling. He hated to lose.

  “I didn’t mean to break anything up,” Stacy said, smiling uncertainly.

  “What are you doing here?” Johnny demanded.

  Stacy’s smile faded. “I just wanted to say hi.”

  Johnny shook his head. “You could have just called.”

 
Dad cleared his throat. “Johnny, why don’t you introduce Stacy around.”

  Johnny hesitated a long beat, breathing through his nose. Only after catching Dad’s eye did he relax. “This is Erik, Peter, Grandpa Hammarstrom, Coach Zajac,” he said, gesturing. Erik and Peter smiled, Grandpa gave a slight, confused nod of acknowledgment, and Coach raised one hand in a meaty salute. “And this is Jerry, who lives next door.”

  Jerry reached out his hand a little bashfully, and Stacy shook it.

  She turned to Johnny playfully. “And you are?”

  “We were in the middle of something,” Johnny said, still not letting it go.

  Dad cleared his throat again, trying to diffuse the awkwardness. “How about a breather?” he asked, motioning toward the kitchen. The men followed his cue and trudged off obediently, even Grandpa, who seemed to greatly resent having to move. I stayed in the doorway, nervous for Stacy.

  “Really, I didn’t mean to break up anything,” Stacy said. She reached for Johnny’s hand, threading her fingers through his. Johnny was as unyielding as a plastic dummy. “Okay. Look, you’re right. I should have called first.”

  “Yeah,” Johnny grunted, relenting. He locked his fingers with hers, bringing her hand to his chest. “We were about done anyway.”

  I knew that wasn’t true. It was barely eight o’clock, and sometimes they wrestled past ten, until Mom started hinting about an early shift in the morning, and Dad drifted off to check the barn one last time. This was the power Stacy had over him, then; she could interrupt his wrestling night—that most sacred of Johnny’s rituals—and be forgiven.

  “Are you sure?” Stacy gave him a playful smile. “You might need more practice. Looks like you were getting whipped right there.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Johnny grabbed her by the waist. “That’s it, Lemke, you’re going down.” He scooped her up in his arms like she weighed nothing at all. I held my breath, trying to figure out if he was joking or angry. It was hard to tell from the way he handled her—swinging her around a little too fast, depositing her a little too roughly on the carpet. Stacy shrieked but didn’t struggle as he pinned her down, his knees on either side of her legs, his hands on her shoulders.