by Gary Parker
2
His dad’s prescription in his jacket pocket, Rem hopped into his silver Lexus LX 470 with the bike rack on top and headed down the main street of Hilltop. A black dog with gray on his face sat on the seat beside him. Christmas lights draped the street, and Rem leaned back and opened a window. Cold burned into his face, but he didn’t care. He patted the dog and gazed out at the small town. Sitting about thirty miles northwest of Asheville, Hilltop boasted three main roads, a couple of nearby ski resorts, and a waterfall a mile from the central square that people swore they could hear from the front steps of the city hall on quiet summer nights. Barely three thousand people lived in Hilltop. Rem turned left and headed toward his old school.
“It’s not the same without Mom,” he said sadly to the dog.
The dog snuffled as if in agreement.
The air felt like snow, and Rem hoped a few inches would fall. Maybe that would make him feel more cheerful. He patted the dog again. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come home, Boomer. What you think?”
Boomer licked his hand. The lights of the Lexus lit up the school, and Rem slowed as he passed it. Memories flooded back. Without planning it, he suddenly turned the Lexus into the parking lot and wheeled toward the back of the main building. Near the gym he parked, threw open the door, and stepped down. Boomer climbed out behind him. The dim outlines of the school’s athletic fields lay straight ahead. Although quiet now, those fields had once served as his home, the place where he let loose every ounce of energy he possessed, every tension he ever felt, every bolt of anger he ever experienced. He’d ruled on those fields and in the gym just above them, had bent games to his will. Maybe that’s why he’d loved athletics so much. Given his natural talents and iron nerves, he could control what happened there, could maneuver life to fit his desires, could steer it away from the whim of random chance.
“Can’t do that anywhere else,” he said to Boomer. “No matter how hard you try.” Boomer licked his lips as if in agreement.
Rem studied the school’s dark outline. He’d moved to Hilltop kicking and screaming, his young life a shambles. If he’d had his way, he and his folks never would have left Knoxville, the opportunities that city offered him, the friends he’d known since birth. But hey, sometimes you don’t get what you want. Sometimes life kicks you in the teeth, and you have to pick yourself up from the floor, wipe the blood from your mouth, and move on. Otherwise you might as well just curl up, whimper a little, and die. But that was one thing Rem didn’t do; no whimpering from him, no sir, no how.
Driven by that attitude, he’d made the most of his two years in Hilltop, turned a pig’s hide into a silk suit, earned a baseball scholarship to North Carolina State. After that he’d hustled away from the little hamlet as fast as he could. Since then he’d returned only as often as necessary to see his folks.
Now he was back in town to see his sick father and deal with a whole lot of worries he’d just as soon not have to face. “What you think I should do, Boomer?” he asked.
Boomer raised his head but didn’t offer any advice.
“That’s what I figured,” Rem said. “You’re as clueless as I am.”
Jenna’s face reared up in Rem’s head, and he smiled ruefully and scratched Boomer behind the ears. “I saw an old friend,” Rem said. “But she didn’t seem too glad to see me.”
Boomer tilted his head to hear more, but Rem thought better of it, lifted the dog into the Lexus, climbed back in, and headed home. In less than ten minutes, he’d parked in front of his dad’s two-story white house and gone inside, Boomer slow but steady at his heels. After hanging his jacket on a hat tree in the foyer, Rem clomped across the hardwood floors to the front room, where he found his dad in a rocking chair, an almost-dead fire struggling to stay lit in a stone hearth to his right. No decorations marked the room, nothing to show that Christmas was only four days away. A big-screen television played a basketball game, and his dad barely looked up as he entered.
“Who’s winning?” Rem asked.
“Carolina. By four.”
Rem pulled out the medicine he’d picked up and sat it on the table. “You eat anything yet?” he asked.
“A bowl of soup. That Progresso’s pretty good if you sprinkle some cheese on it.”
Rem grunted. His dad paid no attention to what he ate. If you spread cheese on a roof tile, he’d probably swallow it, no questions asked. No wonder his heart was in bad shape. Rem threw a couple of logs on the fire and poked at the embers to get the blaze going. After a couple of minutes, he felt satisfied with the work and sagged into the chair by his dad’s rocker and inspected him. Roscoe Lincoln. Former semipro baseball player with a host of North Carolina and Tennessee barnstorming teams. After he got too old for that, he married his sweetheart, Eva, settled down, and became a policeman in Knoxville. For a long time Roscoe had kept his athlete’s physique, jogging regularly and doing push-ups and sit-ups at night as he watched a game on television. But then . . . well, the year before they moved to Hilltop, a man had put a bullet in his thigh and all that had changed. His waistline had ballooned like somebody had puffed it up with an air machine, and he’d rounded out into a barrel-bellied, cigarette-smoking poster child for heart disease. Not a pretty picture, and it had only gotten worse since Eva had died. Although Rem had tried at least a thousand times to talk his dad into better habits, it did about as much good as asking a fourteen-year-old boy to listen to classical music.
“You take your medicine like you should?” Rem asked.
Roscoe grunted and hit the television clicker. The channel flipped to a news report. Somebody had shot three people in Atlanta, a “holiday massacre,” said the reporter.
Rem tried something else. “You want to go shopping tomorrow? Get a tree maybe? A few lights to hang up?”
“What for? Not much to celebrate, the way I see it.”
Boomer moved to Rem’s feet and lay down. “You going back to the doctor after Christmas?” Rem asked.
“I guess.” Roscoe flipped the controls back to the basketball game.
“I’ll come home if you have surgery or anything.”
Roscoe nodded but didn’t look at him. “You’re a good son,” he said. “But you don’t need to do that.”
“I know. You can take care of yourself.”
“That’s right.”
Rem watched the basketball game a few minutes. Never a man for a lot of chatter, his dad had gotten even quieter since his mom’s death, and the constant effort to talk, to find something in common with his dad, wore Rem out when he came home. Even watching sports had become an ordeal. Ever since . . . well . . . He pushed away the bad memory. His dad didn’t mind watching games with him now, but talking about the contests seemed beyond his capability. For all Roscoe seemed to care, he and Rem could watch a thousand games a day but never say a word about anything that truly mattered.
Frustrated, Rem stood and threw more wood on the fire. He hated coming home, hated the way it made him feel, the loneliness it put in his gut, the way it made him feel cut off from everything, his mom, his dad, his . . .
He moved back to his chair and tried conversation once more, this time choosing a new track, hoping it would pique his dad’s interest at least enough to get a few words from him. “You know anything new about Jenna Newsome?” he asked.
Roscoe looked up, his eyes confused, but didn’t speak for a second.
“Jenna Newsome,” Rem repeated. “What’s the latest scoop on her?”
“Why do you ask?” Roscoe asked, momentarily attentive.
“I saw her earlier tonight.”
Roscoe grunted. “She’s an attractive woman, I know that.” He studied the basketball game again. North Carolina had fallen behind by three with less than two minutes to go.
“I saw her at the grocery,” Rem said. “She’s trying to raise money for some kid’s medical costs.”
“That’s right,” Roscoe said, his attention never leaving the screen. “I read about it in the
paper. She’s a do-gooder. Least that’s what your mama always said.”
“What brought her back to Hilltop from Winston-Salem?”
The game went to a commercial. Roscoe turned to Rem. “Why this sudden interest in Jenna Newsome? Not enough women in Atlanta to keep you busy?”
“Don’t you worry about that. Just tell me about Jenna.”
“Okay, okay,” Roscoe said. “I don’t know details; don’t listen to a lot of gossiping.”
“Just tell me what you know,” Rem insisted.
Roscoe muted the television and actually focused on Rem for a change. “You got something for this woman?” he asked.
“Heavens no. I just thought I’d ask her out, catch up on local news. A cup of coffee with an attractive woman might actually make this trip worthwhile. You’re not exactly a party on a stick, you know.”
Roscoe chuckled. “If it’ll keep you gone so I can watch my games in peace, I’m all for it.”
“So what’s the story with her?”
“You promise you’ll go out with her?”
“I promise I’ll ask.”
Roscoe nodded. “Your mama, rest her soul, said something once about Jenna getting jilted at the altar. Some real estate man in Winston-Salem left her high and dry right before their wedding. She went to school at Wake Forest, used to be owned by the Baptists, I think.”
“She never married?”
“Not according to your mama, and she went to church with her. Your mama said she heard that Jenna was teaching school there—second graders, I think—when she met this man. Dated him close to four years before he high-tailed it out right before walking the aisle.”
“That’s got to be rough.”
“No doubt about that.”
“Why’d the guy wig out on her?”
“Who knows? Guys these days get crazy when it comes to marriages—you know that. Here you are thirty and no closer to a wedding altar than a pig to a bath. Am I right?”
Rem nodded. Boomer stood and looked at him. He scratched the old dog behind the ears. “She seeing anybody now?”
Roscoe eyed him scornfully. “What do I look like, the editor of the society column?”
“Just asking.”
The game came back on, and Rem knew better than to interrupt the last couple of minutes. Maryland made a shot, then Carolina. Rem thought of Jenna, figured how hurt she must have been when her fiancé bolted, how ashamed she must have felt moving back to Hilltop. What kind of man would do that to a woman? he wondered. Date her for years then disappear when the moment of truth arrived.
Half-watching the game, he quickly surveyed his own love life. Although he’d dated enough women to fill a baseball stadium, he’d only gotten serious with a couple of them, and he’d never given even one a ring. Yeah, he’d dumped a few pretty hard with little or no explanation, but he’d never treated a woman as poorly as this man had treated Jenna.
North Carolina’s point guard made a last-second shot, and the crowd went crazy with celebration. Roscoe flipped the television back to the news, and Rem felt it safe to repeat his question. “Is she dating anybody?”
Roscoe punched the mute button again and gave Rem his full attention. “What’s got into you?” he asked. “You see a girl you barely know, and all of a sudden you’re the FBI, asking so many questions. And don’t give me the shovelful that you’re just looking for a little company so you won’t have to hang out with me.”
Rem scratched his chin and tried to figure it out. Truth was, it didn’t make much sense. “I knew her in high school,” he offered.
“I don’t recall you ever asked her out.”
“True.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. She was pretty enough, but sort of shy, more than I liked at the time, almost bookish.”
“She’s a bit straight with her religion too; least that’s what I’ve heard. She like that in school?”
“Yeah, always gave off this ‘pure as the driven snow’ air. Not that I was a wild man or anything, but Jenna carried a reputation as a straight-laced girl.”
“You wanted a little more action, that it?”
“Maybe.”
“So what’s the attraction now? I don’t think she’s changed.”
Rem eyed his dad and tried to figure it out. Was it plain old loneliness? Nostalgia for a youth he no longer possessed? The need to talk to somebody about his difficulties?
Rem hung his head and decided not to lie, at least not to himself. He knew why Jenna attracted him. The same reason he’d stayed away from her in high school, and it had little or nothing to do with her religious scruples. Those blue eyes—he’d seen them years before high school, the year he’d turned eight . . .
Rem blinked and pushed away the memory and focused on his dad again, his feelings confused.
“I’m home for Christmas,” Rem said. “Got some things going on, business stuff, you know how it can get. I need somebody to talk to, and you . . . well . . .”
He stopped and let the sentence trail away. His dad knew the nature of their relationship. No reason to spell it out. Although he didn’t have a clue that Jenna would or should become a friend, he wanted somebody to talk to this year, somebody to share a laugh with, somebody to make him feel warm and alive.
Roscoe dropped his head, and Rem saw that he understood it too, the separation between them—the distance as wide as a gorge between two mountaintops. Was it inevitable that life brought a father and son to this point? Carried them to separate islands where they both stood all alone no matter how hard they tried to escape?
“What else you want to know about her?” Roscoe asked, breaking the awkward silence.
Rem sat up a little straighter. “Anything you can tell me.”
“She lives in an apartment,” Roscoe said as if reciting a phone book. “Goes by her mama’s house most every day. Margaret is a pill; you might know that already. As demanding as a staff sergeant at boot camp. I saw her at the doctor’s office a few months ago. They didn’t get her in right at her appointment time. She raised more stink than a skunk at a church picnic. She’ll hardly let Jenna out of her sight. From what I hear, the old woman’s bitter about her husband divorcing her. Fusses about him every chance she gets to whoever will listen.”
“How long they been divorced?”
“Six, seven years, I guess. A couple of years before Jenna moved back. Surprised you hadn’t heard about it.”
“I think I did but only vaguely. Not home much in those days, you’ll recall.”
“Not here much in these days either.”
“You want me around more?”
“I can take care of myself.”
Rem let the matter drop and moved back to Jenna. “She said she directed a day care.”
“Yeah, the Kid’s Delight Day Care. I think it’s part of a chain that operates a number of for-profit centers in small towns in North Carolina. Must have a pretty good head on her shoulders to make one of those things go. They got close to a hundred kids, I think.”
“She must like children.”
“Guess so.”
Rem looked away as old memories flooded back. His eyes watered, but he wiped them quickly and ground his teeth to cut off the flow. He got sentimental like this every Christmas no matter what he did to prevent it.
Uncomfortable with the emotional boil in his stomach, he stood, moved to the fireplace, and stared at a twenty-two-year-old picture of his family, the joyous look on everyone’s face, a look he’d not seen in a long time. He picked up the picture and faced his dad again. “You ever think about back then?” he asked, pointing at the picture.
Roscoe glanced at him but didn’t speak.
Rem studied the picture a few more seconds, then set it back on the mantel. “I wish we could talk about it,” he said.
“Talking changes nothing,” Roscoe said.
“You can’t tell me you don’t think about it. I know you do.”
Roscoe stared at him, a t
ouch of anger in his eyes. “I think about it every day,” he said. “But you know the rule. We don’t talk about what we can’t fix. And we can’t fix this. Couldn’t then, couldn’t now.”
Rem moved to Boomer and squatted next to his old friend. “Will you listen to me?” he asked the dog.
Boomer panted and showed his teeth in a sad smile. “Sure,” he seemed to say, “I’ll listen. Haven’t I always?”
Rem looked back at his dad. “Christmas is rough.”
Roscoe fingered the television controls. The sound of the news announcer once more filled the room, and Rem knew the conversation had ended. He stood and pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll be in my room,” he told Roscoe.
Roscoe nodded but didn’t look up. With Boomer at his heels, Rem stepped to his dad, touched him on the shoulder, and headed to his room. Like every Christmas since that one twenty-two years ago, he’d once again spend the holidays pretty much alone.
3
After the grocery store closed, Jenna packed up the desserts she hadn’t sold, put them in the trunk of her car, and drove immediately to Mickey Strack’s house, a square, boxlike, wood-framed place about two miles outside Hilltop. Brenda Strack met her at the door, her brown hair tied in a ponytail, her feet bare on the wood floor, her skinny body dressed in worn jeans and a Carolina Panthers sweatshirt. Jenna handed Brenda an apple pie as she entered. Brenda pointed her to the seat she always took on the sofa when she visited, then brought the pie to the kitchen.
Suddenly weary from the long day, Jenna took a breath and glanced around the room. A blue sofa, a lamp on a table on the right, no table on the left. Two chairs, one an easy chair that matched the sofa, the other a wood piece with a slatted back. A fireplace, but no fire burned in it. Not much decorated the walls. Although not poor, the Stracks didn’t own much, and Mickey’s medical bills guaranteed that probably wouldn’t change.
Brenda stepped back into the room, perched on the arm of the easy chair across from Jenna, and smiled warmly. Jenna marveled at her attitude. Although not blessed with much education or refinement, Brenda displayed a natural graciousness not many possessed. In spite of all her troubles, she kept her head about her and seemed greatly appreciative of what others had tried to do for her and her family.