Home Leave: A Novel

by Brittani Sonnenberg

  “Send us a clipping when it comes out, will you?” Frank is asking, more pleadingly. And then, stiffly: “We’re at Wittenberg Village. No, it’s not a nursing home; it’s assisted living. Across from the fairgrounds. We’d like a couple copies.”

  He hangs up, looking pleased with himself, which is how he’s always looked when Chris was getting credit for something. From the time Chris was in middle school, I worried the boy’s success would take him away from us, and I was right. First the basketball, which took him down south, to the University of Georgia. Then Elise, who kept him down there. Now work, which has him hopping countries like James Bond, and worries me sick.

  “It will be a fine article,” Frank says.

  “He could have at least had the decency to write the boy back,” I say.

  “He’s in Dubai,” Frank says, all touchy, as though I were accusing Frank himself of being absent.

  “Even so,” I say, trying to picture Dubai. I can only summon Jerusalem, where we went on a church trip in ’83, where I ate the best food of my life.

  * * *

  A week later, we get the article, not from the kid, but from my fifty-five-year-old unmarried daughter, Beth, who works as a part-time librarian in the high school and who missed her train, as far as I’m concerned, when she broke off her engagement with Sam Lehmann, the high school geometry teacher, in 1975.

  Beth brings it by with some potato salad and ham sandwiches, and we take the newspaper out to the patio, putting down pickle jars to keep it from flying off in the wind. It’s shorter than I expected.

  CHARITON’S TOP SHOOTER MOVES TO THE MIDDLE EAST

  By Jim Laurence

  Chris Kriegstein, who scored more points in his senior year than anyone in Chariton has since (even though the baskets were closer together in the old gym), is now living in Saudi Arabia, says his mom, Mrs. Joy Kriegstein. She says he’s very difficult to get in touch with. His dad, Mr. Frank Kriegstein, says that Chris is making instruments there, although he didn’t say which kind. Chris played the trumpet in sophomore year. I guess, given Chris’s famous three-pointer (which is actually a two-pointer in the new gym), you could say Chris was always good at long distance!

  Below is a fuzzy black-and-white picture of Chris in the air. Indiana’s Best Jump Shot is the caption. It’s a beautiful photo, one so familiar I can summon it when I close my eyes. I’ve always been astonished that my own child could look so graceful, like someone from another world.

  After reading the article, Beth snorts and spits out Mountain Dew, she’s laughing so hard. “I always underestimated that Jim Laurence,” she says.

  Frank is so upset he can’t speak. As usual, he waits until Beth leaves to explode.

  “Saudi Arabia! What did you tell the kid?” he fumes at me. I haven’t seen Frank so mad since the church bulletin accidentally wrote his name as “Fran” under the list of ushers.

  “Instruments!” he continues. “It sounds like he’s making bombs, like he’s bin Laden’s personal assistant.”

  “Bin Laden’s dead,” I point out.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” Frank says testily. “And what’s that bunk about a smaller gym? What’s the kid’s last name? Who’s his father?”

  “Laurence,” I say.

  “Sounds Catholic,” Frank says, and I say, “Oh, come on, Frank.”

  He stews all afternoon, doesn’t even get cheered up when we sit on the porch and watch the swings swirl and the roller coasters pitch.

  “Chris can’t see that,” Frank says suddenly, later, lying in bed, long after I think he has fallen asleep.

  “He won’t,” I say. “And besides, he wouldn’t care.”

  “He deserves better,” Frank says, sounding kind of choked up.

  “For chrissakes, Frank, it’s a dumb article, not his tombstone.”

  Then I can hear Frank crying. “Tombstone” was not the right choice of words. I used to wish all the time my husband would be more sensitive. The one time I tried to bring flowers from the fields into the farmhouse, shortly after we’d married, he yelled at me for bringing wild carrot under his roof, as if the limp white blooms were going to turn into vines and choke him in the middle of the night. To be fair, they did wreak havoc on the soybeans.

  “In some places it’s called Queen Anne’s lace,” I’d shouted back once he’d slammed the door, and cried into the strawberry jam I was making.

  Things like that. But about five years ago, Frank started tearing up a couple times a day. Just a thin streak leaking from his eyes, soundless. It took me a while to catch on to what it really was. At first, I worried he had an eye infection, but he got so gruff and defensive when I asked that I put two and two together. He would cry at the most obvious, embarrassing stuff on TV: sappy airline commercials where families get reunited, or after the Hoosiers lost a ball game.

  The crying at night is a new development, since we moved here. I’m worried about him. I’d like to bring it up with Beth, but it’s hard to get a second alone with her and I don’t want to embarrass Frank. So I just pretend I don’t hear him. Our first night at the Village, when I put an arm on his shoulder in the dark and asked him about it, he jerked away. The next morning he wouldn’t look at me, like nights in bed years earlier when he’d been a little rough. I’d always liked those nights, and I’d like his new, crying self, if he’d just let me share it a little with him. Sixty-one years of marriage: What’s there to be private about?

  * * *

  The next morning, after breakfast, Frank begins writing a letter to the editor. I’ve never seen him work on something so hard, not even when he had to give a county commissioner campaign speech. Meaning I have to sit alone, outside, on the best day of the fair. It’s the last day, when the kids are awarded 4-H prizes, just like ours were, just like we were. I call to Frank when the kids start spilling out, clutching blue and red ribbons, and he glances up but stays inside, pecking at those keys. So I reminisce by myself, remembering Beth and her turkeys, Chris and his calves, the awful day when Chris’s calf died the day of the fair, how I always suspected Beth of poisoning it with stuff we kept in the barn for rats, but I never said a thing. I picture the little pond we built for the kids to swim in, in the summer, in front of the barn; the neat rows of tomatoes I tended; my favorite spot to sit on the porch, where it was always shady.

  But thinking back on the farm is a mistake, something I promised myself I wouldn’t do when we moved out here. The first meal we ate at the Village, when we were just visiting the place with Beth, all the talk was farm talk. How the crops were doing, corn prices, pesticides. To hear it, you’d think that all the men were taking a lunch break from field work, and that as soon as they emptied their plates they would be back up on their combines, the women in the kitchen, keeping an eye on a mean thundercloud, hedging bets on how long there was before we needed to grab the laundry from the line. That kind of nostalgia depressed me, and I decided to inject some hard truth into the conversation.

  “We sold ours off to Nesbit,” I said, referring to the farm conglomerate that had bought our land a month earlier. “They’d been bugging us for years. I almost miss talking to James Yancey on the phone each week, telling him no.”

  The others laughed ruefully, and Frank scowled at me. It was an unspoken rule that James Yancey’s name not be said aloud in polite conversation, and my misdemeanor was swiftly punished with silence and the sad scraping of forks, the way I had once punished kids who said “goddamn” on the playground by sticking them on the time-out bench. Most of the Village residents had sold to James Yancey too, long before Frank and I had. The few lucky enough to have passed their farms down to sons or sons-in-law now beamed silently at me down the table: I’d done them the favor of broadcasting their good fortune.

  At the end of lunch, Beth strode into the cafeteria clutching several folders, having finished her meeting with the director. “You guys ready?” she asked, hovering over Frank and me. “Wow, Mom, that brisket looks delici
ous.”

  “It’s not bad,” I replied, employing the phrase that everyone at the table, and everyone in Chariton, has relied on for years to complain without risking offense, a statement that summarizes our beliefs more neatly than the Nicene Creed. We didn’t expect anything in the first place, it implies, so how could we be disappointed?

  * * *

  Once the prizes are given out, they pack up the whole county fair in a mere twelve hours, and it is just another empty lot across the way. That isn’t bad to stare at either, even though all our neighbors go back inside.

  The following evening, Frank asks me to read the letter he’s written to the newspaper editor. I’ve never really read his writing before, aside from what he’s signed on Christmas cards, plus his letters to me during the war, when he was in the Pacific.

  To Whom It May Concern:

  I was troubled to find several errors in a recent article of your venerable publication, concerning Chariton High alum Chris Kriegstein. I have included the correct information below. I was saddened to see the sinking of the newspaper’s standards. I remember when you could turn to Tiger Tracks for solid information, not made-up crap.

  “I don’t think you can write ‘crap’ in a letter to the editor,” I object, putting it down.

  “Well, that’s what it is,” Frank says.

  “What about hogwash?”

  “Nothing with farm animals in it.”

  “Trash?”

  “Read the sentence to me out loud.”

  “All right,” Frank says, nodding appreciatively as I read. “Trash. I like it.”

  I continue.

  Here are the facts: not only was my son Chariton High’s top scorer in basketball, he was also the only student to make varsity, in three sports, from his freshman year onwards. He took his team to the regional finals his senior year, a game against Vernon, a school four times as big as Chariton, where he scored 45 points.

  He is not living in Saudi Arabia making instruments; he lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, Elise, where he is the CEO of Logan Mechanics. He is a very successful businessman and has lived in the following countries: the USA, Germany, England, China, and Singapore. He and Elise were blessed with two daughters, Leah and Sophie. Sophie died in 1996 and is buried at the Lutheran churchyard in town.

  “That’s nice you wrote about Sophie,” I say. “But shouldn’t you mention Beth, too?”

  “What about her?”

  “I don’t know, that she’s his sister?”

  “Everyone knows that already,” he says, and so I leave it be.

  * * *

  The next week they run Frank’s letter (he refers to it as his “editorial”), and Beth brings us five copies. The editor has taken out “made-up trash” and put in “misinformation.”

  “Censorship,” Frank says, darkly.

  We take it with us to dinner and hand out the other four copies to the vegetables who can still read. You would have thought that Frank had won the Nobel Prize. Lina Bauer, who was known for letting boys touch her chest back in middle school, goes on and on about Frank’s “talent” and asks him to write her a poem from the voice of her late husband, which sounds fishy to me. John Hartmann, who has a funny shrunken left hand from a threshing accident, suggests that Frank start a regular column in the school paper.

  “But Frank’s not in high school,” I protest. “It’s a high school paper.” The whole table stares at me, shocked, like I’m some kind of Judas.

  “That’s the point, Joy,” Frank says, quietly, dangerously. “To give the teenagers another perspective on things.”

  The high school journalism teacher says no, of course, just like I thought he would, but that doesn’t stop Frank. He was up two days after his knee surgery last year, and back when our farm was dairy, he milked the cows every day at four in the morning, even when it was pouring, even when he had a raging fever.

  Frank decides to start a weekly paper at Wittenberg Village.

  It lasts for three weeks, until the staff shuts it down for the anonymous editorial criticizing the lasagna and a scandalous column by Lina about the “Ten Most Irritating Habits of Residents” at Wittenberg Village. She comes out of the director’s office crying. “They called me unchristian,” she tells us at dinner that night.

  I am relieved when the whole thing blows over, but Frank takes it hard. He starts watching a lot of TV, and his eyes leak at the littlest thing. I feel bad for not encouraging him more with his journalism. Frank’s always needed something to do. I haven’t minded, whenever I had a spare minute, just sitting on the porch at our old house, watching the corn, or the clouds, or petting our dog, Jenny, now long gone. It always got me in trouble as a girl, my habit of just staring at something, “dreaming,” as my mother said, “idle.” But on weekends, Frank wasn’t happy unless he was fixing something. If anything, he got busier when he retired. A lot of the old farmers were like that, up until a couple years ago: they still had breakfast at five a.m. together at PeeWees, down on Miller Street.

  I mention some of this to Beth when she comes over to check on us and Frank is out playing cards with some of the guys in the fellowship hall.

  “Oh, give it a rest, Mom,” she says.

  “But I’m just worried—”

  “You always have to make them look so good,” she says.

  “What? Who?” I ask.

  “Your men,” she says. “Chris, Dad. Why don’t you just back off? Let Dad fend for himself. And screw Chris.”

  “Beth!”

  “Forget it,” she grumbles, and starts gathering her things. “I’m making a trip to Walmart this afternoon. You guys need anything?”

  “Sit down,” I say. “What do you mean ‘make them look good’?”

  “So Chris made some baskets in high school and makes a lot of money now,” she says. “Who cares?”

  “You know how important it is for your father,” I say.

  “But why do you get caught up in it?” she asks, her voice tight, like I haven’t heard since she was a teenager. “You just encourage it.”

  “Is this about the newspaper article?” I ask.

  “Jesus, that’s what you think? No, Mom,” she says. “Never mind.”

  “Do you want an article too?”

  She stops and stares at me. “Do you really think I’m that pathetic?”

  I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t think she’s pathetic, but sometimes Beth traps you into saying things you don’t mean. I learned a long time ago to be silent with her when it got to thin ice. She sighs and comes over and gives me a cold hug. “I don’t need an article,” she says. “Unlike Dad and Chris, and you, apparently, I’m not obsessed with my high school years.”

  After she leaves, I write one anyways.

  CHARITON ALUM EXCELS IN SHELVING

  Beth Kriegstein, who received Honorable Mention for her turkey, Feathers, in 1965, at the Chariton County Fair, and who had 100% attendance in 11th grade, has gone on to become Chariton High’s star librarian.

  What else is there to say? That she almost wore my wedding dress? That I know she goes to the Mexican bar for salsa nights, because of what Gladys Maynard told me? I suddenly understand poor Jim Laurence’s predicament. I want to spice things up, to give Beth a husband and a volleyball medal and a great career. But that isn’t Beth, or it isn’t who Beth has become. I start over.

  BETH PUTS THINGS WHERE THEY BELONG

  Even when she was a little girl, Beth Kriegstein had a real talent for organization. I don’t just mean she was tidy. She had a certainty that everything had a place. She would drive her dad crazy keeping stray kittens or storing all her magazines in the barn, never throwing anything away. About a year ago, she noticed that her dad and me weren’t doing so hot. I was dizzy and Dad was having trouble getting around. That’s how we wound up here, at Wittenberg Village. The way she used to know the second it was time to move her calf to a bigger stall, she knew it was time for us to leave the farm. I’m not saying s
he forced us here. She watched us close and she knew it was time. To be honest, I don’t like it here all that much. The food doesn’t look the same as it did on the brochure, and it’s creepy to me when I hear folks cry out at night. But I trust Beth to know what’s best and where we belong.

  I hadn’t meant to make it so much about myself. But when I try to rewrite it I just come up blank, so I keep it as it is. The next day, when Frank is at physical therapy, I go to the director’s office and ask if I can make some photocopies, something I learned how to do when I used to help the church out with secretarial work. I make enough for every vegetable. Then I call up Jim Laurence and tell him I have extra-credit work ready for him; he just needs to pick it up. He starts blabbing about scanning again until I tell him to shut up and drive over here.

  I meet him out front, so Frank won’t see. Jim is taller than I thought he would be, with dyed black hair. He sounded so weak on the phone I’d pictured a short, fragile kid with freckles and glasses. I ask if he plays ball, and he says he is more into video games. I hand over my article. Tell your teacher you interviewed me, I say.

  “Who’s this?” he asks, skimming it.

  “Chris’s sister,” I say. “Your librarian.”

  “I don’t go to the library,” he says.

  “Well, you make sure she gets a copy when it comes out.” I make him promise.

  * * *

  The article isn’t the big hit I imagine when I hand out the photocopies at the cafeteria that evening. People glance at it, then spill gravy all over it. Frank doesn’t like it one bit.

  “You didn’t even mention her 4-H prize,” he says. “And you make me sound like a jerk.”

  My media privileges are revoked for one month. “I thought she was photocopying songs for the choir,” the secretary explains to the director in the meeting I have to go to the next morning.

  Even Beth hates it when it appears in Tiger Tracks a week later. “That’s what you think of me, Mom? Someone whose greatest talent is being obsessive-compulsive?”

  I don’t ask her what that means.

  Some would describe it as a disaster. But I feel oddly satisfied. I know that we can’t live on our own anymore. I know the farm is gone, that Chris has his own life, that his taking over the farm was never a possibility. As soon as I saw the whole crowd roar and rise to their feet as Chris sunk a shot from the half-court line, even the opposing team, I knew that he would leave Chariton soon enough. I know that assisted living is what’s done with old folks nowadays, even though I waited hand and foot on Frank’s mother when she was ill and bedridden.