Flat Broke with Two Goats

by Jennifer McGaha

  She didn’t want me to feel this way, and yet, I did, and nothing the nurse said or that David said or that my children or my parents or my aunt and uncle said could take that away. For weeks and months and years to come, I would wish I had done things differently that night. I would wish I had gone to my grandmother when I heard her cry out. I would wish I had sat with her and held her hand, that I had brushed her damp hair from her forehead and smoothed her wrinkled gown and whispered how much I loved her. I would wish I had not let her die alone.

  “Listen to me,” the nurse said. “I know something about loss. I lost a sister-in-law I was very close to. And I want you to know that there was nothing you could have done that would have changed the outcome here. Nothing, okay? And whenever you remember how you found your grandmother today, you just need to think of the best memory you have of her. Okay?”

  Staring into the empty field that used to be my grandfather’s garden, I nodded and tried to think of what that might be, of how one could possibly choose one best memory out of forty-five years of memories. And then I tried to imagine what remembering this might feel like a week from now, two weeks from now, two years from now, when my grandmother’s death wasn’t something that was happening but something that had happened in the past.

  • • •

  The friendly, down-to-earth people in Macomb, the intimate cafes, the strong pro-union sentiment, the elaborate Labor Day festivities that essentially shut down the town, the incessant, mournful sound of trains passing through were all reminiscent of my childhood in rural Appalachia. Gradually, I began to make new friends and immersed myself in my work, and by mid-September, I was starting to feel a little bit settled. One afternoon, I was sitting in my office catching up on some grading when my officemate cleared her throat. I finished the sentence I was reading, then gave her my full attention.

  “So,” she said, “what exactly are you doing here?”

  It was a question people repeatedly asked me in different ways, but the question was always essentially the same: What is wrong with you? What was so wrong with your old life that you ended up here alone? When most people asked, I told them part of the truth, that I needed the money. But for some reason, maybe the fact that I was particularly tired that day, that I had pulled out a shirt to wear and it had smelled so strongly of wood smoke, of home, a home I no longer recognized as my own, I told her more. I told her about our house, about Bill and my grandmother, about my strained relationship with David. And I told her something I was only just beginning to understand: I felt responsible for my grandmother’s death.

  My officemate was in her early thirties. She wore a short red dress and high heels. Her long hair was tinted blond, her freshly manicured nails crimson. While I talked, she nodded and groaned sympathetically.

  “Oh,” she said when I was finished. “So you’re resetting.”

  “Yeah,” I said, tapping my pen on my desk. “Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m doing.”

  Instantly, instead of being a dropout from my old life, this thing I was doing had a name and a purpose. I’m resetting, I told myself over and over in the days to come. For the first time in my adult life, my time was truly my own. I could have wine and cheese for dinner, and no one would care. I could drive all the way to Iowa for spicy apple pie, and no one would notice. I could spend my weekend bike riding and playing with my dog, and no one expected me to do anything else. If my doorbell rang, I would not feel sick to my stomach because I would know that it wasn’t a sheriff’s deputy coming to deliver a subpoena or someone from the power company coming to turn off our power or someone from the loan company coming to repossess my car because that sort of thing did not happen here. It only happened back in North Carolina.

  One evening in late September, a colleague, Karen, invited me to a potluck picnic, sponsored by a local food advocacy group. The guests were an odd amalgamation of professors and farmers and hunters. We sat at cloth-covered tables surrounded by vases of flowers and decanters of water and wine and ate curried sweet potato soup prepared by a former member of the Rainbow Riders and pound cake made by a biology professor who was also a jazz singer.

  Then, as the sun began to set, we gathered our jackets and made our way to the fire pit outside. A circle formed—men with harmonicas and fiddles, women with guitars and voices like lazy rivers. The sky was wide and full of stars, and in that moment, I was one of them, a tiny yet still significant spark in the universe. I was so immersed in my reverie that I didn’t notice at first that the man next to me was speaking.

  “They’re pretty good, huh?” he repeated.

  He was older than I was, in his sixties. He wore jeans and a ball cap and held a Heineken in one hand. He gestured toward the circle of musicians.

  “They’re great,” I said.

  The harmonica was somber and woeful, a long coal train bound for the Mississippi.

  “Do you teach at the university?” he asked.

  It wasn’t a hard call. Pretty much everyone in Macomb taught at the university or had taught there at one point.

  “English,” I said. “I’m just here for the semester.”

  I took a sip of my Blue Moon and moved to a log by the fire. The man eased down beside me.

  “Tell me, where did they find an English teacher just for the semester?”

  “Online,” I said. “I found the job online.”

  “Like on a rent-an-English-teacher website?”

  He had bright-blue eyes and a certain thing about him, a spark, a glow, an easy smile. Together, we chuckled about the low prestige of my position, the crazy randomness of it all.

  “I’m Chris,” he said.

  “Jennifer.”

  While the band launched into a rendition of “Wagon Wheel,” Chris leaned in and asked, “How old are you? About forty?”

  I frowned and downed the rest of my beer.

  “Don’t even,” I said.

  He laughed, and though I never sang back in North Carolina, I begin to sing along. I sang to Chris and to the fire and to the stars, which seemed to be stretching further and further across the sky. When the song was over, Chris was ready to leave. He got his coat, then came back over and crouched beside me.

  “Are you homesick?” he asked, leaning into me, putting his hand on my back.

  Had he asked me this earlier, I might have said yes. Never before had I spent so much time alone, and at first, the large spaces of silence in the Midwest had seemed infinite. Anxious for the sound of someone else’s voice, I lay in bed at night, mentally clicking off how many days I had left before the end of the semester. Hester sprawled beside me, her head on the pillow, her hazel eyes peering into mine, as if she too were pondering the strangeness of our circumstances. But then at some point, not at a particular time or during a particular event but at some vague, indefinite moment, I had begun to ease into this new life, and the silence, instead of being a void, began to have its own weight and texture.

  Now, the Big Dipper hung just over my head, so low, I felt I could reach up and take a gulp of cool, clear sky.

  “No,” I told Chris. “I’m not homesick.”

  The band was playing a Gillian Welch tune—“Elvis.” Karen sang, her voice a low, longing croon.

  “That’s good,” Chris said and patted my back. “That’s good. Sometimes we need to do new things.”

  Long after he had left, I sat there, the fire warming my back, the harmonica strains drifting through the trees.

  • • •

  In the weeks that followed, Chris and I kept in touch. He and his wife were separated, and he was dating someone in a neighboring city. Still, we talked on the phone, emailed, occasionally met for lunch. He was cheerful and easygoing, and being with him reminded me of the early days with David, of the time when our relationship was unfettered and uncomplicated. I told myself that Chris and I were friends, friendly, nothing that
crossed the line into romance, but the line itself was becoming blurry for me.

  That fall, I repeatedly asked David to come see me in Macomb, but he never did, so that October, Hester and I drove back to North Carolina. I met David at Bouchon, a French bistro in downtown Asheville. He had on a new shirt and pants, and we ordered wine and mussels and made polite small talk about our children and our pets. I told him about my students and about the new friends I had made. Everything about our relationship felt strange and new. He felt different. I felt different.

  When we got home late that night, I could see that David had done the dishes, that the bathroom had just been cleaned, that he had put fresh sheets on the bed. We fell into bed, exhausted, content, for the moment, just to be together again. The next morning, we woke to the sound of rain and to the churning, pulsating, gushing of the waterfall. The air coming through the cracked window smelled sharp and green, like pine saplings. Pulling the quilt over my shoulders and snuggling in close to David, I let the sounds of the water wash over me. I soaked in his deep, steady breathing until finally, the torrent outside began to ease, and I threw off the quilt and climbed from bed.

  That afternoon, we planned to go to the Lake Eden Arts Festival in Black Mountain, about an hour away. It took me forever to decide what to wear. I wanted to look cool but not too young, not trying too hard. Finally, I chose a thick, hooded cotton dress and my favorite cowboy boots, and I pulled my long, gray hair back in a clasp. David too spent longer than usual picking out his clothes.

  “Is this okay?” he asked, holding up the brown L.L.Bean shirt that I had gotten him for Christmas years ago.

  “Very okay,” I said.

  It was officially a date—more officially, I suppose, than any date we had ever had before we were married. So I felt sixteen again or perhaps the way sixteen is supposed to feel, giddy and nervous and a little uncertain, but in a good way. At the festival, we listened to music and drank craft beer and ate organic, farm-raised chicken on sweet potato biscuits. Then we wandered past the music tents to a picnic table near the lake. It was a beautiful fall night with a full moon. We could hear the reggae band from the lakeside stage. Barefoot kids with glow sticks chased each other in the nearby field. A steady stream of people passed by on the gravel walkway—young women in short skirts and boots, young men with dreadlocks and combat boots, gray-headed couples perfumed with patchouli.

  And in that moment, it occurred to me that this was who we were now. Perhaps it was who we had been all along. All those years of dressing for success, of attending one function after another in homes so large, we occasionally got lost, of hanging out with people who summered in Europe and owned their own planes and thought nothing of giving their kids a thousand dollars for a trip to the mall—this was infinitely more true to who we were. It was both oddly comforting and unsettling, and I struggled to think of what our futures might look like, of who we would become now that all the extraneous things had been stripped away.

  “Do you sort of feel like we’re separated?” I suddenly asked David.

  We had never called this time apart a separation, never called it anything really, but while I had been away, I had begun to think of myself in the singular. My house. My dog. My life.

  “No,” David said. “Not at all.”

  He almost stopped there. I could feel him watching me as I stared into the lights reflecting on the water. And then he said, “Do you?”

  I took a sip of my beer. Maybe he would forget he had asked. Maybe my silence would imply the answer. But he wanted to hear me say it.

  “Do you?” he asked again.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Sometimes.”

  “Well, then,” he said. “It’s time for you to come home. When you finish in December, I want you to come home. Okay?”

  I loved my newfound freedom in Macomb, my break from the stress of our lives. I loved all the new people I had met, all the things I was learning, the way I was reinventing myself. In Macomb, I was teaching kids who desperately wanted and needed an education. In Macomb, I was not just someone’s wife or someone’s mother. I was interesting and fun, someone who got invited to parties and picnics and bike races. In Macomb, I was not a total fuckup.

  I wanted David to say he would come with me if I got a more permanent offer. We could start our new lives together in the Midwest. He could work remotely, and I could teach. We could go to the grocery store without worrying about running into Jeff and Denise. We could make new friends, friends who didn’t know all about our fuckedupness. He could be married to a woman who had a future. But even as I wished these things, I knew David would never leave the mountains. He would never consider living anywhere else. He just didn’t have it in him.

  “Okay,” I said.

  The next day, I loaded Hester back into my car and, once again, made the fourteen-hour drive to Macomb. For some reason, leaving home was harder this time, but I was also eager to see my friends and glad for the distraction of work.

  A few nights after I got back, Chris and I went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant just down the street. It was a place we had been many times with other people, but this time, we were alone. Chris was thin, and his face was starting to show signs of age, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, lines framing his cheeks, but his eyes were a dazzling blue. We talked about our jobs, our past relationships, and, finally, our current relationships.

  “You know what your problem is?” Chris said.

  We were splitting an order of chicken fajitas. I was eating all the vegetables. He was eating all the chicken.

  “What?”

  “Your problem is you don’t tell your husband what you want. You need to just speak up and say what you want.”

  I wiped fajita juice off my chin while I considered this. Was it true? Was I unwilling to communicate what I wanted? Maybe. Or maybe the real truth was that I didn’t know what I wanted or, perhaps, that what I wanted was constantly changing.

  “You know,” Chris said before I could speak, “I wish we had met a long time ago.”

  For once, Chris wasn’t smiling, and when he looked at me, all serious and wistful, I could see him now, sixtysomething years old with a soon-to-be ex-wife and a girlfriend and two just-grown sons, but I could also see him back then, twentysomething years old—long hair, wiry frame, a wild and charismatic hippy full of quiet dreams.

  “We would have had a lot of fun together,” I said.

  “We sure would have.”

  It was as close as we ever came to naming what there was between us; though perhaps under different circumstances it would have been more, as it was, we were destined to remain friends. We looked at each other for one long moment, until a birthday celebration began at a nearby table. Cumpleaños feliz, the waiters sang. So we sang along.

  Chipotle Chicken Burritos for a Crowd

  •10 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts

  •30 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (about 5 small cans)

  •20 cloves garlic

  •2 1/2 teaspoons ground cayenne pepper

  •2 1/2 teaspoons ground paprika

  •1 1/4 teaspoons ground black pepper

  •1 1/4 teaspoons ground cumin

  •1 1/4 cups lime juice (not diluted)

  •1 1/4 cups Worcestershire sauce

  •1 1/4 cups honey

  •2 1/2 cups balsamic vinegar

  •2 1/2 cups olive oil

  •3 tablespoons salt

  Puree all ingredients except chicken in food processor or blender. Place chicken in pan. Pour marinade over, and turn to make sure it is thoroughly coated. Cover and refrigerate for several hours. Grill. Chop into cubes.

  Serve buffet style with warm tortillas, rice, beans (a choice of refried or black beans is nice), shredded cheese, lettuce and/or spinach, chopped red onions, chopped tomatoes, salsa, sour cream, guacamole, etc. Accompany
with margaritas or a smooth, nutty amber ale such as Green Man ESB from Green Man Brewery in Asheville.

  Chapter Seven

  One day in late October, just after the harvest, when the Asian beetles swarmed from the fields and clung to car windows and doors, to light fixtures and porch railings—a modern-day plague—a tornado skirted Macomb and devastated a small community just outside of Peoria. Hester and I were walking at the lake when the storm hit. The sky turned gray, then an odd, purplish black. Tree limbs hurled through the air. We jumped in our car, and as we drove home, streetlights and power lines shook so violently, Hester huddled on the floor and refused to move. We arrived home just as the storm was easing. I parked the car under the breezeway in the driveway and called David.

  “You wouldn’t believe the storm we just had,” I told him. “The wind—the wind was incredible.”

  I described the eerie, lonesome howling, the way the lake water had turned dark and fierce, the cracking of the tethered boats as they slammed against the dock. And then, as if the storm had pried something loose in me, I was filled with panic at the thought of leaving this place, of leaving friends who had loaned me spare bikes and baked me homemade bread, who had invited me to Sunday dinner at their farms, who had helped me trap mice and shared their homegrown tomatoes.

  “They’ve asked me to stay here another semester,” I said.

  David cleared his throat. “But you won’t, right?”

  I paused. “I don’t know.”

  “We talked about this, remember? You’re coming home in December.”

  Lightning streaked the sky. Branches and leaves littered the yard. The scent of mint filled the air.