Call Me Home

by Megan Kruse

  “I want to marry you first,” he said. “I want to marry you, Amy, and I want us to move to Seattle.”

  She felt as though the wind had been knocked out of her and suddenly she wanted Gary to get off of her. She shifted but he didn’t move.

  “Say yes,” he said.

  “Gary –” She pushed at him and finally he rolled off her. “Gary, wait.”

  He was looking at her and his eyes were full of tears.

  She did want to marry him. She wanted it more than anything. But Seattle – her mother, and Sam. Maybe it was silly, but she couldn’t stand to leave Sam. When she thought about her old dog, her chest tightened. Sam loved South Texas. She couldn’t imagine taking him away from this land, the only world he’d ever known. And how long did he have, anyway? A year? Six months? And her father. Even if no one had expected her to stay, she had expected she would. This was Fannin, Texas. This was what she was supposed to do. The person she should be.

  “Gary,” she said. “I want to marry you. Yes. Yes.” She held his face, kissed his wet eyelids. “I want that so much,” she said. “But Seattle – just give me a little time. My mother – and Sam. I just need to get used to the idea – and get my mother used to it. And Sam –” She was crying too, now. “I just need to wait until Sam goes,” she said. “He’s too old. I can’t drag him across the country. He loves it here.” It sounded silly, she thought, but it was true. Sam knew every path through town, every inch of the house, every smell. She felt like taking him away would break his heart.

  “Baby,” Gary said. He gathered her to him. “Baby.” She breathed into his neck. Please, she thought. Please understand. “We’ll wait,” he said. “However long you need. Tomorrow, ten years, take your whole life, I’ll be here.” He reached above her and straightened the blanket they were lying on, made sure it was under her head. She pressed herself against him, touching his skin, his hair. “All of my life,” he said softly. “This is what I want.”

  The sweetgum trees flashed the silvery undersides of their leaves in the dry wind. Her chest, her heart, felt ocean-full.

  AT THE LEGION the next day, Jennifer squeezed both of Amy’s hands in her own, in the gnarl of her silver rings. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

  “I am,” Amy said. “I love him. I want to marry him.”

  “But it’s been like a month! You don’t even know him. I mean, who is this guy?”

  “What are you talking about? Scott’s the one who knew him in the first place.”

  “He knows him, but he doesn’t know him know him,” Jennifer said. “They’re like, acquaintances. They met like twice.” She poured tomato juice into the mouth of her beer can. “It’s not like I’m not happy for you, Ames,” she said. “It’s just, wow.”

  “Come on, Jen. He’s perfect. I didn’t even know guys like Gary existed.”

  “Amy –” Jennifer stopped.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know – just – that night, he gave me a weird feeling. He seemed, like – I don’t know, like anti-social or something. He kept you outside all night – I don’t know. He gave me a weird look.”

  Amy pushed back a hurt feeling. Jennifer didn’t know Gary, she reminded herself. “We were talking outside,” she said. “And everyone was drunk anyway.”

  Jennifer reached for the saltshaker and salted the top of her beer can. She smiled. “All right, he is cute. Way cuter than Scott.”

  “How can you drink that?”

  “It’s like a Bloody Mary. Whatever, you eat pork rinds.”

  “Scott’s cute.”

  Jennifer made a face. “Scott’s got a pencil dick.”

  “Don’t forget his monkey face.”

  “And he’s hairy. What an asshole.” Jennifer sighed. “Okay. You’re right. You totally 100 percent deserve to be happy. And to get out of this town.” She drank from her beer. “Just don’t go yet, okay? Wait a few months, maybe? I can’t believe you’re going to leave me here alone with Scott.”

  Walking home through the scrub grass and smell of oil, she tried the words: “I’m getting married,” she said to herself. “I am going to be Gary’s wife.” Would it feel different, she wondered. She wanted to feel more of herself, more substantial. Significant to someone besides herself.

  The house ahead of her seemed squatter than usual. It looked washed out. The screen was torn and the doorframe warped. She went into the kitchen and her mother was there wearing yellow dishwashing gloves and cutting peppers. “Look what Dolores gave me,” she said, waving the knife. “She’s got so many this year. I’m making jelly.” She looked at Amy. “Where have you been?”

  “Out. I went to the Legion with Jennifer.”

  “No Gary today?”

  Amy smiled. “I saw him earlier. How’s Dad?”

  “He’s okay. In his chair. So, when do I get to meet him?”

  Amy picked up one of the rounds of chopped pepper and touched the edge to her tongue, feeling the burn spread across it. She had already waited too long, she realized. She should have introduced Gary to her mother earlier, given some signal of what was coming. “Soon,” she promised.

  “Gary’s a Yankee name.”

  “Well, he was born here.”

  “His parents must be Yankees, then.”

  She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know, actually. She hadn’t met his parents, and he didn’t talk about them much, except for the occasional outbursts about his father, how controlling he was, how ungrateful. She hadn’t seen the ranch house; they spent all of their time together in stolen places, the truck, on blankets spread in patches of sunlight between trees. Gary’s work with his father seemed more and more sporadic, and he was often testy and frustrated. Her mother leaned toward her. “Get my hair out of my eyes, would you?” Amy reached up and brushed the hair back. There was an ache in her chest, as though she were already gone.

  THAT FALL FELT long, nearly interminable. They were married in front of a justice of the peace on the first of October; she wore a cheap party dress from Beall’s, and Jennifer signed as the witness. “I don’t care if we don’t have a place yet. I just want to know that you’re my wife.” She looked at Gary, tall and handsome and smart. I’m married, she thought, but it meant nothing, it was just words. She was still living with her mother. The ring was something cheap and she didn’t wear it. It was as though they’d made a pact not to say anything. She and Jennifer didn’t talk about it either; Jennifer still seemed distrustful of Gary. She’d done the witnessing and then left quickly afterward; Amy felt hurt and angry about it at first, but then she told herself it didn’t matter. She and Gary didn’t need a celebration; they were special enough just being together. It was their secret how powerful their love was.

  Still, it was hard. Seattle, Gary kept saying. “In Seattle, God, we’ll get a beautiful house, right in the city. Or maybe out by the coast and our kids can walk on the beach.” He was unconcerned about telling his family. “It’s my life,” he said. “They’re only interested in me if I’m working on the ranch.”

  She brought Gary home to dinner one night. My husband, she thought of saying. Meet my husband, Gary, but she didn’t. Her mother made a roast, and they all sat at the little table. Gary’s manners were good, but his aggressive compliments, his lavish kindness, embarrassed her.

  “You’re such a wonderful cook,” he said to her mother. “I know that Amy must have inherited that from you.” When had she cooked for him? Her mother eyed both of them suspiciously.

  Amy liked the way he looked at her father, though. Her mother was cutting the meat in small pieces, helping him to hold the fork. Gary didn’t stare, and he spoke to him like he was any father, and for that she loved him.

  Later that night she stood at the screen, calling for Sam.

  “I haven’t seen him,” her mother said.

  She stepped back into the house but kept the screen cracked. “Sam!” she called.

  Sam liked to lie in a scratch of dirt outside the tool shed
and lazily watch the birds. He’d lift his head and groan, a sad little howl because he was too old and slow to hunt, or maybe to remind them that he was there. His paws like rough stones, his big old head.

  She called around the block and no one had seen him. She remembered a time when he was barely older than a puppy and he’d wandered over the highway, all the way to the river. Amy had been five or six, and she’d driven up and down the streets with her mother for hours, her forehead pressed hard to the window, her heart breaking. When they found him, standing up to his hocks in the water, drinking lustily, panting from his journey, she’d stood and cried from the pure relief. It felt as though her life had just come flooding back to her.

  She sat on the porch well into the night waiting, listening to the sounds of the town and the river shifting and settling in the dark. Please Sam, she thought. Come home to me.

  EVERY DAY SAM was gone, she felt her own life in Fannin stretch thinner. The whole town seemed lousy with trenches and cellars, small, dark places where Sam might have gone to lie down. To die, she thought but wouldn’t say.

  In the end, it was better, she told herself. Sam was so old. She would not have to see him suffer. She tried to remind herself of that whenever her throat grew tight, whenever the grass rustled and she looked for him, her oldest friend, hoping against hope that Sam would come bounding toward her, mouth open, his body shaking with excitement, his tailing wagging madly in the warm breeze. But he didn’t. And so, she told herself again, she would not have to see him suffer. And in some small way, she was set free.

  Three weeks after Sam disappeared, she called Gary. “Tell me about Seattle,” she said.

  They made plans to leave after Christmas, before the New Year. When Amy told her mother, she didn’t tell her that they were already married. “I’m thinking of going with Gary on a trip,” she said. “To Seattle.” She didn’t say, “to stay,” but her mother looked at her as though it was all already between them, the deceit, and everything Amy meant to do.

  “You love him,” her mother said. She looked so small.

  On Christmas Day, the day before they would leave, Amy walked the neighborhood a last time, looking for Sam. When he didn’t appear, she buried a soup bone near the steps and left the dirt in a tall pile so that he would know. At the last moment, she pulled a handful of purple and yellow johnny jump-ups from the pot on the steps and laid them there. “Oh Sam,” she said aloud. “You were mine.”

  Jackson

  Silver, Idaho, 2010

  SILVER ITSELF WAS IN THE LOWER PANHANDLE, SOUTHEAST of Kellogg and Wallace, still in the dark mountains. It was the river that had killed the mines; the river that killed what Jackson was beginning, even now, to think of as the real Silver, its rocky little heart. The way the men on the crew talked, and the way that the town bore its bad luck without complaint, with familiarity, made Jackson sure that even Silver’s boom years hadn’t been much, not in the way that you might imagine. Little bars, tired miners. Every penny had been pulled from the earth for more than it was worth. And the river – the creek – that sprawled its way down the mountains, just east of the town, kept flooding. It flooded with determined, manic consistency – no way to know when, just that it was inevitable.

  In the mornings, when he didn’t have to work, Jackson walked the channel of the old riverbed. The water was slowly disappearing, the ground turning back to flat hard dirt. It was an expanse of strange housekeeping, everything that over the years had been lost. The bright curve of a flip-flop, a muddy radio, scraps of torn fabric, garbage bags still full of waterlogged trash. An armchair, blooming with mud and leaves. There was an old man with shaky arms who was often there in the mornings, trolling the wide ditch with a metal detector in a pair of tall rubber boots. He stopped every few feet, digging in the mud, wearing a pair of yellow kitchen gloves.

  A hundred, two hundred years of this town – what all had sunk down in that sprawling river? Engagement rings, bottles, toys. He’d heard how police had been on hand when the river was diverted in case bodies showed up. Missing persons. But there were only the bones of dogs, cats, a cow, the shell of a 1931 convertible Cabriolet sunk deep in the mud. Jackson liked to watch the old man, plodding slowly along, his metal detector held in front of him like a dowsing rod. His mother would have found the man romantic, Jackson thought. “Oh,” he could imagine her saying, “Look at that. He’s digging up the past. Digging up bones. Like the Randy Travis song!” She had kept only a few things from her life before Jackson’s father, things she’d brought across the country. Jackson liked to look at them, to try to add them up to something. A glass baby bottle with a thick rubber nipple, a cut china bowl, a yellow leather driving glove. Onto that stratum she added the sentimental detritus of his and Lydia’s things. Report cards (Jackson fulfills obligations but ultimately seems disinterested in engaging with his peers), drawings, the head of a baby doll that Lydia had made up with a Magic Marker – deep blue eyelids and a hideous pink grin. The dead walkie-talkie that Jackson had carried for years, intercepting messages from space aliens, benevolent imagined protectors, and Kenny Rogers.

  That was one thing that bothered him about the new lake – on the surface, it seemed like a kind of forgiveness, to make newness and beauty out of the splintered wreckage of the old dam, the watermarked town. An offering of grace. But at the same time, wasn’t it a falsehood, to think you could just move an entire river, make a new lake, and everything would fall into place? A litter of wild dogs, displaced by the flood, ran in and out of the woods, through the alleys in town. In the absence of more certain landmarks, birds flew woozily into the windows of the new houses. One morning, Jackson had stood in an empty house frame while the wind whipped through, watery and sharp smelling. One of the carpenters had left his lunch sitting in a paper sack on top of a sawhorse. When Jackson turned around one of the stray dogs was there, rangy and skittish, eating the sandwich in choking bites. The dog finished the sandwich and stood there shaking, tonguing up crumbs. His fur was matted. He looked at Jackson with hungry, lost eyes.

  AFTER DON TOLD him about his wife, Jackson didn’t see him for three weeks. The work had picked up, and Don was back and forth to Spokane, to Missoula. Jackson was full of a sick uncertainty – was it over? Would he know if it was? Did it even matter? And then Don came to him on a Tuesday afternoon, when there hadn’t been much to do and Mark Davis, someone Jackson understood to be in at least moderately in charge, told him to cut out early. Jackson had just finished taking a shower – five minutes in the narrow plastic stall, the trickle of cool water from the snaking showerhead, the curtain sticking to him and water spilling out onto the floor of the cab. Now he was trying to get warm again, half-reading a shitty thriller that had been left on the free shelf at Mary’s. He heard sticks cracking outside the cab and froze, waiting. He had a knife, that was all, and he reached for it, wedged beside his mattress and the wooden frame. He held its cool weight and his breath. “Jack,” Don whispered. “Let me in?”

  Jackson swung open the creaking door and there was Don. Pretty, big-eyed Don with that shock of black hair and a shadow of stubble that raked Jackson’s face when they kissed. Don was wearing jeans and a jean jacket – Jackson pictured Randy, stoned, delighted, A Canadian tuxedo! – but on Don it looked right, loose and easy. He had his arm threaded through two lawn chairs and a bottle of wine in his hand. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “I thought,” Don said, setting everything down in the dirt and stepping up onto the first steep step into the cab, “that you might want some chairs. It’s getting warmer out these days.” He looked at Jackson. “You’re wet,” he said. “And so clean. I probably shouldn’t kiss you, being so dirty myself.”

  “You’re probably right,” Jackson said, and he reached for Don, pulled him up and into the cab of the truck, onto his tiny bed, on top of him. God, Don’s mouth. Jackson’s skin was electric with wanting, all of the wanting of the last three weeks rising up in him, hard and nearly pa
inful.

  “Stop,” Don said, sitting up, nearly hitting his head on the ceiling of the cab. “I wanted this to be romantic. I brought chairs.”

  “That is romantic,” Jackson said. “Are they real plastic?”

  “You’re a brat.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “And ungrateful.”

  “So well made.”

  “Shut up and help me.” They climbed out into the five o’clock June light and carried the chairs – pink and green, made of clear plastic that reminded Jackson of Lydia’s old jelly shoes – through the underbrush, to a break in the trees where a swath of the lake was visible, and the rusty blast furnace, the skeleton of an old factory. They planted the chairs in the dirt side-by-side, and sat. Jackson had the feeling that Don had brought him here for a reason, and he waited. When he was seeing Eric, Jackson had come to understand that this was how to talk to men – to pretend you weren’t talking at all. Eric would move from talking about his lunch of scallion salad to his certainty that the other managers thought him a fool, his bitter jealousy of other men, his aching fear of death, while Jackson lobbed soft noises of interest at him from beneath the cloud of the feather duvet.

  “So,” Don said. “How have you been?”

  “I’ve been working,” Jackson said. “Where have you been?”

  “Point taken.” Don peeled the tin from the top of the wine and unscrewed the top. He passed it to Jackson. It was cheap and sweet.

  Jackson wiped his mouth. “No,” he said. “I mean it. I haven’t seen you in a while, is all.”

  “There’s been a lot to do.” Don lifted his legs, in those dirty work boots, and set them on Jackson’s lap. “I’ve been driving everywhere and, god, it’s hell.”

  “Did you go home?” He tried to make his voice sound light, easy.

  “Some. It was shit, actually.”

  “Why?” Clean laundry, Jackson imagined. The smell of detergent, the sports channel, Don’s jizzed up socks in the back of the closet, his wife blow-drying her hair. He imagined they must have had a church wedding. Tastelessly expensive. Did she have any idea? Jackson wondered. Could she even imagine Don with him, here?