Call Me Home

by Megan Kruse

  She took Lydia’s hand and they started toward the main drag, where the parade would be. Even with the thick dark clouds it was still summer and she was full of what she’d forgotten flooding back to her, even though she hadn’t thought of these things in years: lantana, prickly pears, and the smell of cedar in the woods. A Luna moth beating its wings in her cupped hands. Pink crape myrtle, white, purple. The Dairy Queen and Stonewall peaches and Mexia peaches and beggar’s lice. Iced tea with Sweet’N Low in the pink packets, the pile of them beside a glass and spoon. Always she and Jennifer had said they were going to go to Mexico and drink mescal. They were going to float down the San Marcos every day with a keg strung between their inner tubes. They were going to get brave enough to go gigging frogs with their dates, but they both were going to scream before the boys could prong them. Why would the boys care when they were wearing dresses that would make every man in Fannin pause with a tender ache in his chest?

  SHE LED LYDIA through corridors of people and lawn chairs. Half of the faces looked familiar – people she’d known, or their children. To stand on a crowded street – the simple indulgence of that – made her grateful. What terrified her in Washington, what had put her in danger, protected her here; everyone knew a scrap of her story. Gary’s name hung around the town like a fog. Even if she’d been away for eighteen years, she belonged to Fannin, and he didn’t. She doubted he even belonged to Geronimo, where the ranch had been. If she thought about it too long the fear would start to rise up – the suspicion that he was never who he said he was, that she might have married someone who was even more of a stranger than she could imagine, even after everything he’d already done. She didn’t want to know. She thought instead of how, if he so much as turned down First Street, the news would pass from mouth to mouth and someone would help them.

  She was sure that it wasn’t all wonderful, that people must be talking about her. Women in the aisles of HEB lowering trays of gizzards into their carts after service at the Baptist Church. They’d say she was a saint for what she’d endured, they couldn’t believe it, what a shame, but still – to leave a husband, that was wrong, wasn’t it, and hadn’t Amy gone to Seattle in the first place, practically dragged him out there, and Seattle, what kind of place was that, all kinds of liberal Yankee gays, fruits, and nuts, she must have done something to bring it on herself.

  She and Lydia had just passed City Market Barbecue, one of the big businesses in town – they were making money hand over fist this weekend – when she saw Scott. It was him, looking the same, just heavier, and jowly. His stomach pressed against his thin T-shirt. He saw her stop and looked at her. She could tell he was searching for who she was, and then lit on it. He smiled hugely. It was the same Scott, she thought. He could grow old forever and he’d still be a little boy.

  “Amy?”

  She smiled. “Here I am,” she said.

  “Well, shit,” he said, and then bounded toward her, wrapping her in his arms, his sweat and barbecue smell. “Holy hell, you look exactly the same. You look real good, girl.”

  Amy held up her hand, joined with Lydia’s. “And this is Lena,” she said. “My daughter.”

  Scott looked from Amy to Lydia, and she wished for a minute she could see what he was seeing, what whispers of Gary could be found in her daughter’s face, how much she herself had aged. “That’s great, Amy,” Scott said. He looked so happy to see her, as though he’d been waiting a long time.

  “Actually,” she said. “It’s Ann, now. Ann Harris.”

  “Ann,” he said, like he was thinking hard about the sound of it. “I guess you needed to do that, right?”

  She felt heat rising up her face and neck. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

  “I heard he was trouble,” Scott said. “I been feeling real guilty about that, Amy. Introducing you and all.”

  “Scott,” she said. “You didn’t know.” It felt good to absolve other people of guilt for the things that she hadn’t yet been able to absolve herself.

  “Still,” he shook his head. “Still.”

  “Just watch out for us,” Amy said.

  He nodded. He reached out a hand toward Lydia, lightly nipped at her shoulder with his fingers. “You’re real pretty, Lena,” he said. Lydia smiled.

  “I saw Jennifer,” Amy said. “I met Janie, she’s so pretty, Scott.”

  “Aw,” he said. “Janie’s a doll. And Jennifer –” A sadness fell over his face. “You tell her, if you see her. Tell her I’m a broken son of a bitch without her.”

  Lydia was looking at Scott. Amy imagined her puzzling out these mysteries – who belonged to whom, who knew Gary and how, and why.

  “I thought, man, I just thought, love me or leave me the hell alone,” Scott said. “But I’m one broken son of a bitch without her.” He slipped one hand up under his T-shirt and scratched his stomach.

  “She’ll come around,” Amy said, and she believed it. Jennifer and Scott pressed close together in the front seat of Scott’s beater truck on the banks of the San Marcos, against a row of gray lockers. It seemed like the two of them together held something important in balance, a tiny pivot point in the larger machinery of the world.

  She hugged Scott again. “Don’t be a stranger,” he said. She shook her head, even though he had already passed by; she put one hand on Lydia’s shoulder and they walked on through the sidewalk crowds. “Scott,” she said to Lydia, shaking her head. “He’s exactly the same.”

  “He’s nice,” Lydia said, “but he smelled like barbecue.” They laughed. Amy was waiting for questions, wouldn’t have minded them, but now her daughter was quiet, searching the crowd, her eyes skipping from the slumping carnival booths to the main stage and the trucks backed up on the grass. She seemed younger, Amy thought, or maybe Lydia had spent too long seeming way too old. Amy felt the same herself – too young, too old. She’d missed the ’90s, nearly completely. She’d stayed home, raised her babies, ran from Gary, learned the ways to avoid him. Watched nothing but the nightly news. And now, on the Luling streets it was as though she’d aged unbelievably, and as though she was still eighteen, wearing a tight dress, weaving in and out of the crowd.

  She and Lydia stood in line for the rides. On the Tilt-a-Whirl Lydia laughed, screaming, and clutched at Amy’s shoulder. She looked like a child, Amy thought. She was glad that Lydia wasn’t embarrassed by her, to be on the ride with her, and grateful to be able to appreciate something so trivial.

  “There must have been good times, too,” her mother had prompted her, a few nights before, looking so sad, and Amy said, “Yes, yes of course,” not just to placate her mother but because there were. There were normal days, and terrible things, and then there were good ones, too. But the happy times, in hindsight, pained her. Not because she missed them but because they were too bright, full of sharp laughter and big-toothed smiles that seemed about to careen into something else. Like an alcoholic’s happy times, she thought, reckless and lurching madly on a knife’s edge.

  Still, there were good moments that were quieter, between her and Jackson and Lydia, just the three of them. And this, she thought, pulling Lydia close against her, the two of them held still in the heart of the rolling ride, this was good. So what if people talked about her, she thought. Who gave a damn. She had her daughter, and somewhere her other baby was out in the world. It could have been the heat, or the disorienting, bucket-colored sky, the spin of the ride, but she felt like she could feel them both, as though she had one of them at the end of each arm.

  She remembered a time when the three of them were down on the Sound digging for clams. It wasn’t allowed that season, but they weren’t keeping them, just shaping holes into the sand, sinking their arms to their elbows, reaching toward the dark sources of air bubbles. The tide was far out, and after a while they walked out to the water’s edge. There was man there in a yellow rubber raincoat and tall black waders. He’d dug himself into the wet sand and he was pulling on a geoduck.

  She’d heard jokes
about geoducks before, about the long, flesh-colored proboscis. Still, she’d never expected them to look that obscene. Jackson was watching and she could tell he wanted to laugh, and Lydia was mesmerized because it was so unworldly – this man in a tug-of-war with a sea creature.

  She met Jackson’s eyes. “Hold your tongue,” she said, and Lydia said, “What is that?” and Jackson didn’t laugh aloud but Amy was laughing with him, the joke danced between them, even as she crouched beside Lydia, wondering at the geoduck with her daughter. It was the same feeling she had now, even though Jackson was far from her. With Lydia warm against her spinning through the dark, she felt like she was suspended between the two worlds of her different children, a steady foot in each of those places, holding them both.

  Lydia

  Fannin, Texas, 2010

  JANIE, JENNIFER’S DAUGHTER, DROVE ME TO GERONIMO, where my father’s ranch once and maybe still was, on October 22nd, the day after my fourteenth birthday. It felt like we were just two friends, driving the dusty roads with the radio turned up. “An arrangement,” my mother said, because of the time I ran away, and the time that Janie’s mother caught Janie riding in a truck on the back road with a man who was much older than high school. Even though it was an arrangement, I didn’t mind. I felt older with Janie, and more exciting. We’d dyed my hair, too. I liked how it looked. Reddish, darker. Glamorous, I thought. I wanted to feel different, like I wouldn’t catch my father’s eye. I imagined being face-to-face with him on the street and he wouldn’t recognize me. I dreamed I walked right past him.

  The fields we drove past were burnt brown. Here it was late fall and still hotter than any summer I remembered before. There were summers in Washington that passed so quickly I only remember the edge of the Sound pulling in and out, the water over my feet; the sun slanting through the thin curtains; an ice cream from the Lake Goodwin stand. A field that burned down the road, and the way my mother and father took the neighbor’s call and drove the truck fast, kicking up a cloud of dust that mixed with smoke, and then beat the fire with blankets. Jackson and I ran after them, watching from the road, the smoking stinging my eyes, the rough taste of it in my throat.

  “Wow, what a birthday present,” Janie said, winding down the window and letting the hot air rush in. I’d asked her to take me on a drive for my birthday. I said it was what I wanted, as long as it was secret. It took me a long time to find the address. There were two Hollands in Fannin, but that wasn’t right. “Which city did my dad come from?” I asked my mother one day, as if I’d just forgotten. “I mean, which city was the ranch in?”

  “Geronimo, don’t worry, it’s a ways from here,” she’d said. There was only one Holland in the Geronimo phone book, which the Fannin library kept under the front counter.

  It wasn’t really a ways. Half an hour, maybe more. “Slow down,” I said, when I knew we were getting closer, and I watched the empty dirt lots, the driveways, and the houses move past. When the numbers were close, I saw a sign on a fencepost painted Holland. My skin prickled. “Slow down,” I said to Janie, touching her arm, and she looked at me but slowed the car. I knew what our moms were doing, making us watch each other, but just then I didn’t mind.

  The house was small, a trailer house like the house in Washington. There was a red truck parked out front. There was a chicken coop and a sign that said Eggs 2 dollars. There were three sheds, all leaning. They looked like our shed in Washington. I wondered if my father had built it, and the prickling came back over my skin. Once there were bees in the wall of our shed, so many that we could hardly get inside without being stung. My father stuffed the wall with fiberglass insulation that shredded their wings. After they were gone I would reach my hand into the dark space and bring out black honey on my fingers. It tasted sweet and rotten. I knew the bees couldn’t stay there, but still I felt bad, the way it ended.

  I hadn’t known what I would do before the sign. “I need to get some eggs,” I told Janie. “Can we stop?”

  She pulled the car the rest of the way to the shoulder, then she looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Eggs?” she asked.

  I had a feeling that if I sounded certain enough she would agree to believe me. “Yes,” I said, “Come on, Janie.”

  She looked at me again, then sighed. “I’m not going to regret this, am I?” She pulled the car out and made a U-turn, then turned into the driveway. She put the car into park next to the red truck and turned off the engine. She pulled her cigarettes out of her purse. She was smiling a little. “You’re not going to run off with a boy or something?”

  I smiled at her. “No way,” I said.

  She shrugged her shoulder. “Fine,” she said. She slid her seat back and put her legs up on the dashboard. “I’ll wait here.” She tapped a cigarette out of the pack. “Don’t tell,” she said, waving the cigarette at me, and winked.

  “You don’t, either,” I said.

  There were flower pots on the porch, full of roots and dirt. A wind chime of rusted forks and spoons that knocked together but didn’t make a noise. A plastic lawn chair with a broken back. My heart beat like it was trapped in a tiny cage, trying to burst out. I knocked on the screen door.

  “Yes?” the woman asked. She had her gray hair up in a blue scarf. There was a television on loud behind her.

  “I just –” I was looking at her, trying to decide if she looked like my father. If she looked like me. Her eyes were an icy blue, not like ours at all. “I wanted to buy some eggs.”

  The woman smiled. “Well!” she said. “Well, that’s fine. What brings you all the way out here?”

  “I saw your sign –” I said. The woman looked past me at Janie, who was sitting in the front seat with her cigarette hanging out the window. Janie held up a hand. “And – we stopped.”

  “Your sister shouldn’t smoke,” the woman said, but she was still smiling. “We don’t get a lot of people buying our eggs, but we always have so many. It’s a shame. So many go to waste.” She held the screen open and I followed her in. There were roses on the wallpaper, big faded blooms. She went into the other room and turned the television off. “Anita Holland,” she said when she came back in, holding out her hand. I shook it. “Janie,” I said, because it was like I’d forgotten my own new name and even saying it would have seemed like telling too much. I could see Janie through the kitchen window and now with the lie in front of me I hoped she’d stay where she was, smoking and fiddling with the radio.

  “Well, Janie, how many you want, you said a dozen?” The refrigerator was mostly empty, except for milk and orange juice, some casserole dishes, and four brown eggs in a shallow bowl. “You caught me being lazy.” I started to say that four was enough, but then, I thought, she’ll just send me on my way and I won’t know a thing. “Come with me,” she said. She pulled two empty cartons from a cupboard. “You got good shoes on?”

  The coop was full of feathers and the sound of the chickens. “If we got more people coming out, I’d get them ready,” she said. “But we don’t.”

  “Do you need the money, though?”

  She laughed and it sounded big and warm and it made me think of my father when he was good.

  “Well, everybody needs money,” she said, very serious, as though she was afraid I would think she was laughing at me. “But these eggs are just an extra thing.”

  She ducked into the coop, under the metal roof, and came back with a handful of eggs. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “we would go to the railroad station for our chicks. They let you know when the chicks were coming and you would bring a flat box for your shipment.”

  “They came in on the train?”

  “Yes,” Anita said, wiping one of the eggs on her shirt and handing it to me. “We had a little shed with a light to keep the chicks warm, and chick feed, water, you had to watch them, before you turned around they’d start molting and the fluffiness would turn into feathers and pretty soon you’d have pullets and roosters. You only needed one rooster, so you’d use
them up as they got good to eat. Then you’d get little pullet eggs, small like bird eggs. My mother would say, ‘Oh, you’re little, you get the little egg.’ You could decorate teensy eggs at Easter and then as they got older, the eggs got bigger and bigger. They only really lay in the spring, summer, and fall months. Winter – they were getting older, we’d eat them.”

  “You ate them?” I asked.

  “My mother would make such good chicken and noodles. You’d have broody hens, trying to keep their eggs, so you’d have to get the eggs out from under them. My grandmother, I’d follow her through the hedgerows and look for hens, try to bring them in. Sometimes the eggs would be good, other times they’d be so old and rotten. You’d find a hen that’d laid herself a big nest of eggs and you didn’t know what would happen. Some would be fertilized, some would be pretty near hatched, some would be rotted.”

  I tried to hatch a bird’s egg, once, under a light bulb in my closet. Jackson and I tried doing ESP, telling it to hatch, but it didn’t. In secret, after three weeks, I cracked it open and a plain raw egg slid out, smaller but still with the same yellow yolk.

  “What are you going to make with all these eggs?” Anita asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Well, these eggs are a few days old, so they’d be good for an angel food cake,” she said. “If you’re going to make an angel food cake by hand, you need twelve eggs or so, and you need to keep them out. A fresh egg that’s just laid will not beat up. They need to be three days old or so, then they’ll beat.” She pointed to the back of the coop, where the roof was low. “Would you go check around back there? They like to bury them, and I’m too darn old and fat to get back there.”

  I crouched down in the back of the coop and sifted through the sawdust until I turned up an egg with a mottled shell, and then another. “You’re not old and fat,” I said.