“I said, ‘You still don’t say that like it’s a good thing.’
“When we’d gotten our cones, I purposely led us to a table right by the front window. Because the whole point of not going to Canada was to be able to hold my head up and feel like I had nothing to hide.
“We licked our ice cream in silence and just sort of watched the town go by. Some of the locals waved at me, like they were glad to see me back. Others looked away like I was invisible. Except . . . if I’d been invisible, they wouldn’t have needed to look away.
“I did better with the mothers than the fathers, and better with the young women than the young men. But that was just a generality. Somebody will always come along and break the mold.
“After a while I said to your granddad, ‘I never could bring myself to ask you this. I purposely never asked. But I’m going to ask you right now. Do you think I did the right thing?’
“He said, ‘I think you did the right thing for you.’
“After that we never spoke about it again. Probably not because we didn’t feel we could. Probably because we never needed to.”
“Oh,” he says. “Good.”
He’s not saying a lot, but he’s deeply invested. I can tell. I’m sure this isn’t all new information to him. He must’ve heard bits and pieces. He probably never heard my side of the thing.
His mother is trying to flag me down now. And now I’m studiously ignoring her. Because I’m telling this kid the truth. If there’s one thing I learned growing up, it’s that you have to talk to kids a lot, and you have to tell them the damn truth.
“But you said people still call you a draft dodger,” he says.
“Some. Not all. Different people have different opinions. My dad was right about one thing, though. It does follow you around, all through your life, that time in jail. I’m not saying nobody would hire me after that, but the pickings got slimmer. I had to look at that same decision that faced Grandma Zoe after the accident. Should I just get out of this town and go someplace where nobody knew me? But I didn’t think that would work well in my situation, because the arrest record follows you wherever you go. Anywhere I lived, when I applied for a job, a simple background check would turn up that conviction. I figured I was better off staying close to home, where people had a fair shot at knowing it was my version of a principled stand. I say ‘fair shot’ because I knew not everybody was destined to see it that way. You can’t change the way a person’s going to see a thing. If there’s only one thing I’ve learned in my sixty-four years on the planet, it would be that.
“But some people understood it.” I end on that. Or try to, anyway.
“But you were doing what you thought was right,” he says.
“Yeah. But some people don’t want you to do what you think is right. Some people want you to do what they think is right. Anyway, it all shook out okay. I ended up working a pretty menial job at the hardware store. The owner had lost his son in Vietnam. You’d think that would’ve pitted him against me, but it was just the opposite. He was burned by what I guess he felt was the pointlessness of the whole thing, and wishing his son had taken jail time instead. So he hired me, and he treated me with respect.
“I worked hard, lived over the store, and put away every cent I didn’t need to live on. And on the other side of town your uncle Roy was doing the same thing. And we weren’t even talking to each other about it. It wasn’t even a plan.
“Now the old owner is deceased, and we own that store.”
“I knew that,” he says. “I didn’t know all of this, but I know something.”
“Of course you do.”
His mother is waving to me again, and I raise one finger high. Asking her to wait. To let us finish. Surprisingly, she does. I guess she just needed to be acknowledged.
“Here’s a thing I don’t know,” he says. And I wait, and let him figure out how to say it in his own way. “Nobody really told me why Grandpa didn’t have to go fight in the war. I asked my mom once, but I never really got a straight answer.”
“I can understand that,” I say. “It hits on a touchy subject. But you’re a smart boy, and you’re mature for your age. And you know your great-grandma Pauline was not always very . . . well.”
“In the head, you mean?”
“Yeah. That.”
He nods. He knows.
“It’s like this,” I say. “Grandma Zoe had this thing she used to say. ‘It’s an ill wind that blows no one good.’”
He wrinkles his nose. It almost makes me laugh. “I don’t understand that saying at all,” he says.
“You know, honestly, it never made a great deal of sense to me, either, but for years I didn’t say so. It sounded like it just meant ‘bad things have bad effects.’ And I thought, Yeah, so . . . what’s your point? Finally one day I was a little grumpy and tired, so I called her out on it. Turns out it means even most really bad winds are going to blow something good to somebody.
“Which leads me to my point about Connor and his mom. It would be nice to report that everybody’s story had at least a fair or satisfying ending, but that’s not life, is it? And you’re old enough to know it. And I’m not going to lie to you about life, Harris. Your great-grandma Pauline didn’t fare well. She had a breakdown when Connor was sixteen. At the time we all thought, well, people come back from breakdowns. But she never did.
“They couldn’t afford to put her in any kind of facility, at least not one Connor could bear to think of using. And they couldn’t afford any kind of in-home nursing or professional care. So Connor took care of her.
“In our last year of high school, Zoe came over and sat with Pauline every day while Connor went to school. After he graduated, Connor found a college that would let him earn a degree from home—you know, a correspondence course sort of thing.
“He got a nice, cushy job in the county planning department and bought a house for your grandma Dotty before he even asked her to marry him. It’s just who he was. He didn’t want to live and raise a family in that spooky old house he’d grown up in, which I think was a smart move. So he sold it and got a new one with no bad memories, where they could make a life from scratch. With four bedrooms. One for them. A couple for all the kids he knew they wanted. And one for his mom.
“Your grandma looked after Pauline for years while Connor worked. It wasn’t all that hard a job to do. Pauline was never difficult or unpleasant. She just couldn’t do much of anything for herself. She died of a blood infection in 1984. But maybe that part you knew.”
“Right,” he says, “I did. But I still don’t get the part about the wind.”
“I was getting to that. So that ill wind blew something good to someone. Connor—your grandad—was her sole caretaker when he turned eighteen. And that kept him deferred from the draft. And he didn’t have to go.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I think I finally get the part about the wind.”
I feel a little tug on my jacket sleeve. I’m wearing a suit jacket, even though it’s summer, just like it was where I started this story. Even though it’s hot. I look down, and it’s Connor’s youngest granddaughter, Evvie. Tugging at my jacket sleeve.
“Uncle Luke, Uncle Luke,” she says.
For some reason, Evvie has a tendency to say important things twice. Most things, actually. I think she’s at that age when everything on her mind feels terribly important. The repetition must make her feel that she’s properly expressing her urgency.
Life is a very urgent place when you’re seven. I seem to recall that, though it’s been a long time.
“Yes, Evvie?”
“Why are you just standing here? You’re just standing here.”
She doesn’t say, “My mom told me to come get you.” She doesn’t need to. I know.
“I guess we should go, then,” I say to Evvie, in that voice you use with a child when you’re admitting that they’re entirely right and you’re entirely wrong. That’s always a satisfying moment for a kid.
&n
bsp; “Grandma wants to know if you’re coming to the house after. She wants you to come to the house.”
I look up at Dotty in the distance and offer her a sad little smile, but she might be too far away to see.
“Try to keep me away,” I say.
“But we don’t want to keep you away,” Evvie says, clearly frustrated with me. “We want you to come.”
“Okay,” I say. “Fair enough. Let’s you and me go together.”
Evvie and Harris and I walk back to the cars, through the neatly tended gravestones. Evvie and I walk hand in hand.
“What about the kitten?” Harris asks me. “You never told me what happened to the kitten.”
“What kitten?” Evvie asks, but her cousin shushes her.
“Oh,” I say. “Right. I forgot about the kitten. Well. She didn’t stay a kitten for long, of course. Connor named her Sky after the color of her eyes, and she grew into a big cat. Nearly twenty pounds. She lived to be twenty-two years old. No joke. He got her when he was fourteen, and his little girls knew her through most of their childhoods.”
“My mother knew her?”
“She absolutely did.”
“And my mother knew her?” Evvie asks.
“She absolutely did. Everybody cried like a baby when she died. Even me. But I wouldn’t say anybody was devastated. Just sad. I mean, she lived so long.”
Harris stops walking. Suddenly. We almost leave him behind before we notice.
“That was a sad story,” he says.
“It’s really not a sad story. Not to me.”
“But everybody dies.”
“Well, that’s not the problem with my story,” I say. “That’s a problem with life. But anyway, it’s a story about a lot of people doing a lot better than they expected to. A lot better than anybody thought they would. And I don’t mean to be wrapping it up on a bunch of sad notes, but, the trouble is, I’m in a bind here, Harris, because how do you tell a fifty-year-old story without reporting that most of the principals have ended their run on this earth? Well, there’s really only two possible answers for this one: You lie. Or you can’t do it. And you know me. I’m not one to lie. But I still have to say it’s not devastating that people and animals live and then die. Other people may think so, but I don’t. It’s hard, but those are the rules of the game.”
We walk again.
And I think to myself, If you think having and losing is so bad, try never having. Now that’s devastating.
By the time we get back to the Barneses’ house together—Evvie took me up on my offer to ride with me—Dotty, Connor’s widow, is already a little bit in her cups. And Dotty was never much of a drinking woman.
Her family is trying to gently pry the glass out of her hand and talk sense to her, but I don’t interfere. I figure if she can’t get drunk on the day she buries her only husband, on what day of her life will it be okay?
As I step into the house, she’s surrounded by all three of her sons-in-law, all trying—mostly at cross-purposes to one another—to get her to sit down on the couch and relax. But she doesn’t. She looks up and sees me, and her gaze just locks on me. It’s almost a little scary. She’s like a bird of prey, tracking on a scampering mouse in the grass.
I move across the room, but her eyes follow me.
“You,” she says.
Just in that moment it doesn’t sound like much of a compliment.
I move in her direction, thinking a hug might help.
But she stops me with one hand extended, her index finger pointing at the “you” in question. Her dark hair, which was pinned up in a careful bun at the funeral, is coming down in wisps across her face and shoulders. Just here and there. She looks a little too red in the face.
“You,” she says again. “It was always you. Connor told me so.”
She has a son-in-law holding her by each arm. The third is behind her. And now they’re all four staring at me. Probably everybody in the room is staring at me—though I don’t look around to see—wondering what I’ve done.
In that split second before I answer, I swear you could hear the proverbial pin drop in that living room.
“What did Connor tell you?” I ask Dotty. My voice is soft because I know Connor never said a bad word about me to her. I don’t doubt what I know. You don’t know a guy for sixty-one years and then start having doubts like that.
“He said we never would’ve met if it wasn’t for you, because he wouldn’t have lived that long. He said it was all you. Everything after he was fourteen was all because of you.”
“It wasn’t all me,” I say.
I still don’t look around, but I can actually hear people start breathing again. Because now we realize her grief has simply brought out a passion and an intensity in her face and her words that was making even a good thing sound bad.
She’s shaking her head hard now. Too hard. She looks as though she might unbalance herself. Then again, those sons-in-law will never let her hit the carpet.
“He said it was you.”
“It wasn’t. It was Zoe.”
“But who introduced him to Zoe?” she asks, her voice far too loud, her arms flailing wildly for some kind of inexact emphasis.
“I’ll take credit for introducing him to Zoe,” I say. “But I can’t take it all. Connor was a kind man. He was generous. He gave me too much credit. The truth is, it wasn’t me. The truth is, we took care of each other. Zoe and Connor and Roy and me. We just took care of each other. That’s all that was.”
She reaches out and pats my cheek, then nearly falls over.
The sons-in-law usher her out of the living room and into her bedroom for a much-needed nap.
Harris corners me on the back deck a few minutes later and reminds me I never told him what happened to Rembrandt and Vermeer. It seems like a question with an obvious answer. I mean, it’s a fifty-year-old story. So on one level, he knows. But he clearly wants more details. More color, as they say on Monday Night Football. So I drop back into my storyteller mode.
“They lived pretty long lives for Dane mixes. Rembrandt lived to be eleven, Vermeer nearly thirteen. I ran with them up until nearly the day they laid their heads down on their beds and chose not to pick them up again. I’m not saying that’s always a choice. I’m just saying in their cases I think it was.”
“Wait. How do you know?”
“Now . . . that’s a question I can’t answer. It’s not a thing I can wrap words around. You just had to know them. If you knew them, I think you’d understand. Anyway. They both passed quietly at home, in their doghouse next to their cabin in the woods.
“I cried like a baby both times.
“I had my own dogs by then, but that didn’t help as much as you might think.
“Grandma Zoe swore she was done with dogs, I think because the losses hit her so hard. But not three weeks after Vermeer left the world, somebody abandoned a litter of puppies at the county pound, and the shelter was in an overflow situation. Word got around that they were going to put the puppies down straightaway, so Zoe drove over there in that same old pickup and took two of them home. She didn’t even know what kind they were, but she took them.
“They grew up to be crazy to look at. Some huge mix with wild hair like some kind of wolfhounds, or maybe those big long-haired sheepdogs. Or both. They were nothing like the two we lost, but maybe it’s better that way. They barked like crazy, and they grew up to be big, goony clowns, but we loved them. They liked to run with my dogs and me, and that’s what really mattered. To me, I mean. To Zoe, they stayed close to the cabin and made her feel safe.
“They were good dogs in their own way.
“Then she had two more sets after that.
“She had a pair of big dogs when your grandad Connor finally talked her into coming out of the woods and into town. He’d spent years trying to get her to take that spare bedroom his mother had left behind, but Zoe wasn’t having any of it. But then she got into her late seventies, and the strain of living out th
ere in the middle of nowhere finally wore her down. There’s only just so long you can chop your own wood to stay warm and carry your own water from a hand-pump well. Time catches up with everybody. Even Zoe Dinsmore. She lived with your grandma and grandad for a decade, and it was a good decade. I can say that for a fact because I was there. Not living there, but there enough.
“She made peace with one of her daughters before all was said and done, but the other one never came around. Still, both daughters let her see her grandchildren, and that’s no small matter. And then she finally left the world at age eighty-nine. Quietly, at home. Just like her dogs. I thought Connor would be devastated. I thought Roy would be devastated. Hell, I figured it would kill me. But we were fully grown adults by then. We weren’t little boys anymore.
“That’s not to say that grown-ups don’t feel the pain of loss, or that being grown gets you out of a thing like grieving. All I’m saying is that we had her when we needed her the most—when we were scared and lost and all the grown-ups around us were letting us down.”
“That’s funny,” he says. But not really like it’s something you would laugh about.
“How so?”
“It just seems funny how all the grown-ups were always warning you about Grandma Zoe. Like she would hurt you somehow.”
“Right. Good point. And meanwhile they were damaging us every day without even knowing it. And it was Zoe who helped us come home to ourselves. Yeah. I guess that is funny. Here’s why we were more or less okay when she died. We had no good options when we met her. We didn’t have tools or skills to figure out the world, or get by in it. When she died of old age, we had more of that stuff. Because we’d gotten so much of it from her.”
“But then you never got married,” he said.
It’s one of those direct—bordering on rude—statements a grown-up would know better than to make. It’s also incorrect. I did get married. Twice. But both times were long before he was born.
“I got married twice,” I tell him, “but it never really took. They weren’t bad marriages, exactly, and the splits were amicable enough. I still talk to both my exes from time to time. I think we have these ideas about success and failure, and sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking one size fits all. Some guys like Connor were born to be family men. Then there are guys like me who do really well with a couple of good dogs. So that’s the way I went. I went with the couple of good dogs.”
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