Promised Land

by Brandon Dean

  “You don’t know that!” the soda jerk insisted.

  The old man diverted his attention behind the counter again. “Look, kid. I know this is hard to accept. But the world’s going to hell in a hand basket. And it’s going pretty damn fast.”

  I saw the young man behind the counter grow pale, with a few beads of sweat forming on his brow. Just a few minutes ago he’d been as cheery as someone at work could possibly be, and suddenly, he was anxiously waiting for the devil to call his number.

  I walked away from the counter with my drink, taking an occasional sip as I pondered what the news update truly meant. Was the old man simply running his mouth, just a lunatic who had nothing better to do than scare people? Or was he more knowledgeable than he let on, I wondered as I reclaimed my seat at the table with my parents.

  “Did you make some new friends?” Mom asked me, cocking her head to the side in interest.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it took you ten minutes to get a drink. You seemed pretty invested in conversation over there.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” I replied, “just some old geezer trying to give a couple of kids a scare.” I reached down and picked up my burger, the grease dripping onto the wax paper below, and took a bite. Dad was right: this sure was one hell of a sandwich.

  “Tried to scare you how?” Dad asked through a full mouth. He’d been attacking his own burger like a starving lion would a wildebeest.

  Mom looked over at Dad from the corner of her eye in disgust.

  “Just the news,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “What about it?” Dad asked.

  “Something about the Germans using atomic energy to develop weapons,” I replied, taking another bite of my burger.

  Dad started to chew more slowly, with his eyes locked onto me, not necessarily looking at me specifically—more as if he were looking through me, as if he were trying to focus on something in his own head. Dad slid the other two drinking glasses toward Mom. “Amelia, can you please get our drinks for us?” he asked.

  “Sure, hon. What do you want?” Mom asked.

  “I don’t know, just . . . surprise me, okay?”

  Mom nodded and walked toward the counter as Dad watched her for a moment.

  He swallowed the food he had been chewing. “Tell me everything you know about this,” he said in a low voice.

  “I did. That’s all I know,” I replied.

  “Well, what in the world took you so long to come back to the table?” he asked.

  “Just that man at the counter—he was trying to blow this out of proportion.”

  Dad chuckled to himself for a moment. “Blowing it out of proportion, huh?” he mumbled.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what it was,” I insisted.

  “And how do you know that?” he asked.

  “Well, I—”

  “If I recall, you just told me you don’t know anything about it. But now you know it’s blown out of proportion?”

  I looked silently at him, having no response.

  “Who reported it?” Dad asked.

  “Wilmer,” I replied.

  Dad leaned back in the booth, looking a bit relieved. Wilmer had a reputation around the community for being dead wrong on his reports half the time. His shotgun approach to journalism and desperation for a breaking story had even gotten him into some hot water over the last few years, since he never bothered to fact-check anything that left his mouth.

  Dad reached down for his burger again and took one last, massive bite to finish it. “I guess you’re probably right,” he said around a mouthful, “but you can never be too safe, just in case.”

  I nodded.

  Mom came back with the drinks, unaware that Dad’s errand had merely been a ruse. She handed my father a glass of tea, settling down with a club soda for herself. “Did I miss anything exciting?” Mom asked as she reclaimed her seat next to Dad.

  “No, just watching Dad here inhale his food,” I replied, receiving a grin from Dad and a giggle from Mom.

  We finished our dinner about fifteen minutes later, looking outside to see that the rain had cleared and the sun was peeking above the buildings around us. Dad pulled out a five-dollar bill and paid our two-dollar-and-twelve-cent tab. He left the remainder as a tip.

  The car ride home was the same as always—casual discussions about my dad’s work and my mom’s chatter about a piece of jewelry in a catalog she absolutely had to have.

  “Put it on your Christmas list,” my dad would always say, to which my mom would point out how far away that was. “Oh, great, just enough time to save up for it,” was his classic rebuttal. He never meant it, though. He was a softhearted man behind that rugged exterior. He always found a way to get her exactly what she wanted and, typically, when she least expected it. The most memorable of them all was the silver locket he had given her several years back. She’d been so excited, and now she always wore it around her neck. When sunlight hit the ornate charm at just the right angle, it almost seemed to glow. Inside the locket, she had a baby picture of me on the left and a picture of my father on the right.

  We made the usual right turn into the driveway of 1919 Ashford Lane, our home, a small two-bedroom that was just under 1,200 square feet. The old brick exterior of the home was practically begging to be washed as a dark layer of dirt moved up the house, fading as if it were a gradient of mud. The flower bed to the side of the front door, usually vibrant with whatever blossoms were in season, now sat near barren apart from a few out-of-place weeds. Ever since Mom had gotten pregnant, she hadn’t had the energy to tend to her plants, and Dad wasn’t one to take on such a “feminine” task. I supposed even chivalry had its limits.

  Dad stepped out of the car and went around to help my mom. When we walked up to the front door and opened it, we were greeted by the creaking of the glass outer door.

  Mom spoke: “Are you ever going to—”

  “Oil the hinges? Yeah, one of these days,” Dad interrupted.

  Mom sighed. It was like an act of Congress to get my dad to do any work on the house. He felt his weekly forty hours at work were enough of a burden as it was.

  Even so, there wasn’t a speck of dirt anywhere inside our home, courtesy of Mom. She was fastidious about everything being absolutely immaculate at all times. “You never know when someone will drop by,” she always said. But I also believed she truly found some form of accomplishment in her day as she wielded her broom and dustpan to leave the house sparkling.

  I walked to the kitchen, which was too small to accommodate a full dining table, so our breakfast table had to prove sufficient. It was an old table; my father had picked it up at a yard sale at a price that was practically free. It had surely been a beautiful piece at one point, but the white paint was chipped and scratched along its round surface. As I approached the table, I was greeted by the sight of my math homework from the Friday before. I had never been good at arithmetic, but tomorrow was Monday, and time to complete my work was running short.

  I sat at the table, while Mom ran herself a bath just down the hallway. I could hear the water heater hiss like a snake stuck in a lead pipe as it kicked on.

  “Square root of two-fifty-six,” I murmured to myself, counting on my fingers as I watched Dad enter the kitchen.

  He stopped at the back door, next to me, to look out the window for a moment. He turned his head toward me. “I’m going to get that oil for the hinges,” he said before opening the door to the backyard, where the entrance to the cellar was. The catch-all for all the things we had no place for in the house, the cellar was filled with all of my father’s tools, holiday decorations, and miscellaneous items we didn’t have the heart to throw away. I thought it was strange that he felt the need to explain himself to me, but he’d been seemingly more on edge in the last couple of days, so I dismissed his behavior. />
  I looked up at the clock that hung on the floral-paper-covered wall above the oven. The time read 8:30 p.m., and I still had homework to do. I typically tried to be in bed at ten so I could be at least somewhat motivated to get ready for school. I’d never been a morning person, and it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see me crawl out of bed at noon on the weekends. About ten minutes passed, and I finally found the answer my first question. Sixteen, I thought, feeling like an idiot for having taken so long to work out the problem.

  My mother, now finished with her bath, walked into the kitchen sporting house clothes, her hair still wet. She waddled to the sink, grabbing an empty teakettle from the counter as she passed me. “Where’d that father of yours go off to?” she asked, filling the kettle with tap water and placing it on the burner to boil.

  “He went to go get some oil from the cellar,” I said.

  “You mean he’s actually going to fix those hinges?” she asked in sarcastic shock.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I said, trying to focus on my homework. I was on question seven and had only four problems left. I took a quick glance at the clock—9:12 p.m. I pressed my dull pencil to the paper once again and then stopped, realizing that Dad had been gone too long simply to be getting oil for the hinges.

  “Mom?” I said.

  She turned toward me. “Yes, honey?”

  “What’s wrong with Dad lately?” I asked.

  The corners of her mouth turned down, making her look grim. She pulled out the chair next to me and took a seat. “He’s just scared he’s going to have to leave us,” she said.

  “Why? He’s still here, isn’t he? It isn’t like Dad to be acting like this.”

  “I know,” she replied. She paused for a moment, her face indicating she had something she needed to say. “But he didn’t have to serve in the last war. He was lucky and got to stay home, and that’s why he’s so scared of this war. He can’t stomach the thought of leaving us—especially right now, with the baby coming soon.”

  Mom was obviously upset, so I stood up from my chair and gave her a hug. I heard the back door creaking open behind me, and Dad walked in with a small bottle of oil in his hand.

  “Now, what’s this all about?” he quipped, sounding overly chipper. I knew he was hiding it now; he didn’t want us to be scared. But little did he know, sometimes it was okay to be scared. I ended my hug with Mom and immediately followed it up with one for Dad.

  I placed my half-finished homework in my folder, settling on copying the answers from Riley in the morning. “Love you, Mom. Love you, Dad. Good night,” I said before walking down the hall into my bedroom.

  Chapter 2

  Time for school!” my mom shouted as she rapped on my door.

  I grabbed whatever clothes were clean and threw them on. I groggily walked down the hallway into the bathroom and immediately noticed that the mirror reflected a worse version of myself than I’d imagined possible. I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before; I’d been worried about Dad. I couldn’t wait for this war to be over so he could go back to being himself again.

  I hastily brushed my hair and teeth before heading to the kitchen for breakfast. The radio was on. Thankfully, though, it was just playing a song. Not sure which song exactly, but my mom seemed to know it; she was humming along while she set the table. She’d made her usual Monday-morning breakfast of biscuits and gravy, a favorite of both my father’s and mine. She felt that we needed to start the week with something to look forward to. It really was the little things that mattered most, regardless of how trivial they may have seemed. I wish I had realized that before it was all gone.

  I looked down at the table as I sat and saw that there were only two plates and two glasses of orange juice. Mom walked over to me, placed a biscuit on my plate, and covered it in a thick, white layer of gravy.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked as she sat down to make her own plate.

  “Oh, he went into work early today,” she replied.

  “Is everything okay with him?”

  She reached across the small breakfast table to take my hand gently in hers and looked me in the eyes. “You don’t need to worry about your father, okay? This will pass; everything will be fine.”

  “What if he gets drafted? How will it be fine then?”

  “You can’t sit around thinking about what-ifs all the time; it’ll take away from what’s happening right now,” she said.

  “Yeah? And what’s happening right now?”

  Mom smiled at me. “You have both of your parents, you have your friends, you have your health, and you have your future. That’s what’s happening right now. And soon, you’ll have a new brother or sister you can show the world to.” I smiled back at her, and she pulled her hand away slowly. “Now, eat your breakfast before it gets cold.”

  I nodded. Mom always had a way to make me feel better. No matter what, she was someone I could always count on.

  I finished my meal, grabbed my school supplies, and gave her a hug goodbye. I stepped outside and noticed that the creaking of the front door had become a faint sigh. I guessed Dad had gotten around to those hinges, after all. I began my mile walk to school and met up with Riley about halfway. We always walked together; it seemed to help time pass when I had someone to talk to.

  “How ya doin’, Brodsky?” he called as he walked toward me from his driveway. Riley wasn’t someone who would typically have been seen hanging out with someone like me. I wasn’t a dweeb, by any means, but I was a slim kid who usually kept to himself, valuing quality over quantity as far as friends were concerned. Riley, on the other hand, was about as popular as a high school guy could ever hope to be. He must have had dozens of girlfriends to my zero, and while he was an inch or two shorter than me, he made up for it with his athletic build. Before his father had gone off to war, the biggest worry on his mind had been whether he wanted to accept the offer of a scholarship for basketball or football.

  “Pretty good, Riley. You?” I replied.

  “Eh, not so bad, all things considered,” he said.

  “Have you heard from your old man at all?” I asked.

  “No, not yet, but I’m not worried about it. He’s gone face-to-face with these Krauts before, and he came back. I’m sure he will again. After all, he signed up for it on his own,” Riley replied.

  Riley’s father was a patriotic man, from what I knew—always putting others ahead of himself, whether or not he knew them personally. He had already fought in the first war with the Germans. Needless to say, he knew his way around a battlefield and how to handle himself.

  “That’s good to hear. Hey, did you finish that homework Mrs. Cunningham gave us?” I asked

  “Yeah, why? You slack on it again?” he asked with a smirk.

  I rolled my eyes. “Will you quit busting my chops and just let me copy it?” I groaned.

  “Yeah, yeah. On one condition.”

  “What condition is that?” I asked curiously.

  “You set me up on a date with that Melissa girl who sits in front of you.”

  I laughed. “Typical Riley—she’s only been here a week, and you already have her on lock?”

  Riley chuckled. “Hey, buddy, I’m surprised I waited this long. Not often you see a dame as pretty as her just walk in like she owns the joint.”

  “So why can’t you talk to her?” I asked.

  “I would, but if I get caught passing notes again, Mrs. Cunningham already told me she would read it out loud. And let’s face it: sometimes my notes aren’t exactly kosher. Can’t risk that embarrassment.”

  I gasped in mock surprise. “You mean to tell me Riley Jennings isn’t a fearless womanizer? Wow, I’m in shock!”

  “Yeah, yeah, wise ass. So you gonna help me, or what?”

  I reached out a hand, and Riley gave me his homework to copy. “Here’s what’s going to happen, pal: you’r
e going to let me copy this homework, and then you’re on your own with Melissa.”

  Riley groaned. “You can’t blame me for giving it a shot, can you?”

  “No, but you missed your target by a mile.”

  “Now look who’s the one busting chops,” he said.

  We walked together for a while longer, kicking rocks and exchanging small talk as we made our way toward school. At the end of our neighborhood, we spotted what looked like a government vehicle parked at the end of one of the driveways. A glossy white star was painted on the side of it, and a soldier in pristine dress uniform was climbing out.

  “Oh, no,” Riley muttered. “That’s where Milo Varney lived. You remember him?”

  Milo was destined to be a farmhand since the day he was born, a simple guy that valued his hunting, fishing, crops, and chewing tobacco over everything else. I’d never known him that well, personally, since he was a few years older than me, but it was my understanding that he desperately wanted to trade his city roots for the countryside and run his own farm—fields of crops instead of his small three-by-five plot of onions and tomatoes.

  “Yeah, a little bit. What about him?” I asked Riley.

  “You don’t know?” he replied. Riley exhaled deeply through his nose. “That’s what happens when a person, you know . . . dies at war.”

  I was in disbelief. I’d been fortunate enough never to have lost anyone very close to me. Death was a foreign reality that hadn’t struck me up to that point, so this was something hard for me to process. Remembering someone so full of life, only to have that end abruptly. We continued to watch as Milo’s mother answered her door to speak to the soldier. The man in uniform removed his hat from his head, and from a distance, I watched his mouth move. Milo’s frail, elderly mother covered her face with her hands, her legs began to shake, and then we heard distraught weeping from where we were walking, which had to have been about two hundred feet away. I could tell this was harder for Riley to watch than it was for me; this was the worst possible outcome for many people across the country, himself included.