One
Dave
I always hated my home town. There’s a reason that I left, and I used to tell myself afterward that there wasn’t going to ever, under any circumstance, be a reason I came back.
But when you’re a teenager, things are a little different, I guess. You don’t have responsibilities. No sense of responsibility. So I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised, looking back, that I was wrong. Because I was a teenager, making brash declarations that I was going to make everything different this time, and I was just as wrong as every other teenager who thinks that.
When I was seventeen the whole thing seemed small. I knew every little nook and cranny of Woodbridge as if it were a part of me. As if I could know the whole place by sheer intuition, and there was nothing that I needed to know aside from that.
Coming back, after so long in so many other places, I can tell that it’s not as small as I’d given it credit for. When you’ve seen tiny villages, fewer than a hundred people, you start to gain a sense of perspective for how many moving parts their are, even in a town that I thought was impossibly small when I left.
I took a deep breath, and let it out slow. My hands gripped the steering wheel, and my foot eased down onto the gas pedal. The car beneath me groaned and started to move forward at a snail’s pace. The rental car wasn’t my favorite, but I had my entire life in the back of it, all three bags of it, and I needed to trust it even if I didn’t like it.
There were changes everywhere. The impression I got was that it was almost all change: nothing seemed to be all that familiar, or to have stayed the same after all that time. The houses were different colors, they’d been replaced with new houses, with massive additions. The middle of town is the worst of all; Tom’s Hardware closed, and it’s been replaced with an Ace, same as any other hardware store in Michigan these days it seemed.
Everywhere I look, it feels like the local flavor’s gone and it’s just another town. Might as well be two miles out of Detroit, for all the difference it makes. At least then you’d be able to get some business going, rather than living in some dead-end place where there’s no work and no future for much of anybody.
Eight years is a long time for anybody. For someone who said they were never coming back, not for nothing or nobody, though, it wasn’t nearly long enough.
With a long, deep breath, I pulled off the main road and towards the house. The town had changed, or at least the paints of coat that it wore had. But the skeleton was still the same. Alverson onto Washington, left turn onto Scott. The fourth house on the left. It hasn’t changed at all. The old Ford is still sitting out front, right where the old man left it. Only, I suppose he didn’t leave it there this time.
I put the car in park. Maybe this is a mistake. I could get out of here. There’s no reason that I have to come into town for the funeral. Mom can handle it. She’s handled plenty of other stuff without me, this is just one more thing, right?
My jaw sets. Not this time. I’m not going to keep running away like this. Not if I can help it. I push the door open and step out, and breathe in the air.
I didn’t realize how different the air here is from other places, until I left and saw half the world, and realized that not everyone has this damp smell in the autumn. The smell comes off the lake. Even though it’s almost two miles outside of the edge of town, and there’s no beach, you can’t escape the smell of damp lake water when the humidity is up, and the humidity never seems to go down after August.
I heft one of my bags onto my back and start the short walk up the stairs. It’s the longest three steps I’ve ever taken, and at the top of it there’s nothing to be done but knock. My hand comes up, and then it goes back down.
I can still leave. I’ve got enough time to get back into the car and go. Keep my promise, never go back to this little dead-end town.
The door opens and a woman looks out at me. She’s young. Too young to be Mom, that’s for sure.
“It’s you,” she says. I recognize the voice, long before I recognize the woman. She doesn’t look anything like herself, not any more.
“Laura?”
“You could’ve called.”
“Is my mother home?”
Laura steps away from the screen door without a word. I open the door and look around.
Everything around is changing. There’s new development, and stores are getting bought out and replaced all the time. But not my mother’s house. It’s a testament to the fact that almost thirty years can go by without a damn thing happening. A boy is born, grows up, leaves, and comes back, and nothing’s moved except the trash can liners.
“Mom?”
She’s sitting on the sofa with her fingers gripping her knee. She turns when I speak, even though I know she must have seen me come in.
“David.” She purses her lips with a worried half-smile. “I didn’t know if you’d be coming.”
“Of course I came,” I say, as if I weren’t just thinking about leaving without even stopping in for a moment.
“I wasn’t sure you would, after the way… well, whatever.”
“How are you holding up?”
Her smile doesn’t become any more convincing, but it does become slightly wider. “I’m doing alright.”
“She’s barely eaten,” Laura says from the other room. “Since Mark passed.”
“Mom, you have to eat.”
“I eat when I’m hungry,” she says defensively. “I’m not going to stuff myself just because someone says I’m not eating enough. And besides, I just… don’t like to cook.”
I frown. There’s a lot to digest here. Mom looks ragged, like she hasn’t slept in a week. Maybe she hasn’t. I don’t know what her and Dad’s relationship was like when I wasn’t around, but when I was around, it was strained. Maybe that’s not the right word.
Strained sounds as if they were having temporary difficulties that would eventually, with a little effort, be resolved. Their relationship was tuned up like a piano wire, and if you hit it with a hammer it would make a nice clear note. It was so strained that it had taken on the strain like it was a permanent characteristic of all relationships.
“Is that what Laura’s here for?”
“Laura,” Mom said softly, “is here to tell me that I don’t eat enough, and I need to leave the house more, and that I’d feel better if I put some work in.”
“You would feel much better,” Laura intoned from the other room, obviously drawn by the comments from Mom, “if you just worked at it.”
The sound of pots and pans banging around as they were shifted out of the lazy Susan made as clear a sign as there could be that she was cooking. I pushed myself up. “Do you need anything from me, Mom?”
She shrugged.
“A bullet to the head?” Then she gave one barking laugh and shook her head.
I purse my lips and look down at her. Her hand had worked itself loose on her knee, and moved now to wrap around herself, both hands holding her body like she was worried her front might start wandering away.
I step through and around the couch, and into the kitchen.
“You need any help in here?”
Laura takes a pan full of something white and liquid and puts it on the stove. A moment later, underneath the pan, the flame burner kicks to life.
“No,” she says. “I can get along just fine.”
I look down at her. Some parts of her are still the same. She’s still got a knife-shaped nose. She’s still got large, voluptuous lips. She’s still dark-haired, and she’s still almost a foot shorter than I am.
That’s where the similarities end. Her hips are wider, now, and her bust heavier, as well. When she steps across and fills another pot with water I take a moment to look at her. Hourglass, I suppose you’d call her. When I was in high school, I’d always thought of Laura as a thin woman, maybe even twiggy.
The decade I’d spent away from her had been kinder to her than it had to the rest of the town. I looked at her left hand, where all five fingers were bare. Then I took a deep breath.
“So how have you been?”
She ignored me and turned back with the pot of water. “I have to get this pasta on the boil,” she said by way of explanation. “Or nobody’s going to eat in this house until the cows come home.”