Some Go Home

by Odie Lindsey

  He offered her some venison jerky, stuff he had made on his own. The cooler in his truck bed held an iced-down twelve of Miller; he palmed a pair of them into foam koozies, and proposed a toast to this first-last date. Derby then lowered the tailgate and they sat on it and listened, considering the contours of the rolling land and the flinching of tree leaves in the wind. It was a real lovely cliché.

  “You’d better put a bank of windows in the back of that little house,” she said. “Catch every bit of this late afternoon sunset.”

  “You’re right. A bay window would—”

  “I didn’t say bay window,” Colleen corrected him. “You can’t open a bay window, so you won’t enjoy this breeze.”

  He tipped his beer at her, and they chitchatted for another fifteen minutes or so, the low sun smudging over the natural familiar. At some point, Derby got ramped up to take her deep onto the property, to show her the spot he’d picked out for the pond. “I think it’s perfect. Real secluded,” he said. “Though of course I’d love to get your take on the placement.”

  She looked down her nose at him. “Not tonight, cowboy.”

  He turned red as a pepper. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “Not that I wouldn’t mean it that way. But, I mean . . .”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. What I’m sayin’ is, I don’t fish.”

  Derby nooded, and took another gulp of beer.

  “Though I do eat,” she added. “So get me to Dallas, or—”

  “Love it,” he replied. “Let’s go.”

  They drove southwest for another forty minutes, talking and storytelling, and for a mile or two sitting silent as the first stars prickled the evening, with each of them wishing that the other would give in, would suggest just pulling over at a diner, or even for fast food. They both understood that nobody was going to Dallas that night. They did not know what would happen if they got any farther from home.

  Colleen thought about Deana, but not so much. Mostly, she thought about sharing this feeling with Deana, about wanting to admit that the date hadn’t been so bad. That it was kind of fun, really. Real fun, actually. She wanted to explain that, like herself, Derby was also on a mission to redefine himself. He was seeking something new from the future.

  Yet she decided to keep all the flush energy bundled up for herself, for at least another date or two. Or three, or more. She didn’t want to give away the privacy of the joy, or try to describe things to someone uninvolved. (Plus, given all the pressure Deana had piled on about Derby, it would take some time for Colleen to offer thanks, to admit that she felt so swoony about the hookup.)

  In the semi-silence of the truck cab, sitting high behind the headlights, and with the razz of his compound Kevlar tires on the highway, Derby had at some point asked a burning question: “Do you ever want to talk about . . . the war or whatever?”

  She looked out the side window for a few seconds. “I don’t guess so,” she replied.

  He didn’t feel rejected. Nor was she mad that he’d brought it up. “Gotcha,” he said. “Just didn’t want to not ask, you know?”

  “Copy that,” Colleen replied.

  They wound up in a booth in a Waffle House, not too far from the interstate at Grenada, Mississippi, after Derby finally admitted that he wasn’t prepped for Texas. Colleen had pretended to take him to task, but then let him off the hook, care of the promise of an All Star Special. She was impressed when he slid the server ten bucks at the onset, and asked for two large Styrofoam cups (into which he poured their contraband beer).

  Derb had then proposed a second toast, “To the Thai next time.”

  Colleen rolled her eyes, and took a deep, uninterested breath.

  “To the Thai that shall bind?” he asked.

  She turned to look out the window.

  “Okay, okay.” He laughed. “How ’bout, ‘They say that the road to Phuket is paved with . . . ’ ” He cleared his throat and waited. “ ‘Paved with . . . ?’ ”

  “What?” she scowled. “Is ‘paved with waffles’? Is that what you want me to say?”

  “Pave it with whatever you want. I don’t care. I’m just trying to loosen you up, so I can work my way to the other side of the booth.”

  She didn’t respond to this, meaning that she didn’t shut him down, either. Derby got up from his seat, then stepped over and slid in beside her.

  They were all lit up by yellow logo signs and fluorescence, framed out by massive windows, a perhaps-love story for any passerby on the state highway. The booth was a bit cramped, but it felt right.

  THEN BACK, AGAIN

  1

  JP opened his eyes, and looked to the light-break between curtain panels. Early morning, maybe six-fifteen. The bedroom was softened by late winter gray.

  This was during his last season in Chicago, right before Dru died. Just a few months shy of his move down to Mississippi, when the idea of Pitchlynn was still folly, a lie.

  It was a routine season of deprivation, when the damp ashen atmosphere lopped the skyscrapers. By all measures a stock interval of ice. A time that everybody dealt with, had dealt with, would deal with, and which would fast enough fade to memory, then concept, after the sun and spring did their job. Chicago was, after all, the most glorious so-called “sky’s out” space in America. Its springtime was so very much worth the wait.

  He’d spent his life between near northwest Chicago and his folks’ North Shore home. So he knew that in this city, at this time, you slogged, you bundled, you warmed indoors. You made complaint, or you complained about people who complained about weather, and you fought from points A to B, your head bowed against the wind, your boot soles flicking icy drips inside every double doorway. Hats and scarves and coats sagged from brass hooks at the end of the bar booth. Quivers of muddy icicles clumped up at the back of wheel wells, while ridges of frozen, fouled snow encrusted the curbs.

  Most importantly, however, there was this, too: the flush. You extracted potent hints of it while standing by the radiator and staring out the window at night, watching the snow cascade in a streetlight cone. You snatched heat-by-association from the aroma of a passing bakery, whether that heat implied piekarnia or panederia or some hipster take on patisserie. You were even made flush by memory, by the ubiquitous tales of walking on frozen Lake Michigan back in high school, and the burning whiskey shots you and your crew had consumed in the shelter of a creaking ice ridge (you fearless, jubilant dummies). And perhaps flushest of all, as JP had insisted to Dru during their first winter together, was the tucking-in to the heat of the dryer exhaust vent outside of a coin-op Laundromat, your coat tented open to catch the hot, scented gust.

  Yes, for JP the ice remained quite typical. You endured it, you abided, until one morning you woke to the sun. You then caught the swimming-pool-blue-sky-through-kitchen-window, and, moments later, went outside, giddily, greedily, for the first time in months. And though it was still twenty-seven degrees, though the streets were still soiled by salt crust, you stripped down to a thin sweater or thermal undershirt, your armpits ripe from cloister, and you eyeballed the city, the absence of fog, and the steppe of squared rooftops returned to the horizon—“sky’s out” was the phrase, is the phrase—and your chest opened. Your pulse throttled. You knew that this city would soon become incomparable.

  Thus, JP looked for sunlight through the curtain break.

  Dru no longer followed his story line. No matter the overpriced ricks of firewood he brought home, the three-day weekends South, or the fact that he now drove her to work, downtown at Wabash, into the clotty throng of traffic, she refused to believe that the winter would end. At home, she bundled, she huddled, she curled up silently on the couch and watched television. Made her obsessive lists on Post-it notes and paper scraps, a long-established habit that seemed to have drifted from reminder to documentation, to relentless complaint.

  Their days were often an exercise in not touching. They dodged each other in the kitchen, their limbs never glancing. If JP lea
ned in to kiss her—a semi-forced effort on his part—she bickered about his abrasive stubble. Her back pats, or the occasional high five, seemed the last markers of her ambition for intimacy. By early March, he’d given up on either offering or winning affection. He, they, had grown metronomic.

  But they still said I love you, in bed at night. They said it and they meant it, and Dru would broker a smile, and they would grin at each other, and then turn to their respective books, respective bedside lamps. Soon after, those lights would be extinguished and JP would silently pray, something he hadn’t done since being confirmed in the presbytery at thirteen.

  Dru was sick. A part of him knew this, anyway. Something was wrong that went well beyond mood swings. Something biochemical, neurological. Something triggered. Yet JP couldn’t bring it up. What was more, he didn’t want to, and neither did she. The idea of giving the topic a name was more terrorizing to them than ignoring the symptoms, enduring the silence. Besides, she’d recover soon enough. When the baby arrived. And the sunlight.

  So, lying on his side in bed, turned away from Dru, JP would pray while staring at the part in the heavy curtains. He would fall asleep facing them, then wake to do the same.

  On this morning, the sun was missing again. JP eased out of bed and stole into the kitchen, then prepared hot white tea in a burnt-orange kettle. He brought a half sleeve of saltines and a litter of supplements to her bedside, vitamin D in the lead. Waking, Dru smiled politely as she crept out of bed, patting his leg while ignoring the tea, and then she shivered (dramatically?), running her hands up and down her arms. She hauled the burden of herself to the bathroom, her pregnancy fully pronounced, and she peed, and then hoisted up and looked for anything strange in the bowl water.

  “All good?” JP called through the door.

  “Uh-huh,” she replied, exhausted by the question and the surrender of privacy.

  They dressed for work to the din of NPR on the HD radio in the kitchen. Dru made a list on a Post-it note, stuck it into her pocket, and then pocketed the pad.

  He was bundled in Patagonia, she in Pendleton wool. JP went down to the secure parking area to warm the car, while Dru gathered her slim plastic binders of printed data: spreadsheets and market graphics and slogans to present to City of Chicago housing official and private northside donors, all marketable and conceptually vibrant ideas, in hopes of garnering even more funds for even more low- and mixed-income neighborhood revitalization. To Dru, Chicago remained a wreck. She was addicted to fixing it.

  JP marched back upstairs to hurry her. She rolled her eyes at his offer to carry her bag. Before walking out, they peered into the small nursery, a mostly-IKEA affair, light gray and white with a flourish of tangerine, executed with semi-precision. Though the aesthetic achievement no longer kicked up the pulse, the IKEA now conjuring a private college dorm room, they couldn’t help but pay homage to the space every time they left the house.

  They drove from their Bucktown worker’s cottage toward that cloud-chopped downtown skyline. Dru needed to pee, again, and she jostled in the heated leather seat. She ate crackers and chewed a couple of mint-flavored Tums. There was more NPR. She clicked a pen open and scratched on a Post-it, then stuffed the missive into her coat pocket. JP reached over to stroke her hand. She let him, and even reciprocated, squeezing his fingers.

  Snow or no snow, they were thrilled about Lucinda. The child would be named after Lucy George Wallis, Dru’s sister-close cousin. Nothing could take the shine off of that.

  NPR national pitched over to local, WBEZ. South Side traffic was clogged, on account of “another dog trapped on the Eisenhower Expressway.” A shepherd of some sort, the female news announcer noted. It was caught, as per the usual, between the concrete barriers.

  “It’ll be okay,” JP said preemptively.

  “It won’t,” Dru replied.

  2

  They’d met at a party in a loft with a rooftop deck, a couple of years before. It had been a brisk October evening, at the home of a respected activist-poet—a board member of Dru’s nonprofit—who was partnered to a celebrated architect from JP’s extended circle. There were drinks. Handshakes. Qualifications. Charcuterie. Their flirtatious parry over social responsibility and mixed affordable housing, versus the fact that JP owned a rehab-slash-house-flipping outfit. There was the way Dru spoke of Mississippi, and the way he began to make fun of this.

  “You’ve been there?” she asked, eyebrows arched.

  “No, ma’am,” JP replied in a soap-opera southern drawl. He’d grinned wide as a melon slice, until she stared him into submission. “Hey, no offense,” he offered. “Promise.”

  Dru sucked her drink through the cocktail straw, said, “You’d better watch it, man. And you had better stay cute. I tell you, if you ever lose that cute, your comments’ll have your ass in a sling.”

  Her wink.

  His craftsman’s hands.

  The authority she wielded while discussing Chicago building codes. Her interrupting an adjacent academic conversation made of classist snark to assert, gently, that if humanities scholars would only mix a bit more Virginia Pugh with their Virginia Woolf—the former being the birth name of Tammy Wynette, Itawamba County, Miss’ippi, of course—well, academics might not seem like such one-dimensional snoot-holes. “ ’Cause, I mean, nobody wants that. Right, y’all? Don’t you guys want to talk to the very people who need talkin’ to?”

  JP, embarrassed at this, but even more so enraptured, branded the declarative nature of Dru’s interruption as pure midwestern. “Not one hint of southern passive-aggressiveness, yet not rude enough for New York,” he explained. “A sure sign that you have embraced the nuance of my region.”

  “Dammit,” she replied. “You’re right.”

  Following a half hour of their own kinetic, rambling conversation, the two had snuck up to that rooftop deck, where they encountered a gaggle of young poets, tattooed and oily-haired, and desperate to be, well, poetic . . . and who were sparking a joint.

  A joint, JP thought. How silly. And lovely. And panic-y. And, I will if she does.

  As their footsteps crackled into the gravel and tar rooftop, its décor of container gardens and pitched skylights and clean aluminum heating exhausts, he did. Because she did.

  When the poetic stoners had filed back downstairs to the party to drink free designer beer and dissect the elites (who would never, no fucking way ever, resemble their own future selves), JP asked Dru to please stay behind. He mumbled and shuffled, stared out at the miles-long city, and told her she made him, well, comfortable. He’d then mumbled more, said that he was sorry to be forward, but, well, truth was he hadn’t smoked weed in a long, long time . . . and why in the hell had he done so anyway? . . . But whatever, he wasn’t going to worry about it because you just have to cut loose sometimes, maybe . . . though still, he felt like it would be a bit weird to go back inside and try to do the social thing . . . not that he couldn’t, but, you know, so, um, yes, “Would you mind staying with me for a few more minutes?” he asked. “Oh, and I don’t know if you caught it the first time, but I’m JP.”

  “I caught it,” Dru had replied. Then she kissed him.

  His head had tilted sideways, like a puppy’s. She giggled and turned away. Neither of them knew whether to kiss again, or ignore the first peck altogether. So they just stood there, hands in pockets while staring out at the city, bumping shoulders like teenage crushers. A minute later Dru had pulled out a Post-it note and a pen, writing:

  JP. Weed. Night. Chi-skyline windows like glitter: October rooftop northside party. Winter so close it’s a bit cold I smooched him. Jesus!

  “What’s up with that?” JP asked.

  “Habit.” She had folded the note and jammed it into her pocket. “Don’t let it get to you. I just can’t trust my memory.”

  “You telling me you’d forget all this?”

  She shrugged. “I only know that I don’t want to. Though in a way, half the remembering is up to you, right?”


  “Me forget you? Not a chance.”

  Dru retrieved the note from her pocket, then put it into his. She tugged on his jacket lapel a couple of times. “Make sure you don’t.”

  3

  Over that first year, they sat at sidewalk cafés in Wicker Park, in late May, drinking straw-colored Kölsch in the sun. They chased rumors of otherworldly gaeng garee in Skokie, and found cochinita pibil sandwiches on a side street in western Humbolt Park. They moved into a rickety loft near that same sandwich shop . . . before Dru gave up some frame of her guarded independence, her defiant autonomy, and agreed to relocate to one of JP’s past flips, a design-website-profiled, gut rehab in Bucktown.

  All the while, she’d made known that these stops were only temporary; she was moving home to Mississippi, period. All the while there were her little bouts of sadness.

  At least, little bouts was how JP thought of them then. The off-line, off-radar, curtains-drawn-for-a-day-or-maybe-two-type moods. Hyphenations. They were just a part of the deal with her, but still.

  The upside was so much stronger. An eclipse, the upbeat Dru smothered any sense of the down. And whenever it couldn’t, when she couldn’t quite claw back up, they would hit the road. Outrun her condition, so it seemed. They went to the Brat Stop in Kenosha, Wisconsin (his idea). To Club Ebony in Indianola, Mississipi (hers).

  Now and again Dru would mention the years-before death of her cousin Lucy George. These memories might be triggered care of a travel write-up of Mississippi in the Sunday Times, or conjured by the B-roll in a cable movie rerun. No matter the prompt, the facts JP collected were forever the same: Lucy had fallen from a tree as a girl, and she died. Dru had witnessed the event, and left Pitchlynn soon after.

  No. Not left. She was sent away from home.

  Now and again, Dru’s memory was struck by Lucy out of the seeming blue, if not in stark contrast or clash with the setting or moment. Such was the case after a date night to Little Italy, an evening of tagliata with rosemary and sage, and triangle-shaped fazzoletti stuffed with funghi porcini, as had been sailed in across a virtual Mediterranean of vino rosso. Dru and JP had come home in a state that limned love to agitation, a.k.a., they were slobbered by wine. She had thrown open one of the huge double-pane windows, then straddled the sill while smoking a cig. (She forever refused to tell JP where she’d hidden the pack.) Unable to scold her, or to carry on at all, JP had fought out of his clothes, then collapsed into bed. Dru had joined him there soon after.