by Lori Ostlund
“Did you write back to him?” he asked.
“No. What would’ve been the point? He didn’t write because he wanted to make me feel better. He wrote because he was angry at me.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Aaron,” she said, sounding sad and wise and like a mother. “He wanted me to know that you didn’t need me, that you were just fine, that you had managed nicely without me. He didn’t say that the two of you were—you know—but I could tell because he was just so angry.” Aaron did not know what to make of this, how to reconcile what his mother was telling him with the way that Walter had always talked to him about his mother, patiently, as though Aaron were a student in need of his advice.
“Did you come here to Gloria right away?” Aaron asked, even though he knew the answer. What he wanted to know—what he was trying to bring the conversation around to—was why she had left.
“It’s not like that,” his mother said. “Why does everything have to be about that?”
“About what?” he said, not understanding her response or the irritation in her voice.
“About”—she paused and even her pause sounded mad—“about love.”
The afternoon that he opened the envelope Bill had given him and looked at his mother’s address, he had not recognized it as Gloria’s. He had gone to Bill’s funeral that morning and then to the hippie café to drink several beers in his friend’s honor, and though he was not drunk, he thought that the funeral and the beer explained what he did next: he dialed the telephone number for Charles Gronseth, which Bill had also included. Charles Gronseth picked up after just two rings, and when Aaron identified himself, there was silence and then Charles Gronseth said, “Just a minute, please,” and Aaron heard him say to someone, his wife he supposed, “It’s a client.”
Bill had told him that Pastor Gronseth was no longer a pastor. He was just Charles Gronseth, married for the third time and living in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where he sold insurance, successfully Aaron imagined, for Charles Gronseth had always been good at talking, at making people afraid of the unknown.
On the other end, Aaron heard footsteps, a door closing. “What a nice surprise,” said Charles Gronseth. “I thought you might call.” His voice was hearty, but the two statements contradicted each other: one could not be both surprised by a call and expecting it. Charles Gronseth was nervous, which made Aaron feel oddly better.
“I hear you’re selling insurance?” Aaron said.
“Aaron, let’s cut past the small talk,” Charles Gronseth said. “You’re calling because you want to know about your mother. I told everything to that detective, but I guess it still doesn’t make sense to you, so let me explain it one more time.” He paused. “And then I’m going to ask you never to call here again.”
Aaron felt a shot of rage, but when he spoke, he said only, “Fine.”
“Being a pastor is a very lonely thing,” began Charles Gronseth. “Everyone comes to you with their problems. They tell you about themselves, about their marriages and children, their disappointments and failures and weaknesses. And your job is to listen, to offer advice and encouragement, to tell them to pray. But who does the pastor talk to? Nobody wants to hear about his problems. They don’t want to hear that he and his wife sleep in separate rooms, that they keep their cutlery in separate drawers because they can’t bear the thought of their mouths touching the same thing. And your mother was lonely also.”
“I know that,” Aaron said.
“She didn’t think of me as a pastor. We just talked like two regular people. I understood her. We understood each other. At least, that’s what I thought. I thought we were running away together, to be together. I thought we were in love.”
“Love?” Aaron said. He was not expecting the conversation to involve love.
“Yes,” Charles Gronseth said. “I guess that sounds silly to you. It certainly sounds silly to me now. I’ve had a lot of years to think about it.”
“Whose idea was it to, you know, run away?”
“It was your mother’s, but only because it occurred to her first. Believe me—I was more than willing. Then, it turned out that she was just using me.”
“Using you how?” asked Aaron.
“To get up her nerve, I guess. You know how it is. You realize that you need to do something, but you don’t always have it in you to do it on your own.”
“So you used each other,” Aaron said, not defending his mother but stating what seemed obvious.
Charles Gronseth laughed, a bitter laugh. “I suppose we did,” he said. “My wife and I were barely speaking. I woke up one day and realized that my son had become just like her—petty and complaining. When you live every day feeling disappointed, it gets harder and harder to go about your daily duties, to pretend that you know about God and forgiveness and love of any sort, human or divine.”
“And my mother?” said Aaron.
“Your mother understood these things.” He paused. “She was a very unhappy person.”
“I know that,” Aaron said. He did know it. He did not need Charles Gronseth to tell him. “I guess what I really want to know is about that night. Because the last time I saw my mother, she was sitting in the booth with you the way she did every night, looking like she was going to stand up any minute and go to bed and then wake up and do it all over again the next day.” His voice broke, and he stopped.
“I can tell you about it, about that night,” said Pastor Gronseth, “but it will only be my perspective. Okay? Because what I’ve come to accept is that we can never know another person’s mind.”
“Of course,” said Aaron by way of agreeing.
“We left at midnight. I’d snuck my suitcase over to my office earlier that day, and your mother picked me up in the alley behind the church. We got to Gloria’s around three. I drove, but I didn’t know where we were going. I just followed your mother’s directions. She got out of the car and told me to wait. It was so dark, and the only radio was one of those fire-and-brimstone programs, preaching to the sorts of folks who are up at that hour, people who’re feeling miserable and sorry for themselves and lost. I remember wondering whether this radio preacher would ever imagine that a fellow man of the cloth was out there listening to him at that very moment while he waited for the woman he’d just run away with.
“After maybe twenty minutes, Gloria came out. I rolled down the window, and she put out her hand, so I shook it. She told me that your mother was staying, that she had nothing more to say to me but that the car was mine if I wanted it. ‘I’ve come for her suitcases,’ she said. I sat out there maybe another hour. Eventually all the lights in the house went out again, and I finally realized how it was.”
“And that was it?” Aaron asked.
“That was the last time I saw your mother. You know she cried the whole way there. I kept asking if she was okay. She said it was the first time she’d cried in years.”
“Why was she crying?” Aaron asked.
He knew that he wanted Charles Gronseth to say that his mother was crying because of him, but Charles Gronseth said, “I don’t know.” Aaron heard a door open on the other end of the line and Charles Gronseth say, “Sure, honey. Be right there,” and then he heard the door close.
“You didn’t ask why she was crying?”
“I didn’t ask, no. Maybe I was afraid she’d say she was crying because she could see it was all a mistake. There was one thing she did say that I thought about a lot. Still do. She told me that when you lose the ability, the desire, to make your life interesting, then maybe it’s not worth staying alive anymore.”
“You think my mother was going to Gloria’s to kill herself,” Aaron said.
“I don’t know.” Charles Gronseth sighed. “I better go now. My wife needs me.”
“Do you still believe in God?” Aaron asked. He did not know why he asked, except that it seemed a way to know who Charles Gronseth was now that he was no longer Pastor Gronseth.
There was a long sil
ence on the other end, and finally Charles Gronseth said, “I don’t go to church much anymore, but I guess I still believe. I just find it easier to believe when it’s not my job to make sure other people believe also.”
* * *
“You do know that Gloria loves you?” Aaron said, but his mother was silent. “Of course you know. It’s why you came here. It’s also why my father hated her, isn’t it?”
“Your father,” she said, “hated everyone. Did you know that? Do you remember that about him?”
“I remember that he didn’t like me.” Even after all these years, he could not bring himself to say hate. “I remember that everything I said or did made him angry.”
“Yes,” said his mother. “I thought that’s why you’d come.”
“What do you mean?” said Aaron.
She sighed. “What do you remember about that night?”
“What night?” he said, though he supposed she meant the night she disappeared.
“The night before the parade,” said his mother. “We never talked about it, and I could never tell whether you remembered, but I always assumed you must.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You don’t remember being in the closet?” Not waiting for him to answer, she added, “Because it’s all I think about some days.” He heard her tap the armrests of Clarence’s wheelchair. “I’m glad you don’t remember,” she said at last, stood and rolled the chair back across the room. “Good night, Aaron,” said his mother.
He wanted to call out to her, “Tell me about the closet. Tell me everything,” but the door creaked open and then closed, and he had said nothing. He listened to her padding down the hallway, not hesitating or bumping against things because she knew this house. She’d lived here longer than she’d lived anywhere else.
He tried to lull himself to sleep, as he often did, by repeating the last line of his favorite Wallace Stevens poem, It can never be satisfied, the mind, never, and when this did not work, he rose, put on his pants, because it seemed wrong to walk around a stranger’s house in his briefs, and made his way down the hallway to the kitchen. There, sitting in the glow of the stove light, was Gloria, wrapped in a puffy robe. She did not look surprised to see him. He was relieved to be wearing pants.
“Can I make you something?” she said. “Tea or hot milk?”
He shook his head. She gestured toward the other chair with one of her large hands, and he found himself staring, as he had while he watched her cook, the fish fillets tiny in her hands, and again during supper, as she wielded her cutlery and reached for the carrots. “My feet too,” she said, because she had noticed his staring. She held up her right foot, but he could not see it properly in the dim light.
“What happened?” he asked.
She shrugged. “A couple of years ago they just started growing. They ached, so I thought it was arthritis maybe, until my shoes didn’t fit anymore. Your mother wanted me to go to the doctor, but I waited until there wasn’t a shoe left in the whole house that I could still get on.”
“What did the doctor say?” He was trying not to sound horrified.
She shrugged again. “It’s rare.”
“I would imagine so,” he said, and Gloria laughed.
“Your mother told me you had a sense of humor.”
His throat tightened. He wanted to pull his chair up close and demand that Gloria tell him everything his mother had ever said about him. Instead, he nodded in a way that invited her to continue the story. She waved her big hand in the air dismissively. “Something was pressing on my pituitary gland,” she said, “which caused the growth, like I was right back in puberty. It’s under control now. The doctor monitors it. I get measured once a year. I haven’t had any new growth in over ten years.”
“So it’s”—he raised his hands, let them drop—“it’s not serious?”
“I’m still here. Dee always gives me a list of questions to ask the doctor, but I like knowing just what I need to know and nothing more.” She hesitated. “It started right after Clary died, so I thought it was my imagination at first, some psychological thing. That probably sounds silly.”
“It doesn’t,” Aaron said.
“I’m just glad Clary wasn’t around for it,” Gloria said. “He hated giants.” She and Aaron laughed together, and then she sipped twice from her cup and studied the clock on the wall. “That thing just keeps losing time,” she said.
“Gloria, does my mother ever talk about my father? About, you know, what happened the night before he died and the closet?” He was making it sound as though he remembered that night also, but he did not think he was being dishonest, not exactly. He had told his mother that he did not remember, which was true, but as he had lain there, listening to her nervous breathing so close by, a memory had overwhelmed him—a memory of her breathing, panting really, in a small, dark space beside him, the smell of urine and wet wool rising around them.
“When you and your mother visited that summer,” Gloria said, “you came down the hallway and stood in the doorway of the front room. You were eavesdropping on us. Do you remember that?”
He nodded. “You were cracking walnuts with your hands, and she was talking about my father,” he said. “But I was sure that neither of you saw me.”
“Your mother, no, but I knew the sorts of tricks my brother was fond of. I knew he’d send you out to spy. He was very upset about the visit. He didn’t speak to me for two days before you and Dolores arrived.”
“Because he didn’t like visitors?”
“There was that.” She fiddled with the belt of her robe. “But he was especially upset that it was your mother coming.”
“He was jealous,” Aaron said, aiming for matter-of-factness, and Gloria coughed and cinched her belt tighter.
“I guess something like that,” she said. “Anyway, what you heard that day, about what your father said? I was very sorry you heard that. Clary was sorry also.”
“It’s such a strange thing, memory,” Aaron said. “I mean, I’m sitting here with you thirty-five years later, and I remember everything about that visit, everything Clarence said to me, even though I didn’t understand half of it. How does that happen? Why does our memory cling to certain things and just discard others?”
“I don’t know,” Gloria said. “I can tell you exactly what your mother was wearing the first time I saw her, but I have no idea what the weather was like the day I got married.”
“You were married?” Aaron said.
“It only lasted a day. He was a nice enough man. His name was Donald, and he sold tires. That’s how we met. He worked at a place outside Fargo. I was bringing a couple of my father’s spring lambs into the lab at the university there. They’d died suddenly, and my father wanted some tests done, just to make sure there was nothing to worry about. I picked up a nail outside of town, and the back tire went. I had to unload both lambs onto the road to get to the spare. I must have been quite a sight, changing a tire with a couple of dead lambs looking on.”
They both laughed, and Aaron recalled with a twinge that he had been put off by Gloria as a boy, had not liked the way she doted on Clarence, cutting his meat and patting his head. She was a good person, kind, and he felt ashamed that he had not recognized this then.
“And so you loaded up the sheep and limped over to his tire shop on your spare, and while he fixed your flat, you fell in love?” he said.
“Well, he did fix my tire, but the marriage was really just a matter of convenience, maybe not for him so much—men get away with a lot more—but I was twenty-six, and people were starting to talk. He was impressed that I’d changed the flat by myself, and there was something nice about that, about looking at another person and seeing myself reflected as smart and capable. So when Donald started driving out here on Sundays, I didn’t object. It was the first time anyone had pursued me, and there was something nice about that also.” She sounded embarrassed.
“I was tired of my life
here, tired of the farm, of taking care of everything and having all the attention go to Clary. The truth is, I was tired of Clary and of my parents’ guilt and sadness. And Donald really was a very decent man.” She tapped one of her giant fingers on the table to emphasize this, to let him know that there had been nothing wrong with Donald. “I thought maybe it could work somehow, so a couple of months later we eloped. We drove down to Minneapolis, got married, and went to a ball game. That was our honeymoon. We were staying with his cousin out in Stillwater, but that night when we got back from the game . . . well, afterward, I realized it wasn’t for me.”
It took Aaron a moment to understand what Gloria meant: she had had sex with Donald and knew she could not do it for a lifetime, could not do it even one more time.
“The next morning I woke Donald up and told him I just wasn’t cut out for it. I didn’t go into the specifics because I’d heard men feel bad about such things. He wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t try to stop me. I walked to a bus stop, got on the next bus, and rode until I liked the look of things. I got off, found the job with the electric company the next day, and that’s where I met Dolores. She started a week after me.”
“Did you ever hear from Donald?” Aaron asked.
“No. As far as I know, we’re still married, but he’s surely passed by now. He was an older gentleman, almost fifty when we got married.”
“I could look him up on the Internet,” Aaron said. “Put in his name and see what comes up.”
“Thank you,” Gloria said, “but I’d rather not know.”
Aaron nodded. He thought he should say good night, get some sleep so that he could wake up in the morning, which was only a few hours off, and leave. Gloria took her cup over to the sink, where she spent several minutes washing it, several more rinsing it. Next, she opened a cupboard and took down two plates and retrieved a bag from the bread box. He did not know that people still had bread boxes. Inside the bag were homemade caramel rolls with walnuts. She put a roll on each plate and set one in front of him, the other in front of herself.
