by Lori Ostlund
“When your mother arrived that night,” she said, “I didn’t know she was coming. You might not believe that, but she just pulled into the yard and knocked on the door. I went out and got her suitcases from the trunk, sent him on his way. I didn’t know he was a pastor, not then. I figured it all out later, that he believed they were running away together, to be together. I guess Dee let him think that, let him burn his bridges. When I leaned in the window to tell him I had everything and to thank him for bringing her, he started crying, just sat there smoking a cigarette and crying. I guess he was accepting the truth, that she’d just needed—” She stopped abruptly.
“A way out,” Aaron said, and Gloria nodded.
“I didn’t ask any questions, Aaron. I should have. I should have asked, first thing, where you were, but I didn’t. I’ve never pushed Dee on things, and I guess that’s why she’s stayed. Sometimes, she feels like talking, and she does, talks and talks, but that’s rare. If I ask her a question point-blank, she gives me the silent treatment for days. So I don’t ask. I’ve made it easy for her, too easy, and I’m sorry about that.”
He thought about what Charles Gronseth had said on the telephone just the week before, that his mother ran away because she had lost the ability to make her life interesting. “She came here to die, didn’t she?” he said.
Gloria’s hands were stacked like baseball mitts on the table in front of her. “Maybe something like that was on her mind, but I don’t know whether she was thinking about, you know.”
“Killing herself?” Then, because he felt he had to know, he asked, “Did she try?”
“There are other ways to stop living,” Gloria said carefully.
“Meaning?”
“She never tried anything specific, Aaron. Still, I can’t help but think she came here because she was ready to . . . to give up, I guess. She was tired of doing all the things that people do to keep living—working, paying bills, making decisions.”
“Taking care of her son,” he added.
She nodded. “Yes, but also she didn’t want you to go through that.”
“Through what?” he said. “Through wondering where she was, whether she was still alive? Or through wondering, every day for years, whether I was the reason she’d left? What, exactly, didn’t she want me to go through?”
“I’m sorry,” Gloria said. “Clary kept telling me I needed to be harder on her, but I wouldn’t listen. I just thought he didn’t want me to be happy. Anyway, the truth is that having Dee here hasn’t made me happy, or her less unhappy.”
“Has it at least made you less lonely?” he asked. “Because being around people you love, even those who don’t love you back the same way, sometimes that can at least make you less lonely.” He paused. “Though usually it makes you more lonely.”
“You were wise as a boy also,” Gloria said. “Just seven years old, but you understood Clary so well. You had an instinct for people even then.” Gloria did not want to talk about her feelings for his mother, and that was fine. He was not even sure that talking about the past helped. Maybe it did allow you to clarify things so that you could move on. Or maybe it just kept pulling you backward. “I told her plenty of times that she needed to find you,” Gloria said, “but I should have insisted.”
“Did you know that Walter wrote to her?” he asked.
“Not the first time, but she showed me the letter that came last month.”
Gloria picked at the nuts on her caramel roll, and he thought again of her cracking walnuts on the couch beside his mother all those years ago. How strange it must be for her to have him here, a boy who had returned a man.
“I left him,” Aaron said. “I left Walter.”
Gloria nodded. “I figured as much. You know, from how the letter sounded.”
“Right after she disappeared, I moved in with a family in town, the Hagedorns. I don’t know how I would have survived that year if they hadn’t taken me in, but all I could think about was how to get away. I wanted to go to college, but she’d left just five hundred and two dollars behind in the bank for me. And then Walter came along. He gave me a home. He paid for me to go to college. He taught me everything. This life I have, who I am today? I owe it to Walter.”
“Walter sounds like a fine man, but you had something in you, Aaron, something special. You made Clary laugh, and nobody ever made Clary laugh. You were a good, sweet boy, a smart boy. That much I know.”
“Thank you, Gloria. I appreciate that, I do, but it doesn’t change the fact that Walter made it possible for me to have a different life. And how did I repay him? I got in a truck in the middle of the night and disappeared. I haven’t called or written. Nothing.”
“Walter did the things he did because he wanted to,” Gloria said. “People pretend otherwise, but they almost always do what they want to do. I let your mother stay because that’s what I wanted. Anyway, I’ve learned the hard way what happens when you stay with someone out of guilt or feeling beholden. People do it all the time, sure, but they end up angry or bitter or worse, hating the other person.”
“By the end, I felt like I hated Walter,” he said quietly. “I kept a journal of all the things he did that drove me crazy. It was a way to make sense of it, I suppose, but also a way to see the evidence lined up, as my friend Bill would say, and to give myself permission to leave.
“Years ago, when we were still living here in Minnesota, I knew this woman who had three cats she loved more than anything, but she also had a husband who did not love the cats. They were always underfoot, he said, doing things—shredding his papers, peeing on his clothes, swiping at him every time he walked by. They didn’t do stuff like that to her. One day he’d had enough, so while she was at work, he loaded the cats into his car, drove out in the country, and just left them there by the road. That night, when my friend got home from work and couldn’t find them, she asked her husband if he’d seen them. He said no at first, but finally she got it out of him, what he’d done. She left him that very night. When she told me the story later, she said that every time one of the cats peed in his shoes or hissed, she wondered what it was about him that they sensed, so when he got rid of them like that, she was actually relieved because she finally knew what the cats had known all along.
“I used to wish Walter would do something like that, something so terrible or unjust or cruel that it made leaving the necessary thing to do. But that’s the thing about Walter. He’s a good person. All those years he did everything I needed, but the more he did for me, the more I started to hate him for it.”
He was crying now, and he tried to stop himself by taking a bite of the caramel roll, but that only made it worse, his throat tight with his tears and the dryness of the bread.
Gloria nodded. “You wanted Walter to be wrong so you didn’t have to be, but there isn’t always one person who’s right and another who’s wrong. Sometimes—usually—it’s not that easy.”
Neither of them spoke for a long time, until finally Gloria said, “Here’s what I know, Aaron. When your mother left, she wasn’t thinking about you—for better or worse, she wasn’t. She was thinking about herself. Maybe she was planning to end her life, or maybe she was trying to salvage it. I don’t know which, but I do know that sometimes the most you can do is save yourself.”
24
* * *
“Gloria,” he said, “I’m sorry to ask, but I need to know about the closet, about what happened the night before my father died.”
Gloria pushed her plate with the half-eaten caramel roll aside. “Are you sure?” she asked. “I’ll tell you the whole story, but only if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” he said. “Was that what she was telling you when Clary sent me out to spy?”
“She told me just part of the story that day, but when she came to stay, that’s when she told me the rest, over and over until I was worn out from reliving it with her. Then, one day she just stopped talking about it. She hasn’t mentioned it since.”
; “But you still remember what happened?”
“I remember every detail,” Gloria said.
As Gloria told him the story of what had happened in the closet the night before the parade, he felt like he was watching a movie, a movie that he thought he hadn’t seen before, except as he watched, he realized he had because he already knew what was going to happen just before it did. She began with their return from the Englund family vacation. In the week after he kicked the sitting-down Paul Bunyan, the three of them had maintained a truce that primarily took the form of silence. He remembered the silence, the way that conversation was tossed like a hot potato around the supper table, and the relief that he and his mother both felt when his father went back to work. He remembered his mother telling him that on Saturday they would be attending the SummerFest Parade, in which his father would be participating on behalf of the police department. It would be Aaron’s first parade, but his mother said that she liked parades and thought he would like them also.
“You’ll see,” she’d said. “There’s something nice about standing on the sidewalk and watching everything move past you, floats and marching bands, clowns and regular people.”
“Why?” he asked. He meant why were all these people going to line up in the street and march past them? Why was his father going to join them? What his mother described made no sense.
But she thought he was asking how she knew he would like it, and she replied with something unworthy of her, something about all children liking parades. “Right after the parade,” she added, whispering but excited, “everything will change.”
The next afternoon his mother produced his suitcase, just as she had that first night in the cabin after the standing-up Paul Bunyan. It was neatly packed and almost full. “You can choose three more things to put in,” she said, “but you need to do it quickly, before your father gets home.”
“My father doesn’t know about my suitcase?” he asked.
“Not yet,” said his mother. “It’s a surprise for tomorrow, after the parade.”
She made the finger-to-lips gesture that meant this was their secret and then stood by as he hastily chose a blue sweater vest, a book about a boy called Silly Billy, and his stuffed giraffe, whose neck he liked to sleep on. The giraffe was a gift from some people his mother had once worked for. She closed his suitcase, which was not easy with the giraffe neck, and once this was done, she set it in the closet and told him not to touch it.
“When your father gets home,” she said, “I want you to stay in your room.” He said that he would, and she pulled his door shut behind her.
When he heard the squad car pull into the driveway, he went to the closet and checked on the suitcase that was a secret from his father. He could hear his parents in the kitchen, the low rumble of their voices, and then his father yelling and the sound of glass breaking. His father did not like to be talked to when he first got home.
His mother had said only that he was to stay in his room. She had said nothing about not opening the door. He opened it quietly. “Where?” he heard his father say. “You have nowhere.” His mother responded, her voice too low to hear, and just like that Aaron found himself out in the hallway, pulled steadily toward the kitchen, where things were being said that he was not meant to hear.
His mother stood at the stove heating something in a pot, and his father stood nearby, still wearing his uniform, hat on his head, holster on his hip, handcuffs at the ready. Aaron stood to the side of the doorway, for the trick was not to be seen, or else his father would widen the scope of his anger to include him, and that he could not bear, not with the memory of his father’s hand on his head, ruffling his hair in front of the sitting-down Paul Bunyan, the other parents applauding what they called his pluck in standing up to the giant because people admired pluck.
Even though his mother’s back was to him, Aaron could hear her clearly now. “I can’t take it anymore,” she said. “I just can’t.”
“I said, ‘Where?’ ” demanded his father, but she kept stirring, and his father moved up close behind her. “I have a right to know. You’re not going to your parents, so where? To that chickenshit brother of yours? To the dyke? Or maybe you think the Jews will be waiting with open arms?” His father laughed. “You could start a baseball team with the band of misfits you’ve got, Dolores.”
His mother continued stirring, and his father grabbed the pot from the stove and dumped the contents onto the floor. It was stew.
“There,” said his father.
His mother stood with the dripping wooden spoon in her hand. She still did not speak. “You’re not going anywhere ’til that’s cleaned up,” his father said, his voice smug.
His mother crouched with a handful of paper towels and swabbed up the stew, but her calmness seemed to anger his father even more and he snapped open the refrigerator and began flinging food onto the floor until they were surrounded by a moat of broken eggs and mayonnaise, leftover hotdish and milk. He squirted mustard and ketchup on top, the colors creating a festive icing.
“Jerry,” said his mother. “You’re just making a mess for yourself.”
“You want to see a mess?” said his father. He was panting. “Fine, you go ahead and leave, but Aaron stays with me. Then you’ll see what a mess I can make.”
His mother rose with the stew-filled paper towels and turned toward the garbage can. “Try to stop us,” she said. “I’ll call your friends at the station and have them escort us out of the house.”
His father lunged, grabbing his mother and twisting her right arm behind her until she was bent over, her upside-down face peering at Aaron. He could see that it hurt, but his father yanked her arm higher.
“Jerry, please,” his mother said, and his father stepped back, releasing her. “Let’s go,” she said, talking to Aaron now, and his father turned and saw him there. His mother walked fast down the hallway to his room, and Aaron trotted to keep up. She boosted him onto the bed and picked up his shoes, the shoes with which he had kicked the sitting-down Paul Bunyan. “They’re getting tight,” she said. She gripped his ankles hard and forced them onto his feet.
“My suitcase,” he said.
“I know,” said his mother, and she went over to the closet and bent in.
Aaron saw his father come in and move toward the closet. He could have called to her then. “Watch out,” he could have said. “Watch out for my father.”
Instead, he watched his father place his hands on his mother’s buttocks and push her into the closet the way he had pushed her into the oven, as though he were Hansel and Gretel, and she the witch. Her head hit the wall, and his father scooped him up and dropped him inside with her. The door shut. He heard his father fumbling for the key that they kept above the door, fitting it inside the lock.
“Jerry,” called his mother. She jiggled the knob and banged on the door.
Aaron heard his bed creak loudly as his father settled on top of it. And then they waited.
Eventually—Aaron was not sure how long it had been—they heard his father rise from the bed and leave the room. His mother spoke to him then, whispering, “He’ll let us out. He will. He’s just trying to teach us a lesson.” She reached for his hand, but there in the dark he imagined that her hand was a snake or a mouse, not his mother at all. He pulled away, startled, and she did not try to touch him again. When his father returned, the smell of bacon and eggs came with him, wafting under the closet door. They could hear him setting things—a plate, cutlery, a glass—on the nightstand and the bed creaking again.
“Jerry, Aaron is hungry,” said his mother. He had not said that he was hungry.
His father did not reply, but they heard his fork scraping, the sound of him chewing and swallowing, the glass knocking against his teeth each time he drank. His father belched, as he did at the end of every meal.
“What did you have?” asked his mother encouragingly. “It smells like bacon.”
“Did I ever tell you my favorite bacon story?”
his father said.
“Why don’t you open the door and tell me while I clean up that greasy pan?”
“The pan is fine,” said his father. He sounded relaxed, like he was enjoying himself. “Once the grease sets, I might spread some on a slice of bread. I’m going to need a midnight snack.”
“I can make dessert,” said his mother. “I’ll make a crisp. We still have some of those apples left from the motel.”
His father snorted. “And have him puke all over my arm again? Anyway, I have my own dessert,” he said, and they heard him take another drink.
“Jerry,” his mother said, “you know you don’t like drinking.”
“Actually,” said his father, “I do like drinking, and this is a special occasion.”
“What’s special about it?” said his mother.
His father laughed. “How can you ask such a silly question?” he said. “First of all, do you spend most nights in the closet?” His father paused to take another drink. They heard the steady expulsion of his flatulence. “No,” said his father. “You don’t spend most nights in the closet, because you have a bed, and Aaron has a bed, but you don’t care about that, about how lucky you both are to have beds.”
“Jerry, are you drunk?” his mother said.
“I’m celebrating,” said his father. “Tomorrow I’m going to be in a parade, and tonight I’m having bacon and eggs for supper, and I was just about to tell you my favorite bacon story. Don’t you want to hear my story? Do you have something else to do?”
“No,” said his mother. “I do want to hear it.”
“It’s short, but it’s very funny. When I tell the story, I want you to laugh for once in your goddamn life. Okay?”
“Okay,” said his mother. “Tell me the story, and I’ll laugh.”
“Okay,” said his father. “It’s about the Jews. Do you remember the first time I met the Jews?”
