by Richard Ford
I heard his bare feet on the floor, then, limping and sliding. I heard the closet door open and the sound of a coat hanger skidding over metal. I could hear the sounds of clothes moving, and of breathing, and of a shoe-step on the floor in the bedroom. And then my mother’s door opened again, and she and Warren Miller came out together into the hall. He had on the white shirt and trousers he’d been wearing at his house earlier that night, and he was holding his boots. My mother only had on her bathrobe and a pair of shoes I could hear but not see in the darkness. They did not look in my direction; I knew they did not think of me or where I was. They simply walked across the hallway–they were holding hands one behind the other–and into the kitchen and across the floor to the back door. I heard the back door open, and for just a moment I thought my mother was showing him to the back door so he could leave. But then the back door shut quietly, and the screen door shut quietly outside. And the house was silent and empty except for me in the hallway alone and the sound of the water hissing in the tank where Warren had tried to make it stop but been unable to.
I walked to the back door and looked out. In the moonlight I could see nothing but the corner of the old garage at the back of the lot–a garage we did not use–and the shadow of the birch tree on the ground of the side yard. I could not see my mother and Warren Miller. They were gone.
I walked back into my own room and looked out the window toward the street. And I could see Warren Miller then, and my mother. They were on the sidewalk, walking side by side and no longer holding hands. He still had his boots under his arms, and they were hurrying away from the house, almost running, as if they were cold and wanted to get someplace warmer. Together they hurried out into the dark street. They didn’t look either way–my mother held her bathrobe up so she could take longer steps. They did not look back or seem to be saying anything to each other. But I could see from the window that they were hurrying toward a car parked by itself across the street. It was Warren Miller’s pink car sitting in the shadows and collected leaves, unnoticeable there if you were not expecting to see it.
When they got to the car my mother hurried around to the passenger’s side and got in. Warren Miller got in the driver’s side and closed the door after him. The red taillight went on immediately. I saw the interior light snap on, saw them both inside–my mother sitting far across the seat against her door and Warren behind the steering wheel. The motor suddenly came alive and white exhaust blew into the air behind the car. I saw my mother’s face turn toward Warren Miller, and I thought she said something about the light, because the interior light went off then, and the brake lights went out. But the car did not move. It just sat in the darkness across the street. I stood at my window and watched, waiting for it to drive away, for my mother and Warren Miller to go off toward wherever they were going–to his house, or a motel or another city, or to someplace where I would never see either of them again. But that is not what happened. The Oldsmobile stayed where it was with its motor running and its lights off, and my mother and him inside. I could not see them in the dark, and little by little the window glass became clouded from their being there inside together breathing.
I stayed at my window and watched the car for a few minutes more. And nothing happened, nothing that I could see, though I supposed I knew what was happening. Just the thing you would think, nothing surprising. One car came down Eighth Street and did not slow down or notice. Its headlights passed over the clouded windows and illuminated the engine exhaust. But I couldn’t see either my mother or Warren Miller inside. I wondered if they were in danger of suffocating because of the exhaust filtering back into the car. It was a thing you read about. And I decided that they were. But they knew about that and would have to worry about it themselves. If they died where they were and for the reasons they were there, it would be their fault, and I couldn’t help them. And after a few minutes of standing at the cold window, watching the car and its exhaust, I closed my curtain and walked back through the house where I was alone.
From my room I walked into the hall and down to the bathroom. Water was still running in the toilet, and I picked up the lid off the tank, stuck my bare arm down into the cold water until I could feel the slick rubber stopper at the bottom. I held it down until the water stopped running, and my arm felt hard and cold. I waited a minute, it must’ve been, with my hand in the water so that I was sure the stopper would hold, then I dried my arm and replaced the lid, and tried to think what I should do next–if I should get in bed again and go to sleep, or if I should go in the kitchen and read with the light on, or put on my clothes and walk out into the night away from where my mother was in Warren Miller’s car, and maybe not come back, or come back in two days, or call from someplace, or never call.
What I did was to go into the kitchen where my mother’s bottle of whiskey was still on the countertop in the dark, and got the flashlight from under the sink. I turned the flashlight on and went with it–shining back down the hall–and into my mother’s room where the curtains were drawn shut and the bed was tumbled all around, and a pillow and part of the sheet were on the floor. There was an odd smell in the air there–the smell of my mother’s perfume and some other smell also that was like hand lotion, and that wasn’t sweet but I thought I knew from someplace but couldn’t remember where. I shined the light around–at the clock turned toward the wall by the bed, at the closet door, which was open and my mother’s clothes pushed out, at her green dress and green shoes and stockings, which were lying on the one chair. There was nothing in particular I wanted to find, or anything I thought would be secret. It was just my mother’s room, with her belongings in it, and nothing she was doing now would make anything there be different or special.
There was no sign of my father in the room, I did notice that–as though he had never lived there. His golf bag was gone. The pictures that he had left on the bureau top were gone. The leather box where he kept his cuff links was put away someplace, some drawer, and the books he kept on the golf game and teaching golf were down off the top of the bureau where he’d had them standing and lined up. There was only a framed picture of him on the wall beside the window, almost hidden by the curtain. Maybe my mother had overlooked that. I shined my flashlight on its glass. In the picture my father was wearing a pair of light-colored pants and light-colored shoes and a white short-sleeved shirt. He was standing alone on some golf course, holding a driver, looking down the open fairway and smiling, ready to hit the ball that was at his feet. And he was young in the picture, his face looked young and his hair was short and his arms looked strong. He looked like a man who knew what he was doing. He could hit the ball out of sight any time he got ready, and was just making sure things were the way he wanted them to be. ‘That’s the way you play this game,’ he had said when he showed me the picture the first time, when I was ten or twelve. ‘Like you know what you’re doing every second. Clear your mind out. You don’t have a care in the world. Then everything you hit goes in the hole. It’s when you have a lot on your mind, Joe, that you leave everything short. There’s no mystery to it.’ It was my father’s favorite picture of himself, taken when he and my mother were first married and I was not even dreamed up. As I shined my flashlight on that picture then, onto my father’s clean smiling face without a care in the world, I was glad he wasn’t here now to know about any of this. I was glad he was where he was, and hoped it somehow could be all over and done with before he came home to find everything in his life and my life and my mother’s, too, out of all control and out of all sense.
I looked out my mother’s window, between the closed curtains, and into the yard. Maybe ten minutes had gone by since I saw her leave in her bathrobe with Warren Miller carrying his boots. There were no lights on in the houses on our street and no cars moving. I could just see the back of Warren Miller’s car, see the exhaust still coming out of it. I could hear, I thought, the low rumbles of the motor. I guessed that whatever they’d been doing in my mother’s room had all of a sudden
been hard to do or had made too much noise, so that the car had seemed like a better place. Out in our little yard the grass was white with frost and moonlight. The weeping birch tree cast a wider, denser shadow toward the street. A magpie stood in the middle of things there, alone. It moved, a hop one way and another, picked into the grass, looked around, then moved again. I put my flashlight flat against the glass and clicked it on and shined a dim light out onto the bird where it stayed still and did not look up or at me, but stared straight ahead–so it seemed to me–at nothing. It did not know I was there. It could not feel the light that was on it, couldn’t see anything different occurring. It just sat as though it was waiting for something to start to happen that would give it a reason to move or fly or even look in one direction or the other. It wasn’t afraid simply because it knew nothing to be afraid of. I tapped the cold glass with my fingernail–not loud, just enough for the bird to hear. It turned its head so that its red eyes went right up into the light. And it opened its wings once as though it was stretching, then closed them, hopped once toward me, then flew suddenly straight up at the light and the glass and at me, as if it was about to hit the window or break it through. Only it didn’t touch anything, but flew up into the dark and out of my sight completely, leaving me there with my heart pounding, and my light shining onto the cold yard at nothing.
I heard a car door close. I switched off my light and stood by the side of the curtain so that I could still see out but not be seen. I did not hear anyone’s voice speak, but my mother appeared on the sidewalk then, hurrying the way she had before, her arms folded across her chest, her shoes tapping the concrete. She turned in the driveway and went out of my sight. And when she did, Warren Miller’s car moved away slowly in the dark without its lights. I could hear it, its big muffler making a deeper rumbling sound down the quite street. I saw its taillights snap on red, and then it disappeared.
I walked out of my mother’s room and back down the hall in the dark to the spot I had been in when she and Warren Miller had left the house fifteen minutes before, or maybe thirty minutes before. I had lost track of time, though with all of what was going on it didn’t seem to matter. I heard my mother open the back door. She opened it just the way she would any day–as if everything was normal. I heard her in the kitchen. The ceiling light went on. I heard her running water in the sink, filling a glass, and I knew she was standing, drinking water in her bathrobe–something anyone would do on any night. I heard her run more water, then wait, then put the glass away and go and lock the door. Then she walked straight out through the kitchen into the hall where I was waiting in the shadows as I had been before.
But she did not see me. She did not even look in the direction I was, toward my door. She passed across the hall and went into the bathroom. I had only a moment to see her. Her bathrobe was open and I could see her bare knees as she took her steps. Inside, she turned on the light but did not close the door. I could hear her use the toilet and then the flushing sound and water running in the sink and the sound of her washing her hands. I was waiting there, outside the light. I had nothing planned to say or to do. I must’ve believed I would say something when she came back out, or just wanted to say, ‘Hello,’ or ‘This is all right … I don’t mind.’ Or ‘What are you doing?’ But none of those words were in my mind. I was simply there, and it occurred to me that she didn’t know it yet. She did not know what I knew about this–about Warren Miller and her, about what I’d seen or thought of it. And until she knew it, until we talked about it–even if she assumed everything and I did, too–it had not exactly happened, and we did not exactly have to have it between us after tonight. It would just be a thing we could ignore and finally forget. And what I should do was go back inside my room, get into my bed and go to sleep, and when I woke up try to think about something else.
But my mother came out of the bathroom before I could move. Again she did not look in my direction. She turned toward her bedroom, where I had been five minutes before. But all at once she turned back because she’d left the light on in the bathroom, and I suppose wanted to turn it off. And that is when she saw me, standing in the shadows in my underwear, watching her like a burglar who’d broken in the house to steal something and been caught.
‘Oh God damn it,’ my mother said before I could say a word or even move. She came down the hall to where I was, and she slapped me in the face with her open hand. And then she slapped me again with her other hand. ‘I’m mad at you,’ she said.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I didn’t try to move or raise my hand or do anything. Her bathrobe was open in front, and she was naked underneath. I could see her stomach and all of that. I had seen my mother naked before but this was different and I wished that she had her clothes on.
‘I wish I was dead,’ she said, and she turned around and walked back down the hall to her room. She was not crying. And she did not try to close the front of her bathrobe. When she got into the light that came out of the bathroom, she turned around and looked at me. Her face was angry. Her mouth seemed large and her eyes wide open. Her hands were made into fists, and I thought she might be thinking of coming back down the hall and hitting me again. Nothing seemed impossible. ‘You probably want to leave, don’t you? Now, anyway,’ she said. ‘Go ahead. That’s the way everything always happens. People do things. There isn’t any plan. What’s next? Who knows?’ She raised her hands with her palms up in a way I’d seen people do before. ‘If you’ve got a plan for me, tell me. I’ll try to do it. Maybe it’ll be better than this.’
‘I don’t have one,’ I said. My face was beginning to throb where she’d hit me. It hadn’t hurt at first, but now it did. I wondered if the second time she hadn’t hit me with her fist–maybe by accident–because my eye hurt. ‘I don’t care,’ I said. I stood back against the wall and didn’t say anything else. I could feel myself breathe, feel my heart beat, feel my hands going cold. I must’ve been afraid but didn’t know it.
‘A man like him can be handsome,’ my mother said. ‘You don’t know about that. You don’t know anything but just this. I guess I should be more discreet. This house is too small.’ She turned around and walked down the hall and into her room. She did not turn the light on. I heard her shoes hit the floor, heard her bed squeeze down as she got into it, and the sound of her bedspread being moved to cover her up. She was going to sleep now. She must’ve thought that was all there was to do. Neither of us had a plan. ‘Your father wants to make things better,’ I heard her say out of the dark. ‘Maybe I’m not up to that. You can tell him all about this. What’s the difference?’
I wanted to say something back, even if she wasn’t talking to me but was just talking to herself or no one. I didn’t think I would tell my father about this, and I wanted to say so. But I didn’t want to be the last one to talk. Because if I spoke anything at all, my mother would stay quiet as if she hadn’t heard me, and I would have my own words–whatever they were–to live with, maybe forever. And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn’t be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can’t fix anyway. Telling my father about all I’d seen or telling my mother that she could rely on me to say nothing, were those kind of words–better off to be never said for simply being useless in the large scheme of things.
I walked back into my dark room and sat on the bed. I could still feel my heart beating. I was cold with just my underwear on, my feet cold on the floor, my hands cold from nervousness. Out the window it was still bright moonlight, and I knew the next day would be colder and that maybe winter would come on before it ever became true fall. And what I felt like was a spy–hollow and not forceful, not able to cause anything. And I wished for a moment that I was dead, too, that all three of us were. I thought about how small my mother seemed out in the hall with her body showing in the light, how she had not been strong or forceful, and that she must’ve felt t
hat way herself, and that we felt the same way at that moment, saw the same future alone in our rooms, in our beds. I tried to imagine that this was a help but could not quite do it. Then a car went down our street, and as it came in front of our house it blew its horn–two honks and then a very long one. I jumped up to the window and looked out. I thought it would be Warren Miller–I didn’t think it would be anyone else. He wanted to come back, or he wanted her to come where he was, or he just wanted her to know he was out there, in his car, in the dark, riding around Great Falls thinking about her in a kind of panic. The horn changed sound as it got farther down the street, and I never saw the car–if it was Warren Miller’s Oldsmobile or someone else who did not know us. I saw its taillights and that was all, heard the horn stop. Then I got in bed and tried to be calm. I listened to the night in our house. I thought I heard my mother’s bare feet on the floor, moving, thought I heard her door shut down the hall. But I could not be sure of it. And then I went to sleep.
Chapter 5
The next morning was cold, as I thought it would be. I turned on my radio and listened to the forecast, which said there would be wind out of the southwest before the day was over, and that it would stay clear, though along the Rocky Mountain front snow was expected to offer relief for the crews fighting the Allen Creek fire.
I could hear my mother in the kitchen. She was wearing shoes that scraped the linoleum floor, and I knew she was going out soon. The air base, I thought, or to the grain elevator, or to Warren Miller’s house. Anything still seemed possible. For some reason I thought I’d be leaving. I didn’t have a place to go, or any place I wanted to go, but I realized I had waked up thinking, ‘What am I going to do now?’ And that seemed like a thought you had before you left someplace, even if it was a place you had always lived or the people you had always lived with.
