by Deborah Reed
Those mornings with the milk jugs clanging, June might have had only several hours of sleep. She’d wake and drift in and out to the noise that started with the bottles on the porch and then connected to Grandmam, who’d come over to make June oatmeal and toast before school. “Cinnamon-ginger tea again, love?” she’d ask June, draped in her blue apron and pale green house dress, her blunt bob, gone from red to silver, swinging at her chin. June would nod through a fog, slumped at the square table, and even if she was running late, even if it burned her mouth, she would drink all of the tea. She would run her tongue against the raw roof of her mouth while she waited at the corner for the bus, and again as she sat in the back of the classroom, where she read quietly, waiting for permission to pee, lying low in the best interest of others.
“Oh, fuck me!” a voice yelled, and June startled, sat up on the blanket, and glanced toward the course. A whiz cut the air, slicing through leaves, and then a thunk in the yard not far from where she lay. In all these years she’d only ever found three golf balls back here. Most people knew better than to swing too fiercely near the trees. Even if someone were to swing hard from a distance, the angle of the course usually sent the balls flying east, and if not, the branches and trunks blocked them from landing in the yard.
A man in a white polo shirt with an upturned collar and khaki shorts was suddenly fumbling through the trees toward her, stepping over the thin creek that deepened in winter.
“Hey!” she called out. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The trees had always been the only demarcation of the property, a line everyone had understood not to cross. The man stopped, grabbed hold of a nearby branch, and held his other hand to his chest. She couldn’t read his eyes behind sunglasses, but his mouth hung open, and he turned his head side to side as if searching for anything to set his sights on apart from June.
June stood. What possessed her to walk toward him? The world felt uneven, so far out of sorts it might never right itself again, and this stranger approaching her yard, invading her privacy, tilted her still further off-kilter. Her breasts weren’t very large, so they swung only slightly in the open air. Her hair tumbled free of its tie, releasing grass and pine needles onto her shoulders. “You should watch your language,” she said.
The man took a step back and clamped his mouth shut. June picked up the golf ball and tossed it toward him. Her breasts swung a little more with that. He was nearly twenty feet away, and the ball dropped at his feet. “You should learn to behave,” she said.
It was as if she were practicing for a part, a role bolder than any she’d ever played in her life. And why not? No one knew her here. Not really. Not the real June. And the ones who did remember, who gave her any thought, would have known and loved her grandparents, and those who knew enough surely would have said, After everything that happened, you’d be peculiar too. There were rumors and there were truths, and she could never know who had gotten hold of what. Of course she was different than she might have been. Even more peculiar than before she went away that first time, to Salem. Who wouldn’t be?
The man nodded, bent for the ball, nodded once more, and seemed to measure his steps when he turned, so as not to give the impression that he was running away.
6
Earlier, after they’d arrived home from the meeting with Melinda, Ernest had darted from room to room, agitated, ferreting under beds and blankets in search of something, or maybe to be sure that whatever he didn’t want to find, he would not. He didn’t speak much to begin with, but now he denied them a single word, and he ran until they stopped pursuing, until his frustration peaked in the middle of the living room, where he plopped cross-legged to the floor. When they approached he elbowed the air, his cries evolving into screams, the worst they’d ever heard, and the house felt as if it were rising off its foundation in a state of panic.
Jameson walked out of the living room, then walked right back, questioning, as he had so many times, if he was cut out for this. His skin felt thin, no protection against the hot bundles of nerves firing underneath.
Sarah Anne sat on her heels several feet from Ernest, not asking anything of him, not trying to do anything. Jameson didn’t feel it was enough, though clearly it was more than he could think to do. His entire body tingled with nervous sweat. This child’s anguish was doing him in.
He tried to settle on the sofa, but immediately got up. He looked to Sarah Anne, but she frowned as if to say that he was the one who needed to cool off. There appeared no end to what felt like an inferno reaching the ten-foot ceilings, with Jameson disintegrating into ash and embers. “Sarah Anne,” he finally said, hearing the crackle of dread in his own voice. “I can’t keep . . . this is not . . . I’ve got work to do.”
It was well past noon, and a whole checklist of things had to be loaded onto his truck—table saw, gloves, cords, toolboxes; other supplies he still needed to pick up from the lumberyard. He was to leave early the next morning to restore an old farmhouse in eastern Washington, and if his looming departure had been the only thing on their minds today, it would have been strain enough.
When he walked past Sarah Anne his mouth went dry and he started blinking. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. Her upward glare did the talking. A crying child is not the worst thing in the world. A crying child is a child alive, and you of all people should know that.
Her eyes were not saying those things. This was what he told himself as he crossed the yard, kicking up grass already parched and splintered in June. She was not thinking those things about him, was she? He sat on the stool in his workshop, the door closed and the windows open. Jameson was thirty-five years old, but how could that be? It did not seem possible to have lived through all that he had lived in only three and a half decades.
He breathed in the smell of sagebrush and dirt, and he breathed in the potter’s wheel stored lopsidedly in the corner. Its clay-encrusted scent somehow cut through a workspace full of sawdust and metal and turpentine. The wheel evoked his entire past with Sarah Anne, and he resisted the urge to drag it outside and fling it to the ground like a drunk thrown from a bar after everyone had simply had enough. Sarah Anne had not gone near it in the three years since they moved there, in the three years since the children had died. She said that in time she’d get back to it—she planned to get back to it. But now there was Ernest, and she was a different woman. Just as Jameson, even when surrounded by the tools of his trade, was a different man.
He leaned his elbows on the bench and listened to the clear and steady voices of public radio on the old transistor, as his father did in another era, and he thought of how heavy the start of each workday had become as his red knuckles disappeared inside cold leather gloves. And here, too, fatigued in the warm afternoon, bombarded by news of drought and forest fires and technology messing with the minds of the young.
His mother had lived and died by the belief that luck came in threes, though the bad got most of her attention. “Black marks on the day,” she called them, superstitious to the core, the way her own mother had been. All she needed was one ruinous thing to start and she would set about preparing for the inevitability of a second and third. A bruised toe or a neighbor’s dead cat could count, as could a cousin’s lost job or the headline of a murder close to home. By day’s end she would tell Jameson and his father to laugh if they liked, but there it was. Her proof of three black marks laid bare.
And so it was his mother who came to mind when Jameson’s cell phone rang with an out-of-state number. He turned down the radio and thought, Here comes the second black mark. The man on the other end owned the farmhouse where Jameson was headed in the morning, and he apologized for not getting in touch sooner, said he’d had other things on his mind, mainly a diagnosis he’d been given for the pain in his upper left side. He was placing a courtesy call, politely implying that his approaching death was inconvenient. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “But I’ve got to cancel the job.”
A dull daze too
k hold of Jameson, seeped and set into his bones, a stupefied loss of feeling that would return throughout the evening, throughout the silent dinner with Sarah Anne. But before that, right here, a man was dying, and Jameson wanted only to get off the phone.
Voices hummed in the background and glassware chinked as if the man were calling from a restaurant. As soon as his wife got on the phone, Jameson knew what was coming. He told her before she had to ask that he would refund the deposit, of course he would, even as he was wondering how.
As soon as Jameson hung up, Ernest ran into the yard and fell down in the patch of strawberries. Jameson went after him, but Jameson was not the person whom the boy turned to for comfort, and the boy cried harder and scrambled away as Jameson approached. Ernest dug his heels into the dirt, his legs and feet and cheeks smeared with bright red juice while this grown man stood helpless, breathless as the child before him. Sarah Anne appeared as if from nowhere, and Jameson stepped to the side while she lifted Ernest to her chest, her hand on the back of his head. Ernest gave in to her quickly, tucking his face against the side of her neck, his arms up and over her shoulders.
Hours later, with the two black marks behind them, Jameson was washing dishes in the kitchen with Sarah Anne, the sun dipping orange behind the jagged white Cascades, the only sounds the running faucet and, from the yard, a set of collared doves cawing their final bids on the day. Don Marshall up the road once mentioned that it was legal to shoot the birds year-round, an invasive species, he said, worse than pigeons. Jameson had made a point to say that they cooed just like mourning doves, mostly they cooed all along like that without the cawing, and Marshall said he didn’t give a rat’s ass if they knew how to whistle the Lord’s Prayer, they didn’t belong here, and he tilted his head and asked did Jameson not understand the way a system of life worked? “A system of life?” Sarah Anne had asked when Jameson told her about it later. “That’s what he called it,” Jameson said, and they acted like they didn’t know what the neighbor meant, like he was just a funny old-timer, but they knew, and they knew they knew, and each was thinking of the system of life they’d set in place, where they did not speak about the past, and they did not express petty complaints, though every complaint was now petty because nothing was worse than the death of one’s children. This system of life got them out of bed, propped their bodies into upright positions, set their feet moving in the direction of the coffeemaker, still alive, the children still gone, not still, again, gone again with every sunrise.
Sarah Anne placed the covered leftovers in the fridge, and Jameson stopped himself from telling her not to bother. It wasn’t likely they’d go near any of it, but Sarah Anne would not throw food in the trash unless it had gone bad, and there was no harm in letting her have this gesture of goodwill, a ritual that made one thing a little bit easier.
Everyone was tender and quiet now, Ernest resting on the sofa, everything put away, wiped clean and in place. Jameson dried the skillet, hung it on the hook near the stove, and looked around at the tidy solace of the kitchen, the orchestrated order that would greet them come morning when they would try again.
7
Evenings fell like a thick black cloud ever since June gave up drinking, and tonight was no exception. The pressure on her skull weighed in fast. Dusk was the hardest part of the day, sidling up like a friendly drunk offering rounds. Just one beer, so refreshing on a summer evening, watching as the sun slipped into the sea.
Granddad used to say that no matter how long the day, the evening comes. In June’s case, evening was the thing that did her in.
She was teaching herself to step aside at the worst of it, to focus on the things that happened earlier in the day, which wasn’t easy when all she was doing was lying in the sun. She’d kept lounging after the golfer ran off, stayed right there where the clothesline used to hang, allowing memories to break open inside her until she found herself sucking in a breath to keep tears from building in the corners of her eyes. The tears escaped regardless, and pooled in the curves of her ears.
The clothesline. Her grandparents. Her father. Back, back, back before she’d ever known the taste of spirits in her throat, before she’d felt the soft sway of drink inside her limbs and achy heart. Back to hearing her father emerge from his bedroom, to the way she could be certain that when he finally did appear, in the kitchen or the yard or on the front porch, looking out at the rain on the white tips of the ocean, he would be dressed in his custard cardigan and crisp white shirt, faded jeans and black boots, like a uniform. The first words out of his mouth would be “What’s the news, buttercup?” and June might startle from her reading on the braided rug, or doing homework at the kitchen table, or crouched throwing logs onto the fire, but she would feel herself unfold and warm up and brighten when she said, “You’re here!” To which her father would reply, “Here and there and everywhere!” and within the hour the washing machine was churning.
Her father had an oval, lightly freckled face and fair, reddish blond hair that wisped around his ears. Women stared at him for seconds too long; mothers of June’s classmates pinched and prodded their own hair and smiled broadly at him when he accompanied June to the bus stop. When Heather Atkinson’s mother handed him a piece of pink paper torn from Heather’s notebook, June pretended not to see. She looked at Heather, and Heather looked at June, and both turned in the direction of the bus, even though it hadn’t yet arrived. That evening June spotted the crumpled pink paper in the kitchen wastebasket, and she saw it again the next day, its creases evened out on her father’s desk in the living room, on it a phone number written in blue pencil.
For the rest of June’s life the thump of a washing machine would have a way of lifting a dark mood, of peeling off a layer or two of grief, and reclaiming the day in a way that nothing else ever quite could. There had never been room in the carriage house for a dryer before June purchased the stackable set in there now. Back then they’d use Grandmam’s dryer in winter, and in summer they hung everything on the backyard line. Basket after basket, it had felt so good to bear such a weight in her puny little arms, so good to be useful and praised. June’s grandmother watched without watching from next door, her presence as solid and everlasting as the trees. “She thinks we don’t notice,” June’s father once said. “But we know exactly how she looks after us.” June would often glance up to see Grandmam working in the garden or rocking on the front porch, snapping green beans into a bowl. She seemed to sense June looking, and if her father was nearby, Grandmam went easy on the wave, offering a half-hidden one near her ribs and a tempered smile that remained after her hand went down. If June’s father had lived into old age, he would have looked an awful lot like Grandmam; he’d looked a lot like her then. June had waved in the same secretive way, understanding how to model rules that no one spoke. Like the way June never mentioned her mother. No one mentioned her mother. Her father never returned a wave or a smile to Grandmam. He’d shake out the wet laundry in the air before fastening it on the line, and June helped by hugging the cloth sack of wooden pins to her chest behind him, handing them up as needed. “Next, next, next,” her father would say, until the air was transformed into a billowing swell of T-shirts, sheets, and towels. Sunlight filtered through the bright fabrics and onto the blood-red peonies until the petals glowed with a velvety sheen that June’s father once declared had looked delicious enough to eat, right before he plucked a petal, put it in his mouth, and chewed.
That poor golfer coming through the trees—what was June thinking? She wasn’t thinking. Maybe she was.
She was thinking on her front porch at dusk, watching the sunset, determined that tomorrow she would sit at her father’s old desk and not leave the chair until she’d written at least one paragraph. Thinking about tomorrow was as helpful as thinking about earlier in the day, or yesterday, or twenty years ago, other people, characters, anyone real or made up, other than June having to think about herself sitting here on this porch without a drink. One paragraph. How hard could t
hat be?
Earlier today June had lolled her head to the side and opened her eyes to the thin blades of grass, to several black ants crawling inches from her face. They carried what appeared to be crumbs from the toast she’d eaten earlier on the patio, and she watched their microscopic feet, the flicker of each grass strand snapping and releasing from their weight. Then came that smack of the short iron and June’s hands balled into fists. She knew what it was. Nothing else felt quite the same as old anger throwing its weight around. It was Heather Atkinson. All these years later and June had yet to figure out how to lessen the impact of those memories. The ferocity never failed to take her by surprise.
