Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  “My house. What do you mean? You knew he was coming to see me.”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Then why’d you ask if I’d had any visitors lately?”

  Calder shrugs. “Just making conversation.”

  Annie lifts her eyebrow. “Who are you making it with, me or Mr. Haldol?”

  He brushes the whole thing away with his hand. “So what else is going on?” he asks. “I’m serious. I want to know what you’ve been up to.”

  She realizes that this is what he craves. Normalcy. Stories of the every day. Gossip. She starts slowly by telling him about the Bull Creek Tavern, how the reason she looks like hell is because she was out most of the night singing until her voice gave way. Cigar smoke lingers in her hair even though she’s showered, and as she tells him this she sees a shift in his eyes, his joy popping back to the surface. She tells him how snow looks under a magnifying glass and how it really does smell like new upholstery the way Daddy told them, but she saves Detour for another time.

  And then she comes back around to Owen. “I don’t know what I was thinking, wasting all those months. I can’t tell you how good it felt to get out and sing last night. I felt like I was twenty years old. Like everything was new to me, everything still out there and me on the verge of discovering it.”

  Calder gets a huge grin on his face and rocks back and forth like a child about to burst with a secret.

  “What? That was corny, wasn’t it,” she says.

  “No. It’s not that.”

  “What are you grinning at?”

  “Remember the what if game we used to play?”

  “Talk about ruining the day,” she says.

  “No, no. Listen. I’ve got one for you.”

  “I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

  “I’m pretty sure you do.”

  “All right. Go on. Let’s hear it.”

  “OK. Let’s see. Oh, here’s a good one. What if Joshua had never left?”

  The fluorescent lights buzz above her head. They’re suddenly the only thing she hears.

  “What?”

  “Wait,” he says. “How about this one? What if Joshua was the one who came back?”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Sunday morning and the house smells of cooked bacon and coffee and warm buttered biscuits. Her mother stirs the gravy with a wooden spoon. She bends down to check the biscuits and croissants in the oven, recipes given to her by Sidsel, whose café her mother has insisted on running for the last two years. She calls her recent burst of energy nothing more than a second wind, but they all know she was desperate for something to keep her busy. She was desperate not to make the same mistake again.

  Strands of gray hair pepper the red in her part. Her skin seems to have fallen, just a little, along her jaw. She looks older than she did two years ago, though nowhere near her sixty-five years.

  Dragonflies float past the window. The summer sun glares through the live oak into the kitchen where Annie works at the sink.

  “They ought to be here by now,” her mother says.

  Annie slices open a cantaloupe, picks up a large spoon, and gouges the seeds into the compost. “They’re coming, don’t worry. It takes a while to get through customs.” She’s been to see Calder and Sidsel twice since they moved to Denmark two years ago. The second time was a stop she made while she and Joshua were visiting Ireland.

  She lets go of the melon and pats her mother’s arm. “They’ll be here.”

  They finally decided to move back. Calder asked that everyone wait for them at home. This is how he imagined his homecoming, here in Annie’s house, the smell of home-cooked food and the quiet of the country. She thinks he also wanted to have a few minutes to recover after arriving back in Florida for the first time since he got out of jail. The judge had been right about one thing. The minute Calder was set free he took off with Sidsel to Denmark.

  Annie and her mother work side by side in silence. Behind them her father’s long farm table, the one he’d left unfinished, gleams beneath a vase filled with red amaryllises from Annie’s garden. Two years ago she’d found the tapered legs and table-top leaning in the back of Uncle Calder’s garage beneath a dusty moving blanket. Annie and Joshua turned her shed into a workshop and set to work on the Tiger Maple. Now, its rich, undulating grain tempts everyone who sees it to reach out and stroke it like a fur.

  In the living room the puppies have worked themselves into a frenzy, thin ribs thumping against the hardwood floor, growls from pulling and chewing what Annie hopes are the toys she bought for them and not the rugs, the drapes, her socks and underwear from the basket in the bedroom. Joshua is no help at all. He comes down from Washington, D.C., twice a month, and even though he’s only been here for three days this trip he’s somehow managed to spoil them.

  Her mother flips on the radio to the country oldies station Annie likes to set it to these days. The kitchen fills with slide guitars and violins, the melancholy notes of love and loss. Annie can almost hear the old percolator gurgling next to the golden radio in their kitchen all those years ago. The radio was always on in those days, just like her father. Did I ever tell y’all about the time old Weaver’s cable pulley went missing off his tow truck…

  “Frank will be in soon,” her mother says. “He’s just about done checking on Mrs. Lanie’s blueberries. The crows are in there again so he’s setting up another plastic owl to scare them off. This one better have teeth.”

  Annie wonders if the old songs have made her mother think of her lost husband, and in turn, made her think of Frank. They’ve been flirting ever since she came to hear Annie sing last year at the Bull Creek Tavern. Frank has since gotten braces to fix the gap in his teeth, and Annie suspects they’re doing a lot more than flirting, though her mother is too private to say. Annie’s schedule is busy these days with the release of her new CD—How Am I Supposed to Get Back Home? The single “Backstory” may turn out to be her biggest hit yet. She has concerts as far away as Prague, but every chance she gets she still pops into the Bull Creek unannounced and sings a few songs with Frank.

  She looks out the side window at Mrs. Lanie’s new farm. The woman decided to take the future into her own hands and razed the dead tangelo grove and corn and everything else that once grew there, including the grass. She replaced it all with mature crops that can sustain the “new winters,” as they’re calling them. Blueberries, avocados, squash, and macadamia nuts. She’s already making a fortune off the macadamia nuts alone, much to the delight of her daughter Abigail who has no idea that all the property and its proceeds are being left to the children’s home in Mrs. Lanie’s will, so long as it remains a farm. If anyone tries otherwise, the ownership transfers to Annie.

  “Turn it up,” her mother says with a hot cookie sheet in her mitts. Emmylou Harris is singing, “Why can’t I forget the past, start loving someone new, instead of having sweet dreams about you?”

  Annie stares at her, surprised she wants to hear this.

  Her mother smiles. “Remember when your father said that that could be you someday on the radio?”

  She must see the look on Annie’s face. She rubs Annie’s shoulder and smiles a little more weakly this time. She turns back to the food on the counter.

  Annie wonders if she’s thinking of Uncle Calder, now buried near her father, separated only by the plot reserved for her mother. And that piece of paper they’d found on his chest with Miriam, I never stopped scribbled across a corner. They all knew what it was he meant to say, and it must have taken a good year before her mother could hear his name without tearing up. Annie doesn’t think her mother needed a note to tell her what she already knew. For all any of them know, he is somewhere with her father, the two of them loving her still.

  The puppies begin yelping at the door, scrambling against the oval glass as if their lives depend on alerting everyone to the fact that someone has arrived.

  Annie rushes to the door to see Declan’s animated face in the cab of Calder’s truc
k. His curly hair rises above the dash, his chubby hands lift into the air then smack down against the front of his car seat as if he is riding a rollercoaster. The last time she saw him he was a red-faced infant with silky threads of blond hair, his mouth like a bird’s squawking for food.

  Sidsel turns to Declan and laughs, apparently moved by something he’s done, some sound, maybe a word her son has spoken, or perhaps it’s nothing aside from the sheer pleasure of having him there that causes her to reach for his hand and blow a kiss inside his palm. He falls into a fit of laughter so deep that by the time he rises from the truck he’s purple-faced and limp, at the mercy of his own sense of humor.

  Annie’s chest swells at the sight of her brother. He looks so much like Uncle Calder. Her mother must see it, too, as she rushes out the door with her arms spread. His long gait, and the thing with the hair, Annie realizes only now—his hand running through his floppy hair—is Uncle Calder made over.

  She stays put, allowing her mother to embrace the three of them at once. As they come closer to the porch Annie sees her mother in Declan’s face.

  She picks up the male puppy inside the front door, the one she’s giving to Calder and his family. Joshua holds the girl she’s keeping for herself. They kiss the velvety blond knots on the tops of their heads. The puppies squirm in their arms, and for a split second, Annie allows herself to wonder what might have been had Joshua not gone to meet Gabe at Hal’s that evening.

  Joshua sets the puppy down and pulls her into him as if reading her mind.

  “I love every inch of you, Annie Walsh,” he whispers.

  “You would know,” she says.

  It’s Sunday. This is what Declan will remember when he’s grown. Days just like this, with music layered through the smell of cooked meat and bread and cake, the nuts and berries growing outside the door, his parents laughing around a farm table, quarreling over the facts of one another’s stories with his Auntie Annie and Uncle Joshua and Granny and Frank and the dogs, these dogs, and all the others to come, wrestling across the floor.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you, Kathleen Concannon, David Ciminello, Rachel Hoffman, Patricia Kullberg, Monica Spoelstra Metz, and Linda Sladek, for years of insight and encouragement.

  Thank you, Rima Karami, Jessica Donnell, Stephanie Sutherland, Laurie Creed Holst, Stefin McCargar, and Melissa Crisp, for all the hopes, wishes, and dreams on my behalf.

  Thank you, Dylan and Liam, for making me laugh, ponder, and try harder to get everything right.

  And thank you, Andrew, for making this, and so much more, possible.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photograph by Andrew Reed, 2011

  Deborah Reed comes from a long line of storytellers and musicians and finds creative inspiration in the composition of alt-country, folk, and homespun goods. She currently resides in the Pacific Northwest, where she also writes suspense fiction under the name of Audrey Braun.