“Well, Riley tells me you’re doing it for her late grandparents. I think that’s a beautiful thing.”
“You always did wear rose-colored glasses.” Tess bent over to pick up one of the two-by-fours—and to hide a quick flash of embarrassment. “I’d think, after all you’ve been through, they’d have scratched or cracked.”
“Oh, I lost them for a long while.” Claire wandered to the pile of lumber, brushed the top off, and gingerly sat down. “But last year Jenna Hogan—do you remember her? Our class, a little thing with a bad leg? No? Well, Jenna showed up at my door and pretty much gave me those glasses back.”
“Good for Jenna Hogan.”
Tess hefted the two-by-four and brought it to the other edge of the putting green, memories rushing back to her, trying not to think of all the times Claire had shown up at the Baptist church in her Cannery neighborhood with bags of donated clothes or shoes, setting aside a special bag with Tess’s name on it. There were warm coats and brand-name snow boots that Tess couldn’t bring herself to wear, just because they were given out of pity, out of some rich folk’s charity, and Claire knew it.
That was the trouble with coming back to Pine Lake. You couldn’t hide here. The past rushed up and punched you right in the face.
“So,” Claire said, “I heard you got married.”
Tess flinched. She settled the new two-by-four into the trough left when she’d pulled out the old one.
“Maya told me,” Claire explained. “I saw her in South Dakota when Nicole, Jenna, and I drove across country last summer.”
Tess knew Maya. Maya was an archaeologist on the faculty at Cornell University, a star graduate of Pine Lake High, who happened to be scouting a new dig at the same time Tess was driving trucks in North Dakota. They crossed paths at some greasy spoon diner and Maya, delighted, had planted herself beside her at the counter. The archaeologist had poked, scraped, and brushed at Tess like she was trying to coax a Jurassic jawbone out of tightly packed clay.
“Boy,” Tess said, as she knocked the board deeper in the trough, “you Pine Lake girls love to talk.”
“Seeing that you’re not wearing a ring—”
“It didn’t work out. Which you should know, since I heard you saw our farmhouse in Kansas.”
Best to just get that out there now, Tess thought. Best to just confess to the greatest sin rather than go through the agony of having Claire Petrenko, in her sweet-faced, calm-as-butter way, inevitably tease the truth out of her.
Claire said, “It was some shock coming on that place.”
Tess picked up a rubber-headed mallet to bang the two-by-four deeper. “Because it was in ashes? Or because you couldn’t imagine me sweeping that porch, running a tractor in those fields, or baking pies?”
Tess felt the weight of the mallet as she swung it at the two-by-four, smacking it at six-inch intervals to secure it in the narrow trench. She’d met Erik Callahan a few times on Route 29 out of Fargo. A giant of a blond, a Viking without the attitude. He was charming, self-effacing in that farm boy kind of way. He drove trucks to save up for a spread of his own. He had gazed at her across the counter seats like she was a wet dream come to life. They hooked up. Multiple times. She figured it was like some of the other guys she’d connected with on the road over the years—a quick, efficient, purely physical transaction. That’s all she’d ever wanted from any man after the trauma of that other bastard. Eventually, she figured, she and Callahan would drift their own ways.
Except they didn’t.
“Oh, Tess,” Claire said, “did you really make pies?”
Tess kept banging the two-by-four, though it was lodged in good and tight. She kept banging because it made her heart beat harder. It hurt to think about that year, in a different way than it hurt to think about that other year. Thinking about Callahan stung in the way your eyes stung when you tried to stare at the sun. One day, she was driving her semi, and then the next thing she knew, she was married and living on a Kansas farm, wringing the necks of chickens, plucking feathers, and cooking them up as the sun poured through the kitchen window. It was like she’d stepped into some sort of prairie novel. A sappy, romantic prairie novel, because in the mornings with the curtains billowing, she’d wake up in the same bed, her head on the massive chest of the same man, his smile slow and wonderful.
The memories tumbled over one another, rocking her, like a High Plains wind battering the cargo of her rig.
“I made rhubarb pie,” Tess said, examining her work with more attention than it needed. “I made apple pie, I made blueberry pie—”
“I’d give a lot of money to see you making a pie.”
“The marriage was like those pies,” she said. “It was piping hot out of the oven, but too quick to cool, and the crust too easily broken.”
Once settled and domestic, Tess had felt an uneasiness grow. She knew Callahan was faithful but she didn’t like the way his high school flame eyeballed him in the local pub. That woman looked more his type, pleasantly round and well-liked. It didn’t help that the neighbors didn’t take to Tess’s arrival very well, either, some skinny, tatted northern girl who drove trucks and snagged their favorite son. Once again Tess found herself in a place that didn’t like her, didn’t want her, an outsider again. It only made her get another tat, avoid the church fair, wear leather pants, smoke inside the house.
She had just been waiting for it all to collapse anyway. So she fought with him, tested his patience, saw how far she could push him, waited for him to be another bastard. In the end she realized that the only way to make sure that Callahan didn’t leave her was to abandon him first.
Claire’s voice, soft and even: “After seeing that farmhouse, I worried about you. You always did have a bad habit of setting things on fire.”
Tess laughed but it sounded hollow even to her own ears. Of course Claire thought she’d burned the house down. Anyone from Pine Lake would. Callahan certainly did. Right now she felt the bulk of a pack of cigarettes lying in a pocket in her cargo shorts, a pack that had only one cigarette missing. Callahan had always hated when she smoked in the house, so she smoked in the house whenever she was mad at him. She’d smoked one cigarette more than a pack that terrible night, while she paced for him to come home after their argument. She’d woken coughing on the couch hours later, the house in flames.
Even after the arson investigation came back inconclusive, Callahan had always blamed her for destroying his dream.
Which was pretty much what she had done anyway.
Claire’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “You know I’m a good listener. If you want to talk—”
“Don’t think so.”
Still, her mind worked trying to explain, if only to herself, the abrupt turns her life had taken since she left Pine Lake. Two pivotal events came to mind. Once in the moonlight, surrounded by the stench of diesel and strong coffee and bacon grease, with the roar of cars and trucks whipping by on the nearby interstate, when Big Erik Callahan had kneeled in front of her and asked her to marry him. The second was years earlier, quivering after hours of labor, when the doctor placed on her distended belly her infant daughter—Sadie—still warm from her womb.
Both times there’d been a shimmering moment when it felt like a scrim had peeled off her eyes, and she could see the whole, wide world in all its goodness and badness, all its capricious randomness, complicated and full of senseless acts of beauty. Both times her chest had filled with the strangest pressure, and all she could do was gasp, yes.
Yes.
Never in a million years could she explain that. Never in a million years would she admit that she’d give just about anything—everything—to feel that way just one more time.
Tess tossed the mallet aside and wiped her forearm across her forehead. “Tell me about your cancer, Claire. I take it that you’ve been through chemo.”
Claire, to her credit, waited only a fraction of a pause. “One round of chemo and radiation, too. If I’m deemed healthy enough
when I get back to Portland next month, I’ll get the thumbs-up to be a guinea pig in a clinical trial.”
“Something tells me there’s more to the story.”
“Of course there is.” She let her head drop back, her face in a dappled circle of sun. “But honestly, it’s all good.”
Tess gave her an eye, but Claire just curved her lips in a mysterious little smile, giving her the serene face of a Buddhist nun.
“Trauma is a kind of mystery, Tess.” Claire squinted out to the far trees. “It latches on to you in ways that aren’t easy to undo. It’s hard to explain to folks who haven’t really experienced it. It…changes you.”
“Changes you enough to have your head shaved in Thailand?” Tess hefted up some lumber. “Riley told me you did something crazy like that.”
“Yes, well, taking Buddhist vows seemed the reasonable thing to do at the time. My sister had just died; I felt a little unhinged. But something tells me you know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Tess felt dangerous tentacles of communal experience tighten around her.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Claire mused, “how folks who’ve felt battered by life can be successful at any relationships—friends, family. Husbands. Not that I consider myself to be completely successful—”
“You’re kidding, right?” Tess pulled some nails out of the bag, preparing to join the joists. “You just told me that friends have been opening doors all across the country.”
“Yes, but that’s now.” Claire gave her that Buddha smile again. “You didn’t see me just after I was diagnosed. My friends pulled me out of a very bad place, Tess. They made me realize I had to stop letting old traumas shape my life.”
Tess positioned a nail and reached for the hammer. She was glad for Claire, she really was, for finding comfort in friends.
Tess, on the other hand, preferred to fix things on her own.
“Speaking of trauma,” Claire said, “have you seen your mother yet?”
*
Tess craved a cigarette so hard it made her teeth ache. Something about being back in Cannery Row stirred the need for a hit of nicotine. That, and seeing the house where she’d grown up.
She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, watching eagle-eyed for the stir of a curtain in the front window. Nothing moved but the lazy twirl of a whirligig in the postage-stamp-size front yard. But Tess knew her mother was in there. Her mother hadn’t worked an honest day in the whole of her life. She spent most Tuesday mornings still sleeping off the weekend before.
Tess blew out a long breath and glanced at the clock on the dashboard. This, here, was the power of Claire Petrenko. One simple discussion and Tess found herself compelled to come back to the old neighborhood. On the back of her neck she could sense furtive stares through the windows of other houses. Folks stepped out onto their porches, sweeping, glancing up over the ends of their brooms to eyeball the car. Men came out to sit on the front stoop, to smoke a slow cigarette. It was like she could hear their thoughts because she remembered thinking the same things as she used to peer through the sheer curtains at strange cars parked on the road. Who was this woman in the battered Volvo? A local cop undercover? Someone come looking for trouble? What did she want?
A gut-kick instinct told her to run away.
Her damn heart raced in her chest like it did sometimes at work, when she had to check fill levels on a wastewater tank before pumping some into her truck. As she was climbing those spindly metal stairs up the side of a tank, the Canadian wind swept down over the prairie and battered her against the metal walls. One good gust, one wrong step, and she’d be over the edge falling three stories. Depending on her boss’s trucking schedule, it might take a day or two before she was found by anyone or anything but wolves.
Two sharp raps on the passenger-side window and she all but leaped out of her jeans. A woman bent over, peering through the glass, on her face an unspoken question. She mouthed something that Tess didn’t hear.
Tess lowered the window and the woman repeated, “Theresa, she’s not home.”
Tess registered three things at once. One, that the woman knew her name. Two, the woman knew she was looking for her mother. And three, the woman eyeballing her with a tilted smile had the kind of big, blue, slightly protruding eyes of a girl she once knew.
Tess said, “Emma Lu Skye.”
Her lips twitched. “I heard you were in town, Hendrick.”
Tess glanced beyond her, to the old house where Lu used to live when they were in school together. “Are you visiting your mom?”
“She’s gone four years now. The place is mine.” Lu raised her brows. “You want to stop sitting in your car like a creeper and come shoot the breeze?”
Tess glanced over at her mother’s house, still as death, shingles missing from the roof, the crooked stairs. She’d come here to get this done in a rip off the Band-Aid manner, so she wasn’t in the mood to linger.
Lu murmured, “Your mother’s working today.”
“Working a bottle?”
“No. Not anymore.”
Tess laughed. She heard the bark of it echo in the car.
“I’m dead serious,” Lu said. “She’s three years sober now.”
Tess didn’t believe it, and the old house was proof. If a woman was sober for that long, you’d think she’d clean the gutters or plant some flowers or slap a coat of paint on the place. The last time that place got a coat of paint was when her father did it. He spruced it up before lighting out for ten acres in Minnesota, leaving her and her mother behind.
Even the paint was slapped on and forgotten.
“She’s working thirty hours a week as a home health aide,” Lu continued. “She won’t be off until late tonight.”
“How late?”
“There’s no use stalking the place. Your mother isn’t returning anytime soon.”
Tess thought—a boyfriend of course. The one thing about her mother, she never lacked for boyfriends.
“Join me for a smoke.” Lu tilted her head toward the house. “You look like you could use one.”
Tess pushed the driver’s door open, straightened, and squared her shoulders. Suddenly she was sixteen again, scanning the whole place, eying every dark corner, making sure she knew her surroundings. She strained her ears as she passed the Winters’ house, half expecting to hear rising voices, breaking dishes, the slam of a body against a wall, the usual late-afternoon music of Cannery Row. Tess wondered if the brute had finally won custody of his two kids.
She forcibly shook off the memories as she approached Lu’s old house, a mirror of Tess’s mother’s, except this house had trimmed hedges, a straight porch, and what looked like geraniums blooming in hanging baskets. The first step creaked under her weight, just like it had years ago when the two of them used to hang out right on this stoop, before Lu found hockey in high school and Tess found stoners at the Cannery. Tess swiveled and sat on the porch, feeling the sun-warmed boards through the seat of her jeans. Lu offered her a lit cigarette, and Tess hesitated for only a moment before she took it, sucking in a deep drag, feeling the ashy smoke hit the deep part of her lungs. She and Lu used to sit here and watch the world go by, the sun sinking down over the far trees.
Lu said, “Never thought I’d see you back in Cannery Row. When you lit out, I thought you lit out for good.”
“Didn’t expect to see you here, either.”
“Hard to say no to free housing. Why did you come back?”
“Would you believe I’m visiting for old-time’s sake?”
“I heard you were driving trucks out in Minnesota or something.”
“North Dakota. Hauling waste water from fracking.”
Lu whistled through the gap in her two front teeth. “That’s got to pay well.”
“I get along. You?”
“Working the casino at the res.” Lu flicked ash toward the hedges. “Pays well but I work strange hours. Not complaining.”
“Where’s she working?”
<
br /> Lu chose that moment to take a long drag, so deep that her cheeks hollowed as she sucked. Lu had the whip-thin leanness of someone who preferred cigarettes to food, and the deeply ingrained tics that suggested she’d probably always be a smoker. With her hair cut surprisingly short, Lu’s blue eyes looked more prominent than ever, though now they avoided Tess’s gaze as Lu took her time blowing out the smoke.
Finally Lu said, “I can’t tell you that.”
Tess took another hit of the cigarette, felt the woozy head rush of the nicotine. “You know I could find out in a Pine Lake minute.”
“If you start asking questions, people are going to start asking questions back. And from what I’ve heard, you’re pretty much keeping to yourself over at Riley’s place.”
“I’m sure Riley knows where my mother’s working.”
“But she hasn’t told you or you wouldn’t be here asking me.”
“What’s the big secret?”
“Your mother asked me to keep quiet.” Lu leaned her elbows on her knees. “I’m your mother’s sponsor.”
It took Tess a minute to figure out what Lu was saying. It dawned on her as she eyeballed Lu’s hollow cheeks, at the way Lu dodged her gaze and found interest in how the ash grew on the tip of her cigarette, and then, with the lightest of flicks, scattered to the wind.
She and Lu had drifted apart during high school, which was pretty much the story Tess had with all the girls at Pine Lake High. Their worries about chemistry tests and whether that boy in English really liked them just didn’t measure up on the problem scale when Tess went home every day to find her mother sobbing over the kitchen table clutching the neck of a bottle of cheap vodka, raging about her bastard of a father. Perky invitations to join the track team or come to the Raise Money for Darfur Dance just added to her resentment when she had to spend the evenings doing laundry, food shopping, cleaning up the house, or trying to make sense of the bills her mother let pile up in the mail. When she couldn’t handle it anymore, she didn’t head off to high school parties. She headed to the Cannery, where one guy offered weed and another offered a certain form of quick affection to help her forget that, when she got home, she’d probably discover her mother boozy and giggling, upstairs in the bedroom with a new boyfriend.
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