The From-Aways

by CJ Hauser

  I mess around with some finger picking. Play a few chords.

  “It’s for the cause,” she calls back now. “Billy is working to preserve Menamon’s historic character.”

  “There’s no fucking cause,” I say. “There’s just Carter bitching about that shitty park and Billy catnapping people’s pets. Which, by the way, I think is reprehensible.”

  “You’re just pissed because your old man likes spending time with me,” Billy says, all of a sudden a big man, an appeaser.

  “That is not true,” I say. Through the crisscrossed windowpanes I see the moon cut up in four pieces. “How the fuck did you know that?”

  “He told me,” Billy says, and reaches for his drink like it’ll save him. He vigorously chews ice. “Besides, you’re his spitting image. Doesn’t take a DNA test.” He looks out the window. “Moon river,” he sings.

  And this is the thing that’s knuckling down on my heart: everyone fucking knows, including Carter, and it doesn’t change anything. That scrap of please Marta left me, it felt like the first direction in a scavenger hunt. I thought if I did like she asked, the next step would just become obvious, one clue leading to another waiting on Carter’s doorstep or something. Marta, did you have any plan at all? I whistle Jethro Tull. I try to pick out the chords for “Moon River.”

  “Where’d you pick up a dusty old song like that?” I say.

  Billy tilts back in his chair so a square of moonlight falls on his buttoned-up belly. “They listen to WKML while they shuck the oysters in the back,” he says. “I hang out in there sometimes.”

  “Sing it again,” I say.

  “Moon river!” he croons, his voice filling the empty room.

  “Motherfucker,” I say. “Billy, you can sing.”

  Rosie comes out with a plate of potatoes all browned up with onions and peppers mixed in. She takes a seat and pours the Stationhouse’s cranberry chipotle sauce all over them. Billy is ready with a fork, starts shoveling it in.

  “Want to be in our band?” Rosie says.

  His mouth full of food, Billy says, “What band?”

  “Cassandra Galápagos and the Aged Tortoise,” Rosie says.

  Billy rolls his eyes. “I’m not being in any band called Cally Hoo-Ha and the Fuckin’ Turtles,” Billy says. “That’s gay.”

  I give him the hairy eyeball.

  “You know what I mean,” he says.

  19

  Leah

  I make sandwiches. I feel wound up from the meeting. When people argue I get a little bump in my heart and can’t help wanting to cheer along. I wash a sharp knife in the sink and see that the moon is big tonight. Henry rails about the meeting and people’s shortsightedness. “A run-down old carousel. They’re crazy. It’s not even their property. The land belongs to the Dorians.”

  Shut up, I find I want to say, even though I realize that it is, perhaps, a little childish for everyone to make such a fuss about a few run-down carousel horses.

  “Leah,” Henry says, “I’ve got to show you something.” He goes out to his truck and comes back with a large paper tube.

  Henry spreads the blueprint out on the counter. I look over his shoulder. It’s the plans for the Dorians’ house and the different sections of landscaping that will surround it. The ones he’s been working on for months.

  “Look here.” Henry pulls me close. He holds my hand as he shows me where the orchard is going to be. The rose garden. Where Neversink Park used to be but will be no longer.

  “This is why?” I say.

  “This is why,” Henry says, and traces the property border with his finger, rows of little symbols there. And I get it. In Henry’s sketches? There is deer fencing, eight feet tall, blocking the whole property off from the rest of town.

  This is bad news.

  Henry may well be the only person in this town who knows why the park is going. He is definitely the only one who wants it to go.

  “It’s better than a busted old carousel, isn’t it?” Henry asks.

  I let go of his hand. I lean back, my hands pressing against the cabinets, bouncing my body forward and back. I haven’t earned the right to argue like a local yet, but that’s exactly what I want to do.

  “It’s about more than the carousel, Hen. That house looks like nothing else around here. I heard it’s going to have a red-tiled roof!” I don’t really want to pick a fight but already I’m imagining the article about the meeting: public dissent, impotent local officials, Marks with his country preacher’s voice. I feel it, the mental swirl of a story coming together. I live for this feeling, am usually delighted by its arrival. But now I don’t know if I can have it. Because with this story, of course, there is the issue of Henry.

  Henry says, “You’ve got a problem with red roofs all of a sudden?”

  “No, not really, but it’s not exactly in keeping with the local aesthetic, the local culture,” I say.

  Henry looks at me, latently angry. He mushes his hands all over his face as he says, “For Christ sake, Leah. Who cares?”

  “Charley hates that house,” I say. “She hates Elm Park too.” I already have it in my head, the story, and I’m protective of its little spark, my right to write it. Maybe this whole thing will blow over. Maybe in a few weeks people won’t even remember who the Dorians are.

  Henry says, “I hate Elm Park. I hate their gates and their stupid Home Depot ground cover. But the Dorians’ property is gonna be beautiful. Leah, it’s really gonna be something.” He smoothes out the plans and tries to get me to look again, but I don’t want to see them. Why is Henry saying these things? He should be angry like the rest of Menamon. The Henry who told me a million stories of Maine would definitely be angry, wouldn’t he? I want to yell at Henry, You have changed! Change back!

  “What if I showed people the plans?” Henry says, and leans forward on the counter, hovering over his pages. His hoodie rides up in the back, exposing a slash of skin.

  “Henry, you’re deluded,” I say. “People aren’t going to feel better about losing their park just because one family’s backyard is going to be beautiful.”

  “But it’s in Menamon. Just look, Leah.” He starts tracing the paths through the property and explaining where everything goes. The plantings, the structures. And I’m trying to see what he’s seeing so I can understand how important this green world is to him. But it’s already too late. Because this time, when I look? My newspaper brain is awake and ticking away. It is remembering measurements, specifics, filing details away and figuring out what it all means. I shut my eyes.

  “Hen, you shouldn’t be showing me this.”

  “Why?” he says. I open them again and Henry looks so hurt and confused that I feel a rush of love. I love Henry for not being able to imagine a single reason why showing me something like this, me, his wife, but also a local journalist, might be a bad idea. It’s total trust, and I hope I am worthy of it. Before I do or say anything I’ll regret, I kiss Henry on the cheek, and tell him I am going to bed.

  As I climb the stairs I realize that sometimes the way you love someone best is by saying nothing. This is a terrible kind of thing to have to know, and I wish I could go back to when everything was simple and romantic.

  Upstairs, I wash my face. I turn off the lights and climb into bed, though I don’t feel sleepy. When I was sixteen, I had it bad for a boy who was nothing like Henry: a New York City prep school kid with long eyelashes, born of rich Oklahomans. He lived to cut up. His mother let us close the door to his bedroom after school as long as we went to the museums with her every month. She called these trips our dates. Once we went to a Chelsea skyscraper full of art studios, someone different on every floor. There was a gallery of enormous abstract paintings based on a Roman naval battle where they set a whole fleet of ships on fire. She kept us in that room for almost an hour. Every painting looked the same to us: messy swaths of color with little black sticks floating in the middle of them. My boyfriend wandered off to pretend to be the elevator oper
ator.

  What sort of art do you like? his mother said to me. I told her Chagall. He was my favorite back then. I loved those flying goats and mermaids and fiddles.

  I liked Chagall when I was young too, she said. But when you’re older you’ll like this instead. I thought she was terrible for saying that. I thought there was something very wrong with her if this was the kind of art she liked, or else she was a fake. There wasn’t anything happening in those paintings, it was just shapes: messy swaths of color with little black sticks floating in the middle of them. She explained that the color was the fire, the sticks were the ships. The fire was blue and the fire was orange and sometimes there were a lot of sticks and sometimes there was only one. I nodded and hoped my boyfriend would come back soon.

  I don’t really like Chagall anymore, it’s true. Sometimes, goats are just goats. Sometimes I remember my boyfriend’s mother staring at all those flaming ships, and I think that she really did like them. That once you get older you see that there’s an indefinable fire and that everything else is just little black sticks.

  Yes, some of the ways you have to love someone are not very glamorous and I will say no more stubborn things tonight. I will be worthy of Henry’s trust, and I will love him better in the brightness of morning.

  I WALK INTO the Star the next morning and Charley says, “I hope you have a lot of ideas for this article, because there’s no way we’re letting those people take Neversink.”

  “I was thinking of something more impartial,” I say, though of course I do have a lot of ideas. I have the whole story laid out in my head, not a ripple in it, lead to closing line.

  “Forget that. If Carter Marks says the benefit of small-town government is that you can defy bureaucracy and be logical, the benefit of a small-town newspaper is that we can take a stand and I won’t have anyone to answer to.”

  “Except Henry,” I say, though this is obvious.

  I had hoped that Charley, with her fierce family pride, would be the one to rein me in, but she says, “Henry’s in the weeds and he knows it.”

  Is that a pun-filled headline? Sisterly confidence? Charley is wearing a Red Sox baseball cap and knee-high blue rubber boots. As she digs through drawers of files I’ve never seen anyone open before, her ponytail swings. It’s nine A.M. She should be chain-smoking and beating advertising money out of broke local vendors by now.

  “What are you looking for?” I ask. Is it really this article that has her back in gear?

  “The story we ran on those lots going up for sale,” Charley says. She points a finger at me. “We’ll run it again alongside the piece on the meeting. Then we’ll start working the tick-tock for this mess. Back-burner any human-interest stuff until this is done.”

  “Yes,” I say. Yes, yes, yes. Because when people are riled about something, and you write about it, it gets them more riled. Because Charley doesn’t usually give a damn about anything except selling ad space and not pissing anyone off, but now she’s come into the newsroom proper, and it’s on.

  I boot up my computer and think about everything I want to make sure I include about last night’s meeting: the tobacco spitter, the size of the crowd, the deer fencing. I look up the town clerk’s e-mail and think I’ll request a copy of the minutes, because they’ve got to be public record.

  I’m about to start writing, but I pause, because I know that this won’t be great for Henry. In fact, the best thing I could do for him would be to try to talk Charley out of giving this story so much attention. If we didn’t fan the flames this whole thing could die and the Dorians might be old news by Tuesday. Henry would be free to go forward with his plans as is. I think of Henry with his face all beaming and wrapped up in his imaginary green world, his dream project. I should kill this piece, for him.

  But then I hear Charley cursing as she bangs around in the filing cabinets, and I think about how I can’t wait for Quinn to get here and see her this way. I have a chance to do some actual writing again, and to show Quinn how it’s done. We finally have a chance to play at Woodward and Bernstein for real. And so I stop thinking about Henry, and let the eager gears of my newspaper brain take over.

  I open the piece with a description of Carter Marks, rising above the crowd to speak.

  20

  Quinn

  I sit in a wobbly chair and watch Rosie marry the ketchups. I’m helping with her side work so she’ll make her meeting on time. It’s the last day of February, that blip of a month, which means that a bunch of bums who got riled up at the town hall meeting are going to get together and groan about the Dorians and Elm Park at Carter’s house. This is their third monthly meeting, and Rosie says, this time, they’re going to plan their next move. To save Neversink and the carousel they must, Rosie tells me, be unified in action.

  Rosie lines up the more-full ketchups then balances their less-full partners on top, bottles mouth to mouth. Her forearm is dented in a line near the inner elbow, the fold a ghost of baby fat. She’s written Carter’s @ 7! in blue Bic on the underflesh of her arm. Through her ears are two sets of twinkly studs, and enormous hoops.

  “Will you help me with something?” Rosie says. I don’t so much agree to help her as follow her to the walk-in freezer. Rosie points at an industrial tub of ice cream. “Could you put that in your car?” The thing must be ten gallons.

  “Why would I put that much strawberry ice cream in my car?” I say. For a moment I think, stupidly, she might be planning something for us. A picnic.

  We’ll take these ten gallons of ice cream somewhere beyond town limits. We’ll spread a blanket under an elsewhere-bound overpass. We’ll eat the frozen strawberries and cream out of the drum with plastic cutlery.

  “I won’t be able to get it to the meeting otherwise,” she says. “Can I have the keys, please?”

  “Rosie, that’s, like, stealing,” I say, and she looks at me like that’s the lamest thing she’s ever heard. Like all of a sudden I’m the naive one. But this is not like her. “I’m not giving you the car so you can steal strawberry ice cream for Carter Marks,” I say. The freezer’s cooling mechanism circulating air sounds like the inside of a seashell.

  “You can or cannot be involved, but I’m going,” Rosie says. She gives me the Stationhouse keys. “Lock up.”

  Rosie sets the ice cream drum on its side and begins rolling. I stand in the walk-in, not wanting to follow her. My sweater is in the other room and all I have on is a red baseball tee with a peeling #9 decal on the chest.

  I cave. I grab my sweater and jog to the porch and see Rosie rolling the drum across the parking lot. The condensation on its sides picks up grit and ice-melt salt as she rolls. “Rosie,” I shout after her. “That isn’t going to work, come on.”

  “This is my part,” she says, or something like it. It’s hard to tell, because she doesn’t turn around. All I see is her ass bumping up and down as she spins the drum forward.

  I get the car and drive up beside her. “Get in the car,” I tell her.

  Rosie stands up and catches her breath. “It’s heavy,” she says. She hoists it into the way back. She takes a seat in the passenger side and buckles up. As her buckle clicks I realize she knew it was only a matter of time before I came after her. I feel like laughing. I imagine if Sam, if any of my exes, saw me now, they would laugh too. Because I didn’t used to be this kind of lady. I used to be the one who went off to sulk when things didn’t go my way.

  Marta used to watch the horse races. She loved the Derby, always bet a few dollars on some hopeless long shot. For fun, and because Marta was the patron saint of lost causes. She never won a thing but once. The 2009 Derby, she bet ten bucks on a fifty-to-one horse no one had ever heard of called Mine That Bird. You should have seen us screaming our heads off and jumping up and down in our living room, knocking over bags of chips and bottles of beer, making a terrible mess as that horse streaked up and won the whole damn thing. We laughed hard and celebrated Marta’s win the rest of the afternoon. We couldn’t believe
it. No one on TV could believe it either, and when they interviewed the jockey all anyone could say was How? How had he done it? The jockey said, I rode him like a good horse.

  Rosie’s settled in the seat now and peeks over her shoulder to make sure the ice cream is still back there. Her arms are goose-bumped. I toss her my sweater.

  THERE ARE TRUCKS and cars in Carter’s driveway, which reeks of exhaust. Probably dockworkers inside, the kind of men who think emissions testing is a government conspiracy. Rosie leads the way to the door and I follow, carrying the ice cream, my back threatening to give out the whole way.

  Sara Riley from the bar is the only other woman there. Her silvery hair is brushed neatly and her sleeves are rolled up. The rest are men: Joseph Deep, Jethro Newkirk, Cliff Frame, Mikey Eubanks, Billy, and three more boys his age. There aren’t enough chairs, so some of them are sitting on the floor. They’ve tracked dead leaves, crushed up, onto the rug. Should’ve taken off their shoes, but what do I care.

  “We have ice cream!” Rosie says. She gestures at me, like I too am a surprise.

  “Nosing around trouble, Winters?” Riley says. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “We have ice cream, Riley,” I say. I set the tub down in the middle of the circle. “You got a spoon?”

  “Carter!” she says. “No journalists.”

  Billy produces a plastic spoon from nowhere and starts in on the ice cream. “Strawberry is the worst flavor,” he says. The other boys root through the kitchen for spoons.

  Carter comes in, wearing boots and a worn gray T-shirt. He has not shaved. He appraises us and the ice cream. The copper pots hanging behind him sway.

  “We might need a journalist,” he says. “Pull up some rug.”