I watched the boy walk up to a woman in line at the funnel cake stand, head hanging, and when she draped an arm across his shoulders I saw him look up into her eyes and tell her what had happened. Fight for him, I thought. Don’t let her get away with it.
“You trying to win something for your girlfriend?” the Lucky Toss girl was saying, lifting her chin in my direction.
“She’s just a friend,” Lee replied. I knew he didn’t mean anything by it one way or the other, but it still made me crumple to hear him say it.
Now the boy was in tears. His mother stepped out of line, led him by the hand to a park bench out of the chaos of the carnival, and let him hide his face in her soft pink blouse. She had no intention of coming over here. Petty disappointments to better prepare him for the big ones—she had a kind face, but she was that sort of mother. Mama would have done the same.
Lee underhanded the ball the way the little boy had done. He missed the first try and made the second. “Can I win twice with the third toss?”
“You’re not supposed to,” she said, “but no one will know if I let you.” (Nor did anyone see me roll my eyes.) She gave him the third ball—letting her fingers linger on his—and it too landed at the bottom of a can.
“Hey,” he said as she handed him two ET plushies. “What’s there to do for fun around here besides this dumb-ass carnival?”
“I get off at eleven,” she said.
I turned away in disgust. For a moment people passed in colorful blurs across my vision, and all the music and chatter of the carnival dwindled to a distant hum. Then I felt something soft at my ear. “ET phone home,” Lee was saying. “Nah, he changed his mind—he wants to go with you instead.” He pressed the doll into my hands and looked around. “You said you’d watch him for me, Maren. Now where’d he go?”
I pointed to the park bench behind the funnel cake stand. “He’s over there with his mother.”
Emboldened by Lee’s success, a group of boys went up to the Lucky Toss counter, so the girl didn’t notice him heading for the boy on the park bench. I followed a few steps behind him, holding the ET toy with cold and sticky root-beer fingers.
“Excuse me,” I heard him say. “I believe this belongs to you.”
The boy’s face lit up, and he held out his hands. In a moment his mother had sized Lee up, and she flushed because a stranger had done the thing it had never occurred to her to do.
Lee reached out and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Someday you’ll be big enough to give it back, and you won’t be taking any crap from anybody, will you?”
The boy shook his head vigorously. “What’s your name?” his mother asked.
“Lee.”
“Thank you, Lee.” She caught sight of me over Lee’s shoulder and smiled. “Look, Josh—Lee won an ET for his girlfriend.” She cupped his cheeks, brushed the tears away with her thumbs, and nuzzled him close. “You both won tonight, didn’t you?”
* * *
We waited in the truck until the carnival closed. After Lee gave the ET doll to Josh he’d circled back to the Lucky Toss booth and arranged to meet the girl in the park across the road from the carnival.
Finally it was eleven, and from the truck we watched the bright lights on the rides all blink out at once. “You can go meet up with your ol’ pal Sully,” Lee said. “I’ll see you back here.” He took the keys, hopped out of the cab, and strode across the empty soccer field.
Yeah, right. I waited a couple of minutes, and then I got out and followed him. There was a chain-link fence around the playground, and I hid behind a sign by the gate marked GILDER COMMUNITY PARK. The fairground across the street was dark and silent, the steeple turned blue by the moonlight.
The girl was sitting on one of the swings, her back to me. She’d changed out of her red carnival uniform into something two sizes too small and covered in rhinestones. Lee sat down on the swing beside her.
“I never got your name,” I heard her say. Like it matters.
“Mike. What’s yours?”
“Lauren. So, like, who was that girl you were with?”
“I told you, she’s just a friend.”
“Where is she now?”
“She went home.”
“So, like, you’re just visiting?”
“Yeah. So where’s all this fun you were promising me?”
I saw her point to a deluxe jungle gym at the far corner of the playground. It was made of wood and shaped like a castle, with towers linked by rope-suspension walkways. “There’s a tire swing under that tower. No one will see us there.” So she led him by the hand to her doom. Part of me wanted to follow them and watch him do it.
I heard soft footsteps in the grass behind me and turned around. Sully stood there with his hands in his pockets. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but when he spoke his voice was gentle. “Come away from there, Missy.” I rose from my heels, and together we walked across the soccer field.
There was another pickup truck parked beside ours, older and red and half rusted over, with a miniature hula girl dancing from the rearview mirror. I peeked in the passenger’s-side window and noticed that the seat was covered in navy blue oilcloth printed with lemons and limes. I smiled. “This is your truck?”
“My truck or my castle, dependin’ on how you look at it.” He chuckled.
For a few minutes Sully showed me around his moving castle, the stash of beef jerky in the glove compartment and the Hawaiian-print curtains and the blue ceramic jar of pipe tobacco hidden under the seat—trying to distract me, I guess—but Lee took much less time than it would have taken me. I watched him emerge from the darkness under the jungle gym, and as he strode across the soccer field I saw he carried a water bottle and a grocery bag stuffed with the shreds of her clothing, the heel of one shoe poking through the plastic. He tossed the bag into a trashcan and paused for a drink of water. I watched him as he gargled and swallowed. Then he pressed the back of his hand to his lips, to wipe away the last trace of her.
Finally he came over to join us. “You ready?” Sully asked. “Cabin’s not much more than an hour north of here.”
“Sure,” Lee replied. “We’ll follow you.”
Sully hopped up into his cab, turned the key in the ignition, and gave me a wave. “Talk to you in a while, then.”
When we pulled back onto the road I half expected Lee to drive in the opposite direction, but he didn’t. In the warm summer night we caught the strains of bluegrass coming through Sully’s open windows. “How do you do it, when it’s a girl who likes you?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you kiss her first?”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters to her, doesn’t it? For a second or two at least.”
He shot me a mocking look. “What, are you jealous?”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
For a while we sat in silence, and I tried to pick apart this feeling I was having. How could I be jealous of Loathsome Lauren the Lucky Toss girl?
I wasn’t jealous. Not really. I just wanted Lee’s attention—if not forever, then at least for the seven and a half minutes it would take him to polish me off.
“You were awfully neat about it,” I said. It was easy last time; he’d done it in the bathroom.
“I’m not, really. I took off my shirt and threw it in the grass. Then I used hers to clean off my face.” He paused. “I haven’t eaten that many girls.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Why is that surprising? Women don’t give me so many reasons to hate them. They’re more honest. Not always, but most of the time.”
I thought of Samantha, who’d left me stranded in the Walmart parking lot, and of Lauren the Lucky Toss girl. I thought of Mama. “I don’t know about that.”
“All right, so I eat the exceptions.” He paused. “Did your mother lie to you?”
I folded my hands over the ET plushie in my lap. “I guess not. Not exactly. But she hid thi
ngs from me, and isn’t that almost the same thing as lying?” Lee shrugged. “What?” I said.
“I’m not gonna agree with you just because you want me to.”
“You don’t have to disagree just for the sake of it either.”
He flicked me a smile as we pulled onto a wooded dirt road, Sully’s bluegrass still tickling at the midnight silence. I wanted to talk about something else, so I said, “I’ve never had a stuffed animal before.”
“No? I thought every girl had loads of them.”
“Not me. My mother never let me have any, because if I got one then I’d want more, and she said it would be too much to pack.” Jetsam. That’s what you call the stuff they throw off a ship into the sea.
* * *
The cabin was old but sturdy looking, with a well and a cast-iron hand pump just off the back porch. Sully led us through a sitting room with a woodstove, a braided rug, and at least three or four deer heads mounted on the wall. A stag’s antlers nearly grazed the ceiling.
“Come on in and drop your things before we eat,” Sully said as he flipped the light switch in our bedroom. There were two twin beds, each made up with a red and blue patchwork quilt. “You kids all right sharin’ a room? Only two rooms for sleepin’ and I get the other one, so if you’d rather you can take the couch, all right, Lee?”
“This’ll be fine, thanks.” Lee dropped his pack and edged past us out of the room again. “I’m just going to have a shower, if you don’t mind.”
Sully and I went outside, and he bent over the campfire pit and poked at our dinner with a long stick. “The longer you leave it, the better it’s gonna taste.” He reached for a short-handled spade and gently lifted the foil package out of the ash. “If you please, Missy, there’s bowls and spoons in the kitchen.”
When I returned with the utensils Sully spooned out two heaping bowls of steaming vegetables and tender meat. “Ahhh,” he murmured to himself as he brought the first spoonful to his lips. “Now here’s what I call a midnight feast.”
We sat in old wooden chairs around the smoldering fire, eating in contented silence. Moths gathered and twitched around the porch light. The woods were alive with cicadas, but if I focused on the sound for a moment too long I began to feel uneasy. The forest might go on for miles, and who knew what else was in it?
Lee came out with wet hair in a clean T-shirt. Sully went back to the fire pit to fill another bowl and Lee said, “Only a little for me, thanks.”
“You from around here, son?”
Lee applied himself to the stew. “Nope.”
“He’s from Virginia,” I offered.
“You goin’ back there, when you see this little lady on her way?”
“We’ll see how it all plays out.” Lee laid the metal bowl aside and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Why do you ask?”
Sully turned to me. “I know what I told you, that night we met: best not to make friends and all that. But since then I’ve been thinkin’. It’s a long and lonely road, and there ain’t no sense makin’ it longer and lonelier than it has to be.”
Lee stifled a burp. “Well said.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.
“Maybe what I’m trying to say is, folks like us, we gotta make our own family.”
I thought of my real grandfather, who drank red wine with dinner and drove a navy blue Cadillac and probably wished I’d never been born. He would never cook a meal for me or offer me a place to stay. “Thanks, Sully,” I said as I handed him my bowl for a second helping. “For this delicious dinner—and for looking out for me.” The fire flashed in the whites of Lee’s eyes as he rolled them.
Sully’s hair rope never made an appearance, and I wondered if he didn’t want to bring it out only because Lee was there. It was pretty late anyway, so we didn’t linger too long at the fire. I washed out the bowls in the kitchen while Sully stoked the fire in the woodstove. Early summer evenings could still get pretty cold up here.
Lee sat on the sofa and looked around. “You said this is your cabin, Sully?”
“Sure, it’s mine.” The old man shrugged. “Sometimes when things get sticky I come back to one of my usual places, where I know nobody’s gonna bother me. Here’s a piece of advice from old Sully: Git yourself a place like this, soon as you can manage it.”
“When things get sticky,” Lee echoed, a little too pointedly. “Got it.” He turned in his seat to regard the wood-paneled wall, studded liberally with deer heads. “Looks like you’re quite an avid hunter.”
“Those trophies ain’t mine, but I do like to go stalkin’ a stag every now and again.”
“Do you come up here often?”
“Now and then. Good to come right about this time of year. Ain’t nobody here in summertime. They’re all down by the lakes.”
Lee rose and ducked outside, then came back in with the road atlas. “I’d sure appreciate it if you could show me exactly where we are on the map,” he said to Sully. “We’d like to get to Sandhorn by tomorrow afternoon, and I don’t want to waste any time.”
While they conferred at the kitchen table I took out Mrs. Harmon’s yarn and needles and curled up on the sofa under a rawhide lampshade. I managed to cast on twenty stitches, but when I tried to knit into them on the next row I got hopelessly mixed up, so I put down the needles and went poking through the end table. In the drawer I saw a deck of playing cards, a book of Mad Libs, The Midwest Bird-Watching Guide, and a handful of jacks. When I opened the cabinet underneath I found a basket much like Mrs. Harmon’s, with a crochet hook tucked into a skein of bright red acrylic.
Soon afterward Sully wished us goodnight. I took a long-overdue shower and got ready for bed. Lee closed the door and turned the key in the lock.
“Well?” I asked. “How’d you like your hobo stew?”
“Hoboes give me indigestion.”
“Har har.”
“He cooked enough food for all three of us, and then some. How did he know he was gonna have company tonight?”
I drew up the patchwork quilt over my shoulder, the ET plushie tucked under my chin. “You’re getting paranoid,” I said.
“I like to think I was pretty darned polite.”
“You were awfully…”
“Awfully what?”
“Awfully inquisitive.”
Lee shot me a look as he turned out the bedside lamp. “I learned that from you,” he said. “You don’t know if you can trust somebody ’til you’ve worn them out with questions.”
* * *
In the morning Sully’s truck was gone.
MISSY:
There’s eggs and bacon in the fridge, help yourselves. Why don’t you come back once you found your daddy and I’ll teach you how to fish?
See ya soon,
SULLIVAN
I felt Lee reading over my shoulder. “Why is he always calling you Missy?”
I smiled. “It’s short for Maren.”
Again he shot me a look. “No, it’s not.”
We helped ourselves to breakfast, taking our coffee in the rocking chairs on the front porch to soak up the creak and hum of the forest. The bumpy dirt track led away from the cabin, vanishing in the distant trees like a trail of breadcrumbs.
8
The hours it took to get to my dad’s hometown were the quietest we’d ever passed together. It felt like Lee didn’t want to talk, like he was nudging me away because we might be headed in separate directions this time tomorrow. It might take me a while to find my dad, but when I did I wanted Lee to stay too.
Sandhorn wasn’t too far from Lake Superior, and on the way in we passed lots of roadside shops advertising summer boating charters and holiday cabins with tranquil water views. Another small town, a main street, a white church at the edge of a tidy green lawn. Lee pulled up to the curb beside a phone booth. “Moment of truth,” he said.
Maybe one of many. I got out with my notebook and change purse and shut myself in the booth, and with trembling fingers I flipped to the b
ack of the phone directory. There was only one entry. Yearly, Barbara.
The address, the phone number. It was so simple.
* * *
I found my father’s mother as she was mailing a letter. She stood at the bottom of her driveway in a gray shawl cardigan and natty shearling slippers, lifting the flag on the mailbox with a long white hand. As I approached she pulled her cardigan collar snug around her neck and shuddered, as if I carried storm clouds in my wake. It was a gorgeous sunny afternoon, but she was dressed for November.
As I opened my mouth to greet her she turned and walked briskly up the driveway, her slippers scuffing against the asphalt. “Wait,” I called. “Mrs. Yearly? My name is Maren. I’ve come to talk to you.”
She paused, her hand on the railing, and turned on the top step to face me as I hurried up the walk. Barbara Yearly looked me over and, satisfied that I was the right age to be the person she suspected me to be, said: “How did you find me?”
I unfolded the birth certificate and held it out to her, and as she peered and read my name her eyebrows went up. “They gave you our name.”
What other name would they give me? But I said, as neutrally as I could manage, “My parents were married.”
“Yes.” The woman handed me back my birth certificate. “Yes, I know. I suppose you have a few questions for me. You’d better come inside.”
I followed her through a living room dominated by a fireplace of rough gray stone. The shades were drawn on the windows to either side, so that the only light in the room came from the narrow slivers the blinds cast on the brown shag carpet. In a darkened corner I glimpsed a tiny bar, two leather-cushioned stools, and shelves of overturned sherry glasses lightly filmed in dust. I wondered if I would meet my grandfather, or if he was still at work.
As Barbara Yearly padded into the kitchen I caught a whiff of something ripe and faintly greasy, as if she hadn’t washed her hair in weeks. It was dark but threaded with gray, pulled tightly into a knot at the nape of her long white neck. A few loose strands fell limply into her collar.
“I’ve never been to Minnesota before. It must get awfully cold here in the winter. Lots of snow?”
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