Turn Signal

by Howard Owen

  Jack had expanded the back of the house in 1994 so that their bedroom had a walk-in closet, his-and-her baths and a Jacuzzi. Brady and Shannon’s rooms were closer to the front of the house, where Ellen slept, and there seemed to be space enough for everyone. Brady’s ultimately failed attempt at living elsewhere brought them a combination of peace and anxiety.

  Jack knew something had to be done, eventually, but the older his mother got, the harder it seemed to leave. He had watched her hair turn lighter over the years, the reddish-blonde fading to a kind of blonde-gray, then mostly gray. They had taken care of each other in bad times, and she had filled in the missing pieces for him, especially when it came to Brady.

  Finally, Ellen settled matters for him.

  One Tuesday in the early days of 1997, when he’d gotten up late after rolling in from California the evening before, she fixed him pancakes and sausage for breakfast, and when he was finishing his second stack, she sat down across from him at the old kitchen table that still had his initials carved underneath from 35 years earlier.

  “It think it’s time for you all to get your own place,” she told him.

  He wondered if Gina had been talking to her. But his wife had never, to his knowledge, filibustered for her own place within earshot of Ellen.

  His mother had told him, more than once, that it would be OK if they moved, but she had never really insisted, and Jack always thought she was just being polite.

  Now, though, she was giving him an ultimatum.

  She told him that she wanted them out of there in six months. That would give them time to find a good place.

  “I know you’re bound to have some money saved,” she told him, smiling a little. “You’ve been freeloading off me all these years. You ought to have a fortune.”

  Jack and Gina paid the taxes and most of the other bills, but still it had been a bargain.

  “And Shannon ought to be where she’s got some friends her own age to play with,” Ellen added.

  He kissed her on the forehead as he left the table and told her he’d think about it.

  “No thinking to it,” she said to his back. “Do like that shoe ad says: Just do it.”

  He realized just how tied he was to the house, and to the three-generational mosaic of his family in a place where you could see life rise and recede. It was a refuge for someone who spent half his nights sleeping in the back of a truck cab or in some nameless motel. The die was cast, though. The three women of his life were united against him. It was time to go.

  Maybe, he thought, his mother would like some peace and quiet, but he doubted it. She seemed happy enough for Brady to move back in, almost before they’d finished unpacking.

  His mother’s dictum came about the time that Cully Dane and his partner were beginning to develop the wetlands west of Speakeasy, across Humpback Road and Sycamore Creek from the Stone house.

  It was easy enough to get what appeared to be a good deal on the contemporary on Woodpecker Way, and he had never seen Gina so energized about anything. She would come out every day, when they were building it, walking around the footings and then the framework, seeing an island kitchen and an L-shaped great room where Jack saw only lumber.

  Once they moved in, it was good for Shannon, too, he supposed. She has so many more friends now, in a neighborhood where every household seems to have two or more kids.

  Jack wishes he had been there when Ellen died. He is haunted a little by the idea of her possibly calling for help that night and no one responding. He is somewhat soothed by what she said to him once, when they were only a couple of months from leaving.

  He had wondered out loud what would happen to her, if she had a heart attack or a stroke, or just fell in the yard.

  “What will happen,” she told him, “is going to happen. Everybody dies, son, and everybody dies alone. I aim to live to be 100, but I won’t feel cheated if it happens tomorrow. I’ve had it good.”

  These days, he sees that he perplexes people with his lack of concern. So many people he knows seem to be on the verge of panic attacks.

  Mack McLamb seems more worried than Jack does about the way Cisco’s stock has been falling, and Jack wonders if Mack doesn’t have more than he admits invested in it. Jack tells him it’s only money, that they’ll make some more, but Mack doesn’t seem the same. He’s even stopped drinking, something that has most of his old friends concerned. Milo wonders if they can do a sobriety intervention. “I liked him better as a drunk,” he admitted to Jack one day. Jack told Milo that Mack was just making the change from an alcohol-based system to one that ran on blood and was struggling with the adjustment.

  His brother and sister seem to have been permanently deranged by the loss of their late mother’s house, even though the money should be coming to them any time now. Mike obsesses about how such a thing could have happened, and he’s sure it all has something to do with Brady. You would think, from the tone of their phone calls, that they and not Jack had been the ones who lived at the house most of their lives.

  Everyone knows Brady’s in California, from where he sends an occasional postcard. To Jack’s amazement, he claims to have gotten a couple of auditions and has a role in a Neil Simon play Jack thinks he has heard of at some dinner theater in a town south of Los Angeles. He sounds happy and occupied, as if his plate is so full that he barely has time to let them know he’s alive. No one, though, knows who staked Brady on his trip west. It had better stay that way, Jack writes him.

  And Gina, who has gone back downstairs to make her dinner, seems most stressed-out of all. She wonders what will happen if she loses her job, which she assures him could happen. Doctors’ groups merge all the time, and office managers are gone with almost no notice. He can’t make her see how it’s all going to work out.

  When Jack comes down, holding the manuscript in both hands, Gina is on the phone. She hangs up as soon as he walks into the kitchen. He realizes he probably sneaked up on her in his stocking feet, and he’s fairly certain her last words were, “Gotta go.”

  She says it was one of the secretaries, worried about whether she would have a job in the new year. Gina has told her not to worry, but she tells Jack that the girl really should.

  Shannon calls and asks if she can spend the night at a friend’s. Gina tells her it’s OK, as long as she’s home the next morning.

  “Who’s she staying with?” Jack asks.

  Gina names a girl who lives in the next cul-de-sac.

  Jack wonders if she isn’t spending too much time at other people’s houses.

  “What if they have boys over there? I saw this thing on TV the other night about some kids down in Georgia who were having orgies, every kind of sex you could think of, and their parents didn’t even seem to know what was going on.”

  “Well,” Gina says, “I know Walt and Kate Atkins, and I’m pretty sure our daughter’s not going to be partaking in any orgies tonight.”

  Jack tells her he’ll leave the manuscript on her bedside table, if she’d like to read it.

  “Thanks. I’ll be careful,” she tells him. She seems distracted.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll make another copy for Gerald Prince. I’m going to let him know it’s done, though.”

  He’s a little hurt. It has been some time since she last asked him if she could at last read Lovelady, and he knows that his constant refusals until he got it “just right” probably are the reason she stopped. Still, he wants to think she shares a little of his excitement.

  Only he and Gerald Prince have seen anything except small snippets that Jack read to his writing group before he left it in November when he finally realized how misguided and detrimental its members were. He wants to sit down beside Gina now and watch her as she reads it, page by page, to see her belief in him return a hundredfold.

  The Stones are going to buy their Christmas tree in the morning and put it up in the afternoon. Most of their neighbors have long since finished their seasonal decorations—one a couple of houses d
own has Santa and Frosty joining the three wise men in their adoration of the baby Jesus. Some of their neighbors have two Christmas trees. There are miles of cascading lights, outlining bushes and lamp posts.

  The Stones have white lights in most of their windows, and Gina has put a wreath on the front door and tied a red bow around Wesley’s neck that the dog, to Jack’s surprise, endures.

  She told Jack, two weeks ago, that she would leave the tree to him, but he has not gotten around to it, trying to finish his book before Christmas. It became a standoff, with Gina determined not to do anything else in the way of decorations with Jack not working, and Jack telling her he would take care of everything, as soon as he finished.

  When Shannon asked her parents if they were going to have a tree at all, Gina told her it was up to her father. Shannon has spent three nights with friends in the last week.

  They watch Miracle on 34th Street together. When the movie reaches the point where the John Payne character realizes his fiancee doesn’t believe in him any more than she believes in Santa Claus, Gina gets up suddenly and says she’s going to bed.

  “You don’t want to wait until the end?”

  “I’ve seen it about ten thousand times. I think I know it by heart.”

  It used to be one of their traditions.

  Next year, Jack thinks, all the old traditions will be back. I’ll put Santa Claus and his reindeer up on the front roof, cover the dogwood tree with colored lights, the whole nine yards. He finds that, thinking about a year from now, he is as excited as he was as a kid on Christmas Eve.

  He only wishes he had someone with whom to share the excitement.

  Soon, he realizes how tired he is. He never knew a person could get so tired without doing physical labor.

  Only his light is on in the bedroom. He looks at the perfect stack of paper beside Gina’s bed and sees that it hasn’t been touched yet.

  He tries to wake Gina, but she groans in near-sleep and turns away from him.

  In the morning, he is hard for her, but when she wakes up half an hour after he does, she yawns and says that they’ll have to wait until later, that Shannon might be coming in anytime, and they have to get going if they want to have a Christmas tree at all.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The train, coming up from Newport News, didn’t get here until almost 9:30, an hour late. I go and stand outside for a few minutes, trying to clear my head. I haven’t had much sleep since—when?—yesterday morning, I guess. I get a surprise glimpse of myself in the reflection of a Coke machine. You do look a little ragged, I tell myself. This makes me laugh.

  When the train finally arrives, everybody piles out of the station like we’re playing musical chairs and the last one on will have to stand.

  Well, it’s almost that bad. How can so many people be going by train from Richmond, Virginia, to New York City on a Wednesday morning? There’s more leg room than you’d have on the USAir flight, but it’s still pretty crowded.

  I tell the conductor it’s about damn time they got here, and he tells me to watch my mouth. I check myself. Can’t miss this train. First things first. Maybe later. The guy, an old man, really, glares at me as I move along, looking for my seat.

  And then, we’re rolling at last. I’m on the aisle. I’d rather have the window seat, but the woman next to me, another large black mother/grandmother, this one with a little girl in her lap, doesn’t want to switch.

  We’re moving probably 10 minutes later, and then we’re working our way north through the Virginia woods, stopping every time we get up a good head of steam. Ashland, where two Mennonite women wait at the station next to the college campus. Fredericksburg. Quantico, where some Marines get on and some get off. Woodbridge.

  I didn’t ask for non-smoking, and from the seat I’m in, the door at the other end of the car starts to disappear through the haze. Even the woman next to me, the one with the 2-year-old now asleep in her lap, is puffing away. I try to talk to her, but she gives me the sideways fisheye and turns to look out the window.

  I know I really ought to freshen up a little, throw some water on my face or something. Wish I’d brought some deodorant, too.

  Finally, I do try to find the men’s room. I saw somebody get up and walk toward the back, then come back later, so I guessed it was back there somewhere. It’s hard to navigate these aisles with that pack on my shoulder, and I have to say “Excuse me,” a couple of times. But I’m damned if I’m going to leave Lovelady there for somebody to steal.

  When I get to the bathroom, someone’s in there, yelling “Occupied” when I try to open the door. It sounds like a woman.

  So I go on, swaying a little as I walk down the aisle, moving to the train’s rhythm, getting my rail legs. I’m going toward the end of the train, so everyone’s facing me, and I’m facing them. They look at me and then look back down really quickly, like they wish I’d just keep moving. And I realize I’m saying that: “Keep moving. Keep moving.”

  The snack car is two back. I don’t remember bringing my wallet, but it’s there, even has some cash in it. I remember buying the tickets with the bad check—last one of those I’ll have to write for a while. I laugh.

  The kid behind the counter is giving me a look, and when I tell him I want a cup of coffee, he turns around and pours me one, then charges me about twice what he should have for it.

  Haven’t really given much thought to where I’ll sleep in New York. “Sleep when I’m dead,” I think, and then realize, from the way the kid bartender and the other two customers there are looking at me, that I must have said that out loud, too.

  I drink two cups of coffee and eat a cold grilled-cheese sandwich. Then I go back toward my seat, just as we’re pulling into Alexandria, the last stop before D.C. I do stumble into the bathroom and try to make myself more presentable.

  When I get back to my seat, we’re moving again, and the woman and child are gone, so I move over next to the window.

  It’s funny, but the smoke seems to have drifted outside, too. It’s hazy everywhere I look as we creep into the city. I don’t remember Washington looking this smoggy.

  We go over the river. I look at my watch. It’s almost noon by the time we reach Union Station. People come and go, and I wonder for a moment if I’m supposed to change trains. I ask a conductor, and he tells me to just stay put, that we’ll be stopped here for a few minutes, that we’ll be in New York soon enough. Not soon enough, I want to tell him.

  Coming out of D.C., we make three more stops, one at the Baltimore airport, and then, when we’re rolling into Baltimore itself, as we’re creeping past some of the worst-looking houses I’ve ever seen, there he is.

  He’s standing behind a fence, in somebody’s back yard. There’s a rusted metal glider next to him and clothes hanging on a line to one side. He waves as we go by at about 10 miles an hour, and I wave back at him.

  I could swear that he’s giving me the thumbs-up again.

  Suddenly, I’m very tired. I move my legs more tightly around my bag, lean my head against the window, and I’m out like a light, lulled by the rhythm of the northbound train.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Jack chases the basketball across the cul-de-sac. It feels good to do something physical, something other than waiting.

  It’s a teachers’ workday, so the kids are out of school, but Shannon’s middle-school team has a game at 6, and she’s asked him if he’d like to shoot some hoops with her. He’s appalled at how clumsy he is these days. He was not a bad basketball player once, he reminds his daughter.

  “Once,” she laughs. “Long, long ago.”

  After a while, he’s content just to shag balls for her, happy to watch her hit one 15-foot jump shot after another or work on her crossover dribble. She is going to be as tall as he is soon, and it pleases him to see how confidently she moves. She seems unaffected by all that’s happening around her.

  Finally he challenges her to a game of “Horse” and manages to win only because he’s alway
s been nearly ambidextrous, and she can’t match his left-handed hook shots. She beats him on the rematch and accuses him of losing on purpose.

  “Not a chance,” he tells her. “I won’t have many more chances to kick your butt in basketball. If I could beat you 10 times in a row, I would.”

  Inside the house, he feels his stomach tighten again. There are no messages on the phone.

  The Friday after he let Gerald Prince know he was sending the rewritten manuscript of Lovelady, he couldn’t resist calling. After he identified himself to the young man in New York—he thought it was the same one as last time—and waited a couple of minutes, the assistant told him that “actually, Mr. Prince is in a meeting right now and wonders if he could call you back.”

  The Christmas tree was still up then, along with the decorations Jack was supposed to take down but hadn’t yet. He sat there waiting for half an hour, reading a little but mostly just waiting.

  Finally, after an hour had passed, Jack tried again, explaining to the same young man that he had to go out somewhere and didn’t want to miss Gerald’s call.

  “Mr. Prince has gone for the afternoon,” the young man told him, after a pause. “He said he would call you Monday.”

  “Monday’s New Year’s,” Jack said, uncertain as to the work habits of editors.

  “Well,” the young man said, “actually, I guess he’ll call you on Tuesday then.”

  Tuesday passed with no call. Finally, on Wednesday morning, just after 9, Jack tried again.

  “Hold on,” the young man told Jack, after another pause. And then he was talking with Gerald Prince.

  “So,” Jack said, “what do you think?”

  “Well, it’s interesting,” the voice on the other end said. Gerald sounded as if he were eating something at his desk. “I’m really impressed with what you’ve done with it. I’m going to be talking with some other editors this afternoon. Let me call you back tomorrow.”

  But he didn’t, and when Jack called on Friday, the assistant said Mr. Prince was actually out of the office on a long weekend and wouldn’t be back until the next Tuesday.