After You Were Gone

by Alexis Harrington

  “No good, mostly,” his brother replied, laughing and making the hard lines around his eyes and mouth all the more prominent.

  “I thought you’d be married by now. You’re what, twenty-two?”

  “Twenty-three, but who’s counting? Anyway, I don’t want no ball and chain telling me what to do. I got a little gal over in Marfa I see sometimes and it works out fine.” He looked around the tiny living room. “Although it wouldn’t be bad to have some female spruce up this place a little.”

  A little. The mobile home needed a twister to land on it and carry it off to perdition. Mitchell took a long swallow of beer. It was cold and smooth going down his throat. “Where do you work?”

  “I have a few business concerns.” Darcy lit a cigarette with the same old Zippo he’d had since he was a kid. He exhaled a chain of impressive smoke rings with as much flair and importance as a man sucking on a twenty-dollar cigar.

  Earl Tucker snorted. “‘Business concerns’ my rosy rump, Mr. Big Shot. You parked those raggedy-ass lemons outside with grand plans to fix them up and sell them. Every one of those things sounds like an old tractor and farts like the judges at a chili cook-off. The cars and that truck have been sitting there for six months, waiting for you to work on them.”

  “I sold one!” Darcy shot back.

  “One.”

  “What about James?” Mitchell interrupted, hoping to head off one of the Tuckers’ frequent arguments.

  “James—now that boy has a real job.” His father said this while glaring at Darcy. “He loads rock down at the gravel pit for road crews. Makes pretty good money at it, too.”

  “He’s not married, either?” James was the youngest, so Mitchell figured him to be twenty-one by now.

  “Hell no. I’m telling you, women are just a shitload of trouble, and not much good for anything except getting laid and cleaning up.” Darcy drained his beer. “Didn’t we learn that from Mom?”

  An awkward, silent moment fell over them, and Earl sped up his rocking chair.

  Cindy Tucker had taken off when Mitchell was fifteen years old. She’d begged the boys to go with her, and Mitchell had wanted to. But he’d also been brainwashed to believe that loyalty to his father was more important. He was a Tucker, by God. When Mitch wouldn’t leave, neither would James or Darcy. So Cindy had gone off on her own. She’d left her husband, left her sons—she’d even left her wedding rings on the kitchen table. The rings had belonged to Mitchell’s grandmother. Beside them was a brief note that said she couldn’t take this life anymore with their part-time sometimes-cowboying, sometimes-wildcatting father. He’d be away for weeks, even months at a time, in the oil fields up in the Panhandle, or off at some ranch, doing God knew what. He had rarely sent home any part of his pay, that much was certain. Money, and life in general, had been unreliable, and they’d seen their share of welfare and food stamps.

  The Tucker males never heard from Cindy again, and like it or not, Mitchell knew it affected the way all of them had turned out. Baseball had kept him grounded for a while—his high school coach had told him he had the serious makings of at least a minor league player, especially after a scout had come down to have a look at him. Mitch had sensed his natural affinity for the game. The feel of the 108 double stitches under his fingertips, the smell of the leather ball cover, the solid, certain grip of his hands around the bat. When he’d played baseball, everything had seemed to make sense in his mind. But after a while even that hadn’t been enough to keep things from falling apart. He didn’t suppose Darcy or James recognized that. But he’d had a lot of time to think about it, and he guessed he’d made the wrong decision when he’d chosen to stay. He’d had two prime chances to get out of here, and he’d thrown both of them away for a trip to the penitentiary.

  Still, growing up without a mother wasn’t a good excuse for a couple of grown men to be living in this pigsty with their embittered, grudge-bearing father. Even prison had been cleaner than this. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice did not tolerate dirt or disorder. Or much else, for that matter.

  His father interrupted his thoughts. “Your room is still at the end of the hall, Mitch. You’ll probably have to dig yourself a tunnel to get in there, but you might as well stow your gear.”

  “Okay.” Who was he to judge? He swallowed the rest of his beer. He’d come back to live in this pigsty, too.

  But only for a while. Only until he caught up with Julianne again.

  “‘As is’—does this thing work or don’t it?” Old Alvie Bennett pointed to the handwritten sign taped to the top of an avocado-green dryer.

  Julianne Emerson waved a hand in the general direction of her laundry flapping on the clothesline next to her house. “It shuts off too soon, Alvie, but I’m sure it just needs a new timer or something.”

  He’d been eyeing the appliance for an hour, returning to it now and then to open and slam the door a couple of times, like someone checking out a used car. This time he twisted the control knob two full turns, as if he could discover the answer to his question, even though the machine was unplugged and sitting on the front lawn.

  Whatever the dryer needed, she couldn’t afford it right now.

  He rubbed his silver-bristled chin, making a scraping noise. “Twenny dollars . . . seems like a lot of money for something that don’t work.” His frayed, blue biballs looked as if he’d worn them night and day for months, long enough to allow them to stand up on their own. What he’d want with a dryer was a mystery.

  “I’ll let you decide.”

  “I guess I’ll give you ten for it.”

  She curbed a sigh. “All right,” she agreed, just to be rid of the dryer and Alvie, too. “Cash, though, no checks.” It was a phrase she’d repeated many times throughout the day.

  The old man reached into his pocket and produced a worn leather snapper purse. From it, he extracted an equally worn ten-dollar bill.

  Julianne had been out here in the front yard for the better part of the day, watching as what seemed like half of Presidio County pawed over her belongings and poked through things that were part of her earliest memories. But they were also buying them, which was why she was holding this yard sale—to raise money. Her late mother’s china cabinet, a wringer washer that her grandmother had used, a deck of playing cards depicting San Antonio’s Tower of the Americas from the 1968 Hemisfair, a paint-by-the-numbers portrait of Davy Crockett (his eyes looked like two fried eggs), a gaudy bronzed statuette of a nymph with a clock mounted in its stomach, farm equipment, feeders, livestock chutes, stock tanks—the assorted flotsam that got collected by several people’s lifetimes.

  Of course, there was the biggest item of all—the farm itself. It had been in her family for four generations. It had to go, too.

  As Alvie handed her the money, he gazed around at the old house and the seven-year-old barn. “So, you’re really going to do it? Take over your uncle Joe’s dime store?”

  Gila Rock’s older locals still referred to the place as the dime store, a quaint, dust-covered term that Julianne wasn’t really familiar with. She couldn’t think of anything that sold for a dime now. “Yes, as soon as I can.”

  “I don’t s’pose your daddy would be too happy about this, you sellin’ this place and all.”

  Julianne tightened her spine. “I think he’d understand,” she lied. She already knew that Paul Boyce must be rolling in his grave. She’d considered all her options—renting out the store her mother’s uncle had left her, selling it, just sitting on it. She always came back to the same answer—to get out of farming. It would be hard for her to leave the only home she’d ever known. But she was desperate. This was her chance to escape, to start over, to gain some independence and build something that wasn’t affected by weather, disease, and daily price fluctuations.

  It had been a hot day for late April, but with only a hint of the summer heat to come. She looked across the still-green lawn and saw Cade Lindgren, her hired hand, in deep discussion with a man over a g
alvanized tub full of old tools. As if feeling her eyes upon him, he glanced up and gave her a nod of acknowledgment. Cade had been a big help to her, but it wasn’t enough. There were just the two of them, trying to do the work of six or seven, and it was impossible. She had no money to hire anyone else—the vet bills for the hogs alone would have paid half a crew for a year.

  “Julianne,” a woman called from the porch, “how much for this old vacuum cleaner?”

  “Three dollars.”

  The woman nodded and rooted around in her purse for three ones. Julianne climbed the steps to take the money and stashed it in the canvas carpenter’s apron she wore. It had lots of pockets, and she could make change easily. She felt like a ticket seller at the county fair.

  The Boyce farm had hardly been a booming success, but her father had never told her that. They’d scraped by like every other small farmer in the country. He’d placed great value on family tradition, and she knew that he’d counted on her and her husband to carry on. They might have been able to turn it around, she and Wes; things had begun to look promising. But there hadn’t been enough time. After Wes died, Julianne couldn’t make a go of it.

  The town support generated by his death seemed to dry up after the trial was over. She’d faced the daunting job of carrying on alone. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried. She had worked hard, and she’d lived on this hog farm long enough to understand what it needed to succeed. But for every forward step she took, she slipped back three. Fate resisted her efforts to bend it to her will. It had come back at her with a hard, uncaring fist to visit a string of calamities upon her. A scour epidemic, brought in on a crewman’s work boots, had wiped out three-quarters of the stock. The price of feed had spiked at a time when she could least afford it. And one by one, she’d been forced to let her workers go. The last of them, Ángel and Guillermo, had been with the farm for so long they were like family. In fact, they had called her niña till the day they left, even though she was an adult and a widow. Now, years after she’d inherited this land, she had to admit defeat. She’d sold off most of the surviving hogs and was ready to move on.

  As the last shoppers left and the shadows grew long, Julianne watched dispassionately as Cade and Alvie lifted the dryer onto the bed of his pickup. Then she walked to the end of the long gravel drive to take down the SALE TODAY sign she’d posted on her mailbox. She waved at Alvie as he pulled out onto the road.

  “Cade,” she called, “when you go back through town, will you get the signs we put up on the telephone poles?”

  All lanky limbs and long torso, he jogged up to her, the change in his jeans pocket jingling with his keys. “I thought I’d stick around and help you pick up this stuff.” He gestured at the odds and ends that remained unsold. The time-telling nymph still stood on the front porch steps of the house.

  She put her hands on her waist and leaned back to stretch her tired muscles. “That’s okay. There isn’t that much to do. It’s Saturday night and you ought to go back to Cuervo Blanco. Get a beer at the Turnbuckle Tavern and ask some girl to dance. I can handle the rest of the chores till Monday. We have just the two sows left.”

  “Did you make enough money to cover the mortgage payment?”

  She pulled open one of the pockets on her apron and glanced down at the jumble of bills. “I don’t know yet. I’ll have to count it when I get back to Gila Rock. You go on—you haven’t seen your family for over a week.” He usually lived in the foreman’s cabin when he stayed here. Cuervo Blanco, the next town over, was fifteen miles away.

  He grinned and kicked at a dirt clod. “Oh hell, the old man will pester me again to work in their feed store, and my mom will just rag on me for not being in church tomorrow. She thinks that’s the place to find a wife.”

  Julianne knew that his parents had never approved of him working for her, but she wasn’t sure why. He was in his late twenties, certainly old enough to make his own decisions, and too old to still be living at home. But she didn’t say so. “I guess church is better than a tavern for that. You’d make some woman a good husband, Cade.” In the three years that he’d worked for her, he’d been a comfortable, familiar presence. Lately, though, she’d begun to sense that he might have a crush on her. At least he’d never crossed the line of friendship, and she was careful to make sure he didn’t. She liked things the way they were and had no interest in romance. Not now, anyway, and not with Cade. It was as if her heart had seared itself shut to nurse two wounds that would never heal. She saw something in his brown eyes, a hint that he wanted to say more, and she shook her head to stave off further arguments. “Get going. Thanks for your help, and I’ll see you Monday morning. We’ll get to work on the store. I need you for that more than I do this.”

  His shoulders drooped a bit, as if he were disappointed. “Well, if you’re sure—”

  She waved him off. “I want to go home, too.”

  He adjusted his low-crowned Stetson, pushing it down more firmly. “All right, Monday. At the store.” He headed toward his truck, an old, grumbling blue Dodge that had more lives than a cat.

  “You’ll get the signs?” she asked.

  He gave her a short salute and climbed into the cab. When he was finally gone, Julianne released a tired sigh.

  She had a lot of thinking and planning to do.

  After she cleaned up the front yard, she walked into the nearly empty house. What furniture she hadn’t sold or given away—the kitchen table and chairs, her bed—she and Cade had moved to the cluttered, untidy apartment over the store. Her boot heels on the pine flooring echoed through the bare rooms and hallway. She wandered the house her grandfather had built, remembering when both her parents had been alive and she had been a little girl. Standing in the kitchen doorway, she could still see her daddy at the table in the early morning darkness, sipping coffee from a thick, white mug and listening to the farm report on the radio. At the stove, her mother would tend a breakfast of fried eggs and sausage while she hummed to herself.

  Julianne walked down the hall to the room she had shared with Wes. The night after he’d died, she’d sat up in the chair by the window, unable to sleep in their bed. She’d never slept in it again. The next night, she’d moved back into the pink-papered bedroom that had been hers in her girlhood. In those easier days of her ripening youth, before Wes, before her father had lost his battle with a wasting cancer, her heart had beat with a desperate, forbidden desire for a man she was not meant to have. A man who had filled her dreams at night and made her believe that her future would be much different than it had turned out to be. In the end, he had betrayed her in a way that she could never have envisioned, not even in a nightmare.

  She straightened away from the doorjamb. All the people who had ever lived under this roof were dead now, except her. Their ghosts lingered as painful memories in her heart.

  From the living room, the harsh brrinngg-brrinngg of the old black Bakelite phone jolted her out of her bittersweet reminiscing. It was a relic, a rotary dialer left over from the days of rural party lines, and it was due to be disconnected early next week. She’d get by with her cell phone for now.

  She trotted down the hall and reached for the phone where it sat on the bare pine floor with its old round cord coiled up beside it like a cowboy’s lariat.

  “Hello?” At first all she heard was a jumble of background noise—a tinny radio, a sound of something like an old refrigerator or a wheezy air conditioner. “Hello.”

  “You thought it was over, Julianne, but it’s not. It’s not over at all.” The voice was no more than a hoarse, rough whisper, unknown yet familiar. She couldn’t even tell whether it was a young person or someone much older. “You’ve had some quiet years, but they’re done with now.”

  Gooseflesh rose on her arms. “What? Who is this?” She heard the single bark of a dog, then a click. She pushed the switch hook a few times, but the connection was broken. A recording came on.

  “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and—”r />
  She slammed down the receiver, surprised to find her heart thumping hard in her chest. It was just a crank call, just a dumb crank call. Yet . . . yet it had been made by someone who knew her. He had spoken her name. On this ancient equipment, there were no conveniences such as caller ID.

  What wasn’t over? What? Suddenly, the idea of being here alone with dusk purpling the sky was an uncomfortable prospect. She wanted to get back to town, closer to civilization.

  Maybe it was good to be moving away from the farm, she decided. Good to get away from this place. She tightened her long ponytail, then turned and walked outside to her truck, resisting the urge to look back over her shoulder as she went.

  Julianne swore Uncle Joe Bickham had never thrown anything away. He’d been a lifelong bachelor, and it showed in the stacks of old newspapers and accumulated junk in the one-bedroom apartment over the store. She’d found jars of rubber bands, bent nails, and long-expired seed packets. He had a pile of Texas Highways magazines that went back years, and old drugstore calendars that served no useful purpose. The place needed a good cleaning, as did the business downstairs, and if Julianne was going to live here, she would have to paint and decorate, too. She had spent just two nights in this apartment, and her to-do list, written on a yellow legal tablet, was growing by a page per day. There weren’t enough hours for all the work that needed doing.

  In the small kitchen, she nudged a box of empty canning jars out of the way and pulled a cold fried drumstick from the refrigerator for her dinner. That appliance was the only thing she’d washed out so far. The first time she’d opened it, the foul gust of spoiled food that poured out had almost pushed her back downstairs.