Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  “No,” Crystal said.

  “No?”

  “She had a donkey.”

  “Well, there is that,” Anita conceded.

  “I’d like a donkey.”

  Anita sighed and patted Crystal’s leg. “I’m sure you would, honey. Look, we’re home.” She turned into Franklin Court. “There’s nothing like a good story to pass the time.”

  She hauled on the emergency brake as hard as she could, and together she and Crystal flung open the car doors to the rain and made a run for the house.

  Bob got home in time for dinner, and so did Doreen. For the first time in weeks they were all together for a meal just like a regular family. Anita spooned Hamburger Helper into a serving dish and passed around a bowl of creamed corn and a pan of scalloped potatoes.

  “This looks real good, hon,” Bob said, helping himself to ample portions. “Been a long time since you fixed this.”

  “It comes from a box,” Doreen said.

  “Don’t matter to me,” Bob said. “I like it anyway.”

  “So what did they tell you today at the college?” Anita said, spooning food onto Crystal’s plate. “Did they like you?”

  “It has nothing to do with liking me,” Doreen said. She had way too much makeup on, as far as Anita was concerned. It made her look cheap and needy, but Anita knew better than to say anything. “It has to do with money,” Doreen was saying. “They said they’d probably be able to give me some financial aid, but that I’d have to take out a student loan for most of it because my grades weren’t good enough for a full scholarship.”

  “Hey, your grades are good,” Bob protested. “Sawyer High gave you a diploma, didn’t they?”

  “Oh, please,” Doreen said.

  “You should go ahead and apply anyway, honey,” Anita said. “At least it would mean you wouldn’t have to wash sheets for the rest of your life.”

  “Are you kidding? I can’t quit working. Who’s going to support us, Danny? Yeah, right. I’m still paying on his goddamn truck.”

  “You should sell that,” Bob said. “Hack’s said he’d put it on the Vernon Ford lot for you and get you a good price.”

  “So what am I going to drive then?”

  “Use the leftover money to buy something smaller, a Geo or something.”

  “Oh, right, a tin can.”

  “Then keep the truck, honey,” Anita said. “You’re the one who brought it up.”

  Doreen turned on her. “Are you going to pay for some of it?”

  “You know we can’t afford to do that,” Anita said softly.

  Bob kept his eyes locked on his food, eating fast.

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I’m saying,” Doreen snapped. “I can’t afford it either. So what am I supposed to do?”

  Bob said, “Look. Me and Hack can drop you at the hospital in the mornings. Crystal’s in Head Start anyway, and you can walk from the hospital to wherever your classes are.” The college leased space in several buildings around town, mostly in the upstairs of retail stores and the Allstate insurance office. “Then you can catch a ride home with Hack and me when you’re done.”

  “You mean, no car at all? No way.”

  Anita set down her cutlery. “Then what exactly is your plan?” she said evenly. “You’re already living here for free.”

  Crystal stopped eating and put her hands in her lap apprehensively. Bob gave her a wink for courage.

  “Yeah, well, it’s not exactly the Taj Mahal,” Doreen said.

  “I only meant you need to make a budget of your expenses. Then you’ll know what you can and can’t afford.”

  “If you didn’t want us here, you shouldn’t have asked us to come home,” Doreen said, and left the table crying. After grabbing her purse, she slammed out the front door and roared off in the truck.

  Another meal gone to shit.

  Anita jumped up and pulled Crystal onto her lap, but the child stiff-armed her.

  “All right, honey, you can be excused,” Anita said to Crystal softly. “It’s all right, Mommy’s just tired like Jewel’s mother in the story. Why don’t you see if you can find something on the Cartoon Network?” Anita had sent Bob in to pay up on their cable bill a few weeks ago, so Crystal would have something to look forward to in the evenings.

  Crystal hopped down from the table and went off without looking at either Anita or Bob.

  “What the hell?” Bob said.

  Anita rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “She’s just got to grow up.”

  “Crystal?”

  Anita gave him a look. “Doreen. We’re not always going to be here to take care of her and Crystal.”

  Bob stared.

  “Well, it’s true,” Anita said evenly. “I know it, and you know it too.”

  “Know what?”

  “My weight? Your blood pressure?”

  “Oh,” said Bob. “Oh. Well, yeah.”

  “What did you think I meant?”

  “I didn’t know, that’s why I was asking.”

  Anita pushed away from the table. “I wish I knew what was going on with you these days,” she said, collecting plates.

  “Nothing going on with me,” Bob said.

  “Like hell. You know this is the first night you’ve been home for supper in almost two weeks?”

  “And look at the way it turned out,” Bob joked.

  “Honey, I’m in no mood for humor,” Anita said, but she softened. He always looked like a little kid when she scolded him. “I’m so tired I fell asleep at the motel today.”

  “You’re not sick, are you?” Bob said. “Are you?”

  “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I’m sure run-down, I know that.”

  “If you think you’re sick, though—”

  “Something’s been working on me, but I’m guessing I’m almost over it now. No fever today, and the diarrhea’s almost gone.”

  Anita carried a big stack of dishes into the kitchen, and Bob followed with the rest. He shooed her aside and began to wash the dishes by hand. The dishwasher had been broken for going on two years. Anita picked up a dish towel and started drying.

  “Where do you go anyway?” she said. “AA?”

  “Mostly,” Bob said, handing off the dripping scalloped potato platter.

  Anita shook her head. “You aren’t drinking again, are you?”

  “Stone cold sober,” Bob said. “Twelve weeks this Tuesday.”

  “Well, God does work in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.”

  “I get a little credit too.”

  “Well, sure you do. I’m proud of you, honey. I hope you know that. I just can’t figure out what turned you around.”

  “I love you.”

  “What?”

  Bob stopped washing dishes, dripping water all over her clean floor with the sponge he still held in his hands. He didn’t look a day over twelve. “I love you, baby,” he said softly. “I always have, and I always will. I just want you to know that.”

  Anita’s knees turned weak. Most days the man might as well be one more piece of junk in the side yard, but she loved him all the same.

  That was the thing no one had figured out, not even Bunny. Even though he was skinny and scatterbrained, even though he was screwing up half the time, and drunk the rest, he still called her darlin’ like he meant it.

  Of that one thing, that single thing, Anita had no question.

  chapter ten

  Last night, half crazed with insomnia, Rae Macy had had a waking nightmare of herself in black canvas kung fu shoes, polyester pants, and a self-collared pastel sweatshirt with big-eyed kittens on the front. It could happen. Not now, of course, not yet, but if she and Sam stayed in Sawyer for another ten or fifteen years, as Sam had lately taken to suggesting, she would take no bets. Just yesterday she had had to restrain herself from running to the Safeway in her sweatpants and one of Sam’s old shirts. Why not? Everyone else here looked like hell. Still, let your standards slip, and the next thing you
knew, you were shopping the sales rack at Sears.

  At the bottom, though, her bravado was a brittle thing. She was lonely; she didn’t know when she’d ever felt so lonely. Was there another person within fifty miles who cherished Chekhov the way she did? Sam didn’t. God knows Hack Neary didn’t. Rae wasn’t even absolutely sure he could read.

  Yet Hack Neary was the single thing she looked forward to each day with his secrets and sad eyes, his compulsive cheap seductions. Behind it hunkered some old tragedy or transgression. Could he have been an assassin in Vietnam? He refused to talk about the war except to say it had not always been the living hell you saw in movies, that not all his memories were dark. Rae had asked him if Bob had served there too, Bob lately having taken on the gutted look of a man who had seen more than he could live with. But Hack had laughed at that and said Bob was a charmed man; God had given him the flattest feet his draft board doctor had ever seen. Hack himself had had arches worthy of a ballerina.

  Bob sometimes ate lunch with Rae and Hack in the showroom, unpacking two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a Hawaiian Punch juice box, and a Twinkie from a brown paper bag. It was the lunch of a schoolboy, no doubt a larger version of the one Crystal took to Head Start. Rae remembered the little girl in her pink plastic coat very well. Bob had brought her to the dealership several times since then, and she had played gravely until Bob or her mother got off work and could take her home. She rarely smiled outright, but Rae suspected it was the expression of a cautious nature rather than shame over her steel teeth. Plus she might not have had all that many reasons to smile. The mother was a laundress, and the father was a felon. Rae listened to Bob talk about Crystal and Doreen with appalled fascination.

  “Hey, beautiful,” Hack said from the doorway of her cubicle. She jumped.

  “Hey,” she said, flushing to her scalp.

  “How about taking me to the Bobcat for coffee?”

  “Now?”

  “You too busy?”

  He knew she wasn’t too busy. She hadn’t been busy since she’d started working here.

  She stood, nearly as tall in her heels as he was, and swung her purse up over her shoulder. Hack watched her. As she passed in front of him, he put a hand on the small of her back, and it burned like fresh sin.

  Francine looked after them with pure contempt as they left the dealership. Rae straightened her back, lifted her chin higher, and in the parking lot opened her own door and hoisted herself up into the cab of Hack’s truck. She loved the muscularity of the pickup with its high running boards and stiff suspension, its toolbox in the back and deep, manly rumble. Hack pulled his door to amid a cloud of Brut aftershave.

  As they pulled out into traffic, Rae tried to collect herself. She wasn’t stupid; she knew what people were saying. They were saying she was having an affair with Hack. How did you deal with a thing like that? Yet she wouldn’t give him up; she saw no reason to give him up. She was a writer, a thinker, an achiever, the wife of a successful attorney. Hack Neary was no part of that. He was an aberration, strong and fleeting as opium.

  Hack pulled into the Bobcat’s lot and parked right in front. When she opened her door, she slid out of the seat right into a puddle. She could feel the cold rainwater wicking up through her thin leather soles. Hack had already made it inside, smoothing down his hair as she struggled with the heavy door. By the time she got inside a waitress was already leading Hack back to a table.

  The Bobcat’s decor was Vintage Small-Town Sports. Bowling and softball league trophies lined the front windowsill and shelves behind the cash register; dozens of cheaply framed photographs hung on the walls, showing decades of Bobcat-sponsored teams squinting at the camera. On the wall by the restrooms a framed and autographed bowling shirt commemorated some three-hundred-point game.

  After the waitress had filled cups of coffee for them and taken their orders, Rae nodded toward the pictures. “Are you in any of those?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Knees.” He stirred two packets of sugar into his cup.

  “Ligaments?”

  “Steel.”

  “You’ve had a knee replacement?”

  “Let’s just say I came back from Vietnam with a few extra parts.”

  “Ouch.”

  He shrugged. “So tell me about myself,” he said, lifting the thick coffee mug with a foxy smile.

  “Tell me about your sister.”

  “I don’t have a sister.”

  “You said you read poems to her.”

  “I did.”

  “Then you have a sister.”

  “Had, princess.” His face filled with something old and sad. He said softly, “I think you should tell me how wonderful I am.”

  Rae leaned in across the table. “What was her name?”

  “Katherine. Katy.”

  “Pretty names.”

  “The Katydid was a pretty girl.”

  “Did she look like you?”

  “Some people said so. I could never see it, though.”

  “Was she smart?”

  “Real smart. Smart like you. She read all the time, everything.”

  “But not you?”

  “Nah. I didn’t have time for that. I worked. Anyway, the Katydid was the brains in the family.”

  “What was her favorite color?”

  “Green.” Hack smiled thinly. “You didn’t see much green in Tin Spoon.”

  “Tin Spoon?”

  “Nevada. Junky little cockroach town two hours outside Las Vegas. The town motto was, Glad you’re here. Not that anyone was.”

  Their waitress slid their meals in front of them. Hack picked up half his Monte Cristo. Rae pushed waffle-cut fries around on her plate. She never had any appetite when she was with Hack.

  “Why Tin Spoon?” she asked.

  Hack shrugged. “Cherise ran out of money there.”

  “Cherise?”

  “My mother.”

  “Oh.”

  “She was a whore,” Hack said.

  Rae gave him a look.

  “Prostitution’s legal in Nevada, princess. You don’t believe my mother was a prostitute?”

  “Sounds pretty unlikely.”

  “Only to you, princess,” Hack said gently. “Only to you.”

  Rae didn’t know what to say. She watched him finish his sandwich and wipe his mouth and beard neatly with his napkin. Say what you would, the man was fastidious. The waitress came around and freshened their coffee.

  “You’re bitter,” Rae said when she was gone.

  “Bitter? Nah. Why would I be bitter?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Anyway, now it’s your turn,” he said, leaning back in his chair with his coffee mug. “Tell me about myself.”

  Rae shook her head in exasperation. “God, Hack. You’re just like a big kid who really believes this Christmas will be different.”

  “Maybe this Christmas will be different. Maybe you’ll be under my tree.”

  Rae flushed. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know it’s not what you meant, princess.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she said.

  “Why? It suits you.”

  “It’s patronizing.”

  “It’s a compliment. Where I come from, people like you are only on TV.”

  “Who are people like me?”

  “Rich people,” Hack said simply.

  “Am I rich?”

  “Sure. Fancy clothes, fancy lawyer husband, college education, condo on the beach. I bet your husband makes good money—what, fifty, sixty thou? I could do a lot with that.”

  Rae bridled. “It’s not like it’s just being given to us, you know. We’ve worked hard for everything we have, which isn’t nearly as much as you think, and we both went to graduate school for years to get it.”

  Hack smiled, raising both hands in surrender.

  Rae flushed and then deflated. “Francine gave me a look when we went out.�
�

  “What kind of a look?”

  Rae shuddered. “Just a look.”

  “You want me to tell her not to look at you anymore?”

  “You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Hack said quietly. “Do you want us to not have lunch or coffee anymore?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want to stop?” Hack looked crestfallen.

  Rae shook her head. “No.”

  Hack watched her. “We can, though.”

  “I know we can.”

  “Well, just so you know.”

  “I do. I know.”

  “Fuck,” said Hack.

  “What?” Rae saw him looking over her shoulder at something in the front of the restaurant, and whatever it was, it wasn’t good. She saw him straighten himself, straighten his shirtfront like he was preparing for combat.

  Bunny slipped into the seat beside him.

  Rae wondered if she would vomit.

  “Hi,” Bunny said exclusively to Hack.

  “Hi,” he said, his face a perfect mask. “What are you doing in town?”

  “I had to pick up a prescription for Mom. I saw your truck.”

  “We were having lunch,” he said. “Have you eaten?”

  Bunny looked ready to detonate. Rae’s pulse was roaring in her ears. “Look, I’d better get back,” she said. “I can just walk.”

  Neither Hack nor Bunny acknowledged her or said a word.

  “I’ll just go then.” Appalled, Rae fumbled in her purse, pulled out some money, and laid it blindly on the table. “It was nice to see you again,” she said to Bunny lamely, ever the good girl. Bunny didn’t even look at her. Neither did Hack.

  Vernon Ford was four blocks away, and by the time she got there Rae was soaked. It didn’t matter; she was stunned, reeling with guilt and humiliation. She walked past Francine blindly in her ruined pumps and her pointless suit, her eyes filling with bitter tears.

  Hack got back half an hour later. His face was ashen.

  He walked by Rae’s cubicle without even slowing down.

  Down at the public health clinic, Gabriella Lewis was getting impatient, but Bob couldn’t help that. He had some questions, and he was going to stay until he got some answers, which was why he was sitting in this overheated little office with half-moons of sweat blooming under his arms.