“When we go to the new house with Doug you’ll tell my dad where I live, right, Aunt Mimi?” he said to me.
“Your dad will always know where you are, honey,” I’d replied. Sometimes afterward I thought that was a dumb thing to say. Clifton couldn’t even soothe himself with the notion that Tommy couldn’t find him. He’d always think Tommy knew where he was but just didn’t bother to show up.
By the day of Clifton’s party no one had seen Tommy for a couple of months, even some of the harder guys that Steven knew from construction, the ones who were always looking for drugs and trouble. I didn’t know where to begin to search for him but I had to try after my aunt Ruth called me at school and said some man had come to the house and scared her silly. “He walked right in and looked in the closets,” Ruth said, her voice shaking. “He went into your mother’s house, too. I said to him, You’d better not be stealing anything in there. He said, real mean, There’s nothing to steal. He said Tom owes him money. A lot of money, except he used a filthy word instead.” It took me a minute to figure out that he’d probably said a shitload of money. That was bad. The guy sounded like the sort who, when he said a shitload, meant it.
There was a girl in my dorm who was always offering to lend people her car. “I hardly ever use it,” she liked to tell everyone, so I went to her Saturday morning and asked if I could take it for the weekend. She didn’t really know me. None of them did. I studied in the library and I went to Ed’s house to help look after his kids and I walked around by myself. Steven hadn’t bought any houses in the city in spite of his big talk, once he found out about all the rules and regulations and permits and after some guy at a building site told him if he didn’t use union plumbers he’d find his pipes ripped out overnight. But he had stayed with me a couple of times, and I could tell the girls on my floor didn’t know what to make of him. The guys at school were lanky types with long hair and narrow shoulders. Steven still wore his hair short and you couldn’t miss the muscles in his chest and arms. Also he had handed out business cards in the dorm hallway, just in case anyone knew someone in the market for a house in the country. Next to all the guys on barstools in Miller’s Valley, talking about when their unemployment would run out and how much a pound you could get for scrap metal, he seemed like a real go-getter, but here he just seemed slick and pushy. The girl with the car was one of the ones Steven had given his card to.
“I really need a car just for the weekend,” I said. “I’m a good driver. I’ll change your oil if you want.”
“How often are you supposed to change your oil?” she said.
“I’ll just do it, okay?”
I figured I’d stay with Steven when I got to Miller’s Valley. I didn’t really want my mother to know I was home or I’d have to lie to her about why. I went to a couple of the bars and at one place the bartender said, “I haven’t seen him in a good while and his tab is long overdue. Tell him that.” Then he looked me up and down, and I knew he was wondering if I was some girl Tommy had knocked up. “I’m his sister,” I said, and the guy said, “That’s hard to believe,” for about the millionth time in my life.
Finally I went over to the house Steven was working on. It was almost done and it didn’t look like any of the workers were around. The Polish guys insisted on knocking off at four on Saturdays, but sometimes Steven would keep on spackling and painting for a couple hours after, a drop light with a 150-watt bulb hanging from a hook in the ceiling. I’d worked with him on a Saturday night more than once, although not since I’d started school. The boxy house near town was a nice little place, white paint and green shutters. The hunter green shutters were Steven’s trademark, and he still told everyone when I was around about how I’d come up with the color. “It’s not such a big deal,” I said once, and he said, “Don’t do that, babe. Don’t put yourself down.” How do you tell someone that you don’t like being called babe, especially since he’s been doing it from the first time he took your jeans off, when, let’s face it, you didn’t mind one single damn thing he said or did? It was just one of his routines. He called guys pal and mac. He called me babe.
Steven had a lot of routines, actually. When he brought anyone to one of the houses he was selling he put a pot of Dinty Moore stew in the oven on low heat. He said that real estate agents were always telling people they should bake cookies, but he thought stew smelled more like home than cookies, although at one house he left the stew in the oven after he turned it off and left and he’d had to air that place out for a week. He said sometimes that that’s why he’d only made a thousand on it, but I thought a thousand was still a lot. He said when we were married half of it would belong to me.
He always stashed the key to a house inside the belly of a ceramic frog he kept by the back door. It looked low-rent, almost like a lawn gnome, but I’d never said anything. I put the key in the back door, but it was already open. The kitchen looked good, some kind of golden wood cabinets and a dark green Formica counter, same color as the shutters. Through the archway I could see a dining room with a wagon wheel light fixture over where a table would go. It reminded me a little of the arrangement in our house in Miller’s Valley, but nicer.
I heard Steven say something from a room down the hall. It was a narrow room, maybe a baby’s room for some young couple who wanted to start a family and who would be wowed by the green shutters and the gold cabinets. The floor was high-gloss hardwood, two coats of polyurethane, and Steven was lying on it with some girl with long streaky blond hair sitting on top of him, moving up and down. By the noises she was making I could tell Steven wasn’t just good with me, he was good. Either that or she was a fine actress. Steven saw me standing in the doorway and his face went empty for a minute. It’s a creepy feeling, walking in on someone having sex. It’s even creepier when it’s someone you thought was only having sex with you. I turned and went out the back door and walked around the side of the house to the little borrowed blue Volkswagen at the curb. It had a plastic flower around the radio antenna. A pink daisy. Basically that’s all you needed to know about the girl who’d lent it to me.
“Whoa, babe, whoa,” I heard Steven yell from inside the house, and then I heard a girl’s voice say, “What?” That’s what got to me as much as the sex part. The babe part. A guy who calls more than one woman babe is a guy you don’t want to have any part of, even when he comes running out to the car to stop you from leaving in just a pair of jeans and bare feet. I’d turned the car on and he yanked open the passenger side door.
“Don’t get in this car,” I said. Behind him at the front door I could see the girl in nothing but a big T-shirt. “Who is it?” she yelled.
“His former girlfriend,” I yelled back.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Steven. “My feet are freezing. Let me just sit in the car for a minute.”
“No. I’m leaving now. I’m here looking for Tommy. Some guy came to our house and threatened my aunt. So just tell me what you know about Tommy and I will leave and you can get back to business.”
“It’s not what it looks like,” he said. When he saw my expression he shut up about that.
“There are some rumors,” Steven said, beating his hands together. It was cold for April. I was glad about that. He had goosebumps on his chest. “Somebody told me he got in with some pretty bad guys from the city. New York, not Philly.”
“And?”
“And nothing. No one’s seen him. Maybe he’s with them. Maybe he took off because of them. Maybe’s he’s just laying low. He was living in that house on 502 that I tried to buy a couple years ago, remember? That little ranch with the two-car garage?”
I shook my head.
“Yeah, come on, you remember, you were there when the guy told me the roof was rotten.”
“Okay, now I remember. I’ll try there.”
“A woman named Casey rents it. He was living with her.”
“Great. Thanks.” I put the car in gear. “The door?” I said.
“I’m freezing,
Stevie,” yelled the girl in the doorway.
“Oh, Jesus Christ. She’s just some, you know, some—”
“I know. I don’t care. I’m going.”
He started to cry. It wasn’t that big a deal. He was the kind of guy who cried at movies and birthdays and stuff like that. He enjoyed it. He thought it made him seem sensitive. But if he thought crying was going to change anything, he hadn’t been paying attention all this time. I was glad we weren’t indoors, though. There was one way he might possibly have gotten around me, but not out on the street with him still smelling like some lousy flowery drugstore perfume.
He leaned into the car. “Mimi,” he said, pointing at me, “you’re the one. You’ll always be the one. You’re the love of my life. Swear to God.”
“If you see Tommy, call me at school. Call me right away, all right?” He nodded. His nose was dripping. He had a scratch on one shoulder.
“Otherwise don’t you ever dare call me again.”
“I love you,” he yelled as I drove away. He meant it, too. I knew him. I knew he meant it, just like I knew he went back inside and finished what he’d started with what’s-her-name. Probably more than once. Charm is like tinsel without the tree. What’s tinsel without the tree? Shredded tinfoil.
I drove over to the house on 502, but no one was home, and I figured it was probably a good thing, since for the first time in my life I could imagine the feeling that made my brother want to wallop someone, and I was afraid I might wallop him for scaring me so bad if he opened the door. But I think I was mainly mad at myself. I didn’t cry in the car back to school, although over the next week I did. I wasn’t even sure why. I knew that I wasn’t heartbroken, and I guess the fact that I wasn’t made me disgusted with myself. It didn’t take long before I figured out that I’d learned an important lesson, that falling into things, bad things, dumb things, things that felt good but were bad and dumb both, was the easiest thing in the world. It was a good lesson to learn when you were still young.
“I changed your oil,” I said when I got back to the dorm and handed plastic flower girl her keys, but I really hadn’t. I figured she’d never know the difference.
I missed the big one. I’d always thought of the storm that killed Donald’s grandmother as the big one, but it turned out it wasn’t even close. This one was on the evening news, the national and the local both. Eddie said there were pictures of houses he recognized with water all around them, nothing but the roofs showing, although how he could tell which house was which just by the roof I didn’t know.
My mother had been at the hospital when the rain started to come down hard, and they asked her to do a double shift. Then they told her she couldn’t leave because of flooding on the roads. She said afterward that she slept in a patient room and couldn’t get over how uncomfortable the bed was. When she finally went back home the little barn had collapsed along with the shed my father had used as his repair shop, and both the furnace and the hot water heater were shot.
Aunt Ruth had stayed put, as always. When the flooding started to get bad Cissy Langer went over and sat with her. They went up to the attic together and took all Ruth’s dolls with them. Cissy said she was glad that all her doll equipment was in her workroom at the new house, that she didn’t have to keep moving it the way she once had. A waterlogged Singer sewing machine is pretty much a sewing machine that will need to be junked. I’d learned that from my father, who’d tried to repair one once. Cissy told my aunt that her doll collection was worth a pretty penny and that she couldn’t afford to let it get wet. Everything else got wet because for the first time the water rose into the first floor of Ruth’s house. Mr. Langer said with this storm you could get a little bit of an idea of what Miller’s Valley would look like when they flooded it. That’s what he said: not if. When. We knew it was when by that time.
I wondered if they’d gotten impatient, after all those years, the government people. I wondered whether the big one was a natural event, or whether they’d closed off the dam even more than they’d done before and let the heavy rain and Miller’s Creek and the water table and gravity do the rest. But I thought about it, and then I let it go. Sometimes I thought I’d gotten a little addled about the whole thing, and that my suspicion that the water in the valley had been deliberately pushed into rising bit by bit was just one of those crazy notions that helped people make sense of the senseless world, like all the theories about who’d really killed President Kennedy or whether one of the Beatles albums told you secrets if you played the songs backward.
Ed drove up the next week and took my mother over to the new development, which was mostly finished. They were doing a good business in people who lived in low areas of the township, and women who liked shiny new better than same old.
“It looks raw,” my mother said when I asked her about it. I couldn’t get more out of her than that.
“She’s got to be realistic,” Eddie said as I held Kimmy on my hip and she chewed on a hank of my hair. My name had been her first word. Debbie didn’t like that one bit, I could tell. “I have a name that’s really easy to say,” I said. “Clifton learned it when he was a baby, too.”
“Mimi isn’t any easier than Mama,” Debbie had said. Which was true.
“I think Mom is ready to move,” I said to Eddie. “But what about Ruth?”
“I’m tired of all that with her,” Ed said.
“Which doesn’t get anyone any nearer to getting her out of the house.”
“She’s lucky there still is a house,” he said.
The big one was the storm that tipped the balance. Everyone said that afterward, although I thought they were fooling themselves and that the balance had been tipped all those years before, when Winston Bally first drove his sedan around the gravel roads of the valley. This time around, three of the houses in Miller’s Valley didn’t make it out in one piece. Two of them were mostly scrap wood by the time the water went down. It was a good thing no one was living in either one. One had been abandoned after its owners died and one was already owned by the state. The third one had some walls standing but it was still a teardown. That one was owned by Home Sweet Home. Eddie told me that a couple of years ago Steven had purchased three places in the valley, two that belonged to an estate with grown kids who had no interest, one that had gone into foreclosure. He’d already sold two to the state for the water project. Ed said that according to the records he’d seen, Steven had made about three thousand dollars.
“It was a smart move,” he said. “You could do worse.”
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to talk to Eddie, of all people, about my love life. Steven kept sending me Hallmark cards. “Just because I’m thinking of you,” they would say, with a rose edged in glitter, or “You’re purrrrrrr-fect,” with a photograph of a kitten. The last one I hadn’t even opened, just tossed into the waste can next to my desk.
I’d missed the big one because I didn’t get a chance to go back to Miller’s Valley much. Every time I had two days off in a row it turned out my mother was working those days, or had something else planned. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that she wanted to keep me where I was, doing what I was doing, as though to move me forward she had to give me up. I’d never seen her as happy as she’d been at my college graduation. “Magna cum laude,” she said, patting my cheek in a way she hadn’t done since I was a kid. “I was a summa,” said Ed. “Of course you were, son,” she’d said. “And I was very proud.”
She gave me a white lab coat as a gift. One of the doctors at the hospital had told her the best place to buy one. Callie gave me a stethoscope, and Clifton listened to my heart with it, and the look on his face made us all laugh. “It’s very noisy!” he said.
Mrs. Farrell sent me a fifty-dollar bill. “Please come back and talk to my students, Dr. Miller,” she wrote. “They need the inspiration!” And I vowed I would.
My apartment was almost as small as my room at home. It was a studio with a hot plate in a little alco
ve and a bathroom with a shower stall so tight that I had a bruise on my hip from hitting the wall when I turned around to rinse my hair. I think I got the place because I was the only renter skinny enough to fit in that shower. It was cheap, and because of my schedule I was really only there to sleep. “If I lived here I’d spend time at our house, too,” said Debbie when Ed helped bring an old bed of theirs upstairs to my place.
“She spends time at our house because you’re always asking her to watch the kids,” Ed said as he wrestled the mattress onto the box spring. When I listened to the two of them I kept wondering if my parents had been so annoyed with each other after Eddie and Tommy were born. Debbie said she wanted to have two more, and Ed said she was nuts.
“They’ll be fine,” my mother said the one time I brought it up, when I drove to the valley for the day. “You can always tell the ones who will stick.”
“How?” I said, but my mother shrugged. She just knew. Unlike Ed, she seemed to know that I was no longer with Steven. I could tell because she didn’t say a word about him. I did notice there was a big fancy box of peanut brittle in her one kitchen cupboard, but I didn’t know if that was an attempt, like the Hallmark cards, or just a coincidence and some patient had given it to her. I didn’t ask. I guess I’m my mother’s daughter. One of the things she couldn’t stand about Ruth is that she had a tendency to talk about every little thing. “Silence is a virtue,” my mother said sometimes. I suppose Ruth talked because she was lonely, but my mother would have made one of her mouth noises if I’d said that. Lonely. Ha.
When we talked that day in the kitchen it made an echoing sound because there wasn’t much furniture in the downstairs. The big one had been big enough to soak through the couch and the easy chairs, the rugs and the throw pillows. There was no saving them. My mother had gotten two of the guys from the VFW to cart most of her furniture to the dump. Some people left their houses and just never came back. They didn’t want to see what was there, all sad and sodden. After the big one people seemed to take for granted that the valley was done, and that the Valley Federal Recreation Area was happening. The government people had gone from talking about water maintenance and reservoir supply to talking about boats and swimming and waterskiing and ice skating. They’d gone from talking about taking people’s houses to giving people jobs, from eminent domain to tourism. People love the sound of that word, tourism.
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