CHAPTER TWO
Rube had spent the last forty-five seconds wiping his hiking boots on the welcome mat.
Mad had opened the door, walked inside, and was about to speak when she realized he hadn’t followed her, and now she was just standing there like some dope.
She had the urge to inform him that his hiking boots were already pristine and he was actually kind of ruining their welcome mat with all that scuffing, but she thought, Do not ruin your relationship with your half brother in a single day.
Do not kill your half brother on the threshold of your own house, because it will be so hard to explain to the police.
She allowed Rube to prepare himself in whatever way he needed to step into this new reality, a world where he had a sister.
She had, she reminded herself, home field advantage in this situation.
Before this morning, only he had known the truth, but now they shared the information, and he was walking into her home.
And if it did turn out to be an elaborate scam, she could beat him half to death inside the comfort of her own living room.
She wondered why she was thinking so much of doing violence to this recently discovered sibling.
There was all the psychic weight, sure, but it was also just that he was a guest, and she didn’t have many of them.
Because, she reasoned, they were usually an inconvenience.
They showed up and created work for you.
They asked you about your feelings, your day.
They asked if you maybe had a beer in the fridge.
They asked if you could adjust the air-conditioning just, like, two degrees.
They asked if you knew the location of any legal papers that might speak to the true identity of the father you had not seen in over twenty years.
And you just had to nod and smile, because this was hospitality.
He was a guest, she reminded herself.
He was more a guest than he was a brother at this stage in their relationship, so she would let him wipe his feet for fifteen more seconds before she made a small noise of irritation.
Her mom wasn’t at the house, thank god.
They worked the farm mostly on their own, aside from some seasonal help and a few student interns from a community college nearby, but the two of them didn’t overlap as much as you’d expect.
Mad could go nearly the whole day without seeing her if the two of them were pulled in different directions to do whatever needed doing.
Other times, though, when the work was hard, she and her mother were on top of each other so much that Mad thought about setting fire to all the crops and running away and becoming a costumed mascot at some low-level amusement park.
This was the range of her escape fantasies, ruining the thing she loved and then punishing herself by doing the most humiliating work she could imagine to atone for it.
Now, with her half brother walking into her home, she wondered if her dad had been the same way.
And, if so, would that mean the farm had been a punishment for what he did to Rube and his mom? She sometimes considered that wherever he had gone after he left the farm had been the punishment.
But maybe not.
It made her head hurt, honestly, trying to imagine the timeline of her father’s life and keep her own story firmly placed within a distinct part of his narrative.
“This is a really nice place,”
Rube told her, and she felt grateful for that.
She looked at him a little more closely.
He was tall, like her, but thinner, so pale, whereas she was tan and already starting to get lines from the sun.
Rube’s hair was brown, while hers was blonde.
But she could see the resemblance, like their wide noses, just like their dad.
Mad had a squarish jaw, which had always made her feel mannish, while Rube’s was a little less defined, but they both had that tiny indentation in their chins.
That was something she had understood about her father.
He was ridiculously attractive, looked like a movie star without the fake sheen of fame, but it was probably his deficient character that mutated the genes with his children, made them sturdy and plain so they wouldn’t run off to follow him.
She suddenly realized that he had stopped looking around the house and was now awkwardly staring at her, waiting for her to notice that he had stopped talking.
And she found that she couldn’t speak, couldn’t stop staring.
“Rustic,”
he finally offered, and she was not so jazzed about that adjective, but whatever. He wasn’t from around here. He was from … where the hell was he from?
“Hey,”
she then said, a little louder than she’d intended, “where are you from?”
“Oh, yeah,”
he replied, smiling like he’d forgotten his change at the store, “you have no idea where I came from.”
She thought that sounded ominous, but then she remembered that, wherever he had come from, he’d been conveyed by PT Cruiser, and she felt less worried. “No idea,”
she admitted.
“Boston, Massachusetts,”
he replied. “Which is also where our dad was from.”
“Wait, is that where our dad was from? Like, is that where he started?”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said he grew up in Maine, way out in the country. He said his parents had been chicken farmers, and that’s where he’d learned a lot of the stuff he brought to the farm here, but that big processing plants took over and he’d realized he wanted to get back to the land.”
“He was not from Maine,”
Rube said.
“Can I just ask you something?”
she replied. “How are you so sure of all this? How do you know he didn’t make up a story for you and your family? How do you know that there wasn’t a family before yours? How do you know everything you ever knew wasn’t a lie?”
“Those are good points, and I have spent a lot of time—and, you know, money—in therapy working through some of those concerns, and I accept that there are elements of our dad’s narrative that will never line up, and I’ll never fully know the man. Fine. But I have a workable timeline for the man. I have a birth certificate, a copy of it. When he was married to my mom, I guess he hadn’t yet fully embraced the idea that he needed to reinvent himself and create new narratives of his life. He was just himself.”
“So he wasn’t from Maine?”
“He was not,”
Rube replied. “He was from Boston. His mom ran a dress shop. His dad—I can’t find anything on him—wasn’t a part of his life.”
Okay, her dad grew up without a dad. Maybe this was all she needed. This one piece of information gave her some context, and now Rube could go back to Boston. But he didn’t seem like he was going to leave.
“He never left the city of Boston until he left us.”
“And came here?”
she asked, gesturing to the room, which, if she closed her eyes, she could remember her father within.
“Yeah,”
he replied. “Near as I can tell.”
“He just, like, got on a bus and ended up in Coalfield, Tennessee, a town he’d never been in, and became a farmer? And kind of started talking with a southern accent?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“He wasn’t a farmer?”
“In Boston?”
he replied, laughing. “No.”
“What was he, then?”
“I mean, lots of stuff. He sold insurance, and he worked in advertising, but he was also a writer.”
“Wait, a writer? Of books?”
“Yeah, he wrote five books. Detective novels. Under the name C. A. Hill.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m dead serious. That’s actually the name of one of the novels. Dead Serious . The third book in the Detective Harry Bucket series.”
Rube shook his head. “They’re all out of print.”
“Hard to believe,”
she replied.
“It’s just … there aren’t any royalties if you were wondering about that.”
“I was not,”
she told him. She wanted him to calm down. If this was a scam, it was so incredible that she’d honestly be fine if she ended up bankrupt and in the hospital, missing a kidney. It might be preferable to what could end up happening.
“Our dad wrote books?”
she asked.
“Five books and maybe ten that didn’t get published.”
Mad could only shake her head. Her father was a man of letters. Or had been.
“I write, too,”
Rube continued. He said this almost sheepishly.
“For money?”
she asked.
“I mean, for my own artistic pursuits, but, yeah, also for money. That’s how I make a living.”
“What kind of books?”
she asked, and he told her that he wrote mysteries. “Like our dad?”
she asked.
He blanched a bit, then recovered. “Yes and no,”
he said. “I mean, the mystery genre is pretty broad, you know? There’s a lot of territory—”
“But you write mystery novels and our dad wrote mystery novels?”
“Yes,”
Rube finally allowed.
“And our dad was a farmer, and I’m a farmer,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s right. Weird.”
“Oh, god,”
Mad said. The thought that her life was determined by her absent father was something she had of course considered, but it was strange to have confirmation from another test subject. She did console herself that, yes, she was also a farmer, but it was partly because her dad had freaking left her mom to run a farm on her own and so Mad had little choice in the matter at first, had to break her back just to keep the farm running. Rube, on the other hand, didn’t just choose to become a writer, but he’d also decided to write mystery novels. Still, they were both doing things that their own father had grown tired of. It didn’t feel great, honestly.
“Do you write?”
Rube asked, and Mad shook her head.
“I barely have time to read,”
she said. After a few seconds of awkward silence she asked, “And do you have any agricultural interests?”
He smiled sheepishly, looking a little pale. “None,”
he finally replied.
“Wait! Okay, this might be neat,”
she said. “His favorite novel was Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! He read it to me when I was little, and he said it was the greatest American novel. Did he read you that book?”
Rube turned even paler and then got red. “No,”
he said. “He did not read me that book. He did not, if I remember, ever mention it.”
He saw her look of disappointment, and he offered, “But he left when I was a kid, so maybe he read it after he left us.”
“Like, on the bus to Tennessee?”
she asked. “Checked it out at the Boston Public Library and then skipped town with it and owes a million dollars in fines.”
Rube seemed ill at ease with her version of sarcasm. He kept smiling, looked around again at the rustic living room, and then said, “Possibly.”
“I just …”
Mad paused, trying to figure out how to say what she was thinking. She didn’t doubt Rube. It wasn’t about whether or not her dad was his dad. It was that her dad was not his dad. “Okay, like, your dad was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and he wrote detective novels.”
“Yes,”
Rube replied.
“But my dad hardly even read and was from Maine, and he was an organic farmer in Tennessee.”
“Yes,”
Rube said again.
“So what does it matter if we have the same dad? We don’t have any experiences of him that would connect us. We don’t even have our dad. He’s long gone.”
“That’s what I want to know,”
Rube said, his voice getting a little squeaky. “Maybe there is something that connects our versions of our dad.”
“What was your dad’s favorite food?”
she suddenly asked.
“Lobster rolls,”
Rube said, already looking disappointed. “What about your dad?”
“Not lobster rolls,”
Mad replied. “A full slab of ribs. My dad whistled all the time. He would whistle ‘Daydream’ by the Lovin’ Spoonful while he drove the tractor and I would ride beside him. Did your dad whistle?”
“He definitely did not whistle. He didn’t drive a tractor, either.”
“Did he like sports?”
“Boston Bruins hockey,”
he replied.
“UT Vols football,”
I told him. “Hockey? Really?”
“He took me to the Boston Gardens to see the Stanley Cup finals, game four, in 1970, when Bobby Orr scored in overtime to win. It’s like one of the biggest memories of my childhood, how happy he was, just screaming, and so I screamed, too, even though I didn’t know what was going on.”
“He took me to Knoxville when I was maybe seven or eight, something like that. And the Vols upset Bama and he went nuts there, too, singing ‘Rocky Top,’ and I was just scared of falling down the bleachers, but, yeah, it was neat to see him so happy.”
“So that’s something, right? Kind of the same?”
he asked. But Mad was still thinking about that game, the sea of orange, the absolute shock that reverberated through the stadium when it became clear that they would win, her dad telling her, “This is so great, Mad, this is so great, and we’re here! We’re here to see it! It’s always so good to be there when something important happens.”
She hadn’t thought about it in so long.
“So our father was a kind of good-luck charm for whatever sports team he happened to be rooting for at that stage in his life,”
she offered.
“Or,”
he offered, “his kids were good-luck charms for whatever sports team he happened to be rooting for.”
When she didn’t respond, he continued, “You and me. His kids.”
“What was his favorite color?”
she asked him.
“I have no idea,”
he admitted. “Maybe green?”
“I have no idea, either,”
she said. “That was a dumb question. Sorry.”
Who remembers their parent’s favorite color? What a weird thing if your dad was always reminding you, Hey, this yard sale jacket is green, which happens to be my absolute favorite color. But, what she was realizing, which was more important than her dad’s favorite color, was that she didn’t know all that much about her dad. And what she did know felt a little like a dream, a sudden realization that the mug she was holding had been held by her father on the day she lost her first tooth, and how he quickly dumped the coffee into the sink so they could put the tooth in the mug and he could rinse it off. She didn’t know facts about her dad. He left before she could compile a dossier of biographical information and habits. What she had was a flickering series of memories that were about ten to twenty seconds long.
At the very least, she appreciated that Rube wasn’t trying to fill the awkward silence with more facts about their missing father.
“Okay, I guess this is kind of a dead end,”
she admitted.
“I think it might need to be more of a kind of organic process,”
Rube offered. “We’ll know more as it comes up, but this feels like the game show version of trying to remember our dad.”
Mad was so confused by the turn of events that she couldn’t remember who had even suggested that they trade facts about their dad. If it had been her, she felt the need to be a little irritated that he’d called it a “game show version”
when, my god, she was just trying to entertain this wild development and keep it contained within her house while a perfect stranger held a leather satchel on his lap like he was trying so hard to sell her funeral insurance. She was getting angry at the wrong person, she knew. Who else could she be angry with, though, since her dad was still frozen in her mind? He was, however, rapidly thawing.
“Do you have photos of him?”
Rube finally asked.
“Some,”
she replied. After he left them, over the course of a few weeks, the few framed photos of their father disappeared from the house, and Mad never asked her mom about it, didn’t need to. But she assumed her mom hadn’t actually thrown them away. When it was clear he wasn’t coming back, they removed the records of him so they could move forward. “A few, of course. And movies. He was obsessed with home movies.”
“Yes!”
Rube said. “He was always into cameras. He had this, I don’t remember the name, but an eight-millimeter film camera. He had a few of them, actually, because he wanted the newest model. You know? There’s no sound, and it’s on—”
“Oh, yeah, same here. He had a Bell and Howell eight-millimeter with us. I think he actually bought one of the first VHS camcorders before anyone else around here had even heard of them, but then he left.”
Mad realized that it would be strange if their father had jumped on a bus with a camcorder, as if to document his new life, but she didn’t remember it being in their home after he left.
“Did you have them transferred to DVD or anything?”
“What? No. We might have some of them in a closet somewhere. But, you know, thinking about it, Dad was always doing the filming. He’s not in them.”
“It’s so weird that your organic farmer dad was into home video recording,”
Rube offered, “and so was my mystery writer dad. So I guess some stuff holds over.”
JUST THEN, HER MOTHER OPENED THE DOOR, AND HER EYES WIDENED IN such a way that it was as if she’d walked in on Mad having sex with someone on the sofa. “Oh, my,”
she said. “Madeline, I didn’t know you had company.”
“Hello,”
Rube said, nodding.
“Oh … hello,”
she replied. Mad’s mother took a full three seconds to look at this person in their living room, dressed like a man who designed golf courses, who owned four different Subway franchises, who was concerned about the demarcation of the property lines for the land he bought to turn into a water park, and she seemed to register that this was not a person that Mad would entertain as a gentleman caller. Everyone was quiet and then she turned to Mad. “Has something happened?”
“Mom, this is Rube,”
Mad said. She held on to this moment, the last little flicker of time before her family got so complicated, reshuffled and dealt out in such a way that she had no idea what would come after. “Reuben Hill,”
she continued, and she saw her mom’s demeanor change once again. And Mad knew her mom well enough to know that—oh, shit—maybe she wasn’t surprised by this news.
“Hello,”
Rube said again. “I’m Charles Hill’s child. Well, you know, his first child.”
“Oh, god,”
her mother replied. “I better sit down.”
“Dad was from Boston, Mom,”
Mad said, as if this was the greatest betrayal, not the secret family that preceded them, and not the possible secret families that followed, and not leaving them in the first place , but that he was from Boston, Massachusetts.
“Oh, god,”
her mother said again. Everyone but Mad seemed to have, like, one phrase that they had to keep using, and it was up to her to fill in the spaces between with something that resembled meaning.
“Dad was, like, a serial dad? He had a family before us. Rube and his mom. And had a family—”
“Families,”
Rube added.
“Yeah, I was gonna say that. He had a family after us and more after that.”
“Oh, sorry,”
Rube said. “I see what you were doing now.”
“Rube, just let me and my mom talk for a sec,”
Mad continued.
“Tell me, Rube,”
her mom said, and Mad just had to resign herself to the fact that no one was going to let her handle this, “have you seen Chuck?”
“Well, Mrs., um … is your last name also Hill?”
“No, no. You know, Chuck and I never actually married. We were pretty young and had some interesting ideas about freedom and property and … my last name is Daggett.”
“Technically, he never divorced my mom,”
he said to Mad and her mother. “So if he had tried to get married again, he would have been in trouble.”
“More trouble,”
Mad amended. “More trouble than he’s in for leaving all of us.”
“Yes, of course. Legal trouble. But I don’t think he married again after my mom.”
“Rube?”
her mom said.
“Oh, yes, sorry?”
“Be straight with me. Really. Have you seen Chuck?”
“No, I haven’t seen him. Not since he left me and my mom for you guys.”
If Mad was like her half brother, she would have interjected that, technically, he just flat-out left Rube and his mother. To have left them for Mad and her mom, their dad would have had to lay the groundwork in Tennessee on secret trips or been some kind of weird pen pal friend who cultivated a relationship with his mom so that he’d have a place to walk right into when he left his wife and son. But that wasn’t the case. He’d left his first family, arrived in Tennessee, and decided he needed another one.
“Mom, did you know about this?”
Mad asked.
“Well … yes and no,”
her mother replied. She had now heard—or said—this phrase more times today than if you added up every single use of the phrase in her lifetime previous. She hadn’t realized how irritating it was, to be two things at once. You needed to be one thing, always a definitive answer, and she realized that maybe she’d arranged her entire life on this principle.
“Mom, just tell me,”
Mad continued.