Chapter 8
KEITH
She had it laid out on the kitchen table when I came in Sunday morning.
Not the file. Paper. Six years of gas receipts sorted into rows across the whole table, and the road atlas open on top of them, the old one out of the truck door, folded back to our half of the state.
I stood in the doorway with my boots still on.
"Sit down," she said.
I sat down.
"I did the shoebox last night. I do it every October, I'm not snooping, it's a Tuesday chore." She put one finger on a row. "You have never bought gas in this town. Not once. There's a station a mile and a half from this house."
"Marla—"
"I'm not finished, and I'm not mad, so let me get it out.
" She turned the atlas around toward me.
She'd drawn on it in pencil — a line from us to Chilton, out and back, out and back, the way we've always gone.
"You take 41. Every time. Nineteen minutes longer.
Three lights in Vernon. You've told me trucks, you've told me traffic, you've told me you like the road. "
"I do like the road."
"Keith."
I looked at her hand on that map. My grandmother's ring on it, and a burn scar across the knuckle from a casserole dish in 2004. The whole time she was talking I watched her finger move along a pencil line I have driven ten thousand times and never once looked down at from above.
That was the part. Not being caught. Being seen from above.
"And you never gas up on the last leg," she said. "You fill at Vernon or you fill at Kelso, and then nothing for a hundred miles. Even when we're low. You remember Reid's graduation? I said I had to go and you made me hold it, because you wanted the gas at Kelso. I thought you were being cheap."
"I remember."
"There's no receipt from Harlan Falls," she said. "There has never been a receipt from Harlan Falls."
The refrigerator hummed. Out back a dog was going at something two yards over.
"No," I said.
"Say the rest of it."
I put my hands on the table. I had to get them somewhere.
"It's not your town."
She let a breath out. Just the one. It was a small sound, but I heard about six years in it.
"It's not my town."
"It was never your town. It was never Donna Reesor or Petey Vance or that gym.
" My voice was going somewhere flat and strange on me.
"It's Harlan Falls. Twenty minutes past you.
Everybody in your class has a cousin in mine.
The man who does tires in Chilton went to school with my brother.
It's one county with a line through it, Marla, and I've spent my whole grown life staying on this side of that line, and your town was?—"
I stopped.
"Say it," she said.
"Your town was in the way."
She didn't cry. She didn't get up. She sat across from me with her hands folded and took it, and I'd have felt better if she'd thrown something at me.
"Thirty-one years," she said.
"Yeah."
"Every trip I made alone. Every Christmas at Mom's where you drove me to the door and turned around. Every funeral." She was working it out loud, steady, like a woman going down a column of figures. "The homecoming in '99 when I asked you three times."
"Yeah."
"It was all the same thing, over and over, and it never had anything to do with me at all."
"No."
"Why?" she said.
And there it was, and I sat in my own kitchen and couldn't do it. The whole business was standing behind me the way it always does — the station, the tavern, the porch, my brother's face at the screen door. I opened my mouth and what came out was air.
"I need you to tell me why," she said.
"I know."
"Keith."
"I will." My hands were shaking on the table so I took them off it.
"I'm going to. I'm just not going to hand it to you at this table on a Sunday morning with a road atlas, because if I do it here it'll come out the way I've had it packed for forty years, and you'll get a version.
You've had thirty-one years of versions. "
She studied me.
"That sounds like a man buying time."
"It might be."
"Is it?"
"I don't know yet," I said. "Give me till tonight."
She looked at me a while longer, then nodded once and got up and started picking the receipts off the table by rows, in order, because she is who she is.
"Tonight," she said.
I got in the truck at nine-forty and drove east.
I didn't stop at Vernon. Came up on the Marathon there at ten-fifty with the gauge showing a hair under half and my blinker already on — I'd put it on without deciding to — and I made myself shut it off and go by.
I didn't take 41 either. I took the state road, the fast one, the nineteen-minutes-shorter one, and at eleven-forty I came down the hill past the grain elevator and there was the sign.
HARLAN FALLS — POP. 2,104.
They've painted it since. It used to be green.
It isn't much of a town and it never was. Main street four blocks long, half of it dark. The Ford dealership is a vape store. The IGA's still there. There's a Dollar General out where the drive-in screen used to stand.
I drove to the station first, because otherwise I wasn't going to go at all.
It's a BP now. When I was a kid it was a Sinclair, with the green dinosaur, and old Ted Bickell ran it. It was the only place in town where you could get gas or a hot dog or find out anything about anybody.
I parked at the side by the air hose and sat there.
When I was eight my mother sent me down here on my bicycle with a red plastic gas can.
My father had put the car in a ditch out on Sawyer Road on a Wednesday afternoon and left it sitting there.
The sheriff had brought him home. The car had to be got.
Ted Bickell filled that can and set it on the counter.
He wasn't unkind about it. He leaned on his elbows and said, "How's your daddy, son? "
And I said, "He's fine."
And Ted Bickell said, "Mm."
A man said mm to a child in 1979.
I sat in that parking lot at fifty-five years old with my hands on the wheel, and it took me about ten minutes to get the door open.
I went in and bought a coffee I didn't want from a girl about nineteen who never looked up from her phone.
Nobody in that building knew me. Everybody who knew me is dead, or in Florida, or they're the ones who lift two fingers off the wheel of a truck going the other way, and you can't tell a thing from that.
Then I drove out Sawyer Road to the house.
It's still standing. Somebody painted it yellow and put a swing set in the side yard, which I was not ready for, and there were kids' bikes down in the grass.
The maple out front is enormous now — I mean enormous, there's a limb over the roof that ought to come off — and my mother planted that tree in 1976 out of a coffee can.
I sat across the road with the engine off a while.
I did not go to the cemetery.
I went to the tavern last. Rooney's, still called Rooney's, still open at one o'clock on a Sunday with three trucks out front.
My father closed that place, I don't know, a thousand times.
In high school it was my job to go get him about twice a month, because my mother wouldn't and Verl had moved out.
Sixteen years old standing in that doorway with the whole room turning around to look, every man in there knowing exactly whose kid I was and exactly what I'd come for.
Nobody in there ever threw a rock at me.
They'd slide over on the bench and make room.
Somebody would say son, and take his other elbow, and help me walk him out to the car and get the door shut.
Eighteen years of hands on my shoulder, and every one of them said the same thing without saying it. We know.
I stood in the gravel lot outside Rooney's with my hands in my pockets maybe five minutes. I didn't go in.
Then I got my phone out and called my brother.
Verl picked up on the fourth ring and said, "Well, hell," because that's what he says.
"Hey."
"Twice in a year. Ma would faint." Something clanked on his end. "What's up? You all right?"
"I'm in Harlan Falls."
The clanking stopped.
"You're where?"
"Standing in Rooney's parking lot."
He was quiet on that line a long time.
"Are you drinking?" he said.
"No."
"Okay." Another pause. "Okay."
"Verl, I need something."
"Go ahead."
I turned around and looked at the front of that building — the door, the little window with the beer sign in it that has been the same beer sign since 1984.
"Tell me about Dad," I said.
"What about him?"
"All of it. The whole record." My voice cracked in the middle of that and I let it crack.
"I left at eighteen and I never asked you one thing, and I've been running my whole life off what an eight-year-old figured out.
Fifty-five years old with a kid's version in my head, and I've been steering a marriage around it.
I need the real one. The bad parts, and whatever else there is, if there's anything else. "
The line went quiet long enough that I checked the screen.
"There's some else," Verl said. His voice had gone rough. "There's a fair amount of else."
"Okay."
"Get in your truck and come out here. Ruthann's got a roast on."
"Verl, I don't want to put you?—"
"Keith." He said it the way he used to say it through a bedroom wall. "Twelve years. Get in the truck."
I sat in my brother's yard four hours.
We never went in the house. Ruthann brought plates out to the picnic table twice, once with the roast and once with pie.
She put her hand on my shoulder both times without saying anything, then left us alone out there.
Verl talked. I asked questions like a man at a deposition, because it was the only way I could stay in my seat, and he answered every one of them.
Some of it was worse than what I had. Some of it was better.
There's a stretch in 1988 and '89 I never knew about — eleven months when the old man drove himself to meetings in Vernon three nights a week, stayed dry, and built the back steps on that house with his own two hands.
I have stood on those steps a thousand times. I didn't know he built them sober.
Around five the light went orange across the field and Verl said, "You know he asked about you."
"When?"
"The whole time. Every time I saw him." He was looking at his hands. "He never called you, because he was ashamed. And I never told you he asked, because I was mad at him. So there's mine."
I drove home in the dark.
Came in at nine-fifteen with the kitchen light on over the stove. Marla was standing in the middle of the floor with her phone in her hand, and she'd been crying, and I got about three feet in the door before she said it.
"Ruthann called me."
I stopped.
"She said she didn't know if she should, and then she did it anyway." Her voice was doing something complicated. She held the phone up like she was entering it into evidence. "She said, He was here, Marla. He sat in the yard for four hours."
"Yeah."
"Twelve years." Her chin went. "Twelve years, and he sat in the yard."
I put my keys on the counter.
"I was going to tell you tonight," I said.
"You weren't going to tell me about the yard."
I thought about lying. My hand went for it the way it goes for a light switch in a room I've moved out of.
"No," I said. "I wasn't."