SIX Settling In
T he thought of sleeping in my mother’s bedroom freaked me out completely; there was no way I’d be able to relax in that room so intimately full of her. I spent my second night back in the cabin sleeping on the sectional we’d moved from Arkansas. But I woke up to a day from which the fog was already fading, replaced by clear blue sky. I was rested and motivated to claim this place as my own.
Ergo, as Wyatt and I shared a breakfast of cold Pop-Tarts and hot coffee, I suggested that the first item on our Day Two agenda should be getting our bedrooms arranged to our liking. Wyatt was down with the plan, so we got to work.
We yanked literally everything from my mother’s room, all the way down to the moldering braided area rug that had lain on the floor my entire childhood and apparently nearly twenty years beyond that. Though my first inclination was to burn the whole pile, reason prevailed, and we moved the furniture to the equipment shed and loaded all her personal crap into emptied boxes and dumped it all into the U-Haul. We’d stop at the charity shop and then the dump on the way to return the U-Haul.
Once the room was empty, I sent Wyatt off to turn my old bedroom into his new one, and I got to work scrubbing every damned corner of the bedroom that would now be mine. If I’d thought to pick up some sage, I would have burned it. I meant to exorcise all the demons from that room.
When it was scrubbed enough to sparkle and smelled primarily of cleaning products, I finally felt like I could exist within those walls and began to set up my things.
Wyatt and I had done a lot of downsizing over the past year, had had a lot of unpleasant discussions about how important was this thing, really? Or that thing? When your living circumstances change drastically, like moving from a three-thousand-square-foot house to a six-hundred-square-foot apartment, you discover that you’ve collected a whole lot of crap you don’t really need. But you also discover how very painful it can be to hold something in your hands that feels important, something you love , but no longer has any other purpose but the memories it contains, and to understand that there is no room for that thing in your shrunken life.
About two-thirds of my books were gone. Half the clothes and shoes in my wardrobe. Whole boxes of Wyatt’s video games and comic books. I’d sold the whole set of ‘good’ dishes, all the partyware, all the holiday decorations, literally everything we couldn’t imagine using at least once a week.
As for keepsakes, aside from photos, I’d given each of us a single storage tub. Whatever and as much as could fit in those qualified as worthy of the name. We made a lot of Sophie’s choices.
Virtually all of Micah’s things had been sold, donated, or thrown away, including all of his extensive and expensive outdoor gear. Considering the way we’d lost him, neither Wyatt nor I had any further appetite for ‘adventuring.’ Selling his enormous LP collection had been a much harder loss, but Wyatt had held back a few titles that most reminded him of his dad. Those records and a well-worn leather jacket were all the mementos he had.
I’d been too lost in my rage-wrapped grief and too focused on saving my kid and myself to think about what I might want of Micah. All I’d kept was his wedding ring. It was with my own, in the box the rings had come in, in the bottom of my keepsake tub, under the folder full of Wyatt’s schoolwork.
The result of all those hard decisions and loss was that there wasn’t a lot to unpack. Both Wyatt and I had our rooms completely set up by just past noon—which worked out perfectly, since the U-Haul was due to be turned in by three that afternoon.
“Do you want to get lunch while we’re out?” I asked him after we got the Golf back on the trailer.
He made his meh face. “The guys are playing online at ... I guess two, our time. I want to be back for that if I can. I’ll just grab some Pop-Tarts or something. I’m sick of restaurants, anyway.”
One thing he hadn’t lost was his friend group. All hail the internet. There was a problem, however. “We don’t have wifi yet. How are you going to play?”
Now he made his grownups are so clueless face. It was not among my favorite of his expressions. “I’ll use my phone as a hotspot, Mom.”
“You have enough battery for that? And signal?”
If his expression got any more pointed, he was going to find his afternoon suddenly very full of chores. “Without the fog, my signal’s okay. And we do have electricity, you know. I can charge. You’re usually smarter than this, Mother.”
“And you’re usually not such a snot, son .” I made a show of slapping him upside the head, but actually barely ruffled his hair. “Come on, let’s get moving. Apparently, you have plans this afternoon. And while you’re playing with your buddies, I’ll go to the market and get some proper food. We’ll make dinner tonight, okay?” I was pretty sick of fast food myself.
He grinned. “Perfect!”
AFTER NEARLY TWO DECADES away from my hometown, I’d been in Bluster twice within two days. Both those times, I’d felt the pull of the past, but it hadn’t been unpleasant. I’d simply been in my hometown after a long absence, noting all that changed and all that had not. The memories rising to the surface had been harmless.
But I’d been with my son both those times, and I suppose having him with me had kept me grounded in the present. The pull of the past had been only a gentle tug, a slight give in a door I’d kept locked for a long time. When I went into town alone that afternoon, headed to the IGA, that gentle tug on the locked door of my past became a battering ram. Alone, driving my little red VW, every familiar landmark was a signpost of a dark memory, a pain I’d felt or caused, an embarrassment, a disappointment, a desperation. And anything new, unfamiliar, was a blast of guilt and loss.
Like the IGA. It wasn’t the IGA anymore. Now it was The Granary Market I couldn’t make myself get out of the car and actually go in.
Most of my anxiety was a certainty that now, more than a full day since Wyatt and I had had breakfast at Catherine’s, the whole town knew I was back, but I wasn’t sure how that news would be received. I felt pretty sure that Roman Mendoza was ambivalent about my return; I thought I’d detected some judgment in his polite reception. Catherine, on the other hand, had been happy to see me—so happy, in fact, that she’d pulled up a chair at our table and spent ten minutes catching us up about her life. Only her life; while her diner was a hub for town gossip, Catherine herself was of the mind that everybody ought to tend their own garden and leave others to theirs. She’d asked a few question about my life, too, and Wyatt’s, but she’d kept those to the surface, seeming to understand that we wouldn’t want to go any deeper.
Jessie was happy I was back, too. Exuberantly so. But she’d reported that Erin, the third in our trio of Fates, would ‘need some time’—not a ringing endorsement. That wasn’t much of a surprise; Erin had a keen sense of loyalty, and the flip side of that was a pronounced sensitivity to betrayal. She was short-tempered and scrappy. Just like her father. Before she’d accept me again, if she ever would, we’d surely have to go a few rounds.
Metaphorically speaking. Hopefully.
Hard on the heels of that thought, while I sat in the half-full market lot failing to get up the courage to face a possible gossip gauntlet, came another thought, and I put the Golf in reverse and backed out of the parking space.