claimed she could do chainsaws, had juggled them before, but we only ever had the one.
After the divorce, her weird charm grew brittle. Over time, she became the sober, pragmatic one. What home had become eventually became normal, until high school started. Everything changes for everybody, but for us especially, since the doctors felt a lump in her left breast. Then a mass at the base of her spine. This was right around homecoming, and Dad, who had at least kind of still been around, began to venture further out to the periphery of our lives until he was more absent than present, more answering machine than man.
But she still drunk-juggled from time to time, around the holidays, or the date of their anniversary. I still clapped like hell. She died that fall, just before Thanksgiving. The funeral was sober, pragmatic.
I have no idea whether Ruby drinks, or whether it was his sobriety she found attractive, or just the veneer it cast—either way, he must have preferred her figure to Mom’s wildness. And I don’t hope he is dead but I act according to that assumption. When I find myself low on that, I simply wish it.
The way it goes. I don’t pull sour faces anymore—I figure dead or alive, he’s gone for good. That’s pretty reliable. It does the trick. Still—beer is better.
*
Vince lays on the horn when he sees me. I heave my bag into the trunk and hop in like we’ve done this a hundred times.
“Your hair is long,” I tell him. It’s past his collar, though it’s also receding.
“Need to get a cut soon. Caroline likes it.”
“So the lady next to me at the airport bar got bombed and would not stop pushing her dopey son’s deep funk band on me. Deep funk or free funk, I can’t remember. He goes to JUCO. He’s the next Ornette Coleman, so that’s something. No, it was liquid funk, but what that is I do not know. Playing a lunchtime set at the Cubby Bear tonight or tomorrow. Gonna be ‘a real toe-tapper,’ apparently.”
Vince doesn’t even smile. “Things are good with you, then.”
I shrug—at him, and at everything I could tell him, at all I could say in response, my hoard of thoughts and tidings and urges that want a voice, a breath. I keep them stashed. “Feels nice, riding in this behemoth again. How’s things with you?”
He twists around to scope out a gap in the traffic to merge into. “We’re managing,” he says.
The windshield has a hairline fracture knifing slowly toward the center of the pane, the one-knob-missing radio doesn’t seem to get anything but AM, and I’m up to my ankles in wadded Taco Bell trash, which I bury my feet in, searching for the floor.
“Could you not stomp all over my stuff, please? I need all that for work and if I give back a bunch of broke equipment to my boss…”
I hold up a plug head. “What, this?”
“That cable’s for the reciprocating saw. It’s not mine. Don’t monkey with it.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t leave it tangled up on the floor under blankets of garbage.”
“It was fine how I had it before you started getting your muddy, salty shoes all over everything.”
“Here, I’ll coil it up.” I root through the fountain cups and wrappers to the orange cord beneath it all and begin looping it.
“Eh, don’t worry about it,” he says. “They had a piano guy playing at the mall this year. Some Christmas thing. Thought of you for a second.”
“Flattered.”
Vince smirks. “Beneath you, forgot.”
“How are you, other than managing? What’s Caroline up to these days?”
“She and the kids are in Disney World right now. That was their Christmas gift—an arm and a leg of their old man’s. They’re staying outside the park though, at some high school friend of Caroline’s with a place in Kissimmee. Flying back sometime Sunday.”
“They must be a handful.”
“She made me zap my balls last month. Two’s just shy of too much for us.”
“Wendy was big on starting a family. Saw herself having five, six. A great big litter. Red flag right there, if there ever was one.”
Vince nods. “Who’s Wendy now?”
I wave away the question. “Ah, just a girl. You know. Came and went.”
Vince cuts in front of a van, into hectic traffic, his car spewing bluish exhaust behind us like a sad magician’s trick.
I just shrug.
The route gains familiarity, despite my time away. A few ancient billboards still stand, though they are largely dilapidated beyond recognition—just a smoky eye, half a restaurant logo ripping in the wind, the unnerving command Hurry!—being all that’s left of them. I struggle to find something to fill the vacuum of silence between us.
“Know any good songs?”
He shakes his head, and we’re quiet again.
As the road meanders west, forest thins into strip mall, and thick, crooked black cracks start riddling the road home.
“You missed our turn,” I tell him.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You did. Our exit was back there. We need to go north on 94.”
“We’re taking a quick field trip. Have to run an errand.”
“Traffic’s gonna hit any minute.”
“Just pipe down, will you? Giving me a headache.”
He pulls up to a drab McMansion with a high stone archway and a roller hockey net knocked over in the yard. There’s a pair of dark-tipped steer horns mounted in leatherette above a big glass door with a bright brass knob.
“Stay here,” Vince says, getting out. From the rearview I see him pop the trunk, hear the heavy equipment—more power tools, most likely—hit the ground. The lid thuds shut, making the car bounce a little bit. Then it’s even quieter than before.
I crane my neck to look around: not a single soul, no one around. Two minutes become five. I light a cigarette and get out to stretch my legs and escape the car’s reek of old fries and strawberry air freshener. Five minutes become ten and I stroll to the end of the driveway, where I can see, just beyond the T-intersection that we turned into, a street sign that reads “Evergreen Lane,” so bent it points to the pothole beneath it.
I look back at the house: not a creature stirring. I’m halfway down the block before I realize it, my feet like those of an old horse returning to stable.
I knew it was probably a lousy idea, going back to my old house. Until the idea came into my head, I hadn’t thought about my old place at all. It was a corny idea. I had no idea what to expect it to do. It was an ugly house, just like all the houses surrounding it. It was
