After the Parade (15 page)

“That's him, I bet,” his mother said when they pulled up in front of the café one week later, pointing to a short man who was standing with two tall men. “Our new landlord.” The man removed a handkerchief from the back pocket of his overalls and wiped his hands, rubbing each finger carefully, as though he'd just eaten something greasy, and then he came over to the Oldsmobile, where Aaron was struggling to extricate himself from the household items that his mother had packed around him.

“Name's Randolph,” the man said. He shook both of their hands. “Randolph Rehnquist. You probably saw my initials by the train tracks when you came into town. Got my own crossing. Course, you're welcome to use it.” He was bald and had a habit of removing his cap when he laughed, as though it were improper to laugh with one's hat on. “Looks like you brought the necessities,” he said. He nodded at the car, which was filled with clothing and bed linens, kitchenware and a few keepsakes.

His mother had also called these things
the necessities
. “Only take the necessities,” she had instructed, but Aaron did not understand what made something a necessity. Each time he brought out one of his belongings and asked, “Is this a necessity?,” she looked up tiredly and said, “If you can't live without it, then just pack it. Okay?”

“What about my bed?” he asked, but she explained that their new house had furniture that they could use for now; they would get settled and then come back for everything else. But as he watched her wedge plates under the seats and stack frying pans and a colander where his
feet would go, he realized that there would be no back-and-forth between this old life and the new.

The three of them went into the café and sat in a booth, and a man came over with a pot of coffee. Mr. Rehnquist said, “Frank,” and the man said, “Randolph,” and that was the end of their conversation.

It was from this man, Frank, that Aaron's mother would buy the café two years later, but that day, Aaron had no reason to think of the café as part of his future, only his past. His father had sat in these booths. He had not been dead yet, and Aaron had not been alive. He could not make sense of this. His mother did not tell Mr. Rehnquist that she had once eaten a week's worth of meals at this café with her husband. She did not say anything about a husband. When Aaron got older, he realized his mother had known that it would not do to arrive and begin talking about parade floats and dead husbands. Of course she knew that in a town this size a woman who showed up with a young son and no husband invited speculation, but Mr. Rehnquist was not the prying sort. He talked about himself instead, in a friendly, uncomplicated way. He told them that his former tenants had left suddenly. The Packers, he called them. “Packed up and left,” he said. “That's what you get with Packers.”

He laughed, but Aaron's mother, fresh from the hospital, was not thinking about things like laughing along companionably. Mr. Rehnquist didn't seem to mind. He told them that they could have the house for six months, a year tops, because he was waiting for his son to get married. “When a man gets married, he needs a house,” he said, addressing Aaron as if this were a matter for his immediate consideration.

They sipped their drinks. “Yut, well, I suppose then,” said Mr. Rehnquist, and somehow Aaron's mother knew that this meant it was time to leave. They drove out of town, Mr. Rehnquist's truck crawling along in front of them, turned onto a gravel road and then into a driveway, at the end of which lay a house. His mother shut off the engine and stared. “What do you think?” she asked. All around them were fields.

“I think we'll like it here,” he said.

“I think so too.” She reached over to pat his leg, but her hand curled into a fist and she instead knocked on his knee three times.

Mr. Rehnquist said that he wanted to point out some things before they went inside—
features of the property
he called them—like the birch trees on the other side of the empty garden and a rusty wheelbarrow that he said they should feel free to use. He nodded at the house. “This here's the house where I was raised, and that's my field over there,” he said, sweeping his arm toward the field across the road.

“What do you grow?” Aaron's mother asked in her making-conversation voice.

“Oh, corn mainly. That's about all I know how to grow.” He laughed. “My wife's the brains in the family. She's a schoolteacher. Fourth grade.” He studied Aaron. “How old are you then, Aaron?” he asked.

“I'm five,” Aaron said. “I'm going to be in kindergarten this year.”

“Going to be?” said Mr. Rehnquist. “School started over a month ago.”

“Yes,” Aaron said. “I'm getting a late start.” This was how he had heard his mother describe it when she called the school in Mortonville to let them know he would be enrolling.

Mr. Rehnquist took off his hat and laughed. “Miss Meeks,” he announced. “That's the kiddie-garden teacher. I guarantee she's anything but meek.” Aaron did not know the word
meek
. Mr. Rehnquist gave a half chuckle and exposed his head again. “Good luck,” he said gravely and winked.

*  *  *

Aaron's new room contained three beds, two of them bunked, the third beneath the window. That night, he climbed into the bottom bunk and fell asleep quickly, exhausted from unpacking and adjusting to a new house. When he awakened, he was not sure how long he had been asleep or what had roused him. He thought it was the silence. His mother had said it would take time to adjust to the stillness of the country after living in town his whole life. He drank the water that she had set by his bed. Then, because the hallway light was on, he got up to look for her.

Everything about the house felt wrong, not just the placement of walls and doors and rooms but even the small things: the resistance of the bathroom faucet handles, the way his chair caught on the linoleum when he slid back from the table, the quiet of the refrigerator at night. He went through Mr. Rehnquist's house, turning on lights, but when he reached for the switch in the kitchen, it was not where he thought it should be. He was years from developing an affinity for metaphor, years from the moment that his eighteen-year-old self would stand in Walter's house on his first night there, his hand fluttering like a moth against the wall as it searched for the switch, and think,
This fumbling in the dark is how life will always be
.

He could not find his mother anywhere. He walked through the house again, calling for her, but there was no answer. His mother was gone.

Finally, he opened the door of her closet and there she was, sitting on a chair beneath a bare lightbulb. “Aaron!” she said, sounding happy to see him. “Can you believe the size of this closet? I don't know what to do with all this space.”

“It's really big,” he agreed. He did not tell her how scared he'd been, did not ask whether she had heard him calling. He knew she had.

“Come sit with me,” she said, and he went in, closed the door, and crouched on the floor. He thought it must be late, but he did not remind her that he was starting school the next day because he liked sitting with her in the closet, which smelled of trees and something chemical-like.

“Aaron, do you remember the time your father let me drive his squad car?”

“No,” he said. “I don't remember.”

“Of course you don't, Silly Billy. You were just a baby. We set your carrier on the backseat, went out in the country, past Dilworth, and switched places. I drove and ran the sirens. You slept through it all. It was a magnificent feeling, Aaron.”

She smiled and touched her hand to her hair. Her nails were pink. “You're wearing nail polish,” he said. His mother had always scoffed at nail polish.

“My roommate in the hospital gave it to me. I was trying to stop biting my nails, and she told me the polish would taste so awful I'd just quit.” Her nails looked as chewed up as ever. “It didn't help at all,” she said sadly. “The problem is the polish doesn't taste that bad, not like my roommate said it would, but tonight I thought I'd give it another shot.”

His mother had said nothing about a roommate. He pictured them lying side by side in their hospital beds, watching television, because his mother had explained to him after he came back from his aunt's house that in the hospital everyone watched a lot of television. Until then, he had imagined her days filled with shots and thermometers, doctors and nurses giving her medicine and taking her temperature.

“What else did you do in the hospital?” he had asked.

“Well, I slept a lot. And we went to the cafeteria to eat. I always tried to sit by myself, but the nurses put other people with me, people who were very sick, and sometimes I had to help these people because they didn't know how to do things.”

“What things didn't they know how to do?” he had asked.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “Cut their food or open their milk or spread butter on their bread. There was one man who always sat holding an unopened ice cream bar against his forehead until it melted and ran down his face, so finally one night I took it from him and ripped it open, but when I handed it back to him, it fell on the floor.”

“Then what happened?”

His mother shrugged. “He cried, and after that I ate my meals in my room.”

Aaron tried to imagine people who couldn't open a milk carton or spread butter on their food, a man who cried about ice cream. “Is that why they were in the hospital?” he asked. “Because they didn't know how to do those things?”

His mother thought about this. “I guess so,” she'd said, and that had been the end of the discussion. Not once had she mentioned a roommate.

He looked up at her sitting on her chair, the Packers' chair, with her pink fingernails. “What was your roommate's name?” he asked.

“Her name was Helen,” she said. “Helen Ludtke. She was from Barnesville.”

“Where's Barnesville?” he asked.

“I guess I don't know exactly where it is,” she said. “Near here. Well, near Moorhead. Her husband used to drive in after chores, so it couldn't have been far.”

“Was she very sick?” Aaron asked.

“Yes,” said his mother. “I think she was. They finally took her to a different hospital where she could stay longer. She didn't want to go, but her husband begged her. The doctors told him he could either take her home or send her to the other hospital but there was nothing more they could do. They had eight children. Can you imagine?”

“It must be very noisy,” he said, thinking about how his cousins sounded when they were getting ready for school. His mother had not said anything about his time there, except when she found the Bible his aunt had slipped in with his dress shoes. “They never miss a chance,” she'd said, but added, “I don't know how the hospital tracked them down, but it was good of them to take you in.”

“Yes,” his mother agreed. “It must be very noisy. Both his mother and Helen's mother were staying at the farm to help out with the kids. I think it was actually relaxing for him to come to the hospital. He'd pack his supper, or probably one of the mothers packed it, and he would sit on Helen's bed and talk to her while he ate.”

“What did they talk about?” Aaron asked.

“Once he told her the well was running silt and he needed to get the witcher out. Another time he said, ‘I had to put the little dog down. It took a bite out of Henry.' He brought her things from the kids, drawings and cards, some dream bars the girls made. Almost every night, he said, ‘Your mother, my mother, the kids. I'm going nuts.' The night he talked to the doctor, he turned around as he was leaving. ‘You need to get over this 'cause I can't take much more,' he said. He was crying. The next morning, Helen was gone. She left the nail polish on my nightstand.” His mother studied her pink-tipped fingers. “I liked Helen Ludtke. She was a fine roommate.”

“What was wrong with her?” Aaron asked.

His mother did not answer right away. Around them everything was quiet—the closet, their new house, the world outside. He thought about what his mother had said when she told him they were moving to Mortonville: “It's not a place for starting over.”

“Well,” his mother said finally, “she had another baby, and then she got scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“She was scared the baby would get hurt.”

“Hurt how?”

“Well, she was afraid to clean the house because she thought she might vacuum the baby up. That was the first thing. Then she started worrying she might bake the baby in the oven while she was making supper, so she was afraid to cook.”

None of this made sense to Aaron. A baby was too big to get sucked up by a vacuum cleaner and could not climb into the oven by itself. He did not understand why Helen Ludtke did not know these things, or why they put her in the hospital instead of telling her. “Helen Ludtke had to go to the hospital because she was afraid?” he asked.

“Something like that,” his mother said. “Listen, you've got school tomorrow, so back to bed with you.” When he stood, she reached out and wrapped her hand around his arm just below the elbow, caressing the roughened skin with her thumb.

“Are you going to bed also?” he asked.

“I am,” she said. “But first I'm going to sit in the closet a little longer.”

H
is mother wanted him to wear his suit for his first day of school. He had left it in Moorhead, wrapped in a bag and still smelling from when he wet himself at his father's grave. “Nobody wears a suit to school,” he said because he had not told her about urinating in the suit or leaving it behind.

“Of course they do,” she said cheerfully, but she left him to dress himself while she went into the kitchen to make breakfast. “Don't you look sharp,” she said when he appeared wearing his brown pants, a button-down shirt, and the dress shoes. She tied a dishtowel around his neck. She'd made cinnamon toast with the crusts removed.