Ride Around Shining (25 page)

I laid down the coat and took up the robe and spread it as wide as my arm allowed. He squared himself and looked at me over his shoulder, watchful and hard. He looked at my bad arm and he seemed to be contemplating something, something surely terrible, and softly I laid the robe over his shoulders, to forestall him.

“I'll let you change,” I said, as he put his arms through, and giving a small nod to Antonia, who was still staring at us from over the steaming cup, the packs of peas bunched carefully upon her knees, I went out of the room and shut the door behind me, and went down the stairs toward the garage, and the little room they'd given me for my own.

I didn't know they were
really back together until late the next morning, when I strolled into the mudroom and nearly went nose-over on the sleeping body of the serval. It horked to life and tore through the hall, and then it was being yelled at for damaging the Ninth Ward photo, and defended with meows that were all too human.

All the little sounds within the house seemed more familiar than ever that morning—even the quality of light felt more cheerful. The rows of coats and little shoes seemed to greet me, to accept me as a regular part of life there, and to promise that the people within felt the same. I suppose I even thought they might ask me to stay on.

But something went out of their faces when they saw me that day. They were standing in the kitchen, fully dressed, and when I came in they glanced at one another, as if in some confirmation, and when they looked back they both seemed farther away.

“Morning, J.”

I yawned politely and adjusted the sling I'd worn to sleep. My elbow was badly swollen and it throbbed some, but the sling felt precautionary, and mostly a symbol of sacrifice.

Antonia proffered a large bottle of painkillers, and I took a few. “How's your head?” I asked.

“Meh,” she reported.

Calyph cleared his throat. “Get something to eat,” he said.

When I came back with a glass of juice, Antonia was looking at her phone, and when I set the glass on the counter near her, she jumped back a little.

“How you sleep?” Calyph asked.

I settled onto my stool and laughed. “Have you ever actually been over there?”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

“It's like a prison cell,” I said.

Again Antonia shrank back from me slightly.

“Ras and them people did it up. We'd have done it better, if it was us.”

“I guess it's too late now,” I said, willing them to say otherwise.

Calyph cleared his throat again. “Is your stuff packed up? We'll get you a ride back to your place when you're ready.”

“I can drive myself.”

“Ain't nobody in that kind of shape right now. We'll get you a ride out.”

“It's no hurry,” I said, sipping.

Antonia sighed a strange, drastic sigh.

Suddenly I was on my feet. I could feel what she meant quite clearly. I felt like crossing my arms but I couldn't, and willed myself to summon any kind of dignity. “If you want me gone, I'll go.”

“It ain't that,” Calyph said.

She was looking down at my glass blankly. “It
is
that,” she said. It was very silent then. I could hear the distant metal whine of a far-off contractor sawing something in half.

“But I saved you,” I said quietly.

Still she wouldn't look at me, and spoke slowly. “We just need some space right now. You've become very . . . involved . . . in our lives. We've talked it over, and we don't think we can have you quite as near anymore.”

I looked over at Calyph wildly. “You already fired me once.”

He wouldn't look at me, staring downward with his jaw clenched so the muscle stood out. For once in his life, he was silent.

“Why now?” I asked, hearing my voice break. “If it weren't for me—”

She lifted her eyes then, and looked at me very steadily. “We appreciate everything you've done for us,” she said.

I could feel my hand go up to my neck with a jerk, my fingers worrying my spine.

“I know it ain't the best time to hear this, J. And we grateful for last night. I'm grateful. We just got to say goodbye now. We'll mail you a check.”

“I don't understand.”

Antonia opened her mouth, and her face was full of terrible clarity, as though just that morning she had realized something that had made her see the whole of our relations anew, and I was afraid, so afraid of what she would say, even though at the same time I had no idea what it would be, and felt, too, that there were no charges that could justly be laid before me—that I was their friend and had always meant the best. I was prepared at once to be revealed by some awful truth and to be indignant at it, at her utter misunderstanding of my intentions.

But she could say nothing. Her mouth shut again, and then they just looked at one another, helplessly, and from the drive came the sound of a door slamming.

“That's him,” Antonia said.

“Who?”

“He'll take you home,” Calyph said. “He'll take you wherever you want.”

“But I still have nineteen days,” I said hoarsely.

“Goodbye, Jess,” they each said. “Goodbye.” But they came no nearer, and softly beneath their words, I could hear what I had always known they would say one day:
Get out, get out
. And so I went, and in the driveway I met the man Mbakwe Trainor, called Nick, my replacement, who took me wordlessly and with great dignity back to my lesser home.

It was the end of November
when my grandmother died and in Wisconsin the water in the ditches was turning to ice. The woman at the rental agency said that only two weeks past it'd been nearly seventy degrees and a warm fall wind the likes of which she'd never felt blew along the shores of Lake Michigan. But now the leaves that had even then been pinwheeled through McKinley Park by the gusts of summer undeparted shivered among the dry roadside grasses as Calyph and I drove southwest from General Mitchell into the reaped fields at the heart of the state.

I used to like a frozen November day. After I stopped playing football I stopped caring about the feeling of falling onto frozen ground, and watched the landscape stiffen with the satisfaction of someone safe in a warm place who is glad to see things moving along. Looking out the window, I tried to feel again that connection to the midwestern seasons flowing one into another. I used to get a sort of solace from the thought of the mice creeping beneath the threshing and the thawing sounds of unseen streams, but now the ground looked only harsh and colorless, just the dirt people made their numb way over, huddled in old blankets, eating cheese sausage, and running rusted space heaters behind the counters of little auto shops. Somehow I felt no loss in this differing vision—I had the feeling of seeing the natural beauty and natural ugliness together, and feeling equal pride in each.

“What's a salt lick?” Calyph asked, pressing ineffectually at the buttons of the rental's tiny, tacked-on navigation. He'd insisted on driving that day. He claimed his knee had got well enough to make it good exercise, and after the face he'd made at seeing the wrecked Mazda, I thought it best to go into retirement gracefully.

“Where'd you see that?”

“Just back there. Somebody wantin' to sell 'em off a plywood sign.”

I looked backward pointlessly.

“Salt licks,” he repeated. “Five dollars.”

It took me a second to get over my surprise at his not knowing every damn thing in the world. “Salt lick's a block of salt for a deer,” I told him.

“Huh! Is the salt as good? Or is it like some animal crude?”

“I never licked any,” I said, feeling almost depressed at the impossibility of any other reply.

“You shoulda known people was gonna have these questions,” he chided.

There was a pause in which I was supposed to have apologized, and then he went on. “Then they shoot the deer?”

“What?”

“Deer come for the salt and then they lamp it and shoot it.”

“Is that what they do,” I said.

“Isn't it?”

“That wouldn't be sporting,” I said, adopting a patient, lecturing tone. “We have a code here. Not like the South.”

“Oh, you got a code!” He laughed widely, all his teeth showing. It made him look crazed and dangerous, but it was his purest laugh.

I nodded solemnly.

“Who I know gonna teach me that? Andrew Bogut?”

I ignored this taunt. “I'm gonna teach you. And you'll have to learn, if you want anybody to respect you in this world.”

Again he laughed crazily. “You! You all heart, huh?”

“We all heart,” I said, and we sped on, in the kind of easy understanding that opens at last at the endings of things.

I've heard it said that family
is measured not by who comes to the weddings but the funerals. Two weeks after I left the Wests, I got another terse message from my aunt Rose telling me to get on a plane if I could by Sunday. There wasn't any mention of a service, so I had to call her back and ask if it was imminent or—and then I thought of a white sheet coming slowly up, and Grandma Ellen's spotted arms stiffening, and could think of no utterable word for that completion.

“It's all through,” she told me.

Before I flew back I called and asked if I could come by and get the severance check Calyph had promised me, as it hadn't appeared in the mail. He didn't pick up, but a few hours later I got a text that read “tomorrow @ 3 good?”

Even this perfunctory summons filled me with a final rush of apprehension and hope, and I was let down to see the check taped to the front door. But when I pulled it off I saw the words “come round back” written on the note line. It was a brisk, windy day, and Calyph was lounging in a tracksuit, leafing through a playbook with his headphones on. I remember it was a silly-looking thing in a three-ring binder, like it was made at Kinko's for a D-III team. He didn't get up, but we shook hands.

“How you been, Jess?”

“My grandmother's died,” I told him. I couldn't think of anything else to say. I was standing over him and I wished I could sit. He wouldn't have cared, but it would be taking license to sit without being asked, and I could see myself slumping a little, and then, without thinking of it, making some false little gesture, blinking back tears that weren't coming.

Slowly he shut the book and laid it aside. His immaculate hands seemed careful and sad, and I wondered if he ever really felt anything, in small moments like these when emotion was expected, or if it was just physical grace that made it seem so.

“That's bad,” he said. “When'd you last see her?”

“A long time ago. She'd lost her mind,” I noted.

“Where is she?”

“Home. Wisconsin. She used to live in Florida a long time.”

She'd had an orange tree in her backyard, and there's a picture of me, very young, crawling under this tree and reaching up for the fruit. She liked to tell the story of planting it when I was born so it would grow along with me. When I came eight weeks premature she had the seeds but not the shovel, and she said she had to plant it quick with a broken spade before getting on a plane and coming north to see my mother. The tree seemed much too tall for that, and I suspect it came with the house. She took after me that way.

“Would you fly to Milwaukee?” Calyph asked.

“Unless you need me.”

He looked at me kindly. “I never needed you,” he said. And then he ran the tips of his fingers over one splayed, pale palm and asked if he could come with me.

“You'd want to do that? It's just my grandmother. I mean, it was time.”

He only looked at me, speechless. His eyes widened a little and seemed to get drier. I got the idea he was trying to prevent himself from repeating what I'd said back to me.

“I'd like to see you off,” he said finally.

I thanked him. I was grateful, but it was bittersweet. I knew the trip was his way of severing from me with some finality, like maybe if he didn't I'd just stop by and peep in the windows every few weeks because I couldn't help myself. I never could imagine how it was after the trip, after I was gone for good, their second life together with a child on the way and a driver who could keep his distance, full of little gestures of black camaraderie and Antonia walking slower each week. After they were done with me I was done with them. Even being in the same town felt like a burden. Imagining the circuits of their lives entwining invisibly with mine lost its comfort and became a painful reenactment of loss, and before the new year had arrived I'd packed up my things and moved away to Chicago.

To get to my town
we had to pass along the shore of Lake Geneva, by the observatory and the stone pillars of old golf courses. Somehow their proud, dated air, a sad pretension in the hot high season, when the place was filled with summer people from Illinois rushing by toward newer courses, seemed almost convincing in the early winter light. Their worn, bald driving ranges and chipped whitewash signs looked like victims of the season only, not of some more enduring slide.

Looking at the mileage signs, I was reminded how seriously the settlers of the area must have taken the idea of future distinction. Radiating out from the lake in every direction were towns with names like Waterford and Avalon, and Harvard, Illinois. That these names of borrowed noblesse lay just down a county road from larger towns like Janesville and Mukwonago, and the Bong State Recreation Area, gave the region its character and made me feel I was almost home. In college I remember telling people that I was from near Lake Geneva, and then adding “the American Lake Geneva” if they seemed confused.

We came up on Fontana, and old brick houses with white shutters pinned back peered out at us from the shore of the lake through thin, denuded trees.