The Year We Left Home (32 page)

She lost her grip on the doll and it slid to the floor. “I want Baby!”

“Well you weren’t being very nice to Baby. She can stay on the floor.”

In the rearview mirror he saw her lower lip trembling. A squall ready to break out. Ryan coaxed her into the song about the little green frog sitting in the water, the little green frog, doin’ what he oughter. There were three or four verses, which carried them as far as North Avenue. He didn’t know the streets here and he didn’t much like the look of the place, with its air of incomplete urban renewal, its fortified corner groceries and druggie coffee shops. He didn’t think that his wife had been to Delia’s either, and now it seemed like an entirely wrongheaded plan to bring their daughter here. He had a moment of pointless anger toward his wife, then he made up his mind to offer Delia extra pay if she’d come back with him, watch Anna at their place, as she always had. It was already after one o’clock, but things could still work out.

Delia wasn’t home. Her roommate, another sooty-eyed college girl, came to the door and said that Delia was in class, she’d be back a little later. “Are you sure?” Ryan said. “I mean, my wife talked to her . . .”

The roommate gave him a what-do-you-want-me-to-do look. The apartment behind her gave off a whiff of cat. The hallway looked like a crime-scene photograph. The roommate bent down to speak with Anna. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

“When is it you expect Delia?”

The roommate said she couldn’t say, Delia must have got hung up somewhere. She got his daughter to answer her, finally, and the roommate said that Anna was a pretty name for a pretty girl.

He couldn’t and wouldn’t leave Anna here with the roommate. It was a relief to recognize his limits.

Back in the car, Anna announced that she had to go potty. “We’ll be home real soon,” Ryan told her, although they would not. It was after two when they reached their own door, then there was the rush to the bathroom, Anna’s coat to get off, her demands for juice, animal crackers, the
Sesame Street
tape he couldn’t find. “You can watch this instead,” he said. It was a soap opera that he counted on her being too young to understand. “I’ll find your show in a minute, OK?”

In the bedroom, behind the closed door, he called Janine. “I am so sorry,” he told her. “This whole day’s been a landslide.” He began explaining: the phone call, the toothache, and so on.

Janine listened until he reached the end. “Next week,” he said. “Either Friday, or, if Friday’s not good—”

“Ryan?”

He ran out of breath right then and there. “Yeah.”

“Maybe I’m not as OK with this as I thought.”

When he didn’t answer, she said, “Look at everything you had to do today, tie yourself in knots, get your little girl all upset . . .”

“If I was there right now,” Ryan said, “you wouldn’t be having all these unselfish thoughts.”

“Well maybe they wouldn’t be uppermost in my mind. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have them.”

“This is shit, Janine.”

“You’re angry. I can understand that.” Her tone was calm, reasonable. She sounded almost like his wife.

“So I guess you’re bailing on me one more time. Wow. History repeating itself.”

“I can’t be your, whatever it is you want. Long-lost fantasy girl. I can’t live the way I used to, all crazy and dangerous and wild. It takes a toll on you after a while. I’ve had to realize I need to protect myself. I need to protect myself from myself, if that makes—”

Quietly, Ryan hung up the phone.

When he was younger he had wished to see the world, and then he had wished to change it, and then he had been afraid it was passing him by. And his mistake had been to confuse a particular woman with the world.

In the living room his daughter sat on the couch, deep in the folds of it so that her legs didn’t reach the edge of the cushions. On the television screen a handsome couple were having a serious conversation that appeared to have gone on for some time. His daughter was transfixed by them. Ryan sat down next to her, hoping to become engrossed in any story not his own.

Anita sat
at the kitchen table, writing out her day’s list of things to do. She had pretty handwriting, a small, rounded cursive. People often gave her compliments on it. Sometimes she thought she was mostly a collection of minor talents.

The phone rang. The cordless receiver sat next to her on the table so she didn’t have to get up. “Hello?”

“Girl, how are you?”

It was Rhonda. “Fine, I guess,” Anita said. With her free hand, she took her pen and crossed
Rhonda
off her list.

“How’s Jeff?”

“I found a bottle in the garage last night. In a storage bin.”

“They like garages.”

“He said it had been there a long time, he forgot it was there.”

“Good one,” Rhonda said. Rhonda was her Al-Anon friend. Rhonda had already divorced her own drunk husband. “You check the garbage? See if there’s any empties?”

“You think I should?”

“Oh honey, I’m not saying try to beat him at his own game. You have no idea how talented these jokers can be. They are pure cunning. Bill P. used to bury his Wild Turkey out in the potato patch.” Bill P.
was Rhonda’s ex-husband, so called to distinguish him from Bill H., her new boyfriend. It was an AA joke. Bill H. was an alcoholic also, but he was in recovery and went to meetings. “Always out there digging his potatoes. Took me a long age to figure it out. I would of laughed, if I wasn’t so scalded mad.”

Rhonda did laugh then, her big hawing laugh. One of the interesting things about Al-Anon was that you met people with whom you would not otherwise have anything in common.

Anita said, “I know you aren’t supposed to be the alcohol police. I know they can always get more. But I poured his damned bottle down the sink. It felt good.”

“How are the kids?”

“They won’t talk to me. You’d think I was the one who drove the car through the garage wall and peed on the kitchen floor.”

“Give them time. They aren’t sure he’s going to stay sober.”

“Neither am I,” Anita said. A month ago Jeff had got his second DUI and was sent to court-ordered alcohol counseling. The counselor said Anita should go to Al-Anon, so she did. Sometimes she thought it was helping, and sometimes she thought it was only one more way that everything had to be about Jeff.

“Just work your steps. Let go and let God.”

Anita said she would. She told Rhonda she would see her at the meeting and hung up. She was still learning all the AA lingo. It was kind of funny that she’d lived with a drunk all this time and was just now figuring out how to talk about it.

That night at the meeting, there was a guest speaker, a man with one arm. He told them he had lost the arm driving drunk on a motorcycle. But he’d never really made the connection between drinking and losing his arm. It was just one of those things. He shook his head, marveling. Then, a few years later, he left work, stopped at a bar, got back in his car, and T-boned somebody at an intersection. Killed a man. A man who never made it home to his family that night. He’d woken up in the hospital without remembering any of it. Total blackout. He’d gone to jail. Finally, he’d made the connection. Every day
he thought about that man. Every day, that was what kept him from taking another drink.

The man with one arm was thin, with bushy sideburns. Having one arm didn’t keep him from lighting and smoking cigarettes, one after another. He was ordinary looking, in jeans and a cotton shirt. He looked like somebody who worked in a gas station or a factory or whatever job you could do with one arm. You didn’t like to catch yourself thinking this way, but Anita had to wonder if there were other, different AA meetings for drunk bankers, drunk doctors or drunk lawyers, drunk . . . well, people more like her.

But Jeff could have killed somebody too, driving around drunk. Could have gone to jail, lost his job. Killed his stupid self while he was at it. It could still happen. She and the kids could be left on their own. Every time she thought of it she felt scared and furious. Alcoholics were sick, it was a disease. But he wouldn’t be sick in the first place if he wasn’t an asshole.

The meeting was over. They stood and said the Lord’s Prayer. Anita only did a halfhearted job of it. The God who was in charge of alcholics didn’t seem the same as the church God. After the prayer they all held hands in a circle and said, “Keep coming back, it works if you work it.” You had to do all sorts of embarrassing things at meetings. She felt bad about her attitude, she wished she was more openhearted, more sincere. But there were also plenty of times when she resented all the things required of her when she wasn’t the one who got DUIs and phoned in sick to work with hangovers and made everybody miserable.

Anita stood next to Rhonda at the back of the room while Rhonda said good-night to people. Rhonda knew everybody. She’d been coming to meetings for a long time. Rhonda was the first one she’d met at her first meeting. Rhonda had opened the door for her. Anita couldn’t even imagine what her own face had looked like. “You’re in the right place,” Rhonda had said, drawing her in. You had to love her for that.

Anita worried that she’d dressed up too much. She was always doing that, even though she knew better by now; meetings weren’t a real showy place. She had worn a blue blazer and a red silk blouse, black
crepe pants and her red pumps. She didn’t believe in leaving the house without making an effort.

Rhonda wore jeans and a sweatshirt. She was thin and wore her hair long, like a country-western star, and she smoked a lot of cigarettes. Most people in AA smoked, though Anita hadn’t yet figured out what that meant. Rhonda worked as a cashier in a restaurant. She’d had a lot of different jobs and not one of them, she said, ever paid you enough for the misery of it all. Anita and Rhonda were what was called codependents, meaning people who put up with the goddamn drunks. Bill P. had broken Rhonda’s nose. He’d taken the Breyer horse figures she’d collected all her life and melted them down in the burn barrel.

When Rhonda had finished saying the rest of her good-nights, she and Anita walked out to the parking lot. “It could storm if it wanted to,” Rhonda said. It was already dark, but to the west they could make out the darker shapes of bulging clouds. The day had been warm. It smelled of rain and a breeze was kicking up. The meetings were held at the Grange building on the west edge of town. There was a truck stop a little distance down the highway, and a few farm lights. It was the same lonesome emptiness all the way to the Missouri and the Nebraska border, and beyond that, to the Rockies. Bad weather always came through on the west-to-east track, nothing between here and the mountains to slow it down, like a big black mouth opening right on top of you.

“I should get on home,” Anita said, although now she was reluctant to leave. The lights were still on in the building behind them. They had a welcoming look. “Rhonda? I’m mad all the time. I don’t know how to not be mad. Don’t tell me ‘fake it till you make it.’ I’m tired of slogans.”

A flare of lightning lit up an edge of cloud. The lightning was reflected, still some great distance away and too far for the thunder to reach them. Rhonda pulled her jean jacket tighter. “Oh that sky has a wicked look, don’t it? You can tell Jeff you’re mad. Just don’t be mad the very minute you say it.”

“I feel like I’ve been married for a hundred years.”

“Yeah, the first hundred years are the hardest.” Rhonda leaned over and kissed Anita on the cheek. “Call me, OK?”

Anita said she would. She got into her minivan and Rhonda into her old Pontiac with the loud exhaust. They drove back along the access road, Rhonda in front and Anita following. Rhonda’s back window displayed two baseball caps, one for the Hawkeyes and one for the St. Louis Cardinals. Bill H. was a big Cardinals fan. Bill P. had been a Cubs fan, so the caps had to change. When they got to the stoplight, Rhonda honked and turned off to the right.

Anita reached her own driveway, pressed the garage-door opener, and eased the minivan into its space next to Jeff’s sporty Mazda. Of course he couldn’t drive now. Anita dropped him off at work in the morning and picked him up in the afternoon. For now Jeff told everybody that the Mazda wasn’t running right, they were having repairs done. Anita didn’t think they were fooling anybody. People always found out. It meant that Matt couldn’t drive the Mazda even if Jeff would have let him. One more lousy secret. They talked about that in Al-Anon, how unhealthy it was to protect the alcoholic from the consequences of his behavior.

But what if Jeff lost his job? Not that those guys at the bank didn’t all poison themselves with booze. They just thought it was a sign of weakness to screw up and get caught.

She came in through the kitchen and put her purse and keys on the counter. The TV was on in the den. Her son was stretched out on the couch, a glass of Coke and ice on the floor within his reach. “Hi honey.”

He made one of his noises in greeting. He wore a gray T-shirt and basketball shorts. These were the clothes he slept in and sometimes spent whole days in. Some things she had given up trying to make him do. “Did you get any dinner?”

“Grilled cheese.”

“What are you watching?” It was a documentary, something with old brown-and-white pictures and a serious narrator.

“The orphan train.”

“What?”

“It’s for school,” Matt said, as if that explained anything.

“Where’s your dad and Marcie?”

“Upstairs.”

His silences and his telegraphic speech had different tones and qualities and she knew them all. Most often he was just being a teenager who communicated with his parents as if he was a soldier captured behind enemy lines: name, rank, and serial number, nothing else. But more and more he seemed furious at having to live under the same roof with her.

The first long, low roll of thunder broke.

Anita stood, pretending to watch the television while she watched her son. He looked more like Jeff than like her side of the family, but he didn’t have his father’s matter-of-factness or incurious nature. He kept a zone of secrecy around him that she was not allowed to enter. The only way she ever knew if he had a girlfriend was when his sister told everyone else about it. He’d taught himself to play the acoustic guitar and spent a lot of time in his room practicing old Bob Dylan songs. He went in for solitary sports, like swimming and distance running. She worried that he might turn out like one of her family’s oddballs, the ones with peculiar talents and discontents. Her crazy cousin Chip, or her too-smart-for-his-own-good brother, or Torrie and her freakish pictures. None of that kind ever settled for being happy in any normal way.