Miller's Valley (17 page)

T
he morning Tom was due to get out Steven drove me to the state prison. Steven found out the date from a guy he knew whose brother worked as a parole officer. Tommy had served almost eighteen months on an assault charge. No trial, just a deal he'd told the attorney he wanted to make as fast as possible. Steven said that if he'd gone to trial he probably would have gotten a lot more. “With what he did to that guy's face, all they would have had to do was show the jury the pictures,” he said.

“Don't tell my mother that,” I said.

“Babe,” Steven said. “Do I strike you as a stupid individual?”

Even the guys at the diner said Tommy had gotten off easy because of his military service. They'd all been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt before, but once people started to talk about selling drugs the flag wavers had gotten less certain about what a great guy Tommy was. Plus there'd been a description in the paper of the beating he'd given the other man, and it sounded like Tommy had done a thorough job. A dispute over money, the story said, and Steven said the guy had shorted Tommy on some kind of deal, although he wouldn't be more specific because he still thought he could keep me from thinking the worst of my brother. Everyone else thought the worst, though. More than once when I'd picked up a stray shift at the diner there'd been long periods of silence at the counter, where the regulars sat on stools way too tiny for their old-guy butts, their feed company hats pulled down low over sun-speckled foreheads.

The day Steven and I drove up to the prison was one of those November mornings that make you think the weather will never turn harsh, although there would surely be snow within weeks. The air was clear and fresh, chilled like lemonade, and the sky was a blue without clouds. I don't know why I remember it so well. Neither of us really wanted to be there. My course work for the second year at the community college was even tougher than the first, and Steven's business was taking off and he was complaining about losing a morning's worth of demolition. He had two guys from Poland doing a lot of the scut work now. He paid them almost nothing but he let them live in whatever house they were working on while he lived in whatever house was almost sold, or just bought. He said that back in Poland their wages and their living conditions would be much worse, and they should be grateful. They didn't act grateful, and I didn't like the way they looked at me.

Steven had bought a big Victorian house at an estate sale, with a deep half circle of a porch and built-in bookshelves and a pantry with the original oak cabinets and brass hardware. It was a great house, the first one I'd really liked, but it was a wreck, with a floor in the kitchen so soft I was afraid we were going to wind up in the basement. I'd thought he was crazy to take it on. For years it had been the neighborhood haunted house, with kids daring each other at night to run up and ring the bell and then screaming that they'd heard someone inside even though no one had lived in it for ages and the four grown kids who had inherited it had been fighting all that time about how much to sell it for. By the time Steven got to it it was in such bad shape that he'd been able to afford it. Then once he was mostly finished fixing it up two guys from Philadelphia who were looking for a place in the country offered him what he was asking, which was eight thousand dollars more than he'd thought he would get. “You can really breathe out here,” one of the Philadelphia guys said, as though he was partly paying for oxygen. Steven was smart at milking that stuff. He was always putting baskets of apples and pots of mums on the front porch. He'd handed the buyers a bottle of champagne after they'd signed the contracts at the bank. He took me to the steak house that night and ordered the same kind of champagne and clinked my glass and said, “Whole new ball game, babe. Whole new ball game.” I didn't like champagne. One sniff of the stuff and I was right back at LaRhonda's wedding reception, kneeling in the ladies' room.

“She's got the baby blues,” Mrs. Venti told me about LaRhonda, who had had a baby girl in June. Dee at the diner said, “An eight-pound preemie. That's what the boss says. He says he doesn't want to be called Gramps because it will make him feel old.” Maybe LaRhonda had the baby blues because it was just her and her mother in the house most of the time. Her father was living more or less full-time with the diner waitress, although she didn't work at the diner anymore. She was a hostess at the Italian place Mr. Venti had opened not far from where they were building the new development. Fred was managing the McDonald's Mr. Venti had opened on the highway, and Steven said he talked at the bar about how much he wanted to go back to working construction and how his father-in-law screamed at him all the time about how bad he was at his job. “It's like he can tell when something is going wrong, and that's when he shows up,” Fred told Steven, which actually was the truth. Fred didn't know that Mr. Venti had a deal with an eighteen-year-old who was working there to call him if there were problems. Also to call him if she was at home alone.

“The man has Fred's balls in his pocket,” Steven said. Which hadn't stopped LaRhonda from getting pregnant when Serafina was only three months old. I thought about stopping by with a pink onesie and some advice about birth control, but with what my life was like I was not in the mood for more disapproving looks from a woman too stupid not to get pregnant twice before she was even twenty-one. My father had gone from saying random words to saying nothing at all, and the house had almost flooded twice, summer and fall. My mother and I sat on the stairs halfway up to the second floor during the second storm, eating Fritos out of the bag, watching to see if the water would start to seep under the front door, and talking about when the floors would be warped enough to need replacing. We both seemed to think the answer was never. All the times that water had gotten into the house, and it hadn't done much to it that paint and plaster couldn't repair. There had never been anything fancy enough to be ruined.

“You could never have had wall-to-wall carpeting,” I'd said, sitting on the stairs.

“What?” my mother said. “Oh, that. That was just foolish.”

We'd sat for a while without saying anything, which was fine with us both. My lips were puckering from all the salt in the chips. After a while the rain started to slow, so that we could tell that the water wouldn't get any higher than the next to last step to the front door. I could hear Ruth's television.

“They're watching
The Match Game,
” I said.

“I think your aunt is going deaf,” my mother said. “That's what happens when you're forty-five years old and do nothing but sit on your butt all day long.”

“I think she turns it up for Dad. Maybe because he can't talk she thinks he can't hear.”

My mother took another Frito. “We had a stroke patient come in two months ago, her whole left side was gone,” she said. “She stopped by last week with zucchini bread for all the nurses. Baked six loaves herself.”

“That's good zucchini bread. I had a piece. I wish we had that now.”

“It's like nothing happened to her. She's got a little bit of weakness in the one leg, that's it. It's all the luck of the draw. One of the nurses says it's always worse on the right side.”

“That can't be true.”

She'd shrugged. At least I didn't have to worry about saving the cows from the flooding in the pasture, which I could see through the transom over the door was looking like an enormous pond. I'd sold the last of the beef cattle in July. It was sad to watch them march into the truck, their big blocky heads hung low as though they knew where they were going to wind up. I'd stopped naming them a long time ago, but still. For all my worries my father didn't even seem to notice they were gone.

I'd told Clifton the cows were going away for a while. “Where?” he said. “Delaware,” I said. I don't know why, but it was the first thing that came into my mind. That, and the idea that we had become that sad thing, a farm that didn't do any farming. I'd sold our last crop of feed corn and hay, too. Our place was like my father's brain, shutting down piece by piece. Still sometimes I woke up before dawn, listening for the sound of the cows calling, then going out to the barn just to feed the cats.

Clifton hadn't minded the cows leaving as much as I thought he would. He liked to spend time with my father, watching TV in Ruth's living room. He was in all-day kindergarten now. Callie didn't like her grandmother watching him anymore, not since she found her teaching Clifton how to use a footstool to reach the teakettle and put a light under it. “She's got arthritis bad, but still,” Callie said. My father and Clifton liked to watch
Captain Kangaroo
on days Clifton didn't have school. He seemed a little bored by the soaps, but Ruth would make Jiffy Pop popcorn, and Clifton loved popcorn.

Callie didn't want us to tell Clifton that Tommy was coming back. Just in case, she said. “In case what?” my mother said, annoyed, but I knew what Callie meant.

I was up early to pick Tommy up, and my mother was, too, making me the kind of big breakfast I never ate, half a ham steak and a couple of pancakes. Steven came in, leaned over my shoulder, and said, “That's what I call a real breakfast.” He had a knack for figuring out who wasn't buying what he was selling, and my mother was number one on the list. The Ventis had been on board from the beginning. “That's a nice-looking young man,” Mrs. Venti always said, and Mr. Venti usually said, “He's going someplace.” I wasn't sure, but I think Mr. Venti had invested in Steven's business, and I was pretty sure he was ticked that LaRhonda had wound up instead with Fred, who wasn't going anywhere.

My mother said, “I can make you a plate, Steve,” but I pushed mine over to him and he polished it off. I got him a cup of coffee and drummed my fingers on the table while he finished it.

“You make sure your brother knows he should come right back here, Mary Margaret,” my mother said, putting on her nurse's cap. They'd told the nurses years ago that they didn't have to wear their caps anymore, and a few of the younger ones even wore white pants and tunics instead of dresses. But my mother was a traditionalist. “I've got that noodle casserole for dinner, and the apple pie. I'll take care of that when I get home. You make sure your father knows he's eating dinner here. I don't give a rip what's on television. I told him Tom was coming home, but I'm not sure it registered.” She sighed and put on her plaid wool car coat. “Get your brother some fresh towels and some clean clothes from your father's closet and let him take a shower. Make him a decent cup of coffee. He probably hasn't had a decent cup of coffee for more than a year.”

“Mom, it'll be fine. I know what to do. I know Tommy, remember?” Or at least I had known Tommy, a long time ago. I had this idea, of how men looked who got out of jail, all dry and wiry and tough, a boiled-down baked-hard version of a man. But Tommy had been that way even before, a guy who showed up, drunk or sober, with the whites of his eyes hatched in red and fading marks on his hands and arms, a guy who was living in ways you could only imagine and then didn't want to.

“Callie wants to wait a couple days to bring Clifton over,” my mother said. “I suppose that's about right.”

“I think that's a good idea,” said Steven.

“I wasn't talking to you,” my mother said, in a pleasant even voice that, if anything, made the insult worse. I'd heard her use that voice sometimes at the hospital when I was a kid, those times I'd wound up waiting there with a copybook on my lap when my father had had to go out on an evening fix-it call. I'd sit in the hallway with the sad families and sick people, and my mother would say something to one of them in that same pleasant even voice, something like “Now, dear, if you can't calm down I'm going to have to ask you to leave.”

“We have to go,” I said.

“Someday your mother is going to figure out that I'm the best thing that ever happened to her daughter,” Steven said in the car.

“I think my mother thinks the best thing that will happen to her daughter is finishing college.”

“Hey, have I ever done anything to mess that up? No. I'm behind you a hundred percent.” He squeezed my thigh, then took my hand. “World's best boyfriend.” Steven liked to talk like
The Guinness Book of Records.
World's best beer. World's best party. World's best businessman.

“I have to admit, I'm going to like hanging out with your brother again. When he's on his game, he's the world's best guy. I hope he appreciates the effort.”

The wind had picked up while we were driving, or maybe it was because we were so much farther north, but I was shivering in the car while Steven went inside to talk to the people on duty. In just a few minutes he came outside again, shaking his head.

“He's already gone,” he said when he got in the car. “That thoughtless asshole got picked up more than an hour ago and left.”

“Where did he go?”

“That's what I said. The stupid guard laughed and said, ‘Buddy, when they leave, we don't know where they go, and we don't care.' ” Steven turned the key in the ignition hard, then just sat for a minute. “I lost a whole morning's worth of work,” he said.

“Where did he go?”

“I guess your mother will have to eat that whole apple pie herself,” Steven said, backing out fast. “Maybe you can make her a really good cup of coffee to go with it.”

“Don't be a jerk,” I said.

“I'm not the jerk here,” he said, riding the gas pedal, hard.

A
month before I graduated from high school a woman named Gertrude Scheinman died at her house in the Catskills. The house wasn't much to look at, honestly. At some point someone showed me a picture of it and it looked like a house in Miller's Valley, with a narrow front porch and a big living room window winking out at the lawn and what seemed like the edge of a barn to one side of it. But it was the house her family had rented during the summers when she was a little girl, and after it got foreclosed, when the area was on a downward slide, she bought it. Paid cash.

You'd never know, looking at that house, that Gertie Scheinman had $2 million to give the University of Pennsylvania, to endow a scholarship for a “young woman of scientific promise who wishes to attend medical school.” She gave it to Penn, not because it was where she had gone to medical school herself, but because it was the place that had rejected her. One of several. After she graduated from nursing school in 1910 and decided that the only reason she'd become a nurse was because she was female, she decided to become a doctor. She wound up studying in Edinburgh and practicing in New York City and then semiretiring to that farmhouse in the mountains. The
semi
is because, even though she didn't have a real medical practice and was pushing eighty, women who lived in the area would come to her house to have her examine them during their pregnancies, and she would help deliver their babies in their own beds. Some were Orthodox Jewish women who couldn't have a male doctor, and some were early hippie types who wanted to do the natural thing. I don't know exactly where the $2 million came from since those women in the Catskills apparently paid mainly in jars of local honey or homemade macramé hangings. Maybe it was from Dr. Scheinman's father, who owned a big wholesale butcher firm, which she once said was how she got interested in medicine. I wondered if any of our beef cattle had wound up there. Maybe they did, and they made some money for Scheinman's, which would mean I'd come full circle, since it was the Scheinman money that paid for me to go to college, finally, not at the state university but at the University of Pennsylvania, which, my mother never got tired of telling people, was an Ivy League school.

Two years in community college, and then almost overnight I woke up to the sound of truck gears grinding outside the window of a small single room in Philadelphia. A young woman of scientific promise who wishes to attend medical school. Dr. Scheinman's niece had published a little book, a pamphlet, really, about her aunt, with a photo of the doctor on its cover, a woman with the grim look people always seemed to have in portrait photographs fifty years ago. I kept it propped on my desk all through school.

“It's the perfect opportunity for you, Mimi,” Mrs. Farrell said when she showed me the letter she'd gotten as the head of the high school science department. “It pays for undergraduate and medical school studies. That's thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of tuition.”

“I didn't figure on becoming a doctor,” I said.

“Why not?” Mrs. Farrell said, and she had this look on her face that I knew from looking at my mother sometimes when she talked about me going to college, this look of someone who felt like they'd missed something and they wanted you to go out and get it for them. I knew if I told my mother about this scholarship I'd never hear the end of it.

“I don't know,” I finally said.

I didn't even know if I could go when Mrs. Farrell first mentioned it. There was still my father to take care of. Most of the time he was with Ruth, who made sure he didn't try to fill a glass with scalding water instead of cold from the tap, that he didn't stand for hours in front of the tap trying to figure out how to turn it on or what it was for. But as soon as he walked out of Ruth's house he was on his own unless my mother or I was right there. One day I got in the shower when I thought he was all settled taking his afternoon nap in Ruth's easy chair, and there I was dripping wet and naked on the bath mat when I heard Ruth shouting, “Buddy! Buddy!” and saw him through the window wandering down the road, dragging his bum leg along the center line.

“What would it take to make you step out that door?” I said to her after I'd led him back, wearing nothing but my coat and a pair of old boots, my hair freezing into icicle strands. “Give me a clue.”

“Don't get smart with me, Mimi. You and your mother go about your business ninety percent of the time while I look after him. Come have a cup of tea, Buddy. Never mind the outside.” My father sat down in the easy chair with a
whoompf,
like his body was a big heavy bag and he was putting it down. That was where he died one really frigid night in February. They said he had a second stroke.

My father was slumped in the chair, his head to one side, his mouth open the way it always was when we were kids and he fell asleep watching TV. I was always afraid then that his bridge would fall out onto the floor, but he hadn't worn it since he came home from the hospital. It was in a plastic envelope in the kitchen junk drawer. I could see odd whiskers on his cheek. Sometimes there are things that you've rehearsed so many times, thought about so often, that when they happen it's like they already happened a long long time ago. My father was dead but I could tell he'd already died somewhere in my mind. I didn't even cry.

The church was full and then some for the funeral, and Mr. Venti let us have people come to the steak house for sandwiches after, and he refused to send a bill. I think, in his own way, that he liked me. He and Mrs. Venti were there, together for a change, and LaRhonda, too, although she made it clear she didn't want to be. In the church, at the lunch, by the gravestone where my father's parents were buried, I looked for Tommy, but he didn't show.

“Your brother should be ashamed of himself,” said Debbie, whose big belly poked hard against her gray wool coat, but Eddie shushed her. I figured he agreed but didn't want to get my mother upset. Although my mother didn't seem very upset. She didn't cry once in public, but the night after my father died, after we'd picked out an oak coffin like we were buying a breakfront or a bureau or some other nice piece of furniture, I'd lain in bed and heard her sobbing in the kitchen. I didn't go down and sit with her. I figured if I were her I'd want to be by myself. The only other time she broke even a bit was when Callie brought Clifton to the funeral home. He was wearing a little navy blue jacket and a clip-on tie. His hair was damp, with comb marks where Callie had parted it, and my mother's voice shook as she said, “Well, don't you look nice?”

“I don't want Gramps to be dead,” Clifton said, and he started to sob. The funeral home people gave him a lollipop and it didn't help much, but I wouldn't have wanted a nephew who was bought off so easily.

It made me angry at Tommy, though, angrier than him not showing up for any of the rest. He should have shown up for Clifton even if he couldn't see his way to doing it for my father. I didn't know if my mother knew, but he was still living in the area with the woman who had picked him up at the prison. Once I'd driven past a bar on Main Street and seen him getting into a truck, but by the time I'd pulled into a space and gotten out he was gone. Steven had seen him when he went to some guy's house for a drink, and he said Tommy asked about me. “I think he's embarrassed by what he's turned into,” Steven said.

“What's he turned into?”

“You know, babe, he's that guy now. The guy everyone thinks is on the wrong side of things.”

“Is he?”

Steven shrugged. “Who knows?” But I could tell he knew but wasn't saying.

The neighbors brought food again, some of them the same dishes they'd brought when my father first had the stroke, but there were fewer of them now, neighbors and casseroles both. Almost half the families in Miller's Valley were gone, and no one new was moving in because people couldn't see investing in a place where the government might swoop down and take what you had away. Donald's grandfather started a group called No Eminent Domain, but the group was mainly just him, and a few people who put bumper stickers on their cars to make him happy or keep him quiet. Property in the valley had never sold high, and some people thought that if the government was going to pony up a halfway decent amount they could do better somewhere else where the ground floor didn't flood every couple of years. Cissy had always had a sampler in her kitchen that said
WEATHER IS GOD'S WAY OF REMINDING US WHO'S IN CHARGE
. She said her mother had worked it. Once I knew about Andover I understood it better, although even as a kid it made sense to me.

My mother and I sat at the kitchen table after the funeral eating pudding cake. We were both wearing black dresses and our pumps were on the floor in the dining room. At least there hadn't been snow, and the ground wasn't so hard that they couldn't get in with the backhoe. But it was below freezing, and no one had stayed around long. I kept telling myself that maybe Tommy had showed up at the cemetery after we were all gone and the guy with the tractor was filling in. He was a guy my father knew from the VFW. I'd spotted him standing to one side of the crowd holding his red-and-black-checked trapper cap over his heart. He'd left his tractor way on the other side of the cemetery, so that what would come after we left wasn't quite so clear. That was nice of him. It was the kind of thing my father would have done.

I took a slab of pudding cake back to Ruth along with a memorial card. She was in her bedroom with the door closed. “Just leave me alone, Mimi,” she said, her voice all raspy, so I did.

My mother was eating another piece of cake. “Your poor father,” she said. “He must have hated how things turned out.” It sounded terrible, but I knew exactly what she meant. She ate silently and poured herself some coffee.

“Now you can go to college,” she said.

“Not now, Mom, all right. Not yet.”

“You're going. You're going away in September. I don't want to hear any arguments, Mary Margaret. You're going.”

“I'm not arguing. I just don't want to talk about it yet. Besides, who's going to look after Ruth if I'm not here?”

My mother looked wild and fierce, and she waved her fork so that crumbs of chocolate went all over. “I can look after my own sister.”

“You don't.”

“Don't you tell me what I can or can't do. I will. I promise you that Ruth will be fine.”

“You don't even like her,” I said.

She laughed, a strangled sour laugh. “You don't have to like somebody to look after them. If you're going to be a nurse you better learn that fast.”

But it turned out that I wasn't going to be a nurse. I was going to be a doctor. A friend of Mrs. Farrell's was administering the scholarship, and Mrs. Farrell had sent in all the forms from my college application two years before. She sent the essay I wrote about learning to like science because of watching my father make things work in his little shed. She sent the report I wrote on Andover, and some other science projects. She never said, but I think she sent a letter explaining why I was at the community college in the first place. She told me after that it was the first year of the scholarship, and no one had really figured out how they were going to find the person who would get it, and they were relieved to have someone ready-made, who would only soak up six years of tuition instead of eight.

Mrs. Farrell came to the house one night when both of us were home, a month after my father died, and she put a letter down on the dining room table and then began to explain what was in it. The bed was gone from the living room now, and the furniture was back to normal, but the dining room table felt too big for just two people and we hadn't sat at it for a while.

When Mrs. Farrell was finished talking my mother put her face in her hands and stayed that way. After a minute or two the tears began to run from between her fingers like water coming out of the ground on either side of Miller's Creek. She wiped her face back and forth like her hands were windshield wipers, then reached across and put one hand on Mrs. Farrell's.

“I can't ever thank you enough for what you've done,” she said, and Mrs. Farrell started to cry, too, and I just sat there, amazed at the way the whole world had just tilted while we were sitting at that table. I had a plan. A stranger, a teacher, and I had a plan.

“I'm going to start buying up some properties in the city,” Steven said when I told him. “That is a prime area.”

“I wish I'd gotten a deal like that,” said Ed, while Edward Miller Junior yelled in the background. I figured Debbie'd be asking me to babysit for him and the new baby by week two at college.

“I'm as proud as could be,” said Ruth, crying. She cried a lot in those months. Anything could set her off: a divorce on the soaps, a housewife who lost everything when she picked the wrong door on one of the game shows, Clifton eating his Jiffy Pop one kernel at a time and saying, “I miss Gramps.”

“Mom says she'll look after you,” I said.

“I'll be fine. I've got the TV, my magazines. As long as she drops off the groceries I'll be fine.”

“I've never even met a lady doctor,” said Mrs. Venti, and LaRhonda sniffed. She had a patch of baby barf on her shoulder shaped like the continent of Africa. I'd met a lady doctor once, at that clinic in New York. I'd never forget her.