Miller's Valley (20 page)

I
missed the big one. I'd always thought of the storm that killed Donald's grandmother as the big one, but it turned out it wasn't even close. This one was on the evening news, the national and the local both. Eddie said there were pictures of houses he recognized with water all around them, nothing but the roofs showing, although how he could tell which house was which just by the roof I didn't know.

My mother had been at the hospital when the rain started to come down hard, and they asked her to do a double shift. Then they told her she couldn't leave because of flooding on the roads. She said afterward that she slept in a patient room and couldn't get over how uncomfortable the bed was. When she finally went back home the little barn had collapsed along with the shed my father had used as his repair shop, and both the furnace and the hot water heater were shot.

Aunt Ruth had stayed put, as always. When the flooding started to get bad Cissy Langer went over and sat with her. They went up to the attic together and took all Ruth's dolls with them. Cissy said she was glad that all her doll equipment was in her workroom at the new house, that she didn't have to keep moving it the way she once had. A waterlogged Singer sewing machine is pretty much a sewing machine that will need to be junked. I'd learned that from my father, who'd tried to repair one once. Cissy told my aunt that her doll collection was worth a pretty penny and that she couldn't afford to let it get wet. Everything else got wet because for the first time the water rose into the first floor of Ruth's house. Mr. Langer said with this storm you could get a little bit of an idea of what Miller's Valley would look like when they flooded it. That's what he said: not
if. When.
We knew it was
when
by that time.

I wondered if they'd gotten impatient, after all those years, the government people. I wondered whether the big one was a natural event, or whether they'd closed off the dam even more than they'd done before and let the heavy rain and Miller's Creek and the water table and gravity do the rest. But I thought about it, and then I let it go. Sometimes I thought I'd gotten a little addled about the whole thing, and that my suspicion that the water in the valley had been deliberately pushed into rising bit by bit was just one of those crazy notions that helped people make sense of the senseless world, like all the theories about who'd really killed President Kennedy or whether one of the Beatles albums told you secrets if you played the songs backward.

Ed drove up the next week and took my mother over to the new development, which was mostly finished. They were doing a good business in people who lived in low areas of the township, and women who liked shiny new better than same old.

“It looks raw,” my mother said when I asked her about it. I couldn't get more out of her than that.

“She's got to be realistic,” Eddie said as I held Kimmy on my hip and she chewed on a hank of my hair. My name had been her first word. Debbie didn't like that one bit, I could tell. “I have a name that's really easy to say,” I said. “Clifton learned it when he was a baby, too.”

“Mimi isn't any easier than Mama,” Debbie had said. Which was true.

“I think Mom is ready to move,” I said to Eddie. “But what about Ruth?”

“I'm tired of all that with her,” Ed said.

“Which doesn't get anyone any nearer to getting her out of the house.”

“She's lucky there still is a house,” he said.

The big one was the storm that tipped the balance. Everyone said that afterward, although I thought they were fooling themselves and that the balance had been tipped all those years before, when Winston Bally first drove his sedan around the gravel roads of the valley. This time around, three of the houses in Miller's Valley didn't make it out in one piece. Two of them were mostly scrap wood by the time the water went down. It was a good thing no one was living in either one. One had been abandoned after its owners died and one was already owned by the state. The third one had some walls standing but it was still a teardown. That one was owned by Home Sweet Home. Eddie told me that a couple of years ago Steven had purchased three places in the valley, two that belonged to an estate with grown kids who had no interest, one that had gone into foreclosure. He'd already sold two to the state for the water project. Ed said that according to the records he'd seen, Steven had made about three thousand dollars.

“It was a smart move,” he said. “You could do worse.”

I didn't say anything. I wasn't going to talk to Eddie, of all people, about my love life. Steven kept sending me Hallmark cards. “Just because I'm thinking of you,” they would say, with a rose edged in glitter, or “You're purrrrrrr-fect,” with a photograph of a kitten. The last one I hadn't even opened, just tossed into the waste can next to my desk.

I'd missed the big one because I didn't get a chance to go back to Miller's Valley much. Every time I had two days off in a row it turned out my mother was working those days, or had something else planned. It didn't take a genius to figure out that she wanted to keep me where I was, doing what I was doing, as though to move me forward she had to give me up. I'd never seen her as happy as she'd been at my college graduation. “Magna cum laude,” she said, patting my cheek in a way she hadn't done since I was a kid. “I was a summa,” said Ed. “Of course you were, son,” she'd said. “And I was very proud.”

She gave me a white lab coat as a gift. One of the doctors at the hospital had told her the best place to buy one. Callie gave me a stethoscope, and Clifton listened to my heart with it, and the look on his face made us all laugh. “It's very noisy!” he said.

Mrs. Farrell sent me a fifty-dollar bill. “Please come back and talk to my students, Dr. Miller,” she wrote. “They need the inspiration!” And I vowed I would.

My apartment was almost as small as my room at home. It was a studio with a hot plate in a little alcove and a bathroom with a shower stall so tight that I had a bruise on my hip from hitting the wall when I turned around to rinse my hair. I think I got the place because I was the only renter skinny enough to fit in that shower. It was cheap, and because of my schedule I was really only there to sleep. “If I lived here I'd spend time at our house, too,” said Debbie when Ed helped bring an old bed of theirs upstairs to my place.

“She spends time at our house because you're always asking her to watch the kids,” Ed said as he wrestled the mattress onto the box spring. When I listened to the two of them I kept wondering if my parents had been so annoyed with each other after Eddie and Tommy were born. Debbie said she wanted to have two more, and Ed said she was nuts.

“They'll be fine,” my mother said the one time I brought it up, when I drove to the valley for the day. “You can always tell the ones who will stick.”

“How?” I said, but my mother shrugged. She just knew. Unlike Ed, she seemed to know that I was no longer with Steven. I could tell because she didn't say a word about him. I did notice there was a big fancy box of peanut brittle in her one kitchen cupboard, but I didn't know if that was an attempt, like the Hallmark cards, or just a coincidence and some patient had given it to her. I didn't ask. I guess I'm my mother's daughter. One of the things she couldn't stand about Ruth is that she had a tendency to talk about every little thing. “Silence is a virtue,” my mother said sometimes. I suppose Ruth talked because she was lonely, but my mother would have made one of her mouth noises if I'd said that. Lonely. Ha.

When we talked that day in the kitchen it made an echoing sound because there wasn't much furniture in the downstairs. The big one had been big enough to soak through the couch and the easy chairs, the rugs and the throw pillows. There was no saving them. My mother had gotten two of the guys from the VFW to cart most of her furniture to the dump. Some people left their houses and just never came back. They didn't want to see what was there, all sad and sodden. After the big one people seemed to take for granted that the valley was done, and that the Valley Federal Recreation Area was happening. The government people had gone from talking about water maintenance and reservoir supply to talking about boats and swimming and waterskiing and ice skating. They'd gone from talking about taking people's houses to giving people jobs, from eminent domain to tourism. People love the sound of that word,
tourism.

But I guess what really pushed the whole thing over the edge was that the big one killed Winston Bally. “Poetic justice,” I said when I heard about it, but my mother gave me such a look. Winston Bally had been driving through the valley, making his rounds, when he blew out a tire on a dirt track that led to an old trailer where one of the oldest Janssons still lived. He walked down the track to the trailer, but Mr. Jansson wasn't home. He was already over at his nephew's house, where his niece by marriage, who he'd always liked better than his nephew anyway, was convincing him to go to the high school evacuation center, at least until the rain stopped.

When they finally found Mr. Bally's body, after the water went down, it turned out he'd had a heart attack. My mother said all you had to do was look at his color and his belly to know it had been a long time coming. But no one ever stopped talking like it was the water that killed him. Ed said the news made it sound like he was some kind of hero, like he'd given his life for Miller's Valley. Or the Valley Federal Recreation Area, more like it.

I missed it all because I was working long hours, during the day as an assistant at a research lab at the medical school and four nights a week waiting tables at an Italian restaurant. I didn't have a uniform, but the white shirt they wanted me to wear always had red sauce stains, and I wound up buying a lot of replacements. The tips were a whole lot better than they had been at the diner, and I got free meals at the end of every evening. Some days were slower than others. When it was hot outside people weren't so inclined to want penne Bolognese or clams oreganata, but I liked them anytime. There were a lot of things I'd never tasted until I left home. I tried to get my mother to try calamari, but she said she knew bait even when it was on a plate with lemon wedges and she'd just have the meatballs. Mr. Guarino, who owned the restaurant, had let my whole table eat for free after my graduation.

“Always on time, always polite, always good service,” he said to my mother with his hand on one of my shoulders. I still had on my academic robe because I knew it made my mother happy to see it.

“I should hope so,” said my mother as though those were the minimum requirements, which in her mind was true.

It was only a ten-minute walk from the lab to the restaurant. In the summer the city streets felt like the fields around our house, the tar all soft and spongy like wet ground under my feet. I always put on my black skirt and white shirt in the bathroom in the lab, then put my white coat over them so I wouldn't look so much like I was on my way to a waitressing job. Although the waitressing was easier and paid more than cleaning up the lab cages after the rats and mice. I was sad, that last week. Mr. Guarino was a nice man, and his nephew who tended bar and the other two waitresses had been nice to me, too. But I couldn't wait tables during med school. My adviser made it sound like I wouldn't be able to find time to sleep or eat during med school.

I was waiting to cross the street in front of the Roma Ristorante when I heard someone yelling down the block. I looked around but the sidewalk was crowded, people leaving work for home, so I kept going. I'd just stepped off the curb when I heard “Mimi!” right behind me. I turned around. It took me a minute even though I'd seen pictures over the years.

“Donald,” I said. “Wow. Donald.”

“Mimi,” he said. “I've been calling you for the last five minutes.”

“Out of the road,” roared a guy in a GTO as he blew past us.

“He's right,” I said.

“He didn't have to be such a jerk,” Donald said as we stepped back onto the pavement.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to find you.”

“How did you even know it was me? You haven't seen me since we were thirteen.”

“Your mother told me where to find you. Didn't she tell you I was coming?”

I shook my head. “You look just the same, too,” Donald said. “Plus the doctor's jacket.”

He was right, really. Donald and I had both been the kinds of kids who looked like adults. We had even had adult personalities. It was like we'd grown into ourselves, or at least I had. When Donald was a kid his face had looked square and heavy, like it was too big for the rest of him. Now it looked good. He was handsome. I was handsome, too, I guess. That was the kind of face I had.

“Did you go to the valley first to see your grandfather?” I said.

“I'm going after this.”

“It's kind of a ghost town. They're going to flood it, finally, but don't tell your grandfather I said so. I think he's the last person who believes it won't happen.”

“I don't think he really believes that. He just wants to. Your mother sounds okay with it. She sounded good when I talked to her.”

“You know, she's the same. Everything else there is pretty much the same. LaRhonda is just the same, except she has kids.”

“I heard. That's scary, the idea of LaRhonda being somebody's mother. I hope she's nicer to her kids than she was to us.”

“She was mean to you.”

“She was mean to you, too,” Donald said. “You just didn't seem to mind.”

“How's your mother?” I said.

Donald shrugged. “The same,” he said. “My stepfather is a good guy. He and I really get along.”

There was a long silence. We had exhausted everything there was to say standing on a street corner with someone you haven't actually seen for a long time.