Dwelling Places (5 page)

She finishes dressing and goes down to the kitchen. Kenzie and Rita are setting the table, and Mack is in the family room with Young Taylor, surfing between sporting events. This is a positive sign, given Young Taylor's general absence from family activity. Jodie would give anything to see her son put away his black wardrobe and vegetate in front of a ball game for an afternoon.

As they move through an uneventful Sunday dinner, Jodie finds herself studying Mack and thinking of Terry. She tries to see in her husband the fire that used to be there for her. She attempts to interpret Mack's every glance as meaning something, but he looks merely tired, and now he doesn't meet her gaze at all. He's still fighting battles that have little to do with her.

Terry Jenkins has become a presence, very much alive in her mind, whether she wants him there or not. She catches herself going through the day and imagining Terry as her silent audience. In her own house she is posturing for someone who really has no right to her life. And in fact, he probably has no real interest in her; it is her own desperation that manufactured the glint in his eye. She's become so pathetic.

Kenzie

She has been watching Mom and Dad closely the past four days. They aren't fighting at least. Dad's staying busy, and that's good. She saw them take a walk together down to the pond and back, and that's especially good. Part of the time they were holding hands.

They all went to church Sunday. It was the Methodist church in Oskaloosa, the one Kenzie went to until a few months ago, when she started going to the Baptist church just outside of Beulah. The Methodists don't teach from the Bible enough, and the Baptists have a youth group that actually does things. They have movie nights at the church and invite non-Christian friends; they pass out evangelical tracts at the county fair; they have their own Bible study and prayer time. This is what a person needs. But it has been so long since her whole family has gone to church that Kenzie is more than happy to return to the Methodist service for a Sunday or two.

She wants to talk with Dad about his soul, but it's still too scary to talk with him alone. She doesn't want to say anything that would make him feel sad or rejected or afraid. She still doesn't know what exactly made him want to die. Satan would love to trick her into saying the very thing that might send her father back into despair. So she hasn't said much of anything. She did mention, on his second day home, that she prays for him every day, in the morning and the evening, and if there's anything special he wants her to pray about to let her know. He gave her a strange look at first, but then he smiled and said that he would. But that led to no more talk of any impor
tance. In fact, Dad found something he needed to do then, and their conversation ended altogether.

Spiritual warfare is a very tricky thing. Most of the time Kenzie doesn't feel that she's up to it at all. She's talked to Pastor Williamson about it—he's a really good youth director, and he makes you feel as if you can ask him anything. He keeps encouraging her to pray and to spend time with her parents; the best thing she can do for them, he says, is to take care of her own spiritual life so that they won't feel the need to worry about her. She does that, but there are big holes in her day when she's not praying or meditating or spending time with family, when she's doing homework or hanging out with a couple of friends from school. And at those times she feels that she should be close by Mom and Dad, just in case. She needs to be there to pray if they start to argue or if Dad begins staying off to himself too much, the way he did before they took him to the hospital. There are so many bad things that can happen at home, and they can happen quickly, and their lives could change, and so how can she just hang out with Bekka at the mall?

She has begun to write down her prayers; they feel more solid that way. She's not so nervous when she's busy documenting her relationship with God. She can look back and see what she's prayed about, and she can see what God said to her or which specific Bible verses gave her wisdom or comfort. It is all right there, in her journal. She carries it everywhere, along with her Bible. Her small cloth backpack has become part of her body, as if she is storing her spiritual life where she can get to it easily.

Today is Monday, the second day Dad has gone to his job at Hendrikson's. Two sort of normal days: Mom going to the school cafeteria earlier than the rest of them, to start her day; Dad dropping Kenzie and Young Taylor at school on his way to work. So there is now a several-hour block of time when everyone is busy. This too is a good thing.

And today she waves at Mitchell Jaylee. He is in his old green van, stopped at the corner, when she bikes up from his left, on her way to
the church. He must be going into town for something. He recognizes her right away and smiles, lifts his forefinger from the top of the steering wheel in that country wave that is a sign of courtesy regardless of how well people know each other. Mitchell waits for Kenzie to turn the corner and stop at his window.

“Hey, you get a lot of exercise,” he says.

She laughs a little, not knowing what else to say.

“How are you?” He seems to really want to know.

“Fine. You?”

“No complaints. Just going to get the oil changed.” He allows the engine to idle a few more seconds, then eases off the brake and smiles at her. “You drive careful.” And before she can say anything, he crosses the road and heads for town.

Rita

With her son home, the borders of Rita's life pull in and resume their old shape. She made several trips to see Mack while he was in the hospital. Even though he wasn't away long, Rita's schedule molded itself around the crisis. She'd sit in the room with Mack or walk the grounds with him, make as much conversation as either of them dared, and then come home before nightfall. Her night vision anymore is nearly worthless. Although the country roads are completely familiar, in the dark they play tricks on her. So she made only afternoon visits, sometimes with Jodie, sometimes alone, a couple of times with the pastor. She would have made those visits to the end of her life had they been necessary. (She can recall a period in Alex's life when she considered the possibility of having to visit him in prison for the next twenty years.) But she's mighty glad now that her day's edges don't extend much beyond Beulah's city limits.

She knows that they wouldn't have kept Mack hospitalized more than a few days except that Dr. Wenders, the doctor who treated him, knew that Rita's husband and other son were dead. She still remembers how his eyes focused on the chart while he made the word
Barnes
silently with his mouth. Taylor died in an accident with the tractor, and Alex passed out drunk in below-zero weather. Dr. Wenders, who works at the clinic in town, knew their stories and Mack's too. Taylor and Alex and Mack had all had farming and despair in common. So in a time when health insurance sends people home in a day or two, Wenders ordered tests and wrote down who-knows-what to justify Mack's confinement.

Rita sees the fates of her three men as fairly unrelated, but she would lie under oath to save any member of her family. While Mack waited in a nearby examining room, Rita sat in the doctor's office with Jodie and listed symptoms she wasn't even sure her son had. Jodie, nearly mute with fear, didn't blink; she'd found the loaded shotgun and recognized its significance. Since the kids had been older, they'd kept a hunting rifle loaded and in the storage space under the stairwell, for security. It had been long-standing family policy to keep all other firearms empty. When Jodie told her about the loaded shotgun, it occurred to Rita in a horrifying flash that a person really can't miss with a shotgun; one shot would take off most of your head—none of this nonsense about surviving in a vegetative state thanks to a shaky hand.

But Mack is home now and taking medicine to calm his nerves and help him sleep. No one in Rita's family is particularly high-strung, but Mack has always been the most likely to be anxious, probably because he's the oldest and feels responsible. Rita called at Hendrikson's this morning, just to be sure Mack made it to work. He talked with her a minute, not sounding too irritated at her checking up on him. He will be all right—Rita feels this more than knows it. After so much grief, a family has to land at a resting place. Sooner or later things get better—that's the way it's always worked. After you suffer a little while, the Lord lifts you up and restores you. She can't remember the chapter and verse that makes this claim, but she knows it's there.

Against what Tom the mechanic claims is his better judgment, he's installed a new starter in the Ford, and now the car sits in Rita's driveway. She notices that it could stand a good washing. This
thought brings Amos Mosley to mind. Rita developed a relationship with Amos merely by watering her car on the same Saturday afternoon that he watered his. They wandered around their tires and fenders, tepid water splashing out of green hoses, and exchanged some pointless remarks about weather before eventually talking of how the kids were doing and who was living where now and what the latest count of grandchildren was. Amos offered to wash Rita's car whenever he washed his. She said it wasn't necessary, but she wouldn't stand in the way if he decided to give the Ford a squirt or two while he was at it. Two weeks later Amos was hosing down his car, and Rita wandered out to chat and offer him a glass of iced tea. It was June and hot enough to dry a person out even as he hoisted a garden hose. Amos washed his car, then wandered across the strip of grass between their properties and washed Rita's car. She protested, but mildly. It isn't a romantic relationship, but a friendly one, a small, regular contact with another person.

Amos has a bad autumn cold this week—allergies probably—and both cars look neglected. But it's shopping time. Rita snaps on her seatbelt and heads for the grocery store.

When Rita walks in the door, Bud says, “Got stuff here for you,” meaning a bag of vegetables and day-old baked goods behind the magazine rack. Bud is the only person manning the store. It is definitely a one-person grocery, a small storefront that at one time was part of a larger store. Some days, especially bright autumn ones when kids go back to school, Rita walks along Main Street and is caught up in old visions. She sees Beulah as its old self, full of folks, noisy but not too much, with posses of children stopping at this very grocery (it was Bruener's Grocery back then) on their way home from school, sorting pennies, nickels, and dimes out of sweaty palms for just the right selection of bubble gum and jawbreakers, Tootsie Rolls, Fireballs, the sweet wax fangs and mustaches around Halloween, and wintergreen candy cigarettes. Years ago a wall went up where the bread and bakery aisle used to be, and now the area churches use the other side as a thrift store, collecting odd pillow-
cases, pans, and clothing donations to distribute to the poorest of the poor. The grocery is a small, depressed version of its older self; Bud hires help from time to time but mostly handles every bit of stocking, pricing, and checking by himself.

He expects Rita every Monday afternoon. She shops for herself and half a dozen other old folks, and she scavenges the produce that is beyond selling at regular price—the too soft or too ripe or too spotted. In larger groceries such items would get shrink-wrapped together and sold at a deep discount. But Rita is on a mission, and Bud goes ahead of her, setting aside the not-so-prime goods and having them ready Monday afternoon, because most of his shipments come in on Monday morning. This way he deprives no one and puts the lesser products in able hands.

Rita comes by for meat scraps later in the week. Bud still cuts meat to order; this is a necessity in a town with so many older citizens. Some of them are too shaky to handle a butcher knife anymore. And most live alone and buy tiny bits at a time. For a few extra cents, Bud slices and chops, trims fat, divides chickens. The remains—bones, gristle, fat, innards—go into plastic ice cream containers in the back freezer. Rita picks them up, takes them home, and boils the life out of them. Boils them with bits of nearly too far gone onion and pepper, with the herbs from her little garden. She lets the pots of cast-off goods simmer all day on the back burner while she goes about her business. When she has steeped the last rumor of flavor from marrow and cartilage, she strains the broth twice and stores it in bags in the freezer. On Saturdays she makes soup—from the stock she's boiled and from the leftover vegetables from Bud. Week in and week out, in all kinds of weather, Rita gathers questionable goods and makes soup. She has done this for five years.

This practice started because of Bernie Hallsted. Eighty-four years old and too feeble and absentminded to cook for himself, he lives two doors north of Rita. Bernie developed the habit of making one can of tuna and one can of pork-and-beans last a week. Just left them sitting there in the fridge. That, and crackers. Rita happened to look
in Bernie's fridge one day when she dropped off a prescription and asked if he had some cold water to drink. She found the chipped plastic container with ice water in it, a dried-up bottle of Tabasco in the door, and the two cans, forks sticking out of them, on the second shelf.

That day Rita went home and wept for the first time in years. The next day she concocted soup from whatever was in reach and took it over to Bernie. He lapped it up, his face shining with happy surprise.

“I'll bring you bean soup next week.”

“Oh—navy bean?”

“If that's what you like.”

“Oh, sure. Love navy bean soup.”

The next week it was navy bean with bits of ham left over after a church potluck.

She started looking carefully then at other seniors who lived around her. She realized that nearly everyone in her neighborhood was old, retired, without a spouse, and barely making it on Social Security. It was especially hard for those with medical bills, which included nearly everyone. Several people had stopped taking medicine, since they couldn't afford prescriptions and the light bill in the same month. Groceries were often one of the first expenses to eliminate, after the telephone.