Once Was Lost (2 page)

“Yes,” Mom said, smiling back, drawing a perfectly but modestly home-manicured finger through a piece of hair that had fallen across her face. “It does wonders with grocery lists.” But when the guy was gone, Mom said to me, “I guess we’re not supposed to live in the twenty-first century,” and tucked the phone into her purse, out of sight.

There’s a lot of stuff like that we deal with. Those are just examples.

Now Dad pulls the car right in front of Main Street Hardware, and as he turns off the engine there’s a little rattle coming from under the hood. I look at him. He’s pretending not to hear it. After Mom’s accident, and everything else, the last thing we need is car trouble.

The bells on the door of the hardware store jingle as we go in. A wave of air-conditioned air feels too cold at first, raising goose bumps on my arms, but then it’s like heaven.

“Charlie, hey.” Cal Stewart, who owns and single-handedly runs the hardware store, greets us. Or I should say he greets my dad and nods politely at me. “What can I do for you?” I like Cal, even though he never remembers my name. He’s got woolly dark hair that’s just starting to go a little gray, and wire-rim glasses that make him look smarter than most people in Pineview, and he’s a lot nicer than the old couple he bought the store from a few years ago.

Dad and Cal discuss the ceiling fan issue, and I take advantage of the chance to walk the aisles of the store, running my hand over the different-size chains that hang from spools, looking into bins of glittering loose nails in every size, examining a dozen kinds of spackles and glues. There’s something to make or fix or connect everything.

When he’s done talking to my dad, Cal walks by the other end of the aisle and catches sight of me.

“Can I help you find something?”

“I’m thinking about doing something different in our backyard.”

“Let’s go to the outdoor section. Near the front.”

My dad is up front, too, talking on his cell, something about the music for tomorrow’s service.

Cal asks me, “So you want to do something different. Different how?”

“It’s so hot,” I say. “Everything’s kind of… dying.”

He leads me to a spinning wire rack of thin gardening books, many of them dusty and with pages that are starting to yellow from the sun. “Here’s one on desert gardening. Technically, Pineview is high desert and not true desert, but it’s got a lot of info on plants that don’t need much water.”

“Xeriscaping.”

“Right.” He hands me the book. “Is this for 4-H?”

“No,” I say, surprised that he remembers. “Just for my house.”

The last time I came here was to get wooden dowels. I dropped out of 4-H before I finished that project, which was supposed to be me and Vanessa teaching crafts at the Dillon’s Bluff Senior Center, but my mom wasn’t doing so well the day she’d promised to drive us to do the setup, and my dad was busy with church, and instead of telling the truth I told Vanessa that I’d given my mom the wrong date and Vanessa got mad and I dropped out rather than let her down again. Anyway.

“You’ll probably need some of this,” Cal says, leading me through the store to a pile of black plastic sheeting.

“What for?”

“To smother those water-greedy plants you’re trying to replace.” He hands me a bulky, folded armload of it.

“Ready, Sam?” my dad asks, eyeing what I’ve got and, I’m sure, calculating the price.

I nod. Cal rings us up and Dad pays with a credit card. We both exhale and try not to look too surprised when it goes through.

•  •  •

In the grocery store, Dad doesn’t approve of my list. “Your mother lets you eat like this?” He puts a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels back on the shelf.

I stare at him.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Just that you sound like a weekend dad who’s been divorced for years, I think, not someone who allegedly lives in the same house as me.

He pushes the cart down the cereal aisle and throws in a box of cornflakes, the store brand that’s always on sale and is not so much cornflakes as corn dust. To stop myself from complaining I turn on my heel and go off to the pet supplies, where I run right into Vanessa and her mom struggling with a twenty-pound bag of dog food.

“Sam!” Vanessa drops her end of the bag to the floor and hugs me.

It’s only been a little over a week since I’ve seen her, but she looks like a whole different person to me. True, she’s gotten her hair cut, and maybe she’s a little bit more tan, but I mean she feels like a stranger—her voice, her soft arms around my neck, like it’s been ten years, not ten days. I pull back, and wonder if she thinks I feel like a stranger, too.

“Didn’t you get my messages?” she asks.

“I—” Whatever I say won’t be true. How do you admit to avoiding your best friend?

Mrs. Hathaway, still grasping her corner of the dog food bag, saves me. “We wanted to invite you over for dinner sometime this week, if that would be okay with your dad.”

She knows about my mom being gone, that’s obvious, because normally she would have said,
if that would be okay with your mom
. Which makes me wonder how many other people from church know and when Dad is going to officially announce it so that I can stop playing the “I don’t know if you know” game every time I run into church people, which is pretty much every time I leave the house.

“Yeah,” Vanessa says, bouncing a little bit on the balls of her feet, “you can spend the night.”

“I’ll make your favorite Chinese chicken salad,” Mrs. Hathaway coaxes. She always makes me feel like one of the family, as if she and my mom are still best friends and we all practically live at each other’s houses, even though that hasn’t been true for years.

“Come on, Sam.” Vanessa is practically begging. I could make both my dad and Vanessa happy by simply letting the word
yes
come out of my mouth.

But I don’t want to.

I don’t want to be with people. I don’t want to talk to people. I don’t want to answer questions or pretend to be interested in conversations or activities.

“I’m really tired,” I say. Which is true.

Vanessa’s shoulders slump. “So?”

“Maybe. I’ll call you.” It’s the best I can do. “I have to go find my dad.” I pile a dozen cans of cat food into my arms.

“Okay, sweetie,” Mrs. Hathaway says. “You let us know. Or just show up. You know our home is your home.”

The way she says that, so sincere and warm and nurturing, makes me start to tear up unexpectedly, and I turn as I say, “Thanks,” before she can hug me and make it worse.

“Call me, Sam,” Vanessa says. “I miss you!”

“Me, too,” I say automatically.

I find Dad in the produce section, loading the cart with vegetables. “There you are,” he says. “Grab anything else you need and then we have to scoot. I haven’t even started prepping tomorrow’s sermon.”

“Dad,” I say, staring into the cart.

“What now?”

“It’s all… ingredients.”

He stops in the middle of filling up a plastic bag with broccoli and gives me a questioning look.

“Who’s going to cook this stuff?” I ask.

“I thought…” Now he stares into the cart.

“It’s not like
I
know what to do with it. She never let me in the kitchen when she cooked,” I say. Cooking was the one thing she and I didn’t do together. Everything else—shopping, cleaning, watching TV or movies, looking at magazines, gardening, polishing our toenails, doing our hair, trying on clothes, going for walks or runs—was the two of us. But when she was in the kitchen, even I was banished. It was the one place in her life where she was totally in charge.

“Haven’t you noticed,” I continue, “that your meals have come out of a can or the microwave since, like, Christmas?”

I take the bunch of broccoli out of his hand and put it back, along with the mushrooms, the little red potatoes, the baby squash. I keep the bagged salad and apples. Then I wheel the cart to the meat case and put back the package of ground beef and the whole chicken in favor of some pre-seasoned, pre-cooked chicken breasts.

“I could cook,” Dad says weakly, but he knows I’m right. We’re not the kind of family anymore that sits around the table to a balanced and nutritious meal to talk about our days. We’re the kind that lives on stuff only requiring a person to work the microwave or add boiling water.

After filling our cart with stuff that meets these criteria, I pull Dad along to the checkout line. He’s still in a daze, like he’s only just now living in reality. I think of a line he uses in sermons sometimes: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” Funny how talking about things safely from behind a podium in church is different from really getting them in real life.

The cashier, a squat fifty-something woman who’s worked here as long as I can remember, smiles big at us. Well, at Dad. “Hey, Pastor Charlie. Haven’t seen you here in ages!”

And instantly he turns on his Pastor Charlie charm, going from sad and dazed to warm and present, like our grocery cart tragedy never happened. “Come to church and you can see me every week,” he says with a grin. “You haven’t been since your niece’s baptism, am I right?”

I turn away, look at the candy shelf, and add some four-for-a-dollar chocolate bars to the conveyer belt. Meanwhile, the cashier and my dad are laughing it up. “Maybe I was hiding in the balcony.”

“And maybe you weren’t.”

She loves it. Because all women love my dad. He’s handsome enough even with the little soda-belly he’s grown in the last couple of years, has all his hair, is youngish, charming, kind, a good listener, reliable, attentive, there when you need him. Those last four only apply if you aren’t in his immediate family. Most of all he’s the kind of man who would never cheat, and—as my mom pointed out to me once after a few drinks—that’s exactly the kind of man women want to cheat with. “Ironic, isn’t it?” my mom said, kind of laughing and kind of not. And I wanted to tell her how that isn’t the sort of thing I want to know about or think about my own father, and please could we change the subject, but I don’t think she really realized it was me sitting there with her. I mean she knew it was me, but when she’s drinking she kind of forgets I’m her daughter and she’s my mom. So the definition of appropriate topics of conversation tends to… expand.

Dad pays for the groceries with a check, which will float a couple of days while he figures out how to get money into our account.

Back in the car, he’s still in his confident pastoral mode. “I’m sorry,” he says, buckling his seat belt. “The food thing—”

“It’s okay,” I say, cutting him off. I turn up the air-conditioning full blast and lift myself off the seat a little to keep from burning my thighs on the vinyl.

“We’ll sit down and talk about this. We’ll make a plan for how to make sure we’re taking care of ourselves and each other while Mom’s away.”

He’s been saying this for two weeks now, been referring to this mythical conversation we’re allegedly going to have, in which everything will be ironed out and processed and prayed over and resolved, and yet we somehow never actually have it.

We pull out of the lot. The air blowing into the car finally begins to cool. “I just have to get through church tomorrow,” he says, “then on Monday we’ll figure it all out.” He glances at me. “Okay?”

The only response I can give is “Okay.” I know that church comes first, and I didn’t expect us to actually get five minutes to talk, and I guess I should be grateful we got groceries and went to the hardware store.

When we’re almost home, I say, “I ran into Vanessa in the store. I think I’m going to spend the night over there.” Because suddenly the prospect of conversation with other people doesn’t seem as hard as going into that house, our house, staying there with no AC while Dad holes up in his office getting ready for tomorrow.

He gives my knee a light and happy smack. “Good, Sam. Good. I’m glad. You need to have some fun.”

At Vanessa’s house, the air-conditioning works and the mail isn’t piled up and we sit around the table, all of us together, looking out onto a backyard where everything is under control.

“After dinner, you two can go out and pick some tomatoes,” Mrs. Hathaway says as we all pass her our shallow bowls, which she fills with mounds of Chinese chicken salad. “Sam, you can take some home. We’ve got a bumper crop out there.”

“Does this have onions?” Robby, Vanessa’s seven-year-old brother, scrutinizes his dish. He always inspects his food with a funny kind of thoroughness—C.S.I. Dinner Plate.

“No, honey,” his mom says. “Just scallions.”

“I
love
scallions,” I say, trying to help, making my eyes big and excited. “They’re my favorite. Plus they make you super strong.”

He’s skeptical. “What are scallions?”

“Green
onions
,” Vanessa says. Mrs. Hathaway gives her a look.

After we’re all served, Mr. Hathaway extends his hands—one to Robby, on his left, and one to me, on his right. I take it, and Vanessa takes mine, and Mrs. Hathaway takes hers, and then completes the circle by holding Robby’s. The prayer over the food is on the long side, as Mr. Hathaway covers not only the food but also each one of us as well as world events. His hand is rougher and bigger than my dad’s, calloused from playing the guitar, which he does almost every Sunday.

“Amen,” he finally says, giving my hand a squeeze.

This is what a family is supposed to feel like.

“How’s your mother doing?” Mrs. Hathaway asks, as if it isn’t the hardest question in the world to ask and answer.

“Fine.” I eat a bite of salad. It’s good. Mrs. Hathaway got this recipe from my mom.

“I know it’s hard right now, but it’s good that she’s getting help.”

“Mom…,” Vanessa says, and glances at me apologetically.

Robby asks, “Why does Sam’s mom need help?”

I start to say that she had a little run-in with a fence post, which is true, but Mrs. Hathaway answers first: “She’s sick, Robby. It’s a disease. It’s—”

“Like cancer?”

“Well, not quite.” She looks thoughtful. This is a Teachable Moment. “But you could say—”

“We don’t really need to go into this right now, do we, Nance?” Mr. Hathaway looks at Robby. “Sam’s mom doesn’t have cancer, bud. She’s going to be fine.”