Road to Thunder Hill (20 page)

The weekend before Ray and I had the big fight about me finding the acorn in his pocket, we'd had another fight. We'd been drinking all evening at the Four Reasons and when we got home I was pretty much hoping we'd go right to bed since Ray had been in Newville all week. I must have been expecting to have that drinking and smoking weed kind of sex, except Ray said he wanted to watch
TV
and that he'd be up to bed later. Naturally, I reacted badly. By that, I mean, I started going on about how he'd just made me feel like the ugliest girl in the world.

But when he picked up the
TV
remote and said, “I just want to be alone for a change,” the booze in me came right back and I got all pathetic then. Lost any sense of dignity. “So what is it, Ray, you gonna watch porn videos after I go to bed? Is that what you do down there in Newville? Jerk off to tits and ass on the tube? Or is it some real live slut you got going down there ? That it, Ray? That why you don't need
these
anymore?” I think that's when I pulled off my shirt, pointed my tits right at him.

“I have a question for you,” he said, as calm as can be, looking past me at the
TV
screen. “At what point in our marriage do you think you turned so sour?”

I sat down on the footstool then. I looked at the man who I've loved for the past twenty years and realized I no longer recognized him. On the television, a lion was pulling down a wildebeest. The sound was off but you could see the poor thing bawling. I grabbed my shirt and went to leave the room, but not without a parting shot.

“Let's just say I turned pathetic the day you abandonned us to go to Newville.”

He was still ignoring me so I threw something then, a glass bowl that had sat for years on a side table. It hit the footstool and bounced intact across the rug so I picked it up and threw it again, this time against the radiator. There was a satisfying smash that ended in about a million little shards. I know this because I cleaned up the mess the next day, and three weeks later, I'm still finding pieces.

“You're fucking crazy,” was all he said.

He must have fallen asleep on the couch after I went upstairs. I was sick in the bathroom, I guess from the booze and the rage, and when I woke up the next morning, my head and heart pounding at the same rate, I could tell he'd left for Newville before I even got out of bed. Not a good sign, I thought, if we can't spend a weekend together without him ending up on the couch and leaving the next day. You'd think I might have learned a lesson from that, but no, the next weekend went pretty much the same way.

A big black police truck now pulls up to the pumps. Alana bunches her fists on her hips. “What do they expect me to do out there with no power? Siphon the gas?”

I say, “I wonder if this means the road to town is finally open.”

Alana goes storming out the door before the driver even turns off the engine. I watch her approach the police vehicle, fully prepared to do battle if anyone so much as dared to ask for gas.

“What the hell?” I say, from where I'm standing at the window, because she is out there hugging whoever has stepped out of the truck. It's … Uncle Leftie? Now what would he be doing all the way out here? I can't even remember the last time I saw him, especially since he retired as police chief. The back doors open up and who should jump out but Gayl and Biz. More surprises. More confusion. Just what I need.

I open the door for them and say to Gayl, “What are you doing here without my car?”

“I'm so glad to see you too, Ma,” Gayl says, as she stomps the slush off her feet.

“Sure you are. The girl who can't wait to leave home,” I say, but she hugs me and I find myself drinking in the smell of her because, after all, she is still my baby. “The road's open now,” Uncle Leftie is saying to Alana. “But barely.”

“But why are you kids here?” I ask. “What about your grandmother?”

“Olive didn't tell you she phoned us?” says Gayl. “She said you guys wanted us home. So when Leftie came by, Gran said we should come out with him. I guess you didn't miss us that much.”

“What I miss,” I say, “are the things you left back in town, like a hot bath and running water. And then there's the matter of my car.”

Now they're all looking at me like I just said something totally irrational. I feel like asking them just what their problem is, but, instead I say, “Well, seriously. Why would you three leave the comforts of town to come out here?”

“Maybe to make sure you were okay?” says Gayl, sternly adding, “Mother.”

“You all felt you had to come to check on us?”

“Olive said we should all come.”

Olive, of course.

“You could come back to town with me if that's what you want, Trish,” says Uncle Leftie. “Your mother would appreciate it, I'm sure.”

He says that like all my mother's family does, as if I neglect her or something.

I mumble something about there being no point now that Gayl's here, but just how soon is he planning on heading back to town, anyway? In case I decide to go in to see my mother. After he drops the kids off at Kyle House, he tells me, but first he'll see if Olive happens to have her famous oatcakes on hand.

“Although I guess without power she might not have been able to bake,” he says, looking forlorn.

“You don't need to worry about that,” I tell him. “She's got a molasses tub full of them.”

Uncle Leftie is famous for his sweet tooth, and sure enough, he's licking his lips at the very thought. I'm about to mention the blueberry pie she's making but I check myself in time. If I want to catch a lift in with Uncle Leftie I'd rather not mention the pie or he'll never leave Olive's. I like my Uncle Leftie okay, especially after what he did for us the night the farm collapsed, but to this day he still looks at me like I'm something to be pitied, so it's not like I want to spend a lot of time with him.

But Olive has said she gets a kick out of his old fashioned manners so I can just see her trying to convince him stay for dinner or even the night.

“Well, it's about friggin' time,” Alana says from where she's standing by the window. I look down the road in time to see the Bradley truck making the corner from Thunder Hill. Before I have a chance to see if maybe there's more than one person in the cab, it turns down the Bradley's lane and drives behind the barn.

Suddenly, I'm so busy thinking about coming face to face with Bear any minute now that I can hardly hear what anyone is saying. Gayl is offering to drive back to Kyle House with me, but I say she should go on ahead with the others. “I have groceries yet to pick up and, and … I'm wondering if I should get over to our house to check on the cat and shut the water off before the pipes freeze.”

“Have you talked to Dad lately?” Gayl asks.

“That's the other thing I have to do while I'm here,” I say. “Go on to Olive's, I'll be there soon.”

First, I try sitting on one of Alana's stools by the counter. I position myself in what I hope is my most attractive pose. In a minute Bear could walk through that door. But when Alana tells me I look all fidgety, I decide to gather up Olive's supplies. The bell over the door clangs again and when I dare look over it's to see Danny. Alone. I peer over his shoulder to see if Bear is behind him. “Expecting someone?” says Danny, looking behind himself. So much for being subtle.

“No, no, not at all.”

He drops an armload of birch branches in front of the stove. “What brings you here?”

“I had to pick stuff up for Olive and I thought I should get over to my place to shut off the water.”

“No need for that,” Danny says. “Bear told me he went there yesterday and shut it off for you.”

“Bear shut off my water?” I say, hearing wonder in my own voice. That means Bear came looking for me after he woke up alone on the pool table. I say, “He must have wondered where I was. I mean, when he got to my house.”

Danny is studying me far too closely. “I told him you'd gone over to Kyle House. He also said to tell you he put out more food for Carrie in the barn, so she's okay.”

“Oh.” I straighten out a row of chocolate bars on the candy rack. “So what's he up to then?”

“He said something about going into town for
TV
bingo.”

“That's right! It's
TV
bingo tonight!” I say. “Alana! We have to get to town!”

“Um, Trish?” says Alana. “
TV
bingo is the last thing on my ‘to do' list.”

“But we haven't missed
TV
bingo in three years!” I say. This is true. If there is one thing that's sacred it's the bunch of us driving into town on Monday nights to play bingo via cable
TV
. Even our kids have joined us there at the tavern table with their very own daubers. Of course, to them, it's a joke, like we're a bunch of pathetic old fogeys.
TV
bingo was something we started going to town for after the collapse of the farm. We called it bingo therapy. It made us feel so normal; something we suddenly felt we needed.

Alana takes hold of my shoulders and turns me away from the window, telling me in a calm voice that everything's going to be fine. “I think what's needed here is for things to return to normal,” she says in a slow voice, like she's read my mind.

“Normal,” I laugh, and as I do, I notice how much I sound like my mother. “What's normal, Alana? Do you know?”

“No clue. But by the way,” she says. “Ray said to tell you he's been working double shifts. He wants you to phone him.”

Ray called.
TV
bingo. Bear James in town at
TV
bingo. Ray called to say what? I feel like I'm being sanded and salved all at the same time.

“So why don't you phone Ray right now?” says Alana. “It might help you to put things into perspective.”

22. Hope

H
OW QUICKLY SNOW MELTS
in an April sun. The road back to Olive's is almost bare now. Bright green grass pokes up in spots through the fields. Alana's right. Life will return to normal.

The first thing I'll do when I finally get home is to make a cup of tea. I'll steep it in my very own mug. Next, I'll run a long hot bath in my own tub. That reminds me; I'd better pick up that new piece of stovepipe and get it installed before Ray gets home. Yes, Ray is coming home. He's not sure when, but he's going to leave Newville as soon as the road clears. I phoned him from the Four Reasons, and when he said all this I was so surprised I didn't even stop to think about the toothless wonder I've pictured him with too many times. All I know, or care, is that the storm is over and Ray is coming home to me and our old wooden bed with its jumble of quilts and pillows and a few thousand memories. I'll soon be digging through the mess in the front bedroom to locate the summer sheets. It's amazing how a person can forget something like where she put her summer things, let alone what they might look like. It's the same with my clothes. I'll pull out the box from the back of my closet and be surprised to come across my white muslin skirt, the one I wore way back in the farm days. I bet I can even fit into that old skirt since I've lost so much weight this past year. I am feeling positively silly.

I turn off Thunder Hill Road onto Olive's lane and it is some mucky here alongside the lilac bushes. I roll down my window to feel the sun on my face, and is that honking geese I hear? They are headed in what looks like the completely wrong direction; but no, they are flying to Kincaid Lake, their annual resting stop. I shield my eyes from the glare of the sun. Beyond the bare lilac bushes lies a field dotted with rotted potatoes that the harvester overlooked last fall. The smell hits me fair in the face. All of my surroundings — land, water, sky — seem to ooze with spring.

On the radio, Stevie Wonder sings, and I join him. “
You are the apple of my eye, mmm, mmm, forever you'll stay in my heart
.” I was almost surprised when Ray answered the phone at the boarding house. I don't know what I'd been thinking, that maybe he'd disappeared from Earth? He told me he was working the night shift until the end of the week. He said he was planning on coming home. He said all of this like there was nothing strange about the fact that he hasn't shown up for the last three weekends.

Then he asked how I'd managed to end up at Olive's.

“Oh, it's a long story.”

“So I hear,” he said. “It was a dark and stormy night there on the pool table with Bear James.”

“Who told you that?” I almost swallowed my words.

Apparently, just about everyone Ray has spoken to in the last two days told him about Bear and me being storm stuck at Hog Holler and sleeping together on the pool table. This, I guess, is far bigger news than any old flue fire, because he didn't even mention the fact that it was the flue fire that led to all this in the first place.

“Have you spoken to Bear since then?” I tried not to squeak.

“No, why?” he said and laughed. “Old Bear try to jump you or something?”

I didn't know if I should feel defensive or insulted because I wasn't sure if it was concern or amusement I heard in his voice. “Don't worry,” I said.

“I wasn't worried,” Ray said. “Do you want me to be worried?”

I cleared my throat and said, “I think most husbands would wonder, given Bear's track record.”

“True. He'll jump anything that moves,” he said, as if he took some pride in Bear for this.

After a little cough I said, “Oh, come on, everybody slows down with age. Even Bear, I bet.”

“Naw. Not Bear.”

“How do you know?”

“I'm his closest friend.”

“He tells you everything?”

“Pretty much. Why? What are you getting at?”

“Oh nothing. Do you ever talk to him about us?”

“Never about us.”

I wanted to say, then who
do
you talk to him about? Your hot one down in Newville?

He said, “Anyway … we should talk about Gayl.”

He's been in touch with her these past few days. Has it only been days since the storm began? Gayl talked to him about her plan to move into town with my mother long before she mentioned it to me. This is so typical of Ray, how he avoids sticky issues by switching topics. I was wondering if I should call him on this when he said, “I told her it would be okay with me if it was okay with you.”

When I didn't answer he said, “From what she tells me, you two are at each other's throats most of the time so I assumed you'd okay it too.”

I should have felt genuine rage coming on here, thinking, it's fucking great of you to think you can run my life from Newville, but instead my voice kind of cracked, and I found myself saying, “no matter how much Gayl and I fight, no matter how much I can't stand her dirt and mess and noise, I'd feel too sad without her here.”

I could have said the same thing about him, but there was no way in hell.

He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “You know, Trish? Sometimes you just have to let things go.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

He sighed. “Like maybe it's time for all of us to move our lives forward.”

There it was, confirmation. My heart sank like it had been tied to a stone and tossed off a bridge.

“She's growing up, Trish. And going to your mother's might be a logical first step. As soon as I get home I want us all to sit down and discuss what her moving to town would mean. You know, what her responsibilities would be.”

Home? Funny how, just like that, my heart bobbed back up to the surface. And that's where we left it, with him repeating that he'd be coming home soon. I simply said, “Fine, see you then.” It struck me how completely out of my own control life has become.