This Is What I Want (8 page)

SAM

When Sam saw his boy striding across Clancy Park toward him, he felt a wave of thankfulness that he hadn’t had time, before now, to ponder his reaction to the moment. He realized that he couldn’t have anticipated it all—the gladness to see him and the instant, eternally renewable regret for things said in frustration or not said at all, and the trepidation over what more might come out or be held back this weekend.

Samuel gave a wave as he approached, enthusiastic enough and friendly enough by Sam’s reckoning. He responded in kind, and then they shook hands. This, Sam had projected through his thoughts maybe a hundred times. Could he hug his son? Would Samuel hug him? When the moment came, it didn’t feel like the thing to do, and that hurt.

“Mom said you need some help.”

Sam doffed his cap and polished his forehead with a bandanna. “Sure do. Omar’s left me high and dry here.” He caught Samuel’s eye and offered a rueful chuckle to let him know he’d expected as much. The kids would be swimming up at the river. Couldn’t blame a kid for being a kid.

They went to stretching a canvas banner—“GREATER GRANDVIEW OLD-TIMERS’ JAMBOREE”—across the west face of the bandstand. They alternated turns tying it down, Sam at the top right edge, Samuel the bottom left, then top left and bottom right. They worked wordlessly, in rhythm, and Sam liked that. It reminded him of his first year running the show, when Samuel was about to be a senior in high school. They’d been inseparable that summer. Fishing trips, camping in the Missouri Breaks, a golf getaway in Billings. Then, just a few months later . . .

Sam pulled his head up, on alert. He moved around the perimeter of the bandstand to the other side, watching.

“Dad?”

Across the way, in the back parking lot by the swing sets, Henrik climbed out of his truck. Sam spat out a “damnit” and took off toward him.

“Dad!” Behind him, Sam heard footfalls as his son ran to catch up. At a more leisurely pace, Henrik closed the distance, too.

“Can’t park there,” Sam said. “You see the sign?”

“Relax, little brother. I won’t be long.” That smug grin. Sam wanted to punch him in the face, a compulsion tempered by the inconvenient fact that Sam had never gotten the better of Henrik in a physical way. His older brother came by big the way Big Herschel had, a genetic blessing that had bypassed Sam.

“Uncle Henrik?”

Henrik moved his gaze from his brother to his nephew. “Samuel. Been a long time.”

“Norby,” Sam said.

“Huh?”

“He’s Norby now,” Sam clarified.
Goddamnit
. “Get that truck out of here.”

Henrik reached out to grab his brother’s shoulder, and Sam shucked him off.

“I just come to tell you something, and then I’ll be on my way,” Henrik said.

Sam closed his eyes, a search for some vestige of serenity to latch onto, and then opened them again. “What?”

“I come for what’s mine. I’ve already talked to Mama—”

“You stay away from Mama.”

“—and now she knows it, too. People are finding out you’re not such a straight arrow, Sam.”

That self-satisfied grin again. Sam balled up his fists. “You stay away from her. She’s sick and she’s old, and she doesn’t need you dragging her into your horseshit.”

Henrik reached for Sam again, and this time Sam drew back as if to strike. Norby grabbed hold of his father and pulled him a few steps away. Henrik backed off, too, still smiling.

“You know, little brother,” he said. “She’s my mama, too. You don’t get to hog everything and everybody.”

Sam stood his ground. The tension lingered in him until Henrik was in the truck and on his way, and then it released all at once, expending him.

“Dad,” Norby said. “What the hell was that?”

“Just your uncle, being a dumbass.”

“Yeah, but—” Norby said, and Sam cut him off.

“Look, there’s too much to do,” he said, which was true enough but also a convenient dodge. Sam had no stomach for swimming the depths of Henrik right now. “Let’s just get on it, huh?”

PATRICIA

Randy, Denise, and the kids had been in the house less than an hour, and it was wrecked. Bags and baby paraphernalia were strewn from the entryway to the living room; the smashed scatterings of soda crackers dotted Patricia’s hardwood floors; and to compound matters, Maris Westfall had called twice with reminders of what Patricia should bring to the park, as if she had not done this for thirty years.

When it all threatened to be too much, Patricia stepped out onto the enclosed veranda, shutting the glass door behind her and choking off the sounds of Randall Junior and Chase screaming baby invectives at each other as they fought over the plastic horses Sam had given them last Christmas.

She had to wonder when she’d developed such intolerance for the sensory overload of children. Lord knows she’d been down those trails with her own kids. Denise, in particular, could bring an abrupt end to a trip to the grocery store or a restaurant once she got it in her head to explore the octave heights of her voice. Patricia smiled now to remember one lunch in Williston, just the three of them, and Denise’s warbling discontent that sent Patricia out into the snow while Sam grimly paid the bill for food that sat untouched on their table.

Samuel’s arrival, three years behind Denise, didn’t compound the noise and aggravation to any great degree, praise be. On the contrary, he was a happy, contented baby from the get-go. Patricia chuckled to herself. Denise probably wouldn’t appreciate hearing that now. In any case, Samuel’s—Norby’s—discontent came on with a vengeance later and raged to this day. All the more reason to keep her mouth shut, Patricia thought. Denise would point that out, too.

The difference, she decided as she breathed in and out a few more times, steeling herself for going back inside, was that she and Sam had put some years between their two children. Randy and Denise had theirs fourteen months apart, prompting Sam to tell Randy to stop hanging his pants on the bedpost. Patricia chuckled again to remember that directive, delivered over a celebratory dinner in Billings. It was difficult to harness Randy Sternslaw into silence—there’d be a lot of people interested in knowing that trick—but Sam’s words did it. For a while, anyway.

Patricia peeked through the kitchen window at the microwave clock. 2:09. She’d be due at Clancy Park in less than two hours, and that was an appointment she aimed to make on time so as not to invoke further Westfallian ire. Between Denise’s family and Norby, she hadn’t had much time to think about anything other than the rote duty of Jamboree. Not such a bad thing, considering the events of the morning, she thought. And still that unresolved matter lay in wait. Raleigh would be at dinner tonight, and she felt sure he’d have something to say. He’d left a lot on the table. So had she, for that matter.

She reached for the handle of the sliding glass door.
Smile,
she told herself.

Maris called again. Minnie Lane had fallen ill, and could Patricia run over there—“It’s only three doors from you, don’t you know, so that’s why I called,” Maris had said—and get the pickles and grape tomatoes and the rest and cut them up for the relish trays? Please and thank you and all of that. Patricia galloped down there, cooed appropriately over poor Minnie, and came back and pressed Denise into a supporting role.

“So he hasn’t said anything about his . . . whatever you call it?” Denise said.

“Boyfriend, honey. I think the term is boyfriend.” Patricia followed this with a smile, to send the message that she didn’t mean anything cutting by it, but Denise still wrinkled her nose. Patricia appreciated, at least, that Denise had waited until Randy had taken the boys down to the basement for a nap before broaching the subject of her brother. She didn’t want to have this conversation on two fronts. Randy had about as much acquaintance with considered debate as a rabid dog has with decorum. She didn’t think she could face that.

“No,” Patricia said. “I’ve barely talked to him. I thought he and your father would be back by now, but maybe they’re just going to meet us at the park.”

“You know what I think,” Denise said, as if the vastness of her thoughts were common knowledge.

“No, I don’t.”

Denise made two perfect slices, turning one dill pickle into four spears, which she stacked on the tray. “I think he’s got too much of that California in him, that’s what I think.”

“Oh, Denise.”

“I’m serious. He wasn’t like this before he moved out there.”

Patricia dropped the cutlery, pressed her hands against the cutting board and turned to her daughter. “How do you know?”

“What?”

“What he was like. How do you know? How do you know this isn’t who he’s always been?”

“Because I have memories, Mom. Because I lived here with him. Something changed when he moved to California. They’re freaks out there, you know.”

“Oh, good grief. They’re not freaks.” Patricia flashed on the one trip she and Sam made to the Bay Area, six years ago, before any of the mess started—or, at least, before any of the mess was known to them. She loved California the first time she set eyes on it. She remembered City Lights, where she lost herself in the stacks of books. The worst meal they had in a weekend in San Francisco was better than the best meal she’d ever had in Montana. The ocean, so wild and vast and beautiful. The weather. When she and Sam came home, she no longer had any questions about what Samuel saw in the place. How she wished to return. How she hoped that they might square away the pain on this trip and open up such possibilities again.

“You want to know what I think he ought to do?” Denise said.

Not really, but you’re going to tell me, anyway.
“What’s that, dear?”

“He needs to go to Peace Lutheran with you and Daddy on Sunday and get right with his God.”

“Oh, Denise!”

Patricia’s daughter scrunched her face into the little-girl scowl she’d developed long ago and never refined in her subsequent years, and Patricia had been down this route with her enough times to just let her pout. Denise crossed to the dishwasher and began loudly arranging the soiled stoneware and silverware, her displeasure registered in every metallic clank.

Patricia waited it out, and in doing so gave her thoughts over to a worry she’d harbored on and off ever since Samuel lit out for California. He and his sister had never been close, dissimilar as they were beyond the blood coursing through them, and now they had distance working against them, too. Time was still an ally, in that there might be enough of it for them to find their way to each other, but Patricia also knew well how the years tended to stack up. If the next thirty went by as quickly as the previous thirty . . . She shuddered. She wasn’t ready to contemplate mortality today, on top of everything else.

“Denise,” she said.

Her daughter slammed the dishwasher shut and set it on its task. There’d be no opening now. Patricia clamped down on the rest of what she wanted to say.

A reliable alignment had taken root in the family long ago. On matters of principle or emotion, Denise would flock to her father’s side, looking at the issue through the same lens Sam used. That perspective, for lack of a better assessment, tended toward the authoritarian. Suggesting that Samuel hew to what religion had to say fell in line with that. That’s the position Sam had staked out, too.

Samuel, on the other hand, would find communion with his mother on family divisions. If Denise’s feelings were a hammer that she wielded without discrimination, Samuel’s were fodder for introspection. Patricia remembered talking to Mina Pollard about that one time, and Mina had told her, “Your boy, he’s more girl than boy when it comes to feelings.” She hadn’t meant it in a disparaging way, but Patricia was happy all the same that Sam hadn’t been there to hear it. It would have left him chafed and angry.

Patricia’s own reading had backed up her friend’s diagnosis. Where Sam had turned to the Bible to fortify his stance against their son’s sexuality, Patricia had thrown herself into books that she hid from her husband, dense distillations of anima and animus and the archetypes of masculinity and femininity. She thought she’d learned a lot. She wished she could impart some of it.

“Denise,” she said again, and at this her daughter turned to her at last, silent and fuming still, but at least open to Patricia’s thoughts.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of God,” Patricia said. “This is who he is.”

Denise turned and walked away.

OMAR

The Grandview railroad bridge—just “the Bridge” to anyone in the know—had, in its nearly eighty years, come to be viewed as a bitter metaphor for the town that shared its name. It took root but never really matured into fullness. In the time of the WPA, great notions held that the bridge would span the width of the Yellowstone River and establish a rail route for the goods produced on the fertile farms of the river valley. Had that come to pass, Grandview might well have sprung into something larger, economically and socially, for it was generally agreed at the time that neither Sidney nor Williston nor anywhere else in that tucked-in corner of the map had more potential than Grandview did.

History, of course, had the final say, as history is wont to do. One section of bridge and one river piling were built before the plan was scrapped and the funding was diverted. The railroad didn’t come, and Grandview never got its bridge. What it had, for a short, tragic while, was the world’s most expensive diving platform, until one or two kids came home in body bags after ill-fated leaps into the water and the open end of the bridge was sealed with fencing and barbed wire. Now it was a mild curiosity in a no-man’s-land. The town that gave the truncated bridge its name actually had no responsibility for it, as its spot on the river sat east of the state line, on McKenzie County land in North Dakota. This between-two-worlds quality—out of the reach of Grandview’s authority and miles from any active police presence in North Dakota—had made the place a draw for restless teens for four generations.

Omar Smothers stood now on the half-baked bridge and leaned against the railing as he watched a cross section of Grandview denizens—classmates and mothers and fathers and small children—play in the water, lie on blankets in the sun, and tend to portable barbecue grills on the river’s shore. Beside him, Clarissa Axtell stood sobbing.

She’d called the night before and asked him to come, and Omar had been noncommittal. There was this thing he had to do for Mr. Kelvig, he’d said, and he had some other chores, too. It was mostly a lie, the bit about Mr. Kelvig notwithstanding. The bigger truth was that although Omar badly wanted to see her, to talk with her, to be in her space again, he didn’t think he should. The vagaries of a small town and a school where everyone knows everyone else already clawed at the distance he was trying to keep from the first girl to smash his heart.

“Please, just come,” she had said, and that had more sticking power than his resolve did. It dug at him and agitated him all morning, and it must have shown, because Mr. Kelvig had finally told him, “Omar, I don’t think you’re gonna be much help to me today. Go enjoy your friends.”

So now he was here and Clarissa was sobbing, and he didn’t know what to do except reach out and stroke her hair.

“No,” she said, pulling back. Omar tucked his hands in his pockets.

“I’m sorry.” His cheeks burned.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said, and then the crying came on again. Clarissa dropped her head into her hands as her shoulders heaved.

Omar watched the throng below, and he wondered if anyone was looking up at them, seeing this, wondering what was going on, building their own assumptions. There’d been plenty of that already, in other venues, and though Clarissa had never come out and said as much, Omar figured it had spelled the end of them. In high school shorthand, Clarissa was slumming by being with him, and he was trying to climb out of his social caste by being with her. Soon enough, she was in the passenger seat of John Rexford’s Mustang and in the booth opposite him at the Rifleshot, a restoration of social order in which the Axtells and Rexfords remained part of the town fabric and Omar remained the half-Indian son of a single-mom store clerk.

“Tell me what to do,” he said, low and sideways.

“I can’t.” Her words crumbled as they met his.

“I’m going home, then.”

He said it with intent, to force the issue, and if she hadn’t reached for him, he knew he’d have been unable to find the gumption to actually walk down the hill to his bicycle and ride away.

“I’m scared, Omar.” She raked her face with the palms of her hands, trying to clear her eyes. “I need help.”

“Tell me.”

Clarissa knelt before him and asked him to sit with her. He folded himself onto the steel platform, long arms and legs akimbo, the transferred heat of the day scorching his skin. When Clarissa first touched her stomach through the purple tank top she wore, Omar knew, and the words that poured forth from her thereafter simply provided confirmation of the mess she was in.
And what a mess it is,
Omar thought as he swallowed down the waves of nausea. The boundaries that he had dared not cross—not out of deference so much as fear and his mother’s reminders to know his place—had been breached with impunity by his romantic rival. By August and the start of school, Clarissa would be showing, and that, she said, would bring the whole works down upon her if she didn’t do something first. She had a plan, she said. First thing Monday, they could drive her Honda to Billings, where things like this were done. They would be back that evening. She could tell her parents she was spending the day in Minot with a girlfriend. Omar could conjure a fib for his mom. No one would have to know.

“You’re sure?” Omar said.

“I made a mistake,” she said. “A mistake.”

“Why me? This isn’t my problem.”

Omar said it to make it hurt, and he could see that it did. She dropped her head again, and regret spread across him at once. He took her hand, and she let him, and the sensation he missed so much came back to him. He held her hand, his brown fingers contrasted against the pale white of her knuckles.

“I can’t,” she said. “I have to do this.”

“OK.”

“Will you help me?” she asked.

“OK.”

“Thank you.”

“Can I tell you something?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

He let go of her hand.

“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” he said.