I went over to see LaRhonda, who was living with Fred in her old room while they looked around for a house of their own, but I only went after her mother grabbed me outside the diner and told me how lonely LaRhonda was, all her friends back at school and no one home for another month. I guessed I was what was left.
I brought over some homemade cookies and a copy of a book about infant care, and LaRhonda’s mother put the cookies on a plate and then ate three of them. I was pretty sure Mrs. Venti was over the two-hundred-pound mark, but she still favored stretch pants and a snug sweater. You could see a sharp line where her girdle ended and her real thighs began, and another one where her stomach made a donut below her bra and above her waistband. LaRhonda, on the other hand, pretty much looked like herself except for the kind of belly I’d seen before when she’d eaten half a pizza at a pajama party. From the back she didn’t look pregnant at all. From the front she looked annoyed, which was normal, too.
“What do you think, Mimi? Gramma or Nana or Grandmom? I’ve only got a couple of months to decide.” Her mother had started talking about LaRhonda’s pregnancy the moment LaRhonda and Fred had gotten back from Puerto Rico on their honeymoon.
“Aren’t you working tonight?” LaRhonda said to her.
When we went to LaRhonda’s room it looked almost exactly the same as it had before except that the twin beds had been pushed together. They hadn’t even changed the spreads. Then we went back out to the kitchen and sat at the breakfast bar. Mrs. Venti kept calling in to us from the living room, maybe because LaRhonda would barely speak to me. I was just waiting for her to pull out a sheet of paper and read me a list of my transgressions, Leviticus by way of LaRhonda Venti, or LaRhonda Nesser, which was her new name. She’d done that once when we were in middle school and she thought I was being a bad friend because I wouldn’t forge an excuse note saying she’d been too sick to do the English homework. She’d written out her accusations in her diary and then read them to me right off the page.
“Fred says she keeps saying how disappointed she is in you, that you’ve turned your back on God’s plan,” Steven had said to me one day in the car. “You know what she’s talking about? Which plan of God’s does she mean?”
“She’s crazy,” I said. “She’s pregnant.” And I wasn’t. That was what she meant. I could tell it was all she could do not to say something to me. Instead she kept folding her hands over her stomach with a sigh, shaking her head until her hoop earrings rattled. What that meant was that she wasn’t buying my bad clam story before and she wasn’t buying it now.
“And how are you doing?” she finally said in that snotty voice after going on for ten minutes about her bad back. But I wasn’t going to talk to her about that, either. She didn’t really want to hear what I had to say: that my father had been up a couple of times the night before, wandering outside and burning himself on the stove somehow, and I’d overslept and missed half of my history seminar and the professor had said, “I’d appreciate your taking attending this class as seriously as I take teaching it, Miss Miller,” and I’d caught my mother the day before just sitting in her car, staring out the windshield, like she didn’t know how to start the car and didn’t know where she was going when she did. “You okay?” I’d said, knocking on the car window with my filthy hands, all caked with the dirt from the barn and smelling of cows. “Oh, honey, I just lost track of things for a minute there,” she’d said, which coming from my mother was one of the scariest sentences I’d ever heard, right up there with “Yes, you’re around three months along” from that nurse in the city.
I looked at LaRhonda and listened to her stories about her heartburn and her swollen ankles and her shoes that didn’t fit anymore, hundred-dollar shoes and if her feet didn’t go back to normal what was she supposed to do with them? And, as sad as my life was, I knew that I wasn’t eleven years old anymore, and somewhere along the line I’d turned into a person who wasn’t going to let anyone push her around. If there was a bad Mimi list I wasn’t going to wait to hear it. I held on until LaRhonda finally drew breath, and then I said, “I have things to do,” and shoved past her baby belly and walked out.
“You girls have a nice visit?” Mrs. Venti said as I passed through the living room, but I didn’t answer.
The Langers came over the next day and I made a coconut cake and when Cissy saw it on the kitchen counter she started to sob. She was a crier for sure, but I’d never known her to cry at cake before. “Miriam, we need to talk to you and Bud,” Mr. Langer said, sitting down at the kitchen table.
My mother patted Cissy on the arm. She’d started crying so hard that her nose was running, and I handed her a paper napkin. “There’s no need, Cis,” my mother said, and I could tell she already knew what the Langers were going to say. She was good at that, knowing but not saying. For years I thought it was pretty remarkable that I’d managed to hide from my mother what I’d done that winter, but later on it occurred to me, maybe because I knew so much about my own kids that they didn’t know I knew, that my mother had known all along. There’s a way you can let things happen without acknowledging them and so having to act as though you approve of them that comes in handy for a mother.
Mr. Langer looked around and my mother said, “I don’t think we need to have him here. It might upset him, if he understands what’s going on. He’s over at the other place, watching television.” The other place. In her whole life I’d never heard my mother call Ruth’s house Ruth’s house.
I cut the cake and put on the coffeepot. Mr. Langer and my mother passed around the cream and sugar, and then Mr. Langer cleared his throat and said, “We’re selling.” My mother just nodded. He went on and on, that way people do when they’re saying something they feel bad about, as though the more they talk the better it will get, although it’s usually the other way around. Cissy cried her way through a couple more napkins and finally took a big forkful of cake. She ate three slices out of sheer upset.
They’d sold their house to the state, put a down payment on one of the new places Ed had taken my parents to see. It had a sunporch and a patio. Cissy would have a big room to work on her dolls. Henry wasn’t sure if he would still sell bait. I didn’t think it was a bait shop kind of neighborhood. The town council had approved the whole development in record time, and while the paper didn’t say so, and neither did the council, they’d done it because of a deal with the state to offer the houses with a lower mortgage rate to people from the valley who were willing to move fast.
Steven had driven me out there one day, and while it was mostly a mess of foundations, cinder blocks, piping, and piles of plowed snow and gravel, you could see how many houses there would be. Steven talked a lot about buying in bulk, about how much money you could make if you were ordering a hundred new toilets instead of two, but I’d started to tune out a lot of his business talk. For four weeks after I’d taken the bus to the city I wasn’t supposed to have sex, and I’d kept making vague medical excuses, and he kept saying he felt like some dumb high school kid, feeling his girlfriend up in the backseat of the car. By the time I finally let him slip inside me with a big grin and a “worth waiting for, babe,” two things had happened: I’d filled the prescription for birth control pills the doctor had given me, and I’d noticed how annoying he could be when we weren’t both naked.
At the building site he kept saying, “Nice, very nice,” about the size of the foundations and how they’d laid out the roads. But all I’d noticed was the trees. I’d hiked through the woods there a couple of times for Girl Scouts, for trailblazing and to classify leaves. The trees had been so thick that if it started to rain you barely felt a thing. They were all gone now. Thirty-five acres had been clear-cut. They’d done what developers always did, turned it into a tree desert. After the houses were built, they would put those spindly saplings along the curbs. It was like those girls in high school who took off their real eyebrows and then drew fake ones in with pencil. When I was doing my water project research I learned that
clear-cutting was terrible for water maintenance. A couple days of real heavy rains, and all these people, the Langers, too, would have silt in their wells and brown water in all those new toilets. I told Steven, but he just said, “That’s how they do it, babe.”
“Don’t be mad at me, Miriam,” Cissy told my mother, wiping her eyes again. Clifton colored in the flowers on the paper napkins with crayon the way I’d done when I was a kid, but he was still too little to get them right. They didn’t look like mine had. My mother said it was one of the differences between boys and girls. It seemed like there were a million of them.
My mother put her hand over Cissy’s. “It’s the right move, Cis,” she said with a smile, and I almost dropped my coffee mug.
After the two of them drove away I put what little was left of the cake on a smaller plate. When Cissy got upset she cried first and then ate, and between her and her husband they’d managed to eat almost an entire coconut cake. Without turning around, I said to my mother, “Are you selling the farm?” Ten of the houses in the valley were already sold to the government. Two of those were empty, and the families in the rest were looking for another place to live or waiting for Winston Bally to stop by and give them a moving date.
“You can see the handwriting on the wall,” Donald’s grandfather told my father, but he swore he would never sell, would fight until, depending on the day, the bitter end, the moment of truth, or the last dog died. Donald’s grandfather, not my father. My father said, “Fell one. One. Fell. Fell.” The doctor who had said my father’s speech would come back slowly now said nothing. His right side was still barely along for the ride. He liked to sit out in the cold with no coat on.
“The farm belongs to your father,” my mother said. “It’s never been in my name. The family always made sure of that whenever a Miller got married.”
“You could get some kind of power of attorney, I bet.”
“I probably could,” she said. “Why don’t you take what’s left of that cake over to the other house? I’ve got laundry to do.”
The morning Tom was due to get out Steven drove me to the state prison. Steven found out the date from a guy he knew whose brother worked as a parole officer. Tommy had served almost eighteen months on an assault charge. No trial, just a deal he’d told the attorney he wanted to make as fast as possible. Steven said that if he’d gone to trial he probably would have gotten a lot more. “With what he did to that guy’s face, all they would have had to do was show the jury the pictures,” he said.
“Don’t tell my mother that,” I said.
“Babe,” Steven said. “Do I strike you as a stupid individual?”
Even the guys at the diner said Tommy had gotten off easy because of his military service. They’d all been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt before, but once people started to talk about selling drugs the flag wavers had gotten less certain about what a great guy Tommy was. Plus there’d been a description in the paper of the beating he’d given the other man, and it sounded like Tommy had done a thorough job. A dispute over money, the story said, and Steven said the guy had shorted Tommy on some kind of deal, although he wouldn’t be more specific because he still thought he could keep me from thinking the worst of my brother. Everyone else thought the worst, though. More than once when I’d picked up a stray shift at the diner there’d been long periods of silence at the counter, where the regulars sat on stools way too tiny for their old-guy butts, their feed company hats pulled down low over sun-speckled foreheads.
The day Steven and I drove up to the prison was one of those November mornings that make you think the weather will never turn harsh, although there would surely be snow within weeks. The air was clear and fresh, chilled like lemonade, and the sky was a blue without clouds. I don’t know why I remember it so well. Neither of us really wanted to be there. My course work for the second year at the community college was even tougher than the first, and Steven’s business was taking off and he was complaining about losing a morning’s worth of demolition. He had two guys from Poland doing a lot of the scut work now. He paid them almost nothing but he let them live in whatever house they were working on while he lived in whatever house was almost sold, or just bought. He said that back in Poland their wages and their living conditions would be much worse, and they should be grateful. They didn’t act grateful, and I didn’t like the way they looked at me.
Steven had bought a big Victorian house at an estate sale, with a deep half circle of a porch and built-in bookshelves and a pantry with the original oak cabinets and brass hardware. It was a great house, the first one I’d really liked, but it was a wreck, with a floor in the kitchen so soft I was afraid we were going to wind up in the basement. I’d thought he was crazy to take it on. For years it had been the neighborhood haunted house, with kids daring each other at night to run up and ring the bell and then screaming that they’d heard someone inside even though no one had lived in it for ages and the four grown kids who had inherited it had been fighting all that time about how much to sell it for. By the time Steven got to it it was in such bad shape that he’d been able to afford it. Then once he was mostly finished fixing it up two guys from Philadelphia who were looking for a place in the country offered him what he was asking, which was eight thousand dollars more than he’d thought he would get. “You can really breathe out here,” one of the Philadelphia guys said, as though he was partly paying for oxygen. Steven was smart at milking that stuff. He was always putting baskets of apples and pots of mums on the front porch. He’d handed the buyers a bottle of champagne after they’d signed the contracts at the bank. He took me to the steak house that night and ordered the same kind of champagne and clinked my glass and said, “Whole new ball game, babe. Whole new ball game.” I didn’t like champagne. One sniff of the stuff and I was right back at LaRhonda’s wedding reception, kneeling in the ladies’ room.
“She’s got the baby blues,” Mrs. Venti told me about LaRhonda, who had had a baby girl in June. Dee at the diner said, “An eight-pound preemie. That’s what the boss says. He says he doesn’t want to be called Gramps because it will make him feel old.” Maybe LaRhonda had the baby blues because it was just her and her mother in the house most of the time. Her father was living more or less full-time with the diner waitress, although she didn’t work at the diner anymore. She was a hostess at the Italian place Mr. Venti had opened not far from where they were building the new development. Fred was managing the McDonald’s Mr. Venti had opened on the highway, and Steven said he talked at the bar about how much he wanted to go back to working construction and how his father-in-law screamed at him all the time about how bad he was at his job. “It’s like he can tell when something is going wrong, and that’s when he shows up,” Fred told Steven, which actually was the truth. Fred didn’t know that Mr. Venti had a deal with an eighteen-year-old who was working there to call him if there were problems. Also to call him if she was at home alone.
“The man has Fred’s balls in his pocket,” Steven said. Which hadn’t stopped LaRhonda from getting pregnant when Serafina was only three months old. I thought about stopping by with a pink onesie and some advice about birth control, but with what my life was like I was not in the mood for more disapproving looks from a woman too stupid not to get pregnant twice before she was even twenty-one. My father had gone from saying random words to saying nothing at all, and the house had almost flooded twice, summer and fall. My mother and I sat on the stairs halfway up to the second floor during the second storm, eating Fritos out of the bag, watching to see if the water would start to seep under the front door, and talking about when the floors would be warped enough to need replacing. We both seemed to think the answer was never. All the times that water had gotten into the house, and it hadn’t done much to it that paint and plaster couldn’t repair. There had never been anything fancy enough to be ruined.
“You could never have had wall-to-wall carpeting,” I’d said, sitting on the stairs.
“What?” my m
other said. “Oh, that. That was just foolish.”
We’d sat for a while without saying anything, which was fine with us both. My lips were puckering from all the salt in the chips. After a while the rain started to slow, so that we could tell that the water wouldn’t get any higher than the next to last step to the front door. I could hear Ruth’s television.
“They’re watching The Match Game,” I said.
“I think your aunt is going deaf,” my mother said. “That’s what happens when you’re forty-five years old and do nothing but sit on your butt all day long.”
“I think she turns it up for Dad. Maybe because he can’t talk she thinks he can’t hear.”
My mother took another Frito. “We had a stroke patient come in two months ago, her whole left side was gone,” she said. “She stopped by last week with zucchini bread for all the nurses. Baked six loaves herself.”
“That’s good zucchini bread. I had a piece. I wish we had that now.”
“It’s like nothing happened to her. She’s got a little bit of weakness in the one leg, that’s it. It’s all the luck of the draw. One of the nurses says it’s always worse on the right side.”
“That can’t be true.”
She’d shrugged. At least I didn’t have to worry about saving the cows from the flooding in the pasture, which I could see through the transom over the door was looking like an enormous pond. I’d sold the last of the beef cattle in July. It was sad to watch them march into the truck, their big blocky heads hung low as though they knew where they were going to wind up. I’d stopped naming them a long time ago, but still. For all my worries my father didn’t even seem to notice they were gone.