Saxon County has an airport. Joyce Hauser has lived here her whole life and never knew. Though airport is perhaps too grand a term; airfield is more like it. There is a single bare strip for a plane to land, lit at either end by colored lights: red, amber, blue.
In the parking lot she cuts the engine. A small plane buzzes in the flat blue sky. Watching it, she thinks: Is that you? As though the plane were her brother himself and not merely carrying what’s left of him. She imagines the view from above, the fall foliage peaking, a wash of color over the hills. Except for some scattered sumac, there are no red leaves, none of the brash sugar maples she and Ed saw years ago in New England, where they’d driven on their honeymoon. In western Pennsylvania the fall is pure gold.
She rolls down the window and sits a long time, listening to the quiet. The car is a wood-paneled station wagon, five months old, still smelling like its vinyl seats. It’s the first time Joyce has driven it alone. Her son and daughter are three and seven, and always one child or the other must be delivered somewhere. Ed makes do with their old car, a Chevy Nova with rattling windows, prone to overheating. He doesn’t mind the ribbing he gets at work, the principal rolling up to Bakerton High School in a rickety jalopy. It is Joyce who drives their son to his doctor’s appointments, some as far away as Pittsburgh. She needs a dependable car.
She is startled when the hearse pulls in beside her and rolls down its window. “Mrs. Hauser?”
It takes her a moment to recognize Randy Bernardi, in his twenties now. Like all the Bernardis, he is handsome: curly hair, square shoulders, dark eyes full of mischief. He was her pupil several years ago at the high school. Like many adults in Bakerton, he can’t seem to call her by her first name.
Joyce steps out of her car, and for a few minutes they discuss the weather. Randy, once a shy boy, has learned to make small talk. In his profession, she imagines, it is a necessary skill. The Bernardis are the town undertakers—Randy’s father and grandfather, his many uncles.
“It’s quiet here,” says Joyce. “Is it always this quiet?”
The airport is used mainly by the National Guard, he explains. To get a commercial flight, you’d have to drive to Pittsburgh, three hours south and west. Occasionally a crop duster lands here, or a cargo plane.
“Cargo,” Joyce repeats, as if coaxing a reluctant pupil. She is conscious of prolonging their conversation. As long as she is standing in the parking lot with Randy, the next thing will not happen. She will not see the box brought all the way from California, her brother packed inside.
Cargo.
Randy shrugs. “Most everything is shipped by truck these days. Unless it’s, you know, urgent.”
Joyce nods. She can think of many things Saxon County needs urgently: decent jobs, better roads. Coal operators responsible enough to backfill the land ruined by strip-mining, the sooty moonscapes left behind. None of this is likely to be delivered by cargo plane, from points far away.
“Thank you for doing this,” she says. “On a Sunday morning, yet.” It doesn’t sound quite right, though she means it; she is grateful for his presence. Nothing in her life has prepared her for this day. Randy, though young, is a Bernardi and will know what to do.
“I haven’t been out here in a couple years. For a while I was coming all the time. Soldiers,” he explains.
He leads her across the parking lot to the terminal. He seems to sense her resistance; his hand hovers at her lower back. The building is quiet inside, a single large room, sun-filled. The plate glass windows are streaked in the morning glare.
“Wait here, Mrs. Hauser.” Randy lopes across the floor to confer with a stooped man behind a counter. A moment later he returns. “They landed early. This way.” Again he presses her lower back. His presence is reassuring, calm and practiced. She wonders how many women he has guided through this airport—mothers of fallen soldiers, boys his own age back from Vietnam.
She follows him through a swinging door, through an empty back room smelling of diesel. Through an open hatch, they walk out onto the tarmac. A small plane sits with its engine idling, propellers quivering. A uniformed pilot stands smoking with a man in coveralls, who spots them first. He shades his eyes. “Randy, man, is that you?”
“Yeah. I’m parked out front.”
“Well, come on around. You can help me unload him.”
Joyce hugs her arms around her. The mornings are cold now. Fooled by the bright sunshine, she left her coat in the car.
The man in coveralls turns to her. “What about the passenger?”
Joyce stares at him dumbly.
“You’re the family, right?”
She nods.
“There’s a lady on board. I’ll go get her.”
He climbs the stairs into the plane and comes back carrying a Pullman suitcase. Behind him is a woman in dark glasses and a long pink coat. Her red hair blows in the breeze.
“You must be Joyce.” She offers a clawlike hand, bony, heavy with jewelry. “We spoke on the phone. I’m Vera Gold.”
Sandy Novak died on the second of October, the day before his fortieth birthday. This is the fact of the matter, the only one the family knows for certain. He left them so long ago, went so far away. For years he told them little about his life, and not everything he said was true. After high school he worked on an assembly line in Cleveland; later he sold cars and cleaning products and sets of encyclopedias. He was a fry cook, a bartender, a blackjack dealer, a limousine driver. He spoke of meeting famous people: the governor of Nevada, a boxing champion, the actress Annette Funicello. Once he drove the daughter of Frank Sinatra. On several occasions he was chauffeur to the stars.
For twenty years he followed a jagged path westward: Cleveland, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles. He occupies a full page in Joyce’s address book, the entries crossed out every few months and replaced with new ones. That his journey ended in California—a place that had fascinated him since childhood—seems somehow correct, as though he planned it that way all along.
His final address was a basement apartment in a low stucco building in North Hollywood. Joyce has never seen it herself. Her older brother, George, in Los Angeles on business, once visited him there. When George rang the bell at noon, Sandy was still asleep. He answered the door groggy, in undershorts. George hadn’t called ahead, couldn’t have if he’d wanted to. Sandy rarely had a working phone.
It wasn’t much of a place, George told Joyce later: a single room with an electric hot plate, a mini refrigerator, a Murphy bed. Sandy shared a bathroom with the tenant next door.
“Is he eating properly?” Joyce asked. “Where does he do his laundry?”
She could tell by George’s face that he hadn’t considered such questions.
“Never mind,” she said. “How did he look?”
“Like Sandy,” George said. “Like a million bucks.”
The men slide the box into the rear of the hearse. Joyce and Vera Gold watch in silence. The box resembles a shipping crate, long and narrow. Stamped at one end are the words Stern Brothers Mortuary, North Hollywood, California. He’s in there, Joyce thinks, but it seems implausible. At Bernardi’s his body will be transferred to a different box, the handsome coffin she chose from a catalog.
Randy leads the women to the terminal, carrying Vera’s suitcase. “I guess that’s it,” he says, pressing Joyce’s hand. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Mrs. Hauser.” The autopsy, the flight from California, have left no time for a wake. The funeral Mass will be held Monday morning, Sandy’s body rushed into the ground.
“I’m parked out front,” Joyce tells Vera, and for the first time she thinks of the ride ahead, an hour in the car with this strange woman, delivered to them along with Sandy’s remains.
At first they ride in silence. Vera stares out the passenger window, her hand over her mouth. Her long red hair is dyed. She fills the car with a spicy perfume. She is older than Joyce. How much older is hard to say.
Do you know a person named Sandy Novak? she asked when Joyce answered the phone yesterday morning. I found this number in his wallet.
Joyce, stunned, could barely formulate the questions.
Friday, they think. He was lying there awhile.
Sleeping pills. They found an empty bottle.
Yes, honey. I’m sure.
Only now does Joyce wonder: How did you know my brother? For God’s sake, why did you come?
As if sensing these questions, Vera turns to her. “Sandy told me so much about you.”
Joyce thinks, He told us nothing about you.
“We were great friends.” Vera smiles wanly. “When he first came to L.A., he worked for my husband. We owned a diner. I’m a widow.”
Joyce takes a moment to ponder this. She dimly recalls Sandy working in a restaurant several jobs ago.
They take the back road through Kinport, through Fallentree. The sun is nearly blinding. A gentle breeze blows; the golden leaves shimmer in the clear morning light. When they make the turn onto Deer Run, Vera removes her sunglasses. Her eyelids are red and swollen, smeared with makeup. “What’s that?” she asks, pointing.
“A coal mine. It’s closed now. There was an accident years ago.”
Vera studies it, shading her eyes with her hand. “Sandy told me about the mines. His father worked there.”
“Yes.”
Vera roots through her purse for a handkerchief and dabs carefully at her eyes. “It’s beautiful here,” she says softly. “I didn’t picture it this way at all.”
Finally they arrive at the house. Joyce feels an overpowering urge to warn Vera—my sister’s housekeeping isn’t what it used to be—but resists the impulse. If she’d known a visitor was coming, she’d have persuaded Dorothy to redd up.
“Here we are,” Joyce says. Like all others on this street, it is a company house: three rooms upstairs, three rooms down. The family bought it years ago from Baker Brothers. Dorothy, who never married, lives here alone.
Vera stares in wonderment, as though the mean little house were a historic monument. “Polish Hill. I’ve always wanted to see it.” Her lips tremble with emotion.
Why, she loved him, Joyce thinks.
She parks and engages the brake. A moment later Dorothy appears on the front porch. Her sister’s face is as familiar as her own, but now Joyce sees her as a stranger might: the pilling cardigan, the ankle socks and stained housedress, her graying hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. The sweater, once white, is grimy at the cuffs. Oh, Dorothy, Joyce thinks, hot with shame.
“I thought you were Georgie,” Dorothy calls. “He should be here any minute.”
When Vera steps out of the car, Dorothy’s eyes widen. She has never been comfortable with strangers.
Joyce climbs the porch steps, which are a little rickety. The shabbiness of the house is suddenly overwhelming, its flaws exposed. “This is Vera Gold,” she says. And then, for lack of a better explanation: “Sandy’s friend.”
At that moment a car climbs the hill, a newish Cadillac scattering gravel.
“There’s Georgie,” Dorothy says with audible relief.
“Our older brother,” Joyce explains.
Dorothy squints into the distance. “He’s alone. I can’t believe it. I thought for sure she’d come.” George has been divorced for two years, but Dorothy, ever romantic, holds out hope. In Joyce’s view, it’s a subject best avoided. To most of Bakerton, divorce is still a rarity. To Joyce, herself: her brother is, in point of fact, the first divorced person she has ever known.
He parks and steps out of the car, a handsome man of fifty with a full head of gray hair. To Joyce, he looks well groomed and prosperous in his stylish trench coat.
Dorothy clatters down the porch steps to embrace him. “Georgie! You made it.” It seems excessive, a hero’s welcome, as though driving across Pennsylvania were some epic feat. But this brother is hers, her idol since childhood. He belongs to Dorothy the way Sandy had belonged to Joyce.
Arm in arm, they climb the stairs. “Whoa, careful,” says George. “These boards are a little loose.”
Joyce accepts his kiss on her cheek, struck, as always, by his resemblance to their father. She makes what is now the standard introduction: Vera Gold. Sandy’s friend.
Inside, the radio is playing. The local AM station broadcasts a weekly Mass for Shut-ins. Dorothy, who is not a shut-in, listens anyway, though she’s already been to Mass at St. Casimir’s. Joyce ducks into the parlor and unplugs the radio. The dials are long missing, and this is the only way to turn it off.
Dorothy follows her. “Where is she going to sleep?” she whispers.
“Don’t look at me. You’re the one with all the empty bedrooms. She can have my old room, I guess. Or Sandy’s.” Joyce wonders, but does not ask, the last time Dorothy dusted or changed the sheets.
The kitchen is sunny and very warm, the refrigerator packed already with covered dishes. After Sandy’s obituary appeared in the paper, an army of neighbor women showed up with casseroles. Joyce puts on a pot of coffee, wiping the counter as she goes. It isn’t easy to do, with all the clutter. Near the sink are rows of clean empty jars—mustard, jelly, pickles—Dorothy has set out to dry. Eventually they will join the hundred others in boxes in the basement—for what purpose, Joyce couldn’t possibly say.
George and Vera sit at the big Formica table. “We’re still in shock,” he tells her. “You can imagine.”
“Of course.” Vera’s voice is low and gravelly, a smoker’s voice.
“He came back three years ago for my son’s wedding. Before that it was ten years, at least.”
Cups are passed, the sugar bowl, the can of evaporated milk. George and Dorothy drink their coffee light and sweet. Joyce and Vera take it black. Brown, really: the family brew is Maxwell House boiled in a percolator, so weak Joyce can see the flowered pattern at the bottom of the cup.
“He wanted to visit. He talked about it all the time.” Vera sips her coffee, her rings clinking on the china cup. “It was always a question of money.”
“I would have bought him a ticket,” George says.
“He wouldn’t have let you. He’d be too ashamed.” Vera hesitates, as though there’s more she could say.
“He was always hard up,” George says. “I never understood it. He couldn’t seem to get on his feet.”
I gave him money, Joyce thinks. We all did. It’s a subject she has never discussed with George or Dorothy, but she knows, suddenly, that this is true. He called at strange hours: though he’d spent fifteen years on the far edge of the country, he paid no attention to the time difference, as though it were an unsubstantiated rumor he didn’t quite believe. Loans, he called them, though he was casual about repaying. He was casual in all things. Joyce remembers his shirts always wrinkled, his blond hair shaggy before that look was popular, back when other boys were wearing crew cuts. The scruffiness suited him. He was so good-looking, he’d have seemed almost feminine without a day’s growth on his chin.
The coffee finished, George walks Joyce out to the car. Her husband has been alone with the children all day. By now Teddy will be clamoring for his mother.
“Who is she, anyway?” George asks. “His girlfriend?”
“No, I’m sure not,” says Joyce, who isn’t at all sure. “A friend, she says. She’s the one who found his body.” She hugs her coat around her. “Honestly, Georgie, I don’t know who she is.”
“She must have been a knockout in her day.” He fumbles in his pocket for a cigarette. You’re smoking again? Joyce wants to say but doesn’t. She is trying to be less critical.
“I finally reached Lucy,” she says. “Leonard, actually. They couldn’t get a flight out until Tuesday, so I told him not to bother. What would be the point?” Their younger sister is a medical missionary in a remote village in Madagascar. She and her husband run a small hospital, the only nurse and doctor for miles.
“I missed Daddy’s funeral,” says George. “I never forgave myself.”
Here we go, Joyce thinks. It’s a story she’s heard too many times. During the war George served on a minesweeper in the South Pacific. By the time he learned of their father’s death, the body was already in the ground.
“I remember his face so clearly,” says George. “More clearly than I remember Mother’s, if you want to know the truth.” He exhales in a long stream. “Remember my violin?”
It’s another old family story, oft-repeated: the time their father spent his whole paycheck to buy George, then eight years old, a secondhand violin. George’s version of the story is tender, sentimental. Their mother, charged with feeding four children on groceries wheedled from the company store, had remembered it less fondly.
“I told Sandy that story,” he says. “When I went out to California that time. And do you know what he said to me? I don’t remember him at all. That killed me, Joyce. I don’t remember him at all.”
“Well,” says Joyce, “he was young when Daddy died.”
“He was ten. A ten-year-old remembers.” George flicks away an ash. “I’m telling you, it affected him. He was traumatized by it.” He is a man of certain opinions. In that way he is the exact opposite of Sandy, who believed in nothing at all.
She remembers clearly the last time she saw him. They were riding in her car to the airport in Pittsburgh—Sandy behind the wheel, his suitcase in the trunk. His face was pale that morning, a little drawn. He’d had a late night and too many drinks at their nephew’s wedding, the reason for this visit. For years he’d seemed preternaturally youthful, but that day she noticed his hairline receding, faint lines at the corners of his eyes. For the first time he looked his age.
At the wedding he’d put on a good show—dancing and joking, charming neighbors he couldn’t possibly remember, old miners and miners’ widows who still lived on Polish Hill. The Novak boy, gone a decade, had been welcomed like the prodigal son. He’s so handsome, Joyce was told again and again. He always had a way about him. She accepted the compliments graciously, as though she herself had been praised.
His homecoming had been an unqualified success until the final morning, when—despite Dorothy’s wheedling, her lectures, and finally her tears—he had refused to join the family at Sunday Mass. It would be a lie, he said simply. I don’t believe.
“People like to think there’s a plan,” he told Joyce. “Some point to it all.” He changed lanes smoothly, with barely a backward glance. “So they’ve made up all these elaborate explanations.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Fairy tales, Joyce. They’re nothing but fairy tales.”
She stared at him, appalled. “You don’t believe in God? In heaven?” To her it was the essential point: the ultimate reunion with her parents, Rose and Stanley waiting for her on the other side. The alternative—that she would never see them again—was inadmissible, a sorrow she couldn’t bear.
“Sorry, doll. Heaven is here on earth.”
They drove awhile in silence.
“So you’re an—atheist?” The word felt foreign in her mouth, wicked as an epithet. She knew such people existed but had never met one. Fairy tales. Nobody she knew—herself included—would dare say such a thing aloud.
Sandy parked at the terminal and stepped out of the car. With a crooked grin, he handed her the keys. She can see it now, the smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. The memory shatters her.
On Monday morning the house smells of pancakes—a weekend treat, usually, but her husband has made an exception. Ed is an early riser, and he and Rebecca have already demolished an entire stack. Joyce has no appetite and neither does Teddy, who is running a temperature. She lay awake half the night, listening to him cough.
She drinks her coffee as she dresses for the funeral. “I hate to leave him,” she says, helping Ed with his tie. Her friend Eleanor Rouse, the school nurse, has offered to sit with the children while she and Ed are at church. Joyce wouldn’t—realistically, she couldn’t—leave Teddy with anyone else.
“Where are you going?” Rebecca asks.
She stands in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, watching Joyce put on panty hose. On her head is a pink paper cone left over from her birthday. On Saturday morning, in the Hausers’ basement rec room, Joyce served ice cream and cake to a dozen second-graders. It seems a long time ago.
“To the funeral home,” she says. “That building I showed you, uptown behind the A&P.”
“The red one,” says Rebecca, adjusting her hat.
“Yes,” Joyce says.
They have discussed the best way to explain Sandy’s death to the children. Teddy is too young to ask questions, but Rebecca, who is seven, has been told that her uncle has gone to heaven.
Is that closer than California? she demanded.
Farther, said Joyce.
Ed said, No one knows for sure.
The morning is cold and bright. An iridescent grit coats the windshield, the first hard frost. By unspoken agreement, Ed takes the wheel. Though exceptions are made—for disabled veterans, men crippled in mine accidents—it is local custom for the husband to drive.
At the funeral home Ed parks beside the hearse. They are early, a chronic condition in their marriage. Joyce, with her abiding fear of lateness, hustles him out the door with the insistence of a drill sergeant. At church or movies or family gatherings, they are always the first to arrive.
“Sandy’s friend,” he says. “The woman from California. She didn’t tell you anything?”
“No,” Joyce says. “The autopsy report will take a couple of weeks.”
Ed reaches for her hand, Ed who did not love her brother. Who remembers him as a teenage delinquent, a troublemaker and a truant. Ed, the high school principal, took a personal interest in Sandy Novak. He bent the rules to let the boy graduate—to score points, he later admitted, with Sandy’s sister. A week after commencement, Sandy piled into a car with some buddies headed for Cleveland and wasn’t seen for many years. That Ed’s favor was never acknowledged is a sore point they do not mention. Ed himself spoke of it just once, after one of Sandy’s late-night calls.
It was twenty years ago, Joyce pointed out. What do you want him to do? Thank you every time he calls?
I want him to make something of his life. I want him to stop disappointing you.
Broken promises, visits canceled for no reason. Ed was too kind to remind her that Sandy had missed their wedding, that George had stepped in at the last minute to give away the bride. That Sandy had refused—twice!—to serve as godfather. Instead, when Rebecca was born, he wired a large sum of money for the baby’s college fund. A week later he’d declined to visit, claiming he couldn’t afford a plane ticket. Like most of his excuses, it made no sense at all.
The family rides in two cars. Joyce’s wagon and George’s Cadillac line up behind the hearse, leading the slow parade to the church.
The Gospel is a familiar story, the raising of Lazarus, Martha’s anguished cry to Jesus: Lord, if thou hadst been there, my brother would not have died. Joyce closes her eyes, imagining Sandy beside her, the smile crinkling the corners of his eyes.
Fairy tales.
To her surprise, the church is crowded. Sandy was gone twenty years, but Bakerton has not forgotten. Afterward, on the church steps, she is waylaid, questioned, hugged. Sandy was popular in school, she is told, a clown and a cutup. Everyone liked him, the girls especially. They can’t believe he is gone.
Again and again she answers the question: “Heart failure. It was very sudden.”
The story is her invention. Certainly it is kinder than the truth, welcome as a rodent: He swallowed a bottle of pills. He took his own life. Like all the best lies, it contains a grain of truth. What is despair, really, but a failure of heart?
The funeral luncheon is held at Dorothy’s house. Again Joyce and Ed are the first to arrive. She gives the kitchen a lick and a promise, washes the breakfast dishes floating in the sink. The donated casseroles will be served buffet-style, the usual hodgepodge of mismatched food: trays of cold cuts, stuffed cabbage, a lasagna, cakes and pies. A few neighbors—the Poblocki twins, Chuck Lubicki—will arrive with bottles or six-packs, the custom on Polish Hill.
From the window she sees George’s Cadillac park on the street. He opens the passenger door and Vera Gold steps out, nearly his height in her towering heels. That morning every head turned in her direction as she swept into the church. Her black dress is suitable for a nightclub, cut low in front, showing deep cleavage. “Sandy’s friend from California,” Joyce explained a dozen times, fighting an urge she has felt her whole life: to protect Sandy, his reputation, her family’s. It is a habit she will never break.
The guests arrive in waves. She welcomes neighbors and distant cousins, Ed’s colleagues from the high school. “Heart failure. It was very sudden.” The lie is smooth in her mouth, blameless white, lustrous as a pearl.
She agrees that the service was lovely, that Sandy is in a better place now. She accepts condolences and prayers. It is her role, always: the public face of the family. Dorothy, whose backwardness is known and accepted, busies herself in the kitchen. George is nowhere to be found.
“Have you seen him?” Joyce whispers to Ed.
“Back porch,” he says.
Joyce slips into the dining room and glances out the window. George is standing on the porch with Vera and several neighbors—a Stusick, a Lubicki, both Poblockis—in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Joyce feels a flash of irritation and then gratitude. Her brother is performing a useful service, as practical as dishwashing, by keeping Vera occupied.
“Joyce.”
She turns. It takes her a moment to place Dick Devlin, bald now, one of Sandy’s buddies from high school. After graduation the two shared, along with Dick’s brother, an apartment in Cleveland, where they’d been hired at Fisher Body. Eventually the Devlin boys returned to Bakerton, married and raised families; and Sandy moved further and further west.
Dick bends to kiss her cheek. “Joyce, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry now that I lost touch with him. I had no idea he was in such bad shape.”
Joyce feels her heart working. “What do you mean?”
Dick looks down into his feet. “To—do what he did. He must have been in a bad way.”
She glances over her shoulder into the crowded parlor. “Who told you that?” she says in a low voice.
“Vera. His girlfriend.”
Joyce’s face heats. She thinks of Vera in the car, her chin trembling as she studied the house. Polish Hill. I’ve always wanted to see it. Vera, ten years older than Sandy, fifteen maybe, holding court on the back porch, dressed like a cocktail waitress and surrounded by men.
“Who told you she was his girlfriend?”
Dick shrugs, coloring. “I just assumed. He always had girlfriends. And she’s, you know, his type.”
This is news to Joyce, who met none of these girlfriends. Sandy never mentioned any, and she never asked.
“Anyways, I’m sorry.” Dick hesitates, groping for words. “Sandy wasn’t like the rest of us. He did whatever the hell he wanted. We were just working stiffs.”
Joyce feels her eyes tear.
“We had some times out in Cleveland,” says Dick. “I never had a better time in my life.”
As a child Sandy slept in the back bedroom, small and square, its only window overlooking the woods. Joyce closes the door behind her and stretches out on the narrow bed. “Where are you?” she whispers. “Why did you go?”
She is thinking not of his death but of that earlier departure, his disappearance like a magic trick, as dizzying and complete. His manic and determined flight from Bakerton, from the family, from her.
On the one hand, she almost understands it. Family life, on the whole, does not fill her with joy. Her lively daughter delights but also exhausts her, and Teddy keeps her in a nearly constant state of panic: his fevers and infections, his cystic lungs that will never clear. Her sister, more and more, is a like a grown-up child, unwilling or unable to drive a car, maintain the house, or pay her bills on time. And yet Joyce could never leave them, run off to California or to Africa, as her younger siblings have done. Freedom is, to her, unimaginable, as exotic as walking on the moon.
She hears footsteps in the hallway, a knock at the door.
“Can I come in? I need to get something.” It is a woman’s voice, low and honeyed. Only then does Joyce notice the Pullman case lying open on the floor.
Joyce sits up quickly. “Of course,” she calls, swiping at her eyes.
Vera Gold opens the door. “Sorry. I need my cigarettes.” She kneels and rifles through the suitcase. “Damn. I thought I had another pack.” She glances up at Joyce. “Oh, honey. Are you okay?”
“This was Sandy’s room,” Joyce says, her voice trembling. “He had it to himself after Georgie went overseas. I can barely remember him living here. It seems so long ago.” Why did he leave us? she wants to ask. For God’s sake, what did we do?
Vera sits beside her on the bed. A sweet, dirty fragrance—perfume and cigarettes—surrounds her like a cloud. “He was always afraid of missing something. Even in L.A. he got restless. And this place broke his heart.”
The words hit Joyce like a slap. “But why? It’s home.”
“That’s why.”
(Heart failure. Her brother’s unknown heart.)
“You told Dick Devlin,” she says softly. “What Sandy did. Why on earth would you tell him a thing like that?”
“I’m sorry,” says Vera. “He was Sandy’s friend. I didn’t know it was a secret.”
“This is a very small town.”
“Sandy told me that. He said everybody knows your business.” Vera looks down at her hands, the collection of gold rings. In the dim light, her face looks smooth as a girl’s. “He thought about coming back here to live. I guess he told you that.”
Joyce stares. He told her nothing of the kind.
“It was a fantasy, really. Whenever he got into trouble, he figured he’d always have this place to come back to.” Vera smiles sadly. “He never could have done it, though. He would have felt like a failure. More than anything, he wanted you to be proud of him.” She gets to her feet. At the door she pauses a moment, like an actress making an exit.
“The church today—it was a beautiful service, Joyce. But it isn’t what Sandy would have wanted. That wasn’t for him. It was for Bakerton, and for you.”
She closes the door behind her. The click of her high heels fades down the stairs.
In the kitchen Dorothy is putting away the leftovers. Joyce goes out to the back porch, where a Poblocki twin stands alone, smoking. “Have you seen Georgie?” she asks.
“Vera ran out of cigarettes. He’s driving her to the store.”
Joyce walks around to the front of the house. The lawn, she notices, is shaggy. She will ask Ed to run the mower when the guests have gone.
She rounds the corner just in time to see it happen: Vera clomping down the front steps, glancing over her shoulder at George and laughing her throaty laugh. There is a sharp crack like wood splintering, and Vera teeters backward. In a split second she is down.
“Oh, no,” says Joyce, rushing toward her.
George hurries down the steps and kneels at Vera’s side.
“My ankle,” she moans. “I think I twisted it.”
“It’s broken,” says George, who many years ago was a medic in the war. Gingerly he touches her foot. “See that? That’s the bone coming through.”
“Oh, Jesus. I can’t look.” Vera lies back against the stairs and hides her face with her hands. Her black dress is rucked up around her thighs. Joyce resists the urge to cover her.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” she says.
“No need,” says George. “I can take her.”
“Are you sure?” Ed calls from the porch, where a small crowd has gathered.
They watch as George lifts her into his arms.
Joyce never sees Vera Gold again. The emergency room doctor confirms that the ankle is broken and admits her overnight. The next morning, her foot in a cast, she flies back to Los Angeles. George Novak takes her to the airport, carrying first Vera, then her suitcase and crutches, up into the tiny plane.
Joyce spends that day as she does many others: first in the car with Teddy, then reading outdated magazines in a doctor’s waiting room, then stopping to fill a new prescription. It is dusk by the time she leaves the pharmacy and begins the long drive home. By then Vera Gold seems no more real than a character in a movie, her visit fading like a dream.
A week later a large envelope arrives in the mail. The return address is Santa Monica, California. There is a note on perfumed stationery, in a sweeping, nervous hand:
Dear Joyce,
Here are the papers Sandy left. There wasn’t much else, just some clothes and household things. Let me know if you want them. He sold his car years ago and by the end he had nothing.
I guess we will never know what happened. I saw him the day before he died and this will sound strange, but he seemed happy.
I loved him and always will.
—V.
The envelope holds a tan leather wallet—worn and creased, its rawhide stitching coming loose—and a thin sheaf of papers: Sandy’s birth certificate, unopened bills, and a pink carbon copy of a completed form, State of California Application for Unemployment Benefits. Between the papers are a few slippery photographs—snapshots of Joyce’s children, Rebecca and Teddy as infants, as toddlers. Each is marked in Joyce’s neat cursive: Teddy’s first birthday. Rebecca Rose Hauser, 22 months. A photo of her wedding, Joyce and Ed coming out of the church into a shower of rice. On the back, in her own handwriting: We missed you.
At the bottom of the pile is a typewritten transcript from Bakerton High, listing Sandy’s quarterly marks: a string of A’s in Algebra and Plane Geometry, D’s in everything else.
Why would he have a copy of his transcript? Joyce wonders. Was he going to apply to college? For a moment, from lifelong habit, she hopes fervently for his future. For a single cruel moment she forgets that he is gone.
In the wallet she finds a dollar bill and a business card.
TERRY’S BAIL BONDS—FREE BAIL INFORMATION—
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL—24 HOUR SERVICE IN
HOLLYWOOD AND WEST L.A.
In an inner compartment is the stub of a raffle ticket, To Benefit Van Nuys–Reseda Little League Grand Prize Color TV. The drawing took place on October 3, 1974—Sandy’s fortieth birthday, the day his body was found.
That’s all? she thinks. A whole life, her brother’s life, distilled down to this small sad pile. Not a whole life: half a life. The second half he discarded on purpose, the precious years cast to the wind.
The ticket stub is clearly marked: NOT NECESSARY TO BE PRESENT TO WIN.
She decides that this is good news.