34
Mom had once told me about the day Frank came home from the Korean War. Mike and I had been playing in the yard over at our old house. She’d said that Mike got all full of dirt that day, as was usual. But that I’d managed to find even more of it, making my white-blonde hair a muddy shade of brown.
It little mattered, though. Mom’s solution to dirty kids was to send us into the lake to rinse off before supper. Sometimes she even brought out a bar of soap and gave us our bath right there among the minnows and the seaweed.
“Frank came around the corner,” she’d said. “I didn’t even know he was coming home that day.”
She’d told me how she dropped the spade she’d been using to dig holes for her violet plants. She’d run to him, gardening gloves still on.
“When Michael saw us kissing, he cried,” she’d said. “He didn’t know Frank. Didn’t remember him.”
The way she told the story, it had taken Mike a full week to stop eyeballing Frank as if he were an intruder. And a whole month before he’d speak to him.
I thought of that story when Mike and I turned the corner at Lewis and Pine and I saw Frank’s rust-red–colored truck parked in front of our house.
“Whose truck is that?” Mike asked.
“Frank’s.” I glanced at his face. “He said he’d come.”
“I know.” Mike grinned. “I guess I didn’t believe him.”
He ran the last few yards home, hopping up the porch steps and pulling the screen door open so hard, I worried he’d pull it right off its hinges.
I hung back, taking my time, wanting to give them a chance to meet. I imagined that Frank looked up at Mike’s face, his brows knit and his eyes brooding the way they did. He’d have taken Mike’s hand and told him how smart he looked in that uniform. Mike would pull his shoulders back, standing as tall and at attention as he could.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t what happened. Not at all.
When I got to the front door, I saw the two of them sitting in the living room. Mike on the couch, Frank in the easy chair. Mike was looking at Frank as if he were an exhibit in a museum. Frank inspected his hands folded in his lap.
Neither of them looked up when I walked in, not even when I cleared my throat. I headed toward the kitchen, where I heard Mom fussing with something. Joel was there, too, sitting at the table with a glass of milk.
“I don’t know what either of them expected,” Mom said when I joined her at the counter. “Cut of the same fabric, those two.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“As soon as they shook hands Frank asked why Michael didn’t join the Navy.” She rolled her eyes. “And Michael refused to say anything.”
“I moved Mom’s good vase from the mantel just in case they get into a fight,” Joel said.
“They won’t,” I said. “Will they?”
She lifted both of her hands, palms up, and shrugged. “Who knows with those two.”
I peeked around the corner to see them still in their seats, not speaking or moving so much as an inch.
“Hey, Joel. You feel up to playing a song on your guitar?” I asked. “You know a few, don’t you?”
“I guess so.” He smirked. “Why?”
“Come on.” I tugged on his arm. “We’ve got to do something about that.”
“All right.”
Joel brought his Les Paul down from his room, insisting that we didn’t need to plug it into the amp.
“They’ll still be able to hear it well enough,” he said, walking toward the living room.
As soon as he entered, both Mike and Frank lit up. There was something about Joel that was special to the two of them. Another thing they had in common.
“I asked Joel if he’d like to play a little for you,” I said.
“Sure, bud,” Mike said.
Frank sat up straighter, watching Joel sling the guitar strap around his neck and shoulders. He didn’t take his eyes off him while he played what he called riffs from a few different songs he’d heard on the radio. His was a stuttering “House of the Rising Sun” and a tentative “Purple Haze,” but with time and practice he’d get better.
Mom stood in the doorway to the dining room, a cup of hot tea in hand. She looked back and forth between her sons and husband.
Had I been a stranger just happening by our house, I’d have looked through the window and thought what a nice family we had, all in one place and paying all of our attention to the youngest among us.
It almost felt normal.
We all stayed up well past our bedtimes. Mom popped some corn and I made hot chocolate. Mike had changed out of his dress uniform and sat more comfortably on the floor in jeans and T-shirt, his back resting against the couch.
Frank didn’t say a whole lot. He sat in the easy chair, bowl of popcorn in his lap, listening to the three of us kids tell story after story. The day Joel passed out after I convinced him to yank out his first tooth. Or the time when Mike told me that he was going to put rollers in my hair but instead used burrs. And the story of how, one spring Joel had sold all his baseball cards to buy Mom a necklace for Mother’s Day.
Most of the stories earned half a smile from Frank. Still, his eyes remained far away, detached, and brooding.
Mom watched his face through the telling of each story, her eyes narrowed, scrutinizing. I was sure that if I could have heard her thoughts, they all would have been directed at him.
You missed so much.
You missed everything.