Wednesday was Barbara’s third day of recovery and it was rough. Monday and Tuesday were easy; she remembered how bad she used to feel, brain-dead, nauseated, guilt-ridden, dizzy. But Wednesday morning she woke up feeling pretty good and thinking about crème de cacao. She skipped coffee because of the liquorish associations and made green tea which is supposed to help counter alcoholic urges, according to something she read online.
It’s a new life, she told herself. You’re doing great. Keep at it.
She would be sober. She would exercise every day. She would go on a detoxifying diet she had read about that incorporated nutrients found in honey and locusts. She would sell her house and leave town and start Part Two somewhere else, maybe near an ocean, in a sun-swept town on a hillside, in a house with a walled garden covered with vines, on a red-brick patio under a banyan tree. She had it all clear in her mind. And either Oliver would get with the program and marry her or he would be history.
He had never set foot in her house. She had been in his house once and he was so embarrassed by the mess, the boxes of sugar wafers, a case of Spam, piles of soda-pop cans, twelve packs, empty burger bags, pizza boxes, chaos in the kitchen, that he turned around and drove her to the Romeo Motel and that had been their meeting place ever since. He’d call or e-mail her and say “What you up to tonight?” She’d play along. “Not much. You?” He wasn’t up to much either. Just sitting and thinking. “About what?” Things. And then he’d say it. “Sure would be nice to see you.” And she’d go, or she wouldn’t go, and it was always the Romeo, room 135, in back. He could pull up in his old Caddy and walk ten steps to the door and be in the room. He’d pay over the phone and have the clerk leave the door unlocked. Oliver liked dim light and anonymity. He was not ready to stand beside her in the light of day and hold hands and be her boyfriend. She was but he wasn’t.
“Come to my house. I want to fix you dinner,” she said, and he shook his head. “I don’t want you to go to the trouble.” Lie, lie. He didn’t want her watching him eat. Period. She had seen him once coming out of McDonald’s with a box in his hands. It was big enough to hold dinners for six. One could only guess at the contents and shudder.
*
She needed some distraction from the urge to fix a drink. She had discovered a miniature bottle of brandy in the cupboard, left over from Christmas. It was there, next to the brown sugar and the cinnamon sticks. Get out a glass, fill it with ice, have a drink. What’s the big problem? Why make such a big deal over it? And then a girl named Sarah called, asking for Kyle. Barbara went into her hostess mode—“I’m expecting him soon,” she said. “How are you doing? He’s told me so much about you.” Lie, lie, lie. She said, “I’m worried about him. I think he has dropped out of school and quit his job and he left me an odd note—” Oh? “I think he’s having a kickback or something.” A kickback? “It’s when you react to one crisis by creating another one.” Oh. Interesting term. Are you in psychology? “No, but I’m in elementary ed. Special ed, actually.” The girl paused for a deep soulful breath. Barbara could sense something coming, like a drop of water forms on the lip of a faucet and balloons—“I don’t know if I should tell you this or not,” the girl said. “I mean—” Tell, girly girl, Barbara thought. Tell everything, open up the hatches, baby-cakes, and drop the whole load of beans on the pavement. We’re big people here. Mother died Friday night. No time to waste. Let’s hear it—“I found a page Kyle wrote for a journal or something, I don’t know—it was in the garbage, he tore it in pieces and stuck it inside a milk carton—but anyway, I read it and he is all confused. Stuff about currents and searching and a lot about journeys. A lot of journey stuff. I think he’s been drinking, and I know for a fact he’s been smoking dope. I just thought you should know. Also I found some e-mails he sent to a gay website about how do you know if you’re gay or not? I think he’s worried about that. But he’s not. I mean, I know he’s not.” Okay. Good to know, I guess. Say no more.
“But he had sex with this other girl, somebody he met online.” Her voice quavered. “He was trying to prove something to himself. Honestly, I never met anybody with so many problems, and of course he blames it all on me for interrupting him. Why does he hate me? I’ve never been treated this bad by anybody before. I love him. He’s the only boy I ever loved.” She started to cry and hung up.
Barbara had never spoken to Kyle about sex. There was a unit on sex education in seventh grade, and she remembered him bringing home a pamphlet with diagrams of genitalia and underneath it, it said: If there are questions about sex that trouble you, ask your parents or your minister. The idea of him asking her about sex scared her then and horrified her now. Or, worse, asking Pastor Ingqvist. Mother gave Barbara a book once, Everything A Girl Should Know, that basically said, “When you bleed, stuff this in there. Don’t worry about a thing. Someday you will be very very happy, and meanwhile, don’t think about it.” And that was it. Subject closed. Parents are beautiful ignorant people and a child is a miracle, and they have no idea where it comes from, only that it completes their life in a wonderful way. That’s all parents know about sex. Lloyd was putting his hand down there and getting all breathy and urgent, and before she knew what was happening, she was holding Muffy in her arms and Mother was beaming and Daddy was happy and she felt like she’d been torn apart and stuck back together.
She worked the crossword puzzle and moved the sprinkler to water the flower beds. She put out fresh seeds for the finches and oriole and the bluebird who had taken up residence nearby. The sun was blazing and the grass hurt her bare feet and the neighbor’s radio irritated her, that awful chuck-wacka music. I have got to go on all day like this and nothing is going to get better. She called Oliver and his cell phone was turned off. Probably a supervisor was hovering so he couldn’t take nonbusiness calls.
What a prince that fat man was! Her cousin Joanne said, “Barbara, you ought to find yourself a nice guy!” And Barbara wanted to tell her, “I got one and you don’t know it, so ha ha ha! Got a better one than you do, that’s for sure.” Joanne’s husband Allen had a laugh like a dog bark. Imagine putting up with that woofer for twenty-five years. He was completely unselfconscious. You’d be talking to him and he’d reach into his mouth and pick a popcorn husk out of a back molar, or stick a finger in his ear and clean out some wax and examine it and roll it into a ball, and then reach around back and do some proctology. Allen was a college graduate. Big deal. He snored so loud he knocked the alarm clock off the bedside table so she sent him to a sleep clinic and he was sent home because he woke up other patients. Oliver was a high-school dropout and he didn’t run off at the mouth like Allen did about the president and climate change and all, but he had his own wisdom. Still waters run deep. Mrs. Chatterley’s lover was a gardener and he was no intellectual but he sure mowed her lawn. And Oliver made her feel glamorous which she never had been, not for a day in her life.
She called Oliver again and he picked up this time. “Just wishing you were here,” she said. “Kind of a hard day. I’m okay. Just feeling sad. I miss my mom. Why don’t you come over? I’ll fix supper.”
She could hear wheels turning in his brain. “I told a friend I’d help him move some stuff,” he said. “I’m sorry about your mom.”
“I think I may sell my house and move away,” she said. “Start a new life. What do you say?”
There was a brief vast silence.
“Sounds like you made up your mind,” he said. “Excuse me,” and he put the phone down and talked to somebody about windshield washer fluid.
You’ll never find a better lover than me, fat man. I can cook your chicken, baby, just how you like it. I can clean up your mess and never give you a hard time about it. And I can lay you down on that big bed—
“I gotta go sell somebody some motor oil,” he said.
*
She didn’t want to make a big announcement about not drinking. Better to wait until people start to notice. Hey, Barbara, I notice you’re off the sauce, huh? How long has that been going on? Six months. Really? Really. So how’s that? Not bad. How come you decided not to drink? I just decided, that’s all. I drank my share. Time to stop.
Oh, my, how she wanted a drink. A glass full of ice and brandy—that’s what she drank when she and Lloyd were going dancing at roadhouses and making out in the parking lots. And then she graduated to screwdrivers, an occasional Manhattan, and then, during the Ronnie period, she drank beer and boilermakers. She moved on to an affair with a Catholic priest who taught her to appreciate martinis. Met him at a peace rally in St. Cloud. She went with Arlene Bunsen. In front of the courthouse. A couple hundred people waving signs, why more $$$$? and WAR IS POISON, and this very cultivated gentleman struck up a conversation with her about Irish literature and James Joyce and what did she know about James Joyce? Nothing at all. But he was a beautiful talker and made her feel smart and when he asked her to join him for a drink, No did not seem an option. It was wrong, wrong, wrong, and she went and did it. Lied to Arlene. (“I met a friend and she’ll give me a ride.”) And went and had a martini at the St. Cloud Hotel. He said, “Life is a feast and most people are starving.” He said, “James Joyce would have loved looking at you. You would’ve been a majestic presence to him. He would’ve sat over there and stared at you for hours and gone and invented a character who looked like you, and you know? You are more interesting than the one he would have invented.” What a fine compliment! Nobody had ever referred to her as majestic before, or said she could make a man yearn for ruin, which Father had said to her in the elevator. What did that mean? He said she was an angel, she was wholesome and good and good people deserve to have sex too. How did I get here? she wondered afterward, in the shower, listening to him piss three feet away. And what would Mother think? In bed with a Catholic priest, naked, his whiskers against her cheek, murmuring poetry in her ear. “Since feeling is first, who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never holy kiss you,” he said and he kissed her—so that was what martinis held in store. And two months later she was pregnant with Kyle. The father was Father. He was off in New York, the head of something, a monsignor, and there was no reason to bother him about this. And what a lovely gift to get from a martini.
And then there was single malt Scotch. Donnie Krebsbach. He was standing beside a lovely red hatchback the day she strolled into Krebsbach Chev. Donnie, an old basketball star gone to pot but still a charmer. She almost bought that car from him though she’s Lutheran and Lutherans drive Fords because the Krebsbachs are Catholic and so the money you spend there goes in part to pay for diamonds for the Pope’s shoelaces but she was tempted because the car was red and it was a Caprice. And because Donnie was selling it. She thought maybe it was time she had a Caprice. “It’s a good car,” he told her. “And we could come down on that price a little.” He stood next to her and opened the door. She could smell the leather and also Donnie’s cologne, a dark musky smell. He put his hand on her shoulder. “She’s a real good handler,” he said. “You want to get in?” He jingled the keys. So she did. They drove all the way to St. Cloud and parked the car outside the Best Western and went in. He was married, Catholic, and a lousy lover. No foreplay and he was inside her for sixty seconds and afterward he rolled over and turned on the TV. The Golf Channel. He was fascinated. Evidently he’d never seen golf on television before. He said, “Boy, look at those greens.” The man had been intimate with her minutes before and now he was engrossed by Tiger Woods chipping out of a sand trap, sending a plume of sand in the air. “Wow,” said Donnie. He bought her a single malt Scotch afterward. It tasted like paint remover. She didn’t buy the Caprice.
Lots of liquors left, rum and bourbon and vodka, so who knew what mysterious gentlemen awaited her?
But not yet.
Not now, thank you, Lord.
A person cannot coast along in old destructive habits year after year and accept whatever comes along. A person must stand up on her own two legs and walk. Get off one bus and go get on another. Climb out of the ditch and cross the road. Find the road that’s going where you want to go.
Damn, it was hard not to pour that brandy into a glass of ice right now.
But she owed this to her boy. The only sermon that counts is the one that is formed of our actions. She would quit drinking and thereby show Kyle: life is what you make it. A person can grab hold of her life and change things for the better. This happens all the time. We are not chips of wood drifting down the stream of time. We have oars.
*
She remembered Kyle’s graduation. He was No. 3 in his class, wore a gold tassel, won the Shining Star scholarship, got a big round of applause. That was the year the seniors hooked up a tiny plastic hose to the lectern and when Mr. Halvorson stood at the podium to talk about daring to make a difference, he felt the front of his pants getting very wet. A great big dark wet spot. He had to do his Groucho walk back to his seat and sit with his legs crossed and let somebody else hand out the diplomas. So Kyle was out late that night celebrating with his coconspirators, and the next day, Sunday, she put on a big open house, 1 to 3 p.m., with a ham and turkey buffet, potato salad and fruit salad, punch and coffee, and a sheet cake with CONGRATULATIONS KYLE in green icing and a hundred people dropped by and slipped some money in envelopes in the big basket in the living room. Lloyd was there, with terrible back pains, leaning against the kitchen wall, tears in his eyes. She snuck a look at a few envelopes and ten bucks seemed to be the average. It made her furious. Everybody loading up on food she had made and sitting on lawn chairs she had scrounged up and admiring the yard, the opulence of the hydrangeas, the sidewalk washed, and they couldn’t be a little bit generous? Would it kill you? Norwegians! The worst! Kyle strolled by, cutting a wide swathe, working the crowd, and Flo said, “So, what are you going to do next year?” And he said, “I’m thinking I might take a year off to sort of think about it, and I’ll stay with my dad in the city and get a job and earn some money for college or whatever.” It was such a lame reply, she wanted to throw fruit salad in his face—and then she overheard him say something similar to other relatives. A sunny June afternoon in Lake Wobegon with her cheapskate relatives and her martyred ex-husband and lackadaisical son and the whole air of Okay Then Not So Bad Hey and visions of that bright boy adrift and some little trollop latching onto him, a romance like a brain tumor, and in two years he’s working in retail for $8.50 an hour and in debt up to his eyebrows paying for the chintzy rambler and the crummy furniture. She took Kyle aside and said, “You can tell people whatever the hell you want, but you’re not living with your dad next year and you’re not working. You’re going to enroll at the University as you told me you would and you’re going to make a 3.8 grade point average and in return I am going to pay for the whole thing. That’s the plan we agreed on and that’s what you’re going to do. Just so you know.”
He said, “It’s my life, you know,” which was also lame.
And she said, “It is and I won’t let you piss it away. Be as angry at me as you like but I’m not going to let you piss away your chances in life and wind up wearing an apron, putting price stickers on cans of creamed corn. And that’s that.”
He started to say something about needing to find his own way. “Listen,” she said. “The world has enough slackers, and featherbedders and thumbsuckers so don’t become one of them—it’s really very simple—there are the doers who go at the job and get it done and there are the folks who find a comfy spot and surf the Web and download more pictures of themselves onto their website”—this was a dig, she had seen his website. Dreadful. Stupid. Vulgar. “You give me the next four years, and you can do as you like with the rest. And you’ll have more to do as you like with,” she said.
*
And after some stomping around and slamming doors and muttering at her, he, by God, went to the University and studied and got good grades. Not a 3.8, but 3.4, sometimes 3.6, acceptable. Once he tried to pledge a fraternity and she put her foot down: he wasn’t going to join a gang and live in a house smelling of beer and livestock, dirty clothing strewn, underpants with skid marks in the seat, sink full of empty beer bottles, pizza boxes stacked six feet high. She found him a studio apartment, a little cell, white walls, tile floor, a futon, a door on sawhorses for a desk, no curtains so you wake up with the sun. And she mortgaged her house and paid his way. A pretty straight deal. If necessary she would rob a bank. Why not? Find one in a shopping center and walk in with a nylon stocking over her head and a pistol in her purse and tell them to hand over the hundreds and make it snappy. Most bank robbers got away with it. They don’t tell you that on television but it’s true. You could pick up $50,000 in a lunchbag and walk away and that night on Eyewitness News they’d be talking about the Larceny Lady and here she’d sit in Lake Wobegon cool as a cucumber, the loot in a Tupperware dish tucked away in the box of Christmas decorations. The ladies at church would say, “I can’t imagine who would do a thing like that.”
Two o’clock. She needed a drink. Really and truly. If a girl in a frilly apron walked in right now and asked, “What’ll you have?” she would order a brandy sour. Slice of lemon. So delicious on a hot day. And what harm would it do? None. We are poisoning the earth, blasting the ozone layer, the Arctic ice cap shrivels, polar bears perish, and why not have a drink, Barbara Peterson?
*
Three o’clock, the doorbell rang. Front door. Nobody used that door except Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the UPS man. It was the boy from the crematorium, the one she kissed. With a big heavy box that the moment she took it she knew what was inside. It was Mother. She set it on the desk in the living room and cut the box open and lifted the bowling ball out. It was wrapped in heavy clear plastic which she cut off. The ball felt light, with its core drilled out and Mother’s ashes inside. The hole that held the ashes was covered with a plaster patch. She thought maybe she should have the patch waterproofed to keep it intact. But why? Why preserve the ashes? It didn’t matter. Mother was extinguished, her fire was out, let the water in.
She went and fetched the blue loose-leaf binder of Mother’s letters. She had rounded up a few dozen and was keeping them to give to Kyle someday. That morning she’d found one from last December.
Dec 9
Dear Barbara,
I am in Reno, beat, absolutely knackered, and am trying to make this hotel computer work. I wrote you one letter already and then hit shift for a new paragraph and the screen went blank. A thousand words of deathless prose, lost in a single stroke. Ah, progress.
As I said in that letter, I left Tuesday all of a sudden when I realized that if I didn’t, I was going to get roped into baking forty dozen saffron buns for St. Lucia Day. I could feel the phone trembling—Sonya getting up the nerve to call me and pour out her troubles and how hard it is to get people to bake anymore—but I have baked my last bun and am done with it, so to make that clear, I vamoosed. I tried to call and your line was busy. I cleaned out the fridge, hauled away the deer bones that somebody’s dog hauled into the yard, locked the house, and put sunflower seeds in the feeder for the birds to gorge on. Did you know that chickadees eat their weight in sunflower seeds every few days—think of a truckdriver ordering the 200-pound cheeseburger,—but I don’t need to eat one more saffron bun, and that’s why I had to get out. Christmas depresses the daylights out of me. All that damn food. Gladys came home with a mouse tail hanging from her mouth the other day and she was moaning the next morning so on the odd chance she was poisoned, I took her to the vet in St. Cloud, the lesbian one, and there she was in her white lab coat and offering a Comprehensive Care Analysis for $150—I said, “But it’s only an old cat!” She winced at that. She listened to Gladys with a stethoscope for awhile and reported that Gladys has a heart murmur. She said that surgery is an option to consider. (Did you know about Medicat? It’s health insurance for cats.) I said, “Not on your life.” And I paid her twenty bucks and took Gladys out to Rollie Hochstetter’s who owed me one for the times I lied to his wife about his whereabouts when he was running around with the horse-faced lady. He was in the machine shed dinking around with one of his antique tractors and I set Gladys down and told him to shoot her. So he did. It took him a minute to get the gun and I patted her and told her that it was for her own good. Her hips are stiff and she whimpers when she sits and I can hear her wheezing at night and life for her just isn’t the feast it should be and I am not going to pay money to have her be a biology experiment. I said, “I’ll join you soon enough, but there’s one more dance in the old girl yet and so I’m off to Reno. And you are off to the Great Meadow in the Sky.” She didn’t believe a word of it, of course. She gave me a scathing look that I’ll remember to my dying day and Rollie set her up on a stump and I turned my head and he blew her little head off. And now here I am, in the Business Center of an enormous hotel, weeping for a dead cat. It’s a mistake to have a pet—they’re so dear and you get to know them too well and then they turn into a tragedy in which you are the betrayer. I can’t forget how she looked at me, her disdainful look, and today I saw that same exact look on the face of a fat old lady on her way to the slot machines. She glared at me just like Gladys did and I thought I saw whiskers on her. She said, “Where you been? I’ve been looking for you.” I said, “I don’t think I know you.” She said, “Oh, Pfffffft.” A cat hiss.
By the way I stopped in Sauk Rapids and saw Muffy who is very very happy and has a blessed life and you should know that. She can’t read the newspaper or do math and I can’t ride a bicycle on a high wire, and life goes on.
I love hotels, even ones with slot machines jangling everywhere and old fat ladies with jangly bracelets and music dripping from the ceilings and grinning Filipino bellmen who are your instant best friends. There is dancing here and men to dance with and that’s exactly what I want to do instead of sit in the church kitchen baking saffron buns and listening to people lament the dead. I want a gallant man to lead me out onto a dance floor with a prom ball sparkling and the band playing a rhumba and I want to do steps and turn and be turned, over and over again. But meanwhile I am missing my old accusatory cat. Anyway, that’s why I didn’t bring her over to your house. She is dead. I ain’t. Neither is Muffy. She saves all my postcards so I will write her another, soon as I say,
Love, your Mother
Drinking had gotten Barbara excused from kitchen duty: people were afraid she would drop glassware. It also got her out of teaching Vacation Bible school which was good. She had hated that for years, teaching innocent little kids about Noah’s Ark. The kids were doped up on chocolate, vibrating like hummingbirds, so they really didn’t pay attention, and the science was transparently weak—a gene pool of one male and one female means monstrous inbreeding—and then there is the issue of genocide. Judy Ingqvist said, “Yes, it’s a hard story for children. So don’t dwell on it.” So one year Barbara had God send snow and cold instead of rain and instead of an ark Moses built a fort and God gave him fire, which the wicked did not have and so they froze to death.
Moses in the bulrushes, okay. A child destined to lead the uprising, raised by the very family who he will overthrow. Sweet. Or David and Goliath. An all-time favorite. Abraham and Isaac, on the other hand, this was madness. She told Judy Ingqvist, “A god who tells you to kill an innocent child is not a god to be worshipped.” Judy smelled liquor on her breath. She frowned and turned away and Barbara was not invited to planning meetings the next year.
*
The next morning, she was trimming the trumpet vines and then Kyle arrived. She wrapped him in a warm embrace that he tried to wiggle out of. “Mom, people are looking,” he said. Their little joke. He said he had spent the night in Mother’s house. He let himself in through her bedroom window and slept on her sofa. She had come to him in a dream and told him to live his life and go out in the world and travel and meet women.
“Horse hockey,” said Barbara. He looked sleepy, unkempt, unclean, and she embraced him tighter. “People are gonna be thinking incest,” he said. She told him that he was her treasure in this world and she didn’t care who knew it. “You screw up though, and I’ll pound the crap out of you.”
Roger’s boys Jon and Sammy were spoiled rotten in Santa Barbara, drifting along, writing dopy songs, working dead-end jobs, going through girlfriends like rats through crackers. They were almost thirty and they went around in those damn droopy shorts and untied shoes and backward baseball caps and wires coming out of their ears. They owned every expensive piece of junk there was and Roger kept buying them more. They had the attention span of a fruit fly. The thought of sitting down and reading a book was alien to them, like tinkering with a car or growing vegetables to eat. Why would you do that?
She sat Kyle down in the kitchen and she poured him a glass of OJ over ice, got out the butter and eggs, tossed a big chunk of frozen hash browns in one frying pan and fried two eggs sunny-side up in another along with four strips of bacon. Kyle’s favorite breakfast. The kid ate like a wolverine and was slim as a snake. Go figure. He was so beautiful, the dark lashes, the curly hair, she had to make herself stop staring at him. He had Mother’s cheekbones and the priest’s eyes. He was movie material. She was not going to let him fall asleep and go drifting over the dam. God, it was hard being young today. Holy Mother of God—the distractions.
But it was hard for Lloyd too. Lloyd, the ball-handling guard on the Leonard’s basketball team, the good boy with the big grin, the ready lover, and then after they married and he went to work for his old man in the machine shop, he got eaten up. Tried to win his daddy’s love by jumping higher and higher but there was no love to win. Lloyd was blamed for every setback. He should’ve walked out after a week, but Lloyd just got meeker and meeker. He made himself inoffensive. Kyle had that meekness in him and she didn’t want him to get eaten up like his dad. Lloyd worked nights in a factory in New Brighton where he ran a machine that dipped shell casings in an acid concoction that gave him ferocious headaches. He accepted this as his due in life. He came back to his apartment at 5 a.m. and took a fistful of Advil and a sleeping pill and slept, and then got up and watched TV and ate cold cereal. He accepted any overtime hours they threw his way. He had no life.
So when Kyle told her, mouth full of egg and bacon, that his near-death experience on the highway had shown him the preciousness of life and he was dropping out of the U and reading Thoreau and searching for something meaningful to do with his life, she felt sick to her stomach. She drank her coffee, leaning on the counter, thinking, Don’t scream. Don’t yell. Don’t wave your arms, looking at Mr. Anderson mowing his lawn across the alley, back and forth, back and forth. “Get to the point,” she said quietly, not yelling, her arms at rest.
He had totally abandoned the ashes-scattering idea. That just didn’t seem practical. Too much overhead. He wanted to make a documentary about Larry the Flying Elvis. To just sit him down and get him to say what he’d said in the ER, especially the part about Old Man Bush. But he needed $50,000 and he thought maybe Debbie Detmer would like to invest in him.
“I always wanted to make movies,” he said, “and this is the perfect time. Like Grandma said, ‘if you don’t live life now, when are you going to live it?’ I want to get a digital camera, it’s great, it looks like film but you can shoot stuff for peanuts. I can do this. I really think I can. And if it doesn’t work out, fine, I’ll go back to the U next spring semester. But not in English, I’m done with that. Maybe history.”
“Maybe you could make a documentary about somebody doinking around and wasting his time,” she said. “How about a good masturbation movie? The world could use one of those, I’m sure. A camera and a tube of Jergen’s and you’re in business.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “Larry is fantastic. He’s got a story to tell. He shot his best friend. He did time in prison. He had a visit from Elvis. And that Bush family is a bunch of thugs and gangsters. I’m going to ask Debbie Detmer to be the producer.”
“Oh for pity sakes—the woman puts Vap-O-Rub on cats!”
“I met her once, five years ago, when I was mowing her parents’ lawn, and we talked—she knows Tom Cruise. And a lot of others. She went out to California with nothing but the clothes in her suitcase and she made a big career out there—.”
“Sure. Running a scam on cat owners.”
“She can open doors. That’s how it’s done. You can beat your head against the wall for years, or somebody opens a door and suddenly somebody wants to make a movie with me. What’s wrong with that?”
About ten things, actually. Sucking up to the Detmers, for one, and going off half-cocked on a harebrained scheme instead of buckling down and finishing college and getting a degree. Some people spend their lives chasing hare-brained schemes. Why be one of them?
“Why bolt from the barn when you are only two years away from finishing? One thing at a time. And we have a task at hand. Don’t forget. We’re scattering Grandma’s ashes on Saturday. You are scattering them. We are watching you scatter them. We can talk about it after that.”
“I’m there,” he said. “I just want to go talk to Debbie Detmer about making a movie. It’d be cool.” And he put his plate and silverware in the sink and went off to take a shower.
Be firm, Barbara thought. Don’t start making threats. Don’t weep. Be cool and firm. She wanted to put up a marker: DO NOT GO THIS WAY. It leads to a life of bad bounces, perpetual tardiness, invincible ignorance. She filled up a bucket with soapy water and got the sponge mop and washed the kitchen floor, just to steady herself. The kid had canceled fall registration. A done deal, so don’t bother talking about that. You can’t argue with what’s done. The goal was to get him back on track. He wants to change majors, quit English, take up History? Okay. History is fine. She’d never seen him crack a book of history, but never mind. She needed him to set a goal for himself and she would offer a clear reward for completion. She would sell Mother’s house and put her share of it in an account and the moment Kyle got his degree, the money would be his. Twenty or thirty thousand dollars. A young man could keep himself focused for two years, with a pot of thirty thousand dollars waiting for him. Couldn’t he?
“Oh, by the way, somebody named Sarah called for you. She asked you to call her back. She said it was important.” Kyle looked stricken. “Is she your girlfriend?”
“Was my girlfriend.”
“Well, she was very upset. And she asked how to get up here.”
Kyle shook his head. “No way,” he said.
“Well, there are roads, you know. You can buy maps at gas stations. You look up Lake Wobegon under L in the list of towns and it says C-7 and there we are.”
*
Mr. Hansen called as they were sitting down to supper. “I wanted to express my condolences,” he said. Fine, she thought. Good. He said he had a quilt that Evelyn had made forty years ago and it was as good as new. Fine, she thought. Thank you very much. That’s what happens if you don’t ever use a quilt: it stays good as new.
And then he got around to the point. “I’m on the county board, as you’re probably aware.” She was, Mr. Hansen had been there forever. “And we heard tell that you were planning to bury your mother in the lake and I just wanted you to know that there are ordinances about that. So if that’s your plan, you’d do well to speak to one of us. I hope you understand.” She thanked him for his concern. “I don’t want to tell you what you can’t do, but on the other hand, we don’t want to set a precedent, if you know what I mean.”
He was one of the old guys who’d run the county for fifty years and whose passion was roads. They loved to drive around and inspect the roads and shoulders and ditches and bridges and then meet and discuss things and plan new projects. Roads were what government was all about in their book. They took a boyish fascination in the subject. Land use didn’t interest them, except they were against zoning, it was all about roads, grading roads and paving roads and repairing them in the spring, and God forbid you should spend money on the library or a public tennis court, or turn the old firebarn, with the sandstone around the door and the inscription A.D. 1892, into a museum—no need for that. No telling how much that could cost. You want money for that sort of thing, go have a bake sale. Roads on the other hand, you could never spend too much on. You need good roads.
She called him back after supper. “The lake was actually our second choice. What Mother wanted was to be buried in a pothole in County Road F. She told me that two years ago. We were driving home from Holdingford and talking about funerals and the car hit a pothole and she said, ‘Bury me there where I’d do some good.’” Mr. Hansen laughed uneasily and said he didn’t think it was a good idea to dig a hole eight feet deep in a county road. “Oh no,” Barbara said. “She’s been cremated. She’d fit in a pothole very nicely.” He still didn’t think it was a good idea. “It would cause controversy,” he said, “and we’ve got enough on our plates without people coming to complain about that.”
“Then I guess we’ll have to do it in the lake,” she said.
“You’ll need a permit first,” he said. “I hope we’re not talking about scattering ashes. I don’t think the fishermen would go for that.”
“We’re going to put her inside a bowling ball,” she said. “We’ll drop it in and it’ll go straight to the bottom and stay there. Promise.”
And the next day he brought over a county waste-disposal permit, signed and sealed. Permission granted to dispose of one (1) bowling ball in Lake Wobegon, containing ashes of decedent Evelyn Peterson and properly sealed in a watertight manner. He waived the permit fee of $35—“I always liked your mother,” he said. “She was an original, that’s for sure.” He asked if he could see the bowling ball. Barbara brought it out to him and he held it in his arms. “By God, you’ve got something here,” he said.