You don’t drown by falling in the water;

You drown by staying there.

—Edwin Louis Cole
(Left by Jim, teaching grandkids to swim.)

Chapter 9

The sermon wasn’t bad, actually. Reverend Hay was a low-key sort of guy, and being newly engaged, he spoke from the heart when he talked about love and the nature of it. “In modern culture, we tend to think of love as something soft, frilly, and lacy, like the edging on a valentine,” he said, smiling at his future bride in the front row. “And love is beautiful like that, intricate in the ways it changes you, grows you, makes you want to be more than you were before. Love sees in you the best possible version of yourself, and makes you believe it. . . .” I tuned out for a moment, only vaguely conscious of the sermon continuing. I caught myself looking across the room, watching the blonde watch Blaine. She flashed smiles and eye-commentary at him as the sermon went on.

I studied his responses, cataloging them without really meaning to. He laughed when she made cross-eyes at him during some reference to teenagers bouncing in and out of love at the drop of a hat. He returned a couple of smiles, and she winked at him. I still couldn’t decide who she was, but her face was familiar—undoubtedly from high school. She flashed a couple glances my way, thinking the same thing about me, I supposed. Each time, I pretended to be studying the colored glass in the windows behind her head.

Farther down the Underhill pew, Mama B swiveled a narrow glance over her shoulder, and caught the blonde flirting with Blaine. Mama B’s silent message to the blonde seemed clear enough. Mind your business.

Hmm . . .

The blonde turned her attention to the sermon again, and I did, as well.

“ . . . and so much of that is true about love. It’s the best feeling in the world. It’s glorious, but Hollywood teaches us that love is weak and fickle, that evil doesn’t have a very tough time overtaking it. If you watch enough movies, you’ll end up believing that sooner or later all love is doomed to fail, that a broken, wicked, sinful, hate-filled world is just more than love can stand up against. That when a marriage fails, we shouldn’t be surprised. That when a family falls apart, or a neighbor hates a neighbor, or a kid bullies another kid in school, or a church body divides into factions, we should accept that as part of life, because the world is imperfect—so imperfect, in fact, that it’s more than love can combat. But what we don’t realize—what the writers of the Bible knew that we’ve lost track of—is that love is the very essence of God, and God is powerful. In fact, He is all-powerful.”

Pausing to let the point sink in, Reverend Hay moved from behind the pulpit, stood at the edge of the steps and held up his long, thin hands. “Brothers and sisters, don’t let anyone convince you that love isn’t strong enough to combat temptation or hate or prejudice or past hurts or misunderstandings or drugs or alcohol or culture clashes or self-loathing or any other form of evil that may afflict your life or the lives of those around you. Love doesn’t need us to protect it from those things. Love is our protection. Great, big, crazy, extravagant, confident love, like the love God has for every one of us. Love that accepts us just as we are.

“If we only love people who are exactly like us, why, we’re really just loving ourselves, aren’t we?” He paused, gathering murmurs from the audience and a disinterested look or two from the casserole ladies. I glanced sideways at my mother and my brother, thought about all the ways I’d been frustrated with them over the years, all the decisions I’d criticized. Was I really just pointing at the mirror and saying, If you’ll be more like me, I’ll love you more?

A thorn poked somewhere inside me as Reverend Hay went on, the audience now hanging on his hook, ready to be reeled in. “But when we put on that great, big, godly love and go out into the world, we’re ready to do battle with evil, with prejudice . . . yes, and sometimes even with ourselves. Sometimes the armor of love is heavy. Sometimes it’s cumbersome, uncomfortable, and unwieldy. Sometimes it’ll make you sweat, or keep you from having the knee-jerk reaction that’d be satisfying in the moment but would leave blood on the battlefield.

“Divine love is the key to churches that cleave together, to marriages that last and families that overcome, to friendships that forgive insult, and hands that reach out to those who are different from us. We’ve got to love each other more than we love our own reflections in the mirror. When we can do that, love is both a sword and a shield. No matter where we go, or what kind of battle we’re facing, it’s all the armor we need.”

Reverend Hay moved to the head of the aisle then, and the pianist played an invitation song. A man and wife came forward to join the church—retirees, from the look of it. Reverend Hay introduced them to the members.

As the service wound down, my attention moved to a survey of the exits and who was sitting near them. I tried to gauge the quickest path out, the one that would allow me to vacate the premises without being stopped by curious church ladies, trying to ferret out information on our family’s plans and my mother’s reasons for suddenly taking up residence in Moses Lake. If the ladies’ drop-by visit to Uncle Herbert’s house the other day hadn’t clued me in to the fact that we were the current topic of small-town speculation, the plethora of whispers and glances in church would have.

I felt like I was suffocating on a combination of the curiosity in the air and random memories of my dad. He was everywhere in this building, frozen in time. During our visits to Moses Lake, we’d come to church for Christmas pageants, Easter egg hunts, potluck suppers, a wedding or two. Every time we entered this place, people gathered around my dad as if he were visiting royalty, and I could see how much he missed Moses Lake. I always wondered if he resented my mother for putting him in a tug-of-war between his hometown and her.

Just as Reverend Hay was about to end the service, a little boy popped out of his seat and walked the aisle, loudly declaring that he wanted to be baptized. I thought about my dad. The day I was baptized along with a group of friends in our mega-church back home, he’d told me the story about getting up and walking down the aisle all by himself here in this little church. Now, looking at that little boy, I saw Dad. I wondered if, up in heaven, he was looking down and remembering. My dad, I realized now, showed us the kind of love Reverend Hay was talking about. He accepted people the way they were, even my mother, even when her inconsistencies caused him embarrassment, or inconvenience, or pain. If only I had inherited that trait from him, along with his hair and eye color. I wanted to be less like the casserole ladies and more like my dad; I just didn’t know where to start.

When everyone stood up to go forward and hug and congratulate the newest members of the church, I whispered to Uncle Charley that I was going to walk home, and I ducked through an exit door into the parking lot. The air outside was brisk, but it felt good. Moses Lake glistening in the midday sun brought memories of my dad, and the thoughts were good thoughts, not painful spears with which I tormented myself. I felt as if my father were walking the path through the woods beside me, glad to see me in the place that he loved.

How would he feel about the land sale? Would he be pleased to know that something was happening that would provide jobs and much-needed income for Moses Lake, or would he be unhappy that the farmland would be developed? I wished I knew.

The family was already back at Harmony Shores by the time I made it there on foot. As we gathered food to take to Ruth’s house, I began mentally preparing to start up a discussion in the car, where I would have a captive audience. While I understood this strange, nostalgic idea of Moses Lake as the idyllic family homeplace, in which Mom and Clay would happily settle while seeing the older generation through their senior years, I still knew it was impractical. Mom would never survive without her university dinners, her meditation classes, and the throng of graduate students, smitten by her knowledge of everything from Chaucer to Pope. And Clay couldn’t even look after his poor dog properly. Case in point, I’d found the dog dishes empty on the back deck when I arrived at Harmony House after my walk through the woods. Roger was on his hind legs, trying to claw the lid off a metal trash can filled with dog food. I scooped out a helping and put it in the bowl, and Roger ate as if he hadn’t seen kibble in a week. No wonder he’d felt the need to commandeer my FedEx package. If he got hungry enough, at least he could use my iPhone to call for a pizza. A twenty-seven-year-old man who couldn’t feed his own dog regularly had no business taking on the care of two old men and a restaurant.

I rehearsed the conversation, making plans as to how I would gently hammer the point home while we were driving to Gnadenfeld. Somehow, I would figure out a way to do it as my dad would have—without being hard-edged and critical. When he gave advice, you knew he meant it for your own good, even if you didn’t want to hear it. I would channel Dad’s wisdom, be calm, yet determined. Businesslike.

Unfortunately, before I knew what was happening, Mom and the uncs had filled the backseat of the funeral sedan with secondhand casseroles. They took off while I was in the bathroom, leaving Clay and Roger waiting for me on the porch.

“Guess you’re in the second wave,” Clay informed me, seeming cheerful enough about the idea of making the thirty-minute drive to Gnadenfeld with me riding shotgun.

I squinted down the driveway, my feelings oddly bruised. “They just took off without me?” It’s pretty bad when you get ditched by people who don’t mind riding to a birthday party in a car with Funeral Procession written on it. I had the old high-school feeling for a moment. Was I really that unpleasant to have around, or were they trying to avoid the in-transit conversation I’d been carefully planning? “I can’t believe they just took off and left me here alone.” How rude.

“What are we, chopped liver?” Clay and Roger sent smiles my way in unison—two shaggy blondes seeming completely oblivious to any undercurrents in the day. It really is true that people resemble their dogs—or vice-versa.

“Of course not.” But I can’t reason with you, and you know it.

Clay bounded to his feet on the top step and jumped down the other three in one carefree hop. He hadn’t gotten the nickname Tigger for nothing. He could have earned a college scholarship in pole-vaulting, but he was just as apt to ditch high-school track practice as to show up. “I’ll go get our ride.” He jogged off toward the back of the house, and Roger scrambled from the porch to follow.

I waited, wondering what cars were left back there. I hoped we weren’t taking the hearse. As far as I could tell, Mom didn’t even have a rental car, which meant that Clay must have picked her up at the airport. Did Clay even own a car? He’d sold the last one Mom bought him to finance his flight with the earthquake relief project.

I heard a rumbling and chugging out back that didn’t sound like the hearse or Uncle Charley’s pickup, so Clay did have a ride of some sort. Moving down the steps and along the front walk, I tried to catch a glimpse of whatever was headed my way. It sounded like a cross between a motorcycle and a street sweeper.

A white Toyota pickup with a crooked front fender rolled into view, the blinker cover broken on one side, an orange light bulb bobbing like a loose tooth. Something was letting out a dull squeal with each rotation of the wheels, and the entire truck listed to the left. Roger had taken up residence in the passenger seat, his head hanging jauntily out the window as the vehicle drifted to a stop. A string of doggie drool dripped from his mouth onto the door, sliding downward over some sort of badly-decayed decals that remained in bits and pieces all over the vehicle. Bugs, I decided, on further inspection. The truck was covered with partial decals of red-and-black bugs. Moving closer, I read the shadow of decal letters that had long since disintegrated or been removed under the passenger-side window. Ladybug Pest Control.

“This is it!” Clay announced cheerfully, not the least bit embarrassed to be piloting a vehicle that looked like it had driven through a swarm of locust and collected body parts. “Hop in!”

I couldn’t help it—I laughed. I knew Clay wouldn’t care. One thing about my little brother. His ego was all his own. No one else held sway over it. I envied that about him. I always had.

On the other hand, I wondered at the odds of the ancient Toyota making it twenty-five miles down the road to Gnadenfeld.

“C’mon,” Clay said. “She runs better than she looks.”

“That’s not saying much,” I quipped, and my brother smirked at me as I studied the truck. The engine sounded a little like the old crank-start Oliver tractor that Uncle Charley had always lovingly referred to as Betty. Come to think of it, I wondered what had happened to Betty when the family farm was cleaned out for sale. The massive estate auction out there had been scheduled for right after Christmas, as I recalled. Hopefully, Betty had gone to a good home.

Opening the truck door, I stepped back so that Roger could exit.

“C’mon, Rodge, scooch over,” Clay ordered, hooking an arm around Roger’s neck and pulling him into the small space behind the gearshift.

“We’re taking Roger?” Surely Roger was not on the guest list for Ruth’s birthday party.

Clay stretched, so that we could converse over Roger’s head. “Yeah, if you leave him home, he eats stuff.”

“Too bad we didn’t think of that before he eviscerated my FedEx.”

Clay shrugged in acquiescence. “Yeah, but just look at all the entertainment we would’ve missed. Family bonding and all.”

Shaking my head and trying not to laugh, I climbed into my seat and closed the door so that Roger and I were nicely snuggled in. I had the odd thought that Clay was right about the family treasure hunt. All of us tromping around the yard with flashlights and gardening shovels was a postcard moment, the kind of insane family-visit story you’d tell your friends about when you got back home—great fodder for coffee conversation. But who would I tell? I couldn’t picture Mel and me chatting about the homeplace while we prepped for a presentation, Trish was always busy with the kids, and who knew what would happen with Richard?

Strange . . . I’d hardly thought about Richard since arriving in Moses Lake. Too much else on my mind, I guessed. But even that seemed wrong. You shouldn’t be fantasizing about making a life with someone one day and forgetting about him the next, should you? If a relationship mattered, it wouldn’t be so easy to put it out of mind, would it?

What was wrong with me? Was I so screwed up, so damaged that I’d never be able to make the kinds of connections normal people made? Would I always be living in my own private space—running like a hamster in one of those plastic exercise balls, a see-through shield around me, so I could look at the world but not touch it? Would I always be that person Reverend Hay talked about—standing there looking in the mirror, only feeling safe with my own reflection because it didn’t challenge my priorities or my choices?

“You’ve got to admit our impromptu treasure hunt wasn’t that bad.” Elbowing Roger out of the way, Clay put the truck in gear, and we rumbled up the driveway, the Ladybug singing a cheerful song of squeaks and squeals as it bounced over chugholes. “Kind of nice just to chill with everybody for a little while, right?”

I felt the sting of an open wound, and I closed off the tender place as we rolled along the rural highway to Gnadenfeld. “Sorry to kill the fun, but somebody has to take care of business.” Deep inside Clay’s happy-go-lucky exterior there was a guy with a perfect ACT test score who had to know that what he was doing was wrong. He didn’t want me around because he didn’t want to hear it.

He shook his head, then rolled his gaze upward in a way meant to indicate that I was totally off base. “Sometimes it’s not all black-and-white, you know. Sometimes there’re people involved, and you can’t just run it all through some spreadsheet. You’re just like Dad. You’re just like he was. It’s all about whatever makes the most money.”

I drew back, stunned that his feelings about Dad were so different from mine. How dare he say that. How dare he even think it. Sure, our dad had worked hard—even overworked a lot of the time—but he kept a roof over our heads. He kept our family together. He took care of us when Mom was too busy doing her thing, and he never complained about it. He held down the fort while she flitted off on every passing whim, leaving us to fend for ourselves while she indulged in self-obsessed ramblings in a spiral notebook.

Dad didn’t deserve this from Clay, and neither did I.

I felt Reverend Hay’s armor of love crumbling piece by piece, clattering through the floorboards and bouncing noisily in our wake as we drove along.

The vulnerable place inside me opened again, bled a little. I turned away and looked out the window, wishing I were anywhere but trapped in a car with my brother. “You know, Clay, why don’t you give me a little credit? I’m trying to do what’s best for everyone.” A lump rose in my throat, and I swallowed hard, overwhelmed with a tangle of emotions I couldn’t identify, much less catalog or control. Stop here, I wanted to scream. Let me out. Now. But if I said anything more, if I opened my mouth, I knew the dam would break and tears would rush forth, draining a lake that had been filling for sixteen years. There was no way of knowing what would be left afterward.

Silence descended over us, leaving an impasse, a broad, dark chasm between us. I focused outside the window, watching pastures drift by, the winter-brown fields dotted dusky green by live oaks and cedars. Roger wiggled around and lay across my lap, his head on his paws. He licked my hand. Maybe he sensed that I needed it. His fur felt soft beneath my hand as he nuzzled underneath it.

Finally I let out a long breath, took in another, and thought about Trish and all the secondhand advice from her therapist. Deep breathing slows the heart rate. Think of something beautiful and pleasant to produce beneficial endorphins. . . .

Why did everything have to be so hard? Why couldn’t the property sale be quick, clean, painless? Just a business deal with a side benefit of putting the past squarely in the past, now and forever? Why did everyone have to keep bringing it up, to keep harping on it? My dad was a great guy. He died too early, instantaneously, without suffering. A gunshot victim. We would never know if it was accidental or intentional, or what my father was doing with the old shotgun in the first place. The gun had been my grandfather’s, used for hunting. My dad could simply have decided to clean it, having no idea that it was loaded after all these years.

Or, his taking the rifle to the basement could’ve had something to do with the packed suitcases in the master bedroom, the man I saw my mother sneaking around with, and the change in my father’s demeanor during the last week of his life. Clay didn’t know about the suitcases and the man, and I wasn’t going to tell him. What possible good could come from causing someone pain over events that couldn’t be changed? Clay was better off writing his own version in his memory book and turning the page.

I wished everyone else would let me do the same.

The Ladybug chugged and jerked, coughing like a chain smoker as we rolled along the rural highway, now ten or twelve miles out of Moses Lake. I turned to Clay. He was frowning at the console, his lower lip pooched over his top one. He tapped the cracked plastic covering over the gauges. “Aw, shoot.”

My anxiety perked up. The calming voice of Trish’s therapist vaporized and more pieces of the armor of love flew out the window. “What? What’s Aw, shoot?”

The truck lurched, and Roger slid forward, his front half landing on the floorboard. He turned and eyed me with a frown, as in, Well, look at what’s happened to me. I pushed the other half of him onto the floor, so that he was sitting on my feet.

Clay downshifted. “Yeah, we’re low on gas.”

“We’re what?” I pictured being stranded in the cold on the side of the road and missing Ruth’s birthday gathering, which I was looking forward to.

“The gauge sticks,” Clay said, as if that were an explanation.

I sat up straighter in my seat, gripping the armrest on the door, though I wasn’t sure why. A bailout wouldn’t help at this point. Roger whined, indicating that he, too, was worried. Perhaps he remembered the bike trip, when Clay stranded them both in the mountains. “Well, if the gauge sticks, don’t you keep some kind of track of how many miles you’ve driven since you filled up?”

Clay shrugged. “I knew we’d be going past the farm. I figured we could pick up some gas there, if we needed it.”

The logic of that was dazzling. “But . . . how do you know if you need gas, until you, like, run out?”

“It’ll chug a mile or two.”

“But what if the chugging begins, and we’re more than a mile or two from the farm? Ever think of that?” That sealed it. My brother would never grow up and start to think like a normal human. He would always be some strange combination of Winnie the Pooh and my mother. Oh, bother.

“We’re not.” He motioned calmly toward the window. “Look.”

I surveyed the surrounding territory, and it did look familiar. Some things had changed, but I recognized a few of the landmarks that had always told me we were nearing the family farm. While this was great luck, Clay’s sense of planning still stunk.

“Have a little faith, sis,” he said, as if he knew what I was thinking. Perhaps he could see my white-knuckled grip on the door handle as we chugged along the shoulder of the road, the vehicle gasping, wheezing, threatening to give up, then catching another burst of fumes and lurching forward. In the driver’s seat, my brother was perfectly calm. I was envious of him, in a strange way. What would it be like to be so completely unaffected by fear? When I was with Clay, I couldn’t help but feel like I was in a straitjacket, barely breathing, missing some grand adventure because I was afraid to strike out without first studying every inch of the map.

But intangibles like faith just weren’t my strong suit, and I guessed they never would be. Faith was a blind journey, a path you couldn’t predict or dictate. It was giving yourself over to the control of someone who might or might not necessarily agree with your plans. Faith could just as easily dictate that the chugging and the farm gate wouldn’t occur at the same time, and that you’d end up standing on the side of the road, at the mercy of strangers. That wasn’t something I wanted to experience. Clay, on the other hand, would look at it as an event that was meant to happen, an opportunity for an intended side trip of some kind. He would seek the meaning in it. He had learned that kind of thinking from my mother.

Which was exactly why I rejected it.

If you tried to erect a building based on faith, you’d end up with a mess. That was why you needed to create a blueprint ahead of time and follow it.

We ended up rolling into the farm, crawling and staggering up the dusty, gravel lane just as the gas gave out. The Ladybug came to rest in the center of the farmyard, the tall, hip-roofed barn on the left, and on the right, the two-story clapboard house my grandparents had built. Next to their house, the smaller stone house, the original dwelling on the farm, squatted silent and shadow-filled. I turned away, so that I wouldn’t have to see it. I’d been there a thousand times in my dreams. My father died in that house. No one had lived in it since.

Turning toward the barn, I searched for happier memories as Clay put the pickup in park. I remembered my grandfather, a quiet but gentle man, showing me how to whittle and how to find caterpillar cocoons under milkweed leaves. I remembered playing pirate ship with Clay on the horse-drawn hay wagon that was slowly rotting in the sun.

Just looking at the barn made my mouth water for one of the RC colas my grandfather always kept in a refrigerator out there. Uncle Charley’s old Ford tractor, Betty, was still sitting in the doorway, seeming to indicate that the refrigerator and the RC colas would still be there, too.

“Oh, hey, there’s Betty,” I observed, anxious to distract my mind from darker things. Didn’t it bother Clay at all, coming here, seeing the house where Dad had died? “I didn’t know Betty was still around.”

Clay glanced my way enthusiastically, stopping halfway out the door. “You’d be surprised what’s here. Want to take a look?”

“Nah,” I said quickly, wrapping my arms around myself. “I’ll just wait while you gas up. It’s cold out there.” The cold wasn’t the problem, of course; the memories were. They were an assault of roses and arrows, some sweet, some painful. My father used to take me for rides on Betty during our visits. I loved it when he did that. Sometimes we would drive all the way to the lakeshore, through the wooded hills on the back of the farm. He’d sweep a hand over the water and talk about how the whole valley used to be filled with farm fields—cotton, sorghum, corn. There were even a couple of small towns, now buried under thousands of acres of water.

I remembered looking at the lake and trying to imagine what was underneath.

Strange, I hadn’t thought about those tractor rides with my father in years. The memories came back now, fresh, sweet, and fragrant, smelling of grease and diesel smoke, dry grass and caliche mud. I rested my head against the seat and breathed in the memories as Clay fetched gas from the barn, fueled up the Ladybug, did something under the hood, then slid back into the driver’s seat.

“Remember when Dad used to take us down to the lake on the tractor?” I asked.

Clay turned the key and pumped the gas pedal. “He did more of that with you than he did with me.” The Ladybug roared to life, sending out a cloud of black smoke that sailed past us on the breeze. “You were the one who liked the tractors and stuff.”

“Guess I was.” Relaxing in my seat, I smiled out the window as we circled the farmyard and left the place behind. “You were always too busy coming up with strange costumes and pretending to be a dinosaur hunter or Batman.” Even in childhood, Clay’s imagination was amazing. He only lived part-time in the real world.

“I haven’t changed much.” He echoed the thought I’d been forming.

I felt a rush of tenderness toward my brother as we turned onto the highway and rolled toward Gnadenfeld. Whatever else happened, however imperfect we were at loving each other, Clay and I would always be tied together by memories, a shared past, an understanding that no one else could duplicate. “Maybe change is overrated.”

He blinked, then snickered, like he couldn’t believe he was hearing that from me. The words did taste a little strange coming out, but they were heartfelt. I did love my brother, despite all his impracticalities.

The rest of the way to Gnadenfeld, we talked about some of the imaginary characters Clay had created as a kid. Off and on, I’d served as a bit player or cameraman during his fantasy productions. We were laughing about his Star Wars obsession as we passed through Gnadenfeld, its pristine antique shops, Mennonite bakeries, quilt stores, and mom-and-pop restaurants speaking of a healthy economy and plenty of tourism. Guten Tag, the sign read. Good day.

Judging by the look of the town, Gnadenfeld was enjoying good days. When I was little, the place had practically withered away, the Mennonite families moving off, finding it difficult to make a living farming in this hardscrabble country. Now the town spoke of prosperity, a symbiotic economy having developed between residents who worked for Proxica, the Mennonites who’d left the family farms to operate corporately-owned poultry production barns or to work in the processing plant, and those who still farmed and lived the old-fashioned way, selling their wares in roadside stands and the bakeries in town. The Mennonite residents of Gnadenfeld ranged from highly conservative to those who lived fully modern lives. They existed harmoniously, other than some differences in philosophy about mindless entertainment, like television. There seemed to be a place for all of them.

I imagined the economy of Moses Lake booming like this, the town thriving rather than scraping along on tourism dollars and dealing with a school in which half the population lived below poverty level in Chinquapin Peaks. I considered pointing that out to Clay, but I couldn’t bring myself to spoil the pleasant mood in the car.

Memories—fresh and powerful, like a summer rainstorm—surrounded me as we turned into the gateway of Ruth’s family dairy. I knew this place. I remembered coming here with Ruth several times over the years. She’d brought us here the night after my father’s death. She’d taken Clay and me home with her, and we’d stayed in her sister’s house at the dairy, where we were surrounded by kids, animals, activity. Distractions.

Ruth had led us into the big, white two-story house, given us fresh milk and oatmeal cookies. She’d stroked my hair, kissed the top of my head, told me everything would be all right. That night she knelt with me by the bed, and we prayed together. But I was praying for something that couldn’t happen. God, please don’t let my dad be gone . . . please . . .

I’d never thought about the specifics of that night until now. The moments, the days after my father’s death were a blur of family, dark clothes, dark thoughts, stark little rooms with police officers asking questions. Heather, were there any problems between your parents that you knew of? Did you hear any arguments? There were packed suitcases in your parents’ room. Do you know why your mother was packing . . . ?

The questions burned again now, demanded answers I didn’t have. I couldn’t remember anything after hearing the shot and running to the cellar door. I didn’t know what happened next. I didn’t know how much I’d seen or what I’d seen. Mom said she’d come into the cellar from the outside door when she heard the gun go off. She told the police she’d caught me on the stairs, turned me away before I made it to the bottom, before I could see anything.

Had she? Was that true?

Did Ruth know what had really happened that day? Did she know more than I knew?

The trip up Ruth’s driveway took on a strange sense of urgency, an eerie feeling that chased away the beauty of the dairy farm, where various members of Ruth’s family lived in three different houses, generations alternating through as elders passed on and younger members married. Beyond the green fields and tall white-washed stone dairy barns, a collection of toys in the yard—a wooden teeter-totter, a homemade swing set, a carousel of a sort, made by cabling a ring of wooden seats to a tall center pole—testified to the fact that there were children living on the farm now.

The swinging carousel had been there even years ago. I remembered pushing Clay on it the day after my father’s death, trying to distract him. The sheriff’s deputies came to talk with me, and then they wanted me to go with them. Somehow, I gathered that they’d been questioning my mother all night, and they thought I might know something. Clay and the carousel had slowly grown smaller and smaller in the yard as we drove away.

Closing my eyes, I tried to tame the flood of memories. It was ancient history. The police had ruled my father’s death an accident. Our lives went on, but barely—the struggle becoming more and more difficult as my mother sank into darkness, her eyes hollow, distant. Her behavior only helped to fuel the speculation of community members uncertain whether to believe the police reports or the gossip. My mother had never been well liked in Moses Lake, so the gossip was tempting, popular among the ladies in their bridge circles and garden club meetings. The men wondered how someone like my father, who’d grown up around rifles and hunting, could have accidentally shot himself while cleaning a gun. There were whispers, of course. Looks.

But not from Ruth. Ruth had stood by us steadfastly. Perhaps it was easier for her. Being from Gnadenfeld, she didn’t have to live in Moses Lake, but she had always been devoted to Uncle Charley, Uncle Herb, and the family. She’d stood by my dad through the funeral of my grandmother and through moving Grandpa Hampton to a nursing home within two months of our arrival in Moses Lake. When our family faced another funeral, sudden, tragic, unexpected, impossible to understand, she was our rock. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times she had stayed over at Harmony House in the weeks following my father’s death, when all of us, including my uncles and aunts, were wandering through life in a fog.

I’d never realized how deep Ruth’s connection to my family was, but she’d saved us in those dark months—pulled us up by a string, quilted the tatters together with her silent, even stitches. I’d never properly thanked her for that. As soon as high school graduation was over, I couldn’t get out of Moses Lake quickly enough. If nothing else came of this trip, at least I would have the chance to thank Ruth for all she’d done to help Clay and me. It shouldn’t have taken me so long to say it.

I prepared the words in my mind as we entered the largest of the three farmhouses and walked through the utilitarian but comfortable interior to the sun porch out back. We found Ruth settled in a chair, entertaining a come-and-go crowd of friends, relatives, and community members. It was an eclectic group—the attire ranging from Old-Order cape dresses and mesh prayer caps to jeans and sweatshirts.

In Gnadenfeld, the Mennonite population had always been in a strange state of flux, many of the younger members of the community gravitating toward the more liberal church on the outside of town, and the older people, like Ruth, tending to fall closer to the practices of the traditional church on Main Street. Even so, there seemed to be no hard-and-fast rules as to styles of dress and head covering. For as long as I could remember, Ruth had usually worn modest, floral print dresses and a small scarf-like covering fastened over her braided and coiled rope of hair. Today, she was just as I remembered her, except that her hair was thinner, fully gray now, and her cheeks, in the past always round and plump, had a hollow quality. Her dress hung loose, as if she’d borrowed it from someone else.

Her smile was as welcoming as it had always been, her eyes still a sparkling blue, her hug exactly as I remembered. When Ruth took you in her arms, you knew she meant it. You felt her hugs through your entire body. She held me away from herself afterward, her hands cupping my cheeks. I hung bent over her chair, unable to rise and move back so that the rest of the family could come closer.

“You’ve been away too long,” she said.

I couldn’t help feeling that she was right.