The Flicker of Old Dreams Page 8

  Pop walks into the kitchen. He picks up the phone, looks at me, then places it back on the receiver. Clearly, he was about to call Martha, and now I’ve ruined it. When he takes a seat, I pass him sections of the newspaper I’ve already read. He shuffles through the stack, then opts to read the backside of the section I’m holding. And now I feel pressure to read faster.

  I give up and toss the whole paper to his side of the table.

  “More toast?” I ask, standing up.

  “Sure.”

  We’ve been eating all morning. Something to do. I press two slices into the toaster.

  “I’m thinking of renting out the parlor for bingo nights or AA meetings,” he says.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “It would bring in a little extra money,” he says. “We need to do something.”

  We come to this crossroads regularly—these periods of no income. Though we serve all the small ranching communities outside of Agate, death comes when it comes. There’s nothing you can, or would want to do, to hurry it.

  “You want people in our house all the time?”

  He stares at the phone. The toast seems to be taking forever.

  “I did some cleaning in the basement,” I say.

  He doesn’t ask what I cleaned so I tell him I scrubbed every surface and poured Drāno down the sinks.

  I butter the toast and bring it to the table.

  “I organized cupboards, too. Shower caps, gloves, flower stands, embalming fluids.”

  The clock on the wall ticks. I don’t always hear it, but when work is slow, it’s like someone turned up the sound. I take a bite and wonder if I’m full.

  “Oh, and I finally organized the boxes of unclaimed cremains,” I say.

  In every community, there are always the lost and unloved: transients, prisoners, and elderly who die alone on the prairie.

  “I organized them by the dates they passed,” I say, catching my father glance at the phone again.

  “You should really get out of the house more,” he says.

  “Fine,” I say. “I’ll go for a walk.”

  I’m in such a rush to leave the house, I’m already down the street before I slip my arms through the sleeves of my coat. I zip it closed, sure my father’s already dialing Martha.

  I know it hasn’t been easy for him to find a partner. I can feel the heartache in his phone calls to her, how much he needs someone who thinks of him during the day.

  I pause for a moment when I see cigarette butts at the bottom of the Goldens’ driveway. I guess Robert’s a smoker. At least he knows better than to do it near someone with lung cancer.

  Wind blows my hair into knots as I reach the road that leads up to the rimrocks. This has always been my favorite place in Petroleum. Sometimes I climb to the top to watch the sun rise and animals forage for food, although my goal this morning is just to put some distance between me and home.

  When a truck grumbles up the road, I move to the right to let it pass. But it pulls alongside me, and when I turn to look, the window lowers.

  “Hey,” Robert says. “How’s work?”

  “A little slow right now.”

  “Lucky for your neighbors,” he says.

  He seems pleased with this attempt at humor.

  “Actually, I have some questions about the papers you gave me last week,” he says. “I tried to call, but I can’t seem to get a signal.”

  He pulls a cell phone from his pocket to show me, and I can’t help but laugh.

  “It’ll take a while,” I say.

  His eyes squint and a smile lifts on one side. “Are you trying to tell me I’ll never get a signal?”

  I can’t stop laughing. “Closest cell tower’s in Agate.”

  I brush my hair behind one ear, forgetting, then sweep it forward again.

  “What kinds of questions do you have?” I ask.

  He unlocks the door on my side.

  “Here, hop in,” he says. “I have so many questions, I’m not even sure where to start.”

  I look around before I open the door.

  “Don’t worry, no one will see,” he says. “I know how people talk around here.”

  “Let them talk,” I say, glad there’s no one around to see me climb onto the cold seat.

  “I’m surprised,” he says.

  “That I don’t live my life based on what other people think of me?” I shrug and close the door. “So what if they get mad. I don’t think there’s an emotion I can’t shut out.”

  I’d meant to sound tough and unconcerned but, instead, feel I’ve exposed where I’m most fragile.

  “Where should we go?” he asks, rolling up my window.

  “Not sure.”

  “I’ll just wing it, then,” he says and turns the truck around.

  I’ve been with two men—that’s two more than my neighbors would presume. One was more a boy than a man. I was still in high school, and he was a benched basketball player from a rival team. We kissed and touched and traded phone numbers. His number, when I finally tried it, rang a pizza shop in Agate. The other was more recent, a man who visited Petroleum for a hunting trip. We had hurried sex in the open bed of his pickup when anyone standing on the rims could have looked down and seen us.

  I don’t like to remember the shame afterward, allowing such rushed hands on me, mistaking his glazed eyes for affection. But I do like remembering the rush of blood through my body, the feeling I have now, along with a tingling of misgivings.

  I hear the click of the blinker, and Robert turns onto the highway.

  I feel daring as I watch the town disappear behind us, listening to the songs playing through the car speakers. This is music you don’t hear on the local stations—more drums and keyboard, darker lyrics, bass pounding through the seat.

  It’s funny to watch out the window with a different soundtrack. I can’t make the music and scenery fit together. We’ve been conditioned to reject the world beyond Petroleum, the world most of us only know from TV. Immoral, garish, crowded. Different from us.

  “Too loud?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “The music. Is it too loud?”

  “No,” I say. “No.”

  But he lowers it, anyway.

  “What’s it like growing up in a funeral home?” Robert asks.

  I turn so my knee rests on the seat, noticing, even as I do it, that it isn’t like me to make myself so comfortable.

  “No one’s ever asked me that before.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Did you hang out at funerals as a kid?”

  “I wasn’t allowed till I was eleven or twelve,” I say. “I had to stay in my room.”

  Standing at my bedroom window I’d watch the mourners file into the house in dark clothing. Truck doors opened and closed. Footsteps of formal shoes clicked on the porch and then inside, moving from hardwood floors to carpets. Sometimes there was a piano playing, and always a series of hymns and amens.

  “I was under strict orders to keep quiet,” I said.

  I often skated along the hardwood floors in my socks, trying to avoid the one patch of rough wood that was sure to snag a thread loose.

  “Sometimes I’d tiptoe downstairs and sneak off with a handful of cookies or a can of Shasta. If my father caught me, he’d let me sit on a chair in the very back of the parlor, and I’d watch the ladies’ hats with the fake flowers and dotted veils on them.”

  After the last guests left the house, I’d charge up and down the stairs, run in circles through the parlor room, weave in and out of the folding chairs, shrieking, needing to expend all the energy and noise that had been restrained, as if I were a spring needing to uncoil.

  “And you like this work?” he asks. “Now that you’re allowed in on the action?”

  “It’s a steady job,” I say.

  “So that means you like it or don’t like it?”

  This isn’t the kind of conversation I’m used to
, and it bothers me that I can’t simply say yes, I like my job.

  I don’t not like it. It’s just that I didn’t really choose it.

  It was more that this business was a part of my home. It was comfortable, second nature. I read the pamphlets and played with the makeup. I knew the tools. I watched how my father used them. I followed him around until his work became my play. And my world moved more and more into the shiny white-tiled basement. How else was I going to spend my time?

  “Isn’t there a lake out here somewhere?” he asks. “I’m remembering a lake.”

  “I can show you.”

  I know every bit of this road. Soon, there will be the leaning barbed-wire fence that begins and ends for no reason, and then, lit up silver by the sun, the two white memorial crosses at the highway’s bend—a warning to slow down, to pay attention, to stay in your lane—although all of us instinctively take our eyes off the road.

  “Want me to keep on the highway like this?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say, daring now to watch his profile as he drives. “I’ll tell you when to turn. It’s a while yet.”

  I still can’t get over the idea that this man is the grown-up fourteen-year-old who has whimpered so long in my imagination. He must be almost forty.

  He points out a hawk overhead.

  “You see it?” he asks.

  There are the rumors. Things I’m supposed to believe about Robert. And then, I don’t know.

  “You’re going to take the next turn,” I say.

  I grab the door grip when he takes a right at too much speed, maybe assuming the asphalt would continue. The truck rocks over the uneven earth.

  “Now this way,” I say and point to something that looks even less like a road, just faint tire tracks through stubbly white grass.

  “Right,” he says. “Now I remember.”

  He takes the turn slow this time.

  From here, you wouldn’t know there’s a lake anywhere nearby. The illusion in Petroleum and the surrounding towns is that everything is visible—your eye believes it can see for miles in every direction—when much is, in fact, hidden in the folds and pockets of these low hills. The eye sees miles of yellow and sage, but right under your nose are trailer homes, cabins, black cattle, and the muddy school bus that disappears and reappears from nowhere, like a ghost on wheels.

  We reach the wooden sign, faded and chipped, announcing brine lake. A row of gray, splintered fishing shanties line the bank. Long ago, visitors would rent these shanties and carry them onto the ice so they could take breaks from the cold and fish a little longer. When Robert shuts off the engine, I can still feel music thump in my ears.

  “Ready to answer a whole lot of questions?” he asks.

  He sets the parking brake.

  “Paperwork’s in the glove compartment,” he says. “Go ahead. Open it up.”

  This is not what my father wants, but my fingers find the papers and touch Robert’s cramped handwriting, the depressions and tiny tears made by the pen. I’m quiet for some time, noticing all of Robert’s mistakes and the sections he left blank.

  “Okay, so you’ve circled cremation and casket. Maybe we should start there.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I realize doing both will be tricky.”

  He starts to chuckle, and then realizing we are actually speaking about his mother and her death, he quiets.

  “The price shocks everyone,” I say. “But, really, no one around here cremates.”

  This is a line I say so often, it no longer feels like a lie. Cremation is the most reliable way to put a funeral home out of business, and it’s always a touchy subject for Pop, since he does the bookkeeping. The cost of the casket and the restoration is where we make our money. No one’s trying to profit from death, he likes to remind me, but this is a business.

  Robert has questions about caskets and liners, grave markers, and the difference between a visitation and a memorial service.

  “First one includes the dead person. Second doesn’t.”

  “Clothing selection?” he asks.

  “What she’ll wear in the casket.”

  “Memorial displays?”

  “Usually a photo to set out on the table,” I say. “Sometimes people include more, a Purple Heart or some other medal. But it’s usually a photo.”

  “And I have to locate all these documents?” he asks.

  “Yeah, that part’s a pain,” I say. “Birth certificate, marriage license, Social Security, will, property deeds.”

  “I hadn’t wanted to talk to my ma about this stuff, but I guess I’ll have to.”

  He inhales for a very long time.

  “Okay if I take a break from this for a couple minutes?”

  “Sure,” I say. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  “I shouldn’t have waited till she was so sick to talk about these things with her.”

  “For a while, everyone said she was getting better,” I say. “I heard she had a tumor removed.”

  “She did,” he says. “And then more masses grew in the lining of her lung. They went back in and took out the whole lobe. Cancer returned.”

  “There wasn’t any more she could do?”

  “I guess they could have done more,” he says. “But she was tired of getting her hopes up. Tired of the long trips back and forth to Agate, the chemo, her fear every time the phone rang that it would be more bad news. She asked the doctor to stop treatment.”

  “She gave up?”

  “She didn’t see it as giving up,” he says. “When her life just became about being comfortable and painting, she felt like it was her own again.”

  “She’s decided to die?”

  “Or decided to live,” he says. “It depends on how you look at it.”

  “So there’s nothing you can do for her?”

  “The other day I took her to Agate so the doctor could drain fluid out of her lung,” he says. “And she has a couple of oxygen machines at home now. Those help. But mostly all I can do is set up the humidifier. Make sure she has pillows behind her to help control the wheezing. I buy her magazines and paints. Do some laundry. Watch TV with her.”

  “Sounds kind of nice,” I say. “I mean your time together.”

  “I don’t want to make it sound better than it is,” he says. “We sit together and watch TV because, if we didn’t, we would notice how much we don’t talk. I’ve been away a long time. We’re still learning how to be together.”

  I look at the papers again.

  “At least this next page is pretty straightforward,” I say.

  But Robert admits knowing little to nothing about her taste in music, the names of her closest friends, or her favorite lines from scripture.

  “We’ve written so many letters over the years,” he says. “And I met her in Agate for doctor appointments, if I could, not to mention for meals and birthdays. You’d think I’d know more about her.”

  “I didn’t realize you’d stayed in touch,” I say.

  “She was always sending clippings from the local paper and the school newsletter after she’d read them, with little bits circled and underlined,” he says. “She sent recipes, though I don’t cook, and advice columns, though I didn’t have time for them. But I appreciated how, when she read the paper, she was thinking of me.”

  It begins to snow. Not much, but we both stop to watch the little stars fall on the windshield and melt apart.

  “We’re better with letters,” he says. “You can take a break for five minutes or a day, and there’s no awkward silence or struggle to find things to discuss.”

  I nod. Though he’s also making my father’s point, that he’s not the best person to plan Doris’s service.

  I smooth the papers, realizing we’re done. He still has to fill out most of the answers, but I think the confusion is cleared up.

  “Have I answered all your questions?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I have work to do.”

  I put the papers back in the glove box
. He turns the key and music flows through the speakers again. Soon we’ll be back in town and our time together will be over.

  “Robert?”

  It’s the first I’ve called him by his name. He turns down the volume.

  “Can we walk down by the lake for just a bit?” I ask. “I used to come here as a child. I’d love to see it before it freezes over.”

  “Sure, we could do that,” he says and cuts the engine.

  We step over the knotted ground. The few trees bend over the water, and there is a frayed rope from a tire swing, the tire long gone. Robert squats down and shows me the oil and salty brine—runoff from the old oil wells that have gotten into the soil.

  “See the salt scarring on the shore, the lack of any growth nearby?” he asks. “You can bet it seeped into the water, too.”

  I see what he’s pointing at, but my father has assured me it’s nothing to worry about. More of the outside world trying to assert its will in decisions we can make for ourselves.

  11

  Pop took me ice fishing on this lake in one of his many attempts to find an activity we could enjoy together. We went out at dawn, parked beside the edge of the lake, and built a fire on the shore so we could warm up quickly with hot chocolate on our return. I skated out on the ice in rubber boots, holding a candy bar in one mitten and my father’s hand in the other. He promised I could eat the chocolate if I sat perfectly still on an overturned bucket while he drilled the hole.

  When he was done, still breathing hard from turning the handle of the auger and kicking the slush away from the opening, he let me lie on my stomach and look into the dark hole. It blew its cold breath into my face, and I slid my mittens along the thick icy sides around the hole that my father said proved I was safe from falling in. I, however, knew all along that I was safe because he was there. He dropped his line into the hole and I dropped my wrapper after it. He popped me on the head to remind me not to litter but in a nice way that made me show him my chocolate-covered teeth.