These were the happy memories I was holding on to a month later when Victor took a job offer in Houston, and left me behind to sell our house. He found us a new place to live, and he expected me to come to Houston within a week or two, but as soon as I had an opportunity to leave the small country area I’d always wanted to escape, I suddenly realized how much I didn’t want to leave. I was terrified of even thinking of living in a big city, and did everything possible to keep from selling the house. I parked directly on top of the “For Sale by Owner” sign Victor had left up, and I told multiple people who stopped by (after seeing the ads that Victor had put in the paper) that we were selling the house because “I just can’t bear to live in a house where such a gruesome murder occurred.”
After six months of waiting, Victor started to suspect I was stalling and came to bring me to Houston, saying that we’d just leave our house vacant until it sold. On the very day he came, he huffily pried the “For Sale” sign out of the grille of my car (I blamed the nonexistent gangs of hoodlums who, I’d convinced prospective buyers, roamed the streets at night looking for stray pets to eat) and stuck it back in front of the house. Two hours later the doorbell rang, and Victor sold the house to a man who’d just been passing by. He planned to give it to his daughter and son-in-law, and started measuring the front lawn for the wooden wishing well he was going to install to “increase the curb appeal.” I felt almost as sorry for our house as I did for myself.
After a few months in Houston I came to realize that there wasn’t much difference between the two places, except for the change in traffic and the lowered incidences of my parents showing up unannounced with dead animals in the back of the car. But surprisingly, I found myself homesick for both of these things. Victor tried to convince me that it was a whole new adventure filled with sushi and museums and culture and intimidating coffeehouses, and (much as I had done with Wall) I gritted my teeth and bore it, certain that soon we’d leave Houston and go back home to West Texas. And, as before, that was how life went on for the next ten years.
Every time we’d go back to visit West Texas it would change a bit. The cotton fields slowly gave way to subdivisions. The tractors were upgraded and new. I’d drive around our old town to find that the snow-cone shack I’d worked at was replaced by a parking lot. The skating rink was shuttered and abandoned, the sign filled with empty birds’ nests. The bookstore where I’d met Victor was gone now, and my grandparents’ home was sold soon after they died. Each year, my father’s small taxidermy shop grew until it became a true business, with an always-busy parking lot beside my parents’ home. One day I came home to visit and was shocked to see that the elementary school I’d walked to each day had become an alternative school for pregnant teens, and the school playground I’d lived in each summer had been ripped out and demolished. My sister and I walked through the aftermath of the playground together and I took a small piece of the rubble to remember it by. Now when I pass by the school I look away and remember it the way it was, with the dangerous metal seesaws and merry-go-rounds that eventually disappeared all over America. All that remains of it today is the memory, still echoing in my head, of the sound of my favorite swing, squeaking rustily and comfortingly, over and over, back and forth.
One day, several years after Victor and I had left for Houston, we came back home to stay with my parents for the weekend and my mother proudly announced that San Angelo now had “some new coffee place” everyone was talking about. We drove up to see what I expected to be some rural cowboy coffee shop, but instead a Starbucks stood largely on the corner, looking wrong and out of place next to the shops that hadn’t changed since I was a kid.
“Oh, thank Christ,” Victor said. “Civilization comes to West Texas at last!” he proclaimed.
It bothered me. Not that Victor equated caramel macchiatos with civilization, but that there had been a turning point, a final tip over the edge when I realized that the small town I’d always expected to come back to no longer remained, at least not in the same way as before.
Later that night I sat out on the porch, looking at the same stars I’d stared at when I was ten and had longed to travel to places that existed only in my mind. They were places like Egypt or France, but they were the Egypt and France of a child’s mind, filled with blurry visions of perfect pyramids, and warm sands, and Eiffel Towers, and something that people called “wine.” They were visions of places that weren’t quite real, but that was long before I discovered that the romanticized places on the map were more than just pretty pictures, and that included things I couldn’t have even imagined when I was young. Things like political unrest, and dysentery, and hangovers.