Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 29



“Hello Trouble”

Williamsburg, New Hampshire

The man who is probably my father is a divorced professor of chemistry at UNH, living in a modest, crisply painted gray saltbox house in Williamsburg, New Hampshire. He shares custody with his ex-wife of a seventeen-year-old son who, if gossip has it right, is in drug rehab.

And he doesn’t answer my e-mails. I don’t know how to respond to this lack of enthusiasm. I called his home phone once, got no answer, and chose not to leave a voice mail.

So I’ve been forced into the “show up at the doorstep” bit. I don’t like it—it reminds me of selling Girl Scout cookies. But I’ll have to take it. It is, after all, more like a country song than corresponding via e-mails.

I knock on his door and pray his son’s not around this evening. That would be awkward. While I wait, I notice that there are three stamped envelopes clipped to Bruce’s mailbox, ready for tomorrow’s mail.

I hear slow footfalls. The man who is probably my father opens the door. I’m surprised at his stature. He’s at least six feet tall, relatively thin, and rather dark in his features. His hair is thick, almost black, with specks of white on the sides and the front. He looks more Distinguished Gentleman than I expected. (Perhaps when I heard “university chemistry professor,” I just pictured squat, pale, bespectacled.) His dark, deep-set eyes study me carefully.

“Hello,” I say. “Um. My name is Gretchen Waters.”

His face doesn’t change.

“I figured. I thought I recognized you when I peeked out the window. You look so much like . . .” He trails off.

“You peeked out the window?”

“Yes. I get a lot of Mormons.”

I nod, encouraged that he’d seen me and opened the door anyhow. “I don’t know if you’ve gotten my e-mails.”

“I have,” he says. “I hadn’t decided yet how to respond.”

“Do you need more time?” I ask.

“No,” he answers. “It seems my time is up, is it not? Do you want to come in?”

This startles me. It’s not what I expected. (What did I expect?) But it’s chilly out there on the doorstep and not conducive to conversation.

I follow him to his living room, where I sit on his black leather couch. He sits across from me in a matching black chair. He asks me if I want something to drink, and I say no, I’m okay.

He tells me he looked up my book after I first wrote to him. Hasn’t read it, but has been meaning to. Wanted to read at least a little of it, to get a sense of what kind of books I write, before agreeing to anything.

I tell him this next book isn’t going to be anything like the first. This book is going to be about Shelly, not about music. I’ve been in and around Emerson, I explain, learning all about Shelly.

He crosses his awkwardly long legs and asks me who I’ve spoken to so far. I list off a few people—Dorothy, Judy, Diane, and then . . . hesitating first . . . Keith.

He nods. None of this surprises him. He’s very cool with all of this.

“I imagine they were all very helpful. They all cared about Shelly a great deal.”

It’s clear he’s going to be a tough nut to crack. I want to say “And didn’t you care about Shelly a great deal?” Because everything the others have told me indicates that he did.

But instead I say yes and start to tell him a couple of the stories—the more flattering stories—that Judy and Diane told from high school.

After a while he’s warmed up and he tells me one. Shelly was his date for the junior prom. It felt like a pity date at the time—he was a nerd and she was out of his league. It was the one night a year that most kids were allowed to stay out all night—some kids went to the local diner, some went to private parties. Shelly didn’t want to do any of it. She wanted to drive to Cape Cod. Or rather, she wanted Bruce to drive her to Cape Cod. She didn’t have a car. She’d never been there. She wanted to see the sun come up on a nice beach. Wouldn’t that be nicer than getting drunk? And Bruce, who wanted to get drunk in the worst way, said yes anyway, because he was a pushover.

And they watched the sun come up on a nice beach and had breakfast together. And it was one of the most memorable evenings of his high school years. (He doesn’t say why, but I wonder . . . was it just the beach and the breakfast? Is he telling me the story of my conception?) And when they got home, everyone else was hungover.

I’m not sure what to make of this story. I don’t know what it says about Shelly except that she probably kind of liked the beach, and that she was good at manipulating males to do what she liked, which I already knew.

The man who is probably my father saves me from having to come up with a response, however.

“I would say she was spontaneous, but I think she’d been planning on going to the Cape since I asked her out.”

I nod.

“You seem a lot quieter than she was,” he says. “More reserved. Maybe that’s just a first impression. And I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

I smile. Always a pleasure to be told how quiet you seem by people who’ve known you less than an hour. It irritates me enough to pounce on him.

“People think that may have come from my father,” I say.

“Linda’s husband? Bob?” he says, without blinking. “He’s a good man. I remember him.”

“No,” I say. “Not Linda’s husband.”

Bruce sighs and repositions his long legs, staring at his sturdy brown shoes.

“But Linda and Bob are your real parents. They raised you. That’s how Shelly always wanted it.”

“That’s how she wanted it sometimes, I think,” I say.

There was a long pause then.

“Are you sure you don’t want a soda or anything?”

I can’t believe this dapper, sensible man keeps soda in the house, and I almost take him up on it just to see.

“No,” I say, because I don’t want to let him off the hook. “No, thank you.”

Bruce sighs again.

“I see. The gossips have gotten to you.”

“No one was gossiping. I came asking questions.”

Bruce cocks his head and gazes at me, then covers his chin with his hand, rubbing his clean-shaven face rather aggressively.

“You know, your mother . . . I mean, Shelly, was smarter than most people gave her credit for.”

“I know that. I remember her.”

“You know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

This man who is probably my father is starting to irritate me, unfortunately. I think sympathetically of his son in rehab. If I’d been raised by this slippery fellow, perhaps I’d be self-medicating a little myself.

“She was sure she wanted things a certain way . . . because . . .” Bruce sighs yet again and scratches his salt-and-pepper head.

“Because?” This is going to be interesting. I can tell.

“Because she didn’t want anyone to be hurt.”

“Anyone? Who’s anyone?”

“The idea was that you were given . . . you had . . . two committed, caring parents. She didn’t want anyone to get in the way of that.”

“But in these situations,” I say, adopting a professorial tone of my own, “when an adopted child becomes an adult, there is often a natural curiosity about understanding the facts. And I think she was smart enough that she would have understood that. She wouldn’t have denied anyone that.”

Bruce shifts his gaze away from me. “I suppose you’re right about that.”

And then there is another long silence. It had to be about five minutes, at least.

Then Bruce says, “I guess I do need a little more time to think about this. I wasn’t prepared for this discussion tonight.”

So I tell him I’d be happy to set up another time to talk. I’m sorry to have startled him. I just wanted to make that first contact.

He says that he has my e-mail address. He will contact me in a few days.

We make small talk as I slowly head out the door. He asks me how the publishing business is going. Is my book available as an e-book? Do I get paid well for e-books, or is that bad business for authors?

I tell him it’s complicated. As I head down the doorstep, he says, “Gretchen. Uh. It really was nice to see you. Thank you for coming.”

I turn—I must’ve given him a funny look, because then he says, “Really.”

And then he closes the door. What I do next happens very quickly, impulsively, although I admit I was thinking about it the whole time we were talking—how the licks on the envelopes clipped to his mailbox could make good DNA samples.

I yank the three envelopes from his mailbox and slide them into my coat. I’m impressed with myself at how swiftly and quietly I manage to do it. Still, I half expect Bruce to come back to the door and yell at me that he saw what I’ve done—to bring his mail back. But he doesn’t.

And on the way home, I listen to Gram Parsons’s “Hickory Wind.”

I don’t listen to it for any real connection between the song and Bruce or even myself. Unfortunately, I really wouldn’t know a “Hickory Wind” from a whiff of an “Autumn Wreath”–scented Yankee Candle, and I doubt Bruce would either.

I suppose I just listened to “Hickory Wind” all the way home because I f*cking well like it, but if you want connection, let’s try this: “Hickory Wind” is full of longing, full of the question How the hell did I get here, so far away from home? How did I turn into this and how can I get back to what I was?

I’m not sure I have such a nostalgic sense of what home is, but I know I’ve moved far away from what I was ever supposed to be. I’ve sold myself pretty cheap this time.

And the funny thing is, I wouldn’t have minded it so much if it turned out to be Keith. Keith is a gentle soul with bad hair who seemed, oddly, to really want to be the one. It seems he really loved my mother—loved her so much that even though he’s clearly moved on, he’d have liked to have this connection with her now that she’s gone. A tangible thing to reassure him it was real. A little piece of her sending him a Christmas card every year.

Bruce, on the other hand, feels like some tricky part of myself I probably never should have wanted to know about. Still, I can’t help myself.

There are some people who think Gram Parsons actually stole “Hickory Wind” from a blind folksinger named Sylvia Sammons, who performed the song in South Carolina coffeehouses in the midsixties, around the time Gram Parsons was doing the same circuit. So be it, either way. I still love it, and love him singing it. And maybe it shows how heartfelt and how fraudulent some of us somehow manage to be at the same time.