The house itself was spacious and neat, with very little color. White walls, beige carpet, pale linoleum. The living room held a large brown sectional couch, a coffee table, and an enormous, wall-length shelving unit called a shrunk, imported from Germany. There was a brick fireplace, and ceiling fans turned in every room. There were two bathrooms. To me, these people were rich.
The name of the city, San Angelo, was lovely on my tongue, and just exotic enough. I marveled at the short, crooked mesquite trees, at the prickly pear cacti, the armadillo roadkill. The sky, when blue, burned with blue, and, when overcast, hovered white and flat and endless. Once, while walking through the neighborhood, I came upon the flattened, sun-cured husk of a snake that stretched across both lanes of traffic. From the French doors next to the house’s fireplace, I looked out over the dry canal, out into the land, a receding line that beckoned patiently. Nearly every day brought a postcard sunset, violent and multihued and spreading over the wide expanse of sky. I did not miss Maine’s close granite hills or its towering pines full of shadows. When I heard that on a still night one could see a single candle flame from a mile away, I knew I’d landed where I belonged, in the abundant clear air of the desert.
* * *
My first days in Texas were spent quietly—dinners with Tootsie and her husband, Jimmy, and their two young sons, Alan and John; trips to Walmart and the grocery store and the pool on the military base. I met the Eilers, next door: Angela and Katie and their parents, Bill and Donna. Angela was my age and Katie was a couple of years younger. Angela and I played basketball in her driveway, took long walks around the neighborhood just before sunset, and poked fun at each other’s strange accents. She came to the base pool with us and taught me to haul myself out of the water and salute the nearest flag when the national anthem played over the loudspeakers at four. When she asked why I was in Texas, I told her my mother had been killed, and she did not ask any more questions.
Before that summer, I had met Tootsie only twice: once when I was a toddler and once earlier that spring, when she had visited Maine on her way to Texas from Germany. I have a picture of her and Mom from the evening she came to see us, the only picture I’ve ever seen of the pair. They are sitting on the floor in between the living room and the kitchen, in the very spot where Mom would die just weeks later.
Though she hardly knew me, Tootsie soon offered to let me live in her home permanently. I had a few weeks to think about this decision, to observe her closely and weigh my options. I had to decide for sure by August 3. When Tootsie gave me this deadline, she stressed the fact that it was the last day we could cancel my return flight without losing its cash value. I still appreciate how careful and ethical she was when handling my money. But I could have used a little more guidance, an idea of how everyone else felt about this decision. She did not say, “We’d like you to stay.” She did not say, “Carol would love to have you in Maine.”
Tootsie had earned her nickname in the cradle, when her eldest sister leaned down and saw her there, swaddled up and adorable, “just like a little Tootsie Roll!” This did not predict the tough kid who would beat up her younger siblings, or the intimidating, unfamiliar woman I now found myself with. It would be months before I learned that Army women could keep their hair long, that they weren’t forced to wear it in Tootsie’s unstyled chop. Her face was thin, with a narrow, pointed nose and slender eyes accentuated with slight crow’s-feet. She did not wear makeup or make other attempts to soften her image, and I couldn’t understand why she hacked off her red hair, which I saw as her only real source of beauty. She was puzzling to me, seemed almost aggressively unadorned; she was a type of woman that I did not yet understand.
Tootsie’s husband, Jimmy, was retired from the Army, a tall, broad man with a slight stoop, originally from Arkansas. He kept his gray hair very neat, and he rarely said a word. Tootsie gave the orders: she was a first sergeant, in charge on base and at home. Their sons, Alan and John, ages five and three, were rambunctious, prone to fighting with each other and full of wild energy. I had spent very little time with younger children and did not know what to do with them, especially Alan, a big, blond, square-headed kid who tended to bait his little brother into fights and misbehavior. John, the gentler of the two, was a thin boy with bright red hair who was pretty quiet when left alone. Sometimes, if I sat in the living room and watched TV, he would come and sit on my lap, and the fact that someone so sweet and innocent wanted to be near me was both terrifying and intensely comforting.
Although Tootsie was welcoming at first, buying me books and new shoes and planning family outings for my benefit, I did get glimpses in those early days of the difficulties that were to come. When I first got to her house, I had the occasional habit of talking in a baby voice. This was probably something I did when talking to the cats or to my little cousins, but I won’t rule out that I might have done it at the dinner table, joking around. John had the most adorably garbled toddler speech that I’ve heard to this day. Whenever he said my name—“Tair-wah!”—I felt a pure shot of pain in my chest, a visceral joy that surprised me every time. One afternoon, Angela was at the house and he said something that came out in a really funny way, and we laughed and repeated it the way he’d said it. He sounded so silly! Tootsie heard us and lashed out: “At least when he talks like a baby, he doesn’t do it to be cute.” I was mortified; shame burned through me so hot that I wished it would singe a hole in the floor so I could drop out of sight. How could I have been so stupid, I thought, to behave like a child in this house?
From then on, I tried to hide from Tootsie any emotions she might see as too warm, too sentimental. When the family’s two cats died suddenly and terribly, within just a few weeks of each other—one choked on a toy, the other was accidentally crushed under my uncle’s foot while he was carrying a large, heavy box—I held in my tears, telling myself that after all I’d been through, I wasn’t going to get all soft and weepy over some mere animals.
* * *
The end of summer approached, and Tootsie moved up my deadline for deciding where to live by several weeks. Emotionally, it would have made the most sense for me to live with Gwen or Glenice. But so much had happened, and I’d lost so much, I didn’t have the luxury of wondering why the aunts I loved the most wouldn’t take me home with them. This fact loomed like a cocked fist in my peripheral vision; if I didn’t turn to look at it, I wouldn’t get hit.