“They all leave me for college eventually. The ones who want to stay aren’t the ones I want to keep.” The man turns back to his office. “Come back to see us again and we’ll keep being here.”
“We hope so,” Julie says, and looks at me expecting some kind of merit badge. Jenny puts the paint cans in a plastic bag and I ask if she has a box. She disappears into the back to look, returning with one that’s twice as big as it needs to be. I accept it and pile the supplies in. We lug everything out to the car.
Julie says, “Oh, an ice cream parlor.”
“Let’s check it out.” I close the trunk.
“Only if you really want to.” She keeps her eyes trained on the shop.
“Oh, I really want to. If you’d be so kind as to accompany me, that is.” I place a hand on the small of her back, a bit damp from exertion, and push her across the street.
In the shop, no one stands behind the counter. We can hear voices through the open back door. We examine the flavors. I know Julie will stick with her standard. Still I ask her.
“Oh, chocolate, of course. You?”
“Maybe eggnog.”
“Ugh, James. You don’t even like eggnog.” She hushes her voice. “And that’s probably been sitting in the cooler since Christmas.”
“I think it’s time to give it another try.”
Julie sneers.
I step behind the counter to call out, “Hello? We’d like some ice cream.”
“James!” Julie says, embarrassed. “I’m sure they’ll be out in a second.”
But minutes go by. Still, no one emerges. “Can I go back there now?” I’m not asking permission so much as warning Julie.
“Let’s go. We don’t need ice cream,” she says.
“For real?”
“Yes. It’s a sign. No ice cream for us.” She pulls open the door. I follow her. As we pass in front of the window, I swear I see someone peek in from the back.
Julie lets herself into the driver’s side. She starts the car. I buckle myself in beside her. When we drive past the ice cream shop, I see the CLOSED sign has been flipped. The lights are off. Julie doesn’t notice. We reverse our course through the patterns of zoning.
Back under the canopy of the winding road, I ask, “Do you feel better? Having a project to work on now?”
I can tell she feels taken to task. “I know it must seem like I’m throwing money at our problems, but if we think of the house as an investment, this money will all come back to us in time, and if we update little by little, we’ll be able to sell the house someday for much more.”
“Julie, we just moved in. You’re already thinking of when we’ll leave?” I have also already wondered about when we might move on, about what might prompt such a decision. Would it be the grave or that noise or old age and an inability to keep up with the demands of a home that size? But thinking about the house as an investment that we’d cash in on is not one of the ways I’d considered it.
She’s quiet for a moment. I know our minds pause to shape themselves around that same possibility, of admitting a mistake and moving on, but she spins out of that current. “That’s how smart homeowners think, James. I’m an investor, not a gambler.”
I tell myself it’s not a dig. I tell myself that, if it is a dig, I’m getting off pretty easy.
11
I SIT ON the lawn in the backyard, pulling the thick, multifingered spirals of weeds out with all my might. I thrill when I succeed in uprooting the thick plug of a base from the ground. My back aches and I take a break, staring at that blank spot that hides something I don’t want to know. Wide gaps of dirt populate the areas between the patches of grass where the weeds once were. I’ll need to add a bag of seed to the list of items to acquire on my next trip into town. I hear what I think is a flock of birds at the forest’s edge, but when I look up into the trees, I see a couple of children, arranged high in the branches, and assume there are more I can’t see farther in based on the volume of their cries. These must be the children James mentioned. I try to pick out what they’re calling to each other, but I can’t flip their sounds from chirps to language.
I finger the soil, scraping, unpacking, until it’s fresh and loose, and I begin to work my fingers into the earth, get my hands buried deep enough that my wrists feel the cool soil, and let them stay there, feeling fixed in place, grounded, until the chill resolves, and my hands have warmed the earth around them and I feel the dirt go to mud, and it takes a huge effort to pull them up, and the first thing I think when I see them is that these aren’t my hands. These are different hands from the ones I dug into the ground. These fingers look longer now and these palms open wider. I stare up at the sun until the light burns my eyes, and I close them, pull my dirty hands to my face to find some darkness. When my sight recovers, and I let the light back in, everything looks clearer. My hands are my own again and I can see veins in my legs that are closer to the surface than they’d been before. The grass looks sharper and the dirt is clumped in pillowy mounds around the holes I’d cleaved and I feel a face right in front of my own, but I am alone, and I know that if I am not alone, it is just some other version of myself that is nearby. I feel breath on my cheeks, and I think of the way my hands seemed wrong, and I inhale and the air is cool and the light darkens and I look for a cloud, but I can’t even find the sun because my vision is dark or blocked and I feel a tightness around both wrists, snugger than the dirt had been, but when I pull back, I can move my arms fine, yet the pressure remains. I stumble to stand and lurch-run inside, arms out, muscles taut, the door taking too long to swing shut, and I sit on my wrists on the nice pastel floral couch trying to rid them of that feeling of compression, and my vision comes back in pinpricks as I try to remember how long I’d been outside, try to remember when I’d last eaten. I search for all of my answers in the world, return to look out the back window and memorize the empty garden and close my eyes, trying to imagine I am seeing myself sitting out there, conceiving myself as both inside and outside, and then I feel light-headed and lie down on the living room rug, pace my memory until sleep trips me, and James arrives home, shaking me, sure I’ve passed out. I wake, confused, and he looks at my hands and ushers me into the kitchen, where he washes them gently with warm water and soap that smells like tea, scrubbing my nails. We are both silent, but his is an assured silence, a silence of faith that says, Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out, but for now I will care for you. This quiet chimes like a bell, undampered, and I want to thank him for his understanding, for letting this ring, and so I hug him tight, my hands still wet with soap, and I bury my face in the soft flannel of his collar, and he tucks his chin over my shoulder and I feel the scratch of his beard on my neck like Velcro holding us together. He puts me to bed and in the morning I am full of fever, but I pull myself downstairs for water and when I look, there are no longer smudges on the sofa and the holes where I’d buried my hands in the yard have swallowed themselves.