Over Christmas 1965 he stayed two whole weeks at the Hotel Toledo; he’d made senior accountant at the stockyard and had plenty of time on the books. On the Sunday before Christmas, he joined the family in worship at Grace Evangelical. The services were mild and gentle, wholly devoid of proselytizing, and he didn’t mind them at all; the choir sang “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” while the ushers passed the collection plate. Irene stood singing with a soft, contented look in her green eyes, holding the hymnal open but never looking down to check the lyrics. Peter took note. She’d mentioned Bible camp in talking about her childhood, but only in passing.
He was conscious of not wanting to wear out his welcome at the Colton household, so he spent many hours alone in his room that December; it had a television, but he didn’t like to watch much television. Instead, he sat and thought, in a nice old chair that came with the room: he thought to himself about what he was doing in Tama, and what he ought to maybe do next. He tried to diagram the natural course of events between himself and Irene. He wrote down a few notes on hotel stationery, rough projected timelines extending into the future, but these do not survive.
Over time he became a familiar face in Tama. He’d stay for a weekend at the Toledo every few months, visiting the Coltons, going to church on Sunday morning with Irene; her mother and father stayed home except for holidays now, but Irene loved how the light came through the stained-glass scenes in the high church windows, and Peter didn’t mind. He stole glances at her when she bowed her head to pray, her eyebrows knitted in concentration; and he wondered to himself about the substance of her silent prayers, though he never asked. He did not pray himself but sat respectfully. Before heading home, he’d treat the whole family to dinner out.
Around town, he developed a reputation for being a little stuffy; his manners had been formed in a vanishing time. There was speculation, if not outright gossip, about whether he’d take Irene away somewhere, but he held to his pattern for over a year, nearly two. In December 1967, after knowing her for four years and having become a seasonal fixture at the table in her parents’ house, he proposed marriage at the dinner table in front of the whole family, and she said yes.
“We don’t have to leave Tama right away,” he told her the next morning when they went for a walk; he knew it would be hard for her to leave. She was thankful for a husband-to-be who was considerate and understanding, who also came from a small town. But when they explained the plan to her parents at dinner that night, her father grew stern.
“That’s a waste of money,” he said to Peter, as if there were no one else in the room.
“It’s an expense,” conceded Peter. “But it’s a temporary expense.”
“It’s a waste,” said Harold Colton. “Either you should move here, or you both should move out to Crescent.” Irene’s mother nodded without looking up from her plate.
“He’s right,” Irene said. She was of two minds about leaving home: since coming home from college, she’d felt restless, a little curious about what else there might be beyond Tama, having seen just enough at college to pique her interest. But living a whole day’s drive from her parents made her anxious, the idea of it; they weren’t old yet, but it wouldn’t be long. Her job wasn’t awful, but she didn’t care about it; starting a new life appealed to her, but she couldn’t wholly envision the particulars, and when she tried, she felt uneasy. Still, college had been fun, every year a little more so; she pictured herself out in western Iowa, going into Omaha on weekends, seeing the sights. And she wanted to be bold and decisive, to make an impression on Peter like the one she’d made when they first met.
“You have a good job,” she said; her father nodded with satisfaction. “That’s where we ought to settle down.”
But Crescent was not Ottumwa. She made a few friends and played bridge with them, braiding simple daily threads together into a new life that didn’t feel entirely unfamiliar. For a while she felt as if she were settling in; but toward the end of her pregnancy’s first trimester, in 1968, she began to feel an almost primal nervousness, a need to be near her family. She wanted her mother’s meat loaf, not some meat loaf made using her mother’s recipe but the very one stirred together by her mother in a purple glass bowl on the tiny kitchen counter and baked for an hour and fifteen minutes in the Magic Chef oven. She hadn’t acclimated to the view from the living room window in Crescent: it still felt like somebody else’s window, somebody else’s yard. She couldn’t lay claim to it in her mind. The feeling gnawed at her as her body grew bigger; she didn’t want to have her baby in a strange hospital far away. It is hard to leave home, and sometimes it takes a long time.
*
“The faucet’s broken again,” Irene said to Peter at dinner.
“Seems like there’s always something with this place,” he said. It was true; he’d secured a job at the Tama Bank & Trust before leaving Crescent, but it didn’t pay like the Union Stockyards. They’d left a lot of money behind.
“I washed the plates in the bathtub,” she said. In her high chair, Lisa Sample gave out a joyful cry and slapped the mashed peas on her tray with an open palm. She was eight months old.