“Do you want me to give Henry a call?” Henry Jordan owned the house they rented, along with two other houses in town; he kept up the maintenance on them himself. Irene tried to avoid bothering him too much. He was a nice old man and she felt like he needed his rest.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Peter put down his fork and smiled at the baby, who smiled back through a mouthful of food. “You know,” he said, eyes still on his daughter, splitting his tone between business and baby talk, “back in Crescent I hear the Ketterman house is for sale. They’ve got a sink as big as a fishing hole, yes they do.” He tickled Lisa’s chin; she cooed.
“Peter,” she said.
“I know,” he said, still playing at baby talk. “But we’re throwing money away, staying out here. Throw-throw-throwing money. Yes we are!” The appeal to thrift was fair play, and a reliable arrow in the quiver.
“But we manage,” she said.
“I know we do,” he said, turning finally. “And I don’t mind. I don’t. I know you like to be near your parents.”
Lisa cleared what remained of her peas from her tray in one sudden sweep of her short, plump arm; they sprayed across the room like heavy confetti.
Irene was reaching for a dish towel.
“Terry called from the stockyards and says the new guy already left,” he said. “He asked me to reconsider.”
“She won’t eat the carrots, either,” she said, smiling up from her position on the floor. “Carrots are easier to pick up.”
“There’d be room enough for another baby, if we wanted one,” he said.
Irene had crushed several peas under her knees cleaning up the mess; scowling, she calculated the time she’d have to waste on the carpet after putting the baby to bed.
“I feel like I’m just getting up on my feet again, Peter,” she said. She remembered Crescent as a place where everything looked familiar but never felt that way.
“Well, OK,” he said, cheerfully, like he’d only been floating a mild suggestion. But the germ was in the grain. The next day Henry Jordan forgot all about the sink; it was Wednesday before he got to it, and all the while the interior of the Ketterman house grew fine and fresh in her mind. Clean counters, shiny showerheads. It couldn’t be all that much better than this, she knew, but a little might go a long way. And so it was Irene, the following week, who next raised the question of moving house, which she did by first telling Peter how grateful she was that she’d been able to have her baby at home; but it was important, wasn’t it, to start saving up for college, because time would get away from them before they knew it and costs were going up every year, et cetera. They’d been in Tama less than a year. Away, then back, now away again. So much news. It’s important to consider your choices carefully before settling on a course of action; when you keep changing course, you forget where you are. It’s disorienting.
Lisa Sample celebrated her second birthday with her family on October 9, 1970, gleefully smashing both hands facedown into a two-layer vanilla cake with pink frosting, baked by her mother, Irene, at their home, the former Ketterman place in Crescent, Iowa, population 856.
2
On the living room carpet in Crescent, Irene was trying to teach Lisa to play Parcheesi. Lisa couldn’t follow the action, but she loved the dice, the way they rattled in the little blue cup. Was three too young for board games? Her mother thought probably so, but Lisa’d arrived at every milestone early: weaned early, crawled early, and surprised everybody with her first word before she could walk (“bear!” while having The Little Engine That Could read aloud to her; the bear in question was scratching at a tree on the same hillside where the train stalled). As soon as she could say two simple sentences she began putting them together to tell stories about her dolls: “They stopped playing. They need a rest,” she explained to her mother once, sequestering a Raggedy Ann in one corner of the living room and a nameless blinking-eyed vinyl doll in the one opposite.
In town there were only a few other little girls her age. Everybody knew everybody else. The kids would play together while the mothers visited, sometimes at one house, sometimes at another; there was a single grocery store that served as a social hub most mornings. It was a good life, small and navigable.
Peter got home early; it was four. He wasn’t due home until six thirty. “Daddy!” Lisa yelled, running to hug his knees.
“I haven’t even started dinner,” Irene said apologetically, getting up, but this was strictly a formal protest: Peter’s commute, and the way it meant they only occasionally took the evening meal all together, was a hardship for her. She had grown up in a house where everyone met at the table at the end of the day.
“They let us out early to buy gas,” he said, in motion, picking up Lisa and rubbing noses with her before putting her back down. She ran back to the Parcheesi board. Irene knitted her brow.
“To buy gas?”