The cellar seemed immense, given the modesty of the house above it: without doors and walls and separate rooms to break up the space, it felt like a huge, empty arena. The dirt floor, leveled and smoothed down many years ago, was cool and dry, and the bare-beamed walls were sturdy; with work, it might all have been remade into a proper basement, had Emily not been just delighted with it exactly as it was. “Oh, Ed,” she’d said, squeezing his elbow when they first stood at the light switch at the foot of the stairs, seeing the whole of the room at one glance. “It’s like some great secret chamber.”
It was a big operation, hauling all her equipment down the narrow wooden stairs. Initially she’d reckoned the outbuilding off the driveway as an ideal darkroom: from the outside it looked modest and self-contained, a perfect working space. But inside it was full of equipment, she wasn’t sure what for: aluminum tripods and grubby canvas bags, a folding chair and several hundred feet of coiled yellow vinyl-coated polypropylene rope. It’d be shot through with daylight during waking hours, at any rate; its roof sat loosely atop the frame. The cellar was much better.
When all the equipment had been reassembled and rearranged to resemble an easier, more spacious version of the setup she’d fashioned for herself in their West Covina garage, she went back to the shed aboveground: those lights might be useful for something. Her darkroom, curtains and all, only took up one corner of the cellar, the far one, safe from any stray light from the door at the top of the stairs. A lifetime’s accumulation of books and keepsakes were in boxes stacked three high against the near wall. The remaining space to the right of the boxes they’d set up as a TV nook; neither Ed nor Emily had any interest in the television, but the kids might, if they visited. They plugged the old Magnavox into a power outlet in the basement’s northeast corner, and Ed heaped some old couch cushions in a pile against the wall next to it.
Emily felt vindicated. Back in West Covina he’d tried to convince the movers to haul the whole couch off to the Goodwill, but she’d caught wind of the arrangement in time. “Let’s at least keep the cushions,” she’d said: they were yellowish green, a little grotesque. For her, they brought back fond and now quite distant memories of her first pregnancy, when the couch, new and modern, had been the most comfortable seat in the house.
When, having rearranged them into a tidy stack, she turned around to view the room again, Ed saw the expression on her face: in the year they’d spent out on the road, they’d grown accustomed to the vagabond life, keeping possessions down to a minimum and making do with materials at hand. But now, all this old stuff, the chairs and the bookshelves and the cushions, were a line out to the time before they’d set off on their adventures: to the long gathering time that had made all their adventuring possible in the first place, over forty years of diligent, almost unconscious preparation.
“You were right, you were right,” he said, smiling.
*
It was the first weekend that June when James and Abby arrived; he flew from Albuquerque and she came from Portland, and both their connecting flights articulated in Dallas.
“How long are you gonna stay?” James asked his sister while they waited at the gate. The airport was crowded, busy, and loud, televisions and gate-change announcements competing unsuccessfully for attention over the sporadic beeping of utility shuttles.
“All summer?” said Abby. “I don’t know. My dorm doesn’t open back up until August. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“How’s Reed?”
“Portland is the best,” she said. “I want to stay after I graduate.” James felt a pang of jealousy; he couldn’t wait to leave New Mexico behind.
“You’ve been there a year,” said James.
“But there’s so much going on in Portland,” she said. “It’s all right there, you just walk everywhere. Or take the bus. You don’t have to even have a car. I don’t know. I just fell in love with it all sometime during the winter. For two days we had snow.”
“Maybe you’ll fall in love with Collins,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. “Maybe you will,” she said, ducking out of the way before he could punch her on the shoulder.
*
“It’s just a gigantic dirt lot,” said James. Abby’d burst into tears upon seeing her mother in the driveway: parents get so old when you leave them to themselves for a few semesters. But the men lingered outside by the old corncrib. James wanted to see what he was in for, and Ed was eager to see his only son’s eyes taking the place in for the first time.
“No, it’s a field,” said Ed.
“Fields have grass on them.”
“Well, there’s actually some pretty tall grass to cut through once you get all the way out there to the trees,” Ed laughed. “We gave up before we got through it. But whoever was here last tilled under the crop at the end of the harvest, anyway. There’s actually some stuff coming up if you go out and look.”
James pointed toward the trees. “You guys planning on opening a junkyard?”