Driving Home

By Dana Salvador

As I slipped away from the city lights on the four-lane highway, the land opened up like a collapsible box. The sides, filled with trees and undulating rises, slowly flattened to make room for the prairie, the sky as wide as intention. In my beat-up Riviera, I drove towards our abandoned farmhouse, suffering from nostomania, an irresistible compulsion to return home.

The ache for my family and our farm—torn apart by my father—radiated through my body. After twenty-eight years of marriage, my father walked through our farmhouse, took his clothes from the closet, and left—an action so out of character that over twenty years later I still struggle to reconcile the man I thought he was with this moment. I’ve no idea how long my father cheated on my mother before he moved in with his mistress, four miles away. The veil of secrecy my parents created about their marriage, and the deceit my father displayed leaves the events of my memory out of focus, a grainy film that never uses the correct camera angle.

After my father left, and my mother was uprooted, I walked through campus as if a piece of bailing wire were tied to my breastbone. Suddenly something pulled the wire taut, and I’d drive away from Greeley, Colorado—the ugly stepchild of the Front Range where I attended college—to the prairie. I could be eating a bagel for dinner, studying at a coffee shop, or talking to a friend on the phone and a moment later find myself in my car headed east to an empty house.

On this particular night in the fall of 1998, it was almost ten, and I had classes in the morning. I knew it was dangerous for a woman to drive alone down deserted roads—a flat tire would mean I’d spend the night in my car waiting for enough daylight to change it and risk who might stop to help. I also knew if I drove fast, I could make it to the farm in two and a half hours. Usually people drive as quickly as they can through the prairie. They want to get somewhere. I drove the speed limit to take my time.

These moments are the impulse of youth, the moments I fear for my young twin sons who I hope never have to make such pilgrimages to their childhood home. Somehow, back then, part of me felt that if I returned, even for a few hours, I might make the divorce, the abandonment less real, that my presence could conjure my family’s existence. But maybe I just wanted to float out to the deepest part of my sorrow and wallow.

While I’d lived in Greeley attending college for several years, I hadn’t adjusted to the horizon obscured by houses and businesses, the streetlights and traffic, the fast talkers and strangers living on the other side of the wall of my apartment. The house became a Siren, something I couldn’t pull myself away from. I traveled the prairie like an ocean.

•••

Houses nestled next to the road became less and less frequent. Sweet grass grew in wisps like cats’ tails around the posts of barbed wire fences. Purple thistle filled pastures on either side of the road. In the moon’s white-gold glow, clumps of yucca and sagebrush gleamed like forgotten glass ornaments fallen off covered wagons years ago.

Occasionally, I passed iron gates with family brands and cattle guards marking the entrance to large ranches. The gravel driveways led to houses, outbuildings, and barns far enough off the highway to be covered in darkness. I imagined the people in these houses asleep in front of the TV or in bed, curled up like kittens beside each other, just like my own family is now if someone were to drive by our stucco house in Albuquerque.

On the interstate, a stream of headlights greeted me heading in the opposite direction, towards Denver. The farther east I drove, the more traffic thinned. I passed Ft. Morgan as steam billowed from the two concrete columns on the south side of the interstate. I breathed the decayed fumes from the beet processing plant, a smell as stale as dog breath.

After fifteen miles, I took the Yuma exit and followed the two-lane road. I thought about turning around, heading back, but there was nothing waiting for me in Greeley, either.

•••

Wide stretches of pastureland lined the highway. Every few miles, at an intersection, I saw mailboxes. Some sat on top of fence posts like ours at home. Others rested on homemade wrought-iron stands. Yard lights dotted the countryside. I saw few cars. I knew my friends from college, all city girls, would be nervous driving for miles without seeing another car. The isolation comforted me. There are times now, living in Albuquerque, when I still long for this isolation, for space around me and for the comfort of solitude.

In sixty miles, I passed through two small towns, each only a few blocks long. Clustered streetlights glowed like a lighthouse miles before I approach the town. Pickups lined the main street outside the local bar. In Yuma, at one of three stoplights, I turned north onto Highway 59.

I rolled down the window; the cold air smelled like plowed fields. Short blades of green wheat sprouted out of dark soil near the edge of the road. Once in a while, I spotted evergreen windbreaks. Some sheltered foundations of houses that fell apart years ago.

Highways in the country are narrow; few allow for a shoulder. Reflectors, paced every hundred yards or so, lead the way. I watched for deer. Almost everyone I know has hit a deer or had a close call. I’ve been taught never to swerve. It’s better to pump the brakes, take the blow—swerving might cause the car to slide into the ditch, flip. Maybe that’s what these late night drives were about: facing the hurt head on.

After twenty-five miles on asphalt, I reached Clarkville, an abandoned community.

Thistles and sunflowers grew waist high around the two remaining buildings. White paint peeled and cracked on the siding of the church and left boards exposed to the harsh sun, the cold winters. Maybe it’s all changed now. Maybe the church collapsed. Maybe the trailer’s gone.

I left the solid feel of pavement underneath the tires and turned onto gravel roads.

•••

As I drove closer to home, stories attached themselves to places void of meaning for most: the corner where my brother and sister wrecked their car, putting both of them in the hospital; the airstrip on the edge of a field where Mr. Hadler landed his spray plane in the summer; the old Holcomb place where the bus picked up children for several years and then one day the family disappeared, blown like chaff to far away places. Their house, like so many houses in this area, still stands empty.

Even though it was one in the morning, I worried about seeing another vehicle on the narrow gravel road. I might meet someone checking cows or getting home late from the bars. Great-uncles and aunts, countless cousins and neighbors will recognize my car. They’ll tell my dad or my grandparents they saw me. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want my grandparents, who live just four miles away from our house, to worry about me driving so far alone at night. I didn’t want my dad to call me. If they found out, I’d lie. I’d tell them I forgot something I needed, which wouldn’t be as much of a lie as intended.

Eventually, I saw three silver bins like metal cairns on the left hand side of the road. I’d reached our field.

•••

Rounding the corner, my chest swelled. I knew every inch of this mile. I ran on this road when I was in high school and the past two summers when I returned from college. I jogged in the morning before I started chores. As the sun came up, wild sunflowers in the ditch raised their heads towards the light. Rabbits and field mice scampered across the road. Cows bawled as I passed by, and the gravel crunched beneath my weight, my breath labored but even.

Sometimes, I ran at night. I could only see a few feet in front of me. The maintainer’s blade left a strip of dirt on either side of the road. I used it to navigate the road’s edge. Every noise—crickets chirping, wind blowing through milkweeds, coyotes’ calls—magnified itself in the darkened silence. From the ditch, the glow of stray cats’ eyes followed me; at least that’s what I told myself. It could have been skunks or coyotes or raccoons. At night, I only went to the nearest corner, a quarter mile away, and back several times. Fear held me back from pressing further into the darkness.

To most people, there’s hardly a dip in the road. But I knew every washboard, every soft shoulder, every drainage route. I’m home.

The elm trees my great-grandmother planted stood like guards beside the road. I entered the driveway and toke note of the wild mustard, at least a foot tall, growing up through the lava rocks in front of the house. There must have been a storm because part of the gutter over the garage hung off the roof. Small branches had fallen onto the overgrown lawn. The elm tree my parents planted on the south side of the house had doubled in size. As I followed the driveway around back, I noticed the suckers growing at its base.

The headlights glared on the large deck my father and brother built. My mom talked about buying whiskey barrels and loading them with flowers to put on the deck. She never did. She’d say, “We should put lights along the sidewalk” or “We should plant new trees.” Action was never her strong suit. She also didn’t realize everything would fall apart so quickly.

I got out and heard the echo of the car door shutting. From the glow of the yard light, I noticed dandelions and sandburs growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. Buffalo grass encroached the gravel driveway. The deck needed another stain. I paid attention to these things because they were my jobs—weeding, mowing, staining.

Cows gathered in the corral. A few bawled. When I look up into the sky, the Milky Way and a thousand other stars seemed strewn across the sky like seeds thrown by a pioneer from a grain bag slung over his shoulder.

I unlocked the door with one of two house keys we ever had made. I’m not sure how I ended up with one. I walked through the garage, up the wooden steps to the side door.

•••

During the divorce settlement, my mother had a choice: keep the house or sell it to my father. With all the siblings’ consent, my brother said, “Sell it.”

We assumed my father wouldn’t let go of the house—there’s little market for farmhouses. He didn’t need the house. The day he left my mother, he moved in with his girlfriend, Susie. I knew nothing of their relationship. She’s a ghost who has stolen my father and haunts the rest of us.

Three months after my father left, my sisters and I helped my mom move to Greeley, into an apartment. We took essentials—her bed, sheets, a few pots and pans, her clothes, the kitchen table and chairs, a love seat and recliner. My mother wandered around the house, unsure what to take, unsure what to leave. She’d point to the TV cabinet or the floral living room sofa, and ask, “Do you think this can fit?” We’d shake our heads, compromise on something smaller. By afternoon, we loaded all we thought could fit into the small two-bedroom apartment my mother and I’d share for two years.

The apartment never felt like home. In fact, even with a husband and children of my own, nowhere has ever felt so truly like my home except the farm. But the apartment my mother and I shared felt like a stopping point on the way to somewhere else—somewhere better. Living together while we both went to college reversed our roles. She relied on me to help her adjust to college and living in town. From day to day, I didn’t know what to expect. Some days we’d talk and laugh about classes like roommates. Other days, I’d find her sobbing at the kitchen table. I’d talk her through getting flipped off in traffic or prioritizing the myriad projects due for her classes. Most of the time, she couldn’t be a mother. I didn’t expect her to.

•••

When I visited the house, I wanted my mother to be at the table sipping a cup of tea, reading a book, waiting. I wanted my father to be asleep in his chair like so many other nights. Always, I imagined the idealized version of my parents, the version I’d actually had for many, many years, rather than the desperate pair I last witnessed: the woman who locked herself away from us; the man stumbling home, drunk.

I opened the door to darkness. Staleness filled the air like in an empty grain bin. I turned on the hallway light and wandered from room to room like a sleepwalker. I don’t know what I was looking for—I don’t know what I expected to find.

From the garage door, I walked into the kitchen. A towel hung in the refrigerator door. A teacup and plate rested in the dish rack. A 1996 calendar on the wall showed the month of March, the month my father left.

•••

I could’ve grabbed the cookie sheet or the over-sized pan my mom talked about missing. I could’ve taken the flower-print sheets for her bed from the hallway closet filled with towels, sheets, and linens. But I didn’t. I wanted it to stay the same like a shrine or museum. If I took something back, my mother would know I visited the house. She thought I was out with friends having fun.

We had an understanding—I can come back to the apartment whenever I want without question, as long as no boys stay the night. I didn’t want to see the men my mother might have stay the night at the kitchen table in the morning, either. Yet, I shouldn’t have worried. My mother has never been on a date. I’m sure she worried about me, but it would’ve compounded her worry to know I made trips to the house.

As I wandered into the combined living room and dining room, the absence of the table, chairs, and recliner reminded me everything had changed. Shannon’s basketball and track pictures stood on top of the TV cabinet, though the TV is missing. I walked into the hallway to my parents’ room.

I saw the imprints in the carpet where their bed had sat. I looked at the long, oak dresser with a mirror attached. On top, my mother always placed a crocheted runner, her Chanel perfume, our school pictures, and a framed wedding picture to one side. As things deteriorated in the marriage, she took everything down but the framed 8 x 10 wedding picture in the center of the dresser.

My parents stand at the altar facing empty pews of the congregation. They are young; my mother holds a bouquet in manicured hands; my father looks stiff in his white jacket and black dress pants, a crew cut. It’s the only picture my mother ever displayed of their wedding. They had an album, but my mother rarely let us look at it. She didn’t want us to put fingerprints on the pictures. She wanted it to be perfect. Though so many times, even before my father’s affair, her distance and moods created strange obstacles we carefully navigated like cows walking on ice.

I don’t know why she left the wedding picture on the dresser. I like to think she wanted my father to see it, that she wanted to show she’d always been committed, that she’d done her best.

I didn’t stay long in my parents’ room; I couldn’t make myself. I turned off the hallway light and headed downstairs.

I entered my room at the foot of the stairs. I scanned a few framed photos of high school friends on the wall and wandered over to my bureau. I opened the top drawer and shuffled through papers: canceled checks, notes from an old boyfriend, and birthday cards from my grandparents.

On top of my bureau sat a jewelry box with a small drawer for earrings or bracelets. Because I only have a couple pairs of earrings, I put cash inside. When I opened the drawer, a wad of bills spilled out. I counted thirty-seven dollars. I shoved them back into the drawer. I must’ve been saving for something. I don’t remember what.

I scanned my closet filled with old clothes. I hadn’t had time to pack them for Goodwill the day we moved my mom. After a while, I switched off my light.

I knew it was late. It must have been close to two in the morning. I should go back. But I didn’t want to leave. Even though it was abandoned, even though only memories lived there, even though I couldn’t actually stay, I longed for the place even more.

•••

Upstairs in the kitchen, I pulled out drawers filled with silverware, dishtowels, and recipe books. I rummaged through the junk drawer filled with duct tape, Christmas bows, and birthday candles. I opened each cupboard. I looked at the canned soup and vegetables, Tupperware, plates and glasses. I stopped in the hallway just before the garage door and looked at the bulletin board on the wall.

An old school menu and a few jokes clipped out of the newspaper were tacked to the board. Our kindergarten pictures lined the bottom of the bulletin board. But at the top was a family picture, one of only two we ever had professionally taken.

I’m about two. I sit on a stool beside my father’s chair. My father is in the middle of the photo holding Shannon on his lap. Lisa props herself up on her hand on the floor by my father’s feet. My brother and mom stand behind my father on either side, their hands on his shoulders. We wear our best seventies outfits in the color of tangerines and avocados.

While Shannon and I have blank expressions because we’re too young to know what’s going on, the other four seem happy. Darren smiles as though he’s heard a joke. Lisa’s heard the same joke but won’t allow her teeth to show in her smile. My parents look bright, content. They seem to have no inkling of what’s to come—the joys, the heartaches, and everything in between.

I locked the door behind me.

•••

In August 2000, my sister and I were back in mom’s apartment in Greeley for the summer when my father called. He decided to rent the house to a couple with twins. The young man had moved back home to work on his family’s farm, like my father had, over thirty years before.

I hadn’t visited the house for almost two years. To accommodate the renters, we drove from Greeley to the farm three times in one week. Darren had to work; Lisa lived out of state. On the first trip, we wandered around for hours putting a few items in boxes, but mostly we were mesmerized. One of us would find an object—the cast from when I broke my wrist in fourth grade, my mother’s wedding china, the dress Shannon wore for prom—and we told stories.

The next time we made a plan to work room by room. It helped us focus. The third trip, we brought a moving truck. Like a cowboy trying to zip a winter jacket with too many layers underneath, we crammed the truck full, barely leaving space to close the door. We left odds and ends inside—an old bookcase, bunk beds, a broken record player, among other items. We figured my father could move the rest.

After we loaded the truck, each of us took one last walk around the house. Near dark, Shannon said, “We should go.” My mother asked for a few more minutes. She went to the front living room, pulled back the sheer curtains and looked out across the lawn. It hadn’t been mowed. The limbs of the elm trees swayed slightly. The pasture across the road was brown from the August sun. Tumbleweeds caught in the barbed wire fence dangled and thrashed against the barbs, trying to break free.

The setting sun left brush strokes of orange and red across the horizon. My mom turned from the window and said, “I’m ready.” Before we walked out the door, I put the key on the kitchen counter.

•••

Last June, my husband Miguel and I drove by the house with our boys. We were traveling through on our way to work a summer teaching job in Nebraska. I hadn’t been back inside the house since that August, almost fifteen years before. I asked Miguel to slow down as we approached. Wild irises bloomed at the lawn’s edge. A large flowerpot filled with petunias sat on the cement steps leading to the front door. Fewer trees stood in the backyard, and a plastic infant swing swayed in the breeze on an elm bordering the road.

Because Miguel drove slowly, the boys thought we were stopping and said, “We get out Papí? Get out?”

“You have to ask your Mama.”

“Get out Mama? Get out?”

I leaned over to look at them in their car seats, their hazel eyes wide with anticipation then turned back to the house. I scanned the yard, the line of trees, and the outbuildings. I examined the front window and envisioned the formal living room the way we left it so many years ago: the piano against the south wall, the couch tucked between two lamp tables facing the large windows, the swivel chair to the side; a place just big enough for everyone to return.

I thought of all the secretive trips—how I couldn’t stay away. I want to talk to that girl standing in the kitchen. I want to tell her she needs to stop holding on to everything with clenched fists; she needs to let go. But I’m sure if the younger version of myself and I could be in the same room together, she might say the same thing back to me.

What would that girl think if she knew years later she’d still be troubled, that she’d be married but have paranoid moments when she thought her husband would leave, that no other place had yet felt like home? What would she think if she knew she’d so internalized the shape and feel of the land that memories would never satisfy her?

I knew if I asked, the family who lives there now would open their door, would let us wander through each room. But it would be their furniture, their pictures on the wall, their memories filling the house. I want my sons to see where I grew up, to somehow understand, but that would mean breaking the spell, the one that holds my childhood family suspended in time, just beyond the sheer curtains in the front windows.

I turned and said, “No, not yet. Not yet.”

•••

DANA SALVADOR’s work is forthcoming in South Dakota Review and has been featured in Fourth Genre, Cold Mountain Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Literary Mama, among others. Additionally, she’s the recipient of a Vogelstein Foundation Grant and the recipient of the 2016 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She sometimes leaves posts at www.danasalvador.wordpress.com.

Drive-By

O65A8574 (1280x853) — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Cathy A. E. Bell

Highway 50 is a memory map of smells. The dead rot of leaves compete with the wet scent of new growth. The promise of rain in the spring air makes me giddy like a child on Easter morning. My brother Dave and I are taking our eleven-year-old niece Cassidee home to La Junta, a small town where Dave and I grew up on the southeastern plains of Colorado. I’m driving us through the sprawling, open land while Dave points out familiar landmarks and Cassidee sings along with the radio in the backseat. Cattle-yard odor drifts in through the cracked windows, and Dave and I laugh through grimaced faces. Then we breathe in deeply. The scent of country. The scent of home.

Dave and I are looking forward to driving by the houses and schools of our childhood. Perhaps the urge to reminisce together is how we navigate this new phase of our lives so recently upon us: middle age. Even though our lives in Denver are separate now, we are reminded that we come from the same strands of DNA and the same places. I wonder if reliving our childhood through day-long drives, as we often do, gives us insight to the ways the past intertwines with the now. Sometimes we don’t know how we really feel until we come close to the object that excites us, or haunts us, or excites and haunts us all at once, like our mother.

Every few miles, we glimpse the Arkansas River. The slow-moving river parallels us about half a mile to the north, bending this way and that, its banks crowded with cottonwoods. We pass cows, road-side produce stands that aren’t yet open, and fields carpeted with bright green winter wheat.

Cassidee is the daughter of my half-sister on my father’s side. Cassidee is my only niece so I take her for visits as often as I can. During her spring break, I took her shopping and to eat at restaurants that can’t be found in small towns, and I gave her a ceremony and gifts marking her entrance into womanhood. Since I don’t have children, and because Cassidee lives with her dad instead of her mom (as I did), I feel an urge to mother her, an urge to give her the guidance I craved at her age. I had longed to call my mom the day I began to menstruate, but we weren’t speaking then. In the two years Mom and I didn’t talk that time, I had grown into a teenager and by the time we made up, she barely recognized me. Our relationship has always been on-again, off-again and I know that on this drive I will have to face her ghost because before we can get to La Junta, we have to drive through Manzanola, a town less than a dozen blocks long and half as wide. A town where she lives.

Any time I drive through this stretch of the highway in recent years, my breathing becomes shallow, a reaction to being close to things when it’s better to be far.

•••

We drive past a used tire shop, an antique store, and a run-down gas station. Boarded up windows and faded For Sale signs line the streets. When we were kids, these small towns were alive with restaurants and shops, but now cattle ranchers and farmers are the only commerce left.

I try to keep my emotional armor in place as we drive through town, but then Dave asks, “Hey, do you want to drive by Mom’s ranch since we’re so close?”

I shrug my shoulders. “I guess,” I say. Secretly, I’m glad he asks. “Do you think we can find it? It’s been a long time.”

It’s been five years since we’ve seen her. We can’t even be sure she lives here anymore, but chances are, she hasn’t moved and is probably at home. She might be drinking a cup of coffee, smoking a cigarette on her covered porch, and watching geese in the pond, or she could be with her third husband Ed, dressed in her plaid flannel jacket, stretch pants, and tennis shoes, checking in on the calves born in the last month.

She’s been married to Ed for almost twenty years. Because of Mom’s tendency to cast out her loved ones, it seems unlikely that she could be married to one person for almost half the length of my life, but Ed endures somehow. I admire him for figuring out the secret to my mother’s devotion.

The smallest things had always set Mom off. She’d pretend like everything was fine until the day it wasn’t, all the while adding to her mental tally of my wrongdoings (not paying enough attention to her on a visit, or mentioning her house was dusty, or dating a black man). When the list was long enough, she’d spring her reasons on me all at once, but never in person. Instead, she’d write me letters. No matter how many there were over the years, getting them in the mail never hurt any less.

I’ve tried not to take her hatred personally. She ends her relationships (her mother, sisters, and father, too) for inexplicable reasons. It’s not only me. But still, I’m not comforted entirely—being the rejected daughter holds a heavier weight.

•••

“Did we pass the turn already?” I ask Dave.

“Yeah, it’s back there,” he says. I turn around at the next block and backtrack. I pull off Highway 50 and make a right onto an even smaller two-lane highway. The path looks familiar though Mom only lived here for a few years before she quit speaking to us the last time. Before, she lived in an old, red, two-story farmhouse, tucked in a little valley among the hills and canyons, sage brush, and juniper.

I missed that ranch. Every time I visited her she had something new to show me: her latest bounty from farm auctions (antique crocks, an old sewing machine, a loom), flower gardens she’d planted (hollyhocks and lilacs), and the latest kind of animal she was raising (pigs, goats, dogs). Mom’s enthusiasm was infectious and our visits were full of hugs and kisses and catching up. Sometimes I’d even lay my head on her lap like a little girl, trying to make up for lost time. She’d smooth my hair and say, “It’s so good to have you here, honey.” When I left each time, Mom would load me up with a cage full of parakeets or a box of fabric from a farm auction or a plant. But my favorite time to visit was spring because that’s when the baby animals arrived.

Over an Easter weekend in my early thirties, Mom took me up to the loft of the farm house to show me her new incubator. She was excited to hatch her own eggs for the first time (rather than ordering live chicks), and carefully opened the drawer so I could see the brown, beige, and ivory ovals being kept warm. “If this works out well, I might try some geese and ducks next year instead of just chickens,” she said.

Sunday morning, I was sitting on the couch reading and heard peeping sounds. I ran up the stairs, two at a time, and pulled the drawer open to see chicks pecking holes through their shells. “Mom!” I yelled, “The babies are hatching!” She brought me up a basket to put them in. “Here you go. Just set them all in there. I’ll be downstairs finishing up breakfast,” she said.

As carefully as I’d once held a fragile praying mantis, I picked up each newborn as it broke free. I ran my finger over their yellow or brown heads before placing them in the basket. I’d never witnessed anything more amazing, all the babies coming into the world on Easter morning. The gift baskets full of chocolate bunnies and Golden Books I’d received as a child didn’t compare to this surprise.

After twenty minutes, one chick still struggled to escape his shell. I picked up the egg and broke the fragments away for him. The chick’s brown feathers were stuck together, still moist. His body was bent as it had been in the shell and he seemed flattened. I held the misshapen hatchling, knowing his fate wasn’t good. Sadness lassoed around my chest. Maybe Mom would know what to do.

“Mom?” I called again. “Something is wrong with one of them.”

She came back up the stairs and looked. “Yeah, I don’t think there’s hope for that one.”

“What are we going to do with him?” I asked.

“Probably just feed it to the dogs.”

This was her world raising animals. Birth and death. Often in the same day. She helped cows give birth on snowy nights, raised baby chicks, and when needed, shot sick animals, all without a thought. Once when I came to visit and asked where my favorite, fluffy, five-pound mutt was, the dog who always sat on my lap and went everywhere with me, she said, “Ed came into the house one day while I was drinking my coffee. He asked me if I knew I ran her over. I had no idea. The truck slid in the mud when I pulled up to the house.” I nearly cried out from the horror of the dead dog, but Mom showed no emotion. Maybe she cried the day it happened or maybe she was just numb with all the death around her. Any time she felt the slightest bit of guilt, she turned cold and hard. Perhaps she turned cold and hard with me, over and over again, because she was pushing away some kind of guilt. I’ll never really know.

As we drive towards Mom’s Manzanola ranch, the warming sun burns off the morning clouds. The sky begins to change from patchy gray to bright blue. We pass a boarded-up feed store and bump over the railroad tracks and that quickly we are on the outskirts of town.

I glance at Dave in the passenger seat. Even though our mom doesn’t want us in her life, she is present every time either one of us looks at the other. We have her blue eyes and full lips. She’s never far, especially for me. Every day I see her hands in mine: large palms, long fingers, wrinkled knuckles; and as I grow older, I’m shocked to sometimes see her in the mirror, instead of myself.

•••

For years I hated Mom for disowning me again that last time. Any thought of her was so painful, I just avoided the subject altogether, but writing about my early years, when Mom and Dad were married, has peeled away some of the protective varnish around my heart. I think sometimes she really did love me. For the first three years of my life, when Mom was only seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, she diligently filled out my baby book in her beautiful, round handwriting. “At 7½ months Cathy waves bye, laughs like a goat, throws kisses, says Momma and Daddy and baba for bottle.” She wrote of how I loved my baby brother, David, and how I giggled when my dad chased me around the house. My first two sentences were “Oh, pretty!” and “Momma, see!”

And I know she must have loved me because I remember sleeping on the couch next to her—maybe I was two—blankie clutched in my hand, near enough to touch her while she folded laundry and watched TV. When she tried to carry me to bed, I cried and she turned right around and put me back on the couch next to her.

But her love has been capricious. She loves me for a while and then she sends a letter telling me it’s over. In my twenties she wrote, “I gave birth to you. Let’s just leave it at that.” Those words burned into my psyche. The unloved daughter. When she loved me, I felt whole. When she disowned me, I was broken. Up until my mid-thirties, I’d try to win her back again and again, and usually I would.

•••

“I remember it’s past the river a ways,” I say.

We’re getting closer now. I’m leaning forward against the steering wheel, feeling like we’re on one of our typical adventures—it’s a game Dave and I play—finding these places.

“Yeah, past the river. And then we turn right somewhere after that. Which road was it? Road A? Road B?” Dave asks.

We drive over the bridge and look at every dirt road, searching for a landmark to jolt our memories, but there aren’t many. It’s a vast, barren land, still brown from winter. Unlike the growth near the river, trees are scarce here.

Dave spots the Road B sign. “Wait, slow down. There it is! Turn here!”

Cassidee has shed her seatbelt and is scooted up between our seats now. She leans on the console. She’s excited, so I don’t make her put the belt back on—for now.

As we pull onto Mom’s narrow dirt road I ask Cassidee to find my hat. “Quick!” I say. “I need a disguise just in case we pass her on the road.” Dave is on the side of the car closest to her house, but I decide Mom and Ed won’t recognize him. He’s transformed himself into a biker since his divorce two years ago. His hair is pulled back in a ponytail and a long, bushy goatee hides the good-looking guy underneath. But Dave is more brazen than I am. I don’t think he’s worried about being spotted. It’s mostly been me who’s been disowned. Dave only gets cut off by default. It’s like we’re a package deal and she can’t love just one of us.

I put on my hat and sink down into the seat.

The houses sit far, far apart out here; it’s mostly flat land and fences. I turn off the radio and all we hear is the crunch of gravel beneath the tires.

I went back to therapy after Mom’s very last letter came five years ago. I had emotionally come undone, again. I wasn’t sure how to navigate my life without a mother. I had written an essay about my bond with my paternal grandmother and Mom found it online. Mom wrote in part: “I read your essay. You’ve hurt me for the last time. Don’t ever call or come to my house again.” Maybe Mom was upset because I wrote that my grandmother told me the story of my birth more times than Mom had. Or maybe it was the part where Gram says, “The nuns at the hospital all thought you were my baby.”

All the other letters that came before were signed “Sandy.” This letter was signed “Mom.” I sensed a hesitation in her signature, maybe the blue ink pooled on the paper. Perhaps she thought my loss would be greater if she remained my mother until the end.

•••

“That’s not it,” I say as we drive by the first house. Getting close, I almost forget Cassidee is in the back seat. Soon another house comes into sight.

“There it is!” Dave says. “That’s the one.”

I slow down. My pulse quickens. I’m afraid and not sure what she’d do if she sees us.

The small one-story house sits away from the road with its back to us. The dirt driveway is long, and I can’t help but feel the anticipation I used to when approaching her home. When things were good between us she’d greet and hug me the moment I got out of my car. “Hi, Pumpkin! I’m so glad you’re here!” She’d offer a spread of food when we walked into the house and when I left, she’d load me up with fresh eggs from her chickens (pink, green, and blue), pork sausage ground by the local butcher, and anything else that would fit in the car.

Dave and I point out the window: Look, you can see the barn! And that round metal roof—that’s the garage, remember? And her pond was on the other side of the house. It looks just the same.

Cassidee appears puzzled and wonders why we’re so excited and yet so afraid of being found out.

She doesn’t understand how a mother can quit being a mother. Even though her mother, my sister, has battled drug addiction, poverty, and even a nine-month term in prison, my sister always loved her children. Cassidee knows other kinds of mother-pain, but she doesn’t know the sense of abandonment. I’m thankful she’ll never have to drive by her mother’s house, afraid her mother will see her.

“What would your mom do if she saw you?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Probably tell us to go away,” I answer.

“Really? A mom could do that?”

A hawk circles high above us, looking for a snake or a chick, making a silhouette against the sun.

We get quiet as we pass by the house. Even if she were on the porch or feeding the baby cows, we wouldn’t see her since the porch and front door face away from the road. Her world is on the other side of the house, protected from the outside, protected from us.

I make a clumsy U-turn on the narrow lane, worried she might look out her window and recognize my white Saturn.

I joke that we’re stalking our mother. Dave is defensive and shakes his head. “No, we’re not.”

As we drive away from her house, I know what we have just done is an admission—one without words—a truth not spoken that we miss our mother. We don’t say it, but driving by is enough. We are still drawn to her, despite our efforts not to be.

I’m not sure exactly how my brother feels, but I can finally admit that I miss my visits with her: the ranch; her sitting at the kitchen table, bottle-feeding a rejected baby goat on her lap; the smell of straw and manure; the quiet and the star-filled nights. I miss my mother’s tall, round body hugging me—her large, wrinkled, ranch hands wrapped around my back; the smell of her, soap and cigarettes, maybe chicken feed and hay, but mostly a motherly sweetness that can’t be named, like how baby animals know the smell of their mothers. They don’t have to think about the scent; it just is. A connection from birth.

As we approach the river, I ask Dave, “Do you think she felt us just then? Maybe some motherly instinct kicked in that made her think of us, just because we were three hundred feet from her house?”

He thinks for a while before he answers. The river runs quietly under the bridge.

“I don’t know…maybe.”

I don’t say anything, but I think that maybe, just maybe, in that little moment, she stopped what she was doing and longed for us, too.

It is possible. A mom could do that.

•••

CATHY A. E. BELL writes creative nonfiction and is a member and volunteer at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, CO. When Cathy is not writing or volunteering, she’s earning her living at the University of Colorado Denver fixing computers and servers (and other geeky things). She’s been published in The Rumpus, Hippocampus Magazine, and other literary journals. Visit her blog http://cathyaebell.com or say hello on Twitter: @cathyannelaine

The Little House

clothesline — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Karen Dempsey

We’re climbing the hill where I used to search for arrowheads. But we are in the car. It is night, dark. And we can see only the small patches of road illuminated by our headlights. My father is driving and he knows the turns from memory. In preparing for this trip, I’ve tried to piece together a patchwork of my own memories, to create a full picture of this place, whole. Now, in the pure, expansive darkness, the absence of sound except for gravel crunching beneath our tires, I recall a vivid picture of the farm of my childhood.

We pause outside the car for a moment, breathing in the darkness. I look up for the ceiling of stars I once tried to memorize as I lay on my back on this ground until my mother called me in for bed. But tonight the stars are hidden. Years have passed since I last came to my granduncle Joe’s farm. It is more than the place of my memory, more than the place of my imagination. Yet the hole takes up the most space. I have avoided seeing this place again because I would prefer to remember it instead, to preserve my pictures of it from before the fire. But Uncle Joe is here, in the last years of his life. For him, being here is too hard and leaving is too hard, so he moves restlessly back and forth between this place and Lucy’s, the neighbor down the hill.

•••

He’s at Lucy’s now, and we make our way toward the new house where we’ll spend the night without him. The porch is a tiny cement platform and we crowd on, waiting as my father searches for the right key and works it into the new lock. The old house, we never locked. It had an old screen door that banged, a huge, wide porch that wrapped around the house, torn screens that failed to keep out the bugs. Dad turns the knob, and we move into the small, new kitchen.

This is a house of plastic and vinyl, of fresh-painted walls and furniture donated by neighbors or purchased by my father from a failed hotel. The flypaper is missing from the kitchen. The woodstove is old and beautiful but dwarfed by the imposing one of my memory, the one with the big pot of soup simmering on top. We light the stove to warm ourselves. The burning wood cannot erase the invasive smells of pre-fab modernity that have displaced the smells I remember most. The smell of my Uncle Joe’s pipe. The smell of old books lining the walls and stacked on tables. Of hay from the barn and my brothers’ fresh-caught fish. Those smells settled into you when you arrived and clung to you when you drove away, after two weeks of satisfying long days, in the wood-paneled station wagon with your three brothers and three sisters and your still-married parents.

The new house is tiny; there’s not a lot to see. And it’s late. So, soon, my father carefully extinguishes the fire in the stove and we turn in, my father in one small bedroom, the four of us—my sister Megan and me and our boyfriends—wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags on the cold floor of the other.

The house of my memory is an enormous collection of narrow rooms and doorways: small, comforting spaces. Megan and I slept in the first bedroom at the top of the stairs. She once slid off our bed in the night, when she was about two years old. She fell into the space between the bed and the wall without ever waking. They searched every room for her, only to find her still there tucked just out of sight, in that small space, asleep. I slept through their looking and I remember only the telling of it, but I can see her there, curled up and dreaming.

Uncle Joe’s voice wakes me in the morning. His voice is the same (even now, I can hear him still, saying my name) and I go out to receive his strong, familiar hug. His arms and hands have healed. He burned them throwing water onto the fire, trying to save the house that he’d lived in for more than ninety years. I had imagined a black scar in the landscape to mark its loss, but instead there is just this house. He calls it the little house, as if there is a need to distinguish it from the other, as if the other is still here.

We leave my Uncle Joe at the house to walk the hill with my father, and my father talks about his great-grandparents, the Brennans, of the house they built further up the hill, and the other, the house of my memory, built later for their daughter’s family. From the hill I take pictures of the farm—the sheds and tractor, the barn, all unchanged, the garden, much smaller now and closer to the house.

•••

In the afternoons of my childhood summer visits, Uncle Joe would walk me down the hill to the mailbox. The mailman raised a little flag on the box when he’d left a letter, addressed simply to “Joseph McEneany, New Albany PA.” I wrote Uncle Joe later, from home, just to hold that image of him releasing the flag, opening the box to a crisp white envelope marked with two simple and true lines in my own practiced printing.

As we walked back up from the mailbox one day, Uncle Joe stopped to survey the rocky ground.

“I sometimes find arrowheads out here,” he said.

It was a new word for me, arrowhead, and he described stones worn into smooth arrows for hunting and protection by the people who’d lived on this land long before. I followed him into the house then and he reached back on a shelf in the kitchen, drew out his collection of four or five found stones, and showed each of them to me, pressing their smoothness into my palm. I imagined them bound to sticks chosen for their weight and swiftness. I remember that I felt a grave longing to keep one of those arrowheads, to carry away with me its slight weight, its endurance through time, but I studied them and then handed them back, one by one.

Back in the new kitchen now, Uncle Joe instructs me to pick a zucchini from the garden, a big one, then he follows me out there to tease me about choosing the right one. His laugh is a familiar comfort. At home I have a picture, taken about twenty years before this visit. I’m running alongside my Uncle Joe, away from the camera. He doesn’t yet carry a cane but his walk is stooped. He carries a metal bucket, filled, I remember, with potatoes we have dug from the garden. I’d knelt beside him in the dirt, rooting for the things he’d planted there beneath the surface.

We slice the zucchini into slender green wheels and grill it in butter and salt on the stove. And Uncle Joe talks. His jokes and stories are familiar, reminiscent of other visits. But I’m most conscious of his missing pipe. He must feel its absence, too, enough that he needs to acknowledge it.

“I don’t smoke my pipe any more. Not after the fire,” he says, and stops there, without talking about the ash from the stove smoldering beside the house, or the sight of the flames swallowing it. He complains only about new doorframes, misaligned. He does not talk about the old house.

•••

This is my last visit to the farm with Uncle Joe, and we both know this, I think, when he asks us all to stay a little longer. We drive him to Lucy’s house and dawdle there, until it is time to take our leave and begin the drive back. Joe fidgets about Lucy’s house, distracted. He does not linger over the final goodbye.

A couple of years after this last visit, I will pull out the photos from this trip to bring to Uncle Joe as he is dying. But on the long drive to the nursing home I will remember suddenly, startlingly, that he has gone mostly blind, so I will have to describe them. And I do this, although he has lost consciousness by the time I arrive.

The photos are crisp, vibrant. I took only one of the little house. With the others, I maneuvered the lens to try and cut it from view, but the house creeps in, corners of it, to disturb the past.

•••

KAREN DEMPSEY lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family. She has written for publications including the New York Times Motherlode, Babble, and Brain, Child. This is her third essay for Full Grown People. Follow her @karenedempsey or read her work at kdempseycreative.com.