Universal Harvester(55)
He waited, looking around the table, then continued. “Two, we go to the horse’s mouth and talk to the guy whose name we do know, which we can do because his father gave me his e-mail address. Jeremy.” Ed and Emily exchanged a glance; none of this was news to Abby, but she followed along, enjoying the mildly ridiculous but still impressive persona James had adopted, its ad hoc expertise cut just today from whole cloth.
“Or we don’t do anything,” said Emily, certain she’d arrived at James’s third possibility. “We talk more about why this bothers us and respect that it’s not our affair.”
“No, Mom,” said James. “I mean, yes, to me that’s obvious, but Abby hates that one.”
“Would you just tell them?” Abby said.
“She made me send the e-mail,” he said. Everybody exhaled quietly.
“We decided together,” protested Abby.
“That’s what you’ve been doing up there all afternoon?” said Emily.
“I looked at a few other things first. Abby was right, it was all a dead end.”
“Has he written back?” Ed asked, visibly concerned.
“It took him, like, a minute,” James said, measuring his tone; he felt his father’s need for something close to a definitive yes, something to shift the conversation back into the world of known quantities. “He sent me the address of the woman asking him questions on the tape. She lives in Tama. It’s less than an hour from here.”
He was holding something back; families can tell. They waited.
“He also said to leave her alone,” James said, finally. “‘You should leave her alone,’ is exactly what he wrote. ‘You probably won’t. I know how it is. I’ve seen it personally. But I wish you would.’”
They looked around, and down at their plates.
“He’s right,” said Abby resolutely.
“I know he’s right,” said James.
“Is it going to make a difference?” asked Abby.
“No,” said James.
“Was there anything else?” said Ed.
“He said never to write to him again. Not in a mean way, I don’t think,” said James. “‘I know you probably have a lot of questions, but I would appreciate it if you would please not write to me again. Don’t take this personally but all this stuff is none of your business. Sincerely, Jeremy Heldt.’”
“‘Sincerely’?” said Abby.
“‘Sincerely,’” James repeated, and Emily Pratt, alone among his audience, caught the sadness in his voice, this mood of concern for a stranger whose need to insulate himself from some unknown grief seemed both so clear and so hard to claim. It made her feel proud, to have a son like James.
When the pasta was all gone they finished off the dinner rolls. Any casual onlooker would have thought they were locals.
7
In most lives, in most places, people go missing. This isn’t as true as it was in a less connected age; people see more of their high school classmates on Facebook every day than they previously would have in their entire lives after graduation. Lonely husbands or wives form secondary accounts to keep track of lost loves and secret prospects; short of catastrophe, these points of contact never wholly erode. They may go ignored for months or years, but they crackle away in the cables, never wholly out of reach.
In Iowa we had a head start on this whole process, because when we gather on the Fourth of July or at Christmas, we find joy in tracing movements. The habit travels with us; whether we end up moving to Worthington or Owatonna or to the Black Hills in South Dakota, we maintain keen interest in what became of whom, whether we knew them well or not. If somebody in upper management at Mahindra got to talking with Mike about smallmouth bass at the annual expo in Des Moines and ended up offering him a package with better benefits, then that was how Mike and his family ended up in Troy: we may never see Troy with our own eyes, but we’ll know where Mike and the kids are all the same. Bill went back to Ashton. Oh, is that right? Yes, he never warmed up to Storm Lake, he feels more at home when he’s near where the folks used to live. Yes, that’s what Davy said, too; well, but he goes by Dave now, I think he only ever spent two years outside of Urbandale in his life. From Ashton to Bangkok to Spirit Lake to Ventura, and onward, to points further west beyond the imagination, we keep track of our own. It would feel like putting on airs to call it our passion, but it’s hard to know what else to call it. It’s sufficient work until it comes time to part ways, which we always must do, too soon sometimes.
Did anybody ever hear from Stephanie? Yes, she’s teaching again; she was in Ames for a while at Fellows Elementary, they say she had a gift with the special needs kids, but she’s not there any more, I don’t think, when I saw her at the Wheatsfield Grocery she said she still missed Chicago. Just recently? No, it was a while back, Ezra was working the counter, he looks so different from when he was young and still limps a little from the accident. Do his parents still farm? Yes, his father will still be hauling beans to the Farmer’s Exchange in that antique tractor with the cart behind it until he’s ninety-three, it’s all he knows how to do. But didn’t Ezra go off to school in Nebraska? Well, sure, but how’s he going to just turn around and be a Big Red guy for the rest of his life, everybody knew he’d be back. You know that nice secretary friend of Steve Heldt’s was a Cornhusker, though. She came to visit in the hospital. But Steve never remarried, did he? No, it didn’t work out, I guess. He says they still get dinner sometimes, though. I think it’s nice.