Don't You Cry(25)

“The rest of the kids have gone to college,” she says, as if somehow I’m in the dark about this little fact, the fact that all the kids I grew up with are no longer here. “Not for you?” she asks as I lay the cards out on the table before us. Ten for her, ten for me.

“Couldn’t afford it,” is what I say, but of course that’s not true. Well, it is true—Pops and I couldn’t afford it, but we didn’t need to. I was offered a full ride that I turned down. Tuition and housing included. I said thanks, but no thanks. I’m a smart kid, I know that as much as the next guy. Though not in an ostentatious, inflated kind of way, more of a sly, witty kind of way. I know big words but that doesn’t mean I’m going to use them. Though some of the time I do. Sometimes they come in handy.

“How’s your father?” asks Ingrid in a knowing way, and I say point-blank, “Still a drunk.”

Pops hasn’t been able to hold down a job for years now. Seems you can’t show up at work completely pie-eyed and plastered and plan to still get paid. After the bank nearly foreclosed on the mortgage years ago, I started working part-time for Priddy because she turned a blind eye to the fact that I was only twelve years old. I washed dishes in the back room so that no one would see, and Priddy graciously paid me under the table so the IRS wouldn’t find out. It was another one of those things that everyone in town knew about, but nobody mentioned.

And then I change the subject because I no longer want to talk about my dad. Or college. Or the fact that the rest of the world has moved on, while I’m stuck in a life of stagnancy.

“Supposed to be a cold winter,” I say as the wind turns tight corners around the periphery of the house like a race car driver, brakes squealing, tires shrieking.

“Aren’t they all?” asks Ingrid.

“Yup,” I say.

“Ever hear from your mom?” she asks as if she just can’t quite let it go, this conversation about my father, about my mother, and I say, “Nope.” Though sometimes I do, sometimes just a random postcard from a place I’ll never see: Mount Rushmore, Niagara Falls. The Alamo. Funny thing is they never say anything. She doesn’t even sign her name.

“It’s not easy being a mother,” she says under her breath, not looking up at me as she speaks. Ingrid is a mother, though her children are long gone, her husband gone, too, thanks to a particularly virulent strain of the flu that passed through many years ago. But Ingrid is a much better mother than my mom ever was, whether or not her kids are still around. She must’ve been. She looks like a mother, the considerate eyes and good-natured smile. Flaccid arms that look like they give great hugs. Not that I would know.

I consider Ingrid’s words: It’s not easy being a mother. To this I don’t say anything. Not at first, anyway, but then I finally offer up, “Must be,” because the last thing I want to say is something that will exonerate my mother for leaving me. There’s no excuse for that, for disappearing in the middle of the night, hopping the train out of town without ever saying goodbye. There’s a photograph Pops keeps of her. In it, she’s about twenty-one. They’d been together only a short time when the photograph was taken, my mother and my father. A month, two months. Hard to say. In the photo, she’s not smiling. But that’s not saying much. It’s hard to remember my mother ever smiling. Her face is narrow, tapered at the bottom to a point. Her cheekbones are high, her nose slender. Her eyes solemn, verging on stern, maybe even mean. Her hair, brunette, cut above the shoulders, is fanned out around her head, a fallout of the generation. It’s the 1980s, early 1990s. She wears a dress, which is strange because I don’t ever remember seeing my mother in a dress. But in this photo she wears a pale gray and foggy lavender dress. The dress is ruffled and tiered and shifty, but it’s also simple, as if trying to be something that it’s not. Just like my mother.

“We all make mistakes,” she says, and I say nothing.

And then before I know it, we’re talking about the dreaded winter again. The cold, the wind, the snow.

It’s after the fourth game that Ingrid tells me to go. “You don’t need to stay here and keep me company,” she says while gathering the playing cards in her hands. “I’m sure you have better things to do,” though of this I’m not so sure. But I go, anyway.

I bet Ingrid has better things to do than hang out with me.

I say my goodbyes and I head out the front door, letting it slam closed. From the front porch I catch the sound of the dead bolt latching. I hurtle myself down the steps and into the middle of the street as a sedan sluggishly pulls into a parking spot before me and cuts the engine. A young lady climbs out, a cigarette pinched between her thin lips. I step around the sedan and that’s when I see the shadow of a lone figure ambling down the road. In a black-and-white checkered coat, a black beanie set on her head. Her canvas bag crisscrosses her slight body; her hands are shoved into the pockets of her pants. The ends of her hair blow in the wind.

Pearl.

She disappears into the morning air, over a single hill on the far end of Main Street—over the hill, getting consumed by the large homes and the enormous trees that fill that part of town, swallowed up and digested, so that before I know it, as I stand, feet frozen to concrete in the middle of the street, she’s no longer there.

And then I hear the squeal of a screen door and I see Dr. Giles standing outside his cottage home, watching this scene, too.