Call Me Home (15 page)

“Sure,” she said, and laughed lightly, though she still felt chilled. “I know how that goes.” Amy didn't know, but she made herself try to imagine what it was to find yourself eighteen and working a ranch under the hand of your father, who held the key to everything you wanted, everything your father still, and absolutely, owned. She had never once fought with her own father. She kissed him on the cheek every time she left the house, and there were times when her throat tightened painfully in his presence,
but even then it was a sorrow she couldn't dream of articulating. He was there and not there. She was conceived two weeks before her father shipped out for the forests near the Cambodian border. All of that year her mother waited for Amy to arrive, imagining the life they would lead when her father came home.

Her father came back when Amy was two months old, but he didn't come back in the way that he should have. He was home two months early, honorably discharged, his face carved up, slow as a baby. Traumatic brain injury, the doctors said, with severe aphasia, dysarthria, and cognitive deficits, and little hope for rehabilitation. The bleak prognosis was lost on Amy's mother. In the evenings she'd sit next to Amy's father, pumping the pedal of her Singer, the needle thundering over the alteration work she did. In between seams she would smile at him while his eyes drifted around and around the little bedroom, lighting on stacks of newspaper, the baby picture of Amy, the Purple Heart in its square glass case. “He's not in there, Ma,” Amy wanted to say. She imagined that her real father – the part of him that had loved her mother, that would have loved Amy – had bled right out of him and was gone before they could fly him out of Da Nang. But it's true that there were moments when he seemed to surface, as though there was a break in the smooth waters behind his eyes, as though suddenly he was looking out again. Her mother lived for those hours when he would look at her, smile, hold her hand – when he was there. She believed – and this was what broke Amy's heart – that she could bring him back. That when he blinked at her and saw her, that it was her own will that had done it; when he didn't, that it must be something in her – or not in her, and that made it her fault.

The band was carrying their equipment out the back, and she could smell someone nearby smoking pot. Groups of people were making their way out of the club, milling on the lawn, the cherries of their cigarettes looping through the air. Gary put the palm of his hand against her cheek. “I'd like to see you again,” he said.

IT WAS PAST
three when Scott pulled the truck onto the lawn with the lights off. Jennifer was asleep with her head in his lap. Amy took the pumps off and left them on the seat next to Jennifer, then went barefoot up the dry scrub lawn and into the house. Sam was asleep on the floor and he lurched up, thumping his tail.

“Shhh, Sam.” He was her dog. He listened to her. She put her hand out and he licked it but he didn't bark. She knelt down on the floor beside him and laid her head on his warm side. He wriggled with pleasure and she stayed there for a long while. She'd never had a brother or sister, just Sam. She couldn't think of a greater comfort in the world than his soft fur or coarse tongue against her hands.

She lay in her bed unable to sleep. She was drunk still, but barely. She closed her eyes and they drifted open again. There was a thumping ring in her ears. She put her own palm against her cheek and pressed it there.

She was awake in the morning before her mother, even though she usually slept late into the day. She put on her robe, made the bed, and walked quietly to the kitchen. The house was full of light and it looked pretty to her, the bare wood walls soaking up heat already. The painted concrete floor. You could have a house like this in Fannin because it was dusty and dry. When it rained, her mother swept water out with a broom and waited for the sun to dry it up again. It was someone's cheap old ranch house, but it looked nice to her today, in summer.

She knew there would have been other ways to live. Her father drew disability checks from the government and sat silently in the bedroom. Their life – her father's, her mother's, her own – had suspended the moment her mother drove her father home from the VA hospital. She tried sometimes to understand the life her mother had chosen or allowed, her implacable dreams, but it was as unreadable to her now as it had been in her childhood.

Her father was asleep, too. She stood, made the bed, went to the kitchen, gave Sam fresh water and some scraps. He thumped his tail against the floor, and she sang to him a little bit as she
began the dishes, something tuneless she was making up as she went along. Her hands were shaking from too little sleep but her mind was clear. The sky outside the window was the color of bone. She could still feel Gary's thigh against her own, the warmth coming through his jeans. She thought about how he had looked at her, like he could see everything curled inside of her, all of her waiting hopes and dreams, like he wanted to reach in and bring them out into the light and make them real.

IT WAS MONDAY
evening when Gary called her. Her mother picked up the phone. She was reading in the bedroom with her father while he watched television and she bolted from the room when she heard her name.

Her heart was beating hard when she took the phone from her mother. “Hello?”

“Hey,” he said.

She sounded like an idiot on the phone. She had known this since sixth grade. As early as sixth grade, when girls from her math class would call her, she was already saying the wrong thing. “What are you doing?” they would ask. “Nothing.” The conversation was supposed to go somewhere from there. She would hold the phone against her ear hard. “So, are you coming to school tomorrow?” she asked once, and the girl on the other end of line had laughed at her. She knew she was missing the point. Gary, however, did not seem to notice.

“What are you doing, Kitten?” he asked her.

“I'm just at home.” Her voice was shaking. He'd called her Kitten. “Not really doing anything.” She needed to fix that, soon. It had been two months since she graduated. She cleaned house for an older woman in town once a week, and she read copy at the
Fannin Herald
because the real copyeditor was having surgery. Amy was good at copyediting, but when Pat Morris came back she'd have nothing again. She'd thought about taking classes in Seguin, but that cost money, and she didn't know what she would
want to study anyway. The girls in Fannin were either going to move to Seguin or Lockhart, or they had babies already and were staying here. Her mother hadn't graduated high school. Her father had, but who knew what he would have done if he hadn't been drafted. “He wanted to open a store,” her mother said. “He was going to own a franchise, one of those gas stations.”

“What are you doing tomorrow?” Gary asked her.

“Tomorrow?”

“No, come on, what are you doing?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Nothing.”

“You're not working at the paper?”

He'd remembered. “No,” she said. “I did today. It's only three days a week.”

“Come out with me then. I'll pick you up in the morning. Come out to the ranch.”

“I guess I could.” Her face was hot again. She wondered what it meant that he wanted to bring her there. He had seemed to hate the ranch and to love it all at once, his familiarity with the land and his enjoyment of the work at odds with his sometimes-anger at his father. Maybe seeing the ranch would explain things, she thought.

“Okay, tell me where to pick you up,” he said, and she told him how to find the American Legion. Because it was easy to find, she said, right on the main drag, but to be honest she couldn't imagine introducing Gary, having him in. Or worse, running out to the car while her mother watched through the window. There wasn't anything wrong with Gary, or with her mother, really, but the idea of the two of them together made her squirmy. And her father – it wasn't time for that yet.

“I'll be there,” he said.

When she hung up the phone, her mother called from the sofa. “Who was that?”

“Just this guy I met on Saturday.”

“Where's he from?”

“Geronimo, I guess. He works on his dad's ranch.”

Amy's mother didn't say anything, and Amy waited. She
opened the refrigerator and took out the milk. She poured a glass and stirred chocolate powder into it.

“Amy,” her mother said finally.

“Yeah, Ma?”

“You need to be careful. You shouldn't go anywhere with him alone until you know him better.”

“I know, Ma.” She sighed. “Jennifer and Scott and I are going to go to his ranch tomorrow. We're all meeting at the Legion.” Her mother liked Scott because she had gone to school with his uncle. Amy thought about the time that she'd watched Scott shotgun one beer after another and then take off his pants and shake his dick around at Seguin Bridge. Let her think that Scott was going to be there.

“Ride with Scott,” her mother said. “Not – what's his name?”

The night of the dick shaking, Scott had passed out in the mud and Jennifer had gone home with Rick Pearson. “Gary,” she said.

SHE WAS OUTSIDE
of the Legion by ten thirty, a half an hour to spare. She went inside and Junior, the bartender, poured a bottle of Bud into a plastic cup and handed it to her, winking. “You gotta have breakfast, girl,” he said. Junior knew her mother. He had spent some time in prison in Huntsville but now he worked here, washing glasses, stocking the coolers. He never talked about Huntsville and he was always sweet, and she liked him for that, for the way he could have two lives. She took the beer and went out to the front patio to wait.

It was Tuesday and the only people coming in and out of the Legion were old veterans, men who sat like kings at their card tables until the rush came in, when they went home to bed. She stood half-hidden behind the front pillars and watched the slow traffic on Main.

Gary was early, too. He pulled up in his yellow Chevy and got out, blinking in the sun. She watched him from the steps of the Legion for a moment before he saw her. He was handsome,
she thought. He looked older than twenty. She stepped out of the shadows.

“There you are!” he called. He smiled at her broadly, and she laughed. The beer was warming her chest and she was already sweating in the heat. She threw her cup in the trash and ran down the steps to meet him.

The drive to the ranch took half an hour. Gary had a Styrofoam cooler on the floor of the truck. He opened a beer for her and one for himself, wedging the can between his thighs. “You'll like the ranch,” he said.

“I can't wait,” she said. She meant it. She'd been around ranches all her life, and they'd bored her – empty land dotted with sheds and rusted-out tractors. In Texas the land was everywhere and nowhere. It was too dry one year, and always too big, but mostly it was just flat and wide, hardly there at all. But Gary talked about it like it was a living thing, someone to visit. “Will you own it, one day?” she asked.

Gary laughed. He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the dash and handed it to her. “Will you light one of these?” he asked. When she did, he took a long drag and blew the smoke out the open window. She lit one for herself. “Hell, no,” he said, finally. “I want to get out of here. I want this ranch to die out. I want it to go back to dirt while my father watches.” It was that tone again, and she looked at him quick out of the corner of her eye. What had his father done? Gary caught her looking and a smile broke over his face, and just like that, the tone was gone. “I told you, Kitten,” he said. “I want to go to Seattle.”

She pushed back a pang of something at the idea of him leaving – she didn't know him at all; there was no reason to miss him. “What will you do there?” she asked.

“Shit, there's so much. There's logging jobs everywhere, and Boeing. I could work on planes. There's mountains, and the ocean is nothing like Galveston or Corpus. There's nothing in Texas, Amy.”

I know it, she thought. But the idea of Seattle, of anywhere
else, gave her that same blank feeling she had at school – what would a life somewhere else even look like?

Gary turned the truck down a dirt road, charging over potholes. The dust rose around them and Amy rolled up the window holding her beer out in front of her so it wouldn't spill. There was fencing on either side, and empty land covered with scrubby patches of grass and rutted dirt. Gary stopped in front of a metal gate and got out, opened it, pulled through, and shut it again. He was grinning and proud when he climbed back into the truck. “The house is down there a ways,” he said. He put the truck in drive and started the opposite way, making no move to take her toward the house. He narrated as he drove, pointing to a pile of scrap metal towering across a ditch to the left. “I'm getting rid of that. I'll make a grand off of it.” The truck rattled over a cattle guard. “I'm putting up a building over there, a shed, when I'm done hauling off that shit. Someplace where we can store tools or park a trailer or something.” He looked at her. “It'll be the first building I've ever built completely alone from the ground up.”

She could hear the pride in his voice again, and she smiled. “It's great,” she said, and she meant it for his sake, even though to her it looked like every other boring ranch. “What was it like growing up here? You must have had a lot of room to run around.”