Like Family (37 page)

The suitcase was in the tack shed at the back of the yard, next to the peeling tractor and defunct mustached Subaru, and Bub’s
half-built boat, which looked like it hadn’t been touched in a good long while. Although the lock on the shed door was rusty,
it gave with several firm yanks. Light rushed in, falling over Queenie’s old saddle, stirrups looped stiffly around the horn.
A string of bridles hung along one wall, their bits caulked with dried grass and horse slobber. I was so lost in the smells,
sweet and loamy and bitter, that I didn’t hear the wasps until it was too late. They came at me in an angry, humming arrow.
The first sting jangled between my shoulder blades, the second behind my right ear, and I was sent stumbling toward the house.
I heard myself screaming, but it sounded too far off and muffled to be me, and the word I heard again and again was
Mom!
I fell onto the patio, scraping my knees, the wasps around my head like an unforgiving rain. Hilde found me there. She pulled
me inside, stood with me until I quieted, then helped me off with my shirt.

“Kneel down,” she said, and I did, right there on the carpet, in front of the TV and horse light, while apparitions of every
childhood dinner rivered in from the empty kitchen. I crouched with my arms crossed, flinching as Hilde rubbed a camphor-soaked
cotton swab on my back.

“That hurts, doesn’t it? I’m sorry.”

Half an hour later, Bub and Hilde stood in the mouth of the front door and watched me leave. I waved once, backing away. I
never saw them again.

O
N
F
EBRUARY
1, 1987, I arrived in Detroit — to snow. Teresa, Jackie and her husband, Mike, met me at the gate, and we ran through a flurry
to get to Mike’s Chevy Blazer, them in parkas, me in my thin jeans and penny loafers. As we made our way toward the freeway,
Mike concentrating on road signs and Jackie fiddling with the radio and the heat controls, Teresa and I sat close in the backseat.
She looked well. Her punk, longer-on-one-side haircut had grown out and softened, and her face was rounder.

“You’ve gained some weight,” I said.

“I know, I know. It’s a rule here. The Michigan Snow Cow rule: get fat or freeze. Just wait, it’ll happen to you too.”

“What about those shoes?” I said, pointing to her boots, which were puffy and trimmed with ratty-looking fake fur. “Will those
happen to me?”

“Shut up,” she said, laughing. “They’re not even mine; they’re Mom’s.”

Mom’s.
It slid out of her mouth so easily. Would I gain that like ten pounds? Like a pair of furry shoes?

“Hey, girls, are you hungry?” This from Mike, who had spotted a Taco Bell and was quickly changing lanes to get to it. He
was quiet and decisive, I could tell, a military-looking man with short slicked hair parted deeply to the left and a trimmed
caterpillar mustache. Although Mike had been born and raised on a farm in northern Michigan, he met our mother in Arizona.
What either of them was doing there, I couldn’t glean. They skirted my questions like pros, cohorts, divulging only little
pieces of things. They’d been married thirteen years and had come to live in Michigan after Mike’s great-aunt had fallen ill.
Mike had one grown son from his first marriage, but he was a screw-up, the kind who only called home late at night, wanting
money. I didn’t ask Jackie what had happened to Roger, and I didn’t ask if she’d ever spoken to our dad again. Maybe I was
a cohort too, blinking away the hard questions like
Why didn’t you come back for us earlier?
Thirteen years meant I was only eight when Mike and Jackie got together. We had just gotten to the Lindberghs then; we weren’t
even half-grown.

Mike passed back giant Pepsis and paper-wrapped burritos, and we got back on the highway, where strip malls and cineplexes
soon gave way to fields of corn that had been harvested and shorn down to the nubs. Ice-covered, grizzled. On the road, snow
swirled like a liquid, burying the lane markers, and I wondered how Mike kept the Blazer steady. He didn’t seem the least
bit fazed, wasn’t even bothering to keep both hands on the wheel, in fact. He was an expert, I assumed, Macho Snow Guy. I
had seen snow maybe five times in my life. The first time was with the Clapps, when they took us on a day-trip to a town called
Fish Camp to visit a family friend. It was past New Year’s, but the little town still had its Christmas decorations up, weepy
garlands and string lights, fat Santas waving from sleighs. Over it all, snow sat heavily. Wet and dirty, it bowed the roofs
of houses and car tops and turned the sides of the narrow, curving road into peppered slush. I must have been six, then, or
seven. My sisters and I didn’t have boots or gloves and so wore sneakers and two pairs of socks on each hand. We parked near
a meadow, and Mrs. Clapp told us we could go out and play, they would wait in the car.

We were thrilled. The snow in the open field was still clean, like sugar on a table, like something that would catch you if
you fell at it. We left the warm car and ran into the meadow, lurching like cats in the rain, our sneakers punching through
the icy crust and catching at the toes. It was harder than I thought, colder too. When I tried to form snowballs, my hand-socks
quickly soaked through, the wet coming at my fingers like a row of little teeth. My feet were wet too, and cumbersome.

“Come on,” I called out to Teresa and Penny. They were maybe twenty feet away, hunched over and scooping snow through their
open legs like dogs digging in dirt, but they didn’t seem to hear me. I wanted to go back to the car and get warm, but knew
Mrs. Clapp would be mean about it, gloating — here she’d given us this chance to have fun and I’d wasted it. Why did she even
try? So I stayed put. It wasn’t so bad. My fingers were barely tingling at all. If I stood there long enough, maybe I wouldn’t
feel anything, cold climbing from my hands to my elbows to my neck until I wore it like a tinkling ornament.

I must have been shivering a little because Jackie poked her head through the gap between the seats of the Blazer and said,
“Are you warm enough, Paula? I could turn the heat back up.”

“No, no, I’m fine. I’m good,” I said, turning back to the gone corn. That’s when Teresa reached over and put her hand on my
leg. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, whispering it like it was just for us, a snowball passed between mittens.

“Yep,” I said. “Me too.”

F
INDING
A JOB IN
Michigan was harder than I thought. Elk Grove, the town Jackie and Mike lived in, had fewer people in it than the high school
I’d gone to. Downtown was all of two streets and a stoplight. There were three bars in addition to the Moose Lodge, one drugstore,
Ace Hardware, a Pizza Hut and several gas station / convenience stores that sold videos and camouflage clothing as well as
beer singles and lottery tickets. Unless I wanted to bag groceries at the IGA or work at the Yoplait factory in a hairnet
and paper shoes, I was better off twelve miles away in Big Rapids, which was home to a technical college and contained, therefore,
all the expected fast-food places, as well as JC Penney’s, Kmart and a four-screen movie theater. I ended up at Domino’s Pizza
as a delivery babe making $3.50 an hour plus mileage. Granted, giving sponge baths and enemas at the nursing home hadn’t been
glamorous, but I didn’t feel I had taken much of a step up delivering pizza to frat houses and keg parties. And worse, small-town
Michigan was nowhere. Cold nowhere at that.

Two things were good in those days: I shared a closet with Teresa again, and I had unlimited access to fatty foods. Jackie
and Mike kept a freezer full of red meat and cooked everything in the deep fryer. Every day during my first three months in
Michigan ended with a root-beer float. I gained my Snow Cow pounds plus a few more. Teresa was busy with school and Braun,
but several nights a week we hung out together in our shared room, her studying and me reading in bed in flannel pajamas and
three pairs of socks. Sometimes she set me up with one of Braun’s friends and we’d all go to the Alibi together, and sometimes
she and I would just get into the truck and drive into Big Rapids for soft-serve ice cream, even though it was fifteen degrees
outside.

I slowly grew more comfortable around Jackie and Mike, but I didn’t know quite what to think of their lifestyle. Jackie worked
as a computer technician at a factory that made lumber-saw parts, and Mike did something with quality control for a Chrysler
plant. They left the house before seven each morning and would meet downtown at five-thirty for “just one.” Sometime between
nine-thirty and eleven they’d come in drunk, microwave something in Tupperware, then head to bed. Get up and do it again.
I guess I thought having two “daughters” in the house would slow them down so they’d stay at home more, but it didn’t. I felt
hurt by this but wasn’t sure why. I hadn’t moved to Michigan to have a mother again, but for free room and board, and I was
getting that. What was missing? Why did it sting that Jackie wasn’t making any effort to get to know me? That I didn’t know
much more about her than I had that first night in the Mexican restaurant?

One day, when Jackie called me from work to ask if I’d throw on some chops or make lasagna, I snapped and said, “Why? You’ll
just end up drinking your dinner as usual.” She hung up with a clatter, and I stared at the phone for a long minute, wondering
what I’d started. Hours later, I heard the door and soon Mike was standing at the mouth of the room I shared with Teresa.
His eyes were glassy, and he leaned against the doorframe slightly.

“Who the hell do you think you are,” he said thickly, “talking to your mother like that? Don’t you know what she’s done for
you?”

“No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.” I had my flannel pajamas on and tugged at the thread on a loose button.

“Well, if you don’t, let me tell you. Every year we were married I knew when you girls’ birthdays were. Not because she told
me, but because she would cry and cry on those days. Cry and cry.” He was getting into it now, moved himself, his voice thick
and choked-sounding. “She never forgot you, not for one day. Don’t you think she deserves some respect for that?”

Mike stood silent for a moment, letting his words sink in, and then stumbled out and down the hall. Perhaps an hour later
I heard Jackie’s car pull into the garage. I waited for her to come down the hall and speak her mind as he had, but she didn’t.
I heard her running the tap, then the rattle of the aspirin bottle over the sink, then her bedroom door clicking quietly closed.

D
ON’T ASK ME HOW
— I still shake my head at it, wondering — but my three-month head-clearing trip to Michigan turned into years. I earned
three degrees, married one of my professors with breakneck speed, had a child within a year and quickly filed for a divorce.
My son’s birth showed me that although I’d had countless mothers, I didn’t know anything about
mothering,
how joyful and transformative and complicated and staggeringly difficult it can be.

I moved often (my record is five times in little more than a year), first via Hefty bag, with everything I owned stuffed into
my tired Plymouth Sundance, later in U-Haul trailers, singing along to top-forty country with my son, Connor, and his cat,
Zero, beside me on the bench seat. With each move I felt myself growing farther from the homes and people I wanted to forget,
but also further from being the kind of woman who knew how to find a place or a person worth sticking around for.