Miller's Valley (19 page)

“He was asking about you.”

My mother nodded.

“He seems good.”

We found an osprey once behind Ruth's house when I was a kid. It's a big bird, three feet tall, with those mean little black eyes those hunting birds have. He was pressed up against the back of the house like he was hiding. He had one wing out to the side dragging in the dirt. Even if you didn't know anything about birds you could tell his wing was broken.

“Go get the long gun, Mimi,” my father had said. LaRhonda put her hands over her face, then peeked from between her fingers.

Sometimes you see things that seem so not-right that you never forget them. That big bird of prey, standing on the ground, at our mercy, was like that. So was my mother when she sat down and looked at me. She looked old and beaten, like she might never get up from that chair. There was a little bit of Ruth in her eyes.

“You've always been a terrible liar, Mary Margaret,” she said. “Worse even than your father was.”

I
can't tell you exactly when my brother disappeared. It seemed like it was near the end of my senior year in college, right after spring break. I hadn't seen him since that run-in at Thanksgiving, but Steven had talked to him at the same bar the following fall, and LaRhonda said her father had seen him at the diner right after the big snowstorm that cut off power to the valley for close to a week. She remembered because her father said he didn't want him there. LaRhonda didn't care about hurting your feelings, never had. Come to think of it, she didn't even really know when something she said would hurt your feelings. I felt sorry for her kids.

If Tom had been one of those men who had a mortgage and a car he bought on time, a wife and two kids and a boss waiting for him to sit down at his desk at nine in the morning, in other words if he'd been Ed, it would have been different. You'd go to the police and say to them, Mr. Dependable parked in the lot on Tuesday and hasn't been heard from since. But Tommy Miller wasn't Mr. Dependable, and he wasn't someone whose absence the police would worry about. He disappeared the way Aunt Ruth had gotten housebound, or the way my father stopped talking after his stroke. He did it by inches so you couldn't figure out exactly when it started. I only really noticed myself after he missed Clifton's birthday party. That had happened before, but even when he was in jail he got some sketchy guy to drop off Tinkertoys and a card signed “Love, Daddy,” although it wasn't in his handwriting. Clifton didn't know the difference.

But when I got to Callie's mom's house and there wasn't even a present things looked bad to me. I'd brought Clifton a tape recorder and a bunch of tapes because he liked to make up stories and act them out with different voices. I told him the tape recorder was from his dad, and he was traveling on business which was why he had me bring the present. Callie's boyfriend made a big fuss over the tape recorder. He was such a nice guy that I didn't even mind so much that after he married Callie he was going to move her and Clifton fifty miles away. Callie said she would still bring Clifton to see my mom, and they'd be closer to me at school so I could visit all the time.

“She deserves some happiness,” my mother said. Also Clifton was coming to stay for a month in the summer. My mother had already arranged to take three weeks off work. It was like Donald all over again except with a good mother this time. Same father situation, though, although Donald had never talked about his father and Clifton talked about Tom a lot.

“When we go to the new house with Doug you'll tell my dad where I live, right, Aunt Mimi?” he said to me.

“Your dad will always know where you are, honey,” I'd replied. Sometimes afterward I thought that was a dumb thing to say. Clifton couldn't even soothe himself with the notion that Tommy couldn't find him. He'd always think Tommy knew where he was but just didn't bother to show up.

By the day of Clifton's party no one had seen Tommy for a couple of months, even some of the harder guys that Steven knew from construction, the ones who were always looking for drugs and trouble. I didn't know where to begin to search for him but I had to try after my aunt Ruth called me at school and said some man had come to the house and scared her silly. “He walked right in and looked in the closets,” Ruth said, her voice shaking. “He went into your mother's house, too. I said to him, You'd better not be stealing anything in there. He said, real mean, There's nothing to steal. He said Tom owes him money. A lot of money, except he used a filthy word instead.” It took me a minute to figure out that he'd probably said a shitload of money. That was bad. The guy sounded like the sort who, when he said a shitload, meant it.

There was a girl in my dorm who was always offering to lend people her car. “I hardly ever use it,” she liked to tell everyone, so I went to her Saturday morning and asked if I could take it for the weekend. She didn't really know me. None of them did. I studied in the library and I went to Ed's house to help look after his kids and I walked around by myself. Steven hadn't bought any houses in the city in spite of his big talk, once he found out about all the rules and regulations and permits and after some guy at a building site told him if he didn't use union plumbers he'd find his pipes ripped out overnight. But he had stayed with me a couple of times, and I could tell the girls on my floor didn't know what to make of him. The guys at school were lanky types with long hair and narrow shoulders. Steven still wore his hair short and you couldn't miss the muscles in his chest and arms. Also he had handed out business cards in the dorm hallway, just in case anyone knew someone in the market for a house in the country. Next to all the guys on barstools in Miller's Valley, talking about when their unemployment would run out and how much a pound you could get for scrap metal, he seemed like a real go-getter, but here he just seemed slick and pushy. The girl with the car was one of the ones Steven had given his card to.

“I really need a car just for the weekend,” I said. “I'm a good driver. I'll change your oil if you want.”

“How often are you supposed to change your oil?” she said.

“I'll just do it, okay?”

I figured I'd stay with Steven when I got to Miller's Valley. I didn't really want my mother to know I was home or I'd have to lie to her about why. I went to a couple of the bars and at one place the bartender said, “I haven't seen him in a good while and his tab is long overdue. Tell him that.” Then he looked me up and down, and I knew he was wondering if I was some girl Tommy had knocked up. “I'm his sister,” I said, and the guy said, “That's hard to believe,” for about the millionth time in my life.

Finally I went over to the house Steven was working on. It was almost done and it didn't look like any of the workers were around. The Polish guys insisted on knocking off at four on Saturdays, but sometimes Steven would keep on spackling and painting for a couple hours after, a drop light with a 150-watt bulb hanging from a hook in the ceiling. I'd worked with him on a Saturday night more than once, although not since I'd started school. The boxy house near town was a nice little place, white paint and green shutters. The hunter green shutters were Steven's trademark, and he still told everyone when I was around about how I'd come up with the color. “It's not such a big deal,” I said once, and he said, “Don't do that, babe. Don't put yourself down.” How do you tell someone that you don't like being called babe, especially since he's been doing it from the first time he took your jeans off, when, let's face it, you didn't mind one single damn thing he said or did? It was just one of his routines. He called guys pal and mac. He called me babe.

Steven had a lot of routines, actually. When he brought anyone to one of the houses he was selling he put a pot of Dinty Moore stew in the oven on low heat. He said that real estate agents were always telling people they should bake cookies, but he thought stew smelled more like home than cookies, although at one house he left the stew in the oven after he turned it off and left and he'd had to air that place out for a week. He said sometimes that that's why he'd only made a thousand on it, but I thought a thousand was still a lot. He said when we were married half of it would belong to me.

He always stashed the key to a house inside the belly of a ceramic frog he kept by the back door. It looked low-rent, almost like a lawn gnome, but I'd never said anything. I put the key in the back door, but it was already open. The kitchen looked good, some kind of golden wood cabinets and a dark green Formica counter, same color as the shutters. Through the archway I could see a dining room with a wagon wheel light fixture over where a table would go. It reminded me a little of the arrangement in our house in Miller's Valley, but nicer.

I heard Steven say something from a room down the hall. It was a narrow room, maybe a baby's room for some young couple who wanted to start a family and who would be wowed by the green shutters and the gold cabinets. The floor was high-gloss hardwood, two coats of polyurethane, and Steven was lying on it with some girl with long streaky blond hair sitting on top of him, moving up and down. By the noises she was making I could tell Steven wasn't just good with me, he was good. Either that or she was a fine actress. Steven saw me standing in the doorway and his face went empty for a minute. It's a creepy feeling, walking in on someone having sex. It's even creepier when it's someone you thought was only having sex with you. I turned and went out the back door and walked around the side of the house to the little borrowed blue Volkswagen at the curb. It had a plastic flower around the radio antenna. A pink daisy. Basically that's all you needed to know about the girl who'd lent it to me.

“Whoa, babe, whoa,” I heard Steven yell from inside the house, and then I heard a girl's voice say, “What?” That's what got to me as much as the sex part. The babe part. A guy who calls more than one woman babe is a guy you don't want to have any part of, even when he comes running out to the car to stop you from leaving in just a pair of jeans and bare feet. I'd turned the car on and he yanked open the passenger side door.

“Don't get in this car,” I said. Behind him at the front door I could see the girl in nothing but a big T-shirt. “Who is it?” she yelled.

“His former girlfriend,” I yelled back.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Steven. “My feet are freezing. Let me just sit in the car for a minute.”

“No. I'm leaving now. I'm here looking for Tommy. Some guy came to our house and threatened my aunt. So just tell me what you know about Tommy and I will leave and you can get back to business.”

“It's not what it looks like,” he said. When he saw my expression he shut up about that.

“There are some rumors,” Steven said, beating his hands together. It was cold for April. I was glad about that. He had goosebumps on his chest. “Somebody told me he got in with some pretty bad guys from the city. New York, not Philly.”

“And?”

“And nothing. No one's seen him. Maybe he's with them. Maybe he took off because of them. Maybe's he's just laying low. He was living in that house on 502 that I tried to buy a couple years ago, remember? That little ranch with the two-car garage?”

I shook my head.

“Yeah, come on, you remember, you were there when the guy told me the roof was rotten.”

“Okay, now I remember. I'll try there.”

“A woman named Casey rents it. He was living with her.”

“Great. Thanks.” I put the car in gear. “The door?” I said.

“I'm freezing, Stevie,” yelled the girl in the doorway.

“Oh, Jesus Christ. She's just some, you know, some—”

“I know. I don't care. I'm going.”

He started to cry. It wasn't that big a deal. He was the kind of guy who cried at movies and birthdays and stuff like that. He enjoyed it. He thought it made him seem sensitive. But if he thought crying was going to change anything, he hadn't been paying attention all this time. I was glad we weren't indoors, though. There was one way he might possibly have gotten around me, but not out on the street with him still smelling like some lousy flowery drugstore perfume.

He leaned into the car. “Mimi,” he said, pointing at me, “you're the one. You'll always be the one. You're the love of my life. Swear to God.”

“If you see Tommy, call me at school. Call me right away, all right?” He nodded. His nose was dripping. He had a scratch on one shoulder.

“Otherwise don't you ever dare call me again.”

“I love you,” he yelled as I drove away. He meant it, too. I knew him. I knew he meant it, just like I knew he went back inside and finished what he'd started with what's-her-name. Probably more than once. Charm is like tinsel without the tree. What's tinsel without the tree? Shredded tinfoil.

I drove over to the house on 502, but no one was home, and I figured it was probably a good thing, since for the first time in my life I could imagine the feeling that made my brother want to wallop someone, and I was afraid I might wallop him for scaring me so bad if he opened the door. But I think I was mainly mad at myself. I didn't cry in the car back to school, although over the next week I did. I wasn't even sure why. I knew that I wasn't heartbroken, and I guess the fact that I wasn't made me disgusted with myself. It didn't take long before I figured out that I'd learned an important lesson, that falling into things, bad things, dumb things, things that felt good but were bad and dumb both, was the easiest thing in the world. It was a good lesson to learn when you were still young.

“I changed your oil,” I said when I got back to the dorm and handed plastic flower girl her keys, but I really hadn't. I figured she'd never know the difference.