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Authors: Marlys Millhiser

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C
HARLIE STOOD OUTSIDE the church, remote from the small band of people standing around her mother. She knew Edwina was from Iowa, but she'd rarely heard of Myrtle and never of these relatives. Edwina had never brought Charlie back to visit and Charlie'd never wondered why. Well, boy, did she now.
She was a busy career woman and didn't have much time to waste wondering. She knew her father had had a previous family, but Howard had never chosen to invite them to the house. Charlie hadn't wondered about that either.
You're thirty-four years old, Charlie Greene—washed-up by Hollywood standards—but still as self-involved as a teenager.
Two more church spires rose among splendid scarlet, burnished-orange, gold, and russet trees. They were glorious in the sunlight against the depth of sky and scattered puffs of clouds as white as Great-aunt Abigail's collar. Looked like a painting, a fake Hollywood backdrop.
Just because you've never been to Iowa doesn't mean it can't be beautiful. Little bit out of our element, aren't we?
How could a place like this produce a Great-aunt Abigail?
Your mother needs you now, and she has all the answers, and she was there for you after the accident. Took six weeks off work to nurse you. Even lost her boyfriend because of you. You owe much of your prized independence to her.
Totally without her permission, Charlie's conscience was
growing stronger as she grew older, thus making her weaker. Didn't make sense.
I was there for her after her mastectomy, Charlie fought back, but she was beginning to see the lovely red trees through tears and suddenly realized she wasn't alone after all.
“You really hurt for the passing of old Gertie? Well, don't. She didn't know who she was or why and didn't give a damn either. Not for, oh, like—” the Myrtle marshal pursed his lips and squinted at the cloud puffs “—I'd say ten, fifteen years” now.
“Really?” Charlie wiped a cheek. Hollywood literary agents don't cry. Well, not in public. She was so self-involved she hadn't even heard him approach. “That long?”
“Oh, yeah. Took her a whole Myrtle minute to die, poor thing. But she didn't mind because she didn't know. So if you look at it that way, a Myrtle minute's not that bad. In the long run.” His last sentence cracked him up so hard that even Charlie's grin found her. He stuck out his hand. “You're Charlie Greene. Del Brunsvold.”
“Was Gertie your mom or aunt or somebody? I mean, I noticed you filling in the grave as we were leaving.”
“This is Myrtle where the marshal is the sexton, and I plow the streets in winter, too. Hey, we all got to make a living. Oh, my. You could wipe out half the town with that smile,” said Del, the marshal of Myrtle who plowed the streets. “I'd have to put you in jail, you know. If I had one.”
Charlie and the marshal were both laughing when Edwina and Cousin Helen joined them. Cousin Helen looked startled, to put it mildly. There was no end to the social faux pas Charlie could commit in Myrtle, Iowa.
“Go slow,” Edwina said. “I want to see this.”
Charlie, driving the rental car, was scared—her mother's voice had gone hollow like she'd never heard it do before.
But she didn't have to be reminded to go slow—Charlie wanted to see this, too.
The main street of Myrtle was actually called Main Street. And it was paved, sort of. The asphalt had crumbled away at the edges, leaving pothole parking along the high concrete curb and sidewalk. The sidewalk was wide but only on the side of Main Street that had stores—a few boarded over, others with windows out and sills and sashes loose and crooked like warped, vacant eyes. Crumbling foundations and thresholds presided over cracked, humped sidewalks.
The other side of Main Street was mostly empty lots, the city garage, and the Town Hall. One of the lots was scored by a long trench that Helen explained was a cave-in that the worthless Delwood better get filled in before someone broke a neck stumbling into it.
“What caved in?”
“We all figure it was from mining the white rock around here for buildings and roads in the old days.”
On the store side of the street, signs read THE MYRTLE HOME AND FARM HISTORY MUSEUM and MYRTLE LIBRARY, and there was a grocery store, too. All were closed, the grocery store had been for years. The Myrtle Post Office—
“Charlie, stop.”
Charlie already had.
“What's happened to the pool hall?”
“Not much but the name, I understand,” Cousin Helen answered from the backseat. She was showing them the way out of town to “the farm” so they could unpack. “I've never been in it, of course.”
Charlie was laughing again. This was certainly being a strange day. Crying, laughing, feeling sorely out of place. “Viagra's Bar and Grill?”
“Kenny Cowper's back in town. Marlin's Kenny. You probably didn't know him. He took over the place.”
“I knew Marlin,” Edwina said.
They turned at another abandoned grocery store, and on
the side road out of town stood a Sinclair station. The sign covering most of its window advertised GAS FOOD, AND VIDEOS. A block later, they crossed a beautiful white-stone bridge—made out of the local rock—and were on a road between fields that stretched to the horizon.
A dusty road of white crushed rock that coated the black Lumina. Charlie pulled out to pass one of those huge shiny-green harvesting machines—burdened with claws and chutes—that invariably seemed to be pulled by old dirty pickups and far too slowly. “Don't people in Iowa know there aren't three ‘e's in deer?”
“Some of them don't know there can be three ‘e's in Greene,” Edwina said dryly.
There was only silence from the backseat until Cousin Helen relented. “John Deere is a trade name, Charlie. Everybody knows that. And Edwina, a lot of us younger folks feel bad about how you were treated. It doesn't look like it, but times have changed in Myrtle. You'll see. Next turn is ours and to the left. Second farm to the right.”
Edwina ordered a stop here, too, when Charlie was about to turn into the drive of the second farm to the right. “My God, what's happened to the trees?”
“It's called ‘Family Farms,'” Helen answered with a sigh. “Told you things had changed.”
“I buy their products all the time at Von's.” Charlie pointed to a little sign that managed to fit a young, slim family, happy cows, pigs, and chickens all in the same picture with a barn.
It was a long drive, with a few buildings and a windmill at its end. “Used to be big maples and oaks along the driveway. Buildings were shaded by more, and there was a regular forest behind them.” Edwina had tears in her voice now. “Half the buildings are gone.”
“Oh, yeah. Like Uncle Elmo says, what the home place needs now is a real good tornado.” Helen's tone held more
than a modicum of stoic sarcasm. “Trees don't grow profits every growing season, don't ya know?”
Great, there's an uncle, too. How much family did Edwina have here, and how could she have hidden it this long? Charlie, however, was beginning to guess why.
She was sure that her mother's parents were dead, and Edwina had always claimed to be an only child.
The driveway to the home place was two rutted mud tracks through high, dried-up weeds in the middle that scraped and scratched at the underside of the Lumina with bristle sounds to make your teeth grit. In other words, it was not much in use. Why should it be? There was nothing at the end of it but some foundations, a house, a few sheds, a giant barn falling apart, and the windmill unaware of a swift October breeze. The house was wood like the barn, both showing white paint worn through to gray patches. The front porch took up the whole face of the house and sagged at both ends like a frown. Helen had Charlie drive around to the backdoor, where the back stoop sagged, too. “Couldn't we stay in a motel or bed-and-breakfast?”
“No such things around close. It's not as bad as it looks.”
“It'll only be a night or two,” Edwina added and opened the car door.
Well, it was too that bad—the kitchen floor as warped as the front porch and back stoop, the October breeze that didn't interest the windmill whistling around the window frames and into the room. A stained gas cooking stove took up half a wall, and a round table in the middle of the room wore a tablecloth stuck on with thumb tacks.
“I don't think so,” Charlie said over the din of a football game on a television in the next room. “I've been humiliated, scorned, and made to feel like a slug. I'm not sleeping here tonight.”
Edwina said, “No, you haven't, you just imagine it, and that should make you feel guilty enough to do what's expected of you.”
Cousin Helen yelled, “Elmo, turn that damned thing off. You got company.”
Charlie said, “I never heard of these people until today. How should I know what they expect, and why should I care?”
“You know—” Charlie's mother studied her closely “—maybe I didn't do such a bad job of raising you after all.”
And Charlie looked back really close for the first time this trip. “Edwina? You've done something to your face. What—”
“—not just any game. It's the Vikings versus the Packers.” But the football game silenced in the next room. “And I wouldn't go to that old bat's funeral if the dish was dead and there weren't no game.”
There were honest-to-god grooves in the wood flooring where foot traffic had worn a path and where out walked a man with a cane, followed by Helen, who nearly ran into him when he stopped short at the sight of the two women standing in his kitchen. “Ain't neither one of them two our little Edwina, I can tell you.”
“Hello, Uncle Elmo.”
He wore a silly grin filled with stained teeth too straight to be real for his generation, a few wisps of gray hair, and oversized bib overalls like the ones young girls wore these days, but his were more sturdy and had more pockets. He leaned the cane against the refrigerator and hobbled over to peer into Charlie's mom's face, turning his head to one side as if suspicious.
“God love ya, little girl, I never said you could turn into such a good-looking woman.” He smelled of cigar and beer, but Edwina didn't seem to mind as she disappeared into his hug. “What took ya so long to come home?”
And then—
“I know. You don't have to tell me. Nobody meaner to women than their womenfolk. Well, I'm sure glad to see you. And this has got to be your little Charlemagne Catherine. Ain't she a beauty, now?”
“Uncle Elmo—” Helen handed him his cane “—Aunt Abigail announced at the church this afternoon that Aunt Gertie was murdered.”
“Well now, that's not so far-fetched. Awful lot of folks died in that place lately.”
“The Oaks is a nursing home. They're supposed to.” Cousin Helen had tightly curled hair of an indiscernible color, which probably meant she colored it herself—sort of a pale, orangey-gold color like she'd been doing it too long. Her face was broad with a big smile and her body heavy-boned, plus she had a chronic sniff and thick eyeglasses. “Gertie was supposed to have died many, many years ago.”
“Yeah—those are the ones been going. Could be someone's giving them a little extra shove. Wouldn't surprise me none. Nope.” Uncle Elmo put his arm around Charlie's shoulders and gave her a squeeze and a wink.
“Did anybody tell the marshal?” Charlie asked.
“Delwood Brunsvold?” Helen's jaw dropped for a moment. She was a mouth breather, so you weren't sure if she was done talking or, as in this case, slack-mouthed with astonishment. “What good would that do?”
“
W
HY DOESN'T THE windmill turn in the wind?” Charlie asked Uncle Elmo as they sat on the droopy stoop drinking Budweiser.
“Froze up. Nobody young enough to crawl up there and oil the bearings anymore. I did it for years.” He turned to look down at her with a thinking-hard squint. “You afraid of heights, pretty little Charlie?”
“Terrified.”
“Yeah, these young folks just can't cut the mustard. Shame, too.”
Edwina and Helen had driven off in the rental to bring back dinner.
“What did you mean about women being meaner to women? Who was mean to Edwina?” Besides me.
“People around here don't discuss that sort of thing, but it seems to me when a young person goes off to college, gets a good job someplace else, they get separated from their folks at home and the town. And when girls do it, they're lost forever. It's like a shunning, but nobody organizes it or talks about it. It was sort of like Edwina was getting above herself, not that anybody said so. Their attitudes said it. Edwina was plain and she was awkward, and her place in the pecking order was set by that even though her folks had the money to send her to the university and she had the brains to make good on it. Hard to explain because we don't talk about it.”
“I think you explain it very well. It's been in the air ever since we got here. Being different is threatening. Those who
are different feel threatened, too. People do that to each other everywhere, women especially because they're more vulnerable and subtle and backhanded about it. But what kind of work can people find around here, where the marshal digs graves and plows streets?”
“Matter of fact, we have three major industries and they're all owned by one man. He went off to college and after a while, came back home and took over the family businesses and they flourish. That's Gentle Oaks, the grain elevator, and The Station. Without Harvey Rochester, town of Myrtle'd a died years ago. Oops, you'd better get rid of that beer can. Here comes your mother and the family with the dinner. Ladies in Myrtle get their jollies eating, not drinking spirits. Prohibition was a real lively event around here in the old days, you can bet.”
The family came in two pickups and an ancient Buick, as well as the rental. And they didn't bring commercial carryout. They brought covered bowls and flat pans for the oven and saucepans for the stove top. The kitchen range was soon giving off horrific gas smells to warm up the food, and the “ladies” were setting out the plates and table service from a buffet onto a beautiful old claw-foot table that took up ninety percent of the dining room. It reminded Charlie of an Italian family's apartment in Manhattan in the building where she and Libby had lived before moving to California. But there was no wine, no pasta, no garlic, no salad greens, no vivid arguing, gesturing, hugging, or laughter here. A few chuckles were all.
By the time Charlie sat down next to Edwina at dinner, three more carloads of family had arrived—from faraway places called Nora Springs and Floyd and Fertile. Really. Charlie was treated with nothing but a curious, distant kindness. But for once, she was so grateful to be sitting next to her mother she could have cried.
Again? What time of the month is it? Ever since the accident, her body had been screwed up menstrualogically. In
L.A., that word would have gotten laughs. She didn't think it would play in Myrtle.
The reason she was so glad to be close to Edwina at this particular table was that when she reached for her fork, her mother elbowed her in the ribs, only recently healed, mind you, but the gesture gave her time to notice that everyone else was instead bowing their heads.
Uncle Elmo delivered grace while bowls of creamy mashed potatoes, creamed peas with pearl onions, scalloped corn, gravies of every kind steamed comfort into the air. There were platters of sliced ham like on the Family Farm commercials, fried chicken that reeked of real butter, a beef stew that burbled odors from a crock pot plugged in with a cord separating Charlie from the man next to her. And platters of flaky dinner rolls, lime Jell-O with pineapple and carrot bits and marshmallows. Still out in the kitchen were four kinds of carrot cake and true homemade pies with meringue on top and pans of brownies. We are talking maybe five o'clock in the afternoon here. In Charlie's time, it was three. She didn't know if this was lunch or dinner.
Uncle Elmo's prayer was short and to the point. “Dear God, grace this table with love, not envy, hunger, not revenge. And most of all gusty appetites, not petty ones. Now these two women here have traveled from the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean to rejoin our family in time of need. Let us, Lord, support them as their incredible journeys here support our own. Let us not be petty, let us enjoy thy bountiful feast. Amen.”
Charlie had no idea how all these people related. Two very elderly, very tiny ladies had come in the very big Buick. Elmo had whispered that they were sisters and “maiden” ladies. Did that mean they'd never had sex? Or just never married? They dressed in dresses, hose, little hats, and ate like birds.
Charlie took an instant liking to Helen's husband Buz, a big man whose stomach hid his belt and whose robust sense
of humor nothing could hide. He was responsible for what chuckling there was.
The men wanted to talk about the football game, the women about distant children and grandchildren. They had to wipe buttery crumbs off their fingers before handing the endless family photos around the table—the men passing them on to the women with barely a glance, the women exclaiming how much little Derek looked like Grandpa Staudt did once, or Art's Ronnie.
From the endless bowls and plates passed before her, Charlie selected a fried-chicken breast, mashed potatoes and chicken gravy, creamed peas, and a flaky dinner roll with real butter to put on it. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had fried chicken—it usually came grilled, dry, boneless, skinless, tasteless now. Everything on her plate was so good she ate it all—something she never did. Well, this
was
a stressful situation.
“How long did it take you to drive clear from California?” one of the maidens asked Charlie during a lull in the football and grandchildren, just as Charlie savored the last of the real milk-chicken gravy. There had to have been a pound of butter on her plate alone.
“I flew from LAX to Minneapolis.”
“And I from DIA to Minneapolis, and then we flew to Mason City together and rented a car,” Edwina said.
“Isn't that terribly expensive?” the other maiden asked.
“We both work,” Charlie explained. “Missing too much of that can be even more expensive. We can't afford the time off to drive this far.”
“Yeah, just wait till this stock market crashes,” Elmo said. “Everybody'll have more time than they want and no money to live on.”
Helen and many of the women under, say, sixty-five, assured Charlie they worked, too. “Farmers and their wives have to have outside jobs these days.”
Having seen the humongous John Deere harvesting machines on the roads, Charlie could see why.
“Helen and Buz took two weeks to make it to Tucson last year,” Elmo said. “When are you leaving this year?”
Edwina dropped her fork and stared at Cousin Helen, who rolled her eyes and said, “Well, we have a right to a life, too.”
While the other ladies gathered in the kitchen to wash the special china and silver kept at the home place and the men sat down in front of the TV in the room off the dining room, Charlie and Edwina crept upstairs to unpack and settle down. Theirs was a small room with twin beds and heaps of thick comforters. The one bathroom in this house was downstairs off the kitchen.
“Be thankful,” Edwina said. “It used to be in the backyard.”
Charlie discovered that her cellular didn't connect from here—it hadn't from the back stoop, either. She'd have to wait until she got back to Myrtle to contact her new and valued client, so she confronted her mother. Hell, neither of them could afford this time off or wanted to be here.
“What is it Helen wants you to help her with? Why get upset if she and Buz winter in Arizona, and how can she take that much time off if she works? Are we being had? Is that why I had to come? You're my mom, but I need answers. There's a bad secret here, isn't there?”
Edwina grabbed the pillow off the bed she was sitting on and sobbed into it.
“Tell me what's going on. Hell, if they're really killing off helpless old people, I don't want to stay around here, and I don't want you to, either.” Charlie grabbed some Kleenex and handed them to her mom when she turned over. That's when Charlie realized what was so different about Edwina's face. No bifocals and bags underneath and no droops above. She had a hollow look there she never had before.
From Charlie's earliest memories of her mother, Edwina had been studious and dowdy, like a university professor and
mother, widow and grandmother should be. But a couple of years ago, Edwina had a mastectomy for breast cancer and it changed her forever. Suddenly her dumpy figure straightened and slimmed, her lank hair was colored and styled, and front teeth capped. And for a short while, she even dated a younger man.
“It's Great-aunt Abigail.”
“That doesn't surprise me. Is she your great-aunt or mine?”
“Mine. She'd be your great-great-aunt if—”
“If I weren't adopted. I have no problem with being adopted, you know that.”
“Then how come your father and I were always Howard and Edwina instead of Mom and Dad?”
“That was rebellion, not—”
“Charlie, you're over thirty, with a child of your own. And poor Howard's been dead for eighteen years. When do you stop rebelling?”
“I notice a clever switch in the subject matter. Edwina, we aren't responsible for old people dying, and certainly not for the Wicked Witch of the Midwest, Great-aunt Abigail. Whatever is going on here, I don't like it. You keep saying it's not about us, but we are the people being treated way weird.”

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