Where Do I Go? (36 page)

The question took me by surprise . . . and for some reason I found myself telling this woman I barely knew about the juggling act all week, trying to entertain my boys
and
keep up with my job.

“Oh, boy, tell me about it. I've been teaching third graders ever since our youngest started school. At least Denny and I both work for the public schools, so when school is out, so are we. Well, technically. Except Teacher Institute Days. And athletic meets on weekends, ad infinitum. But if one of our kids got sick? There went all
my
sick days.”

For some reason, I found Jodi's homily strangely comforting. Lots of families had to juggle schedules. I was not crazy. “The worst part is,” I found myself saying, “I let them stay home yesterday since the woman who cleans for us was there until two o'clock, which was fine, but I didn't get home until three—which turned out to be just long enough for them to get into trouble.”

“Oh dear. What did they do?”

Why was I telling her this? “It's so embarrassing. I guess they were exploring the building we live in, got into the parking garage, and started rocking cars to make the car alarms go off. Like ten or twelve all at once.”

I heard a gasp at the other end, and mentally kicked myself for saying
anything—
now she thought I was a terrible mother!— but to my shock, Jodi Baxter started laughing. I mean, howling.

“Oh. Oh. Oh.” More belly laughter. “That is so
funny
! I mean, I know it isn't right now, but it's the sort of thing you and your husband will tell on your kids and laugh about later. I mean, I'm sure they meant it as a prank, and there was no real harm done. But, oh dear. I can just imagine.
Yikes
. The noise! Just be sure you guys stuff a sock in your mouths so the kids can't hear you laughing behind closed doors.
They
can't know you think it's funny until they're at
least
eighteen.”

Her laughter was contagious. I couldn't help it. Pretty soon I was giggling too. And that night, after the boys had come home, talking a mile a minute about their exciting day at Navy Pier with their dad and getting excited about our road trip to North Dakota, the world no longer felt like it was falling apart. Of course not! What the boys did was naughty, yes. They had to be disciplined, yes. But it wasn't the end of the world.

As I lay in bed after Philip had fallen asleep, I wondered what it would be like to giggle in the dark with my husband about what had happened yesterday, and laugh so hard we had to stuff socks in our mouths.

chapter 35

A cloudless sky arched over the city Sunday morning, and the TV weatherman promised mild temperatures in the low seven-ties. Perfect travel weather. I sent up a heavenly thank-you. The weekend “door-dude” called the penthouse at eight to tell us Enterprise had delivered the rental minivan. While Philip rode down the elevator with the boys and the luggage, I did a last-minute sweep of the house. Good thing. I found the earphones to Paul's portable CD player, my cell phone still charging in the bed-room, and our damp swimsuits still in the washing machine where I'd washed them last night. I guiltily whisked them into a recloseable plastic bag. My name would be mud if I forgot those.

At the last minute, I also stuck my Bible into my bulging backpack. I'd been telling God I was going to start reading the Word more regularly. Maybe this week while I was on vacation I'd have time to actually make good on that promise.

Outside by the car, Philip gave me a peck on the cheek, smelling faintly like his Armani aftershave. Sea breezes and tropical forests. He'd already picked up a tan from the outing on Lester Stone's sailboat, our afternoon at Wrigley Field, and another layer yesterday. Gosh, he looked good. I had a sudden urge to slide my arms around his neck, feel his body pressed against mine, satisfy this hunger for skin touching skin . . . but the moment passed as he opened the car door and waited for me to get in.

“You're sure you know how to get out of the city?”

“I think so.” I showed him the maps I'd printed out from the computer.

“Looks okay. Just be sure you get on I-90 to Wisconsin, Gabby, and not I-94, or you'll waste a lot of time.” He leaned in a side window. “'Bye, guys. Don't give your mom any grief. Call me when you get there, okay?” Philip stepped back and waved us off. When I looked in my rearview mirror just before leaving the frontage road, he was gone.

It seemed to take forever to get out of Chicago's sprawl, even without major traffic delays. Finally we were zipping northwest on the toll road, past newly plowed fields, pretty farms, and the occasional oasis for gas, restrooms, and fast food. The day was so beautiful, I drove with my window down, the sunroof open, and no AC. The wind felt so good, I didn't even mind that my curls would probably end up a snarly mess. And the farther we drove away from Chicago, the lighter I felt.

My cell phone rang the “William Tell” midmorning just as we were entering Wisconsin. I snatched it up and recognized the area code for Alaska. “Celeste? Thank goodness you called! . . . What? . . . Yeah, the boys and I are on the road now, heading for Minot. Are you coming? . . . Can't hear me? I
said
, are you coming home?!”

I pressed the cell phone to my ear, my sister's voice fading in and out. But I got the gist of it. She wasn't coming. Late snow. Some stranded hikers. Tom needed her there. Maybe later in the year when their daughter Kristi was home from college . . .

I finally flipped the phone closed, fighting the lump in my throat. I knew it'd been a long shot, trying to get my sisters and their kids home all at the same time. But I'd been hoping . . . no,
needing
to try to tie up the loose ends in my life. We'd been distant too long.

I shook off my disappointment, stuck an
Eighties Faves
CD in the car player, and turned up the volume. It would've been great to have a family reunion, but the boys and I were going to have a good time anyway.

“What's love got to do, got to do with it . . .” I bellowed with Tina Turner.

“Mo-om! I can't hear my CD player!”

“Too bad. It's my turn.”

“I'm hungry!”

I tossed the bag of snacks into the backseat and kept singing. “Who needs a heart, when a heart can be broken . . . !”

Nothing was going to stop me from enjoying every second of this trip.

We stopped just west of Minneapolis at a chain hotel for the night.
Eight hours on the road, not bad
. . . though it took a twenty-ounce Pepsi to keep me awake in the late afternoon, and I had to move P.J. to the front seat to end the jabbing and poking.

But once in a booth at a local Outback Steakhouse, I actually managed to get the boys talking. Well, Paul anyway. “Tell me about this piece of music you composed for the band, Paul. I wish we could have heard it.”

“Aw, I was just horsing around with my trombone and came up with a tune, and my band director showed me this really neat composition program on the computer, and, well . . .” As he prattled on, I mentally made a note to ask Philip about getting the software for our home computer.

The boys spent an hour in the hotel pool after supper, while I soaked in the Jacuzzi, watching them horse around, letting the forceful water jets coax the last of the tension from the past several weeks out of my body. I didn't think about Philip. I didn't think about Manna House. I didn't think about anything at all except how warm and relaxed and . . . and
safe
I felt, five hundred miles away from my life.

The next morning, we were on the road again by eight o'clock after a carbohydrate-heavy continental breakfast in the hotel lobby. P.J. elected to sit up front, and as the long miles clicked by on the odometer, I had a momentary hope he'd open up and tell me more about what was happening at school, but he pretty much kept plugged into his iPod.

However, both boys did reasonably well on the second leg of the trip, as long as I stopped every two hours and reloaded the snacks and drinks. Between Minneapolis and Fargo, we played the License Plate Game and called out thirteen different state plates plus two Canadian provinces, then ran Twenty Questions into the ground. Paul decided he'd annoy us by starting in on, “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and was delighted when I joined in the old camp song. But at around sixty-five bottles left on the wall, P.J. hollered, “Enough already!” I couldn't have agreed more.

My heart was singing. I wanted to keep driving forever.

As we crossed into North Dakota around noon, the topography had definitely changed from compact family farms to sprawling prairie. Cattle dotted the slightly rolling grasslands, which were still reasonably green in early June, though miles went by without seeing a single tree—just shrubs, sagebrush, and occasional sandstone formations. Mega-acre fields sprouted the first mantle of spring wheat, looking like a military crew cut.

Both boys pronounced it “boring,” but to me it was beautiful. The pungent smell of sagebrush made me feel slightly drunk, and my pulse quickened as we turned off I-94 at Jamestown and headed north on a two-lane highway. Minot—170 miles the sign said.

Home . . .

For the first time in months, that word formed in my conscious thought and rolled around on my tongue.

“There's Grandma!” I pulled into the driveway of the boxy beige house that had been my childhood home and beeped the horn. My mother, grayer than I remembered her, got up stiffly from the flower bed where she'd been weeding, turned, and shaded her eyes from the five o'clock sun. A four-legged bundle of wispy yellow hair erupted from the grass and charged the car, barking.

“Hey there, Dandy,” I said, trying to keep the dog from jumping up on me as I crossed the yard and threw my arms around my mom. Had she always been this short? But she still smelled like lavender, the same soft smell I remembered from nighttime kisses when she'd tucked us girls in bed.

Paul was already tussling with the dog. I waved P.J. out of the car. “Hey, guys. Come give your grandma a hug.”

“Hi, Grandma!” Paul ran over, gave his grandmother a noisy smack, and ran off again with the yellow mutt, who led him on a merry chase around the yard.

P.J. climbed out of the car and sauntered over to where we stood by the flower bed. He gave his grandmother a polite hug. “Whatcha doing—planting flowers?”

My mother looked at my oldest quizzically. “Is this Ryan?”

“No, no, Mom. This is P.J.—Philip Junior. You remember.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Philip's boy. He's just grown so much. Looks so much like Ryan now.”

P.J. rolled his eyes at me. His cousin Ryan was Honor's oldest, at least two years older than P.J.
An easy mistake
, I decided, since my mother hadn't seen any of the grandchildren since my dad's funeral two years ago. Except that even then, Ryan had been a beanpole, blond and freckled.

I made a quick call to Philip and left a message on his cell that we'd arrived safe and sound. Then we unloaded the car, and I had the boys put their stuff in the second-floor bedroom with the two dormer windows that Honor and I had shared for years until Celeste left home, at which time Honor inherited her bedroom.

P.J. made a face. “Aw, Mom. It's all full of, you know, girl stuff.”

“I won't tell anyone.” I laughed. “I'm going to help Grandma with supper. But I'll tell you a secret. Behind that little door into the crawl space, I bet you'll find a whole box of superhero comic books. Go for it.”

I left the boys diving into the crawl space. To my surprise, the oven was cold, no supper makings in sight. In fact, the refrigerator was surprisingly bare. A half gallon of milk, half-empty. A carton of orange juice. A wilted head of iceberg lettuce. A bag of raw carrots. A package of shredded cheddar cheese. A carton of eggs—full. An array of condiments in the door. Several contain-ers of leftovers. A partial loaf of wheat bread. And in the freezer, two TV dinners and a package of Mrs. Stouffer's Homemade Lasagna.

“Uh, Mom? Did you have any plans for supper? How about if I make some cheese omelets? We can eat at the kitchen table, make it easy.”

“No, honey, we can't eat in the kitchen. I've got the dining room all set with the good china. Tonight is special, having you and the boys here.”

I peeked into the dining room. Sure enough, the dining room table was covered with my mom's antique lace tablecloth. Her rose-patterned wedding china sat at each chair—six place settings in all. A silk flower arrangement graced the center of the table.

China on the table, but no supper? Six place settings? What was going on here?

I woke up in Celeste's old room the next morning, sunlight streaming in through its single dormer, and stretched. What a good sleep! And we'd had fun the evening before, eating our cheese omelets on china and lace, pretending to ignore the two empty place settings, and then all four of us had played a rousing game of Pit, yelling and trading and hoarding. My mother had laughed triumphantly when she
won.