Looking out the window of Dad’s cabin, one memory links to another, and then, suddenly, there is Lana Gantry.
Not outside the cabin, but in my memories.
The Gantrys live up the street. I hadn’t remembered it all that clearly when I’d been reintroduced to Lana earlier in the week, but now things started coming back. Mr. and Mrs. Gantry. His name is Walter. He works at the Ford plant. He’s the first person in the neighborhood to have one of the new Mustangs. My parents get together with them once in a while. They play bridge, or barbecue out back. One time, they actually play charades.
After three days, Mom starts talking to Dad again. It is summer, and they’ve already invited the Gantrys over for dinner that weekend, so some sort of peace accord is reached.
I see the four of them out back, Dad and Mr. Gantry with beers in their hands, laughing, the women shaking their heads and smiling, sharing jokes about their husbands’ foolishness. They are all friendly together. Mr. Gantry talking to Mom. Dad talking to Lana.
Sometimes, slipping his arm around her waist. Surely, I think, this does not mean anything.
And then, not long after, Mom at the door with her suitcases.
And not long after that, the Gantrys move away.
And the four of them never get together again.
But now, a decade after my mother’s death, here is Lana Gantry again. Back in my father’s life.
Living in the same town as a young man she refers to as her nephew. Orville Thorne. Who, I guess, is about thirteen years younger than I.
And who, I now realize, looks an awful lot like me.
It doesn’t seem possible that Mom would walk out on Dad for the better part of half a year over the Emergency Brake Incident. But I can imagine her leaving him for fathering a child with a woman from down the street.
The night before she leaves, I hear snippets of her argument with my father in their bedroom, snippets which, up until now, more than three decades later, never meant anything to me. I hear the name “Gantry.” And I hear the word “baby.”
“I can’t live here,” I hear my mother say.
“The shame,” I hear her say.
And then I pull the pillow down harder on my head so I won’t have to hear any more. There isn’t anything else from that argument to recall now.
She keeps her word, though. She does call all the time. She talks to Cindy, and then my sister hands the phone to me, and she asks me what is going on at school, and whether I am doing my homework, and what I am doing with my friends, and I tell her everything I can think of, about Star Trek and this episode where Kirk and Spock go back to Earth in the 1920s to find Dr. McCoy, who’s met this woman who will change the course of history, and I am ready to tell her every detail of the entire episode because I want to talk to her for as long as possible, but finally, Dad nudges me aside, mumbles something about long distance, because Mom is staying with her sister in Toronto, but what he really wants is to talk to her himself.
Once he has the phone, he asks me and Cindy to leave the kitchen, to go watch TV or something, but sometimes I hide around the corner and hear my father say, “I still love you. It’s my fault, not yours. I’m ready to start all over again. How are you feeling? Are you feeling okay?”
After six months of this, Mom comes home, and our house is whole again.
They are both different after that, but especially Dad. He still has his quirks and phobias. He gets the oil changed in the Dodge every four thousand miles, and if he’s even a hundred miles overdue he can’t sleep at night for fear the engine will seize up and cost him a thousand dollars to fix. He still drives me and Cindy nuts, but he is never so critical of Mom again. He lets stuff go. He even trades Mom’s Volkswagen in on a compact Ford with automatic transmission, doesn’t care anymore whether she uses the emergency brake. And maybe, after a year or two, they are signs that they actually love each other.
But there are also times when I notice a faraway look in Mom’s eyes, and I will ask her what she is thinking.
“Oh, nothing,” she says. “Nothing at all.”
It’s the day she leaves that stays with me. Her standing in the door, waiting to leave, the suitcases at her side. The rain coming down outside.
Cindy rushes to give her a hug, but I hold back. I am so angry that she’s going. That no matter what Dad has done, she can’t put it aside to take care of us.
“Zachary,” she says, “can you give Mom a kiss goodbye?”
I run to my room and watch from my window as Dad helps Mom take her bags to the car and toss them into the back seat of the Volkswagen. And then she gets in, Dad standing next to the car as though he expects her to roll down the window and say one final thing to him. But she does not.
The Bug comes to life with its distinctive, throaty roar. She puts the wipers on, then backs out of the drive.
That’s when I notice that one end of the belt to her raincoat has become caught in the bottom of the door, and is dangling down, swinging an inch above the wet pavement.
I run from my room and descend the flight of stairs in two jumps, burst out the front door, run past Dad standing in the driveway, and after my mom’s car, screaming, “Your belt! Your belt!” But Mom does not look back, and then the Volkswagen turns the corner and is gone.
Standing there, in the rain, I cry enough tears to drown the world.
24
I CAME OUT OF DAD’S STUDY and walked past him and Lawrence at the kitchen table. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Dad, not directly, anyway. I reached into the fridge, found some orange juice, and poured myself a glass.
“Lawrence here was saying,” Dad said, “that you don’t really choose to be gay. You’re born that way.”
I said nothing. I looked at Lawrence, who was smiling at me.
“That’s kind of interesting, don’t you think?” Dad said. “Maybe it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pick on gay people if they can’t help it.”
“That’s very charitable,” Lawrence said.
“Well,” said Dad, who’d evidently detected some sarcasm in the air, “you know what I mean.”
I leaned up against the counter. “You’re not joining us?” Dad asked, nodding toward an empty chair. “What’s with you?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“It’s this Leonard thing,” Dad said, happy to provide me with an excuse for my unwillingness to participate in the conversation. “I’m upset, too. Shit, I’m the one, I guess, who’s going to have to find some sort of family, have them come up here and pick up his car and his stuff. Hey, where’s Leonard’s backpack?”
“My car,” Lawrence said. “I can go get it for you.”
“No hurry. I just don’t want to forget about it.”
“What do you want to do?” Lawrence asked me. I was looking at the floor, and when I didn’t say something right away, Lawrence said, “Hello? Earth to Zack?”
I raised my head slowly. “So, Dad,” I said, “I finally remembered Lana Gantry.”
Dad looked around. “Hmm?”
“From when I was a kid. I didn’t remember her at first, but it came back to me today. All kinds of memories.”
“Oh,” Dad said. “Okay.”
“She and her husband, they used to come over, right? I can remember you guys barbecuing in the backyard. Coming over to play cards, watch stuff on TV.”
Dad made an effort at trying to recall. “Yeah, yeah, I think we did, now that you mention it.”
“I seem to remember you guys laughing, having a good time. There was even a time, I think, when I walked into the living room and you were all playing charades.”
“Charades,” Lawrence said. “People really did that, huh?”
I said, “You all seemed to get along really well. You and Lana, you were friends years ago before you reconnected up here.”