I had a blanket in the trunk of the Impala, and at the farm we spread it out on the grass and lay next to each other and waited for the stars to come out. It got so dark out there in the country, and under all those stars we said the things that were most on our minds, the things we could barely stand to face when they were right there in front of us in the daylight.
Connie said she missed her mother, and sometimes she cried a little, and I held her hand and didn’t say a word.
One night she said, “Why doesn’t your mother love your father?”
I told her I didn’t know, which was the truth. I’ve had years to think about what the trouble between them might have been, but I’ve never been able to say it was this or that. Maybe it was my father’s caution. Maybe my mother grew tired of the careful way he lived his life. One evening when they were hosting a pinochle party for a few couples they knew from church, my father kept underbidding his hands. Finally my mother said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, R.T. Live a little.” Little things like that have come back to me as time has gone on, but I can’t say for certain they mean anything.
But one thing I remember keeps me up at night, and that’s the moment I told Connie about on the Saturday night before that Sunday when she told me she couldn’t see me anymore, and later Bill and my father and I were moving into the woods with our shotguns. It may have been the story that spooked her, that made her believe what we were doing was ill-fated and could never come to a good end.
I said to her, “Last night I heard him beg her to stop.”
My mother’s and father’s talking stirred me from sleep in the middle of the night. I don’t know how long they’d been at it, trying to keep their voices low so I wouldn’t hear, but by the time I was awake, they were beyond that point. They weren’t thinking about anything except what had brought them to where they stood — in the midst of an ugliness they could no longer deny or ignore.
My father said, “Please, Annie. I’ve always tried my best to give you a good life, to give us a good life...” His voice trailed off, and then I heard a noise I couldn’t at first identify as anything that might come from a human being. A groan, a growl, a whimper at the end. In the silence that followed, I remember thinking, That’s my father. “Annie,” he finally said. “You’ve got to stop this. If you don’t...”
His voice left him then — swallowed up, I imagine, by the terror he felt over the prospect of a life lived without her.
“You want a divorce,” my mother said after a time. “Is that it?”
My father was weeping now. I could hear that. “Annie,” he said in a breathless, shaking voice that could barely make the words come out of his mouth. “I want you to love me.”
For a good while there was only the sound of him trying to choke down his sobs and get his breath.
Then my mother said in a gentle voice I’ve always tried to remember for what it was, the voice of a woman who’d found her way to trouble and didn’t know how to get out, “I’m here,” she said. “R.T., shh. Listen to me.” I like to think that she touched him then — touched his face or his hand, maybe even put her arms around his neck and pressed him to her. “I’m right here,” she said again. “That’s the most you should wish.”
Connie hadn’t asked for this piece of information. We’d only been lying on the blanket, looking up at the stars, not saying much of anything, just enjoying being close to each other in the dark, and I’d felt safe telling her that story. I was sixteen. She was my first love. She was the only person I could tell. What did I know then about the ties that bind one person to another?
I had to live through what was waiting for me that Sunday to know anything about love at all.
“My father’s the cause of that.” Connie sat up on the blanket. She crossed her arms over her stomach and started rocking back and forth. “He should have left your mother alone.”
“She made a choice,” I said. “It wasn’t just him.”
For a good while Connie didn’t say anything. Then in a whisper she said, “Yes, they both made their choices.”
Just then a set of headlights came down the lane. They lit up the gravel roadbed and spread out over the fencerows. They came so far that they shined on the wire fencing around the farmhouse yard. I could hear the engine idling and the faint sound of the car radio. The tires crunched over the gravel as the car rolled forward an inch or two. Then it stopped.
I knew whoever was in that car was looking at the grille of my Impala. Those headlights had caught the chrome. Whoever was in that car knew now they weren’t the only ones who’d come down that lane, and they were trying to decide what to do.
Connie was still sitting up on the blanket. We were on the grass to the left of the Impala, about even with the trunk, and just barely out of the glare of the headlights in the lane.
“Roger,” she said, and I could tell she was scared.
I reached up and put my hand on the small of her back, felt the heat of her skin. “It’s okay,” I said. “Everything’s okay.”
It seemed like the car in the lane would sit there forever, the driver unable to decide whether to keep coming. A drop of sweat slid down Connie’s back and onto my hand. Then somewhere nearby a screech owl started its trill, the call that seemed to come from the other side of the living, and I felt my heart pounding in my chest.
“Oh, God,” said Connie.
Then the car in the lane started backing up. It backed all the way to the end, where it swung out and pointed itself north. I watched the red taillights, and what I didn’t tell Connie, though maybe she knew this on her own, was that those long vertical rows of lights, set wide apart, were the taillights of an Olds ’98 like her father’s.
“Whoever that was, they’re gone,” I said.
I let my hand fall to the bow of her halter top. I started to untie it, but she slapped my hand away.
“That was spooky,” she said. “That car. C’mon. Let’s go.”
So in my mind now, the image of the two of us walking toward my Impala and getting in and driving back to town is forever tied up with the picture of me stepping into the woods that Sunday with Bill and my father.
We waited and waited around a stand of hickory trees where we’d seen pieces of husks on the ground, and though from time to time we heard a squirrel chattering in the tree mast high above us, we could never get a clear shot, and after too much time keeping quiet, Bill finally said, “Fuck it. I’m done.”
He was all for heading back to town, but my father said, “Let’s walk on over to the end of the next field and see if there’s any better hunting in Kepper’s Woods. We’re here. We might as well see what’s what over there.”
Jean Timms had been a Kepper before she married Mr. Timms, and those woods had been in her family longer than I could imagine. I didn’t know any of that on that Sunday — Kepper’s Woods was just a name to me, the way Higgins Corner or McVeigh Bottoms was, places marked by the names of families, the history of whom I had no reason to know.