“So, you’re going to be hanging around for a while, then, before you head back to Burlington?”
“Until I sort things out.”
We were done, at least for now. As Harry led me out of the office, he put his hand on my arm.
“Ray,” he said tentatively, “do you think if your brother had noticed how long it had been since your dad had been in the house, if he’d gone out looking for him a little sooner, it would have made any difference?”
I’d asked myself the same question. Dad, pinned to the ground just over the hill, probably several hours before my brother found him. There had to have been quite a racket when it happened. The tractor flipping over, the rotating blades roaring.
Did Dad scream? And if he had, would he have been heard over the noise of the mower? Would any of the sounds have carried up over the hill to the house?
My brother probably never heard a thing.
“I tell myself it wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said. “There’s no point thinking otherwise.”
Harry nodded understandingly. “I guess that’s the best way to look at it. What’s done is done. No turning back the clock.” I wondered if Harry was going to offer up another cliche, but instead he said, “He’s really off in his own little world, isn’t he?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.
TWO
I got into the car and drove back to my father’s house.
After Mom had died, I’d still thought of it for the longest time as my parents’ place, even though Dad was living there without her. It took a year or so for me to move past that. With Dad dead less than a week, I knew it was going to take a while before I could think of it as anything but his place.
But it wasn’t. Not anymore. It was mine.
And my brother’s.
I’d never lived here. There was a guest room where I always slept when I came to visit, but there were no mementoes from my childhood here. No dresser drawer with stashes of Playboy and Penthouse, no model cars on the shelves, no posters on the walls. My parents had bought this place when I was twenty-one. I’d already moved out of our house on Stonywood Drive, in the heart of Promise Falls. My parents had hoped one of their sons would make something of himself, but put that dream on hold when I bailed on my university career in Albany and got a job at a Beekman Street art gallery in Saratoga Springs.
My parents were never farmers, but when they’d spotted this place, it fit the bill. First, it was out in the country, several hundred yards from the closest neighbor. They’d have their privacy. Some isolation. It reduced the likelihood of another incident.
Second, it was still a relatively short drive to work for Dad. But instead of driving into Promise Falls, through the downtown, and out the other side, he’d take the bypass they finished back in the late 1970s. Dad liked working for P amp;L. He didn’t want to look for something closer to home.
Third, the house was charming, with its dormer windows and wraparound porch. Mom had loved to sit out there, three seasons out of the year. The place came with a barn, which Dad didn’t have much need for, other than to store tools and park the lawn tractor. But they both loved the look of the structure, even if it wasn’t storing hay every fall.
There was a lot of property, but my parents maintained only about two acres of it. Behind the house, the yard stretched out flat for about sixty feet, then sloped down and out of sight to a creek that wound its way to the river that flowed into the center of town and cascaded over Promise Falls.
I’d only been down to the creek once since I’d come home. A task awaited me there, when I finally felt up to it.
Some of the flat and treeless land, beyond where Dad maintained it, was rented to neighboring farm interests. For years, that had provided my parents with a secondary-if nominal-income. The closest woods were across the highway. When you turned in off the main road and started up the drive, the house and barn sat on the horizon like a couple of boxes on a flatcar. Mom always said she liked a long driveway because when she saw someone turn in-which was not, she’d have been the first to admit, often-it gave her plenty of time to steel herself.
“People don’t usually come to your door with good news,” she’d said on more than one occasion. It had certainly been her experience, most notably when she was a young girl, and officials of the U.S. government had come to inform her mother that her father would not be coming home from Korea.
I nosed the car close to the steps that led up to the porch, parking my four-wheel-drive Audi Q5 next to Dad’s ten-year-old Chrysler minivan. He didn’t think much of my German wheels. He questioned supporting the economies of nations we once fought. “I suppose,” he’d said a few months ago, “when they start importing cars from North Vietnam, you’ll buy one of those.” Since he was so concerned, I offered to return for him his beloved Sony TV with a screen big enough that he could actually see the puck when watching the Stanley Cup playoffs.
“It being a Japanese set and all,” I’d said.
“Touch that thing and I’ll knock your block off,” he’d said.
I took the porch steps two at a time, unlocked the front door-I hadn’t needed to take a house key from Dad’s ring; I’d always had one-and went into the kitchen. The clock on the wall said it was nearly four thirty. Time to start thinking about something for dinner.
I hunted around in the fridge to see what might be left in here from my father’s final trip to the grocery store. He wasn’t much of a cook, but knew the basics. He could boil water for pasta, or heat up an oven and throw a chicken in there. But for the days when he hadn’t the energy for anything that fancy, he’d stuffed the freezer with hamburgers and fish sticks and french fries and enough frozen dinners to start a Stouffer’s franchise.
I could make do with what was here for tonight, but tomorrow I was going to have to make a trip to the grocery store. The truth was, I wasn’t much of a cook myself, and back in Burlington, found many nights I couldn’t be bothered to make myself anything more ambitious than a bowl of Cheerios. I think, when you live alone, it’s hard to get motivated to make a real meal, or eat it in a proper way. Many nights I’d eat dinner standing in the kitchen, watching the news on the TV, or I’d take my plate of microwaved lasagna up to my studio and eat while I worked.
I opened the refrigerator. There were six cans of Bud in there. My father liked his beer affordable and basic. Part of me felt funny, dipping into his last six-pack, but it didn’t stop me from taking one out and cracking it.
“To you, Dad,” I said, raising the can, then taking a seat at the kitchen table.
The place was almost as neat as I’d found it. Dad was meticulous, which made the upstairs hall all the more difficult for him to accept. I attributed his fastidiousness to his time in the Army. Drafted, he did his two years, most of it overseas in Vietnam. He never talked about it. “It’s over,” he’d say anytime it came up. He was more inclined to credit his habits to his work in printing, where precision and attention to detail were everything.
I sat there, drinking Dad’s beer, working up the energy to defrost or nuke something. I cracked open another as I began pulling things out of the freezer. Given my unfamiliarity with this kitchen, I had to open several drawers to find place mats and cutlery and napkins.
When things were almost ready, I walked through the living room and rested my hand on the banister before heading upstairs. I cast my eye across the room: the checkered couch my parents brought here two decades ago from the house in Albany, the recliner my father always sat in to watch his Sony. The chipped coffee table they bought the same time as the couch.
While the furniture was dated, Dad didn’t skimp on the technology. There was the TV itself, a thirty-six-inch flat screen with HD that he’d bought a year ago to watch football and hockey. He liked his sports, even if he had to enjoy them alone. There was a DVD player, and one of those gadgets that allowed him to order up movies from the Internet.
He watched those by himself.
The living room looked like a million other living rooms. Normal. Nothing extraordinary.
That changed as you got to the top of the stairs.
My parents had tried, without success, to keep my brother’s obsession contained to his own room, but it was
