A high-school friend, Emelina Domingos, had offered to meet my bus but I’d told her, No, don’t bother, I’ll make my own way. The plan was for me to live in the Domingos’ guesthouse. Not with my father. My relationship with Doc Homer had always improved with distance, which is to say that mail was okay and short, badly connected phone calls were best. I thought I should still keep some miles between us, even though he was ill and conceivably dying. It was going to be touchy. He would be an unwilling candidate for rescue, and I was disaster in that department myself. But he had only two living relatives and the other one was behind the wheel of a Toyota pickup headed for Nicaragua. I stood my suitcases side by side and sat on them for a minute to get my bearings. I think I was hoping Emelina might still show up.
There was no evidence of human life, or life that was ongoing in any obvious way. The one vehicle parked in front of the courthouse, a blue station wagon, had four flats and a bumper sticker stating “ONE DAY AT A TIME.” I suspected it had been there in 1972, the year I finished high school, when I last climbed on a Greyhound and turned my back on Grace. There wasn’t a soul on the street today and I thought of those movies in which a town is wiped clean of its inhabitants, for one reason or another-a nuclear holocaust, say, or a deadly mutant virus-leaving only a shell of consumer goods. The point, I think, is to make some statement about how we get carried away with all our trappings, but this wasn’t the place to shoot a movie like that. Grace hadn’t yet entered the era of parking meters, for example. There were iron rings mortared into the block wall of the courthouse where a person could tie a horse.
I tried to imagine Doc Homer coming downtown on horseback, looking silly, his tall, stiff spine bouncing up and down against his will. I erased the fantasy from my mind, feeling guilty. It was too late to be taking imaginary revenge on my father.
There wasn’t much to Grace’s commercial district. The window of the Hollywood Dress Shop leered from across the street, framing a ferocious display of polyester. The headless mannequins were dressed to the nines, with silver vinyl loafers and red nail polish. If I moved a little I could put my reflection there in the window with them: me in my Levi’s and Billy Idol haircut. (I was the one with a head.) A friend of mine used to make bizarre collages like that-Nancy Reagan in mink among the slaves on an Egyptian mural; Malibu Barbie driving sled dogs in the Iditarod. She sold those things for good money.
The Hollywood Shop was flanked by Jonny’s Breakfast (open all day) and the movie theater. Back behind these buildings ran the railroad tracks. On the other side of Jonny’s were the State Line Bar and the Baptist Grocery. I tried to place myself inside these stores; I knew I’d been there. Directing Hallie through the grocery aisles on a Saturday, ticking off items from Doc Homer’s list. Sitting in Jonny’s afterward, hunched in a booth drinking forbidden Cokes, reverently eying the distant easy grace of the girls who had friends and mothers. But I couldn’t see it. Those things didn’t seem so much like actual memories as like things I might remember from a book I’d read more than once.
I had lied on the bus. I’d told the woman sitting next to me that I was a Canadian tourist and had never been to Grace. Sometimes I used to do that, tell tales on buses and airplanes-it passes the time. And people love you for it. They’ll believe anything if you throw in enough detail. Once I spent a transatlantic flight telling a somber, attentive man about a medical procedure I’d helped develop in Paris, in which human cadavers could be injected with hormones to preserve their organs for transplant. I would be accepting a prestigious medical prize, the name of which I devised on the spot. The man seemed so impressed. He looked like my father.
I didn’t do it anymore, I was more or less reformed. What I’d said that morning was the truest kind of lie, I guess, containing fear at its heart: I was a stranger to Grace. I’d stayed away fourteen years and in my gut I believe I was hoping that had changed: I would step off the bus and land smack in the middle of a sense of belonging. Ticker tape, apologies, the luxury of forgiveness, home at last. Grace would turn out to be the yardstick I’d been using to measure all other places, like the mysterious worn out photo that storybook orphans carry from place to place, never realizing till the end that it’s really their home.
None of this happened. Grace looked like a language I didn’t speak. And Emelina wasn’t coming. I hefted up my suitcases and started to walk.
Oh Lord, the terror of beginnings. I dreaded having to see all the people who were going to say, “How long are you home for, honey?” Possibly they would know I’d come for the school year. We would all carry on as if this were the issue: the job. Not Doc Homer, who’d lately begun addressing his patients by the names of dead people. Since I really did need to come, I’d gotten myself hired to replace the high-school biology teacher who’d recently married and defected without warning. I had practically no teaching qualifications, I should add, and
