Temperance Creek. Pamela Royes
next exit was, searching for another car, calculating what would happen if I opened my door. And then Jack growled, fracturing the stillness, bringing air into the space, and I screamed, “Stop the car!”
In the drumming, ragged heartbeats that followed, pulsing through the thin fabric of my shirt, there was a shift. And though it seemed time couldn’t possibly move forward in its former careless way, the salesman stepped on the brakes, throwing me forward, arms splayed. He swerved off the freeway, and I battered against the door and threw it wide before the car had stopped, leapt out without shutting it, wrenched open the back and grabbed my stuff as he sped away, black marks scorching the pavement behind him.
On the shoulder of the highway I stroked Jack’s head over and over, droning, “He’s gone, you saved me, he’s gone,” waiting for the tremor in my legs to stop and thinking briefly of the bus money—cashed, pocketed, and spent so righteously on cigarettes, dog food, and a collar and leash for Jack. It wasn’t easy to stick out my thumb again on those wide Nebraska flats, still a thousand miles between me and 418 Campbell Drive. I thought I knew what was safe and what wasn’t. That I could read people. I looked up and down the freeway, wretched and without option. But eventually, I realized I had everything I needed. North was still north. I had my thumb. I had Jack.
Shortly after my safe arrival, Jack proceeded to lay waste to Mom’s flower beds and give my dad fits. Not wanting to add to their already-overflowing list of worries, I ran an ad, and when an interested farmer called, Laura and I hitched out together for old times’ sake. I took a last picture of Jack, straining against the leash held by a stranger, and sobbed all the way to Crookston, where a passing tornado, dark and apocalyptic, forced us from the side of the road into a ditch, swirling in a great whirl of wind and debris.
“I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling Looking for something, what can it be?”
—JONI MITCHELL
In second gear I drove slowly by my parents’ new home, the neighborhood still under construction. A trim yellow ranch-style with brick detailing, it sat below the road and was built partially into a hillside. A single strand of multicolored lights hung along the eaves.
I parked on the hill, killed the engine, pulled up the emergency brake, and finished my smoke. All the family heirlooms were inside, but I wasn’t sure what to call home anymore. My heart was bouncing around the inside of my chest like a rubber ball trapped in a clothes dryer. We hadn’t shared a Christmas holiday for years. I got out, stubbed my cigarette on the pavement, located the Big Dipper, and grabbed my bag.
Then I opened the front door. “Hey, anybody here?”
Dad, silver-haired and festive in a red cashmere sweater, stepped into the entryway, arms open. “Sweetie, good to see you.”
“Hey, Pops,” I said, smiling as we hugged. “Merry Christmas.” He smelled of toothpaste and shaving cream, and there was a hint of Old Spice, but it wasn’t overpowering. His shave was so close I reached up and affectionately patted his cheeks with my palms.
“I didn’t hear you pull in,” he said, stepping back to peer through the door glass toward the street. “Still driving that Volkswagen?” he asked, shaking his head. “How’s it running? How’s school?”
“Fine. Great.”
“Need help packing anything in?”
“Let’s do it later. I want to see everyone first. Is Mark here?”
As I kicked off my boots, Mom appeared in the hallway, wiping her hands on a tea towel. Her face was flushed. “Here you are, I was beginning to worry.” She let me hug her, but for no more than a couple seconds before she backed away, still smiling.
“Are we having company tonight?” I asked, glancing down at my flannel shirt and bell-bottomed jeans.
“Just us.”
Though it was just us, Mom was wearing the silver jewelry of every Christmas—a large pendant of Celtic design on a chain and silver bracelets that jangled and chimed.
Randy took the stairs two at a time, and we hugged, patting one another’s backs. “My brother,” I said. “My sister,” he said. Lanky, bespectacled, and curly-haired, Randy floated along like a tall red bobber on the end of a pole, indifferent to the tensions that arose when we were all home.
“How’s it going so far?” I mumbled under my breath.
“So far, so good.”
The table was set. Upon a red tablecloth, the family porcelain shone, flanked by silverware engraved with the letter S, for Severson. Overhead, the chandelier prisms sparkled, and in the living room I could see the tree, boughs tinseled, adorned with ornaments and spread over a mound of gifts.
Despite our differences, I loved being home for Christmas. Especially now that I’d stopped (well, nearly) agonizing over the contents of the presents under the tree and could focus on the pleasures of sleeping in. Letting someone cook, answer the phone, fill up my tank with gas, and take me out for lunch.
Turning, I saw my brother Mark coming up the stairs. He was thin. Very thin. And he was using a cane. “Pammy,” he said.
“Wow,” I said. “What’s happened to you?”
He was vague. Said something about an infection, that it was nothing time wouldn’t heal, but when he crossed the floor to hug me, I noticed how he leaned on it. He’s always been thin, I thought, and I glanced questioningly at Mom. But she shook her head, and I postponed my questions.
We mixed drinks, gathered in the kitchen, and eventually took our places at the table, all of us talking at once. “A toast! A toast!” I cried, hitting the edge of my whiskey tumbler with the back of my spoon. “To Mom! And to all you fair people, and” (a little drunkenly) “the ham!”
“To Mom and the ham!”
Since my parents’ astonishing move from North Dakota to Oregon three years before, there were empty seats, missing faces. No extended family, no long-standing friends dropping by unannounced to clink cocktail glasses of good cheer. Though Mom never expressed any longing for the life they left behind, I noticed she’d put on weight, her black blouse pulling a little at the buttons and the long brocade skirt in rich hues of red and orange taut at the waistline. We passed steaming bowls of traditional fare. Ham, rolls, scalloped potatoes, three-bean salad, green salad, deviled eggs, and asparagus. Mom winked at me and whispered, “Rum cake for dessert.”
“Mom,” I groaned, patting my stomach.
Watching Mark, animated and relaxed, converse with my Mother, it was almost possible to forget the change in his appearance. Randy and I shared in but somehow remained outside of their clever banter, their laughter, though I never felt jealous, like I think maybe Dad did, because I loved to see her happy. Soon, Mark would return to Europe and take with him whatever it was that made her sparkle. He couldn’t please Dad, but Mom overlooked his drinking, his chain-smoking, his ineffable otherness. She adored Mark’s wit and intelligence, his noble profile and slender, expressive hands.
Randy asked Mark, “What’s it like to wake up in Paris?”
“Oh, it’s noisy, crowded. I don’t really get up that early, as you well know.” He smiled and gave a self-deprecating kind of laugh.
Dad attempted to direct the conversation to the subject of Mark’s work, which had something to do with theater and wasn’t what he considered, after eight years of college, a financially mature way to make a living (substantiated by the frequency with which Mark hit my parents up for loans), but Randy diverted that line of questioning by asking Dad about his work and the rising cost of real estate. I took a deep breath, rolled my eyes at Randy across the table, and wondered what the odds were we’d get through the main course, all of us intact and seated.
“It’s