Fiction

Last fall, six weeks after President Nixon resigned, my father went out. He went out through the kitchen, into the garage, into the 1971 Chevy Impala, impeccably white, the dark green vinyl seats cool and smooth, heavy with the scent of cigarettes. I smoked in that car when I was thirteen, in the back seat with Kevin Harrison, smoked and necked and knew Daddy would never smell the difference. Would never know the scent of my cigarettes laid over his, my desires drowning his. Daddy loved that car. More than he ever loved me.

I smoked in that car when I was fourteen, smoked and screwed and said screw you to Darren Fuller, who dumped me for Susie Fiedler, who already had everything. A big house, the best clothes. Her daddy loved her, why did she have to have my boyfriend, too, except just because she could. And I smoked and drank and screwed Kevin Harrison who would then dump me for someone, anyone else in the weeks after Daddy left. And sometimes I smoked and did my homework. I did my homework because I was always good at school and that gave me hope.

Nixon had been a big disappointment to Daddy. Just like me. On that day, when Daddy went out through the kitchen, into the garage and into that goddamned white car, here’s what he might have done:

He might have gone to the 7 Eleven, sat outside in that car, in the parking lot, his face lit by the neon 7 and the neon Eleven, awash in disappointment. He might have let the engine idle in park until he put it in
gear, into reverse, backed out of the parking lot, not spraying gravel because it might fly up and chip the paint, and drove down the highway into the middle of the night.

But he didn’t. We know he bought cigarettes, Lucky Strikes, we know that from the guy behind the register, Kevin Harrison’s stupid older brother, Scott. ”Yeah, Regina’s dad was in here-two nights ago-bought cigarettes and a six-pack of Coke.” Scott Harrison wasn’t cute like Kevin.

And he wasn’t smart like Kevin. He always let his greasy hair hang over his
forehead, as if that would hide the pimples.

But I knew before we talked to Scott that Daddy had stopped for cigarettes and Coke. He always did.

Here’s what else he might have done:

He might have broken open the carton, fished out the first pack, stripped off the cellophane right there in the parking lot, in the front seat of that white car, smelled the fresh rush of new tobacco before the sulfur and smoke of the match. Daddy never used a lighter, not even the one in the Chevy, just matches. The glove box of the Impala was stuffed with books of matches from the places Daddy had been-the White Horse Bar, the Zanzibar, P.T.’s Topless Bar, the diners all along East Colfax and the truck stops between here and Reno, the far west end of Daddy’s territory. He had matches from just about everywhere in the known world. The lighter stashed in the crack between the deep green cushions in the front seat was mine, not his. He might have turned on the radio to listen to the news.

Daddy might have inhaled that first full drag, shaken out the match and
settled back into the dark green seat. He might have let his arm dangle out
the window until he’d smoked that Lucky Strike down to the filter, then
flicked it away in the dark and said, “Fuck it. I’m outta here.”

He might have driven through the night, moving from one radio station to another, from one call-in talk show to another, far west into the mountains then down into the Utah desert. He might have driven as far as he could and then fallen asleep behind the wheel, nodding over the dotted white line into the semi rolling east towards Grand Junction. He might have crashed in a shower of glass, talill1g the Impala with him, but sparing the truck driver so he could go home to his wife and kids. He might have done that.

Or maybe he got all the way to Salt Lake City, ringed by the same Rocky
Mountains you can see from the hill at the top of our street. Maybe there he
had another family. I read a story about that once, a cowboy with two wives, two families and two houses. The cowboy’s first wife didn’t know until he died, kicked in the head by a horse. Maybe Daddy had another family, one with a daughter who didn’t smoke and screw and get drunk on rum in the back seat of the Impala. Who didn’t hate the war. Maybe he liked her
better because she was smarter and prettier and funnier and didn’t slam
doors and cry in her room. Who didn’t think she was better than everybody
else because she was smart. Maybe he liked her better because she didn’t
know he was screwing slutty Lois Johnson across town and probably every
other woman from here to Reno because my daddy was so good looking
that all the ladies loved him.

And maybe the woman in that house really didn’t know, instead of
pretend-not-knowing, all the time with her pinched angry mouth, like
somebody made her eat soap for telling the lie of it-ain’t-so, my husband’s
not a drunk and a liar and a cheat. I never smoked or screwed in my mother’s car. That would have been too much for her to bear.

Maybe on that clear crisp day in the fall, when the cottonwoods and elms
had all turned to yellow, and the maples and Virginia creeper to orange and red, and the nights turned cold, maybe he bought those cigarettes and then went down to the EZ Pawn and bought a gun and bullets and then drove out somewhere and blew his stupid fucking brains out and a stray bullet bounced out of his skull and hit the gas line of the Impala and instant immolation. Maybe Daddy died in a funeral pyre like those Buddhist
monks. Only not so pure.

And here’s what else didn’t happen.

I did not sneak out of the house after him, find him at the 7 Eleven, have a smoke with him in the front seat of that car. I didn’t hear the neat snick of my lighter, then see him smiling in the flare lighting his face, brighter than the dashboard lights, as we drove down the highway, smoking those Lucky Strikes. I did not drink rum and Coke in the back seat with my daddy, crunch the ice before it melted, while he cried and told me he loved
me but he was leaving, then pass him the rum until he was too drunk to get out of the car to take a leak without falling down, much less drive me home. That’s how I learned to drive, when I was twelve. Driving Daddy home. Home from the White Horse Bar or the Black Horse Bar or from Lois
Johnson’s stupid, run-down little house, with her grass all brown and dead,
but mowed. I was twelve when I started mowing our grass, so my mother
wouldn’t have to.

I did not take the little Army surplus shovel from the trunk, folded up and tucked in by the spare, for digging out of the snow if he got stuck before he got the chains on. That Impala always did handle like a pig in the snow. I did not bash his head in as a single unlit cigarette dangled from his face as he tried not to piss on his feet.

I did not use my lighter, the little silver one engraved To SK with Love, the one I swiped from some guy sitting at the counter at the White Spot on East Colfax that night we stayed out, Kevin Harrison and me, to see The
Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight and then didn’t go home until later, much later.

And I did not comfort Daddy with shhhh… it’ll be all right, shhhh… don’t cry, while he whimpered it was cold, so cold and his white car lay in the bottom of a gully up above Morrison, south of the interstate. I did not say Daddy, I love you, I love you, I love you. And I didn’t hold him until the shaking stopped and his breathing stopped and the fire ate up his car, blistering the white into grey and then black, char where it used to be green, smoke all over now and not just on the seats, and he could never leave us again.

And I don’t sit in the front seat of my mother’s car on Saturday mornings, looking out the window, hating him, while my mother cries and drives me across town to that house where I watch him mow the grass.

It was a Christmas gift from my mother—a Christmas gift from a long-time lapsed Lutheran woman to her Jewish daughter.

I grew up in a house without God. In my teens, I searched for God in the charismatic Christian campus ministries. In my twenties, I sought God in the great outdoors, in the mountains of Colorado where I grew up, went to school, and married for the first time. In my thirties, I saw God in the faces of my children.

Then in my forties, I walked into a synagogue for the first time, for the bar mitzvah of the son of a friend, and came home to the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.

The day of my conversion was the first time in forty years my father had set foot in a shul. My daughters beamed from the second row and my son bounced from seat to seat in the back. My mother didn’t come.

That gift from my mother had been carefully wrapped in red paper with white snowflakes, snowmen and candy canes. No Star of Bethlehem, no wise men, no cross. No “Merry Christmas,” no Christ.  No problem.

She means well, my mother, I have come to understand that over the years. Not merely that she means me no harm, but that she actually means me well. It has always been hard for her to show that. It has also been hard for me to see.

The paper crinkled as I opened the gift. Fresh paper, without the softness of recycling, gently frayed at the creased edges. I never minded the reused paper. I used to think she did it because she was cheap. Now I like it because, whatever her reason, it seems to me that she walks gently on the earth as I begin to think gently of her.

It is a sepia portrait of Julia McKee, later Julia Wingo. She is young, eighteen perhaps, but the photo is old. In the upswept hair, tight bun, high collar and closed gaze, you see nothing of the spirited young woman who was to become my great-great-grandmother.

The photo is a reproduction, a delicately retouched copy of the fragile original my mother found among my grandmother’s things after her death ten years ago. It is framed in an oval of dark oak.

“Who does she look like?” my mother asks.

Dave, my oldest brother, gapes.

“She looks like Robyn,” I say. Robyn is my niece, Dave’s daughter, twenty-two and on her way to law school in Chicago. She looks like Rachel, I think. Rachel is my daughter, eighteen and on her way to college in California.

Dave turns to look at me. My mother looks disappointed, but it’s not the look of disapproval and disappointment I’ve seen before. Law school? How are you going to pay for that? Or: You’re pregnant … and getting married? Well, you’re too old for me to tell you what to do. Or: Religion is a crutch.

Instead it’s a look of confusion – as if maybe the portrait isn’t of who she thinks it is.

Dave shakes his head. “Janie,” he says to me. “She looks like you.”

The portrait could have been me.  Same high cheekbones, same delicate face, and same sometimes opaque eyes – the ones that say I don’t feel like sharing myself with you. Same face as Robyn, as Rachel, as me … as my mother. Genetics run deep.

I wonder how my Scots-German mother felt, giving this likeness of the women in my family, giving it to her Jewish daughter at Christmas.

How can I help her find ease in my home, where the ketubah from my second marriage hangs on the wall, where my shelves are filled with Chanukiot, Kiddush cups and Sabbath candlesticks, where a mezuzah marks every doorway?

She came to my wedding, the year after she gave me the portrait, but she did not come to my bat mitzvah last year. How can I tell her that my conversion was not an act of betrayal- that although my soul is Jewish my maternal bloodline is still hers?

How can I tell her that the faith of my father and my other great-great-grandmothers called me?

Called me home to God and my father’s people, but did not call me away from her.

I wonder how my mother feels when she looks in the mirror and instead of seeing her seventy-four year old self, sees the Jewish face of her forty-nine year old daughter. I wonder what she thinks when she looks at me.

The portrait now hangs in my upstairs hallway. She is really quite beautiful. Julia McKee. Robyn. Rachel. My mother. And me.

When I kayaked in to shore early this morning, I was thinking about men. Richard, my brother and captain of the small sailboat tied to a mooring ball in a tiny bay on the back side of one of the British Virgin Islands. And Sam.

Having dragged the kayak over the sand, above the highwater mark, I left it between two of the open-air bars that trailed along the shoreline. The terraces were empty, the town quiet as the islanders began to come in to work as domestics and day laborers; most of the tourists, both boat people and beach people, were still asleep. The faint smell of wood smoke was beginning to drift in from somewhere above the beach. I am here in the Caribbean, instead of back home in the desert, to be with Richard, who is recovering from yet another breakup with yet another woman who doesn’t want to live on a forty-eight foot sailboat. He is forever chasing after women who break his heart.

Sam said goodbye the night before I left for the Islands.

Have a good time.

Say hi to Richard.

We’ll talk when you get back.

Whatever happened to:

Call me whenever you can.

I’ll pick you up at the airport.

Whatever happened to:

I’ll miss you.

Don’t go.

So now I’m here for two weeks of warm weather, Richard’s good cooking, sailing and swimming. There will be plenty of time to help Richard sort through the short stacks of books and CD’s, separating them into his and hers, stowing the keepers in the cabinets in the galley and putting the rest
into plastic bags. There isn’t much. She’d only been on the boat six weeks. I didn’t ask Richard how many days this one had stayed after he asked her to marry him. Her left-behind clothing will go to the charity box of some church on one of the larger islands; I might keep her red and orange hibiscus sarong and one of her sunhats if it doesn’t bother Richard too
much. We’ll trade the books at the bars for ones Richard hasn’t read yet and the CO’s for mangoes and lettuce and fish on the islands that have no markets. At least I didn’ t have to worry about Richard calling her – no forwarding address.

I love the nomad’s life on the boat, and the Carib is my favorite place in the world. The islands rise up out of the water like the tips of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Northern New Mexico, rough and covered with twisted
scrubby brush. The land itself is dry, but surrounded by the sweet shush of surf and wind. Mostly we’re sailing the smaller islands, the ones with mooring balls in the bays instead of docks, the ones with fewer people, less civilization, more quiet. Cane Garden Bay, on the back side of Tortola, is a small beach town with a grocery, a laundry and diesel.

Santa Fe, where I live when I’m not on the boat, is a desert city in northern New Mexico, high, dry and dusty. Hot in summer, harshly cold in the winter. My house is always dusty, the kitchen counters, the bathroom floor, all covered with that light fine grit, the kind that gets on your skin and your teeth, in your shoes and your hair, and always shows up when you blow your nose.

But Sam’s house. Sam’s house is an oasis of clean in the dustbin that is Santa Fe. Sam isn’t the only man I know who has white carpet, he’s just the only man I know whose white carpet is still white.

Sam’s house is in one of the older neighborhoods of Santa Fe. Nothing special from the outs ide, the same dry and dusty flagstone walk up between the cactus and low ground cover, just like everyone else’s. Sam’s front door is turquoise, the same impossible turquoise as the Caribbean. The doorframe is white, just beginning to blister and peel in the tough New Mexico sun. Sam teaches eighth and ninth grade history in the public schools. He loves his job and loves his students. I don’t think he loves me.

I brushed wet sand off my feet, laced up my running shoes and set off. The road was nearly flat for the first hundred yards or so, then hooked hard to the right and began a wicked climb, one that wouldn’t let up until it reached the spine of the island where one can look down onto the Atlantic
Ocean on one side and the Caribbean on the other.

Just before the bottom of the hill, an American couple walked a pair of mixed breed dogs the size of Australian shepards. The dogs looked like littermates, with the same tan and brown markings and easy gait, except that one trotted with a limp.

I greeted and then passed the Americans, annoyed that they didn’t have their dogs on a leash. But when the dogs turned to follow me, I realized they were island dogs. They both looked well fed, or at least well enough, and one had a worn red collar, the one that didn’t limp. They must have belonged to someone.

I slowed to a walk and was relieved, perhaps unjustly so, when they went past me, tails up and wagging, unneutered males both of them; but then, I am not really a dog person.

They trotted by, turned to go up the road and stopped, looking back at me, waiting. The one with the limp stood on three legs, a canine Captain Ahab favoring his left front paw; they both panted in the hot tropic morning, long pink tongues hanging down like the sailboat’s telltale on a calm day.

I went on a bit and they stayed with me, pausing frequently to look back, not impatiently, just to make sure I was still there. Fine. So today I run with dogs.

The neighbor’s dog barked once in the still New Mexican morning air, but it was only me. I slid my key into Sam’s lock and let myself in.

I shouldn’t have gone, I guess, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was leaving in a few hours and my favorite swimsuit was still in the drawer in Sam’s bedroom, the drawer I appropriated when I started staying over sometimes. I didn’t like hauling all that stuff around in my gym bag. Deodorant’s one thing, but after the day the only tampon I had in my bag was gummy and damp from my toothbrush, I started leaving stuff at Sam’s.

I closed the door behind me and toed out of my shoes, leaving them on the hemp mat just inside the door. I remember the first time I saw Sam sweep under the mat- the dust patterns, mostly red, were intricate like the sand paintings of the Navajo, beautiful, spiderwebby circles and wavy lines. He lifted the mat off the smooth hickory floor and the top layer danced up into the air and hung there, twisting and turning and glittering in the desert sun. And then gone, swept off the floor and out the door, last traces damp mopped, last motes pulled out of mid-flight by the ionizer in the air conditioner, whirring quietly, constantly in the corner.

I stepped off the rug, past the memories, and through the entryway. Sam was at school, wouldn’t be home until long after I left. I padded across the living room, toward the bedroom, my wool socks slippery on the hardwood floor. It’s cold in Santa Fe in February, and I don’t like to be cold. And I don’t like to sleep alone.

The run up Tortola’s highest hill lasted twenty yards before the road pitched upward again and I had to slow to a walk. The road was lined with crushed aluminum beer cans, empty cardboard boxes, discarded clothing and other castoffs. One of the dogs made an easy leap to the top of the stone wall that served as both fence and token guardrail, scattering a small herd of goats on the other side. They didn’t seem interested in the scruffy little island chickens.

Ahab heard the first one coming before I did. He stopped in the middle of the pavement, between me and the approaching car, grinding in its lowest gear down the steep road. I lifted my hand to the driver. Ahab wheeled and
charged, barking and snapping at the back of the car. Steady Freddy watched him go by, then looked back to me again, as if to say no big deal, are you coming? Happy from the chase, tail wagging, Ahab loped to catch up.

By the time we reached the overlook, six or seven cars and pickup trucks have been threatened and chased. A couple of drivers just ignored the small dog with the big bark and the slight limp. Most slowed down, but one sped up and swerved toward him, just missing him.

I stood at the top of the island, looking east over the steely grey Atlantic, my back to the stark turquoise of the Caribbean bay to the west, thinking about dogs and men. I have a friend back home who says dogs are more easily housebroken than men. I don’t think that’s true. Sam keeps a cleaner house than I do, and Richard’s boat is cleaner yet.

Sam’s bedroom is light and airy, with the big bay window beside the bed, the center glass double-hung and all double paned to keep out the summer heat and the winter cold. The window looks out over the arroyo that separates Sam and his neighbors from the houses behind them. Sam’s bonsai trees are arrayed across the dark blue tile of what used to be a window seat. The loamy smell of wet dirt lingers low in the air by the window. Sam waters -Lhe bonsai every day, even in the winter. They are spare and stark miniature trees, but they are not creatures of the desert. Not like me or like the cactus and yucca and yarrow outside the house. Under the smell of the bonsai is the sharp bite of lemon and ammonia.

On our first month anniversary, I gave Sam a bonsai tree, a tiny pine, not much bigger than a teacup. Not a desert creature either, but I was trying to compromise. Sam never made room for it on the window seat.

Five months later, I knelt on the white carpet to get my suit from the bottom drawer. It was so quiet in there, the windows closed up, the rhythmic click of the electric floorboard heaters, and the bonsai, just waiting. I needed my suit. Really. I did.

I dug through my stuff, looking for my green suit, faded and smelling faintly of chlorine and salt. Toothbrush, hairbrush, assorted tampons and condoms, t-shirts, socks. I snagged my favorite bra, pushed it into my pocket. But no suit.

The bonsai I had given Sam was no longer on top of the dresser. Neither was the framed photo of us, at the Pueblo in Taos, I had given him on our second month anniversary.

Sam had offered to help me carry my things to my car.

I ‘ll help you.

I didn’t want help.

A clean break. He didn’t look at me, but I think he actually meant it. It’ll be easier this way, if you take your things now and let me have my key back.

I didn’t want to take my things. I didn’t want to leave Sam’s key.

Could we talk about this?

There’s nothing left to talk about. He held out his hand for the key, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I knew I had to let him go, but not yet. Not yet.

Okay. Sam put his hands in his pockets. Those warm, gentle hands that used to… We’ll talk when you get back.

But I knew we wouldn’t, that he wouldn’t change his mind. He’s like that when he decides something. Like how he always sweeps the dust out from under the hemp mat by the front door. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted Sam.

In the early morning, that last day in Santa Fe, after Sam had gone to work and I went to look for my suit, I dumped everything back into the drawer and banged it shut. My tiger striped panties caught on the side, sticking out and keeping the drawer from going all the way in. I yanked the drawer back out, shoved everything down, scraping my wrist on my hairbrush, and slammed it shut. My hairbrush used to be on top of the dresser, along with the tiny pine bonsai, and now it was shut away in the drawer. Sam must have thrown the little tree away. Or had taken it to school and given it to
the botany teacher. Or to one of his precious students.

I crawled to the side of the bed, Sam’s side, ignoring my CD’s and books stacked in a box by the nightstand. I tugged the covers out from under the mattress and got in. I clung to the life raft of we’ll talk when you get back. He hadn’t changed the sheets yet and the bed still smelled of him, of male sweat and goodbye sex.

I turned my face into the pillow and inhaled the faint peppermint scent of his soap.

Freddy, the island dog, flopped in the long morning shade of a short, wind-bent tree at the top of Tortola, panting and waiting. It was already hot, the air heavy with the scent of litter and goats. Ahab marked the stone guardrail in a couple of spots and sniffed at a small mound of trash. Sam would have loved the view; Richard would have loved someone, anyone to share it with. I stretched a bit, my knees aching from the climb, then started back down the hill, wary of the loose gravel covering the cement pavement in large patches.

The driver of one pickup truck, going past a second time, returning from whatever early morning errand had taken him over the hill, slowed enough to ask me if they were mine. No way! I called back over Ahab’s loud barking.

It was like being shadowed in the mall by a pair of adolescent boys, one of who is behaving badly. They’re not my dogs, I wanted to shout to the drivers who glared at me when they went by. Sometimes, when I was a sophomore in high school and Richard was nine, I used to feel that way about him. I don’ t know that kid, I’d shrug, walking six steps ahead of him at the store or the library or the movies. He’s not my brother. One time, he followed me and two of my friends all the way to the girls’ dressing room at Sweet Sixteen. He lasted twenty minutes after we’d slammed the door on him, giggling and talking about boys, before he started to whimper.

I wanna go home.

Big baby, one of my friends said.

When are we gonna go home?

Don’t you know when you’ re not wanted?

I cracked the door open and hissed at him to be quiet, to stop making such a fuss or I’d really make him cry. He wanted to be with me so bad, he’d curled up on the floor, right in front of the door. I thought I’ d die from the embarrassment.

But I never left him behind.

I heard it – a small thump. The joyous barking cut short and punctuated by a canine shriek. The car never slowed down. I turned to look, but Freddy didn’t. Ahab, his limp more pronounced, loped to catch up to us, tail wagging, panting, head up as if to say it had been well worth it. But he let the next three cars go by without so much as a longing glance.

We were nearly down off the hill, just above the turn into town, when he couldn ‘t help himself any longer. Barking and snapping, he started up again, rushing the cars going by. You ought to be on a leash, I growled. On second thought, I glared at the two dogs, both of you ought to be on leashes!

I just wanted to run down, back to the kayak and the beach, to get away from the possibility of something really awful happening, but the hill was too steep. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been cowardly about it, but I’d already decided that if he got badly hurt or even killed I was going to keep
going, leave him on the road, and report it to someone, anyone, when I got back to the little town on the beach. Sam would know how to help a broken dog, where to find a vet before anything was open, how to comfort without being bitten. Even Richard would have been unafraid. I tried to pick up the pace, but not enough to risk falling on the gravel.

Far below, the boat rocked on the in-coming tide, the mast swaying above the tightly furled sails. A haven at the end of my run . My favorite green suit hung over the railing to dry, the suit that had turned up in the bottom of my duffel once I’d gotten to the boat, the suit I hadn’t left at Sam’s.

I saw him misjudge the distance and get hit by the truck. He wasn’t run over, just clipped on the side of the head by the bumper, a sick thud of metal to flesh and bone. He yelped, I cringed, and even his littermate turned to look.

Ahab limped along, slowing every few steps to shake his head, pawing at his ear. Incredibly, there was no blood, no ear ripped off, no skull crushed. His spine wasn’t broken, leaving him to drag his back legs behind him, crippled like a seal on the beach. And it wasn’t the last truck he chased that day.

The two dogs followed me all the way back in to town, to the top of the crumbling concrete steps leading down to the beach, where I’d tied up the kayak. There they turned to follow a trio of Canadians, one of the women cooing and calling them good dogs.

The dogs trotted along with the Canadians toward where the road began to climb and the traffic grew thicker as the island came fully awake. I watched them go, thinking about men and women. And dogs. How they only chase you when you run. I wondered which truck, bumping over a furry body, would be Ahab’s last one.

As for putting them on leashes, I know that’s a bad idea. The smart ones you don’t have to worry about. They go where they want to go, see what they want to see, generally keep you company, and stay out of traffic. The others I’m not sure can be helped.

Maybe it runs in the family. Richard and Ahab and me. The dogs and the Canadians disappear around the first bend in the road. I turn to look for a phone to call Sam.

My grandmother died on a cold, grey day in November. We didn’t know until the next day, when old Mr. Parson, who lives down the lane, went to check on her and found her dead in the yard with her boots on.

When Mom called, the first thing I thought was how much I would miss Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother’s house. I grew up in my grandmother’s kitchen, Thanksgivings and summers, in boots or barefoot.  We were close the way women get when they’ve been through hard times together. Losing my grandmother was like losing a piece of me.

The second thing I thought was Oh, my God, how am I going to manage three children in the car for the four-hour drive over the Colorado Rockies, a stay in a strange hotel, their first funeral, one where they would surely c1y because I would be crying, and then four hours in the car back again the next day.

“When is the funeral?” I asked.

Mom’s voice was quiet but steady.  She had already told me she didn’t intend to cry. “Saturday, I expect.”  Grandma always said women in our family are supposed to be tougher than boot leather, stronger than grief.  Often we are stronger than the men we choose and that can be a problem.  Grandma was a widow for 28 years, Mom raised my sister and me by herself, and I was raising my three girls since their father decided he was tired of being a family man three years ago last August.

“Friday would be a good day to travel,” I said.  Tia’s kindergarten class got out at noon.  If I took Katie and Sarah out of school at lunch, and the weather held, we’d be down off of narrow twisty Rabbit Ears Pass and checked into the Holiday Inn in Craig before dusk.  If the weather didn’t hold, the driving could get seriously bad.  Friday was also good because I knew Matt could get the afternoon off, if he asked. Yes, Friday would be good.

I knew Matt was home, so I waited the six and a half rings it took him to answer. “How was your day?” I asked.  Matt always listened better when he’d already had his say, and today I wanted him to listen.  After he went on for awhile, I thought it was time enough to change the subject.

“My grandmother died yesterday.”

“Ahh.”  Matt dragged it out, slow and soothing.  I was glad I had called, glad I wasn’t going to be alone with my grief and my girls. “Jody, I’m sorry.”

I didn’t intend to cry, at least not until later. “The funeral’s on Saturday,” I said. “I thought we could drive over on Friday.”  Unasked, I let the question float out like a wisp of cloud.

“You’re going then?”

Idiot, like I’m not going to go to my grandmother’s funeral.  She had always been there for me, when Katie and Sarah and Tia were born, and when I ran out of money in college, one semester short of the degree that would get me a job better than any my mother ever had a chance for. And when I tried to fall apart when my ex-husband walked out on the girls and me, she was there to remind me that I had children to take care of and that the women in my family have more staying power than most any man any of us had ever seen or were likely to see.  “Yes,” I said. “I’m going.”

“Will your ex keep the kids for you or what?”

“I’m not going to ask.”

“Don’t you think he’ll do it?”

After 18 months of hearing me tell stories, Matt didn’t much care for my ex-husband, but then again neither did I, so I let that go by.

“I want the girls with me.”  They had never stayed at my grandmother’s house, that was my only regret, that they had all been born after my grandmother decided the farm wasn’t a safe place for city kids.  I wanted them to see it before it was sold out of the family. I wish I’d had the money to buy it. “This is their family, too.”

“So, you’ll leave on Friday, then,” he said. “What time?” Last year on my birthday, my sister had kept the girls so Matt and I could go out to dinner. He said I deserved wine and candlelight on my birthday, and he was going to make sure I got both. He gave me a small wooden box, a box he had made and painted with sea shells and gulls. When I opened it, there was a · gold sand dollar on a chain, nestled in red tissue paper. Next birthday, I thought, it might be a ring.  I twisted the chain around my finger and asked, “Matt, would you go with us, help me drive?”

I heard his lighter snap. He inhaled deeply, then let it out. I could just see the smoke curl up to the ceiling, dingy yellow from all the years Matt had meant to but hadn’t quit smoking, and I knew it wouldn’t matter when I decided to leave.  I waited to hear how he would tell me that.

“I don ‘t think that’s a good idea, Jody.”

Once I get started, I can be a lot like my grandmother and my mother are with men, stubborn and unforgiving, sometimes hurting no one but myself.  I knew he wasn’t going to help me, but I wasn’t going to let him get away without saying it.

“Why not?”

“It’s just not a good idea.”

“You could help me drive.  It’s a four-hour trip.”  I choked the whine out of my voice. Each way. And you’re going to make me drive it alone.

“It’s just not a good idea,” he said again.

Maybe I couldn’t quite believe he was really going to let me go alone. Or maybe all that sorrow, all that loss I was holding inside, holding until after all the arrangements had been made, all the things that needed taking care of were taken care of, maybe all that had gotten inside the boot leather, had softened me up a bit, made me stupid, but I asked again. “Matt, please.” Please help me do this hard thing.  Please come with me and drive so I can tell stories to my daughters about their great grandmother, so I don’t have to be the only grownup with three tired, hungry, con­ fused little girls, so I can get ready to see my mother cry.  So I don’t have to be alone at night with my grief in a strange bed in a hotel room so far from home.  So I can start to believe that not all men are like my ex-husband. I could hear all of that in my voice. I don’t think Matt could and I don’t think it would have made any difference, at least not in how it turned out, even if he had.

“Jody, no!”  He should have left it at that. I might have forgiven him for the sake of peace, for the sake of our future together I thought about, for the sake of not sleeping alone.  But he said, “I don’t want to intrude on your family.”

Intrude on my family.   My family that he’d managed for 18 months to avoid meeting. My family who had been there, in Grandma’s kitchen for Thanksgiving, on the front porch in summer, year after year.  My mom, my sister, my aunt and cousins. My family.

“Matt-“

He talked over the top of me. “I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s not like you were close to her or anything.  You haven’t visited her once, not one time, since I’ve known you, so how close could you be?”

The drive west out of Denver, through the Eisenhower Tunnel, then north to Kremmling, was long, but the weather and the roads were clear for the first three hours.

Tia sat next to me in the front seat, keeping me company by keeping quiet.  Katie and Sarah read and talked and were bored in the back seat, but they didn’t fight and they only asked once, just as we passed through Dillon, to stop for ice cream and to go to the bathroom.

The rain started after we were down off the pass; it didn’t turn to sleet until we cleared Steamboat Springs, 45 miles shy of my grandmother’s house. Suddenly, in this weather, it was another hour-and-a-half away.

After we checked in, the girls went down to the hotel game room with a fistful of quarters among them and a promise from me that we would all go in the pool together later, once we were settled.

I unpacked my black sweater and the long black skirt I’d brought, shook them out, and hung the skirt in the closet, on one of those weird wooden hangars, the kind you can’t steal because they come apart into two pieces, leaving the ring on the rod and in your hand a worthless triangle of wood, sort of a boomerang that never gets thrown, so it never needs to come back around. I put the sweater in a drawer, hid the remote control to the TV (that would have been more than I could stand), and looked at the phone.  My sister was staying out at the house with my mother and my aunt.  My cousins, both coming with husbands and children, hadn’t checked into the hotel yet.

I wanted to just sit and cry, those great heaving sobs I’d been holding back since Mom called, the kind where you want someone to hold you and to hand you Kleenex when you’re done, but I still had to deal with dinner, room service or the dining room, or something. I didn’t think I could face fast food, even though the girls would be begging for burgers and fries. Being alone filled the hotel room, spreading out over the chenille spread, the rough woven curtains, the standard issue white towels that looked soft but weren’t.  I twisted the sand dollar chain around one finger, picked up the phone and dialed 8 for an outside, long distance line.

I didn’t cry until the funeral started. After, I stopped long enough to drive, headlights on, to the cemetery for the graveside service.  My grandmother’s casket sat low to the ground, next to my grandfather’s grave, which was obscured by the mound of sod that would be rolled out by the cemetery workers after the family and other mourners left.

 Sweet Tia sat with my mother and my aunt on a folding aluminum riser whose legs sank into the soggy ground.  The sky began to spit little bits of wet that couldn’t decide if they wanted to be rain or snow. I started to cry again when Tia leaned her head against my mother’s shoulder.

Matt had picked up the phone on the third ring.

“How was your day?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said.  “How was the drive?”

“Long,” I said.  “Lonely.” Underneath this I’m thinking please, please, please-  ·

“Jody,” he said.  “I don’t do funerals.”

Something inside me shifted, and I let go of the sand dollar chain.  “What do you mean you  don’t do funerals?”

“I mean I don’t do funerals.  Not since my mother died.”

Right.  Matt’s sainted mother had been dead for over 10 years.  In the time I’d  known him, his days were always harder than mine, and insults and slights cut him deeper.  That was bad enough, but now his grief was going to be bigger and grander than mine as well.

“Goddamned doctors,” he said. “If I had been there it never would have happened.”  Matt told everyone, whether they wanted to hear or not, whether they had heard the story before or not, that it was the doctors’ fault, giving her too high a dose of the wrong drug.  “They killed her,” he said.  Matt’s sister told me once it was alcohol and cigarettes that killed her, just like it would kill Matt if he didn’t quit.  She said Matt and his mother fought like cats and dogs over her drinking, so bad that she didn’t even want him there at the hospital toward the end, all because he just wouldn’t let up on her.  His voice, rough from the cigarettes, broke into a righteous cough.  “And we were close.  We were so close.”

Katie and Sarah, unbearably beautiful in the drizzling rain, stood with me after the graveside service.

Tia walked with my mom back to the long black limousine.  I could just see her boots dangling out the door, swinging back and forth.  I knew she’d wait for me to come fetch her, that she’d want to ride with me out to the house, where my grand­ mother’s friends and neighbors would come to eat cold cuts and cake and swap stories.  Tia wore the sand dollar chain, which now held the tiny shamrock charm Mom gave her to remember her great grandmother by. I had left the sand dollar next to the phone in the hotel room.

I turned back to my grandmother’s casket and my gran father’s grave to say goodbye.  I was ready to go now, out to the house, where I would have plenty of stories of my own to add to the telling of my grandmother’s life.

Sarah and Katie walked with me all the way back to the car, their small hands soft and warm and comforting in mine. Although I didn’t feel it now, I knew I wasn’t done with being lonely. But I was done with Matt, and that was fine with me. After all, it’s not like we were close.

She had been a storyteller from the time she was three. Born to the high plains desert, she spent much of her youth with the blowing red dust of the American southwest- Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado- caressing her skin. Walking in the desert, wind and sun stripping water from her hair, her skin, her eyes, she could see and say more color in the dry sand of the desert dunes, than most people see in a tank of tropical fish.

She drove through Nevada and into California, her gunmetal grey pickup an oasis of air conditioning on the highway. Death Valley—the name—was a great mystery to her. Everywhere she looked, she saw life, she heard stories- stories of Spider Woman and Coyote the Trickster. The land itself, tough, scrubby and dry, whispered secrets to her, how First Man and First Woman brought forth Changing Woman, who gave birth to Monster Slayer and Born for Water and then rubbed the skin off her body to create the Navajo people.

She could smell the water she couldn’t see, and told of that, too.

It became her path to travel the great deserts of the world, in no particular order, before she grew too old, before she settled into one place for the rest of her days, before travel became too much of an effort. She walked with the Masai in the Kalahari, ate kangaroo and grubs in the Australian Outback, drove a Range Rover in a caravan down the West Bank and into the Negev. She rode camels and horses in the Sahara. From the inside of a Snow Cat, she saw the Arctic as a desert of ice. Ptarmigan, snowshoe hares, wolves, snow- a thousand different stories in white. She told of how the Bushmen and Inuit were cousins, how Anansi the spider traded hornets, a python and a leopard to Nyame the Sky God for all the stories in the world, and how Kiviuq lived in the winter with a white-haired beautiful woman who was not a woman but a fox. And the deserts began to murmur to her of her own place in the stories.

She began to grow weary, to look for easier ways to travel. She discovered sailing, and that’s how she came to know that oceans too are deserts.  Deserts awash in a thousand variations of that color often miscalled blue or green or grey.  Deserts teeming, with all of their life but the birds under the surface.  Islands—the San Juans, the Virgins, the Canaries, the Antilles—spotted like springs and ponds and lakes, peninsulas poked like long fingers of river carved out into the sea.  And she gathered their stories as well.

On her way to Antarctica, she slowly traced the Baja Peninsula in a forty-two foot sloop, anchoring in the bays of Espiritu Santo and the other island, the one whose name did not call out to her to be remembered, a long shank of land connected to Espiritu Santo by a thin braid of sand, not really a separate island. Perhaps she could not remember its name because it had no story of its own.

At Los Islotes, she swam with the sea lions, barking at the sudden cold crush of the water, waving her flippers and fingers at her sea cousins, slipping through the coven of jellyfish, quietly beautiful and painful as a cactus to kiss. She sailed south toward La Paz, toward hotel rooms and restaurants, bars and brazen stares, gift shops and groceries, toward hot showers, cold drinks, taxi drivers who talk too little and charge too much – sailed toward the La Paz of tourists and old broken dreams. On the way to La Paz, the desert of the Baja called her. Come. She waved farewell to the whales, anchored in one of the bays, and turned toward the shore.

The sea kayak, even with its shallow draw, took her only so far. Too many rocks, reaching up from the sand, sought its soft inflatable underside, its belly its weakness, just like the porcupine, puma, and bear.  Looping the rough, yellow lead rope around her wrist, she waded into shore, the cool caressing her knees, the sun hot on the bright still water. Gnats whined and dragonflies thrummed in the salt air. She left the kayak above the highwater mark, tied tight to the elbow of a mangrove tree. Anything the sea took from her now, it would not take without effort. She carried the stories of the world’s deserts and seas in her heart. An almost-trail wound through the low scrub, some kind of gorse, home to tarantula, lizard and snake. Pools of sand lay in the shallows of the land where she could smell the shade and the hiding places of tiny creatures. Small swells of crushed sealife, scale and shell and bone, gave way to bare canyon walls. Cactus of infinite size and shape and desire walked with her through the flat. Her bare feet, toughened and calloused from the teak deck of the sailboat, left whispers on the ground, breaking through the salt white crust. Jackrabbit tracks, frantic and fleeing, were paced by the track of coyote or fox. The hollowed-out shell of a pufferfish, the skull of a heron, the scattered bones of something small and no longer afraid, heard her go by.

The salt scent faded and she grew thirsty. Her pack with sunscreen, camera and journal, extra food, matches and a water bottle, her pack, she had left in the kayak. She took off her sunglasses, dangled them from one finger, then left them beside a rock in the shape of her past. Her clothing was cotton and hemp, and she shed it into the cactus and scrub pine, all but the woven blue-green anklet and the cord with the tiny brass bell.

Wind lifted the waters from her body. Her tongue grew dry and leathery until it reached down past her knees, still flecked with the dried tears of the sea, one last gift from the desert waves, past her ankle with the tiny brass bell, past her toes, until it touched the land, where it split into two, fell from her mouth, and became lizards who sailed off into the sky.

Her skin, a dusty gold from the sun, began to flay from her body, floating quietly in long sheets to settle at her feet as sand. Muscles fell away. Better they should feed the buzzards and bats, than weigh her down. Her eyes that could distinguish a hundred different tastes of green, a thousand different scents of grey, a million different touches of brown, her eyes became owls.

The fine thin bones of her hands drifted away as she walked through the land, becoming scorpions, centipedes, and lesser spiders.  Her shoulder became a rise in the land, a rock, a windbreak for the small yellow flowers of her toes. Her hair, tangled and twisted, a tan among the browns, lifted to the wisp of clouds shredded along the bowl of the sky, then became lines in the sand where the hermit crabs walk.

Her heavier bones settled into cactus and grasses and thorns. Over time, her ribs rolled back to the shore, rooted in the salt, became mangrove and heron. Her spine stretched into a sheltering thread of shade.

Millennia pass, or so it might be, and she lies quiet, gathering into herself the stones of the desert, the beetles and wasps, the cry of the owl, the wishes and secrets and dreams of the lizard. Constellations cycle through the sky, and galaxies spin farther and farther away, away from the desert and away from each other, and her stories blow to the ends of time.