Winter Loon(8)

“What’s he look like, the father?”

“Well, good looking but you can tell he’s a drunk. Not worth the time, honey, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Their voices came up as they went over the clipboard that hung on the end of my bed. I stirred to stop their talk. The new girl, young and stringy with a black mole on her cheek the size of a raisin, introduced herself as Sandy or Cindy and waved to the one whose shift ended, then rolled me over and took my temperature for the umpteenth time, checking the inside of me with a probe that shot me full of shame.

“Doctor says you’re going home tomorrow. That’s good, huh?” I had spent nights away from my mother, but I’d never known a place called home where she did not live. What was home without her?



GIP AND RUBY LIVED SEVERAL hours south in a town called Loma. They were not the sort of people to stay overnight in a place, so when they returned to the hospital with my father, they were already worn out from driving back and forth.

My father was freshly showered. He’d changed his clothes but hadn’t shaved. “You’re looking better. Got more color today.”

I could see regret in his forced smile, in the way he made a point to stand up straight and sober. And I felt bad, too, for the way I’d talked to him. I tried to apologize back by nodding in response, tightening up a smile for him. We looked each other in the eye and, in that moment, it seemed all was forgiven between us.

“Nurse said I can leave tomorrow.”

“Yeah, Little. I heard that. That’s good, right there.”

Ruby shook her head and kept her arms crossed as she sat in the only chair. Gip stood in the doorway, still. “So you’re feeling better?” he asked.

I shrugged. What was better anyway?

Ruby jabbed my father in the thigh with her elbow. “Go on.”

My father rolled his neck until it crackled like sap in a fire. “So, Wes,” he said. “Here’s the thing.”

In the pause before what came next, I went back to him saying maybe my mother was on the run, that she’d crawled away somehow. Could I really recall her going under for good? Hope gathered up in me, a wisp that puts broken things back together.

“Gip and Ruby and me, we got to talking. We think it’s better you go stay with them for a bit. Cabin isn’t a good place in the winter, and besides, I got something lined up in Montana. Won’t make sense you being with me right now.”

Ruby chimed in. “You can stay in Valerie’s room—your mom’s—right in her bed.” She said this not knowing I could leap there in my mind, put my mother under the covers, forever shivering and wet.

“But why?” I asked my father. “Is it because of last night? I didn’t mean it. I don’t want you to go.”

“No, Little. It’s not that. It’s just, I got things to take care of. It’s only for a while.”

“You can’t just up and leave me with them. When will you come get me?”

“Let’s take her one step at a time, Wes,” Gip said.

That this could be decided while he sobered up, while I slept, that he could ditch me like that. None of it made sense to me. “This is wrong. Don’t I get a say? I’ll go with you. To Montana.”

“You listen now,” Ruby said. “You need a roof over your head, square meals. Your dad figures things out, he’ll be back for you.” They were my mother’s people, sure. But I’d spent more time in a car in front of their house than I’d spent inside their house. They could have been anyone. My father was leaving me with strangers.

He stood there, hands in his front pockets up to his wrists. He would not fight for me.

“You’ll come back?”

He dipped his head down once. “Yeah, Little. I’ll be back. Just you wait.” He leaned over and pulled me to him until my head was against his chest. I wished I could climb into his shirt pocket with his licorice tabs. The boozy smell was mostly gone and what was left I tried to source. Shower soap, chewing tobacco, woodsmoke. The final disappearing note held and lingered and drifted off. My mother’s lemon perfume.



MY LAST NIGHT IN THE hospital, I made my way to the window. Snow fell again, and I scraped a downward spiral in the buildup of frost, remembering the useless way my mother had clawed at the ice with fingernails chewed to the quick. I looked at the silhouettes leaning against the lamppost below and wondered if maybe my father was down there, holding Elizabeth, stroking her gray fur, scanning the windows for me, planning our escape. But only nurses were there, smoking against the side of the building, their white breath lost in the swirling snow blown up by a passing plow.





CHAPTER 3

I SAT IN the front seat of the Plymouth between Gip and Ruby on our way to their house in Loma. I’d tried to get in the back seat, but it was piled high with garbage bags, a suitcase, and cardboard boxes I recognized. Happy tomatoes with eyes and arms and legs, tap shoes and top hats, open tooth-free, half-circle mouths. My mother called them her dancing tomatoes. My father and I were never allowed to put anything in the boxes or take anything out. They belonged to her.

“You get all our stuff?”

Ruby told me to never mind, that we’d go through those things later.

My mother said my grandparents never visited us because they were homebodies. She said they drove her nuts as a girl, that she never had privacy because they were always around. Between them in the car, I worried what it would be like for me. Ruby was a tiny woman prone to perturbed sighs. Wrinkles and lines clustered between her eyes and on her forehead and in the puckers around her thin lips. She had graying brown hair that she pulled back in a knot during the day and untied at night. Neither of their faces showed signs of laughter. Gip had spent years laboring at the feedlot and was big as a boulder from his thick neck to his rock-hard beer gut. He’d fought in France during the war and had a bluish divot where a bullet had grazed his right temple. Oiled ringlets of gray hair coiled on top of his head, and his eyes sometimes glassed over like they should have been covered with coins. When I was real little, I’d cowered behind my mother whenever he talked to me. But she warned me off Ruby more. “Watch yourself there, Wes,” she’d say. “That one’s got fangs.”