“Chin up, kid,” Bobby said, and hugged me. “And our offer stands.”
Starr and Bobby split town and I tried to stay busy with work. I didn’t know what else to do and Jeff was glad to give me the hours.
Pickering’s Furniture was just off the highway on one of those dirt roads with no name. The stock was held in the main barn and tagged for sale, but all the work was done in the expansion Jeff built—an insulated workspace he’d had plumbed and heated.
I’d open early and watch the lights flicker on. I’d turn up the heat, brew some coffee, take a fresh pad of sandpaper, and start right in. Mostly I sanded and stripped, but every once in a while Jeff gave me the sprayer and let me cut loose with some lacquer. It was hard work but it paid well and I could set my own hours.
I put in ten-hour days and then I’d drive around to avoid going home. I didn’t like the house being empty, but mostly I was afraid of coming up Clark Street to find police cars in the drive. I could picture the neighbors all crowded on their porches, everybody on their phones while the sirens flashed blue and red off the snow. I could see Granger standing there by the door with his hat in hand.
Which wasn’t to mention the fact that I still didn’t have any idea where Jenna was. I was worried about her, too, and one night I drove over to the Baptist church, thinking her foster family might be the religious type. It was a Wednesday, so I knew there’d be Bible study, and I parked across the street to watch the people file in. I spent a month in foster care in the sixth grade and we went to Freedom Baptist twice a week, including every god-awful Wednesday night, when we’d all sit around tables and take turns reading from the Bible—which was exactly as much fun as it sounds.
I didn’t see Jenna, but once I thought I did and even the possibility sent a shiver straight through me. It stirred me up so bad I sat there for another hour just to watch everybody file back out and make sure it wasn’t her.
Afterward, I left the church and drove through town. It was as dark and hushed as usual. There was some snow falling through the streetlamps and I saw the orange flicker of a city plow, two blocks up by Penn Park. I wondered what all the downstate and Chicago money was doing now—how were they passing the winter in their bustling and brightly lit cities?
I took another lap through town, smoked my last cigarette, then came home to find the Bonneville had magically reappeared in the drive.
The sight of Mama’s car knocked the wind clear from my lungs, but I did not cry. I was too confused to cry. I was angry and I was relieved, but mostly I was shocked. I had been so sure she was gone, but there was the Bonneville and the living room lamp was lit.
I parked along the curb and had a thought like maybe Mama was clean. That she’d been drying out after what happened in the hills and that she’d been gone so long because she finally hit the mysterious bottom they talk about in the movies. The ground zero where great transformations take place.
I had her blanket in the glove. I’d taken it to Portis’s funeral to give to Starr, but never did. I kept the blanket for the same reason I didn’t tell Starr about anything that had happened, and I took it out now and held it in my hands. If Mama was clean then there would be no better welcome home than the blanket she probably thought she’d lost.
I knew it was foolish, pathetic even, but I folded the blanket in a neat square and stepped from the truck with honest-to-God hope in my heart. A car was coming up Clark Street and I looked down the block at Night Moves while I waited for it to pass. There was blue light from the Open sign above the door and in the dark it cast a glow clear to the curb where somebody stood smoking. It might have been Gentry.
The car rattled by and I hurried across the street and up the front steps. I held the blanket to my chest and looked out at the falling snow. I thought Mama might have heard me and waited to see if she came to the door, but she did not.
Finally, I put my face to the panel window and there she was on the couch—pouring some vodka into a coffee mug and lighting a cigarette. She had some racket on the television, but she wasn’t really watching. She was just staring off toward the dark middle of the room. Her knees were bouncing up and down as she knocked some ash off her cigarette and talked to herself, or whoever it was she imagined was with her inside. It might have been me.
I put my hand to the doorknob. It was cold against my palm and I did not turn it. I only held it there and remembered the way Mama had pulled in the trailer and how Jenna had wailed as she was stretched out between us. I remembered how desperate Mama had been and how she crumpled on the steps beneath me when it was over. I remembered how she had called out her pathetic threats.