After the Leaves Fall Page 3

  “You think this is about smoking.” It was a statement, so I didn’t respond. Janice was still eyeing me offhandedly.

  The silence stretched, and in a detached part of my mind I thought that the soup must be almost ready and Dad would come in to tell me so before I could fix this. “It’s okay, really,” I continued quickly. “You can do whatever you want, and I won’t boss you anymore. I promise.”

  “Promises don’t keep, Julia,” she said. “And I’d like you to call me Janice.” She bit her bottom lip and gave a helpless shrug as if to say, Oh, well; what do you do? Then she turned back to the small, pink fingernail polish bottle and screwed the lid on tightly. Leaving the cheese curl bag and the TV on, she palmed the bottle and left the room without a backward glance.

  As Dad and I ate our pea soup, we heard the shower running and then the blow-dryer. Janice emerged from the bathroom as we were putting away the clean dishes from the dishwasher. She was wearing a pair of snug jeans and a lavender sweater that made her eyes look the same color. She looked fresh and clean and happy.

  “I’m going out,” she said cheerfully and waggled her fingers in a little wave.

  Dad looked at her across the room, and I knew that he knew she wouldn’t be coming back. He lifted his hand and waved at her, but he didn’t say good-bye and neither did I.

  It was the last time we saw Janice. She took the rusty Caprice, the clothes on her back, and her purse, which contained a joint credit card in the names of Daniel and Janice DeSmit. Dad didn’t cancel the credit card, but she put only two purchases on it: one for gas and food at a Shell three hundred miles away and another for more gas and food at a Phillips 66 just outside of Chicago.

  We didn’t try to find her.

  Signs

  THERE WAS A sign in a farmer’s field a few miles away from Grandma’s acreage. It was obviously homemade, with letters that got smaller and more cramped together as they reached the right side of the piece of plywood they were painted on. Whoever made it did a poor job of planning ahead and didn’t take the time to measure out how much space each letter would take. It was big and bold though, and in spite of any artistic oversights, it got the message across.

  Heaven? Or Hell? the top line proclaimed unflinchingly. Heaven was lettered in a gaudy turquoise green that I assumed was meant to invoke a feeling of cool, inviting newness. Hell was a rich scarlet that I far preferred to the green-blue of heaven, but who would ever admit that? Under the curlicue question marks another line marched in black above the tall ditch grass: Are You Ready?

  I suppose whoever made the sign—Grandma and I didn’t know the owners of that particular piece of property—imagined drivers straining to read the words and pondering their depths as they continued on their way. Hmm. Good question. Am I ready? How does one become ready? Are there bags to pack? Oh, boy, I’d better get right with God! I’m sure his intentions were pure, and maybe his questions did get people thinking about the great beyond. But for the summer of my sixteenth year, there was nothing I wanted to do more than torch the ugly thing.

  Hate is a strong word, and Grandma always advised me never to use it lightly. In our home, a phrase as innocuous as “I hate homework” was quickly countered with a gentle, “Really, Julia?” After which I had to amend my statement or be ready to defend why I violently disliked something that would make me more studious, intelligent, and well-rounded. Grandma was big on dictionary definitions, and words were to be used intentionally and—more importantly—properly. But hate accurately described the way I felt about the hell sign, which is what I began to call it after it started making me crazy with disgust.

  Every time I drove past it, I envisioned new ways to bring it down. I was never very clever when it came to retorts, but for months I tried to come up with the perfect thing to write over part of the sign. I’d leave the top line or the bottom line, but I’d spray paint over the other and write something that would make people laugh. Like, “Bedtime. Are You Ready?” But that was just plain stupid. Or “Heaven? Or Hell? Northwest Iowa.” Get it? Oh, forget it. Just as stupid. Maybe I would sneak up in the night and light a match to it. But then again, that could be disastrous—all that grass and surrounding crops? Poof. Maybe I’d go to juvie hall.

  I was trying to ignore the sign one afternoon as I was driving home from school, and an idea flitted into my head without a single prompting from my conscious mind. It was perfect. I would drive my car into the sign with a giant yes painted on the windshield in black letters. Of course, it would only be cool if they had to pull my limp and lifeless body from the wreckage. Otherwise it was pointless. If I were dead, then everyone would wonder what I meant by yes. Yes, I was ready for heaven? But how could that be? I had committed suicide, and if my final act on earth was a sin that I could not ask forgiveness for, how could God possibly forgive me and accept me into heaven? So then the yes meant I was ready for hell? How frightening and unexpected and mysterious! Why? Why would this sweet, young, innocent girl be ready for hell? The whole scenario would drive people nuts. I loved it.

  But I wasn’t suicidal. After all, it was just a sign.

  I never told Grandma about my obsession with the sign because I knew she wouldn’t understand, and more than anything it would only worry her. Once I casually mentioned it as we were driving past, and she absently said, “Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  No, it did not make me think.

  I did, however, share my fixation with Thomas, and he offered to take his father’s ax and chop it down one night. The sign was at the far edge of the property and nowhere near close enough to the house for anyone to hear wood splintering.

  I had to ponder that one for a few days, and when Thomas saw me in the hallway at school, he would grin and make a sweeping arc with his arms as if he were landing a huge blow with an imaginary ax. I loved him for his willingness, but in the end I told him that I was fine with it and the sign could live on.

  “Whatever you say,” Thomas said when I told him, wrapping his arms around my shoulders from behind and nuzzling the top of my head with his chin. “If you ever change your mind …”

  I pulled away from him and punched him teasingly in the stomach. “Yeah, I know who to come to.”

  The first time I ever spoke to Thomas was the same night that Dad and I moved onto the farm.

  It had been three years since Janice left, and Dad and I made a sorry pair of castoffs. He was so busy that laundry piled up, food went moldy in the fridge, and dust bunnies collected under nearly everything. I never blamed him and even tried to help, but I was only twelve.

  Even though we lived in town, Grandma cooked supper for us every night those first bewildering years we were without a wife and mother. Usually cooking was Dad’s job, but with so much to juggle, he found little time for culinary artistry. I think Grandma felt sorry for us. Once, over steaming plates of roast and mashed potatoes, Grandma casually mentioned that her house was too big for one lonely woman, and Dad’s face lit up as if she had presented him the moon. It was an unspoken but impossible-to-ignore offer, and within six weeks we had become a party of three. Though Grandma’s farmhouse was small and we would be living on top of one another, you couldn’t find three happier people.

  The night that we moved, it was cold outside, cold enough to warrant my winter parka and the thick mittens that Grandma had knit for me a month previous. Even bundled so, I hunched my chin down into the tall collar of my coat and covered my numb ears with my mittened hands. The wind whipped the few remaining leaves on the trees into an eerie, spinning frenzy, and in the moonlight I could see the occasional leaf give up the fight and escape across the yard into the darkness. The air smelled of snow, and in the perfect rectangle of light cast by the picture window in the living room, I could dream about how high the drifts would reach this winter. To the windowsill? Beyond?

  I was waiting for Dad to come back with the truck. We had already eaten supper—fried chicken and new potatoes from the cellar with lots of hot mustard—and
although it was time for reruns of Seinfeld and Grandma’s air-popped popcorn, Dad wanted to make one last trip to our old place.

  Everything we truly loved or needed had already been sandwiched in Grandma’s house, and the remaining items that we simply couldn’t part with had been put into storage. Appliances and several pieces of furniture had been written into the deal when we sold the house, but there was one object—an old, teak writing desk—that Dad had decided over supper he couldn’t live without. Adam, the guy who bought our house, was over there turning my bedroom into a nursery for his soon-to-be-born first child, and when Dad called him on his cell phone, he must have conceded the desk.

  Dad punched the air in triumph and winked at me with the phone still cradled against his shoulder. “Julia, I’m going to get the desk,” he whispered with his hand over the mouthpiece. “Adam’ll help me put it on the truck, but I want you to put your coat on and meet me outside in ten minutes.”

  Into the phone he said, “Thanks so much, Adam. This whole thing has been a really pleasant experience.” He meant no one had gone into hysterics over drapes and light fixtures and little fixer-uppers. Adam was almost as easygoing as Dad, and his wife was too pregnant to care. “I just want to be out of the trailer before the baby is born,” she had said to me conspiratorially at the paper signing.

  I didn’t know where Dad planned to put the desk once he had it in the little farmhouse, but I didn’t question him. Ten minutes after he left, I dutifully pulled on my coat and went outside to kick at the gravel in the driveway while I waited for him to show up.

  “Wait inside!” Grandma yelled from the living room. She was knitting a hat to match the mittens I was wearing. “It’s too cold!”

  “I want to see the stars!” I yelled back and didn’t wait for an answer before swinging the door shut.

  There were a million stars on such a clear, cold night, and they trickled so far down the horizon that they seemed to nestle between the tree branches like tiny Christmas lights. I traced Orion and the Big Dipper, then tried to make up my own constellations because I didn’t know any more. I found a snake and a stick that looked a lot like the snake I had just discovered. Ashamed at my own lack of creativity, I gave up.

  I was just about ready to give up on Dad, too, and go back into the living room to wait with my coat on. It was so cold I didn’t dare breathe with my mouth for fear the wetness on my lips would freeze if I so much as parted them.

  And then, in the stillness, I heard someone walking across the yard. The moon was not quite half full, and the light it cast was shimmering and imperfect; I had to strain to see in the darkness. But he was obvious even in the shadows: a tall, lone figure carrying something bulky and clearly cumbersome. He walked with his head hunched over and his arms akimbo around the object that was twice the size of his chest and as tall as it was wide. I didn’t recognize him at a distance—he was halfway between the house and the barn, a hundred feet easy—but I wasn’t afraid, and it never crossed my mind that he would be anything but harmless and ambling through our property with very good reason. It occurred to me that I should be neighborly.

  He hadn’t seen me standing near the front porch, and he was too consumed with his task to notice when I began making my way to intercept him. The frozen grass crunched beneath my feet, and my nose was making diaphanous little clouds of steam that looked remarkably like the smoke that curled out of Janice’s mouth all those years ago.

  I expected him to look up at any point and see the telltale clues that would notify him that he wasn’t alone on this frigid night. He’d probably smile at me knowingly, the conspiratorial smile of strangers who share nothing but the weather in common, and comment, “Cold one.” And I’d agree. But he didn’t look up, and he didn’t know I was there.

  When we were fifteen feet apart, I found myself with nothing clever to say. “Looks heavy,” I managed.

  The boy—now that we were close, I could tell he was not much older than me—swung his head around, searching for the source of the sound, and leaned forward slightly as if ready to run. He looked confused when he caught sight of me, and I was surprised to realize that he was scared. “What?” he said.

  “Your …” I gestured at the thing in his arms. “It looks heavy.”

  Afterward, I looked back on this moment and held it gently in my mind as if it were precious and valuable, though I didn’t understand its worth.

  The boy was silent for a few breaths, and skepticism was etched in a deep line across his outlined forehead. And then, out of nowhere, the line disappeared and he smiled at me.

  The smile broke luminously across his face, and the white of his teeth reflected the moonlight as he began to laugh. I think I fell in love at that instant.

  “It is heavy,” he said, still laughing. Carefully, he set the object down and turned it bit by bit along the ground until it was facing me.

  “It’s a stop sign,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own.

  “Yeah, we ripped it off the B-level road intersecting Highway 2. You know the one?”

  “I know the one,” I repeated and wrapped my arms around myself as if for protection.

  He continued to smile but didn’t say anything more.

  I could barely look at him but was less able to tolerate the stillness, so I asked, “What do you want with a stop sign?”

  He shrugged. “It’s cool. I don’t know. I’ll hang it in my room, I guess. I already have a yield sign.”

  I was looking at the sign, but I snuck a glance at his face as he was talking. The thought crossed my mind that stealing road signs might be a federal offense or at the very least not legal, but that would be a stupid thing to say. “How did you get it?” I eventually asked.

  “Oh, you know, a bunch of guys, a truck with a winch …” He trailed off, and I caught his eye for a second. “You’re Nellie’s granddaughter, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I untangled my arms and held out my mittened hand. “Julia.”

  “Thomas. I belong over there.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of our neighbors to the north. He gave my outstretched hand a friendly shake.

  “You’re the oldest Walker,” I said as it clicked into place. I knew Thomas’s little brothers and sisters—there were four of them—quite well. They were always playing in our grove. I knew they had an older brother, but I had never met him.

  “Yup,” Thomas said.

  “Yup,” I repeated.

  “Well . . .” Thomas looked over his shoulder, and I understood for the first time that I was a huge impediment to whatever plan he had for the sign. “I’d better get going.”

  “Me too,” I said as if I had something equally interesting and inexplicable to do. “Nice meeting you.”

  As I turned away, headlights swung down our long driveway.

  Thomas froze. Giving the sign a hard push, he let it fall flat to the ground and thrust his hands into his coat pockets. “Who’s that?”

  “My dad,” I guessed, and the silhouette of Dad’s little pickup confirmed it.

  I watched the truck pull onto the cement pad by the front porch. Dad was far enough away that I was sure he couldn’t see us standing in the shadows, and somehow I was thankful for that.

  Thomas grabbed my arm and spun me around, catching me completely by surprise. I held my breath.

  “Keep the sign for me,” he said quickly. “I can’t exactly be caught with it.” He flashed another stunning smile, and his mouth was so close to me that I could see each perfectly straight tooth. “Just pull it into the grove before morning, and I’ll come back for it later, okay?”

  “Okay,” I echoed.

  “You’re a good girl, Julia,” he said, squeezing my arm. And then he turned toward the grove and took off at a light jog.

  I watched him go.

  When I turned back to the truck, Dad was standing on the tailgate watching me watch Thomas. “Who was that?” he yelled as he hopped out of the pickup bed.

 
“Thomas Walker!” I yelled back. Looking down at the sign, I realized there was no way he could see it lying there in the dark, but I nervously scuffed at it with my foot anyway.

  “Get over here! You’re supposed to be helping me with the desk!” Dad waved me over with both arms.

  “Coming!” I shot back. I peeked once at the grove, where Thomas had disappeared, but he was long enveloped in the darkness and the trees. The only movement left was the wind.

  “What was Thomas Walker doing out here in the freezing cold?

  It’s almost nine o’clock,” Dad commented as we lugged the desk— which was far heavier than it looked—into the front entryway. “Drop it here,” he added, and I gratefully slid my fingers out from under the hefty piece of furniture.

  “He was on a walk,” I improvised.

  Dad cocked an eyebrow at me but only said, “Kids are so weird.”

  I followed him out when he went to pull the pickup into the detached garage and managed to drag the sign into the grove while he was busy. I left it facedown and kicked some leaves and branches on top to hide it.

  Before school the next day, I went to make sure no one had found the stop sign. It was gone.

  Good Girl

  AFTER DAD DIED, I became a bit of a celebrity. I had always been the object of peripheral pity as the little girl whose mommy had left, but when I became an orphan, the sympathy that flowed out of people was almost tangible.

  In the grocery store, one woman would whisper something to another, and the two would fix me with looks so equally compassionate and voyeuristic that I hardly knew where to turn. At first I shriveled beneath their concern and avoided going out alone where I could be cornered and gently ministered to by every well-meaning stranger who believed they had some insight to offer me. But I soon found it easier to disappear inside myself and ignore them altogether.