SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Rachel absentmindedly turned on the radio. Not a lot of choices on her dial. There were perhaps ten to twelve stations that were at least mildly free of static, but nine of them played country, and the rest were hit or miss depending on the weather. Luckily, Rachel always made sure her phone was stocked with some decent music for trips like this—her own personal jukebox.

Just as she synced her car’s sound system to her phone, her phone chirped. She fumbled with the volume on the dash for a moment before answering.

“Hello?”

“Rachel?”

Rachel recognized the voice immediately. “Hello, Uncle Allen. Yes, this is Rachel. I’m on my way, if that’s what you’re checking.” Her tone contained a touch of sarcasm.

“Of course I wasn’t checking,” Uncle Allen responded. “I was just calling to see how my favorite niece was doing.”

“Allen?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m your only niece,” Rachel said, a grin creeping onto her face.

“That doesn’t make it less true,” Allen chided. “But since you brought it up, what time do you expect to be here tonight? I’ll see about having dinner on the table when you do.”

Rachel glanced down at the clock on her now-silent radio and mentally plotted out the remainder of her trip. “Oh, I’d say about seven o’clock? Maybe later if I get caught in a traffic jam.”

Uncle Allen guffawed. If there was anything more unlikely in Southern Illinois than a traffic jam, it was a skyscraper, or perhaps Godzilla. “Okay. Sounds good. I’ll tell your grandma. She’s really looking forward to seeing you.”

Rachel felt a pit in her stomach. “She’ll see me, but will she remember me? Will she even know I’m there?”

Allen went quiet, and Rachel realized she should have been more sensitive. She knew that Uncle Allen felt personally responsible for his mother’s health—after all, he was the one who lived close by, and he was in charge of her care. Yet most days Allen was needed in the field, so he’d had to rely on a cobbled-together series of nurses, family members, and friends to come by and watch over her while he worked.

This week, it was Rachel’s turn to help. And in addition to keeping an eye on her grandmother, Rachel had also promised to purge the clutter in Grandma Naomi’s attic. It seemed that Grandma had never forgotten Rachel’s long-ago promise to clear out the mess—even though there was no guarantee that Grandma would even remember Rachel’s name when she pulled in the driveway.

Rachel was almost sure her call had dropped when Allen finally spoke again. “You know she loves you. She can’t help it, and whether or not she remembers, it’ll be good for you to be here.”

Rachel nodded, even though Allen couldn’t see her. “I guess you’re right. I better get off the phone and focus on the road then. I’ll see you in a couple hours. Love you, Uncle Allen.”

“Love you, Rach.”

The trip took a bit longer than she’d estimated, but at last Rachel pulled onto the road leading to what had been her favorite place to visit as a little girl. It had been several years since Rachel’s last visit here; after college, she had moved up to Indianapolis, a land full of metal and noise. Now, just turning onto the gravel road gave her goose bumps, reminding her of all the memories she’d shared with her cousins at the farm.

Her sports car kicking up dust behind her, Rachel maneuvered down the gravel road and then up the long driveway belonging to Grandma Naomi. Surrounded on three sides by a thick grove of trees, her grandmother’s house was typical of early twentieth-century farmhouses in the Midwest: four bedrooms on the top floor, a large living room and dining room attached to the kitchen on the main floor, and a basement that followed the same basic floor plan of the house. The only difference in the basement’s layout was that it lacked the additional bathroom that Naomi and Grandpa Henry had added to the main floor back in the late 1950’s, when they were first lucky enough to get running water. Rachel’s mom still talked about using the outhouse in the winter when she was a child.

From the outside, the house looked almost like a big cardboard box with the flaps slightly open to form the roof. A hailstorm had devastated the area the year before, and the aging shingles showed the evidence of it. Uncle Allen had promised to take on the repairs, but farming took him away from the task nearly every chance he had. Still, the roof was in decent shape, and everyone knew Allen would fix it immediately if it ever leaked anywhere in the house. Uncle Allen was busy, but he took care of his family. In fact, he was the kind of guy who was everyone’s favorite, whether he was your favorite uncle, brother, friend, or farmer. He just had a certain magnetic personality that kept people entertained.

As Rachel parked, she saw her grandmother out in front of the house, watering her small flower garden. Rachel wouldn’t say Grandma was a hoarder, but the years she spent living in the Great Depression had taught her never to be wasteful. That was particularly true with clothes: if there was any use to be gotten out of an old item, she would squirrel it away for a rainy day. Her clothing, therefore, was a mix of styles gathered from across decades. Today her top bore a definite resemblance to the homemaker blouses Rachel had seen in a few reruns of Leave it to Beaver , while her slacks were 1970’s polyester through and through.

“Hello, Rachel!” Grandma Naomi called out as Rachel stepped out of the car. “We’ve been waiting for you to get here.”

Whew. At least she remembers my name .

“We?” Rachel asked, hoisting her suitcase out of the back seat.

“Oh, yes. Me and your Uncle Allen, of course.”

“Of course.”

“We had more visitors, too, but they left just a minute or two before you got here,” Grandma Naomi said. “Funny-looking. Kinda glad they didn’t decide to stay.”

That stopped Rachel. She knew she’d been all alone on the gravel road coming into the farm. And while the road continued on past the driveway, it was rarely used, and Rachel hadn’t seen any dust kicked up. Well, she had been distracted listening to the music on her phone. Perhaps she’d simply missed them.

“Really? What were they here for?”

“Hmm…now that you ask me, I can’t quite remember. I’m sure they were here for your Uncle Allen, though. They always are,” Naomi said, putting her watering can down next to a row of marigolds. She bent down—an amazing feat considering her advanced age—to pluck off a few dead flower heads.

Rachel was still concerned about these visitors to the farm. “Who were they, Grandma? You say they’ve been here before?”

“Oh, yes,” her grandmother replied. “Those men have been coming here for a long time. I wish they would just go away, but they won’t leave me and Henry alone. They just feel…off. Like they’re here, but not here at the same time. Strange clothing. And their accents…I’m not even sure they’re from this country. Could be spies. You know: the Soviets.”

And there it was . Her grandma was combining fact, fiction, and history. She may have recognized and greeted her granddaughter by the correct name, but she was also somewhere in her own past, and apparently reliving some political thriller at the same time.

Just then Uncle Allen popped his head out of the side door of the garage, saving Rachel from an uncomfortable situation. “Supper is ready. Glad to see you, Rachel.”

After allowing herself another sideways glance at her grandmother, Rachel grabbed the handle of her suitcase and headed toward the garage. As she passed by Uncle Allen, she made eye contact with him for a brief moment. And in that split second, she saw something…strange. Allen had always been so jovial and vibrant. Even in the face of his mother’s illnesses and maladies, he’d always kept up appearances. He’d always put on a brave face.