Richard Ford - Wildlife

When I got home it was dark. The moon had gone behind clouds and I was cold as I came up the walk because I had not dressed warmly. Lights were on in our house, and up and down our street. Tiny mists of snow, the first snow of the year, were drifting onto the yard. It would not stay long, I guessed, though I didn’t know when winter truly started.

My mother was sitting on the couch — in the middle of it — in the living room, playing a card game by herself. It was a game I had seen her play before and it required two decks. She’d learned it in college. She was dressed the way she had been that morning — her white blouse with a white bow, a brown skirt and high heels. She looked nice to me. She was sitting on the front edge of the couch, with the cards laid out on the low coffee table, and her knees to the side. She looked like somebody who was going somewhere.

She looked up and smiled when I came inside and shut the door. She had half of the cards in her hand. I did not see a drink anywhere.

‘Where have you been till after dark,’ she said, ‘and half undressed on top of that?’

‘I went to work,’ I said. It was another lie, but I didn’t think it mattered and didn’t want to say I had walked as far as the air base.

‘Did you go to school?’ she said, still looking at me.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, you can later, I guess. I thought you might go after lunch.’

‘Where were you today?’ I said. I sat down on the chair that was beside the TV. My arms were cold, but it was warm inside. I wondered what there was in the house to eat. I had forgotten about eating.

‘I went to the Helen,’ she said. ‘Then I had some other things to do.’

‘Are you going to rent one of those?’ I said.

My mother divided the cards she was holding into two stacks and put one on top of the other. ‘I paid some out on one this morning,’ she said. ‘It seemed nice. You’d like it.’

‘Did you see Warren Miller?’

My mother put her cards down and sat back on the couch and looked at me. ‘I’m waiting for your father to come home,’ she said. And this was no surprise. I’d thought my father would be home that day if he wasn’t dead. He hadn’t said so, but it was just something I knew about both of them — the intervals it took them to do things. I knew them that well. ‘Did you happen,’ my mother said, ‘to find a pair of striped socks anywhere in this house today?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well.’ She smiled. ‘Have you eaten anything?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’m hungry.’

‘I’d fix something,’ she said. Then she looked around at the clock that was beside the door to the kitchen. ‘I’ll fix something in a little while,’ she said. ‘Your father’s coming in a cab. I thought you might be him driving up.’

I looked out the window behind me and saw only the snow seeming to dance in a new wind, and the empty sidewalk, and the lights in the houses across Eighth Street. I thought our car must be in the garage now, and that my mother had been at Warren Miller’s house all day. Maybe she had been to the Helen Apartments for an hour, but she had gone to Warren’s after that. She didn’t care if I knew it. She may have felt like she had slipped off the world and, while we waited for my father to arrive, been waiting to hit the ground again. There was a way in which I felt that, too, and felt sorry for her.

‘It snowed up there where they were today,’ she said quietly. ‘And now it’s snowing down here.’ It was just a thing to say, to make waiting not be uncomfortable.

‘I know it,’ I said.

‘Did you think your father would be injured?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I hoped he wouldn’t be.’

‘Me too,’ my mother said. ‘That’s the truth.’ She folded her arms and looked across the room at the front windows. ‘I have passion for him. I feel that. But I don’t feel I have the way to express it now. I guess that’s it. That’s the problem.’ She ran her fingers back through her brown hair and cleared her throat. I could see she had a little mark on her neck, like a little bruise, something she touched with her finger without realizing it. ‘Events can maroon you more than people can. I know that,’ she said, and breathed out. ‘Do you feel that way, Joe? Don’t you feel marooned out here?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’

‘That’s good,’ my mother said. ‘I guess you have a lot to look forward to.’

She stood up. She was watching out the front window. She brushed her hand over the front of her skirt and pushed her hair back again. I looked at her, then looked around. Outside at the curb beyond our wooden fence was a yellow cab, its red roof light shining in the snowy evening. The interior light was on, and I could see the driver turned back, talking to someone who I knew was my father. I saw my father’s hand with money in it and saw the driver laugh at something they were saying. Then the back door opened and my father got out, holding the gladstone bag he’d left with. It seemed like a long time ago to me.

‘Well. There comes the firefighter,’ my mother said. She was standing, looking out the porch window from in front of the couch. She had her arms crossed and was standing very straight.

I got up out of my chair and opened the front door. The porch light was on. I went down the steps to meet my father, who was halfway up the walk, and put my arms around him. He looked larger than he had two days ago, and he was smiling. His black hair had been cut short and his face was dirty and unshaven. He put his bag down and put his arms around me. He had on a heavy canvas shirt and canvas pants and black logger’s boots, and when my face was against his clothes what he smelled like was ashes and things that had been burned. His shirt was stiff and dirty and rough against my face. I heard the cab drive away. He put his hand on my neck, and it was cold and hard. ‘It started to snow,’ he said, ‘so they sent the smart people home. How are you doing down here?’ His voice seemed clipped, and he hugged me again, harder. It seemed silly in a way, because he had not been gone very long.

‘That’s good,’ I said.

‘Is your mother still walking on her lip?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I held on to him a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ I said again.

‘Well, we’ll have to see, I guess,’ he said. He picked up his bag. ‘Let’s get out of the snow. You’d think we were in Montana here.’ We walked, the two of us, up the porch steps and into the house, where it was warm and the lights were all turned on and my mother was waiting.

She was sitting back on the couch facing the front door, where she’d been when I came home, though she was not playing cards. The cards were all in two decks in front of her on the table. She smiled at him when we came in, but she didn’t stand up. And I knew that surprised him. It was not what he thought would happen, and it must have let him down and let him know that something was not usual.

‘How was the fire?’ was all my mother said. ‘Did you put it out?’

‘No,’ my father said. He was smiling. I think he must’ve known he was.

‘I could’ve guessed,’ she said. And then she smiled at him again, and got up off the couch and came across the living room and kissed him, put her hands on his arms and kissed him on the cheek. I was standing right beside them. When she had kissed him she said, ‘I’m glad to see you back, Jerry. Joe is, too.’ Then she walked away from him and me, and sat back down on the couch.

‘I feel like I’ve been gone a long time,’ my father said.

‘Three days is all,’ my mother said. She looked as if she was still smiling, but she wasn’t. ‘Have you eaten any dinner?’