Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift

My mother asks me to drive for a while. She says it’s been a long day, what with the early flight from Dallas/Fort Worth, the drive down to Cheyenne Wells from Denver, and now the drive back across Colorado to Wyoming, the entirety of which still stands between us and Billings. She says all of this as if she had no choice in the matter, which tells me that my mother still thinks she did the right thing. This flummoxes me. It’s not like her to be so obtuse (I love the word “obtuse”).

The full night is upon us now, and only Michael Stipe’s voice is fighting against the silence as he sings about the imitation of life. I’ve turned the volume down to where only someone who knows the songs as well as I do can make out the words.

“Losing your job really threw you for a loop, didn’t it?” my mother says.

“Yes.”

“I’m sure it was nothing personal. Mr. Withers always liked you.”

“It’s not the insult. It’s the timing.”

“Edward,” she says, “you are so fortunate. You don’t have to work if you don’t want to.”

I laugh. It’s not a ha-ha-funny laugh. It’s bitter and hard.

“Jay L. Lamb said the same thing,” I say.

My mother sits up.

“I’m going to call Jay in the morning. I bet he can help you find a job. Would that be all right?”

I consider this. When it comes to talking to Jay L. Lamb, I’m always in favor of someone else doing it. And I do need a job. Somehow, I have to start rebuilding a life in Billings, Montana, which seems odd to say since it’s the only life I’ve ever known. I might as well start the rebuilding project with a new job.

It can only get better from there.

I stop for gas in Casper, Wyoming, and fill the tank with 15.464 gallons of unleaded at $3.0399 per gallon, for a total of $47.01. My mother asks me if I’m getting weary. It’s 8:31 p.m. now, and I probably could use a break from driving.

As we get back on the road my mother says, “I want to show you something.”

Instead of heading back to the interstate, she drives in the other direction, through Casper, and soon I am unsure where we are. We pass a building emblazoned with TOWN OF MILLS, and we ride on from there. About a mile up the road, my mother turns left into a patch of 1950s-era ranch-style homes.

“Where are we?” I say.

“I’ll tell you when we get there.”

She takes a left turn (bad), then a right turn (good), then another left (bad). She rolls the Cadillac up to a small box of a home.

“Your father and I used to live in that house,” she says.

I have never heard about this.

“When?”

“Right after we got out of school. He went to work for the oil company, and they put us here in Casper. God, I hated it. I’d grown up in Texas—your father had, too, of course, but at least he had something to do here. The wind blew all the time. We’d get buried in drifts of snow in winter, way worse than anything we ever saw in Billings. Anyway, that was our first house together.”

I stare at the structure. It looks too small, even for just two people. However, I have to concede that whoever lives here now takes pride in it. The yard is neat and tended. The chain link fence doesn’t sag. It’s small, but it’s nice.

“Was it red like this?” I ask.

“No, it was white. The red looks better. It also had a garage, but it looks like they’ve turned that into a room. Good idea. It was a tiny, tiny place. Your father and I had to turn our backs to the wall to pass each other in the hallway.”

“How long were you here?”

“Fourteen months. I counted every day.” My mother laughs. “Getting to go to Billings was like paradise. We built a good life there, too. You came along.”

“It’s weird to think of any place other than Billings being home to you and Father.”

My mother puts the car back in drive and leaves her past behind. I’m still struck by the fact that there’s something I could learn about my parents this late in my life.

“I’ll tell you something, Edward. It’s becoming weird for me to think of Billings as home. I’m a little nervous about seeing it again.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m getting ingrained in Texas. It’s like I rediscovered where home is. Now that your father has been gone awhile, there’s not so much for me to do in Billings anymore.”

We make it to Billings at 12:07 a.m. My mother drives through the quiet dark to her downtown condo and then turns the car over to me. She says she will call Jay L. Lamb first thing in the morning and let me know what he says. She gives me a kiss on the cheek and says good-bye. Four minutes and twenty-eight seconds later, I come home to 639 Clark Avenue.

The house is as I left it eleven days ago. And yet, it feels foreign to me. That doesn’t make sense, but then a lot of what I’m feeling lately doesn’t seem logical. I’m going to have to hang on until things sort out.

I’ll have to go to the post office later today and retrieve my mail. I’ll call the Billings Herald-Gleaner , too, and get my paper going again. I’ve been thinking about it during the entire drive from Cheyenne Wells, and figuring out how my life works here—what Scott Shamwell calls “sorting out the shithouse”—is going to take discipline. Throughout this shitburger of a year, I’ve been letting routine get away from me. Routine, I’ve decided, is my way back to happiness, if happiness is anything I can aspire to. At this point, I’d take normalcy, whatever that is.

My ribs ache. The constant motion and the getting out of and into the car have sapped me physically.

I need to make a list of things to do when I wake up, so I can begin to round my life back into shape. A list represents discipline, and discipline is what I need.

1. Go to the post office and get my mail, and reinstate delivery.

2. Call the Billings Herald-Gleaner and restart home delivery of the paper.

3. Go to the grocery store. Think lean meats, whole grains, and fruits and vegetables.

4. Go to Rimrock Mall and get something for Mother for Christmas.

5. Before going to Rimrock Mall, see if a good item can be found online and delivered before Christmas. Rimrock Mall four days before Christmas? What was I thinking?

6. Arrange to see Dr. Rex Helton and Dr. Bryan Thomsen. A good life means good health. I need to get on top of this.

7. Stop writing this list.

8. Stop now.

9. Dammit.

10. Go to sleep.

11. Shit.

12. STOP IT!

I break another pen in half to keep from writing another item. It’s 12:49 a.m. I’m tired.

Since we left Casper, I’ve been thinking about my mother and my father and their life together—the way it was before I came along and the way it was after. I was surprised to learn that they had lived in Wyoming when they first got married, and after that, I was happy to have heard the story. My mother doesn’t talk much about my father anymore, and I struggle with that, because I think about him more than I ever have and would like to talk with her about him. I don’t measure such things as the amount of time spent thinking about my father, of course, and that’s not really my point. My point is that my father is often on my mind.

When we drove into Montana, I reminded my mother about my father’s crashing into a deer, and she scoffed.

“That was up by Little Bighorn,” she said. “He was drunk, you know.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yes, he was drunk. The whole thing scared me to death. That deer, he bounced off the front of the car and into the windshield, and I swear, I thought he was going to come through and land in the backseat. Your father there, prattling on, not paying attention. We’re lucky we weren’t killed. That’s when I told him, ‘Ted, never again. I’m never riding with you again when you’ve been drinking.’”