Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

“Sure,” I said after a moment.

“Okay, buddy,” he said, climbing into his green Bronco. “See you at seven.” He headed off to his fiancée’s place.

I hadn’t seen or heard from my parents since we’d broken the news, either, which suddenly seemed very odd, and so I thought I’d drop by the house on my way home, check in.

They were both at home, although my little brother was out with some friends. Mom was watching the news from the big lounge chair while she let a casserole cook in the oven. Dad was out on the back patio, sipping a bourbon and water. He held up the glass in salute when he saw me through the plate-glass window to the patio. I leaned over and kissed my mother on the cheek and she kissed me back on my cheek and said, “Hey, hon.”

I sat on the sofa and watched the news with her for a bit.

“Listen,” I finally said, “are you doing okay?”

She turned her attention from the news to give me a nice warm smile.

“Of course,” she said. “How are you? How’s Olivia feeling?”

“Oh, she’s fine, I guess,” I said. “I mean, she’s been fine. We went on a picnic.”

“That sounds like fun.” And she turned her attention to the news again.

I went out back onto the patio.

“Hello, son,” my dad said. He wore an old pair of dress pants with a sheen worn into the thighs, his favorite high-top sneakers, and a guayabara shirt. “Drink?”

He’d never offered me bourbon before. He’d let me have a beer before, the previous year, and that had been a big deal. I guess the idea was I was grown up now, for all practical purposes.

“Sure.”

He went in and came back out with a second drink, handed it to me.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

We drank the bourbon and talked about golf. He’d been watching a tournament that day, at one of the local country clubs, following the leaders in a cart and drinking beer. I remembered how I used to go to the tournaments as a kid and put together long, elaborate strands of beer can pop tops and wear them around like primitive necklaces.

“So,” I finally said. “Are y’all okay?”

He looked at me with the sort of indulgent smile a father can give.

“Sure, we’re okay,” he said. “How about you? How’s Olivia?” he said suddenly, as if he’d just that second remembered our whole predicament.

“She’s good,” I said. “We went on a picnic, at Mom Bertha’s lake. I caught a pretty good bass.”

“Yeah? How big?”

“Maybe six pounds, I think.”

“Damn. You going to mount it?”

“We ate it.”

“Good for you.”

After the drink, I said my goodbyes and went on home to Olivia. She was in the little kitchen, making biscuits. I didn’t know she could bake anything. In fact, I’d never seen her cook anything. It was a pleasant surprise. I gave her a kiss on the cheek. The room was filled with a late, glowing, warm yellow light.

“What’s going with the biscuits?” I said.

She shrugged.

“Want breakfast for supper?”

“Always,” I said. I sat down at the table. “It’s so cool in here. Crazy. Just a couple of days ago, it was unbearable.”

“I know. Must be a cool front.”

“Well, it feels pretty much the same outside. As it was a couple of days ago, I mean.”

“It’s bearable out there,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s not what I mean.”

She didn’t really seem to be listening. She was brushing the tops of the unbaked biscuits with melted butter before putting them into the oven, just like my mom would do.

“I guess the rent’s due,” I said.

“Mmm.”

“I’ve got the cash,” I said. “I’ll go down and pay it.”

I didn’t relish any contact with our landlady, but seeing her in order to pay the rent was preferable to having her pound on the door, pissed off, to demand it. I checked my wallet, pulled out three twenties and a five, folded them, walked down the deck stairs and around to the front door of the house, and knocked. No one answered. I knocked again, and heard no steps of anyone approaching the door.

I cupped my hands against the door’s glass window and looked inside. No one home. I’d never known the landlady not to be home. Aside from our measly rent, I didn’t know how she survived.

I looked through the windowpane again. In some strange way, the place looked as if no one had been home in a long time.

WE ATE SUPPER AT Olivia’s parents’ house the next night. As with my parents, it was like nothing had happened. Or it was like everything had happened, but no one was upset or even concerned. It was as if Olivia and I not only had been married a number of years, but had gotten married in an entirely conventional way.

Olivia’s mother’s cooking, normally unsalted green beans and white rice and bland baked chicken because of Mr. Coltrane’s blood pressure problem, was much better, too. It was a rich lasagna, with a green salad drenched in tangy oil and vinegar dressing, and French bread slathered with butter and garlic. We all ate like gluttons.

Mr. Coltrane ate like a man just released from a concentration camp, all but shedding tears of pure joy and gratification.

AT SOME POINT IN THERE, because I knew Olivia and her parents would like it, I joined their church, the Baptist church, and signed up to sing in the choir, and taught a Sunday school class to seventh-graders, and went out on witness nights with other men of the church, to convert and save souls. I didn’t particularly believe any of the things I was supposed to believe in as a Baptist, but I didn’t feel especially bothered by pretending to believe them, either.

Unbeknownst to myself before, I had a very nice singing voice.

We went to the Sunday morning service, the evening Sunday service, and the spaghetti suppers on Wednesday nights.

WE ENTERED A VERITABLE DREAM of days. At work, Curtis convinced the carpentry crew to take me on as apprentice, so I spent my days cutting studs to length, and joists, and hauling them up to the carpenters. I nailed the least attractive jobs, such as overhanging eaves, squeezing my legs around the two-by-six boards and leaning out over a drop of forty feet so we wouldn’t have to erect scaffolding. But I loved it. I’d always been afraid of heights but that seemed to have vanished. The crew voted to hire me on as a real carpenter after only six months. I decided I wanted to be the best carpenter in town, I would devote my working life to it. I took the GED and sailed through it, nights.

Our little boy was born in December. He came out with a full head of thick tawny hair like a lion’s mane, so we decided to call him Leo: William Leonardo Caruthers.

The next year, with a loan from our parents, Olivia and I bought a piece of land with a small stand of woods next to a pasture, and I began to build our house there in the late afternoons and evenings. Curtis helped me when he could. It was a simple but free-ranging design of our own. I wanted it to be at least part treehouse, remembering the ones I’d helped build as a child, so after the basic structure was done I began to expand it up and into a huge live oak we built next to for that purpose. Within two years we had our wish-home, all wood, with a broad front porch looking out over the pasture, a screen porch off our treehouse bedroom looking down into the woods out back. I was a good carpenter, as it turned out, and good at scavenging surplus and scrap materials from work sites, so when we were done the debt was minimal, and Olivia worked only part-time at home transcribing medical records, and sold rugs and coverlets and other nice things she wove herself on a big loom she kept in her workroom. She took long walks in the woods, early mornings, Leo toddling along or strapped in a carrier on her back, though he’d really gotten too big for that, to gather roots, nuts, flowers, and berries for natural coloring of the wool. Her body, which had been the lithe but soft body of a high school girl before, was now supple and muscular, beautifully toned. She was amazing in the sack.