Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

Tula, too, was restless. One evening she stood outside and watched a star shoot across the November sky, thinking, Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But the familiar phrase failed to comfort her, and the future, which she had always thought of as nestled in a sunny valley at the end of a pretty country road, no longer seemed so easily reached. The weather had turned cold, but when she thought about going back inside, her thin shoes felt heavy on her feet, as if the dense clay soil of the yard were pulling at her, and beneath the clay, the earth’s magnetic core.

9.6 Lyle

Without Maggie around to tame it, the house started to make demands on Lyle. Great flakes of paint curled off the metal fretwork that held up the sagging roof of the porch, and a gutter rattled loosely in its bracket whenever the wind blew. A window cracked, seemingly without reason. The bathrooms sprouted mold. Even as they disintegrated, the objects around him seemed to have more life in them than they’d had before, if only because a thing first had to have life to lose it. The connection between the broken boards of the porch and the trees they had once been announced itself every time he mounted the front steps, and when he looked closely, he could see that the rusted screws that had held the boards in place for so many decades were slowly loosening their hold, as if the job was finished or they had somewhere else to be. Everything had a place in a grand scheme that was slowly making itself visible to Lyle, and the grand scheme was death and decay. The jagged piece of gutter, the rutted driveway, the rotting leaves, the screen door that had started to sag and whine. “Even the house misses your mother,” he said.

“It’s always been like that,” said Will, but Lyle didn’t think it had. Bills were piling up on the desk, and after brooding about it for a few days, he discussed the idea of paying them with Will.

“Go ahead and do it, Dad,” said Will.

“But your mother was always the one…”

“Well she’s not here now, is she?” Will’s usually placid face bloomed white in the darkened kitchen, where both lightbulbs had blown at once.

It wasn’t like Will to lose his temper. “I think Will’s drinking beer,” Lyle said to Jimmy Sweets when they met at the Merry Maid one evening after work.

“Jeezus, the kid’s seventeen,” said Jimmy. “It’s not as if he’s motherless. And he still has you, doesn’t he? He still has that hot little number he’s dating. What more does a growing boy need? Three squares and a little cha cha cha.”

“Don’t be crude, Jimmy,” said Lily, but everyone in the bar was laughing at the way Lyle’s ears were turning red.

“Jeezus, Rayburn,” said Jimmy. “You’re as sensitive as a girl.”

After that, all anyone had to say was “cha cha cha” and Lyle would slap a fiver on the bar and storm out the door.

“What’s eating him?” Jimmy would say loudly enough for Lyle to hear.

Sometimes Lily ran after him and they would sit in the front seat of Lyle’s truck and talk for a while before Lily got out and Lyle went home. It occurred to Lyle that he was being tested and he was failing the test. It was clear he had relied too much on Maggie, that she had sapped his strength in some way and it was up to him to get it back, but that seemed beyond him.

“I know what it’s like,” said Lily one evening when Maggie had been gone for almost three months. “Two years ago, my husband left me.”

“Maggie didn’t leave me,” insisted Lyle, but he wondered if she had. And not only had she gone, but she had left behind a great suitcase full of responsibilities. For the first time, a little tendril of blame wrapped around his heart. “Do you think it’s safe for her to come back?” he asked Lily. “I never heard from the police again, but I don’t know what that means.”

“No news is usually good news. If they wanted to go after her, they probably would have done it by now.”

“Probably,” said Lyle.

“But I guess you can’t ask without opening it all up again,” said Lily.

“No,” said Lyle. “I guess I can’t.”

Lyle thought about how he had followed Lily home and how she had said, “You might as well come in,” and how for a split second he had thought she was saying it to him. Now her eyes were filled with soft question marks, and he figured he had come to one of those moments where he got to decide something important about the future. He tried to look down the various roads that pinwheeled away from the truck where he and Lily were sitting, but all he could think about was how MacBride had said he wasn’t a visionary. He guessed MacBride had been right about that, for try as he might, he couldn’t see down any of the roads or even through the door Lily seemed to be holding open for him.

“MacBride told me I wasn’t a visionary,” he said, explaining his hesitation.

“Who the heck is?” asked Lily. “‘Visionary’ is just a word they slap on people who turn out to be right about something. For instance, if you come home with me now, I’m a visionary, and if you don’t, well then, I’m not.”

Lyle wondered if there was a way to go through a door and simultaneously not go through it, just so he’d know what he was getting into. “I guess I could come for a little while,” he said.

“Aw heck, Lyle,” said Lily. “Nobody’s forcing you. Maybe you and I are better off as friends.”

When Lily got out of the truck and started down Main Street, Lyle’s first instinct was to run after her. But his second instinct was to stay put. The two impulses held a battle in his imagination, and by the time he decided he should follow her after all, it seemed too late to do it gracefully, not that he’d ever been particularly graceful. Then he had to argue with himself about whether there was such a thing as too late in this case and if it was just habit that kept him from acting decisively. It was too late, anyway, to be decisive. That much he knew. And being indecisive was probably insulting to any woman, Lily included, which meant he was probably better off waiting for the future to come to him rather than rushing wildly off to meet it.

Of all the things Lyle had learned to do over the course of his life, the thing he did best was to blend in. So he sat in the truck as the lights in the shop windows went out one by one and the citizens of Red Bud hurried past him as if he wasn’t there until the only beacon for the weary left in Red Bud was the blinking neon BEER AND CHEER sign in the window of the Merry Maid.

After that, he did what was expected of him the best he knew how to do it, and when people asked him how he was doing, he mostly said, “I can’t complain.”

Early one morning two weeks before Christmas, Ben and Reilly returned with a warrant to search the house. When Lyle protested, Reilly pushed in through the glassed-in alcove as if Lyle were just another jacket hanging on the row of hooks. Lyle watched silently as the two men turned everything upside down before leaving empty-handed.

Ben said, “Be seein’ you, Lyle,” as if the visit had been a social call, but Reilly stormed out without a word, rattling the windows and slapping the screen door against the side of the house.

“Hey,” Lyle called out. “Are you happy now?”

Reilly didn’t turn back, but Lyle heard him mutter, “What about the phone records? Do you reckon we could get a warrant for those?”

It was almost eight-thirty when they left and Lyle was already late for work. Still, he waited for an hour in the Redi Mart parking lot, dialing the attorney’s office every few minutes until Maggie picked up the phone.

“The good news is that the police came back with the warrant, but they didn’t find anything,” he told her. “The bad news is that we can’t use the house phone anymore. If you can get to the office early on Mondays, I’ll try to call you then.”