Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

His mother came home from the hospital and walked through their house like a stranger, running her hands along walls as she searched for light switches, bumping hard against the edges of things, the couch, the refrigerator, the sliding doors that led into the backyard. On his third day back, as they sat eating pork and beans for breakfast yet again, she announced, “Aaron, we’re moving,” and though he feared change, he felt relieved, for he saw that they could not remain in Moorhead, where he had always lived but where his mother could no longer find her way.

They were going to a town called Mortonville. Before he was born, his mother and father had spent a week there at a fishing resort run by a couple who had probably purchased the place with high hopes, the way people do, though by the time his parents stayed, the couple was far past the honeymoon phase of ownership. The resort, which was several miles outside of Mortonville, was called Last Resort. His mother said their cabin was a dark, filthy box, and though she had brought along food to cook their meals, she had become queasy at the thought of eating off the plates she found in the kitchen. She pictured other people using them, people who gutted fish, picked at themselves, and rarely bathed. When she lifted a water glass to her mouth to drink, she was sure she smelled stale milk and fish. They had ended up going into Mortonville twice a day to eat at the Trout Café, an unexpected expense that so enraged his father that he ended their stay early, packing up the car in a huff and refusing to speak to Aaron’s mother, even when she begged him to pull over so that she could vomit. They did not know it yet, but she was pregnant. Each time she told Aaron the story, she ended it the same way: “Later I couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t you that made me so sick.” She would sigh, and as he got older he understood that she thought him responsible for all of it, not just the queasiness and vomiting but his father’s anger and their abrupt departure, precursors of the life they would have as a family.

After his mother announced that they were moving, she said, “Now’s as good a time as any,” and she unfolded a slip of paper with the telephone number of a man who had a house to rent in Mortonville. She did not like telephones, an aversion that Aaron would come to share, so she spent a few minutes pacing before she dialed. The man with the house answered. He did most of the talking, and when Aaron’s mother hung up, the only part of the conversation that she related to him was the man’s cheerful last words: “Let’s just meet at the café in town. You’ll never find the house on your own because I guarantee I give the worst directions in this entire county.” Aaron looked forward to meeting the man. He had never met anyone who actually bragged about being bad at things.

“That’s him, I bet,” his mother said when they pulled up in front of the café one week later, pointing to a short man who was standing with two tall men. “Our new landlord.” The man removed a handkerchief from the back pocket of his overalls and wiped his hands, rubbing each finger carefully, as though he’d just eaten something greasy, and then he came over to the Oldsmobile, where Aaron was struggling to extricate himself from the household items that his mother had packed around him.

“Name’s Randolph,” the man said. He shook both of their hands. “Randolph Rehnquist. You probably saw my initials by the train tracks when you came into town. Got my own crossing. Course, you’re welcome to use it.” He was bald and had a habit of removing his cap when he laughed, as though it were improper to laugh with one’s hat on. “Looks like you brought the necessities,” he said. He nodded at the car, which was filled with clothing and bed linens, kitchenware and a few keepsakes.

His mother had also called these things the necessities . “Only take the necessities,” she had instructed, but Aaron did not understand what made something a necessity. Each time he brought out one of his belongings and asked, “Is this a necessity?” she looked up tiredly and said, “If you can’t live without it, then just pack it. Okay?”

“What about my bed?” he asked, but she explained that their new house had furniture that they could use for now; they would get settled and then come back for everything else. But as he watched her wedge plates under the seats and stack frying pans and a colander where his feet would go, he realized that there would be no back-and-forth between this old life and the new.

The three of them went into the café and sat in a booth, and a man came over with a pot of coffee. Mr. Rehnquist said, “Frank,” and the man said, “Randolph,” and that was the end of their conversation.

It was from this man, Frank, that Aaron’s mother would buy the café two years later, but that day, Aaron had no reason to think of the café as part of his future, only his past. His father had sat in these booths. He had not been dead yet, and Aaron had not been alive. He could not make sense of this. His mother did not tell Mr. Rehnquist that she had once eaten a week’s worth of meals at this café with her husband. She did not say anything about a husband. When Aaron got older, he realized his mother had known that it would not do to arrive and begin talking about parade floats and dead husbands. Of course she knew that in a town this size a woman who showed up with a young son and no husband invited speculation, but Mr. Rehnquist was not the prying sort. He talked about himself instead, in a friendly, uncomplicated way. He told them that his former tenants had left suddenly. The Packers, he called them. “Packed up and left,” he said. “That’s what you get with Packers.”

He laughed, but Aaron’s mother, fresh from the hospital, was not thinking about things like laughing along companionably. Mr. Rehnquist didn’t seem to mind. He told them that they could have the house for six months, a year tops, because he was waiting for his son to get married. “When a man gets married, he needs a house,” he said, addressing Aaron as if this were a matter for his immediate consideration.

They sipped their drinks. “Yut, well, I suppose then,” said Mr. Rehnquist, and somehow Aaron’s mother knew that this meant it was time to leave. They drove out of town, Mr. Rehnquist’s truck crawling along in front of them, turned onto a gravel road and then into a driveway, at the end of which lay a house. His mother shut off the engine and stared. “What do you think?” she asked. All around them were fields.

“I think we’ll like it here,” he said.

“I think so too.” She reached over to pat his leg, but her hand curled into a fist and she instead knocked on his knee three times.

Mr. Rehnquist said that he wanted to point out some things before they went inside— features of the property he called them — like the birch trees on the other side of the empty garden and a rusty wheelbarrow that he said they should feel free to use. He nodded at the house. “This here’s the house where I was raised, and that’s my field over there,” he said, sweeping his arm toward the field across the road.

“What do you grow?” Aaron’s mother asked in her making-conversation voice.

“Oh, corn mainly. That’s about all I know how to grow.” He laughed. “My wife’s the brains in the family. She’s a schoolteacher. Fourth grade.” He studied Aaron. “How old are you then, Aaron?” he asked.

“I’m five,” Aaron said. “I’m going to be in kindergarten this year.”

“Going to be?” said Mr. Rehnquist. “School started over a month ago.”

“Yes,” Aaron said. “I’m getting a late start.” This was how he had heard his mother describe it when she called the school in Mortonville to let them know he would be enrolling.