Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“I can tell you about it, about that night,” said Pastor Gronseth, “but it will only be my perspective. Okay? Because what I’ve come to accept is that we can never know another person’s mind.”

“Of course,” said Aaron by way of agreeing.

“We left at midnight. I’d snuck my suitcase over to my office earlier that day, and your mother picked me up in the alley behind the church. We got to Gloria’s around three. I drove, but I didn’t know where we were going. I just followed your mother’s directions. She got out of the car and told me to wait. It was so dark, and the only radio was one of those fire-and-brimstone programs, preaching to the sorts of folks who are up at that hour, people who’re feeling miserable and sorry for themselves and lost. I remember wondering whether this radio preacher would ever imagine that a fellow man of the cloth was out there listening to him at that very moment while he waited for the woman he’d just run away with.

“After maybe twenty minutes, Gloria came out. I rolled down the window, and she put out her hand, so I shook it. She told me that your mother was staying, that she had nothing more to say to me but that the car was mine if I wanted it. ‘I’ve come for her suitcases,’ she said. I sat out there maybe another hour. Eventually all the lights in the house went out again, and I finally realized how it was.”

“And that was it?” Aaron asked.

“That was the last time I saw your mother. You know she cried the whole way there. I kept asking if she was okay. She said it was the first time she’d cried in years.”

“Why was she crying?” Aaron asked.

He knew that he wanted Charles Gronseth to say that his mother was crying because of him, but Charles Gronseth said, “I don’t know.” Aaron heard a door open on the other end of the line and Charles Gronseth say, “Sure, honey. Be right there,” and then he heard the door close.

“You didn’t ask why she was crying?”

“I didn’t ask, no. Maybe I was afraid she’d say she was crying because she could see it was all a mistake. There was one thing she did say that I thought about a lot. Still do. She told me that when you lose the ability, the desire, to make your life interesting, then maybe it’s not worth staying alive anymore.”

“You think my mother was going to Gloria’s to kill herself,” Aaron said.

“I don’t know.” Charles Gronseth sighed. “I better go now. My wife needs me.”

“Do you still believe in God?” Aaron asked. He did not know why he asked, except that it seemed a way to know who Charles Gronseth was now that he was no longer Pastor Gronseth.

There was a long silence on the other end, and finally Charles Gronseth said, “I don’t go to church much anymore, but I guess I still believe. I just find it easier to believe when it’s not my job to make sure other people believe also.”

* * *

“You do know that Gloria loves you?” Aaron said, but his mother was silent. “Of course you know. It’s why you came here. It’s also why my father hated her, isn’t it?”

“Your father,” she said, “hated everyone. Did you know that? Do you remember that about him?”

“I remember that he didn’t like me.” Even after all these years, he could not bring himself to say hate . “I remember that everything I said or did made him angry.”

“Yes,” said his mother. “I thought that’s why you’d come.”

“What do you mean?” said Aaron.

She sighed. “What do you remember about that night?”

“What night?” he said, though he supposed she meant the night she disappeared.

“The night before the parade,” said his mother. “We never talked about it, and I could never tell whether you remembered, but I always assumed you must.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You don’t remember being in the closet?” Not waiting for him to answer, she added, “Because it’s all I think about some days.” He heard her tap the armrests of Clarence’s wheelchair. “I’m glad you don’t remember,” she said at last, stood and rolled the chair back across the room. “Good night, Aaron,” said his mother.

He wanted to call out to her, “Tell me about the closet. Tell me everything,” but the door creaked open and then closed, and he had said nothing. He listened to her padding down the hallway, not hesitating or bumping against things because she knew this house. She’d lived here longer than she’d lived anywhere else.

He tried to lull himself to sleep, as he often did, by repeating the last line of his favorite Wallace Stevens poem, It can never be satisfied, the mind, never, and when this did not work, he rose, put on his pants, because it seemed wrong to walk around a stranger’s house in his briefs, and made his way down the hallway to the kitchen. There, sitting in the glow of the stove light, was Gloria, wrapped in a puffy robe. She did not look surprised to see him. He was relieved to be wearing pants.

“Can I make you something?” she said. “Tea or hot milk?”

He shook his head. She gestured toward the other chair with one of her large hands, and he found himself staring, as he had while he watched her cook, the fish fillets tiny in her hands, and again during supper, as she wielded her cutlery and reached for the carrots. “My feet too,” she said, because she had noticed his staring. She held up her right foot, but he could not see it properly in the dim light.

“What happened?” he asked.

She shrugged. “A couple of years ago they just started growing. They ached, so I thought it was arthritis maybe, until my shoes didn’t fit anymore. Your mother wanted me to go to the doctor, but I waited until there wasn’t a shoe left in the whole house that I could still get on.”

“What did the doctor say?” He was trying not to sound horrified.

She shrugged again. “It’s rare.”

“I would imagine so,” he said, and Gloria laughed.

“Your mother told me you had a sense of humor.”

His throat tightened. He wanted to pull his chair up close and demand that Gloria tell him everything his mother had ever said about him. Instead, he nodded in a way that invited her to continue the story. She waved her big hand in the air dismissively. “Something was pressing on my pituitary gland,” she said, “which caused the growth, like I was right back in puberty. It’s under control now. The doctor monitors it. I get measured once a year. I haven’t had any new growth in over ten years.”

“So it’s”—he raised his hands, let them drop—“it’s not serious?”

“I’m still here. Dee always gives me a list of questions to ask the doctor, but I like knowing just what I need to know and nothing more.” She hesitated. “It started right after Clary died, so I thought it was my imagination at first, some psychological thing. That probably sounds silly.”

“It doesn’t,” Aaron said.

“I’m just glad Clary wasn’t around for it,” Gloria said. “He hated giants.” She and Aaron laughed together, and then she sipped twice from her cup and studied the clock on the wall. “That thing just keeps losing time,” she said.

“Gloria, does my mother ever talk about my father? About, you know, what happened the night before he died and the closet?” He was making it sound as though he remembered that night also, but he did not think he was being dishonest, not exactly. He had told his mother that he did not remember, which was true, but as he had lain there, listening to her nervous breathing so close by, a memory had overwhelmed him — a memory of her breathing, panting really, in a small, dark space beside him, the smell of urine and wet wool rising around them.

“When you and your mother visited that summer,” Gloria said, “you came down the hallway and stood in the doorway of the front room. You were eavesdropping on us. Do you remember that?”