Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“You were wise as a boy also,” Gloria said. “Just seven years old, but you understood Clary so well. You had an instinct for people even then.” Gloria did not want to talk about her feelings for his mother, and that was fine. He was not even sure that talking about the past helped. Maybe it did allow you to clarify things so that you could move on. Or maybe it just kept pulling you backward. “I told her plenty of times that she needed to find you,” Gloria said, “but I should have insisted.”

“Did you know that Walter wrote to her?” he asked.

“Not the first time, but she showed me the letter that came last month.”

Gloria picked at the nuts on her caramel roll, and he thought again of her cracking walnuts on the couch beside his mother all those years ago. How strange it must be for her to have him here, a boy who had returned a man.

“I left him,” Aaron said. “I left Walter.”

Gloria nodded. “I figured as much. You know, from how the letter sounded.”

“Right after she disappeared, I moved in with a family in town, the Hagedorns. I don’t know how I would have survived that year if they hadn’t taken me in, but all I could think about was how to get away. I wanted to go to college, but she’d left just five hundred and two dollars behind in the bank for me. And then Walter came along. He gave me a home. He paid for me to go to college. He taught me everything. This life I have, who I am today? I owe it to Walter.”

“Walter sounds like a fine man, but you had something in you, Aaron, something special. You made Clary laugh, and nobody ever made Clary laugh. You were a good, sweet boy, a smart boy. That much I know.”

“Thank you, Gloria. I appreciate that, I do, but it doesn’t change the fact that Walter made it possible for me to have a different life. And how did I repay him? I got in a truck in the middle of the night and disappeared. I haven’t called or written. Nothing.”

“Walter did the things he did because he wanted to,” Gloria said. “People pretend otherwise, but they almost always do what they want to do. I let your mother stay because that’s what I wanted. Anyway, I’ve learned the hard way what happens when you stay with someone out of guilt or feeling beholden. People do it all the time, sure, but they end up angry or bitter or worse, hating the other person.”

“By the end, I felt like I hated Walter,” he said quietly. “I kept a journal of all the things he did that drove me crazy. It was a way to make sense of it, I suppose, but also a way to see the evidence lined up, as my friend Bill would say, and to give myself permission to leave.

“Years ago, when we were still living here in Minnesota, I knew this woman who had three cats she loved more than anything, but she also had a husband who did not love the cats. They were always underfoot, he said, doing things — shredding his papers, peeing on his clothes, swiping at him every time he walked by. They didn’t do stuff like that to her. One day he’d had enough, so while she was at work, he loaded the cats into his car, drove out in the country, and just left them there by the road. That night, when my friend got home from work and couldn’t find them, she asked her husband if he’d seen them. He said no at first, but finally she got it out of him, what he’d done. She left him that very night. When she told me the story later, she said that every time one of the cats peed in his shoes or hissed, she wondered what it was about him that they sensed, so when he got rid of them like that, she was actually relieved because she finally knew what the cats had known all along.

“I used to wish Walter would do something like that, something so terrible or unjust or cruel that it made leaving the necessary thing to do. But that’s the thing about Walter. He’s a good person. All those years he did everything I needed, but the more he did for me, the more I started to hate him for it.”

He was crying now, and he tried to stop himself by taking a bite of the caramel roll, but that only made it worse, his throat tight with his tears and the dryness of the bread.

Gloria nodded. “You wanted Walter to be wrong so you didn’t have to be, but there isn’t always one person who’s right and another who’s wrong. Sometimes — usually — it’s not that easy.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time, until finally Gloria said, “Here’s what I know, Aaron. When your mother left, she wasn’t thinking about you — for better or worse, she wasn’t. She was thinking about herself. Maybe she was planning to end her life, or maybe she was trying to salvage it. I don’t know which, but I do know that sometimes the most you can do is save yourself.”

“Gloria,” he said, “I’m sorry to ask, but I need to know about the closet, about what happened the night before my father died.”

Gloria pushed her plate with the half-eaten caramel roll aside. “Are you sure?” she asked. “I’ll tell you the whole story, but only if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Was that what she was telling you when Clary sent me out to spy?”

“She told me just part of the story that day, but when she came to stay, that’s when she told me the rest, over and over until I was worn out from reliving it with her. Then, one day she just stopped talking about it. She hasn’t mentioned it since.”

“But you still remember what happened?”

“I remember every detail,” Gloria said.

As Gloria told him the story of what had happened in the closet the night before the parade, he felt like he was watching a movie, a movie that he thought he hadn’t seen before, except as he watched, he realized he had because he already knew what was going to happen just before it did. She began with their return from the Englund family vacation. In the week after he kicked the sitting-down Paul Bunyan, the three of them had maintained a truce that primarily took the form of silence. He remembered the silence, the way that conversation was tossed like a hot potato around the supper table, and the relief that he and his mother both felt when his father went back to work. He remembered his mother telling him that on Saturday they would be attending the SummerFest Parade, in which his father would be participating on behalf of the police department. It would be Aaron’s first parade, but his mother said that she liked parades and thought he would like them also.

“You’ll see,” she’d said. “There’s something nice about standing on the sidewalk and watching everything move past you, floats and marching bands, clowns and regular people.”

“Why?” he asked. He meant why were all these people going to line up in the street and march past them? Why was his father going to join them? What his mother described made no sense.

But she thought he was asking how she knew he would like it, and she replied with something unworthy of her, something about all children liking parades. “Right after the parade,” she added, whispering but excited, “everything will change.”

The next afternoon his mother produced his suitcase, just as she had that first night in the cabin after the standing-up Paul Bunyan. It was neatly packed and almost full. “You can choose three more things to put in,” she said, “but you need to do it quickly, before your father gets home.”

“My father doesn’t know about my suitcase?” he asked.

“Not yet,” said his mother. “It’s a surprise for tomorrow, after the parade.”

She made the finger-to-lips gesture that meant this was their secret and then stood by as he hastily chose a blue sweater vest, a book about a boy called Silly Billy, and his stuffed giraffe, whose neck he liked to sleep on. The giraffe was a gift from some people his mother had once worked for. She closed his suitcase, which was not easy with the giraffe neck, and once this was done, she set it in the closet and told him not to touch it.