Return to Oakpin(2)

            “I’m glad you called,” Craig told her. “You caught me daydreaming at the store.”

            “No, you weren’t. Your father ran a good store, and so do you.”

            “It looks like we’ll survive until they put in a Walmart, so that’s something. I finished that house, you know, Marci’s dream house on the hill—our dream house. I’m one of those characters who lives on the hill. You’ll have to come by.”

            “Remember when that hill was the wilderness? I think the boys used to hunt right there—I can see the lights some nights,” Mrs. Brand said. “This town is changing, but you’re not one of the guys who live on the hill. They’re all from California, aren’t they?”

            “Or Idaho. I’m glad Jimmy’s coming back. He got out and did something. Those books. He’s the only guy from Oakpine to write a book.”

            “Is Marci at the museum?”

            “She is. She’s doing what she wants now. Larry’s a senior. You’ll see him.”

            “My god,” she said. “Those babies.” She stood stiffly, having said all that she could manage, and she looked past Craig at the impossible garage, her eyes heavy now and laden with sadness and the weariness of all of time and time’s sadness.

            “Mrs. Brand,” Craig started, “we all go way back. And Marci and I have that big house, and with Jimmy coming—”

            “Don’t, Craig,” the woman said. She put her hand on his forearm. “We have to do it this way.” She was looking at his face now.

            “Just tell me what we need, Mrs. Brand. I’ll get Larry, and we’ll get this done for you.”

            • • •

            A week later Larry Ralston came walking up the smooth driveway of the new house on the scrub oak hill, the house they’d just moved into last spring, taking those long rolling strides he took after a run, his hands on his hips, each breath three gallons of September, still a touch of summer in it, and he was smiling and shaking-his-head happy. He and his father had poured the cement for this concrete surface six weeks ago, and now he walked in a circle on the ramp “I ran around the town,” he said. Larry Ralston was seventeen and had been talking to himself for two or three months. “That town is captured in its entirety.” He turned in the new night and looked out over the dark world and the small pool of the sparkling network of lights of the town, and the knotted cluster of downtown Oakpine and the white halogen slash of the railroad, and beyond the dark pool to the colored lights in a distant grid, red and red, at the airport. It was the first time he’d run around the town, and he ran again now up the steps sweating and smelling the fall grass in the sod and the newness of the materials cut just this year, and it was funny not to tramp sawdust, as they’d done for weeks, into the kitchen.

            There his mother stood now in her black bra, which was her nighttime ritual, doing the dishes in her underwear, her hair tied back in a ribbon, something she’d never done until this year, and it was almost seven. She said, “Where have you been?” thinking he’d been catting around, that age: seventeen, because it was what she was doing or about to do or considering doing or played at, and her thinking was that if her life had turned that way, then she saw it in everyone, even Larry, shining and breathing, and saying now, “I ran around this entire town.” He wanted a glass of water but didn’t want to get near her at the sink. “Mom, summer’s over, grab a shirt.”

            She said the obvious thing: “It’s my house.”

            And he, still having an ounce of humor about this woman and her black bra season, called out to the living room: “Dad, what is this with Mom?”

            “Play through, Larry,” his father called.