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Briefly, I wondered how much life I’d lived through them and decided I didn’t want to know the answer. It was easier this way, safer.
And I’d keep reminding myself of that until I believed it.
4
OLD HABITS
KEATON
My alarm went off before the sun a few days later, but I was already awake, waiting for the sound so I could get today done.
It would be a day like any other. I’d get myself up, go to work, keep busy until dinner. Eat because I had to. Watch TV with my brothers and my niece Sophie, shower, and go to bed. But there would be no rest. I’d lay here in the dark and beg for sleep so I wouldn’t have to be alone with myself.
This was where I’d been the night the police knocked on the door to tell me my wife had died.
Dad’s gravestone hadn’t even been put in place yet. We’d just moved back into my family home, still had boxes in the corner, just over there under the window. I hadn’t been asleep that night either, not after the fight she and I had.
I didn’t know where it came from, her wanting to move. His death had changed me, she said, but how could I ever be the same? It was too much, she noted, for me to bear. She once told me I’d be destroyed by the weight of it, that there was no way for me to move on if we stayed here. We could start over, away from her family and mine, an escape from the yoke of my responsibility. That she would even suggest it was madness. Maybe it was some survival instinct she had, a fear that I wouldn’t be the same. As if leaving would have turned back the clock.
She knew I couldn’t leave. That I wouldn’t leave.
The fight had escalated, almost from the second Dad died. The last time I saw her, we’d shown our ugliest selves, slinging accusations and insults at each other down to the stupidest, smallest things that only people who have been together a long time fight about. In the end, she’d stormed out, tears on her cheeks and keys in her hand.
On that moonless night, on that unlit country road, she didn’t see the little hatchback with the young family inside pull out of their drive.
Her truck flipped and rolled down a slight hill. They said she died on impact, as did the family she hit, all but a boy in Sophie’s grade. Only a toddler at the time, he was adopted by a local family, one I knew well and saw often. Seeing his face kicked the wind out of me every time.
It was my fault as much as it was hers. I let her walk away angry, my pride too deep to stop her, to be an adult. Let her go, I’d thought. Maybe she’ll come back with some sense of reason. I’d questioned whether or not she knew me, to press leaving like she did. Wondered if there was something else at play, another reason to run.
I thought the worst of her that night.
The truth of the matter is that I could have stopped her. If I had, they’d all still be here. But I didn’t. And they weren’t.
I flipped off my covers, my skin crawling and my guts full of bolts. Once, this was my parents’ bedroom, though their things were long gone, relocated to other parts of the house or stored away. I wouldn’t have taken the room if I’d had a choice. Mandy had insisted, and when she died, my brothers moved in whether I wanted them there or not. The twins sharing a room as boys was all well and good, but as adults they’d passed at the suggestion of bunkbeds when there was an empty room in the house.
Nobody wanted this room. But since the house had gone to me, I had no real argument.
With a sigh, I went about my business, brushing my teeth and dressing for the day before heading down to Dad’s office where stacks of problematic paperwork waited on my desk for solutions.
Trouble was, there weren’t any.
Not that my brain knew the difference—it happily blamed me for the numbers. After all, it was my responsibility to move them from red to black, to find money where there was none.
We hadn’t been in the best shape when Dad died—he was just as prone to sacrificing profit for lending a hand to the town as I was. Over the last couple years, we’d run up against a string of brick walls. The rising cost of lumber. The supply shortages. The exorbitant costs of building and repairs that the people of this town couldn’t afford. And then there were the town projects I’d agreed to do at cost. It benefitted all of us to refurbish Main Street. When Pastor Colburn needed a new roof for the church, I couldn’t say no, couldn’t charge him what I normally would despite the fact that churches in general were wealthy. They weren’t here in Lindenbach. Ten percent tithe on minimum wage or a farmer’s salary was barely enough to keep the pastor and his family fed and clothed, never mind renovations.
