Lone Star

Chloe never saw her mother as respectful to anyone as she was to Moody, and her father as silent. Lang didn’t sit until Moody sat. There was no eating, drinking, or speaking, until Moody ate, drank, and spoke. Every other question out of Lang’s mouth was, do you have enough salt? More ice? Enough cream on the mashed potatoes? I made chocolate profiteroles for dessert, and fresh coffee, but I also have decaf, or some brandy, if you like. Of course I have whiskey. Would you like some now? Are you cold? Would you like a shawl? You’re too hot? Chloe, open all the windows. And bring in the floor fan from the shed.

Her mother sat in adoration. As if Moody had waltzed in, in light cloth, sans sandals, and beyond her stooped shoulders trembled two wings. That’s how Lang behaved around her husband’s mother. Not so much the husband.

“I fixed the screens,” Jimmy said in a stiff tone meant to convey he had built the Maginot Line—between himself and his mother.

Moody shrugged, as if his fixing the screens was an achievement on par with brushing his teeth. “Good,” she said. “Because I don’t enjoy mosquitoes.”

When Lang would pass Moody’s chair, she’d place her hand gently on the white-haired woman’s shoulder, patting her. It would be amusing if it weren’t so exasperating. All the while Jimmy gazed upon his wife with a pungent mixture of compassion and hostility.

A stressed and anxious Chloe was sullen and silent, like her father, though, she guessed, for different reasons. She and Jimmy sat gray like the unfallen Berlin Wall and stared at their food, at the darkening lake, warily at Lang and Moody across from them making small talk. Chewing her lip, counting to 741 by unlucky thirteens, Chloe tried to be still, to not think. The evening blossomed with the smell of mint and quivering fresh water.

“Moody, how are your flowers doing?” Chloe went over to her grandmother’s every spring and planted beautiful things in the raised black soil.

Moody made a face. “The flowers bring bees,” she said. “Which I also don’t enjoy, having grown up in a bee farmer’s house. Especially the blood orange tulips that came up a few weeks back. Pretty, but the bees! Never seen anything like it. Don’t plant those again.”

“Tulips are perennial, Moody. They come up on their own.”

“Well, plant something else. Something that doesn’t attract bees.”

“You want me,” Chloe asked slowly, letting it sink in, “to find flowers that don’t attract bees?”

Nothing sunk in. “No bees is what I want,” Moody said. “How you get there is your problem.”

Chloe’s scalp tingling, her skin shivering, she clawed at an old bite on her forearm. Was the grand diminutive woman ever going to get to the point of her visit?

There was much food and meaningless conversation before there was finally no food and a meaningful one. After coffee with Baileys, and a second helping of profiteroles (or was it a second helping of Baileys?) Mudita Devine, née Klavin, mother of six sons, oldest one deceased, Lochlan’s widow, fluttering Clarence Odbody clockmaker, opened her mouth.

“So your mother tells me you’re wanting to go to some damn fool city in Europe.”

It wasn’t a question. It was just a beginning. And what a beginning! Chloe nodded.

“Why?”

Before Chloe could reply, Moody cut her off. “I don’t care why. Neither do your parents.” Her mother across from her and her father next to her didn’t have time to nod. “The question is, is this a good idea?”

Chloe knew better than to even pretend to answer.

“Your mother and father don’t think so. You plan to go with your friends? That boy you’ve been hanging around with?”

“Mason. Yes. I’ve grown up with them, Moody.”

“Did I ask how long you’ve known them? Did I ask their names? What does any of that matter to me? You could know them five minutes or fifteen years. None of it matters. What matters is they’re boys, and you want them to join you girls in some tomfoolery.”

“Not …”

“Chloe.” Moody raised her hand. “You’ll have plenty of time to speak briefly. Your time has not come yet. Let me ask you this. In broader terms, beyond the few weeks you’re hoping to grab on a beach, have you given any thought to what you want to do with your life?”

Now could she speak? Chloe glanced from her mother to her father. She answered. Yes, she said. She has thought about it. She was thinking of going into law. She was thinking of majoring in history.

“So what I’m hearing is you want to major in history, yet your first inclination is to head to a Barcelona night club?”

Chloe must have looked flummoxed. “It makes me wonder,” her grandmother said in explanation, “how serious you are about your life.”

“Moody, I’m not even eighteen …”

“Do I not know how old you are?” Moody exchanged a glance with Lang. “So to your parents, you declare that you’re almost eighteen, as if you’re so grown up that you can make your own decisions. Yet now you remind us of your insignificant age to excuse why you can’t be serious about the road before you.”

A squirming Chloe kept quiet.

“So which is it? Are you eighteen or are you eighteen?”

Chloe had no answer, except yes. She couldn’t look up.

“I thought so. Look at me, child. That’s better. Your mother tells me you’ve had your heart set on Europe.”

Not Europe, Chloe wanted to bleat. Barcelona. She wasn’t even brave enough to defend her one small dream to her grandmother.

“You can decide to visit any European country,” Moody continued. “There are nearly two dozen to choose from. You have a few precious weeks before college. An opportunity of a lifetime. And you choose—Barcelona?”

Why was this so frightening? Her heart drummed in her chest.

“Yes.”

Moody raised her strong, wrinkled hand. “Still not your turn, child.” Her gaze was unwavering, which was more than Chloe could say for her own. She’d rather look at her mother! What torture this was.

“Your parents tell me that Hannah talks a good game, but has not yet produced enough cash for your Iberian adventure. And the young men, having come into your dream belatedly, are even more broke. Is this true?” Moody stopped Chloe from replying. “I have a proposal for you,” she said. “A proposal I’ve talked over with your parents, and they agree. A way for you to get what you want. That’s why I came. Do you want to hear about it?”

Chloe couldn’t hear anything above the thumping in her chest. A way for her to get what she wanted! was all she heard. What could Moody possibly have in mind? That Lang and Jimmy go with them to Europe to chaperone? That they go to Canada instead, as her dad had suggested? Moody was speaking, but Chloe—bouncing up and down on the trampoline beat of her excited heart—missed the important part, and she knew she had missed it because the three adults around her had fallen silent.

Chloe blinked. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that? I don’t think I heard right.”

Moody sighed. “Riga,” she said impatiently. “Riga.”

“I don’t know what Riga is.”

“The capital of Latvia. Also, where I was born.”

“Ah.” Chloe nodded, as if acknowledging that she vaguely already knew that.

The three adults waited for Chloe’s reply. Chloe waited for an explanation.

“Honey, so what do you think?” asked Jimmy.

“Of what?”

“Of your grandmother’s plan.”

“I don’t understand. You want us to go”—Chloe struggled—“to Riga?”

“Yes.”

“No! Why?”

“I have family near Riga,” Moody said. “I want you to visit them. I told them a lot about you. You can bring them a letter from me, and a package.”

“You know, Moody, there’s something we have in this country called the United States Postal Service—”

“Not interested. And don’t be fresh. Also, there is an orphanage in a Latvian town called Liepaja. The town has had a painful history with the Communists, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, the young people there have not been doing so well. Many American families sponsor children from Eastern Europe to come live, study, and eventually work in the United States. Your parents have been thinking of sponsoring such a child.”

“Don’t look so shocked, honey,” Jimmy said. “We meant to talk to you about it. We just didn’t get a chance to.” He glared at his mother who ignored him.

“Your parents would like you to visit this orphanage in Liepaja. Maybe you can find them a suitable boy. Age doesn’t matter, but it must be a boy. Older is better. Not too old. Six or seven. The four of you kids can stay with my relatives. It will make them happy and stretch your lodging budget. Riga is a wonderful historic city. You’ll love it. A win-win, if you ask me.”

Chloe shook her head. Lose-lose is what it sounded like. Worse, Moody wasn’t finished. There didn’t seem to be a finality to her words.

“And,” Moody continued, “after you finish helping your parents, I’d like you to do something for me.”

“Other than visit with your family?”

“You have it wrong. They’re doing you a favor, not the other way around. You won’t be forced to stay in places unsuitable for a young lady.” The old woman kneaded her creased and square hands. “A long time ago, before the war, I had a best friend like you and a sweetheart like you. When war broke out in Poland, we knew we were going to get squeezed by the Russians on one side and the Germans on the other. We ran from Riga and hid out in the countryside. Our plan was to get to the Baltic Sea, make our way to one of the Scandinavian countries and board a ship bound for the west. But we didn’t realize how much of the continent Hitler and Stalin already had in their grip. We were in Kaunas, northwest of Vilnius, when we got caught by the Soviets and taken to the Jewish ghetto. We were there two years, until 1941 when the Germans came. We all thought we were lucky we weren’t in Vilnius because there was a massacre there, near Ponary. Everyone died. They put us on a train bound for the Bialystok ghetto. A year later there was an uprising, crushed of course. But by that time, most of the Jews had been taken to a transit camp nearby. Do you know the name of that transit camp, Chloe?”

“Of course not.”

“Treblinka.”

No one spoke for a moment.

“What about you?” the girl asked her grandmother.

“I’m not Jewish,” Moody said. “Though I reckon that meant little to the Germans. What might have meant more is that I made boots for them. Footwear for the German soldier. I was quite good. Perhaps that helped me.” She spoke matter-of-factly, looking only at her gnarled hands that once had made boots for the Wehrmacht. “How little I understood life. I really believed after the war I would find my friends, see them again. I didn’t know then that Treblinka was like pancreatic cancer. No one survives.”

Chloe didn’t know what to say. Questioningly she opened her hands.

“After Latvia, I’d like the four of you to travel by train and visit Treblinka. Bring my love some red roses. There must be a mass grave around there. After that, you can do what you like. You might want to visit Warsaw, or Auschwitz in southern Poland, but that’s your business. You have three items on the to-do list. Liepaja for your mother and father, Riga for my family, and flowers in Treblinka for me. You do those things, and I will help pay for your trip.”

“I have my own money, Moody,” Chloe mumbled in response, as if that was the only thing she’d heard.

“Oh, sure you do,” Moody said. “But you know who doesn’t have their own money? Hannah. You know who else? Blake and Mason. I hear their mother plans to tap into her life savings to buy them the plane tickets. You can’t travel through Europe on the kindness of strangers, Chloe.”

“You’re going to pay for all of us to go?”

“Well, let’s just say you’re not going to be staying at the Ritz-Carlton. You’ll bring your own money for food, for incidentals. But your travel expenses and your lodging expenses, yes, I will take care of.”

Chloe shook her head. “Moody, I don’t want to go to Riga.” Or to an orphanage! She scowled at her stoic mother, at her father sitting like a sad sack next to her. “My friends will never go for it.” Chloe was thinking of Blake especially. “They’d rather not go at all than go to Poland.”

“Child, I think you’re mistaking what this is,” Moody said. “Is this how your mother allows you to speak to her? This isn’t a negotiation. It’s a proposal. Take it. Or leave it. You want Barcelona? Fine. You’ll have to get to it through my home country. And through Poland. Barcelona through Treblinka.”

“But …”

“Or you don’t go.”

Chloe frowned, perplexed, maddened, upset. “Why would you pay for my friends to go with me?”

“It’s my graduation present to you,” Moody said. “You’ve been largely absent from my life these last few years”—she glared at Jimmy who glared right back—“and I would like to fix that. I’m not as young as I used to be. I don’t want your father’s irrational anger at me to stop you from taking this historic trip. And without your friends you can’t go.”

“Not irrational, Mom,” said Jimmy.

“Oh, yes,” Moody said. “Chloe is your daughter, like Kenny was my son, like you’re my son. Why can’t you understand that?”

“Chloe is a very good daughter,” said Jimmy.

“You’re not such a good son,” Moody said. “What son can stay angry at his mother? Kenny wasn’t a good man, but he was a good son. Better than you. He didn’t stay angry for seven years. That’s a sin, you know. It’s bad luck.”

“We’ve had about all we can handle of that, thanks to him,” Jimmy said as if spitting. “Us, Burt, Janice, their boys. Bad luck well and truly covered, Mom.”

“Listen, if I spoiled him, all right, but I spoiled all you kids. He wasn’t special. You wanted me to love him less than you? He was still my son! I had it rough growing up. I wanted it to be easier for my own children. Why is that so hard to understand?” She raised her hand. “Stop arguing with me, Jimmy. I’m done with it. We’ve yelled all we can yell. Help your child, spoil your child, or take me home. That’s your choice.”

Chloe could see her mother making intense beseeching eyes at her father from across the table. Head bent, Jimmy wasn’t looking at anybody.

Moody turned her attention back to Chloe. “I advised your parents not to keep you from going. Even though you are only eighteen or already eighteen or whatever it is you say, I told them that you should at least try to look for the answer to the fundamental question before you.”

Chloe hated questions before her. “What question is that?” she asked in an exhausted voice.

“What meaning does your finite existence have in this infinite world?”

Chloe didn’t think her Uncle Kenny asked himself this question once, and he probably was never harangued like this. Maybe he should’ve been. Maybe that had always been her dad’s point when he railed at his mother.

“You keep telling your mother and father you want to see things with your own eyes,” the old woman said. “So go see them. Do you only want to see the water and the waves?”

Yes?

“Do you only want to hear the cathedral bells?”

Um, yes?

“What about examining for five minutes your place in the world, what it means to be alive? What it means to be dead?”

“Enough, Mom,” Jimmy said in a voice more exasperated and tired than Chloe’s. “Unlike some others we won’t mention, Chloe gets it.” Jimmy turned to his daughter. “It’s not ideal, Chloe-bear,” he said, putting his arm around her. “It’s called life. You endure a lot of stuff you don’t care about, but then, if you’re lucky, you get what you want.” Jimmy’s eyes caught Lang’s for a glimpse.

Chloe took a few minutes to compose herself before she spoke. “Moody, Mom, Dad, do you guys have any idea how far Riga is from Barcelona?”

Moody smiled with a full set of dentures. “Yes,” she said. “A train ride away across Europe, just like they did it in the war days.”

12

Peacocks

THAT NIGHT UP IN THE ATTIC LANG SAT ON CHLOE’S BED. “Your father doesn’t want you to be upset. He thinks we were too hard on you. Some police chief! He’s gone soft in the head, I tell you. The fight has gone out of him.”

“I wonder why,” Chloe muttered. Lang said nothing.

“We don’t want you to be disappointed,” she said when she spoke again. “Dad and I don’t fully understand why you want to go, but then we’re not meant to, are we? I almost wonder if you yourself know. And that’s all right too. If you think you need to go to Barcelona to discover what you want and who you are, then who are your father and I to stand in your way? Your acceptance of Moody’s generous terms is wise. I know you’re worried about your friends not wanting to go to Latvia, but I think they’re going to surprise you. Besides, what choice do you have, really?”

“Not go?”

Lang nodded. “That will make your father happy,” she said. “In any case, everyone agrees the boys should go with you. Burt, Janice, Moody. They’ll keep you safe. Your father and I won’t argue this anymore. If you must go, then better with them. Soon you’ll be far away, and they’ll still be here saving up for that junk-hauling truck they won’t be able to afford because they’ve spent the summer frittering away their money in Barcelona with you.”

“You mean in Poland with me. In Latvia with me. Trudging through graveyards and death museums. And orphanages. What fun.”

Lang remained unfazed. “Europe is your parting gift to your friends. Now you can say goodbye to them the way you’re meant to. Abroad. And I hope when you come back, you’ll see one or two obvious things in a different way. Though I told Moody and your father, I wouldn’t count on self-discovery. I barely count on you coming back in one piece.”

“Nice, Mom.”

Lang patted the pink quilt above Chloe’s leg. “This is our gift to you, letting you go. Your dad and I are proud of you. You’ve been a good girl. We wanted to reward you for not disappointing us the way other parents have been disappointed.”

“Like Terri?”

“Not Terri. I think she’s rather fond of her daughter. And Terri works the hardest in that family. That’s why she doesn’t give a damn about the raccoons and dinner and Hannah’s homework. When you have to care desperately about bringing home the bacon, you’re hardly going to be bothered about who cooks it or what species eat it.”

“Who do you mean, then? Mason and Blake? But you love Janice.”

“There you go again, putting words in our mouths and feelings into our hearts. I didn’t say Janice. I don’t mean anybody in particular. I’m just saying. We thank you for not letting us down.”

“Not letting you down how? By not dying?” Chloe was disappointed in herself. With her mother, and only with her mother (and maybe a little bit with Blake), she sometimes had trouble hiding her tortured heart.

A composed Lang said nothing.

For a few minutes, neither of them spoke.

“Just stay safe, all right?” Lang said quietly. “As safe as you can.”

“Mom, why do you want me to find you a strange boy?” Chloe whispered.

“Not strange,” Lang said. “Just someone who might need a little help. Someone you think your father and I might like. We’re not adopting him, Chloe. We’re sponsoring him. What are you worried about?”

“I’m not worried.”

Lang got up. “In this one way I echo Flannery O’Connor,” she said. “For the last eighteen years, my avocation has been raising peacocks. This requires everything of the peacocks and very little of me. Time is always at hand. Especially now that the last surviving peacock is leaving.”

The conversation was over. Lang smoothed out Chloe’s blanket and bent down to kiss her head. “How was the cemetery?”

“Fine. Moody insisted on putting my flowers on Uncle Kenny’s grave.”

Lang sighed as she took the railing to descend the steep attic stairs. “Why not? I do.”

13

Uncle Kenny from Kilkenny

WHEN CHLOE WAS ELEVEN HER UNCLE KENNY DIED. He was a wild one, lived small, died small. He was cremated and a portion of his ashes were interred in Fryeburg’s rural cemetery, while the rest was flown to Kilkenny to be buried in the family plot next to Lochlan. Chloe’s parents flew to Ireland for his burial. Chloe got excited. Then she found out she wasn’t going.

They were gone a month.

“Must have been some funeral,” she said when her parents returned, all flushed and refreshed, as if they’d been on a honeymoon. They showed her photos of Dublin and Limerick, of glens and castle ruins, of moors and churches and pubs with names like the Hazy Peacock and the Rusty Swan. They began inexplicably to refer to the time away as a “trip of a lifetime.”

Chloe didn’t know what that meant, but she did internalize it.

Seven years later no one spoke of that trip of a lifetime, or of Kenny, or Kilkenny, or glens, or moors. Most of the pictures of Ireland had been taken off the walls of their wood cabin and stored in a box in the shed her father had built for the specific purpose of storing boxes with photos of Ireland in it, and of other mementos. One black and white Castlecomer dell remained in a frame in the hall.

A colossal vat of frightful things was stirred up by Kenny Devine’s vagrant life and subsequent (or consequent?) demise.

The Chevy truck he crashed his speeding swerving rattletrap into belonged to Burt Haul.

On the way home from work, Burt had stopped at Brucie’s Diner to pick up some meatloaf on Monday special. It was eight in the evening in July, not yet dark. It was warm, glorious, chirping.

Burt survived because his truck, built like a Humvee, had been in second gear. The same could not be said of Kenny or his Dodge Charger. Eyewitnesses, unreliable but myriad, clocked his miles per hour at somewhere between seventy and a hundred and twenty. He had no chance.

Burt lived, but barely. He suffered three broken vertebrae, a punctured lung, and five broken ribs. His kneecap, hip and femur were crushed almost beyond repair. It was upon visiting Burt in the convalescent facility that Moody first noted how blessed were those who could push around their own wheelchairs. Burt couldn’t.

His livelihood depended on his truck and his able body. When he wasn’t driving the school bus, he was a handyman. After four months in recovery, he found himself on a disability pension, still unable to walk. Janice Haul got a job at the attendance office at Brownfield Elementary School, but it barely paid half the bills. Little by little Burt improved, but was never the same. He couldn’t sit behind the wheel of a bus anymore, his fused and compressed vertebrae barking so loud they required handfuls of Oxycontin to quieten, and how well could anyone drive a school bus numbed up on Oxy?

Until Burt got well enough to return to work, he was replaced by a Brian Hansen, a recent Vermont transplant, and apparently an excellent driver.

Jimmy Devine’s animosity toward his brother, whose reckless existence had set into motion the spinning wheels of fate, was so violent that it ate apart the bond with his own family. He blamed Moody for never reining Kenny in, for indulging him, spoiling him, coddling him, paying his tickets, his suspended license fees, his legal bills, bailing him out of jail, buying him new wheels, allowing him to live in her basement and to drink her liquor. “Not just a good man’s back, but a whole family has been shattered, all because you could never say no to your firstborn son,” was one of the accusations Jimmy hurled at his mother, way back when. Burt and Jimmy and their families had been close before the accident, then less so, and then hardly at all. Burt blamed Jimmy for his ruined life, for knowing that Kenny should’ve never been allowed behind the wheel and yet doing nothing. “How much more could I do?” Jimmy argued in his defense. “Kenny’s license had been permanently suspended!”