All That Work and Still No Boys

The Long Way Home

1 2 1 The Long Way Home No one in my family knows it was me who set the fire. I did it deliberately, meaning this: I made a loose pile of my sister’s eight most precious things—one for each year I bore her existence—struck a match and coaxed forth a blaze. I was eight years old; my sister Joanna was ten. I didn’t know the house would go. The beds, the sofa, the green glass plates my mother used to serve cake. But I knew the match would lead to fire, and fire to destruction of possessions held dear. I was not so sorry watching it all happen. I was sorry later, the next twenty-one years. My parents think it started at a faulty closet light. I will tell them today how it really happened. I have chosen today as carefully as I cupped my hand and blew, delivering my message with 1 2 2 T h e L o n g W a y H o m e one long, giving breath. The paper caught, the fabric too. They will learn all about it at five o’clock. It’s warm and sunny, a good day for confession. “I’m here,” I call as I head up the walkway to my parents’ second house. My father won’t remember that I told them I would visit, but my mother looks out the window, waves a happy hand. They live in the flats, in a two-bedroom box built to match its neighbors. Not as nice as their first house, but still—says my father , when anyone complains—a house. A house. “He’s wonderful today,” my mother tells me. “His old self.” She forgave him years ago, six weeks after his own tearful confession; since then, she looks for signs of the man she forced herself to absolve. “Look, Dad.” I hold up from my shopping bag a fat triangle of brie. His doctors have forbidden it, making it all the more worthy of his lust. “Plenty ripe I hope,” he says. He’s sniffing at the package like a dog. “Oozing,” I assure him. He smacks his drooping lips. For my mother I’ve brought coffee beans and chocolates and embroidery needles I’ve already threaded in fifteen different shades of orange and red. She’s working on a sunset. “Southwestern,” she informed me, “for the little pillow on Dad’s old chair.” I imagine the outline of one noble cactus and layers of color indicating sky. These are not bribes or offerings of peace. It is part of my job to supply delectables; I’ve been doing so now for more than ten years. Joanna brings her troubles, and I bring the bounty. A husband, five years older, and a promise of grandchildren in one or two years. Words of assurance on health and money; even money itself , when my parents need it. I work as a bookkeeper. I’ve learned accountability and caution. “Joanna’s coming.” My mother has settled into her chair, under the only decent lamp in the room. I’m fetching her needlework; with my back to her, I make an extravagant face. “I thought she was away. In Oregon or something.” I’m not all that surprised. My sister has a taste for drama, a sixth sense for spectacle and final acts. She’s discovered two suicides and seen a boy drown. My mother pulls the lamp closer. She spreads her needlework T h e L o n g W a y H o m e 1 23 over her bulbous knees. She’s got skinny legs and feet that slip into girls’ buckle sandals, but her knees look huge, the caps like eggshells waiting to be cracked. “Oh you girls,” she says. I’m dismayed to hear her mantra spoken with more humor than grief. Once our battles were my mother ’s greatest sorrow. Joanna would hate as much as I to have become a source of gentle exasperation, or worse yet, amusement. “Well I’m glad she’s coming,” I tell my mother, but already she’s bent over the array of needles I’ve brought her, the gleam of gluttony brightening her eyes. She chooses one threaded in pale orange and slides it into her needlework with an addict’s ecstasy. In the kitchen I hear my father snuffling cheese; here in the living room, my mother’s swooning. Be content with the...