front of a computer, typing in my mother’s name. Had he bothered to type in my father’s? He probably hadn’t, and that made sense. After Mrs. Wansing died, my mother had been the one to call Mr. Wansing in icy weather, to see if he needed anything from the store or the pharmacy. And because she was the one who walked Bowzer, she was the one he regularly bumped into on his own slow morning walks. I believed Mr. Wansing liked my father. He thought my father was funny, “a real pistol,” he said. But my father had not gotten a call this morning. If he had, he would have said something. I think he would have wanted to go. But Mr. Wansing had known he had to make a choice. And so he chose my mother.
So there it was. My father got remarriage and a disposable income. And my mother got the neighborhood pie party. When I considered all this, I changed my mind. It seemed okay for us to go without him.
We took two cars. Elise didn’t want to move Miles’s car seat, and we couldn’t all fit into her Volkswagen. My mother and I took the van, and she let me drive, my new key in the ignition. There was no traffic; the streets in Lawrence had that eerie, empty feel of a city on holiday, all the banks and businesses closed, and so the whole way to Kansas City, I followed Elise’s car closely, as if I didn’t know the way.
“Do you think she’s okay?” my mother asked. She nodded at the back of Elise’s car.
I looked at her, surprised. “I think so,” I said. “Why?”
“I don’t know. She seems tired. I mean, of course she does. It’s hard, what she’s doing. It’s hard in a way she probably wasn’t used to.” She appeared deep in thought, her gloved hands crossed in her lap.
“You gave her the babysitting,” I reminded her. “That should help.”
She looked at me and smiled kindly, as if there was much I didn’t understand. She shook her head. “I’ll talk to her,” she said.
After that, she was chatty on the drive, humming along with carols on the radio and clearly in a good mood, but as we got closer to our destination, she grew quiet. We both gazed out the windows, passing landmarks of our old life: my grade school, the grocery store where my mother pushed shopping carts for thousands of laps, the Italian restaurant where my parents had gone for anniversaries and special occasions, the park where we took Bowzer to run off energy when he was young. Just two years ago, I might have closed my eyes out of boredom with the suburban scenery. I had watched it roll by too many times from the back of a school bus or my mother’s van. But now that we were on the path to all that was lost to us, the very familiarity of the houses and quiet streets gave them an almost magical sheen. The past wasn’t elusive. We could go back anytime we liked, just by following the old route home.
But at the last minute, I didn’t. As we pulled off a main road into our old neighborhood, Elise turned onto the street that Mr. Wansing lived on; but I didn’t turn, because it also would have taken us by our old cul-de-sac. The roof of our house—the roof that had begun the unraveling—would have been visible from the street. Maybe Elise could drive by it, but I didn’t want to, and I didn’t think it would be good for my mother to drive by it. By taking the next turn and then winding around, we would approach Mr. Wansing’s from the opposite direction, and not see our old house at all. When my mother noticed that we were not turning with Elise, she looked at me, but said nothing.
The longer route took us past the Butterfields’ house, or what had been the Butterfields’ house. The fountain had a wreath on the front. The stone lion was gone now, replaced by a regular mailbox with a lock.
“I just talked to Pamela last week,” my mother said. “She was a little down. Haylie couldn’t come home for Christmas. It’s their busiest time. But she really likes it out there, I guess.”
I nodded. Haylie had dropped out of school and was working at a ski resort in Colorado. Her mother told mine she was making good money, saving it up.