white clapboard houses, roads with more stop signs than stoplights, and the modest two- and three-story square brick buildings that made up Muscatine’s business district.
“That’s Pete’s Hardware,” I said, pointing to a sun-faded, green-and-red-striped awning over an old metal cursive sign. The decal in the window had been scrubbed away years ago by some local teen idiot so that it only read P HARD. Pete had left it that way, figuring a reaction would only encourage more local teen idiots. Pete was now running for Congress. “Oh, and Joey’s Tacos. Joey is famous for his bread taco, which is, wait for it, meat and toppings inside a shell made from a piece of bread that he’s folded into a U shape and deep-fried.”
“So…a sandwich,” Nick said. “Oooh, can we go to Pizza Ranch?”
“Ironically, I’ve never liked their ranch dressing,” I said.
“I love it here,” he announced. “Let’s relocate. We can be Knitwear Nick from Nick’s Knitwear and Pottery Bex from Bex’s Pottery, and eat bread tacos forever and ever.”
“Nick,” I said, “I love you, and I love your Demi Moore in Ghost fantasies of pottery wheels…”
“Mmm,” he said dreamily.
“But we would go broke if we had to rely on selling your knitting.”
He straightened up. “You laugh now, but wait until everyone in Iowa is wearing my creations.”
“Creations is a good word for them,” I agreed.
We pulled up to the two-story converted farmhouse my parents had bought when Lacey and I were eleven, tucked in a spread-out section of what qualified as Muscatine’s suburbs. I hadn’t been back since my father’s death, and the loss hit me again as I saw only my mother bang open the screen door to greet us on the porch.
“Honey!” she called out, scurrying down the stairs to fold us both into hugs. “Nicholas! Welcome to Iowa.” She drew back and scrutinized him. “That mustache is very Young Tom Selleck.”
“I’m itching to take it off. Literally,” he said.
Mom grinned and shouldered my weekender as we followed her inside. We had experienced a lifetime of highs and lows since my father died, so it was irrationally surprising to see the house much as I’d left it: the wood-paneled entryway, the Coucherator in front of the TV, the framed Olan Mills photos of me and Lacey lining the staircase. Even the Christmas decorations were all the ones I remembered from my childhood, a collection Mom and Dad had steadily built without ever eliminating any of it; they’d simply shifted all the handcrafted abominations from our elementary school years onto a short fake tree that sat in the dining room, leaving the tall one with the white twinkling lights for the nicer orbs and commemorative ornaments, like the ones I’d sent them from Windsor as a thank-you for helping Nick make Thanksgiving happen, or the year I bought them Henry VIII’s six wives.
“What is this supposed to be?” Nick asked, pointing to a plastic-looking puddle on the kids’ tree that said X on it.
“It was a Shrinky Dink project that they did in kindergarten,” Mom said. “Bex’s melted. Also X was the only letter she liked.”
“It marks the spot,” I defended myself. “There’s always treasure under it.”
I watched Nick delightedly prod at all the cockamamie projects of our youth, then move on to Mom’s shadow box full of thimbles from every place she’d ever visited. He fit here in my past as if he’d always lived in it. But not everything was as easy. Framed photos of our lives had been scooted aside to make room for memories of events where Dad should have been, but wasn’t: Our engagement celebration in my London apartment after I’d pulled the Lyons Emerald out of a Cracker Jack box; our wedding; Lacey’s wedding; Danny’s christening. And it would be endless. There would be no photos of Earl Porter’s beefy hands cradling his grandchildren, sitting them on his belly, or—as I had photos of him doing with us—sneaking them a surreptitious sip of beer and then watching with glee as they screwed up their noses in disgust. Both his presence and his absence felt huge.
“I don’t understand how I can be used to this, and yet it will never feel right,” I said softly. “Wasn’t it just yesterday that he sat me down over there and told me to pull it together and go back to England?”
“I know, honey,” Mom said, putting an arm around my waist. “I know.”
We stood there like that, facing our memories and the empty spot in our future,