Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,12

diner, then a steak house two towns over, then a pizza place in the new shopping center. After ten years living in a cinder-block house behind the dumpster behind the diner, he’d married LaRhonda’s mother, whose name was LaDonna. He was thirty-nine at the time, and she was sixteen. She finished up at the high school and hustled home from classes every day to do the four-to-midnight at the diner, which actually didn’t make her much different from some of her classmates.

Now, though, she was different from almost everyone in town. The Ventis had saved their money, and expanded their businesses, and done well enough to live in the biggest house in the county. It was the only ranch house I’ve ever seen, to this day, that had columns in front. LaRhonda’s mother didn’t want a house with stairs, but she did want a house with what she called presence. It had a sunken living room and a kitchen with a wall oven and one wing with Mr. and Mrs. Venti’s bedroom and a big bathroom with a round pink tub, and another wing with four bedrooms for the children. But there was only LaRhonda. That was sad to me, because Mrs. Venti seemed like the kind of person who would have liked to have a whole mess of kids. Maybe it would have taken her mind off of Mr. Venti, who liked to make comments about the size of her behind and then, when she started to cry, say that she couldn’t take a joke. My mother said she felt sorry for her. “With that big old house?” Tommy always said.

“A house doesn’t make a home,” my mother said.

One of the cooks from the diner took us from the church back to LaRhonda’s house for the night. “What about school?” I said when I heard I wasn’t going home.

“Oh, honey, there won’t be school for I don’t know how long,” LaRhonda’s mother said as she settled us in the station wagon. “With how bad the flooding is there’s no way for half the kids to get there. They’re going to have to do something about the valley now, after this.”

“You ready to move out, little lady?” Mr. Venti asked me.

“We’re never moving,” I said.

“I meant you ready to get going? That’s military lingo. Move out means get going.”

“Hey, Johnny, turn on the radio,” LaRhonda said. She leaned into the front seat of the station wagon. In the middle of a natural disaster LaRhonda was flirting with the grill guy. He was kind of disgusting, too, with greaser hair and grubby pants that smelled like bacon and cigarette smoke.

“I’m worried that my parents are going to drown,” I said that night as we lay with a white-and-gold bureau between us in the twin canopy beds in her room.

“Your parents are the last people in the whole wide world anything bad will happen to,” LaRhonda said, turning off the light. LaRhonda’s room was three times the size of mine, and everything matched—the bedspreads, the curtains, the little chair at the dressing table, all covered with the same pattern of big blue and yellow flowers that didn’t actually look like any flowers I’d seen growing anywhere. I liked my room better than hers. In my room you could hear my mother humming dance tunes from when she went to the high school and see Ruth’s living room light through the arms of the trees. LaRhonda’s room was quiet and kind of lonely, with a view of a boring lawn that seemed to go on forever. I lay awake there for hours, listening to the rain thrash angrily against the windows, thinking that a few miles and a few hours could make all the difference between an ordinary day and disaster.

My parents didn’t drown. Donald’s grandfather didn’t drown, either. His grandmother did. I’ll remember that date for the rest of my life: August 21, 1966, the day Donald’s grandmother died and the day my brother Tommy enlisted in the Marines.

“In a damn canoe,” my mother said when my father picked me up and brought me home from LaRhonda’s house. That’s how I knew it was bad, because my mother swore in front of me. “A goddamned canoe.”

Even then I could tell that her anger was a mirror of her love. She loved Tommy so, and so did I, and my father did, too, although it was more complicated with the two of them. Everybody else liked him a lot, mainly in spite of