left that house for the better part of a month,” my mother said, putting a handkerchief in her one good purse, the patent leather one with a handle made to look like bamboo. My mother started to bait her: come with me to the market, let’s go to the diner for breakfast. She never wanted to do things with Ruth before, but now she was testing her, taunting her. Finally she said to my father, “You ask her, Bud. She’s always liked you better than me.”
“Now don’t say that,” my father said.
“She’s always liked you better than anyone, truth be told. Go on up there.”
So my father went up the path and he stayed there for a long time. But he didn’t have any better luck moving Ruth than the rest of us.
When Tommy came home for a visit after basic training, he’d turned into a grown-up. I didn’t like it much. It took some of the old shine off him. His hair had been buzzed down so far that you could see the raw pink of his scalp between the bristles, so that it looked kind of like a baby’s head. I’d seen a picture of him in what my mother called his dress blues, although between the hat so low on his forehead and the serious expression it could have been any guy in a fancy uniform. So I was surprised that he came home wearing the old plaid shirt and tan work pants that he’d left in three months before.
We weren’t really sure exactly when he would show up but I came in from the school bus and there he was, sitting at the kitchen table and drinking a beer. I threw myself on him and he patted me on the back and said, “I brought you something.”
I acted happy when he pulled a doll out of his duffel, a weird little doll made of corn husks and clothespins. But it made me wonder whether, while he was becoming somebody else, he thought I had, too. I guess I figured that that’s what it’s like when people go away. Donald’s mother had stopped at our house three days after the funeral, and she’d told my parents that she was moving to California and with her mother gone Donald wouldn’t be visiting anymore.
“We’d be happy to have him here when he visits again,” said my mother. “He’s absolutely no trouble.”
“He’s a fine young man,” said my father. “He can stay with us anytime.”
“California is a long way away,” his mother said.
I don’t remember Donald saying a word. It was like he was sliding away the longer he sat in one of the living room chairs. I figured if I ever saw him again we would barely recognize one another, that we would both be so different we might as well be strangers. But as they were heading out to the car, he and his mother, he all of a sudden turned to stand in front of me, with his back to her.
“I’m coming back,” he said, like he was daring me to disagree.
“Okay,” I said.
“I mean it.”
“You promise?”
“Promise,” he said.
“We need to get on the road,” his mother said. “I’ve got a lot to do.”
“I’m coming back,” he said again. “Don’t forget.” Then he got in the car and they drove off.
Even still I was a little surprised that he wrote me so often, although they weren’t really letters, just postcards of Knott’s Berry Farm or the La Brea Tar Pits or places like that, with maybe two sentences. Donald had always been a person of few words, and writing only made that more so. We have a pool behind our house. I went to Disneyland. There’s an orange tree in our yard. I stuck the postcards in the corner of the mirror over my bureau. I liked Grauman’s Chinese Theatre the best. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before. A berry farm didn’t seem like much even with a Ferris wheel.
My father had been out on a job when Tommy showed up, fixing the clock in the tower of the old train station that hadn’t been a train station in years. He came into the kitchen looking beat and then clapped his hands together once when he saw my brother.
“Son,” he said.
“Sir,” said Tommy.
Then they shook hands, which was what men always did that made me feel like they must be lonely, or at least that made me feel that way. My father scrubbed his