monuments, and the White House it didn’t really seem like a place where people went bowling and had dinner and lived a real life. On The Beverly Hillbillies they were supposed to live in Beverly Hills, but their house didn’t look that different from the Ventis’ house. Donald’s postcards made his life in California sound not much different from his life here, except that it was warm all the time. Finally I said, “I guess every place is pretty much the same.”
“Nah, that’s the weird thing. Every place is really different. Like where I am in South Carolina, the food’s different, the houses are different, even the flowers. But the people now—they’re pretty much the same. You got guys from all over and it seems like they should be real different, but once you get to know them they’re a lot like the guys I knew in school, you know?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. This was the most adult conversation I’d ever had with Tommy, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and have him all of a sudden look at me and remember that I was barely a teenager.
“You got to be smart,” he finally said, not looking at me. “You walk around thinking everything’s going to stay the same, you know? But everything changes all the time. Ten, twenty years, this whole place will be different than it is now. It’s like, how come we’re so stupid, to think that things are going to stay the way they are forever? We should know better, right?”
“Nothing changes around here,” I said.
Tommy laughed. “Yeah, I hear you. I know it seems that way. I went into the diner the other day and it looked like the same guys were sitting in the same booths they were in the last time I was there eating the same food.”
“They probably were.”
“Yeah, probably. But you can’t be like that, you know? You don’t want to get stuck. You don’t want to wake up someday and just be sitting in the same place doing the same stupid stuff. Especially not somebody like you. You need a plan.”
“Like what?”
“You know what I mean. Like Ed. He was gonna be an engineer, he went to school, now he’s doing it.” I didn’t want to say that Ed’s life seemed about as boring to me as a life could be, even more boring than mine, so I said, “What’s your plan?”
“Uncle Sam has a plan for me,” Tommy said, with a little barking laugh. “I don’t know exactly what it is yet, but it’s all up to him. You come up with your own plan, Meems. No matter what happens.” That last sentence froze me, like it might be the beginning of a hole opening in the ground around me. I was too young and stupid to realize that the hole had already opened. But sometimes now when I think about that day, the two of us sitting close so our rib cages were almost touching, I think that Tom saw it right there at our feet.
He took a deep drag on his cigarette and then rubbed it out on the rock. “You’re smart,” he said, and he stood up. “You’ll figure it out. I don’t know much about much, but I know you’re going to be okay.”
“Yeah?” I said, wishing I did, too.
“No question. No question. How’s that crazy LaRhonda?” he added, and I knew our real conversation was over.
“Still crazy,” I said to make him happy.
“The military makes you grow up,” I heard my father say that night. “He’ll get himself some discipline, come back here and run this place.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Buddy. If the government has its way there won’t be a here to come back to anyhow.”
“Don’t you be saying that. The government talks and talks. They don’t do. This farm will be here long after I am, and Tom will be taking care of it the way I did.”
“It’s a different time,” my mother said, and I heard my father push his chair back and go out the back door.
When Tommy left it was one of the only times I’d ever seen my mother tear up, although she got it under control before my brother got in the car. But I hung back in the kitchen doorway, in the shadows. There was a story in our family about me, about how when I was real little we all went to a birthday party. The big kids