know where he left him, but that guy didn’t live in Miller’s Valley anymore. One day a car had dropped him opposite the barn just as I was getting home from school. I wrapped my arms around his neck, but it was like hugging a mannequin. He peeled me off as soon as was decent, or maybe sooner.
“Who was that?” I said as the sound of the car’s spitting muffler receded. “Damned if I know,” said Tom, picking up the military-issue duffel at his feet.
We weren’t even sure where he’d been. He’d been gone more than three years, but Eddie was certain he hadn’t been in the service all that time. It was funny, Tom had changed so much but Eddie hadn’t changed much at all, still serious and a little anxious. He was working as an engineer at a big real estate development company, had bought a nice little house just outside Philadelphia. He’d gotten married a couple of years after college; Tom was supposed to get leave to be his best man but just never showed up. I was a bridesmaid; my dress was purple and a little big on me, and they did my hair teased and lacquered into some kind of updo. As soon as we got home I tore it all down and my mother changed into slacks and a summer shirt. It was like we had been visitors in Eddie’s life, and we were glad to be back sleeping in our own beds.
“They seem like nice people,” my father kept saying about Debbie’s parents.
I guess you could say that it was the other way around with Tom after he got back, that he turned into a visitor in our lives. He got himself a place near town and we didn’t see him a whole lot, and when he came to dinner or stopped by to use the washing machine we had nothing to talk about. “What have you been doing?” I’d say, and he’d say “Not much,” and where do you go after that? He even scared me a little. He’d grown a big mustache and his hair was even longer now, and everything about him had coarsened, his skin, his body, his language, his eyes. The light in his eyes was gone, and so was the grin. That broke my mother’s heart, I think. The fact that he was living in a falling-down trailer on the other side of the valley and yet always had enough money hardened my father’s. I was glad we lived so far from anyone else so no one could hear him and my father yelling at one another after they’d had a couple of beers, or more than a couple. My father might drink six beers during the course of an evening and just get quieter and quieter, until finally he’d say, “It’s the sandman for me.” But Tommy was one of those drunks who went through all the stages: sociable, silent, sulky, mean, nasty, violent. He tuned my father up, although he’d probably say it was the other way around.
One evening after Tommy had been back a few months Callie asked me to pick her up at work because her car was in the shop. She’d been a good friend to me, Callie, when I’d found myself without anyone, Donald always promising to come back but never showing up, LaRhonda off with God and the Goddettes, Tommy smelling of smoke and whiskey and unwashed clothes. Callie had her evening shift at the diner and she was taking classes in the mornings at the community college and there was Clifton and her grandmother had emphysema and was always wanting her to do this or that, but she somehow made time every week to stop over and spend an hour with me, or ask me to walk her through any of the schoolwork she needed to know for a test.
Callie brought a slice of German chocolate cake out to the car from the diner and we put it on the seat between us and picked at it with our fingers as we drove. We both had coconut under our fingernails.
“How’s chemistry?” I asked.
“I’m never going to be a whiz like you, but since you went over that last chapter with me I’ve got a better idea of it. I’m going to pass, at least.”
“Of course you’re going to pass.”
“They grade on a curve. They have to. There are some real dummies, although some of the girls are smarter than