Her kids—as well as a couple of others from the neighborhood—were buzzing orbits around her on the sidewalk, on the parkway. They were still releasing energy bound up from a full day in classrooms, now set off by the sun and fresh air on the walk home through the neighborhood. Kim smiled, kindly, in between the snaps to keep the kids corralled back off of the street and their interruptions of our conversation. I checked Megan and Kylee to see if they were looking for the same things and felt a little relief in seeing it held no interest for them.
The sunset maple was gone, I noticed, but the willow was still there. There was a grill on the flagstone patio where before the outdoor furniture rested. It looked bare, with just the grill there. It needed something more, I thought. Hours and days went into hauling off the dirt and setting all that stone level, and it deserved something more than just a solitary grill resting on it.
Kim and I chatted, as best I could, while I tried to keep my attention held on her. I was in the car, Megan and Kylee with me, idling in the middle of the street. We were close enough for easy, conversational voice, but the distance between us seemed both vast and tangible. Today it felt just a bit uncomfortable there, being in the neighborhood.
I remembered how much I hated that willow, even in all its tenacity and grace. I thought it a weed tree. It was her favorite, her choice. I begrudgingly planted it and wished it dead, then later debated for two years over killing it and setting it ablaze. A fitting end for it, I thought.
I felt the curious urge to drive around the corner, see if the garage door was open, but then thought better of it. It would be picking at the wound, obvious and maybe hurtful to the girls. It would be selfish and silly and serve no good purpose. Not now.
How long ago was it? I was already struggling with remembering it in the context of time. Two years? Three years? How long didn’t matter.
One evening in particular burns in my memory even though I can’t put a date to it, or frame it with any other life events. I was sitting at my desk, paying bills and mapping out my finances. The girls were at their mother’s house for the evening. In the figures scrawled across the pages it was all too obvious. The promotion didn’t happen. The raise was way less than expected. The reserves were all gone and the 401k was tapped. I wasn’t asking family—even if they could help—to throw money down a rabbit hole that didn’t show any promise of a bottom. It was game over.
The certainty washed over me, a wave of disbelief, like so many before since she asked for the divorce. I’d come to recognize that each new step in the grinding and slow legal process would shake me from my fragile denial, remind me that it really was happening.
I got up from my desk and went to my room, and curled up on the bed. I looked at the walls around me and wondered how and when I would make them just that to me—walls. I had to forget the suede-textures and fall colors I carefully chose and painstakingly painted. I had to forget the river birch in the front lawn, prairie grasses clumped around it, that sunset maple and the willow (that damnable willow) and the hours invested in planting, pruning, and maintaining. The same for the Japanese maple in front of the windows; it would now become a Father’s Day gift I would not be able to take with me. The garage (man, how I wanted to see what he did—if anything—to that garage), painted, the floor coated with epoxy, the walls lined with cabinets, the workbench handmade, a lifetime of accumulated tools on the walls—all that would have to somehow become meaningless material.
I told myself things. I told myself I tried everything. I told myself it was a product of the divorce. I told myself I was like so many in the area, in the state, in the country. I told myself it was the economics of the times and it was unstoppable, that it was a larger-than-my-life freight train rolling over thousands. I tried to tell myself it didn’t define me, wouldn’t define us. I was grasping for something that would help me shake the feelings of shame and blame and guilt.
But none of it was working.
And I worried. I worried about the whispers, about what the girls might suffer at the hands of their friends if they chose to be either cruel or, at the very least, inconsiderate. I hoped with all hope we could hold out for the end of the school year before we had to move, could slip quietly into an apartment during the summer when everything would be less obvious. We had an exchange student with us at the time, and I didn’t want to face having to uproot her as well. She never wished for anything like this as a part of her American experience.
We did make it through that school year, and I was able to shift mental gears from feeling beaten to feeling empowered. The work and preparation that had to go into finding someplace else to live and making it a home took over, and the disconnect began. Anticipation replaced fear and uncertainty and dread and melancholy, as best it could. The garage sale helped me sell every little unnecessary remnant of what would soon be our former lives.
I took the girls with me looking at apartments, tried to give them some sort of investment in our new home. They seemed eager and excited. I couldn’t tell if they were just trying to help me (What had she told them?) or if they never really had much invested in wherever we lived. I remembered how many times we had moved for my career when we were all still a family and wondered if that afforded them some sort of detachment. I envied them for that, because this house was home to me, more than any others had been.
We haven’t gone back very often since; it’s only Kim with whom we keep in contact, and the invitations to visit have been few and far between. Whenever we have gone back, the girls and I would take different roads into the subdivision—avoiding the street we lived on—so as not to tempt the feelings I felt I could barely keep suppressed beneath the surface.
It wasn’t so much the house as it was the intangibles I missed, struggled to let go. There was a void where before there were feelings of community and belonging. When we first moved I used to call and see if there was a fire pit gathering planned during one of my weekends off, see if we could stop in, but somehow came to think that maybe I was inviting us back into something that made everyone a little uncomfortable. After a while I quit calling to see if they would call to invite us, and wasn’t surprised to never hear from anyone. Disappointed, but not surprised.
Those days, our house still sat empty, and everyone—including me, I think—still identified us with it. We’d built it, after all. But, now it’s sold, and the new owners have likely filled any and every void we may have left for the neighborhood, financially or emotionally. I imagine they’ve joined in those fire pit gatherings we so enjoyed, our absence now barely noticed, if at all.
It’s only days like today—when we are in the old neighborhood—that some of those old feelings resurface. I don’t want them to, but they do anyway. I wish those feelings away as best I can for myself, and hope nothing similar is being processed by the girls. I wish them all the protection their youth and naiveté can afford them.
Later that same day—in another cozy subdivision not far from our apartment—I drove Megan to her singing lesson. She’s been several times now, and I’ve never even gone in to meet her teacher. When I take her, I sit outside in my car on the quiet street that meanders past landscaped lawns, three car garages, and bicycles splayed out under basketball hoops in the drive, all the while feeling out of place, detached. This isn’t me, isn’t us. Not anymore.
© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.
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