****
Now I stop to use the bathroom, to refuel, to eat luke warm burgers from damp foil wrappers. I arrive in Northfield, tired and nostalgic, a persistent drizzle obscuring the familiar pitch and roll of a landscape that is childhood.

Northfield is now a town in flux. For a hundred years before now, it’s been a town not trying too hard.- no steepled church on a pretty town green surrounded by antique homes with black shutters, no boutiques or coffee shops, not even a proper grocery store; only a post office, a cemetery long neglected that sits beside a squat, beige brick building that was the Congregational Church, built there in the fifties as some modern manifestation of form following function and ornament as crime – all that has changed since commuting an hour to and from the city had become normal, expected even.

The residents of Northfield have begun parceling off their land and selling to developers. There are now cul-de-sacs and by laws and cable services with high speed internet access. There is a Super Stop and Shop, Dunkin Donuts and no shortage of foreign cars with halogen head lights and satellite radio.
But the Northfield I grew up in was a town populated by the descendants of farmers, people who had long since given up tending to live stock or working the fields, with empty barns and pastures gone to weeds and thistle, holding space between small neighborhoods of working folks and people looking for lonely. As children, we expended great effort to find fun in the quiet sameness of the place.

There was always Jim Dings frequently found in the bushes along Union Street, a spreading wetness at the crotch, muttering profanities. His wife would hide his car keys when he was on a real bender. The only way he could continue his drunk was to ride his bike or walk five miles when the liquor ran out. And with the single minded devotion of a true addict he would keep at it until he had fallen off that bike on the way to the packie.

I remember the singular thrill that was Dings coming, weaving his way towards town, as we rode the bus home from school. No matter if there was a biting North wind or rain or sleet, as I remember it, that man would be short sleeved and hatless. We’d all dig into our backpacks for leftover lunch items, empty soda cans, apple cores, whatever we could lob from the windows of the bus as they hurtled by. It hadn’t been all that cruel considering that Dings was blackout drunk and operating outside of himself. Not one of us would have had the courage to ridicule a grown man like that if he had not already made himself such a laughing stock.
There were a few guys like that in Northfield to make my father’s trespasses seem minor. What’s a raised fist every now and again, some chronic unemployment, when you have people like Dings to compare yourself to?

The truth about my familial situation didn’t begin to crystallize until one optimistic spring day, warm enough for playing outdoors and spreading a picnic blanket in the patch of sun near the Calleaux’s pool, still covered in the blue plastic liner of Winter. Jessie Calleaux and I ate row after row of sugar wafers straight from the package as we watched the ants march towards the crumbs they had scattered. Mrs. Calleaux, the kind of woman who defined herself in terms of in-ground swimming pools and trips to the Caribbean in February, went on about removing the pool cover and bringing down the table and umbrella from storage up in the garage.

“I hope Jerry laid enough bait up there this winter to discourage their eating holes in the lounge cushions,” she said to her bored audience, more concerned with cookies crumbs and squashing ants with the bottom of our juice cups. “We had to buy all new pool furniture last spring. Destroyed by rats.” She offered this fact as warning, what could happen to even the best families if diligence about rodent control was disregarded.

Jessie’s Dad was one of the few men in town then working somewhere far from Northfield, making the commute in somber gray suits with a plastic clip hanging from his breast pocket that said Jerry Calleaux, Management Services. He spent weekends in colorful polo shirts and did Dad-like things about the house and yard like lay rat poison, clean the pool and prepare square patches of soil in the sunny part of the yard for Mrs. Calleaux to grow zinnias and tomatoes and rosemary.

“My Mom uses Ex-Lax,” I offered, brightly. “For the rats I mean. She swears it makes them shit their guts out.”
Mrs. Calleaux sucked in her breath sharply. Her sudden intake said, Such words from a little girl, without actually uttering it aloud. And it was then, right then, on the first warm day of my ninth year, that I realized we were somehow strange and hopeless for my Mom’s being in charge of things like Ex-Lax for rats and my knowing how to use curse words in a way that could make a grown woman uncomfortable.

So it went on like that, me and James, well into the chill days of October. Right up until my car was vandalized. At first Chad was fiercely protective, admirably concerned when he discovered the car covered in graffiti.

“Who would do this? We should call the police,” he said. And I confessed, told him about James to save him the embarrassment. I had expected the confession would feel like a great unburdening but instead I scrambled and begged, trying to explain something I myself didn’t understand. The car was the least of it, just the inevitable response of a scorned wife – Bridgette, in her Citizens for Humanity jeans, toting a can of spray paint and a temper.

Chad said very little after my admission. His silence was freakish and unbearable. Say something, anything, I felt like shrieking but it seemed too cinematic. So I tried to stay out of his way, sat hugging my knees, fading into my side of the futon as he attempted to pace the cramped confines of our tiny space. I watched him hopefully, convinced that he might climb into his VW bus and barrel down North Hollow Road to go knocking at James’ door.

I had imagined the confrontation many times. Chad pounding the wall behind James’ head, his fist going clean through the cabin’s wood paneling.

Instead, Chad carefully lifted his framed collection of rock icons from the wall, climbed into his VW bus, wedged a fire extinguisher between his thighs to douse periodic engine fires and began the long drive West.

Somehow that ending seems aptly scripted, just a drop in the proverbial bucket when I think about the other stuff that went down those five months I stayed in Grafton. Chad’s leaving was really just a side-show considering there was one night in particular, one night when Grafton went from being a smallish, stubbornly same village nestled in among the Green mountains, a town that few had ever heard of, to being a place where a young girl’s death changed everything everyone had ever felt about one another. A place where chronic optimism and small observations about the weather gave way to distrust, suspicion and a palpable uneasiness.
I’d like to say that I had nothing to do with the events of that July night but I’d be lying. And it started when my father pulled up in his Holiday Rambler needing gas, his pockets bare empty.

“Well if it isn’t Claire Bear and her big dog Goliath,” he had shouted stepping down from the motor home he had bought for his and my mother’s 20th wedding anniversary. No flowers or a necklace, no weekend at the beach. He’d spent every dime of Mom’s savings, small change and dollar bills squirreled away, cash she’d had been scraping together for two and half decades, parental grudge money, the pitiful wages she earned answering phones and filing and performing menial tasks for which she was over qualified.

With its three burner stove, queen sized island bed, oak cabinetry and decorative valances, that Rambler was my father’s prize.

“Isn’t she a beauty,” he declared coming up the front steps quick and slamming through the door of the double wide to get clear of Goliath who had a good read on people and was hell bent on tearing the ass out of his khaki’s. “I’ve got to piss like a race horse, Claire Bear. Where’s the john?”
As far as I know, my mother has never stepped foot in that Rambler.

My father spent a few hours telling me about his latest fishing spot on the Connecticut River. He said he spent days hauling in White Perch the size of house cats.

“You should’ve seen them all. Fat fish just waiting to jump on the hook,” he said, leaning back in the plastic patio chair until the back legs flexed with the weight and bluster of him. I suspected that he had watched a few skilled fishermen do the hauling while he attended to the forty of Evan Williams he had brought along.

“Where’s Chad? Leaving my Claire Bear alone all summer,” he asked and I explained the nature of Chad’s position as a wilderness guide while silently marveling that he found Chad’s absences reprehensible while his own chronic failures as a companion, his own leaving without pause or consideration, went un-dissected.

Of course I didn’t mention James. There are certain things a girl doesn’t discuss with her father and, well, when it comes to my father, those things are just about everything beyond the Red Sox, game fishing and that Rambler.

After he finished the six pack of Miller Genuine Draft that was in the fridge, carrying each can out to the concrete pad that served as patio and entertainment space behind the double wide, absorbing the sweet smell of cow pasture at dusk and pitching the empties into a garbage bag I had hung on an old hanger meant to hold a pot of petunias or trailing vinca just to the left of the backdoor, he heaved his large frame, all height and no girth, still handsome but for the pronounced ravages of living hard with the bottle, and went down street to Tyler’s to finish telling his fishing tales to someone else for the rest of the night. I’ve wondered everyday since then if maybe that someone was Lacy Robinson before she walked home along Rte. 100 and wound up dead.

It was the first of many afternoons, his waiting for me to finish the lunch shift, our walking out together, far into the woods while he talked about the great novel he had come to Grafton to finish. He spoke occasionally of a wife named Bridgette, a Rhodes scholar and academic, teaching summer school at Yale. I imagined her as my opposite, an ashen haired beauty with fashion sense and heels, someone who wore designer denim and had dismissive things to say about girls who attended state universities and wore fleece.

James never defined the rules of their marriage but I imagined they were loose and radically liberal, considering our daily coupling. He spoke of emotional freedom and the outmoded nature of monogamy and began to pursue me in ways that were increasingly urgent and lascivious. He left small un-poetic notes that were dirty and directly sexual in the books he left for me on the lunch counter. Come to the cabin, 3:30 p.m.. I’m going to fuck you all afternoon . These little dribbles of correspondence grew frequent, simply slipped between the pages of his favorite prose.

“None of my business. I know it’s not. But Chad seems like a nice boy. Someone who should make you happy,” May Bowen said one morning while she counted the money in the register.

“Chad’s great. He is,” I mumbled, eyes down, concentrating on refilling the napkin dispenser.

As the owner of The Peavine, born and raised in Grafton and married to the same man for nearly fifty of her seventy years, May considers herself a sort of authority on the subject of intimacy.

“You know that the thing between you and Writer James is becoming something of a public curiosity,” she said. “Dependability and kindness. Can’t overstate the importance of those two traits. Separates good from bad. Seems like Chad’s sweet and head over heels for you. Hate to see you overlook that fact.”

“Do we have a new case of Ketchup in the back? I’ll marry the bottles,” I said, hoping to change the subject.

“You’ve got no business marrying anything,” she’d said laughing and tossing me an apron. “Why don’t you get started on Mr. Bowen’s breakfast. He’ll be walking in the door any second.”
“Two eggs, over easy,” I ask.

“Yup, over easy. Should come natural to you,” she said, not unkindly.

Though she meant well, her words needled . I’d been meaning to cut it off but then James began to invite me to dinner at the cottage he rented out behind Harvey’s farm. He’d spread a paisley print tapestry on the living room floor and serve meals of sugar snap peas and roasted pheasant. He would load the CD player with Dvorak, Orff and Bach when all I was used to was bands called Fat Buttercat and Big Head Todd. He’d pour us goblets of Pinot Grigio he’d bought by the case in New Haven. He gave me poems he wrote for me. He made gifts of hardcover books by Melville and Fitzgerald and Austen and a leather bound journal with Indian scroll work on the cover.

One chilly night, after he removed my t-shirt and my bra and peeled me out of my shorts, he slipped a tiny, green velvet box into the waistband of my panties. He removed the panties with his teeth and slid the box up my stomach to rest in the crease between my breasts.

“Open it,” he ordered and I began to sweat a little despite the breeze that blew in through the open windows, making the candles sputter and throw our shadows in shifting shapes on the living room wall.

I was nervous, fumbling with the itty bitty box, never having received anything in such a promisingly sized package. There were diamond studs, each a half-carat. He placed them in my ears, securing the backs carefully. He tossed the turquoise tear drops I’d been wearing into the full ashtray on the coffee table and I stood there naked before him save for the first expensive jewelry of my life.

“I don’t want you to think I’m not thankful. That I don’t love them. I do. But I’m going to have to keep the turquoise. Chad gave them to me for my birthday. He’ll notice they’re missing,” I said, removing the earrings from the ashes and blowing them clean.

“That’s right, I forgot. Mountain man’s coming back for a few days. Wear the diamonds. See if he notices the replacement,” James said running his tongue along the lobe of my right ear, sucking on the faceted, shimmering emerald cut gem he’d secured there.

So I placed the turquoise tear drops in my bedside table drawer and wore the diamonds that weekend. I guess I was daring Chad to see me… really, really see me. There was no outrageous confrontation. No admission of guilt or discussions of disloyalty. He didn’t even notice the sparkle and weight of them, the cold cut of betrayal in my ears.

For the most part, Mom has suffered her parental void stoically. She lets slip her longing only occasionally.

I can remember a time when she dressed me for Christmas Eve in a tartan plaid dress and shiny Mary Janes. I was seven, trying my best to be comfort to a lonely woman missing family and tradition, suffering the sting of having been slighted.

“If only your Grandmother could see my pretty girl,” she’d said. “Her loss though, right Claire Bear?” And I had nodded and moved off to admire myself in her dressing table mirror. I can remember thinking that they weren’t missing anything special.

Despite her half hearted attempts to talk me out of the same mistake she had made at my age, I went to Grafton with my Mom’s reluctant blessing. I guess she had spent too much time pondering the concept of forgiveness and the dangers of enduring grudges to allow history to repeat itself.

And, at first there were nuances about Grafton I found romantic – its running streams and dirt roads and old village center where townspeople meet for coffee at The Peavine Diner each noon after the livestock have been watered and fed and turned out to pasture. There is something undeniably story book quaint, something Hans Christian Anderson, so Little House in the Big Woods, about the place.

Having made such literary comparisons, I was briefly content with the simple and rural rhythms of hamlet living.
But Chad was gone from Grafton for weeks at a time, guiding school age boys through the motions of self discovery and forced communion with nature. While Chad was gone, I spent my days working at The Peavine with the wide pine floors and wooden screened door that closed slowly enough to allow house flies to congregate on counter tops and on the edge of coffee cups. After a few months of sameness serving berry pancakes and rescuing donuts from the fryer, I began walking out most afternoons with a slightly unkempt man, a man of appetites and strong smells and big ideas.

My afternoon trysts were big entertainment for the people of Grafton, one thousand practical and the weathered citizens who care little for things considered needless luxury, things like diplomas, cable television, cell phones, matching china and adulterous sex.

In Chad’s absence, I got myself a mean dog named Goliath and made attempts to be domestically responsible, trying to make capital improvements to the double-wide Chad and I had rented high on the North Hollow Road where the wind blows steady enough to knock a grown man over. I even called the landlord about fixing the trailer’s rusted-out siding. It didn’t occur to me that the neighbors littered in their own yards and put tires on their roofs in order to prevent its blowing off in powerful weather. Who was I kidding? What’s a little rusted metal in a setting like that?

Goliath and James were my collective answer to loneliness and both started off nice and got a little meaner as time went on. The Rutland shelter advertised Goliath as a fine house pet despite his size. I secured a chain to the ancient Silver Maple just West of the front door – the last tree in Grafton to lose its leaves in autumn. (When the whole valley finishes flushing out in all manner of brilliance, that maple will be holding on to every leaf, curled and brittle, waiting for the last shudder of November before coming down in great drifts. All at once, like sudden rain, they will fall.)

And with James, after the first few times, it became easy; such a separate diversion, this sleeping with a man fifteen years my senior, earnest and handsome and married.

It began as certain proximity, his hanging about at the lunch counter, ordering slices of Maple Sugar pie, pretending to read while his blue, blue eyes watched me wipe down the counters and shoo flies from the syrup containers. He followed me out one late afternoon, after I’d hung my apron on the peg behind the door.

I suppose I was an easy target, transparent with loneliness, agreeable to a long walk up through the meadow and into the woods. We picked our way up the crude trails that climb Mount Bethel, hoofing it almost to the top of the peak. We stopped to rest on an outcrop bordered by a tangle of poison ivy and delicate throated wild flowers. James leaned into me and untangled a twig caught in my dark curls.

“Let me guess. You’ve got a guy. Someone worth your wasting time up here at the top of the world.” he whispered, pressing his lips to the top of my ear.

“Something like that,” I mumbled, aware of his breath on my neck, liking the brush of his hair on my cheek.

“What about you? Not too many Proust readers come into the The Peavine and spend all afternoon over a cup of coffee,” I said.

“I’m married,” he said. “But that has nothing to do with my being in Grafton. And it doesn’t have anything to do with you and I, or Proust, or my needing a cup of coffee every now and then.”

“You and I? Is there a You and I?” I said, something coquettish and wanting having taken over for caution and propriety.

“Let’s see about that.” He touched the side of my face, which felt a minor triumph, his saying he found me adequately attractive.
His mouth covered mine, completely, confidently, as if he did this often, seduce young women on mountain tops in summer.

He spread his jacket on the smooth surface of the outcropping, making space for our groping. And after a few short minutes of rubbing up against one another, he came all over the inside of my thigh. The salt semen dripped down and stained the inside of his hunt jacket, light splotches of our sex leaving indelible markings on the green lining.

“But we’re friends, Chad. I mean really, really friends,” I said, stepping back a little to see him in the darkness.

“Exactly. I can eat sunflower seeds and watch baseball with you. All day. Without your ever mentioning the fat content of a seed. I love that,” he laughed, drawing me back into his chest. I could feel his clavicle against my temple.

Bob Dylan growled from the stereo,I’ve seen love go by my door/It’s never been this close before/Never been so easy or so slow.

“You need to live someplace that is warm and dry, without pets.” I said, reminding him that I was once and always from New England, that New England could have humidly oppressive summers and spring was yellow with pollen and bees and rag weed. I reminded him that I loved dogs, dogs that were great shedders, dogs that slobbered with aplomb.

“So where does that leave me? Allergy free and alone,” he suffered my resistance with humor.

I had always pictured him living in a one bedroom apartment on the West Coast, wearing loose clothing and sandals, reading lots of books. I had imagined that on weekends he would surf and paddle. I had never imagined that I’d play a role in Chad Gabbard’s post-collegiate life.

“Most women are psychotic. You’ve said that. Those are words from your mouth,” I said.

“Not you. A beautiful girl who acts like a guy. We could have children together and name them all Cal. You know, for Cal Ripken?”

“I’m your best friend and I’m gonna be honest with you. I have no idea who Cal Ripken is and you’re stoned,” I said with firmness, a trumped up severity.

There had been an awkward phone call a day later, his effort to apologize. He had asked me over for Milwaukee’s Best and bong hits. And we’d laughed and resumed friendship and failed to notice that this was our version of courtship, this quiet folding into one another. Two months later we rented a canine-free yet dingy trailer in the town of Grafton where Chad would play mountain-man for the summer. Our post-collegiate belongings mingled and merged, CD collections sorted and shelved, sheets and towels in neutral tones purchased.

Mom had tried to talk me out of going but only in a half hearted, I’m-too-tired-to fight-you-on-this, kind of way. And she had two things working against her in this argument. First, there was the general absence of conviction. The more she insisted that I should only abide the lure of engagement rings and well padded savings accounts, the more I could sense that she was uncomfortable arguing for tradition and appearances. Second, she had her own history with which to contend. At seventeen, Mom moved out of her parents’ three-story, antique home with its coastal views and terraced gardens and ran off with my father, one of the tennis pros at the yacht club. He had admired her long legs and her short skirts and, probably, screwed her regularly in the men’s locker room on weeknights. With his easy, wide grin and courtside tan, my father found it simple to talk her into doing something she would, for the rest of her life, regret.

As Mom tells it – when she’s defending the place she had made for herself in the world – Dad, with his quick charm and wicked drop shot, had all kinds of potential. He was offered a full-time pro position at the Junior College just outside of Northfield, only two weeks before the Fall semester was to start. She insists that there wasn’t long to think it through and she hadn’t yet learned about the drinking.

Dad didn’t keep that job for long. And Mom, when pressed, talks vaguely of restraining orders and a sad girl named Melissa in the way a person hints at something shameful. She’ll say in self defense, What was I going to do with a baby on the way and hastily acquired marriage certificate? Their town hall wedding was witnessed by Mom’s hairdresser and Dad’s only friend from the tennis circuit that had not yet given up on his total lack of discipline and his tendency to show up to matches horrifically hung-over. By the time I was born, he had quit tennis all together. I have never even seen a photograph of my father holding a racket.

Mom’s stubborn perseverance after years of obvious connubial failure was, I can only guess, an effort born of spite and malice, a way to offer up a giant middle finger to her own parents who passed a year or so ago, but not before ignoring their daughter, her hastily acquired husband and their only grand daughter for several decades. They were hard, uncompromising people and the day their daughter left with Don Bensley was the day they began denying her all access to the life of clanking halyards, lobster rolls and crisp pressed tennis whites save for a monthly check they sent without a note, without any correspondence at all, not even word scratched on the memo line – a monetary contribution to ensure their daughter’s exile.

I know there was nothing conventional about eloping. Not back then. It was an act of defiance before its time. The Summer of Love was still eight years off when Mother looked past money, class and a stable future for the sake of some romantic notion. When Dad began to spin off on his very own version of the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test but with whiskey and cheap beer, she was already anchored in the stuff of convention: motherhood, work, mortgage payments. Haight-Ashbury, the Beatles, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters had no resonance with her.

Hello, you have reached Marla and Don.
We are not available to take your call.
Please leave your name and your number at the beep and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

It’s the same recording it’s been for years. Mom speaking woodenly into the phone as if someone was holding a gun to her head, so strained and uncomfortable with technology. Soon it will be replaced by a message saying You’ve reached the Bensleys, the way divorced women, widows, people afraid of being robbed, leave suspiciously pluralistic messages on their answering machines.

No answer. She’s already at the gym in one of her many workout ensembles selected for its flattering color and cut, her hair pulled back to highlight a face carefully completed with smudge-proof eye liner and her trademark shade of lip color – Pink To The Club. She is sporting her iconic black head band, the one she has always used to harness the great mane of chestnut hair that has been the center of her universe for as long as I can remember. I have known my mother to spend whole afternoons considering her hair – its color, the length, pondering the merits of bangs and layers, discussing the acceptability of a grown woman wearing headbands.

Despite her efforts, age has not entirely spared her the usual etchings of time. There are a few world-weary creases about her mouth and eyes. But, at fifty two, she still emanates a sort of steady resolve, a glow of endurance earned putting up with my father who has always been gaining jobs and losing jobs and leaving for weeks at a time, usually in summer to drink and fish and scratch whatever manly itch needs scratching. He’s been at this version of fatherhood as long as I can remember and probably before then.

I straighten my old jeans, grown tight and faded, smoothing at mussed hair that I have allowed to get shaggy, all split ends, mousy and neglected. I swipe my credit card at the pump and can’t help but do the mental math. If I fill up three times today, that’s at least eighty five dollars. I am ashamed to be making calculations. It amounts to, God damn it Dad! Why’d you have to go and get cancer? It’s costing me a fortune.

Winding my way down interstate 91, I rehearse what version of things to tell my mother – about the car, about Chad, about my latest failure to measure up to the money and the optimism she has thrown at my college education, an investment she’s made in my future that has little to do with grades or thesis papers or career preparation. There is a certain life my mother has always imagined for me – children, commitment, a two bedroom house on a quiet street. She saw my going to college as a simple way to avoid the disappointment that is her life.

Like perfect hindsight, I can see now that going to Grafton with Chad wasn’t going to reveal the answer to any of life’s questions. But I moved there in a hurry when Chad suggested I go with him for the year. It seemed the only way out of boring that I could fathom at the time. I didn’t known that countrified Vermont is, in a lot of ways, worse than suburban Connecticut. To my twenty year old self, it felt like a romantic adventure, one that would surely help decide the rest of my life but maybe not in the way I’d hoped.

Chad is the kind of boy considered a jock – high school shortstop, running back, good looking enough in a gangly way. So it’s apt, this post-collegiate career as a guide for a wilderness program serving ‘at risk youth’, spending the summer running delinquents through four week stints in the Green Mountain National Forest, building temporary shelters and splitting wood for evening fires.
There were plenty of pretty, smart girls from established families of wealth and reputation in our graduating class of ‘95. The only distinction I can claim was that I was the only one desperate enough to go with him. There was Abigail Graf with her dancer’s poise and spotless GPA and Erin McLaughlin with the class spirit and the cheerleader’s smile, even Stacy Malloy with her black concert t-shirts and wild eyed brooding. But then, they all had futures beyond a boy named Chad and he must have seen that clearly.

Memories of my father, his temper, his long absences, the defeated hang-dog way he drifts around the house filling ashtrays and playing Steppen Wolf albums so the windows rattle, make it hard to conjure anything close to pure sorrow. I hurtle past Brattleboro and Bellows Falls and struggle to suppress panic as it dawns on me that I will be asked to say something apt and poignant at the service.

By Exit 62, I recover my senses. Service, what service? Mom and I will bury him in Franklin, the place he played his last USTA match in ’61. It will be she and I and the open grave site. No trumped up eulogies delivered by a minister that has never laid eyes on my father. Yes, Franklin. Franklin is perfect. Franklin is a town thirty miles from the one in which my parents have lived physically together and mentally apart for more than two decades. Franklin represents a time before ashtrays and Steppen Wolf, a memory my mother will be willing to honor.

Still, I am restless and divided, unable to settle on which loss to mourn. There’s the effort to anticipate my father’s shrunken frame, his last days ahead of him, but just. But then there’s Chad’s recent departure. Nothing to show for our year together but the embarrassment that is now my car. Violent, sprawling expletives spray painted across the hood. ‘BITCH’ and ‘WHORE’ companion sentiments to the old bumper stickers, peeling and faded: Keep Your Laws Off My Body, Clinton/Gore ’92, Good Planets Are Hard To Find.

It’s been seventy-two hours since Chad packed his collection of framed vintage concert posters into the back of his VW bus – Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed – a neatly stacked assembly, the audience to his long drive back to Santa Monica. .
Three days and already my mind has begun to revise things, to forget the noisy way he chews, with his mouth wide open, great gobs of food collecting along his gum lines – a smile traced with bits of frozen burrito or Fruity Pebbles. I can suddenly and inexplicably forgive him his inability to wring out the sponge, leaving it soaked in the bottom of the sink, cold and stinking. I have the inner patience to overlook his habit of leaving glasses and bowls and heaping ashtrays on counter tops and bedside tables. Now that he’s gone, I can’t remember why these things ever mattered to me at all.

After Chad’s leaving, there had been several hours in which I did nothing but contemplate the blank space above the couch where those posters had hung. I had just decided to find an Impressionist print to fill the space. I’d resolved to purchase something like Madame Monet and Her Son. Monet is so un-Chad. I expected it to soothe me. I had made this kind of emotional progress when Mom called from Wichita.

“It’s your father,” she said. “I’m bringing him back to Northfield. You need to come. There won’t be much time to say goodbye.”
Turns out that the nice folks at the Wichita Ecno Lodge, a ruddy cheeked woman named Ruth or a squat and solid man named Buddy, had taken great pains to be polite and delicate when informing my mother that her long estranged husband was dying a messy, inconvenient death in the confines of Room 115.

I’ve always expected my father to be exempt from common endings – tumors, colostomy bags, a morphine drip. I had been certain that someday he’d suffer a rock star’s demise – found face down in a pool of his own vomit or bent, broken and scorched in a fiery wreck. But now there was the slow, sucking waste of metastasized cancer.

I shouted, “Wichita? Why Wichita? What the Good God Damn is in Witchita?” But it had been a hypothetical rant. I knew there was no good reason for my father’s having chosen to die in a motel overlooking the Little Arkansas River. It was just convenient to his latest wanderings and seemed as good a place as any. Too sick for choices, once Mom arrived in Kansas, he had quickly caved to the idea of a supervised death of standard proportions, when it became clear to him that dying alone in a cheap motel was an impossibility.

Feel free to read, enjoy or simply yawn and look away….

It’s a Green Mountain morning in October. Great drifts of scenic fog. The sun yet to rise over the dumpster, the parked cars, the leaves and litter blowing in restless tumbles down the slopes of the valley. I pack my small suitcase with the broken zipper, cramming it full of bulging woolens and scarves and a few hand knit sweaters I’ve had since I was sixteen. As if careful planning and an early start might offer any comfort against the cold hope that my father, before his passing, will say, just once, ‘I did it and I’m sorry.”

My old Honda starts with a shudder, the familiar whine of a Japanese car, a high pitched, tinny sound reminiscent of toy planes and Vespas. I wait for the engine to warm, rattling through the CD’s that Chad left in the glove box, searching for something appropriate, a score suitable for the epic and solitary drive. It’s a Fire and Rain moment. I need a little James Taylor, his familiar, mournful crooning.

It’s nowhere. Gone. Chad must have taken Sweet Baby James with him, leaving me only the rejects. There’s No Jacket Required. I can’t stand Phil Collins. I blame Phil for the D+ I earned in Cultural Anthropology. My mind, too busy retaining every word of Take Me Home (which I haven’t heard in-total since 1985), to absorb lectures on humanity.

I settle for old Radio Head, singing along with Thom Yorke, If I could be who you wanted, all the time…

There’s one more cigarette in the pack on the dashboard . It’ll be a good five hours before I arrive, enough time for the smell of cigarette smoke to dissipate. Mom, reproachful, worried, has just sent a study linking malignant breast tumors and smoking. It won’t do to have that conversation upon arrival. Not with the Dad dying the undignified death of terminal cancer.

I call up to Grafton to check on Goliath who has been living in the Bowen’s barn, awaiting my return.
Mary Bowen assures me, “He’s no bother, really, none at all. He just lies around the all day looking for a warm spot, shifting with the sun. When are you planning to come back, honey,” she asks. And I can’t say for sure. I can’t fathom returning to the loneliness that is my version of Grafton.

“You’re sure missing all the excitement,” she says. “Michael Conrad was arrested last week.”

I know she must be torn, relieved that the whole thing might finally be put to rest and somehow sad, having always claimed that Conrad reminded her of her only son, lost in a hunting accident back in ‘95.

I sit forward in the arm chair, perched right on the edge. She reads uncertainty into my silence. While I try to catch my breath, she fills the void with awkward chatter.

“Straight from the horse’s mouth, Claire. Mike lives with Adam Miner, the boy who works the calves. Adam’s got all the details. It’s kind of sad. Judge set bail at $50,000 last Tuesday. He’s got no family to post that kind of cash. He’ll stay in the county jail until the thing goes to trial.”

“What about his lawyer. Isn’t there a lawyer to help him out,” I ask.

“Public defendant,” Mary corrects me, concern and surprise and more than a little curiosity, mounting in her voice.

I think I might be sick, dialing information and jotting down the number for Jared Wright, Office of the Defender General, State of Vermont.

I reach his voice mail and hang up. Trying again every thirty minutes until he answers his phone.

“Yes, I am assigned counsel for a Michael Conrad,” he says, clipped and professional as one might expect of a state employee. But after a few minutes of talking, his voice begins to tremble and pitch with the excitement. He begins to speak a sort of legalese, about testimonies and reasonable doubt and undermining the prosecution.

According to Jared Wright, Mike cannot take the stand as his own reliable witness because he was deep in the whiskey that night and his recollection of things have a certain unpolished, hazy quality to them. Mike remembers that he and Lacy had walked out to the end of Anna’s drive to sit at the fence line behind a small swale, gathering privacy from the loud party that had sparked after Tyler’s had closed. He has vague memories of her unzipping his fly, drawing aside her panties so she could straddle him in the yard. He’ll even admit that her efforts were largely useless, his having gone limp and unresponsive from the alcohol. Disappointed, disgusted even, she climbed over him and out onto the road to begin her walk home. He shouted to her to let him give her a ride and she’d laughed and said, “That’s what I was hoping for, Whiskey Dick,” and continued down Horse Farm Lane and out onto Rt. 100.

“That was the last thing she said to anyone in this whole wide world?” I ask Wright when he finishes the telling.

“Guess so. Kind of sad when you think about it.”

I imagine Lacy must have felt she was exercising some new defiance by straddling Conrad out there in the yard on a hot summer’s night towards the end of her adolescence. Even then, with half a liter of Wild Turkey under his belt, Michael Conrad must have had the alluring presence of someone who believes that the particular life they are leading is enough.

Wright explains that Conrad is trying to comply with the prosecution, having voluntarily given blood samples and turned over the boots he was wearing the night Lacy was killed. He has even walked out Rt. 100 with Detective Foley, showing him the spot where he had littered the empty pint of Wild Turkey, the source of some serious drunkenness and now the sole focus of his innocence; that one discarded bottle the only bit of evidence tying him to her death.

Wright and I agree to meet the following afternoon. I will make the reverse drive beneath the leaded sky of late November through the steep canyons of rock, blown apart by dynamite, allowing us flat-landers access to the hill country. There is never traffic, only Brake for Moose and Grooved Shoulders signage, underscoring the inherent danger of driving the mountain passes in slippery weather or mating season.

One of the first things I learned from Grafton locals, unlike deer or raccoons or just about any other animal you’re apt to encounter when driving in the Green Mountains, moose do not have reflective retinas. There is no green glow or glaring yellow flicker to warn a driver, allowing them to slow for the massive creature in the road. So many lives lost, both animal and human, as the great creatures are all but invisible in the dark.

I hang up and cradle the phone in my lap, rocking slightly to the realization that my Dad’s death isn’t the end of anything at all but, rather the beginning of hope for Michael Conrad, just 33, who lives out past Anna Cowley’s when he isn’t driving a ten wheeler down to Louisiana and back.