“Oh.”
It was roundly known that my mother and I had problems with each other, that I attended her by duty, but now I had done something stupid, I knew. I had given Hamish knowledge of my previous whereabouts. I was a lousy criminal, and he was a lousy lay. We were perfect together.
“It’s good with my mom,” Hamish said. “We get along, and living together works for us. It was harder with Dad.”
“You don’t have to,” I said, feeling guilty now.
“I’ll tell you if you want.”
I remembered Hamish as a toddler then, how he would allow Emily to boss him around and how, over time, she took advantage of this in a way I didn’t like. He was that same boy now. He would tell me what I wanted to know in the same way he would endlessly give his toys to my small daughter or bring her, on demand, bucket after bucket of sand for building Barbie castles. Natalie and I had pretended only briefly that the two of them would grow up to be married. At a certain point we both realized that neither of us knew the first thing about what made a good marriage.
“You know your father and I didn’t get along,” I said.
We had driven out of the McMansions-set-in-birches section and were passing through the long no-man’s-land of one-story warehouses and shabby ’50s-era community halls.
“That’s not unusual for you,” Hamish said, looking straight ahead.
“What?”
“If you call ‘mostly ignoring me’ getting along,” he said.
“I’ve never ignored you,” I said.
“I know what you think of me.”
“Which is?”
“That I’m lazy. That I’m a drain on my mom. Stuff like that.”
I was silent. Everything he said was true. I pulled off Phoenixville Pike and onto Moorehall Road. I was taking the long way round.
“I’m a real bitch, huh?” I said.
Hamish laughed. “You know what? You kind of can be.”
I slowed the car down and scanned the lot of Mabry’s Grill for Natalie’s car.
“He picked her up in a Toyota four-by-four,” Hamish said.
I cleared my throat and put my turn indicator on for Yellow Springs.
“My dad was horrible in a lot of ways,” Hamish said. “I don’t miss the screaming between them and between me and him. He hated me.”
It was the moment to say “No, he didn’t” or “I’m sure that’s not true,” but I wouldn’t. Hamish may have needed a tantric-sex tutorial, but his sense of the truth was exact.
“My mom’s glad,” Hamish said. “Though she wouldn’t say it to me. His great dream was to move back to Scotland someday.”
“How can she stand to live so near the bridge?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Hamish said. “I think it’s because she wants to be there in case his spirit rises out of Pickering Creek so she can bash it over the head.”
“That’s how I feel about my mother,” I said.
“I know,” Hamish said, and reached out to touch my hair.
How long would it take Jake to get to Pennsylvania? The flight was at least five hours, maybe more. He was coming from Santa Barbara, not Los Angeles or San Francisco. There was too much I didn’t know. I wanted to tell Hamish this: that the very same afternoon Jake had met my mother, he’d turned to me and said, “Why didn’t you tell me she was nuts?” And how it had been like a curtain parting for the first time onto a larger world, the beginning of the great divide between Jake’s and my mother’s love. The force that, if I had let it, would have ripped me apart.
“She met him on the Internet-Mom’s date,” Hamish said. “He’s a contractor from Downingtown.”
“What?”
“She was afraid you’d judge her. I think she wants to get married again.”
We passed the gravel yards and one or two low-lying buildings that, for as long as I’d lived in the valley, I’d never seen anyone enter or leave. These buildings sported two large Vs on their corrugated windowless outsides and were protected by electrified fencing.
“Remember?” I said, nodding toward the steel buildings.
“I just wanted to get in because they were keeping us out,” Hamish said. “I wasn’t going to steal anything.”
“A Toyota four-by-four, huh?”
“Helen, judge? Helen never judges. She loves everything!”
“Bitch?” I asked.
“Grade A.”
“Who would want less?” I said, laughing.
“That’s why Dad sent me to Valley Forge,” he said after a moment had passed. And my heart saw Hamish in his most difficult years. How he had tried to make his father happy and repeatedly failed, how when the three of them came to dinner at my house, he had made a point of sitting at the very edge of his chair, “like real soldiers do,” and how he’d beamed as he passed the lamb chops to Emily. “You’re not a real soldier,” his father had said, heaping mint jelly on his plate as an awkward silence descended on the table.
On the other side of Vanguard Industries was the remnant of a town established in the years before the Revolutionary War, with additions being made sporadically after that until the end of the 1800s. Only seven buildings remained, and these were all on one side of the road. Those on the opposite side had been washed away in the same storm that revealed the great mother lode of gravel that comprised Lapling Quarry.
Everything in the small town was closed as Hamish and I cruised past. The still-functioning general store, with an attached tavern that served only Schlitz, had shut down at eight p.m. Through the windows, I saw the low lights on over the bar, and Nick Stolfuz-my age and the only son of the owner-mopping up.
At the corner of the boarded-up Ironsmith Inn, I hung a sharp right with the skill that came from years of retracing the same near invisible shortcuts.
It was on a drive with Natalie that I discovered the view of the Limerick nuclear plant. It was during a long, humid afternoon in the early ’80s, when I was visiting my parents with Emily in tow. Sarah had stayed in Madison with Jake.
Every time I came home to Pennsylvania from Wisconsin, I would call Natalie, and we would go for long drives during which neither one of us would talk. It was our way of being alone without being alone, and it provided a justifiable excuse, to my mother, to Jake, to Natalie’s husband, to get away for a little while from the emotional hotbeds that were so benignly labeled “domesticity.”
We would purposely set off to get lost together. We would dead-end on old farm roads that hadn’t been used for years or find ourselves in isolated churchless graveyards, our feet sinking into the gaps of air left by the only frequent visitors-the moles. Once lost and outside the car, wandering, we would easily separate, trusting that we would find each other again. If I looked for her, I might come up behind a long-dead chestnut tree and hear her crying. In those moments, I would feel the cords of my upbringing pulling me back. I had not been raised to hug or to comfort or to become part of someone else’s family. I had been raised to keep a distance.