I continued over crumbling highways, past once-immutable towns in the last stages of drying up and blowing away. Gas stations abandoned, factories gone, warehouses now run by robots. Farming operations that once took hundreds of people could now produce corn, soy, or pork with a handful of technicians overseeing the machines. Gazing out over the flawless green of a soy field, I imagined how my father would have hated this new farming world. I missed my dad intensely in that moment and thought of sitting on his lap as he drove the tractor, that beast jostling beneath us, one of his heavy, chapped hands acting as my seat belt. It wasn’t sepsis that killed him. It was giving up his work, his creativity, his communion with what was once our land. When the crisis of the eighties came and family farms were foreclosed across the country en masse, he and my grandpa beat the odds. As a young man, he’d stayed when the children of other farmers had run, only to lose it all in the end.
When the car pulled into the driveway, I barely recognized my childhood home. It looked feral. The yard was soggy, the grass yellow and pitted with mud puddles. The shingles were rotting, flaking off, and leaving the roof’s tar paper exposed. The vinyl siding my father had put on before his illness was moldy and cracking, battered by the ferocious summer storms of the past few years.
I went to knock but could tell the door wasn’t latched and let myself in, calling out to my mom.
Immediately, I wanted to scream at her.
My childhood home was a catastrophe. The TV was blaring, the living room coated in garbage. Old fast-food bags and take-out containers and pizza boxes. As kids, we’d never been allowed so much as a Happy Meal, and now I could see the crumpled Golden Arches in every crevice of the room. Flies buzzed around a stack of dishes in the sink. Everything I touched was sticky. There were wine bottles, half-finished, littered throughout each room. I couldn’t remember my mother drinking alcohol at all before about 2026. Apparently, her preference was JP. Chenet Rosé Dry sparkling wine. A gas station brand.
The TV’s volume was so high, I went sifting through a pile of unopened mail on the coffee table to try to find the remote. Finally, I remembered what decade I was living in and simply told the TV to turn itself down.
My mother emerged from the downstairs bathroom, though I’d not heard a flush.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, less surprised than suspicious.
“I told you I was coming.” She still looked uncertain. “I called Monday?”
She batted a hand. “Thought you was talking about another week.”
Still wearing her nightgown, she shuffled to the couch. She’d never looked so old to me, and watching her move, in pain from both hips, it was almost difficult to imagine how she’d looked when she was young. She’d been beautiful, at least in the way most daughters find their mothers beautiful. I’d envied her blond hair because Allie’s was also blond, but mine had been a mousy brown. Mom never wore makeup except for church, but I’d always been proud of this. My mom needed no makeup, I’d bragged to girlfriends.
The way the years took you—it was astonishing. In my circle, the game was defying age with simple cosmetic procedures. I looked at pictures of myself from ten years earlier and was pleased to see that the changes were imperceptible. A light facelift, a small surgery to smooth the cellulose from one’s thighs—no one need ever feel vain about it. Mom was proof of what happened without these inexpensive adaptations. She had deep, drooping bags under each eye and flesh that simply hung, rippled, and swayed around every portion of her face: cheeks, jowls, and turkey throat all part of the same mass. The meat of her triceps wobbled, skin patched with psoriasis, moles spiraling ever higher. Her hair sat atop her head in an unkempt mat of gray and white. She eased into the seat nearest an end table where a mug of JP. Chenet awaited her return.
“You finally got yourself some time, huh?”
“It’s been a busy start to the year,” I said.
“Doing what?” Her eyes trained on the TV.
“Fred’s fund has been growing. We’re starting to get serious returns. I really would like to spend some money on this place. Fix up a few things.” My eyes landed on a missing spindle in the balustrade. Beyond that, the pictures of our family. Me and my siblings lined up like grinning hostages before the feet of our parents in a picture snapped at Walmart when I was six.
“Don’t want your money, don’t need your money,” she sang.
I had developed a rule with my mother: only self-defense. Never take her bait. I walked to the sliding glass door at the back of the house. A gorgeous rainbow vaulted over the fields that once belonged to my family. I still loved this view from the back, where I could feel the ancient time of the prairie.
“What if you sold the house? Moved into my place in Chicago.”
“Don’t wanna go anywhere, especially not the city,” she sighed. “Besides, you know what I’m likely to get for this place? Property values round here are a Big Zip. Maybe the meth guys would take it off my hands as a place to cook, that’s about it.”
There was nothing to eat, so we went to the Hy-Vee, which had an armed guard at the entrance, something I’d never seen before. It was a hassle because so many of the products were now behind locked glass, and it took forever to hunt down an associate to open them. I bought fixings for lasagna and back at the house, the two of us slapped it together, adding some cayenne pepper for kick. After that, I took a trash bag and moved through the downstairs, cleaning up.
“Don’t have to do that,” my mother said.
“Oh yes I do, Mom. Tomorrow I’m getting you some flowers too.”
By the time the lasagna was ready, the living room, dining room, and kitchen looked habitable. We ate with the TV on, and when I sat down with my plate, I realized she had turned it to The Pastor’s new channel. Not him, but a show that looked like the news with coiffed anchors blasting President Randall’s response to the crisis on the US-Mexico border and “reporting” on what The Pastor had said about various issues of the day. They spoke of him, with newscaster intonation, as if he really was a prophet. They speculated on how God might guide his hand toward other revelations, and if the End of Days predictions would be coming soon or if they were still a few years away.
“This is the only place left you actually get at the truth,” my mom noted. I’d noticed the family Bible on the mantel, but now next to it, The Pastor’s “New Faith Translation” with a gold-leaf cross. It occurred to me that her eyes might light up if I told her I’d just seen the man in person, but I decided that might be more unsettling. Forget about what else I could tell her.
“Are you still going to church, Mom?”
“Of course. Not many people left in it, though. Don’t suppose you ever go?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “I’d go with you tomorrow, though.”
“That’d be nice.”
She didn’t smile, but I did.
After a few minutes of silent eating, I said, “You know, it doesn’t have to be Chicago. We could get you a place anywhere. Down in Saint Louis with Allie. Or Florida with Erik. I’d say New York near me but—”
“I don’t like the city!” she cried. “What the heck don’t you get about that, Jack? I don’t like the city, and now stop frickin’ bothering me about it.”
I couldn’t remember my mother ever raising her voice like that. My fork hung suspended over a noodle while she glared at me, eyes furious moons behind ornate glasses. Then she turned back to the TV.