Move-in Day (excerpt from “Shovel and Salt”)

Her lips were dry. The bottom lip was cracked near the corner and I could see a little blood dried there.

“You should drink some water,” I said.

“You should mind your business,” she said.

Still, I got her a glass of water while she shuffled her things from the doorway to the living room. She didn’t have much. She never did like to keep things. “Sit down,” I told her, and she did. I handed her the water. “Room temperature,” I said and she nodded.

“Howard put ice in it all the time.”

“Well, I know how you like it,” I said.

She nodded again and I took her hand. We both knew it was time. Her house was falling down around her ears. Every week when we met for lunch she’d have a new story to tell, about the lawn that was infested with moles– “more holes than earth,” she’d said. Or the awnings– “front bedroom fell off and almost killed the postman,” she’d said. The ice dam was the final straw. Spring came fast, like overnight, and Mary woke up to birds singing and a steady drip of water on her face. Howard probably never cleaned out those gutters, probably not even once.

“Drink your water,” I told her and she did it. Mary had been down like this for a year, ever since Howard died. I never did like that man. He was too handsome and too witty and too unemployed. I never liked him and I told Mary that every single time she had a complaint. I was surprised she trusted me with complaints after all the times I said I didn’t like him, but she persisted. She never defended him to me, but she loved him, I could see it in her eyes when he walked into the room. They were married just about twenty years before he drove his car into that tree on Route 7.

Mary and I drove out there a few weeks after the crash. She said she just wanted to see where it happened. I told her that I thought it was just torturing herself but I drove her out there anyway. Howard had wrecked the only car they had in that crash. The whole of Route 7 was flat and full of farmland. I turned on the radio on the way there. Sometimes driving along on those flat roads was hypnotic and I’d fall into an old car game to keep myself awake, just reciting what I saw over and over: rock, corn, trench, telephone pole, like a catalog of seeing. It drove Mary crazy as it had ever since we were children. My father used to say that I had a one track mind but I saw it more as a means of time keeping. I marked the time by the sun, the road traveled, the song on the radio.

When we drove out past McCauley’s farm to see where Howard died I held my tongue. Mary was already down. She’d been down since even before it happened so I kept my cataloging to myself and we listened to Top 40 radio to pass the time. Now and then, I would look over at her to make sure she was all right. Mary was usually the upbeat one, and the skinny one too. We were fraternal twins and though we looked like sisters, certainly, we did not look as though we shared a womb. I cannot count the times we told someone we were twins only to have them say, “Are you sure?” In truth, I looked like our father and Mary looked a carbon copy of our mother. She got the curly auburn hair and svelte figure. I got the stout body of my father’s German ancestors, basic brown hair, and milk-pale skin. I could say that I didn’t resent her good looks but that would be a lie. I did resent it while we were in High School but not after.

Mary said she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to find the exact spot when we got there. We had a mile marker to go by and we knew it was by McCauley’s place. Tom McCauley was the one who called the paramedics. He heard the crash from his farmhouse. At first, he figured it was kids out racing on the usually abandoned road. Since the interstate went in nobody drove the backroads anymore. Howard drove them because he said it relaxed him but I think it was because he’d been picked on the Interstate for speeding. He might have gotten his license taken away if the officer had given him a breathalyzer but Howard was good about hiding his drinking. The day he got the speeding ticket he was three sheets to the wind. He laughed and told the story about getting out of that “mess” every time I saw him. So, he was driving the back roads around dinner time to get to a “job interview” according to Mary. Most everyone else knew he was headed to the Off Track Betting station on the other side of Brownsville.

We were still a ways off when we saw the crash site. The tire marks were still clear, black rubber streaks that began straight and then curled around like a flourish on a signature, a looping “O” connected to a sullen “L.” Mary saw it the moment I did. The tree was just past the skid marks. There was a scatter of broken glass on the road nearby, twisted pieces of metal and a blackened bite taken from the trunk of the oak itself. We knew the car caught fire. I saw it when Ben went to the impound lot. Mary asked him to go after the insurance company told her they were releasing the title to the junk yard. It was beyond repair, obviously, but Mary wanted Ben to see if there was anything left inside. I don’t know what she was looking for. I don’t think she knew what she was looking for. Ben told us that he didn’t find anything. I always wondered if that were entirely true or if he was trying to spare her some further injury.

It was Tom McCauley that got the fire out. He worked on tractors in the barn on his property. When he heard the crash he went right out to see what happened, saw the flames and got the extinguisher for the fire. He caught that in good time, saving the tree at least, but Howard was already gone. This is back before anyone had airbags and before people wore their seatbelt as a matter of course. Howard hit hard enough to propel him from his seat, through the window, past the tree itself and into a nearby stand of corn. By the time Tom got the fire out and found Howard, it was too late. He called the ambulance and the sheriff and the sheriff called Mary with the news.

I parked on the side of the road as close as I could to the field where the tree stood, but not too close. The drainage ditch kept us from it. Howard must have jumped the ditch and flown straight into the oak. As much as we all puzzled over it, we could not determine just how that might have happened. It was not until that moment that I realized why Tom McCauley and the sheriff were so wondrous about the whole thing. It was a sight to see. The tree would survive. It was already starting to bud up for spring that day, wearing the scar like a badge of honor in the fallow corn field. Loose stalks still stood in lonely patches nearby.

As I was about to make a funny comment about the tree and the corn stalks I looked to Mary. Her hands were on her cheeks. Her face seemed to age far beyond our years. She rubbed the tears into her skin as they fell from her eyes. I put my arms around her shoulders. She felt fragile. I was afraid to hug too tight for fear that she might break apart into dust. After a few minutes, she asked to leave and so, we did.

Now, as she sat in my living room drinking water from the metal cups that belonged to our mother years earlier, we were a pair of widows. I sat on the couch next to her. I held her hand and when she placed her cup back on the table, she took up my other hand and kissed it. She scooted closer to me and we put our heads together. She sighed, “What’s to be done about us?” and I said, “Yes, the widow-y Walton twins.” We sat like that for what felt like forever.