Chapter 7 - The Currency of Absence
The first week of November arrived with a blue norther that dropped the temperature forty degrees in five hours, turning the prairie grass along the Canadian River to brittle iron.
In my family, absence was usually handled with a very specific, strategic deployment of silence.
The protocol was ancient: Brenda would stop answering the phone; Arthur would decline to send the annual coupon for the oil change at his friend’s garage; Maddie would post cryptic, sorrowful quotes on her social media about "toxic family members" and "choosing peace over drama," accompanied by photographs of Harper and Leo eating expensive waffles at a boutique diner in the city.
The goal was always the same: to create a vacuum so cold, so terrifying to the offender’s sense of belonging, that within fourteen days, the rebel would arrive on the back porch with an offering—a casserole, an apology, a check for three hundred dollars to cover "expenses"—and the ledger would be re-established on Brenda’s terms.
I didn't call.
On Tuesday, Brenda’s minister, Reverend Hallowell from the First United Methodist Church, called my cell phone while I was sitting in my truck behind the lumberyard on North Flood Avenue.
"Zane," the Reverend said, his voice smooth, warm, and lubricated with thirty years of pastoral mediation between wealthy parishioners and their wayward children. "I had a very long, very painful visit with your mother this morning. She was in tears, Zane. Real tears. She feels that a terrible misunderstanding has occurred, and she is desperate to restore the family circle before the holidays."
I took a bite of my ham-and-cheese sandwich, chewed three times, and swallowed.
"Reverend," I said. "Did she show you the photographs from Saturday?"
A slight hesitation on the line. "What photographs, Zane?"
"The ones Maddie took of the living room," I said. "With the four-foot banner that had Harper’s name on it, and the Barbie Dreamhouse, and the drone."
"Well, no, Zane, she didn't show me photographs," Hallowell said, his tone shifting into that gentle, chiding register used for difficult children. "She was speaking from the heart about her grief. She feels that you have hardened your heart against her. She mentioned that you took the cake and left without even letting her say goodbye to the children."
"Did she mention," I asked, "that she walked past Noah without saying happy birthday?"
"Zane, people make mistakes in the heat of a busy morning—"
"Reverend Hallowell," I said, leaning forward against the steering wheel and looking at the rain beating against the lumber stacks. "When you preach on Sunday, do you tell your congregation that an eight-year-old girl gets two birthdays in one month because her mother is having a difficult divorce, while an eight-year-old boy gets an apology in an empty parking lot?"
"Noah was turning seven, Zane," the minister said, his voice tightening with slight annoyance at being corrected on the details.
"I know he was turning seven," I said. "Because I was there when he was born. Brenda wasn't. Brenda was in Dallas with Maddie, helping her pick out the tile for her master bathroom."
"Zane, that is uncharitable—"
"Reverend," I said, "if my mother wants to talk to me, she has my address. But if she comes down that stairwell with anything less than an apology to Noah—written in her own hand, on a piece of paper that doesn't mention Maddie, doesn't mention Harper, and doesn't mention her blood pressure—she can turn around and walk back down to her Buick. Do you understand me?"
A long, frozen pause followed.
"You are in a dangerous spiritual place, young man," Hallowell said, his voice dropping the pastoral lubricant entirely, revealing the hard, ecclesiastical bone beneath. "Pride goeth before destruction, Zane."
"No, Reverend," I told him. "Pride was that glitter banner. What I have is an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment that doesn't have room for people who don't love my kids."
I ended the call.
I sat in the truck for ten minutes, listening to the rain drumming against the aluminum roof of the lumber shed.
For thirty-four years, I had believed that if Brenda stopped speaking to me, the world would somehow lose its color. I had thought the family was an electrical circuit: if you pulled the plug from the wall in Linden Lane, the lights in my own house would flicker and die.
I looked at my hands on the wheel.
They weren't shaking.
My knuckles were scarred from twenty years of working with framing timber and drywall screws, my watch was an eight-dollar Casio that kept perfect time, and in twenty minutes, I was going to pick up Noah from his after-school program at the elementary school.
We had plans.
We were going to the public library to check out a three-pound book on the Cretaceous marine reptiles of the Western Interior Seaway, and then we were going to the hardware store to buy two cans of green spray paint for a wooden ramp he was building out of scrap pine in the garage.
The lights didn't flicker.
May you like
The current hadn't come from Linden Lane at all. It had been coming from me—from my labor, from my silence, from my willingness to be the battery that powered their machine while they kept me in the dark.
And the plug was out.
