I understood what was happening to us when the fourth house went unsold. First had been the Tenners, to the left, who put their beach house on the market in January, but the FOR SALE sign never added UNDER CONTRACT. With the Beaudreauxs on our right, Louisiana transplants who couldn’t handle the cold—so Mom suspected—the only indication they’d abandoned their house was the foot-high grass and weeds spraying through the squares of their driveway. Directly across the street, in August, the Petrarchs never came back from their week in Canada. Several shingles fell off the roof and no one ever came to repair them.
None of that clued my mother in, my sister noted with a roll of her eyes later. “Because she never sees what she doesn’t want to see,” she said.
Well, I thought but didn’t say, I think that just makes her a person.
***
What did it, finally, was the pine tree falling over the back fence. A trio of trees on the Freemans’ property had long stretched their branches over our yard, their cones landing among the agave blue flames and the marigolds in my mother’s plant garden like grenades. She and the Freemans usually got along well enough, all polite with one another. They invited us over for dinner all the time. They waved if they were gardening—they had installed several raised beds when they moved in—and we waved back, though Mom was always unenthused about it. If I asked why she seemed to dislike them, she said they were plastic, fake, too nice for it to be real. What had we done to earn their friendship? If I suggested that maybe they really were just kind people, she said, “No such thing as free kindness.”
When the pine tree was knocked down by a tropical storm bustling through, Mom was quick to go around the block to their front door. She pounded away, but no one answered. At first she grew angry and knocked harder, blasting away until her hands were raw. One knuckle bled. Realization slowly dawned in her, like an egg breaking and leaking its albumin inside her. She rushed home and stood on the sidewalk in front of our house, looking first at the Tenners’, then the Boudreaux house, then behind her at the Petrarchs’. Like something out of a movie, she let out a shriek of recognition.
***
“She’s pretty upset.”
My sister sighed into the phone. “What, precisely, are you asking me to do about it?”
“I’m not asking you do to anything.”“Then why bring it up?”
I looked out my bedroom window. The Petrarchs’ lawn was truly out of control, more of the roof on the ground than attached to the house. A downspout was speared into the soil like a flagpole staked by some explorer claiming the property.
“I just thought you’d want to know what’s going on with your family.”
“Well, think again.”
“Okay,” I said. “Great. Good talk.”
My sister hung up.
I found Mom’s bedroom door closed, and though I couldn’t hear anything on the other side, I knew she was holed up in there, the lights off, the tiny television on her bureau bathing everything in deep-sea blue. One of the windows would be cracked open, letting in hints of the ocean. Mom loved the smell of saltwater. This had been a source of disruption between her and my dad, who always complained that the salt in the air was ruining the paint and the baseboards, rusting all of the house’s metal surfaces. She called him delusional, ridiculous, the kind of man who thought he knew way more than he actually did. I watched this fight once, and when she said that, Dad looked as though she’d punched him in the face. Later, I understood: he was hurt, yes, but not exactly by the brutality of Mom’s words. Instead, it was their accuracy that stung: she’d found something he’d always thought he’d kept deep inside and she’d brought it to the surface, turning it raw and tender via the sting of exposure.
***
“I just don’t understand,” my sister said to me three weeks before the realization, “why you stick around.”
“Well,” I said, licking salt from the rim of my margarita, “I don’t really understand what’s to understand.”
“The things she’s said.” My sister shook her head and drank, then refilled her glass from the pitcher between us. We were sitting at Chimi Limi’s, a beachfront Mexican cantina with terrible food but excellent drink specials. My sister had worked here for several years as a hostess, before she moved from Surfside to Columbia to go to the University of South Carolina. When she deigned to come home, never when Mom wanted, she insisted we sit at one of the outdoor tables and split a pitcher and queso dip, the only thing she was willing to ingest that came out of the kitchen.
“I know,” I said.
“Do you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
She drank again. “So explain it to me. Why stay?”
“Well,” I said, “where else would I go?”
“Anywhere.”
“Easy for you to say.”
She rolled her eyes. “Anyone can go to college, David.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You’re smarter than you think.”
My sister didn’t seem to understand that college wasn’t just about being smart. It required a dedication, a desire, and a drive that I wasn’t sure I had. I didn’t think this was a flaw of mine, just a different set of skills and wants and sense of the future. I had been working as a line cook at a bar two doors down from the shitty cantina, mostly mornings, because that’s when Glen & Tina’s transformed into a breakfast spot catering to the vacationers who had chosen the one hotel in town, right across the street, which didn’t have an in-house restaurant. They mostly came sputtering over in the morning, sunburnt and hungover, seeking eggs and carbohydrates that I was fast becoming excellent at preparing. My sister always said food prep wasn’t a future. But she’d majored in art history, so what did she know?
She refilled her glass, emptying the pitcher, and took a swipe of queso onto a chip. I looked past her, toward the water, as she ate. The ocean was, perhaps, the one thing that could convince me to agree with her about school. I had always loved the water, was glad that our family had planted itself so close to the sea, even if our beach was regularly occupied by travelers from afar who had minimal investment in the long-term health of Surfside and its environs; I’d watched business loop 17 turn from home to a string of high-quality local stores and eateries into tourist-oriented glitz: candy shoppes, beachwear outlets with cheap towels and swimsuits and airbrushed t-shirts, liquor stores every three blocks. Bars replaced diners. But the ocean still held its allure, not just for the euphoria of days sprawled on the sand under the sun but its wild call: its depths, its mysteries, its ecosystem, its power.
But all of that, too, I could learn anywhere. Books. The internet. More books. Who needed a classroom in the twenty-first century?
My sister shook her head but said nothing. She drank. When our waitress came over to ask how we were doing, she ordered another pitcher by rattling the empty one, never consulting me, not wanting, or needing, to hear what I might want to contribute.
***
Mom asked me to go with her to church. I was eating breakfast, a bowl of wheat cereal that was somehow both soggy and stale. She shuffled in, still in her pajamas—a fluffy pink robe over blue and white drawstring pants and a matching flannel shirt, all of it way too hot for summer sleep—and made her request while I had the spoon in my mouth. I left it there, hanging like a thermometer.
“Oh stop,” she said. “It’s not that crazy.”
It seemed crazy. I knew my mom was raised Catholic, but not once in my life had we walked into a church. I wasn’t even sure where in Surfside the nearest Catholic church was. I didn’t know the hymns. I had no idea when to kneel versus sit. I could guess about half of the Our Father, but that’s it. Sunday was my one morning off work, but I woke early to stay in rhythm.
I looked at the clock on the microwave: eight fifty-seven. I didn’t know how much time we had to get ready. Mom followed my gaze and said the service started at ten.
The church was modest, the only glitz the stained-glass windows that showed images of Jesus carrying his cross and then being nailed to it; the pews were varnished wood that creaked whenever someone sat. The missal in front of the space I occupied near the back had a worn spine from decades of opening and closing. The altar was marble, the chalices brass that shimmered and caught the light of the chandeliers, which were understated. I liked that the place was only half-full. Mom knelt when we slid into our seats, folding her hands in prayer; the knuckles of her right hand were still bruised, healing from whacking the Freemans’ door three days prior.
I tuned out the readings and the homily, though I did catch that the theme was about loving your neighbor, which made my ears ring. I watched Mom, but her face was placid. I knew I would never tell my sister about this. We left during communion, turning away from the line instead of into it when our row was freed by the usher to approach for the body of Christ. This made me relax, too.
“Well,” I said in the car. “That was something.”
Mom whipped her head to look at me, eyes narrowed. “It was enlivening.”
“Did your prayers get answered?”
“You sound like your sister.”
When we reached the house, I couldn’t help but stare at the surrounding homes, feel the emptiness that buttressed us on all sides. Mom refused to look at them. She said nothing of what must be happening to us, to our family, though I started to think it had been happening for a long time. Mom parked in the driveway even though the garage was empty. She stomped up to the front door without making sure I was following. I scrambled after, suddenly certain she wanted to lock me out, but of course she didn’t.
***
When we were kids, my sister and I spent our summers riding our bikes through Surfside’s neighborhoods, wending west of the business loop, crossing US 17. I followed my sister, watched sweat bloom across the back of her t-shirts, watched her calves turn glossy with perspiration. She never seemed to tire, no matter how far we went, jagging north toward Dogwood Lake and the bigger, more expensive homes on their larger spread out lots, she never slowed. I pushed myself not to, either.
We were in the teen streets—called so because of their names: Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth—when my sister finally slowed and then came to a halt. I skidded to a stop, nearly heaving over my handlebars. Before I could accost her, she said, “Can you imagine what it must feel like?”
She was staring at a house set back from the street. At first glance, all seemed normal: the hedges were cleanly trimmed, the siding in good order. Someone had planted peonies in several large terra-cotta pots on either side of the front stoop. But then I glanced at the house we’d just passed. Its roof was in disrepair, its grass jungle-like. A window on the second floor was spiderwebbed. With a lurch in my stomach I turned and looked behind me. Directly across the street from the pristine house was a property in just as bad shape as the neighbor house: paint flaking, a porch swing halfway detached. Planters were cracked like broken eggs, dried soil and dead flowers spilling out along the stairs. Long fingers of weeds sprouted from between the front walkway’s slabs like unkempt hair.
“I mean,” my sister said, “who does that to someone?”
Our dad had left two years ago at that point, and we had not talked about it much. I’d been too young, as he packed up and disappeared, to really understand what had happened, though Mom had promised more than once that she and he both loved us very much. But we hadn’t seen or heard from him since. All I knew was that my sister stomped around the house a lot more, and hadn’t let up in twenty-four months.
“I don’t know,” I said, even though I understood well enough that she wasn’t actually asking for my thoughts; she was talking through something for herself. My sister was fourteen now, on the cusp of cutting ties with me, her ten-year-old kid brother, and I was desperate to hold on to her for as long as I could. I gripped my bike’s handlebars, twisting my hands around the plastic, my skin going hotter than it already was at the friction. I could feel the flesh of my palms threatening to break, to bloom into blood, but at the last possible moment my sister sighed, shrugged, and said, “Let’s get back, I guess.” We biked home and never returned to that neighborhood, so I never knew how long it took for the abandoned homeowners to leave, for someone new, someone with tethers, to take over, to bring life back to that falling-down radius.
***
I came home from work and found the front door cracked open, that day’s mail scattered in the foyer. I called for Mom but she said nothing. I walked halfway up the stairs to the second floor and called for her again, but still got nothing. My breathing caught. My heart pumped harder than during that morning’s breakfast rush, during which I’d managed to screw up three orders, confusing which plates needed scrambled versus poached versus over-easy eggs. My manager had pursed his lips but said nothing. Marble, the waitress whose tables I kept effing up, smiled in forgiveness as I rushed to fix my mistakes. My body reeked of sweat and grease, fryer oil and spattered fat. I wanted a shower, but I also needed to understand what was happening. Mom was not a leave-the-door-open person, if for no other reason than she didn’t want bugs colonizing the living room.
“Mom,” I said again at the top of the stairs. Her bedroom door was cracked. I tiptoed over. When I peered into her room, I could tell she wasn’t there. I pressed the door open and scanned the space: her bed was unmade. The drawers of her dresser were open, camisoles and socks and blouses draped over the edges. My ears began to tingle. I pulled open the door of her walk-in closet, where the first thing I saw was what I hoped I wouldn’t: a bare space beneath her blouses and dresses, which had been thinned out, favorites plucked off their hangers like meat from bones, where her rolling suitcase should have been. I reminded myself to breathe. I gripped the door knob hard, but then closed it without slamming it. I pressed my forehead to the wood, feeling the grain against my skin, bumpy and cool, and realized I had completely misunderstood: it wasn’t Mom who had been abandoned, or the two of us together. All along, it was me. I was the one being left behind.
***
“Well,” my sister said. “This is a twist.”
I’d left the front door ajar while I waited for her to arrive, as though our home was a crime scene and my sister an investigator who needed to absorb every detail. But she had no interest in going upstairs to see the evidence of Mom’s vanishing; she took me at my word. We sat down in the kitchen, where my sister plucked a half-empty bottle of white wine from the refrigerator and took a pull before handing the bottle over to me. I drank; the wine was sour, turned, but I took a second gulp anyway before handing it back.
“What do we do?” I said.
“We could sell the place.”
“Isn’t it in her name?”
“We can just say she’s dead.”
“We’d need a death certificate, I think. Some kind of proof.”
“Look around,” my sister said. “There’s proof enough.”
From where we sat at the kitchen table, I could see into the back yard and across to the decay of the Freeman place. The fallen tree was still rotting away, bark curled to black mold and white mushrooms. Beyond the pine’s thinning branches—the needles had finally started to shower off in the absence of water and nutrients—I could see how smudgy the house’s rear windows were.
“I guess,” I said, “you could make a case.”
“You seem upset,” my sister said. “Distraught.”
“Well. Shouldn’t I be?”
She shrugged.
“I know Mom’s flawed.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“But she didn’t seem to want to leave.”
“Sometimes people just know. Like Dad.”
“I don’t really remember much about that.”
“You remember why he left, right?”
I shook my head. My sister drank. “They were always fighting. She was convinced he was cheating, despite all of his denials. He was never out late. He never vanished on weekends. There was no proof of anything.” She paused and drank again. “Also, she was always doubting him.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I think this is good for you.” My sister finished the wine and let out a satisfied ahh. “You need more freedom than you’ve given yourself.”
“I wasn’t a prisoner.”
She held up her hands. “Okay, okay. I’m not the bad guy here. I’m not the villain.”
“Does there have to be one?”
“Of course,” she said, frowning at the empty bottle. “Of course, David. There always is.”
***
When I was nine, not knowing any better, I told Mom, in response to her joking cajole of “Who do you want to be your Valentine?” that I hoped it would be Toby Gondreaux.
“Toby? The boy who sits behind you?”
I nodded.
She pursed her lips. We were eating dinner, just the two of us. My sister was babysitting, something she’d started doing a few nights a week for the Petrarchs now that she was thirteen. I bit into my square of freezer aisle lasagna, the center of which was still lukewarm. As I chewed, I looked up to say something, but was surprised by the look on Mom’s face: she seemed to be battling confusion and upset.
“What?” I said. “Is your lasagna cold inside, too? We can zap them together in the microwave.”
“No,” she said. “Not that.” But then she said nothing else.
“Who do you want to be your Valentine?” I said. Mom was starting to date again. She’d introduced us to a few “prospective gentlemen,” as she called them, but most of them only came around the one time.
Mom didn’t answer, forcing an unhappy smile. She kept eating but said nothing else about me or Valentines or Toby. When she stood and took both of our dishes to the sink, I felt something squeezing between us, slicing whatever invisible cords tethered us together. I watched her scrub away the sauce and caked noodles. Mom stared toward the back door the whole time, never meeting my gaze. As if I wasn’t there. As if I never had been.
***
To my surprise, Mom had changed the deed to the house. She’d scrubbed Dad’s name from the records and put mine on.
“Well,” my sister said when I explained what I’d found at the County Records office. “That’s a twist.”
“Are you mad?”
“Why would I be?”
“Well. Don’t you think you should be on it?”
There was a long pause on the phone before she said, “I’ve never really felt attached to that place.”
“But the money. From selling it.”
“You wouldn’t share?”
“Of course I would.”
“Then why bring it up?”
“I meant. What if I didn’t want to sell?”
“Oh. Right.”
Her attitude didn’t surprise me. My sister, who had not come back to Surfside after college even though the town was quiet and safe and the ocean was right there, only blocks away, thought that anywhere that wasn’t here was just as, if not more, paradisiacal, even if she hadn’t any reason to believe that. Yet she did, which is why she’d stayed in Columbia and found some kind of unexciting administrative assistant job at the university.
“I don’t think I’d want to leave,” I said. “I like it here.”
“What’s there for you that you can’t find somewhere else?”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that except, “What’s to be found somewhere else that I can’t find here?”
“Sassy,” my sister said. “But fair.”
“So you don’t mind?”
“Don’t mind what?”
“That I want to stay?”
She sighed. “I’ve always wanted you to have whatever you want. I’m not like her in that regard.” I almost told my sister she was being maternal, but didn’t, because I didn’t want her to hang up, and I knew that’s exactly what me saying so would make her do.
***
The houses were bought up in reverse order. First, someone paid a company to clear away the tree in the back, and then they even put up a nice new wooden fence the color of fresh red bricks. A few weeks later, I saw flashes of people moving about inside. The new owners set up a huge patio umbrella in the back and strung fairy lights along the awning over their porch that they turned on whenever they ate outside. Roofers woke me early in the morning as they repaired the Petrarch place. The Beaudreaux yard was hacked away at and landscaped back to beauty. The FOR SALE sign on the Tenner place finally did get that UNDER CONTRACT slapped over its front.
“I guess she’s really not coming back,” I said.
“Yes,” my sister said. We were standing on the front porch, watching movers unload boxes, drinking beers. Neither of us suggested we go offer our help; the men were muscle-bound, professional-looking, sweaty and fast. “A nice view,” my sister had said.
“I don’t really understand it,” I said. “She left, and now people are coming back?”
“New people. There’s no real ‘back’ to it.”
“Still. I don’t get it.”
My sister shrugged and finished her beer, pinching the can into a fat hourglass shape. She set it down on the porch rail. “I wouldn’t think about it too much.”
“Easier said than done.”
“I want to show you something.”
“Okay.”
She jingled her car keys. We navigated the clogged street, scraping past the moving truck right as the new owners of the Tenner place pulled into their driveway. I glanced back: two tall, sun-blistered men emerged from the front of the car, a brown-eyed girl in a pink dress from the back.
“Cute,” my sister said.
She drove us across town to the teen streets by Dogwood Lake and I understood where we were headed. Despite its proximity and my own abandonment, I still hadn’t gone back to that first abandonment we ever encountered. Strange, I thought, the way close and far can be so muddied. My sister pulled up to the curb and said nothing as I looked around: all of the houses that had fallen into disrepair years ago were now pristine, renovated from head to toe with fresh columns and awnings, pinned-back shutters, smooth walkways and drives. Topiary and garden beds were clean and abundant. Enough time had passed, of course, for this to have happened for any number of reasons. Still, I understood.
“You’ve been by here,” I said.
“A few times.”
I looked at my sister. “Invested in our home town’s well-being?”
She chuckled. “Something like that.” Then she grew somber and said, “I need to tell you something.”
What she needed to tell me was that she was going to pack up her things and leave South Carolina in three weeks; she’d found a new job in New England, in a sleepy town in western Massachusetts, doing something for a small liberal arts college there four days a week at their art gallery. She couldn’t look at me as she confessed, and I couldn’t look at her, either.
I knew, then, that Mom would never come back, though I didn’t know that I’d never hear from her except for one time, a postcard, the postmark too smeary for me to make out—it might have been New Mexico—with a single sentence in her flourishing, familiar handwriting: Be well~. I didn’t know that I would stick it on the refrigerator door and look at it every time I went to grab the water pitcher or to chop vegetables. I didn’t know then that I would befriend the men who had bought the Tenner place, or that I would fall in love with the man who took over the Petrarch house. I did not know that I would eventually move in with him, a leap that felt equally short and long. I didn’t know that I would thus abandon my home despite what I told myself as my sister pulled away from the Dogwood Lake house and drove me back: that I would stick with it. That I would be the one.
To prove to my sister that I wasn’t angry at her, I insisted on cooking that night, a lasagna I made from scratch, a dish that was neither her favorite nor mine but Mom’s, a gesture that she didn’t comment on but we both understood. We sat down together, the pasta steaming, the sauce thick and rich and garlicky, and ate in silence. My sister nodded after her first bite, swallowed, and said, “I guess I get it,” and said nothing more. I didn’t ask. I simply let the words settle there, into the grain of the table, the slats of the floor, let them seep into the house, a permanent fixture.
Joe Baumann is the author of five collections of short fiction, most recently Tell Me, from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.