Ghosting - Kirby Gann

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Cole stands and jangles his keys from a pocket and looks down at his mother on the step, her choppy, saloned hair exposing a little gray at the roots.

      “Guess I don’t know what to tell you.”

      “Tell me you got your brother’s back.”

      “Is he asking?”

      “He’s not here to ask. I am. I’m your mother and I am asking you. Make it right.”

      “Jesus, make what right?”

      Lyda doesn’t answer. She reaches forward, plucks dry petals from the hydrangea and grinds them into confetti falling brightly from her fingers.

      “Make what right, Lyda? Tell me, ’cause I don’t know.”

      “That man don’t own us. He might act like he does but he owes me, he owes me and he knows it.”

      Cole watches the show and refuses to be pulled in. His mother grinds her teeth and wires of muscle braid and weave along her jaw; she clamps shut her eyes, snaps them open, says in a rawboned, hard pioneer-type voice: “I don’t get out like I used to but I still hear what goes on out there—”

      “Maybe I should be asking you the questions. You know something I don’t, tell me. All I know’s Fleece aint around. That’s no different from life as I know it. What do you want me to do?”

      “You shouldn’t need me to tell you. You’re all grown up. You’ll do right.”

      She makes a display of relenting. She repeats to the grass edging the walk that she thought she raised her boys to know better. She pulls more dry petals from the hydrangea, grinding them in her fingers and catching the crumbs in her palm and staring at the pile as though a fortune could be divined there.

      “That boy just is as he does,” Cole says, and mother and son share nostalgic smiles at the line, a family saying coined by Lyda one night telling police at the door how sorry she was for what Fleece had done, twelve years old, brought home for egging the cop’s car miles away. I’m trying to raise him officer but the boy just is as he does, she had said.

      “You see your brother you tell him I want to talk to him. He don’t just take off on me like that.”

      From over one shoulder he tells her he will though he doesn’t expect gossip from Spackler’s horses, and this gets a laugh from Lyda. Sometimes—when he was much younger and when his mother had more energy and clarity—they used to take long walks through the woods, not quite losing themselves in its hidden cavities and hollows, occasionally happening upon a secluded sward of grass that appeared to have no reason to be empty of trees. They would circle Lake Holloway and his mother might step out of her shoes and roll up her cuffs to tramp into the sheltered corners overgrown with rushes and shush the croaking psalms chanted by frogs, where she might laugh like a woman without a care, striking out at the water’s surface with an elegantly curved foot, the ruby polish fresh on her nails. Once she had been a woman renowned for dancing on rooftops. So Cole had heard.

      He leaves her sitting on the two short steps to the little house, where dark green moss sprouts beneath curling shingles and the brick needs tuck-pointing in many places. She looks frail, barefoot in Fleece’s old high-school football jersey and baggy flannel pajama pants, a figure he feels sorry for as much as she enrages him—even, he would admit, disgusts him at times and on a variety of levels along some murky inner scale. He backs out the narrow gravel drive. His compassion turns to mild surprise as he sees too the figure of a man in the doorway behind her, Lyda half-turned and smiling as she mouths words, her posture suddenly charged, different, astounding Cole with her ability to still be charming and flirtatious as required.

      After the horses he hits Montreux. The city isn’t forty minutes away, and even though the counties are connected by interstate, rail, and road, the drive from Lake Holloway feels like a passage from one distinct time to another. Passing through the lake again his small truck thumps over a road that’s more pothole than pavement, passing swampy lawns, rust-streaked muscle cars on concrete blocks, an engine block that has dangled from its tree chain at least three weeks, houses walled in tar paper and concrete and asphalt shingles. A mile along 29 and a strip of shops appears on the right. He never has been able to figure the original purpose of the place, a series of small one-story structures connected in a line, each slightly taller than the next until the corner building, which is two stories. Like a square-moduled retractable telescope fully extended. The two-story used to be a garage and motor oil still stains the lot about it; now a man called Boonie Ed keeps a handful of jalopies there for sale. The other storefronts are inhabited on and off—nail salons and short-loan offices—but otherwise house “For Lease” signs with the name and phone number of the father of a kid Cole knew in grade school. A miscellany of shotgun churches with diverse long names bursts from the woody roadsides at uneven intervals. Then he hits the modern era of gas marts and fast-food hovels with NOW FRYING neon signs, and a small strip of upscale boutiques along Main Street in Renfro, where the rails still divide the road.

      Speed up the rising onramp and the landscape turns to Interstate Anyplace USA, Southeast version. Traffic increases the closer he gets to the city and the FM classic rock radio stations come in clearer and soon he’s passing identical suburban plans and waterfront and then the houses grow closer and begin to betray their ages. Cole enters downtown Montreux only as necessary—he doesn’t know the layout well, and the city center creeps him out a little because he knows, by his uncle, his father died here.

      The Spackler horses had been stubborn and slow and kind of mean when he turned them out and he’s late pulling in. Everyone’s standing by their trucks, eyeing him as they finish cigarettes.

      “Young men don’t care for Saturday work, do they?”

      Orval’s the oldest on the crew, older than Ron-Ron and ever ready to sass. His fine white hair is trimmed so short that his five-day beard wanders into it seamlessly, a soft white moss taking over his skull.

      “Nobody cares for Saturday work,” says his skinny companion, CD Cooter. “We like Saturday pay, though, aint that right Cole?”

      “Truth be told, I don’t even care for the pay that much,” Cole smiling at the banter, relieved they haven’t started the usual ride of him being the boss’s nephew. He’s the youngest of the regulars by almost half and his lack of skill outside of welding is evident and happily acknowledged. He wouldn’t be employed here if not for his status as family relation and though Orval in particular likes to tease him for that Cole can tell he doesn’t hold it against him, Orval himself once admitting a man can’t be held liable for the family he’s born to.

      He asks to bum a smoke but the old man shakes his head and starts in. “Boss is already in and we don’t need him to start handling that shit himself”—the joke being that his uncle has lost his touch with carpentry, better with the clipboard these days.

      It’s a job and Cole doesn’t really care that it’s Saturday, though he looks forward to the time when he will be welding exclusively and a master at it, unionized and career-bound. Ron-Ron finds him things to weld and farms Cole out for MIG welding when he can, but they have finished all opportunities here, an old firehouse they’ve renovated into a duplex. Mostly he’s been carrying greenboard and plasterboard and hauling debris. His uncle was there then not there, zipping off in his light Japanese truck—another instance of hilarity to the crew—from this job to another and then home again, a boss content to tour sites with sleeves rolled up and hands on hips as he argues sports and politics with radio hosts on the small transistor dangling from his belt. He rarely pays much attention to Cole onsite and today’s no different, Cole ducking his boss for fear his cousin Sheldon (Ron-Ron’s son) had complained about money Cole owes. But his uncle says nothing about it, and he imagines Sheldon, supposedly a college student, doesn’t want his father asking where he found three hundred dollars to lend toward Cole’s scuba training. Cole needs the license to meet his goal of attending a commercial diving school. Swimming with fins is the one thing he’s found where his locked knee is a help and not

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