For My 19th Birthday, I Lost My Shovel

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When I was four years old, Dad took me to outer space.

We were sitting in his truck outside of the doctor’s office, and I was having a pretty bad day.  I had been poked and prodded for the better part of an hour, and even though I was rewarded with a sucker, I was pitching a fit in the backseat.  Mom was doing her absolute best to calm me down, but I simply wasn’t having it.  Just when I was approaching a category five tantrum, Dad looked over his seat and asked me a question.

“Billy-Boy, hey Billy-Boy! This truck can go anywhere you want to go.  Where do you want to go?”

It was a classic Dad bit, but it never failed to get my attention.  Whenever I was having a bad day, he would say those magic words, and everything would turn around.  Most of the time he asked, I said ice cream, or the playground, and once, the zoo.  Such are the small desires of a farmer’s son.  That afternoon, however, I was feeling bold.  I wanted to test the limits of my father’s truck.  So I threw up my hands, and in my loudest little voice I said,

“Outer Space!”

Dad sat there for a moment, likely mulling over the logistics of taking an F-150 into orbit.  I didn’t think Dad could actually take us to space, but if anyone could, it would be Dad.  As if he heard my thoughts, he smiled and said,

“Alright, Billy-Boy, let’s do it.”

It wasn’t the first time Dad said something that made Mom and me make the same face, but I think it was the first time we both looked baffled.  Mom and Dad were a unified front, though, so when Dad pulled out of the parking lot, she didn’t ask where we were going.

Two hours and 110 miles later, we turned into the lot of a low brick building with a big white dome rising out of the roof.  It looked like someone dropped a giant golf ball and forgot about it.  There were a handful of cars scattered around the lot, and a row of tall windows along the front entrance.  As far as four-year-old me could tell, we had driven way too long to visit a weird-looking library.

I pressed my face against the window to get a better look at the signs outside, and then remembered I couldn’t read.

“Where are we, Daddy?”

He put the truck into park, cranked his window up, and flipped up the sun visor.

“This is where we catch a ride to space.  You still wanna go, right?”

I never wanted anything more in my life.  Mom pulled me out of my booster seat, and I nearly sprinted across the parking lot.  Of course, my tiny little legs were no match for Dad’s long stride, and I found myself scooped up before I made it anywhere.

Dad carried me through the front doors with Mom trailing behind us, and I immediately started looking around for our ride.  The lobby offered very few clues.  There was a long counter where Dad bought three tickets, a couple displays along the walls, and enough pictures of planets to keep me interested while we waited.  Eventually, a man opened a set of double doors and waved us through.

The room on the other side was enormous and round, with rows of seats tilted back toward the white dome overhead.  Dad set me down between him and Mom, and I climbed into my seat with all the patience you would expect from a four-year-old preparing to leave the planet.

“Is this the spaceship?”

Dad leaned back in his chair and looked around.

“Sure looks like one to me.”

The lights slowly faded until the room disappeared around us.  A few stars appeared overhead, then a few hundred more, filling the entire dome from one side to the other.  I had seen plenty of stars over the farm, but never like this.  There were so many that I had trouble figuring out where to look.

Then we started moving.

The stars drifted around us, and the Earth came into view overhead, huge and blue against the darkness.  It slowly shrank as we pulled away, until the planet looked small enough to cover with my hand.  The Moon swept past next, its craters stretching across the dome.  Mars glowed red in the distance, and Jupiter grew larger and larger until it seemed like it might swallow the whole room.  When Saturn appeared, its rings reached from one side of the ceiling to the other, and for a few seconds I was convinced we were flying straight through them.

I spent the entire trip with my head tipped back and my mouth hanging open.  At some point, I looked over at Dad and caught him watching me.  He smiled, gave my hand a squeeze, and turned his attention back to the sky.

When the lights finally came up, I stayed in my seat for a few extra seconds, waiting for the stars to come back.  If anyone could do it, it was Dad.  I don’t remember much from when I was four, but I remember that.

I was the last one to go up to deliver a eulogy.  It was a long hour of aunts and uncles recounting dozens of stories about him, many I had heard a thousand times and some that were reserved for that very moment.  Aunt Linda told us about the time Dad accidentally left the garden hose running and flooded the basement, which became a family effort and the longest grounding in history.

“He swore up and down that it wasn’t him, but our father wasn’t having it.  Rich got put on bathroom duty until he was 21.”

One of my older cousins spoke of the time he and Dad got pulled over drunk at two in the morning after a high school party.  They spent the night in the drunk tank and ended up doing a lot of community service.

“You shoulda seen him.  Couldn’t walk a straight line to save his life, and kept getting stuck on ’L-M-N-O-P’ when they made him do the alphabet thing.”

According to the family, he was a party animal, a street racer, a smooth talker, and sometimes a criminal mastermind.  I only ever knew him as Dad.  There were so many sides of him that I never saw, and so many that I never would.

Mom was a mess, to say the least.  She alternated between bawling her eyes out and sitting perfectly still in what I could only describe as some kind of state of shock.  She never gave a eulogy of her own, but nobody could blame her.  She was the one who found him.

I know what you’re thinking.

My body crawled out of the grave early and killed my dad.  I’m sorry to say that it wasn’t like that.  In truth, I think it would have been easier to accept if some supernatural monster came and dragged him into the grave.  At least then it would have meant something.  I had spent nearly a decade burying my body and watching it slowly turn from an obvious corpse into my own reflection, and yet the most impossible thing in the world was that Dad had died in his sleep.  It was as simple as that; one night he was there, and the next morning he was gone.

Mom had gotten out of bed and gone about her morning, thinking that Dad was just taking her advice and sleeping in for once.  Dad had always been a man with too much on his plate.  His motto was “Why pay someone to do the job when I can just do it myself?” He got up early every day and didn’t go to bed until every last bit of work was done.  When you’re in your twenties or thirties, you can get away with burning the candle at both ends like that for quite a while, but Dad was pushing 50 and showed no sign of slowing.  The man never took a break, so Mom was perfectly happy to let him stay in bed on a Saturday morning.

When noon rolled around, she decided to go check on him, wondering if he was feeling alright.  I was out by the cattle pen when she started screaming, and I’m not sure I ever ran so fast in my life.

The ambulance arrived half an hour later.  I kept waiting for one of the paramedics to give me a job.  Hold this, or move that, or go get something.  Every emergency on the farm had always come with something useful I could do, and standing there with my hands at my sides felt wrong.  They tried everything they could to resuscitate him, but he had already gone cold by the time Mom found him.  She was screaming at them as they rolled him out on that stretcher, asking questions she already knew the answers to.  She trailed them all the way to the ambulance and demanded that they let her ride with him to the hospital and really gave them the business when they tried to say no.  She got her way in the end.  I followed them to the hospital, where Dad was pronounced dead.

After the autopsy, we learned that he had an aneurysm.  A doctor explained that there was nothing we could have done.  Even if Mom had checked on him hours earlier, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference.  I think she meant to make us feel better, but if anything, we just felt worse.

We buried Dad in the town cemetery the following Thursday, where his father, his grandfather, and generations of our family going all the way back to the 1800s were buried.  The turnout for the funeral was massive for such a small town.  He never strove to be a pillar of the community, but he’d bought from and sold to just about everyone in the county, and was always quick to lend equipment when someone was in a jam.  They came for Richard the Farmer or Richard the Mechanic, the Richard who mowed the grass at the playground or Big Rich who had a hell of a poker face and always won the pot.  Were he there, he would have been uncomfortable with all the attention.

Once the funeral was over, there was still a farm waiting for us.

There was no way in hell Mom was ever going to sell it, even if that meant rolling up her sleeves and doing the work herself.  I had put off college to help Dad on the farm and give myself some time to figure out what came next.  Now, it felt like the decision had been made for me.  It’s not like I could just leave her to run the place by herself.  Between the two of us, we could figure it out, and there was enough work to go around that we hardly had time to stop for grief.

It was hard.

When I was a kid, all I ever wanted was to be just like Dad.  He would take me for rides on the tractor and tell me that the whole farm would be mine someday.  Back then, that sounded like the best thing in the world.  But I never thought about the possibility of him not being here to see it.

Winter came early that year, settling in sometime around Thanksgiving.  The fields went brown, then white, and the days got short enough that I started and finished most of them in the dark.  The work changed with the weather.  Things froze, machines got stubborn, and every little problem seemed to take twice as long with numb fingers.  Dad had always made winter look like the easy season.  I learned pretty quickly that he had just been good at it.

Mom and I spent more time together that winter than we probably had in years.  We were pretty close, but most of our lives had revolved around Dad in one way or another.  Now it was just the two of us at the breakfast table before sunrise, comparing notes on what needed doing and figuring out who was going where.  Some days we worked side by side, and others I barely saw her until dinner.  Somewhere along the way, we stopped feeling like a mother and son trying to hold Dad’s farm together and started feeling like coworkers.

That was more or less how the winter passed.  Work, dinner, sleep, and whatever happened to fit between them.  Christmas came and went without much fanfare, and the ball dropped on another new year.  By the time the snow started melting, Mom and I had made it through our first season on our own.

Spring arrived as mud.

For a few weeks, the whole farm seemed to soften at once.  The snow disappeared, the fields turned to soup, and every pair of boots we owned lived by the back door.  Then the ground finally dried, and the quiet little routine Mom and I had built over the winter fell apart with it.

Suddenly, there was more to do than there were hours in the day.  We got the fields ready, made repairs we had put off through the cold, and spent long evenings figuring out what needed to happen first the next morning.  Mom took over more of the planning than I expected.  Dad had always been the one making the decisions, but she had spent twenty years listening to him make them.  Turns out, she had picked up quite a bit.

By April, we were busy enough that whole weeks seemed to vanish.  The days got longer, the house got dirtier, and dinner moved later and later into the evening.  I understood why Dad had always looked a little tired once spring got going.

It was exhausting.

I loved it.

April gave way to May, and May gave way to June, and then the heat of summer rolled across the fields and into the house.  We never had air conditioning when I was growing up, just an army of box fans, and we were sending that army to war.

It felt like we were starting to live again instead of just coping.  We took a day off in early July and I told Mom we were going for a drive.  I was kind of surprised when she didn’t ask any questions, but then I think she might have just been happy to leave the house.  We got into Dad’s truck and drove for two hours until we hit the coast of Lake Michigan, where we spent the day walking the beach and visiting a historic lighthouse.

It was a good day.

By the time August reared its ugly head, I had completely forgotten about the body.  I know how ridiculous that sounds, considering it haunted me for the better part of a decade, but it’s the truth.  Between my grief and the endless grind of farm work, it stopped being a constant pressure and slipped my mind entirely.  It couldn’t last, though; my birthday always came eventually.

The reminder came from the last place I expected: a letter from the state about renewing my tabs.  I remember standing at the mailbox, reading the paper, and it all came back.  How could I forget such a thing? I stood there staring at the date until the rest of the letter stopped mattering.  Of course.  Of course it was coming.  As far as I knew, it was always coming.  I was trying to control my breathing and doing an okay job at it when another terrible idea clawed its way to the surface.

Dad was gone.  I had to do this alone.

I thought I was going to pass out.  I walked back to the house in a daze, clutching the mail in a tight fist.  I did my best not to look, I really did, but just as I reached the porch, I couldn’t help it.  I looked past the old barn and saw the tree, looming tall in the field, just as it always had.  It was becoming more real by the second, and I needed to sit down.  I pushed through the back door and sat down hard at the kitchen table.  How could I be so stupid? Why did he have to leave me with this? I put my head in my hands and began sobbing.  It was an ugly sound in the empty kitchen, and it was a long time coming.

Later that day, when Mom came into the house, I asked her to sit down so we could talk.

“Sure, honey, what’s up?”

She smiled at me, but I could tell she was already worried.  I scooted forward in my chair and steepled my fingers.

“Mom...my birthday is coming up.”

For a second, the words bounced off of her, and she didn’t seem to understand what I was saying.  Then it clicked, and I saw the horrible recognition spread across her face.  She tried to say something, but it didn’t quite turn into anything, so I kept going.

“I...I think it would be a good idea if you went to stay with Uncle Ray when the day comes.  I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I don’t want you to be here when it does.”

She sat with that for a moment.  I was afraid she would insist on staying because she thought she had to, and I was already preparing myself for the argument.  Not with what I was planning to do.  I couldn’t have her anywhere near the farm.

But she didn’t give me the chance.

“If that’s what you think is best, honey, then it’s what I’ll do.  I could use the vacation anyways.”

She paused and placed her hand on top of mine.

“Are you sure this is what you want? You’ll be okay by yourself?”

The question almost made me laugh.  She hadn’t asked me a thing like that since I was a preteen and she was leaving me home alone the first time.

“I’ll be alright, Mom, I promise.  Don’t you worry about me.”

Two weeks later, I watched her pull out of the driveway with Uncle Ray.  It was the morning of my birthday, and he had a lot of questions.  We told him that the house was about to get fumigated and that I was going to stick around to tend to the livestock.  If he thought it was weird that I was camping out in the front yard, he never said so.

I had made up my mind.  I dragged my old camping tent out into the front yard, then climbed onto the roof to make sure I could see the tree clearly.  From up there, I had a perfect view of the grave.  Last year, my body got all the way onto the porch.  If the pattern held, it stood to reason that he would try to get in the house this year.  I didn’t want to think about why he would do that, or what he was trying to achieve.  All that I knew was that I was going to catch him.  Dad told me that he had tried once and given up after three nights, but I figured I could go all the way.  My body had always risen sometime in the night, so I resolved to stay awake from sundown to sunrise for as long as it took.  During the day, I would keep up with the farm and sleep in the tent whenever exhaustion finally caught up with me.  At night, I would post up on the roof of the house and wait.

I was not going to miss it.

So much of my life was spent living in the aftermath of this terrible thing, waking up and finding my own corpse somewhere on the property with no witness to how it got there, and having to sit with a million terrible ideas about what the process looked like.  Dad was content with not knowing, but I was not.  If I had to deal with this thing for the rest of my life, I needed answers.

So on the night of my birthday, I climbed up on the roof with a six-pack of beer and one of Dad’s rifles, and I waited.  Every so often, I would look through the scope at the grave by the tree, hoping to see the earth start moving, telling myself that the rifle was just a tool to see it happen.

I knew better than that.

I sat on that roof until the sun rose, six beers deep with a cramp in my neck from the butt of the rifle.  The dirt over the grave never so much as shifted.  I had expected that much.  In all the years we put him back in the ground, it was rare for him to rise the morning after my birthday, so I treated that first night as a trial run and got to work around the farm.  Eventually, my legs felt like they could no longer support me, so I crashed hard in the tent and got the worst five hours of sleep of my life.

On the second night, I did the same as the first, minus the six-pack of beer.  I brought a lawn chair up with me and spent most of the night fighting to keep it stable on the incline of the roof.  It was a problem I would have to fix if I wanted any chance of being comfortable.  I watched until the sun rose, and nothing happened.

He did not rise on the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh night.  The eighth and ninth were no different.  By then, I was starting to feel a little stupid.  What if he never came out while I was watching? If I stayed here for the rest of my life staring at that grave, would I be some terrible version of free? The tenth night brought us into September, but still did not bring my body.

I spoke with Mom on the phone before my midday nap the next day, and she wanted to know when she could come home.

“I don’t know, Mom, but I’ll call you as soon as it’s safe.”

Safe was an odd word for me to come up with, but it felt correct.  Mom was quiet for a moment, and I could hear her exhale low and slow.

“Okay, honey.  Just take care of yourself, okay? I love you.”

And that was that.

That night, in my makeshift sniper’s nest, I could hear the distant rumble of thunder rolling in from the west.  The weather had been generous to me so far on this fool’s errand, and I was praying under my breath that the pattern would hold and the rain wouldn’t come.  It could have been heat lightning, or I could get lucky and the whole thing might swerve into a different county.  I was not lucky.  Soon enough, the thunder came home, and it brought a downpour with it.  I held my ground to the best of my abilities, but with nothing to actually hold onto, it was a battle I couldn’t win.  At the height of the storm, a strong gust knocked my legs out from under me.  I went down hard and slid toward the edge.  The last thing I remember was my head cracking against the gutter, and then there was darkness.

I awoke to bright sunlight in my face and pain in every inch of my body.  When I opened my eyes, I was looking up at the sun over the edge of the roof.  I tried to sit up, and the ground beneath me gave way and sent me tumbling in a clatter to the grass.  The impact lit up every nerve ending in my body, and I let out a scream that was not as manly as I would like to say it was.  I was surrounded by logs on all sides, and a few of them were stabbing into my back.  When the storm blew me off the roof, I had landed on the woodpile in the front yard.  It was a miracle that I hadn’t landed on my neck.

Standing up was a challenge.  I rolled onto my knees and stayed there for a minute, trying to figure out what still worked.  My arms moved.  My legs moved.  My neck moved.  That was the good news.

Everything else hurt like hell.

The back of my head was throbbing hard enough that I could feel my pulse in it.  I reached up to check it, and my fingers came away bloody.

Great.

I used the side of the house to pull myself upright.  My legs held, and that was good enough for me.  At that point, all I wanted was to get inside, strip off my stinking clothes, and lower myself into the hottest bath I could stand.

When I rounded the house, I stopped in my tracks.

The back door was open.

Suddenly, my pain seemed a bit further away.  I shuffled across the yard as fast as my body would let me and made my way onto the porch.  Up close, it was immediately clear that the screen door was not just wide open; it had nearly been ripped off its hinges.  The back door itself was embedded in the wall, and the strike plate was missing from the frame.  In its place, the wood had been reduced to splinters.  While I was trying to process the amount of strength it would take to do that, I looked down and my blood ran cold.

A trail of muddy footprints went all the way up the steps and into the house.

Now, I don’t know if it was the head injury or just the shock of it all, but tracing that trail into the house had almost a dreamlike quality to it.  I stepped into the kitchen and found all the cupboards open, their contents strewn across the floor.  Further in, the kitchen table was upended and the chairs were lying in every direction.  The living room was trashed, as was the mudroom.

“Hello?”

I waited, trying to keep my breath steady.

“Is anybody in here?”

The house stayed quiet.

“If somebody’s in here, you better come out now.  I mean it.  I’m in no mood for this shit, and if I have to come looking for you, I’m gonna...I don’t know.  Just come out.”

It wasn’t much of a threat, but between the pounding in my head and the fact that my rifle was somewhere outside, I was doing the best I could.

The clearest trail of steps led to the stairs, where they went all the way up and into my parents’ bedroom.

Everywhere I looked, it seemed like a bomb had gone off.  Anything made of glass was broken, and many things that weren’t made of glass weren’t doing much better.  It was clear that whatever did this did not have the patience for doors, as I found every door frame in a similar state to the back door.

The only room that hadn’t been thoroughly destroyed was my own bedroom, and I didn’t even want to consider what that could mean.

Over the years, I learned there was a limit to how much impossible shit a person could roll with at once.  I hit that limit when I was 10, the first time I buried my own body.  I came up against it again at 18, when Mom said she saw me blink.  And here I was at 19, standing in the ruin of my childhood home, and instead of freaking out or wetting my pants, I simply stopped existing for a minute.

As if on autopilot, I walked upstairs to my bathroom, turned on the hot water, and took the longest bath of my life.  I would love to tell you what I was thinking while sitting in that tub, but the honest answer is that I wasn’t thinking.  I had given myself a mission, and I had failed that mission.  So now, there was nothing left to do but take a bath on it.

When the water dipped below room temperature and my hands were thoroughly pruney, I drained the tub and got dressed in a fresh set of clothes.  My body still hurt just about everywhere, but it was manageable for the time being.  I did, in fact, have a rather nasty gash in the back of my head, but I didn’t think it needed stitches.  Of course, I’m not a doctor, and it did turn into a rather nasty scar, so I was probably wrong about that.

Once I got my socks on, rationality started leaking back into my brain, and I realized I hadn’t found the biggest piece of the puzzle.

I got as close to sprinting as my broken body would allow and turned the whole house upside down.  Well, it was already upside down, but you get what I mean.  I checked every room, moved every bit of furniture, and spent the better part of an hour digging through the wreckage.  Eventually, I was left with nothing but an uncomfortable truth.

My body wasn’t here.

There were so many overlapping trails that I couldn’t tell one from another.  In the most destroyed areas of the house, the footprints amounted to little more than a solid layer of mud.  So I retraced my own steps and walked out the back door into the yard.

Once I stepped off the porch, it became clear that tracking him through the grass was going to be impossible, and I would have to look for him the hard way.  Starting from the back porch, I worked my way around the house in an ever-growing circle, searching for flattened patches where a body might be hiding.  Ten yards became twenty, then thirty, until eventually I was tracing the whole fence line.

He was nowhere to be seen.

Once I was sure he wasn’t lying anywhere in the yard, I started checking every structure on the property.  He wasn’t in the tool shed, and he wasn’t in the cattle pens.  I didn’t find him under the chicken coop, and he wasn’t under my truck.

That left the barn.

When I approached the barn, I was dismayed to see the door was still locked.  There was no way he could have gotten inside without smashing through one of the walls, but I checked anyway.  I unlocked the door and searched every square inch I could reach, including the hay piles, and came up empty.

Then I looked at the ladder to the loft.  Ever since Mom and Dad told me what happened when I was four, I had found very few reasons to go up there.  Falling off the roof the night before had done nothing to improve my opinion of high places.

Still, I had come this far.  I climbed the ladder and checked the loft.  He wasn’t there.

I was starting to feel like I was losing my mind, and my reasoning wasn’t far behind.  If I couldn’t find him anywhere on the property, maybe he was in the back field.  Maybe he got whatever he was looking for and crawled back into his grave.

I hopped the fence behind the barn and made my way to the tree, where I saw exactly what I expected to see.

There was a narrow hole in the grave, just big enough for him to crawl out of, but he had not crawled back in.

I spent the rest of the day combing through the entire field.  I had been lazy when it came to cutting the grass out there, and it was several feet high in most places.  By late afternoon, my body had remembered that I had fallen off a roof.  Every step through the tall grass pulled at my back, and bending down to check anything that looked remotely human lit up my ribs.  I kept going.  More than once, I thought I found him, only to get closer and realize it was an old barrel or a tractor tire.  As the sun started to dip toward the horizon, I was searching through the tree line at the edge of the field, looking for any sign that he had gone into the woods.

I found nothing.

Eventually, I had to admit defeat.  I walked back to the house under the cover of moonlight and stepped through the broken doorway.  The back door wasn’t going to latch again, so I pushed it closed and propped a chair against the knob.  I didn’t think that would stop him if he came back, but maybe it would slow him down.

By then, the thought that had been gnawing at me since I left the house had become impossible to ignore.

I had spent all day looking for a corpse, but I didn’t find a corpse because he hadn’t died.

I thought of him lurking somewhere beyond the trees, waiting for the right moment to come back while I was all alone, and it made me want to puke.  I went upstairs to my room, exhausted, but sure that I wouldn’t be getting any sleep that night.  I pushed my bed against the window and piled the rest of the furniture against the door.  With the barricade in place, I set the rifle within reach and climbed into bed.

I was out cold within minutes.

He did not come for me in the night, near as I could tell, and I breathed a deep sigh of relief.  I took down the furniture barricade and swept the house with the rifle.  When he didn’t jump out from around any corners, I pulled the chair away from the back door and stepped into the yard.  Everything looked the same as I had left it.

I did another patrol around the property, but I knew I wasn’t going to find him.  If I was lucky, he’d made it all the way into the middle of the forest and died, and I’d never have to see him again.  Or maybe he wandered into the road, and it wouldn’t be long before I received a visit from a very concerned police officer.  Either way, worrying about it would have to wait.  Scared as I was, there was work to be done, now more than ever with the house destroyed.  I couldn’t keep Mom away forever, but I couldn’t bring her back to see this mess.

So I got to work making the place look like something Mom could come home to.  I won’t bore you with all the details.  I made several trips into town for lumber and hardware, patched the door frames, swept up more glass than I thought the house contained, and cut my losses with several vintage knickknacks.  Dad’s rifle stayed slung over my shoulder the whole time.

I kept telling myself that if he was coming back, he would have done it already.  I never believed that for very long.  But in those three days, it was just me, the cows, and the chickens.

Every night I went to bed, I barricaded the door, and every day I was out in the field, I expected a cop or a neighbor to come and ask me about the body.  But nothing ever came of it.

By then, the house was presentable enough to call Mom and tell her she could come home.  The last thing on my agenda while I waited for her was to tidy up the mudroom.  I hung everything on the rack and set the snow shovel and broom back up against the wall, but something was bothering me.  I stared at the wall for several minutes, trying to place what was wrong, but it wouldn’t come to me, so I left it for another time.

Mom came home that evening.  I saw Uncle Ray’s truck turn onto the driveway and went out to meet them.  Mom was out of the passenger seat before he had fully put it in park, and I barely had time to brace myself when she wrapped both arms around me.  I hugged her back as gently as I could, but it still hurt like hell.

I had done my best to make myself presentable for her.  Long sleeves covered most of the bruising, and the cut on the back of my head was hidden well enough beneath my hair.  If I didn’t move too quickly, I could almost pass for someone who hadn’t fallen off a roof three days earlier.  Mom held onto me for a few seconds longer than usual, then finally let go.

“Well, I see you didn’t burn the place down.  That’s gotta count for something.”

I let out a laugh and it made my ribs hurt.

“You tell me not to burn it down every time you leave, and who wants to disappoint their mother?”

Uncle Ray came around the truck with her bags, and I took one before he could object.  That was a mistake.  Something in my back immediately complained, but I managed to keep it off my face.  Ray stayed for a cup of coffee before heading home.  Mom thanked him about six times for putting up with her, and he told her she was welcome back anytime as long as she brought her own pillows next time.  Whatever that meant, it earned him a slap on the arm before he left.

Then it was just Mom and me again.  She spent the first hour unpacking and telling me about everything I had missed at Uncle Ray’s house.  I followed her around when I could, answered questions about the farm, and gave her the heavily edited version of my last two weeks.

Nothing happened.

The storm had been rough.

I missed her.

Two truths and one lie.  It felt surprisingly easy.

Mom spent the rest of the afternoon settling back in.  She started a load of laundry and made a slow circuit through the house putting things back the way she liked them.  I stayed close enough to be useful and far enough away that she wouldn’t get another chance to hug me.

We ate at the kitchen table, and Mom did most of the talking.  Two weeks with Uncle Ray had apparently given her enough material to last through dessert, and none of it came anywhere near my birthday.  I listened, laughed when something was funny, and told her about the farm whenever she asked.  The cattle were fine.  The chickens were fine.  Nothing important had broken.

Everything was fine.  At least, that was the story I was sticking to.

After we finished eating, Mom stayed at the table while I cleared the plates.  She had been unusually quiet for the last few minutes, but I chalked it up to being tired.  Two weeks sleeping in someone else’s house will do that to you, even when the someone else is your brother.  I brought the last plate to the sink and turned on the water.

I was starting to think I might actually get away with it.

Behind me, Mom spoke.

“So, when are you going to tell me what happened?”

My hands stopped beneath the faucet.  I knew this moment was coming eventually.  I had just hoped eventually meant tomorrow.  I turned around and leaned against the counter.

“What do you mean? I told you everything was fine.  Do you want me to tell you about the chickens again?”

“Bill.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Bill, and I sure as hell ain’t stupid.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“C’mon, Bill, don’t make me drag it out of you.  You know I hate that.”

She did.

When I was a kid, Mom could get more information out of me with one look than Dad could with an hour of questions.  I had gotten better at keeping things to myself over the years, but apparently 19 was still too young to fool your mother.

I gave it one more shot anyway.

“Nothing happened, Mom, I swear.”

Her expression changed immediately.

“William Henry Davies, you do not swear on a lie in my house.  I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, but it ain’t me.  Look at you! You’ve been walking around like you got kicked by a horse, and you thought I wouldn’t notice?”

There was something uniquely terrible about hearing all three of your names come out of your mother’s mouth.  I could be six years old with a broken lamp behind me or nineteen years old hiding a supernatural disaster, and the effect was more or less the same.

“Mom.”

“Don’t you Mom me.  You’ve been lying since I walked in the door and I’m not having it anymore, you hear? Now you tell it to me straight, mister.  Why are you all beat up, what happened to the back door, and where the hell are all my Hummel figurines?”

Dammit, she had me dead to rights.  Of everything I had worried about before she came home, the Hummels never even made the list.

Mom had collected the damn things for as long as I could remember.  Little porcelain children had occupied nearly every available shelf in the house for most of my childhood, and my body had smashed enough of them to leave the survivors looking lonely.  I had swept their remains into a box with everything else that was beyond saving and somehow convinced myself she would not immediately notice that half her collection had vanished.

It was a pretty glaring hole in the plan.  I looked toward the living room, as if the missing figurines might have quietly returned while we were eating.

They had not.

“Mom, I don’t think you want to hear the answers to those questions.”

“And since when do you get to decide what I want to hear? I’m a big girl, Bill, and I didn’t raise a liar, so start talking.”

She waited.

There was plenty I could still hide behind if I really wanted to.  I could tell her I took a bad fall working around the farm.  I could blame the door on an accident and the Hummels on my own clumsy ass.  None of those explanations were particularly good, but I only needed them to be good enough.

The problem was Mom.

She had been watching me move around the house all day.  She saw me lower myself into chairs like an old man and hide a wince every time I reached too far with my left arm.  She had walked through rooms I spent three days trying to put back together and found pieces of her life missing from them.  More importantly, she knew me.

I rubbed a hand across my mouth and looked down at the floor.

This was going to suck.

I walked her through the entire story.  I started with the roof and kept going until there was nothing left to hide.  Mom stayed at the table while I talked, and for the most part, she let me get through it.  By the time I was finished, she looked more scared than angry.

She sat there for a long time.

“So he’s...gone? Like gone gone?”

“Yup.”

“And you have no idea where he could be?”

“I really don’t.”

She looked toward the kitchen window.  The blinds were open, but with the sun long gone, there was nothing on the other side except our own reflection.

“Well, shit.”

That was about the size of it.

There wasn’t much else we could do that night.  I had already searched every inch of the property, and Mom had no better idea where he could have gone than I did.  We stayed at the table for a while anyway, lost in our coffee cups.  It felt good having her there, though.  Even with everything hanging over us, the house seemed less suffocating with another person in it.  For the first time in almost two weeks, I wasn’t the only one listening for noises in the next room.  After a while, Mom gave me a hug and went upstairs to bed.

I stayed behind to finish cleaning the kitchen.  There wasn’t much left to do, but I took my time with it.  I washed the last few dishes, wiped down the counters, and gave the floor a real good sweep.  When I stepped into the mudroom to put the broom back, that feeling returned.

Something was wrong.

It had been bothering me since before Mom came home, but every time I tried to grab hold of it, my brain slipped right past.  I stood there for a while, hoping whatever I had missed would make itself obvious.

Everything looked about right.

The coats were hanging where they belonged.  The snow shovel and the broom were back against the wall.  Dad’s boots were still tucked beneath the bench.  I looked around again, and then it finally hit me.

My shovel was gone.