Checking In

Here's an excerpt from a collection of stories set in a tiny midwestern farm town like the one my mother grew up in. It's a place where everyone knows everyone else's business, but where they also take looking after one another very seriously.

I picked my way through the weeds around the side of John and Mary Beth’s house and up the stairs to the back porch, being careful not to trip and fall. At my age a fall can turn your life around, and I wasn’t ready to head in that direction.

I still thought of it as John and Mary Beth’s house, even though Mary Beth left this world over a year ago. It was on a Monday in that steaming July heat wave, when no one could catch a breath. That’s when Mary Beth took an iced tea and her Country Woman magazine out to the screened-in summerhouse, sat down on the glider and died. Just like that. Only the day before she’d been the picture of health, serving up her fried chicken and mashed potatoes to us all for Sunday dinner. Oh, happy days gone by, as my mother used to say.

After the viewing, the funeral service, the burial and the reception at the First Christian Church, and after the family and closest friends had left John and Mary Beth’s house, Fanny and I washed up the dishes, put away the casseroles and wiped off the counters. John had retreated to the coolness of the basement by the time Fanny and I hollered our goodbyes.

Problem was, he was still there. All this time later he was still holed up away from life. Little by little John set up housekeeping in the cellar. First he moved a sofa and TV down there. Then a hot plate so he could warm up some Campbell’s chicken noodle or cream of tomato. He already had a second refrigerator, where he kept his supply of Imperial margarine, the stick kind, not the tub. Row after row of Imperial one-pound boxes were stacked up ‘til there wasn’t room for anything else. The man loved his margarine. And his Wonder Bread, slathered with Imperial and Mary Beth’s homemade peach preserves.

If John Reynolds ate anything else since Mary Beth passed, it most likely came from me or Fanny. We felt as if it was up to us to make sure he was getting some nourishment and making it through okay. We owed it to Mary Beth, her having been taken away so sudden-like, to look after the one she left behind. Now it was all up to me to tend to John, what with Fanny coming down with the Alzheimer’s two months ago and having to go into the nursing home.

So here I was again, knocking on the back screen door, checking in. I could hear the TV blaring up from the basement, so I yelled my greeting a little louder than normal.

“YOO HOO. John, are you down there? It’s me, Gertie. YOO HOO.”

All I heard was explosions and gunfire. John was watching that war movie on the VCR again. How could a person watch the same war over and over as if it were new every time? I know for a fact it used to drive Mary Beth crazy. I yelled into the house a little louder.

“John? I’m going up to the Wal-Mart in Salem and I thought you might want to go along. John?”

More gunfire, more explosions answered me. I almost gave up and let him be, but the stairs to the basement were right across from the back door, and I caught a glimpse of him climbing the stairs, first his gray wispy hair, then his pale face, then his dull white T-shirt and jeans. He wore his usual scowl.

“I heard ya,” he grumbled. “Where’d ya say you were headed?”

“Over to the Wal-Mart. Would you like to keep me company? I could use the company.” This might have been a lie, as I wasn’t so sure I wanted him tagging along. But I was on a mission to get John Reynolds out of the house, and I was starting to feel the tug of Mary Beth from beyond the grave to set her husband straight.

“Well, I’ve got my show to watch, don’t ya know,” John said, studying his dark blue corduroy slippers. “It’s just gettin’ to the good part.”

“How many times you watched that movie?” I asked him.

“Dunno,” he said without looking up.

He was ashamed, I thought. Ashamed of hiding away in the basement. Ashamed of not living his life. Well, he should be ashamed. I’d been checking in on John Reynolds for over a year now, and I never got him farther than the back porch. He ate my beef stew and he ate my cherry pie and he asked me to get his darned sticks of Imperial margarine and Wonder Bread, which I did gladly. But I couldn’t get John out of the house and back into a real life to save my soul. I’d about had enough.

“Well, I think you know that movie by heart by now,” I said, “and I think it’ll be the same the next fifty-two times you watch it, and I think you should get up out of that basement and get some sun on that pasty skin of yours!”

I was so worked up I surprised myself. My heart pounded. I felt my eyes well up, but fought back the tears. What would Mary Beth think? How could I ever face my friend in the next world if I didn’t get her husband back on track in this one? I stared a hole through the screen door at that man.

John raised his eyes from the ground and looked around the kitchen before he looked at me, then past me toward the summerhouse. His jaw was set tight and I thought he was going to explode like one of the bombs in his movie. But his eyes told a different story. There was a struggle there I hadn’t ever seen in John before, and I started to feel like I’d overstepped my bounds, being so firm with him.

“Mary Beth’s peach preserves are gone,” he said. “I suppose I need some more preserves.”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose you do.”

He stood there like a statue, staring at the summerhouse, then at me, like he was seeing me for the first time.

“Well, are you comin’?” I said, holding my breath. “Time’s a wasting’”

He held my gaze for a long time, and then looked down at his slippers.

“I guess I should put some hard soles on,” he said softly.

He turned away, disappeared down the hallway and came back with his boots. He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, sat down and slowly laced up his boots. He grabbed his John Deere hat from the wall hook, took a deep breath and looked up at me, standing just beyond the screen door.

“Well, what are ya waitin’ for? Let’s go if we’re goin’,” he said.

And John Reynolds finally opened up the screen door and stepped out into the light of day.

Copyright Liz Zuercher 2011