handshake to half-hug.
Lilly pointed to the muddied floor. “Boots. Boots!”
“Yeah, yeah.” He hopped back to the enclosed porch, peeled off his crusty steel-toes. “These ladies and their floors.”
Olmstead followed him, looking through the screen door for his brother. “Where’s Wayne?”
“He’s fixing some girl’s fence next door.” Devon jerked a thumb at the trailer park, pushed a length of dull, thin hair from his face. He was lean and dirty, his skin permanently grubby from the mines so that even straight from the shower he appeared suspect.
Olmstead glanced at the big black truck still in the driveway. “Did he walk there?”
“Prob’ly took the dirt bike. Or one of the four-wheelers.”
Lilly’s voice rang from the kitchen: “He oughtta leave that girl alone. He’s married and so is she.”
Devon flashed his lotto grin, displaying his two gold canines. “Wayne’s wife oughtta move down to Pittsburgh, with her husband. Where she belongs.” He tromped back into the kitchen, dug through the cupboard for a mug.
“Why?” asked Lilly. “When her husband’s chasing poontang right here in Berk?”
Devon laughed to himself. “Anyway, word over at Dew Drop says that girl’s old man moved out. He’s living in town somewhere. Somewhere classy, like above a pizza joint or something.”
Lilly’s lips pursed. She shot a sad glance at Olmstead. “That’s a damn shame.”
Olmstead sensed something he wasn’t privy to. Something ominous and ugly beyond his brother’s apparent infidelity. “I understand they want to re-open the mine,” he blurted.
Devon glared at Lilly before answering. “That’s right. Only we don’t want it.”
“Didn’t you work in the mine?” Olmstead asked.
“Right again. So we know how bad it is, me and your Pop. Was us mined it. Along with a thousand other men and a hundred kids. Eighteen inches.” He held his hands apart. “That’s what they mined down to.”
Lilly shook her head. “But this is strip mining, Dev. Nobody has to go inside anything.”
“It’s the same acid rocks poisoning the water. You wanna be the next Johnstown, where the rivers run orange? You want your kids around the blasting?”
Devon stared out at the acres of stacked trash just like Lilly had. The man’s crooked smile revealed little. Olmstead suspected his uncle looked back on those dark days much the way Olmstead recalled grad school. Long nights, impossible tests, teaching classes full of freshmen who didn’t care and whose parents threatened him regularly, topped off with the intermittent sleep-deprivation-induced hallucination. But in retrospect those years were fun, challenging. Olmstead missed them.
What did Devon see? Old miners shared the reticence of World War II vets. But sometimes they told stories. Cave-ins, explosions. Glory days.
“Town needs some real jobs,” Devon said.
Lilly sighed, sympathetic. “I think we need any jobs we can get. Even mining jobs.”
“What you kids don’t seem to recall is that Berk was a boomtown. When you were little, this place was growing faster than grass in a rainy summer. They even talked about building a college here! And the mine was already closed then. So why we need it open now?”
Lilly asked the obvious question. “If it was such a boomtown, why’d Pop start collectin’ them fridges?”
“Pop’s always had those fridges.” Olmstead gazed at them, there in the yard. “I mean . . . maybe not so many.”
“Not always. Your always maybe,” said Lilly, “but not mine or Wayne’s.”
Uncle Devon swooped a hand, finger aimed, across the vast expanse of dead cars and white goods. “Each one a’ them fridges represents fifty bucks.”
“And the washers?” Lilly demanded. “And the cars?”
A memory surfaced—Olmstead snapped his fingers. “Pop started taking stuff from people right after the foundry closed. So they wouldn’t have to pay the county to come and get it.”
“But he charged ‘em!” Devon exulted. “Charged ‘em, yes, but less than the county did, and people’s more likely to give their money to a regular working man tryin’ to make a living than to the state.” His hooded gaze found Olmstead. “That’s how your college got paid, boy.”
“That and a number of academic scholarships.”
Devon flashed his oblique smile. “You always were an ungrateful sum’bitch.”
Olmstead now gestured out the window. “Who’s gonna clean up all that crap? That’s a veritable Superfund site out there! Pop is dying; guess who’s going to foot the bill?”
Berkshire Burlington clattered through the kitchen door. “Who said Pop’s dying?” He winked at Olmstead. “Come give your old man a hug, you ungrateful sum’bitch!”
Olmstead threw his arms around his father. He sank his teeth into the flesh inside his cheek to keep from crying, dug his nails deep into his palm to keep from squeezing his Pop the way he wanted, like when he was six. And mostly, he kept his eyes closed.
Berkshire Burlington, always such a broad-shouldered barrel of a man, felt now like a broom in Olmstead’s arms. His eyes, molasses black, still sparkled with mischief, but now they did so from the depths of bruisey caverns. When he let go of his son, he leaned back on his cane.
Olmstead coughed away his grief. He couldn’t think of anything to say, had forgotten all his obligatory questions about how the surgery went and did the chemo start yet. He panicked that he might throw up again—or worse, start crying—but then he heard the grumble of one of the four-wheelers start up. Not wanting to invoke his uncle’s wrath again, he asked instead about the other absent family member. “Where’s Mom?”
“Your mother? She’s down at the women’s club. Thursdays, that’s what she does.”
Olmstead frowned at his sister. “I thought you said—”
“After Dad goes to the doctor, he drops Mom off at the club.”
Berk glanced at his daughter, then back at Olmstead. “That’s right. Drop her off on the way home.”
He clattered his way to the kitchen table with his cane and his boots. Same boots as Devon’s, Olmstead noticed, but without the steel toes. Berk left a trail of mud, but Lilly didn’t bark about it, just wiped it up after him before helping him get the clunky shoes off.
Devon filled a mug halfway with Ensure, then topped it off with coffee. Setting it in the table he asked, “You want some apricots, Berk?”
“Yeah, but I wanna walk around.” He smiled at Olmstead, who could only stare into the gray-brown mixture in Berk’s mug: his father had always taken his coffee black.
“New way of living, son,” Berk grunted, pulling himself to his feet. “It’s weird for all of us, not just you.” He waved at the table. “Why don’t you sit down. You’re making me nervous.”
Devon yapped something about a cigarette and Lilly echoed his sentiments, but regarding laundry. Suddenly Olmstead was alone with his father.
Berk paced the kitchen, clunk, shuffle, shuffle, taking a dried apricot from the counter on each pass. “Been easier to eat this way since the surgery,” he explained. “You send a lot of emails to your mom, kid. Of course I read ‘em. But why don’t you tell me about California?”
So Olmstead did. He talked about his job and his friends and how much he loved living by the ocean. The University of California at San Diego had provided him a master’s degree in computer programming, and