No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

A Hollow with Houses

Paying late fees on unwatched videos is a fierce gouging in the guts. Each time it happened I swore never again. The old Malibu clung to the tight curves and charged through the dips in the road as I poured the coal to it and arrived at the video store just before closing.

In the parking lot I saw Lena, one of the few girls with whom I was friends in high school. My female friends liked the cool guys who drove cool cars — athletes, outlaws, musicians. The girls dated them but talked to me. I was funny and short, a mascot to their beauty.

Lena had been married twenty-three years and had four kids. She worked as a dental hygienist. Five years ago she moved to Flemingsburg because Morehead got too big.

“It grew so fast,” she said, “spreading up the hollows like floodwater. I wanted to raise my children in a small-town atmosphere. Clearfield used to be separate from Morehead, but now you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. It’s nothing to get a bicycle stolen anymore.”

“I didn’t know that, Lena.”

“Morehead’s got all the problems of a big town, but none of the advantages. The traffic is terrible, and prices are high as a cat’s back. You go to Wal-Mart and don’t know a soul.”

“But why Flemingsburg,” I said. “It’s not a town, it’s a hollow with houses.”

“Oh, Chris,” she said, “you still make me laugh. You’re just as easy to talk to as ever. Maybe easier.”

“Well, I always liked you, Lena.”

“How come you never asked me out?”

“I didn’t think you’d want me.”

“Why do you think I always talked to you so much?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think about it.”

“You should have,” she said.

“I just wanted to get out of here, Lena. The only reason I stayed was failing the army physical.”

“The only reason I stayed was I got pregnant.”

“Maybe that’s why I never asked you out.”

We looked at each other, our eyes seeking purchase. The world ceased to exist in time and space. We were fifteen, afraid to kiss. We were twenty-five, young parents working hard. We were thirty-five, both wondering how our lives would be with different choices, pondering an affair with a stranger. We were forty-five and proud grandparents. At fifty-five we quit working and drove a gigantic RV around the country, a gray-haired couple making up for a life spent in one place. At sixty-five, we took walks together, arm-in-arm along the creek. In our seventies one of us died. The other mourned with a gradual withering like a leaf curling into itself before detaching from the limb and becoming part of the loam.

Time swirled back like a tornado, encircling us with the present, holding us fast to the tar of an immense parking lot.

“Lena,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

I stepped forward and hugged her briefly before turning away. After fifteen steps, I looked back and watched her drive toward Flemingsburg. To me, Morehead’s growth meant more things not to do. For Lena there were more people not doing those things.

I drove home to my family, kissed my wife, and wrestled with my kids. We watched a video together. I thought about Lena the whole time. I imagined that she and I were at the old Trail Theatre downtown. I pretended to yawn and stretch, leaving my arm on the back of her seat, and when she didn’t mind, I kissed her. It was our first kiss, our only kiss, merely a peck, but it counted — an infinity of first kisses in the darkness expanding through the universe.

At the end of the movie, Rita and I put the kids to sleep and lay in our bed — the same bed where I’d wrestled with my boys, the same bed we’d all four slept in like cats through the cold Montana winters, the same bed Arthur and Irene had given us when Sam was born. I thought of how fortunate I was to have both left the hills and made it back home.

I didn’t know that people were constantly inviting Rita to their church. I didn’t know that she politely thanked them and explained that she was Jewish. I didn’t know that each time this happened, the person’s invariable response was, “Oh, I’m sorry.”