by Andy Harper
I was fourteen years old and a freshman in high school when my parents announced their divorce. In late August, when my mom asked my little brother, Matt, and me to come look at trailer homes with her, we were appalled. We could only think of lopsided monstrosities with vertical aluminum siding, dingy and grass stained, strewn about some overgrown hog lot among rusted-out Crown Vics and totaled pickups. The show lots we visited were found mostly along the highway, flat gravel expanses full of the stench of ditchwater and refuse. But the “manufactured homes” we toured together were a world apart of our expectations, and the prospect of designing our own—at least, in terms of wall patterns, carpet colors, and window placement—quickly turned us around.
October 2004 found me occupying a square slab of gray sidewalk before the great muddy mess of 220 Welsh Drive, in Wayland, Missouri, my shoulders scrunched up to my ears and my hands shoved into the frayed pockets of my favorite black and gray flannel jacket. The expanse of black mud before me lay near one end of a long stretch of green grass, the only occupied lot on the west side of Welsh Drive with sloppy ruts sliced into it by the heavy tires of a semi-truck, and belching, amorphous pits where boots had sunken in.
Laid long-ways across the center of the 220 lot so that one end looked out on the gray street from a single wide window, our newly manufactured trailer home rested on four concrete slabs, crouched on scissor like black axles, a triangular hitch jutting out one end. Two figures in hunter green Carhartt coats scuttled through the mud, a man and a woman. They parted in the front lawn, and the man sloshed back to the cab of his semi, which roared as he steered it one way and another to adjust the angle of the trailer. The woman—his sister, my mother told me—ascended a set of wobbly wooden steps placed more or less in front of the front door and checked the storm door for the second or third time. It opened easily for her, and she next tried the inside door, which seemed to work okay too. Then she trudged over to a silver pickup truck parked in the drive of an empty neighboring lot. I stood between my little brother and my mom and stared at my new home. It didn’t seem real.
The first time we stepped inside, it was like any number of trailers we had set foot in on any number of gravel lots with any number of overly friendly sales representatives, their white binders tucked under their arms, whose offices usually comprised the only traditional buildings on the premises. It even had the same “new car” smell that permeated the trailers we had toured over the past two months. But it was ours. It came in the colors and other specifications that we had chosen as a family—clay-colored vinyl siding with burgundy shutters and white seamless guttering. The carpet was a color we had chosen: “champagne” or “mocha” or some name for a beverage that was too dark to be called beige and too light to be called brown. It was springy and new beneath our shoes, and, when Mom reminded us to take those off, it was soft to our socked feet. The walls were white, textured, some thin material I never could quite identify—cardboard, maybe—identical panels two feet wide with matching trim tacked over the seams. The living room was bright, with a wide window on both sides, and it flowed into an open kitchen of faux cherry oak and granite patterned Formica. A small window over the sink looked up to the end of Welsh Drive, over all the lots that hadn’t been rented yet. Young trees stood in twos between each lot like buttons on a long coat.
Beyond the kitchen was my mother’s bedroom. Like the living room, it featured windows on two sides, plus a small walk-in closet and a luxurious private bathroom. The same granite patterned Formica from the kitchen was trimmed by the same faux cherry oak, and stone patterned linoleum covered the floor. There was a separate shower and garden tub, two sinks on a long vanity, and a small, narrow, frosted glass window that looked out back of the trailer at the scrappy evergreens that sheltered Wayland Acres from a county blacktop.
From the corner of the living room, by the rectangle of stone patterned linoleum at the front door, a narrow hallway ran by my little brother’s small bedroom, our shared windowless bathroom with a shower-tub, and an octagonal window we had specifically decided upon as a family for the outside wall. My bedroom, larger than Matt’s, was at the end of the trailer, where the wide window looked out on Welsh Drive. While Matt and Mom were still exploring the rest of our new home, I crossed the room and concealed myself in the closet, shut the door and sat down with my knees to my chest. It felt strangely cozy, safe and right, and I wanted to stay for a while, but I didn’t want anyone to find me and think that something was wrong.
And then my dad was there, standing in his coat and cap by the front door, silently taking note of every detail of the construction. I could feel the weight of his boots on the linoleum, anchoring our home on wheels to its spot. Well, not his home. I walked out into the middle of the floor and stretched out on my back, felt the carpet cushy and rough through my cotton t-shirt, stretched my arms back over my head, my elbows bent out at a comfortable angle, and gazed, chuckling, at the ceiling. The streetlight glowed softly through thin plastic blinds, and I lay there in my empty room—my room—in the blue dark until someone came in and turned on the light.
My mom moved in right away. She took half the bedroom set she had shared with my dad—the queen-sized sleigh bed and the tall bureau—and arranged them in her new room. Meanwhile, Matt and I continued to stay in the house we’d grown up in, which my father had built on one corner of the family farm the summer I was born. Matt wouldn’t have remembered, but I knew that in the corner of our front porch, beneath the wall of the added-on garage, was spelled out “July 1990” with a stick in fresh concrete. I had lived one month outside my mother’s womb before moving into that house, little more than a year after my parents’ marriage, and there we had made our family and our home. In October 2004, all my mother took from that home was the bed and the dresser, and so from there we began accumulating the furnishings of a new home.
“I’m thinking we should have a theme,” Mom said as we walked the aisles of some furniture store or maybe Hobby Lobby. “What d’you guys think?”
Matt wanted a “modern” theme, and Mom agreed: “Yeah, modern, but not too space-agey. And maybe an island-y theme for the kitchen. Whadda you think, Pete?” (Pete is my mother’s nickname for me, though no one knows where it came from.)
“I dunno,” I responded noncommittally, “that all sounds cool.”
What we ended up going for—we were watching a lot of HGTV those days—was a mix of modern and old-fashioned, with some palm trees splashed around. Our living room was a cheap glass and brushed nickel television stand, an antique looking sofa of gold-colored and burgundy tapestry upholstery, and whimsical dark wood accents. For the wall by the hallway and the front door, we found a tan pleather glider with a gliding footstool to match. Our dining set was a wobbly glass and aluminum table with wobbly olive-colored aluminum chairs. Palm tree motifs adorned the placemats and dish towels. For Matt’s bedroom, he and Mom picked out a twin bed and mattress and a wire shelving unit for the small closet. We found white particle board cubbies for shelving in my closet.
My bedroom door opened right into the ladder at the end of my bunked bed. Although the mattress for the upper deck was quite comfortable, I almost always opted to sleep on the lower level futon, usually without even folding it down. The frame was black metal that rang hollow when you stepped or tapped on it. Under the window, a cabinet board salvaged from an old piano lay across two dusty plastic crates, a red table runner draped over it. The crates were filled with some old records I had inherited from my mother—Jackson Brown, Billy Joel, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, James Taylor, and others—and the makeshift table was topped with a turntable, a stack of books, and a couple of candles around which may have lain a book or two of matches. Under the table were stacked piano books which also filled a wire shelving unit against the opposite wall. Also standing against the opposite wall, the only inside wall of the room, was a Yamaha P22 studio piano and its accompanying bench. Here, between the hallway door and the closet door, my mother taught piano lessons on Monday and Tuesday afternoons while Matt and I were at the house we shared with our dad.
On nights we returned to our trailer—Mondays, Tuesdays, and every other Sunday—we did so at eight o’clock. We piled into our father’s white F-350 and rode north on MO-81 to its intersection with US-136 at Kahoka, then east ten miles. After curving down a wooded hill, the highway straightened for a bridge over a small creek, followed by two small hills, and then the green sign reading:
WAYLAND
CITY LIMIT
POP. 427
With our mother, Matt and I lived in the nicer, newer, and larger of Wayland’s two trailer parks. On the east end of town, about a mile before the Flying J truck stop just off MO-61 and the Avenue of the Saints, Route B branched off and ran north toward St. Francisville, separating Wayland Acres from the rest of the town. Welsh Drive ran north to south, with Rose Circle, Charles Lane, Paul Lane, and Jones Lane—all of which ended in cul-de-sacs—branching off of it. While Rose, Charles, and one side of Paul Lane were all populated—the streets with single-wide and the cul-de-sacs with double-wide modular homes—the west side of Welsh Drive was a long, empty strip of finely kempt lawn but for our solitary home, which our mother had affectionately nicknamed the Tuna Can.
Our choice in the 220 lot had come of careful consideration. 220 was the third lot from the south end of Welsh Drive, which was the populated end of the trailer court. We had peeked through the trees and the rooftops from the car while passing through Wayland on 136 to the length of Welsh Drive that was visible, and my mom had chosen to park our home where it couldn’t be seen from the highway. After that, we drove the trailer court just to look at the site of our future home, to survey our future neighborhood.
On the bend of Welsh Drive sat a modest white mobile home with blue shutters, messy blinds, and a huge knot of brightly colored children’s bicycles in the corner of the patio. This is where Mrs. Doty lived with her four children and her father, who was staying with the family while her husband served with the military in Iraq. On the corner of Welsh Drive and Charles Lane sat a gray trailer with potted plants along the sidewalk and a carport over the drive and the gray storage shed. On the corner of the patio, like a permanent fixture, a man sat in a lawn chair with glasses on the end of his nose and a paperback open in his hand. He was there every time we drove by. In the rain, he simply moved his lawn chair further under the carport to avoid the drops that came down sideways. At night, he waved his arm and a small light over the shed doors came on. He propped his feet up on a blue cooler, white socks rising high on whiter calves over New Balance tennis shoes. We called him Reading Guy, because he was always out there, reading. He was there on that muddy day in October when the Tuna Can joined the landscape at Wayland Acres, and he was there every afternoon when Matt and I got off the school bus.
I say that Wayland Acres was the nicer of the two trailer courts in Wayland. The manufactured homes found here complied with a set of regulations regarding their exterior appearance. Most of the trailers at Wayland Acres had vinyl siding rather than aluminum, but no siding was allowed to sport mold or grass stains. All featured skirting around the bottom to cover up the ground, wheels and jacks beneath the trailer, and any blinds or drapes visible from the streets were kept neat and orderly, whether closed or opened. Some homes featured car ports and porches of varying sizes—one porch ran the entire length of the trailer, with a roof and ceiling fans and wooden latticework beneath, stained to match—but no rooms could be built to extend the sides of any. Each lot was allowed one storage shed, painted whatever color or colors the owner chose, and it was kept padlocked at the end of the drive, which lay in the back portion of each lot and was connected by sidewalk both to the back steps and to the front patio.
Our storage shed opened onto the driveway and housed the pianos my mom refinished and fixed up in her spare time. It probably took the greater part of the winter to fully transform from a mess of stacked boxes and scattered trinkets into the piano shed I remember it as, but by the start of 2005, my mother was running her one-woman business, 88 Key Works, out of there. Against the north wall stood a workbench made out of an old upright piano. Pegs against the back, where the harp and strings would have been, held tools for tuning and repairing, while cans of paint stripper and wood stain were stacked in the corners. The plywood surface, which stuck out about six inches further than the keys would have, held a variety of tools, tool bags, books, magazines, empty Corona bottles, and a couple of ashtrays. Becky Krueger, the mother of one of Mom’s piano students, often came to help with stripping finish from the wood of acquired pianos—an activity they both referred to as “stripping parties”—and they often stayed out there late, sharing beers and laughs and opening the doors to smoke their cigarettes and let out the fumes. Mom usually kept one piano against the back wall of the shed and one piano against the wall opposite the workbench, with enough room in the middle to lay a piano down on its back when she needed to. Toolboxes and storage boxes littered the back corners.
My mother had been working in the piano shed one rainy day in the spring of 2005 when she opened the doors and sat down on the edge of the wooden floor, her feet on the concrete of the driveway, to have a cigarette. She watched a woman, a little bit shorter and older than she, emerge from the trailer across the street, the one with the carport, with an umbrella and a black garbage bag. The woman set the bag down on the front steps and somehow managed to squirrel a cigarette and lighter from her pockets without dropping the umbrella. Upon lighting her cigarette, she wedged it into the corner of her mouth, picked up the garbage bag, which was almost as big as she was, and teetered down Welsh Drive to the dumpster on the corner. She was headed back up the road when she spotted my mother and started up the drive to where she sat.
“Hi,” she said, maneuvering the burning cigarette between two of the fingers already wrapped around the black handle of her umbrella and thrusting her right hand out to my mother, “I’m Myrna.”
Myrna Severin lived at the corner of Welsh Drive and Charles Lane in Wayland Acres with her husband, Paul, whom we had known previously as Reading Guy. They had lived in a number of places around the country, most recently Arkansas—which was also the most beautiful place they had lived, although the mosquitoes there were as big as baseballs. They had sons in Japan and Mississippi, and Paul’s brother, Tim, lived with his wife, Sheila, on Des Moines Street, with a backyard that looked up Welsh Drive from behind the dumpster on the corner. Myrna cleaned houses for a living and drove a red Chevy Tracker with Wild Cherry seat covers, floor mats, and steering wheel cover. Paul worked from home and collected books and guns. They became good friends to our family.
Mom set out to find a classier replacement for the scrappy wooden steps at our front door and found a set of smooth concrete ones with a black metal railing, which offered a more polished look. The old steps we moved to the back door. The following spring, after Mom found work at a Volvo dealership in Kahoka, she got the idea of building a small deck in back and ordered a lumber kit from Menards in Quincy, Illinois. My older brother, Brian, came to help us put it together, and the four of us spent the day out on the mud in back of the trailer, fitting numbered and lettered lengths of lumber together. When our work was done, we placed a gliding bench against the back rail and a green metal chair across from the back door. The chair became my mother’s smoking chair, and Matt and I often sat on the bench and talked with her while she sucked down cigarettes, placing the butts into a Diet Coke can on the floor.
Being the only family on Welsh Drive gave us an experience unavailable to others in our neighborhood: a yard. That spring, we hung a brightly colored hammock between the piano shed and a sturdy young tree, where I loved spending time on clement afternoons. When it was finally warm enough to start spending more of our time outside, Mom unpacked a worn, brown baseball glove she had had since she was a girl, her full name written neatly across it in black permanent marker. She drove Matt and me to the Wal-Mart in Keokuk, Iowa, and asked us to each pick out a glove of our own. We bought a baseball and went home to play catch in our faux backyard.
A family trip to Hobby Lobby in Quincy had yielded a pair of cheerfully hand-painted ceramic piggy banks. One of them was the cussing pig, and my mom put a quarter in every time she cussed. We decided to save up for something fun for the family, so Matt and I were glad to pitch in, and when one pig got heavy, we started in on the next. By the start of our first summer in Wayland, we had saved up $138 and some change, which my mother split between my brother and me for bicycles. With $69 apiece, we each found a bicycle from Wal-Mart in Keokuk, mine red and Matt’s blue. Mom bought her own bicycle, and we became well acquainted with Wayland through family bike rides. Matt and I scouted out the neighborhoods on our own until our mother came home from work, and then we’d all take to the streets in a row.
Our route was called the Loop, and we “rode the Loop” most days spent with our mother. We started out, the three of us, up the wide empty Welsh Drive, through the uninhabited side of the trailer park, and across Route B to Clark Street. The east end of Clark was all neat white bungalows with screened-in porches and Japanese maples in the front lawn. Japanese maples bloomed with big pink blossoms in the springtime, and then in mid-summer the blossoms fell softly to the grass and were replaced by bright green leaves. We passed a big farmhouse overgrown with vines and weeds and trees and bushes so that we almost couldn’t see the front of the house and couldn’t see into the backyard. A narrow opening in the overgrowth allowed a small blue pickup down the drive to a similarly overgrown garage, but I could never believe that anyone actually lived there.
We’d turn south on Henrietta—a narrow residential street where one of my mother’s piano tuning customers lived in a small red house—and ride south two blocks before turning onto Taylor, then Avondale, which formed the town’s western border. On Hagerman Street, we passed one of Wayland’s disproportionately numerous churches before turning north on Main, near the entrance to a small retirement village. We took Main north two blocks before turning right onto Des Moines, past the tiny post office and a row of boarded up, abandoned shop fronts, including the old drug store, and across Route B to the south end of Wayland Acres.
With the advancing summer came tornado season. The first warning to come across our television caught us off-guard, and my mom ran around the house with her hands on her temples trying to figure out what to do, calling our landlord to no answer. Matt and I, who had been herded into the basement countless times throughout our childhood for storms and never experienced an actual tornado, remained lethargic and unconcerned. After a call to my grandparents in Keokuk, Mom hurried us out the backdoor, across our new deck and down the sidewalk in slantwise rain to the Blazer. It was a cold early summer rain, and murderous drops penetrated my thin hoodie to sting my arms and splash across my face, forming little rivers over my forehead as though it were a windshield. Our wipers pushed them all away as we hurtled up Highway 136 under churning grey clouds. We descended Sand Hill on the west side of town and traversed the Wayland Bottoms, ten miles, past Alexandria, to the Iowa border, where fireworks were sold out of pole buildings and large tents on little hills that stood like islands during spring flooding. We crossed the Des Moines River into Iowa and turned onto the bypass, where my grandparents’ house sat at Hilton Road. We waited out the storm there and returned home.
The next day, my mother called our landlord, Neil McKee, who was the town pharmacist and lived in a mansion my dad had built for him outside Kahoka with an elevator and a vineyard and a lake with a covered bridge over it. His wife, Lois, mostly ran the trailer court, but Mom usually went straight to Neil when she needed something. There was no storm shelter at Wayland Acres, and only a few years ago a tornado had leveled a trailer park in Canton, just twenty minutes south on 61. Neil explained that the First Baptist Church in town would open its basement to residents of Wayland Acres during tornado warnings and watches. Mom didn’t like it, but she figured it would do. Nonetheless, being in the trailer made her all the more paranoid about storms, and she bought a weather radio for the kitchen, which would go off like a smoke alarm when a watch or warning was posted, and an electronic voice would give us the details.
The first time the weather radio went off, we bundled up in our jackets and hoodies and went leaping down the sidewalk through the rain once more to the Blazer. Mom backed out into Welsh Drive, exited the trailer park south by Des Moines Street, crossed Route B, where Assistant Pastor Daniel Fox’s two-story Victorian had been planted on the northwest corner after being lifted off some foundation elsewhere, and followed the streaming streets to the parking lot of the church. We all threw open our doors and ran across the parking lot to the all-glass door on the west side of the brick building. Mom wrapped her hand around the brushed nickel handle and tugged. With a small clink, the lock held, jerking my mother’s body back toward the door. With fear in her eyes and perhaps a couple of expletives for the piggy bank, she turned to my brother and me—“You get back in the car”—and jogged around the corner of the building to the front doors. We watched through the tinted windows as she came running back across the parking lot, her head down, her hood up. “Goddamn it,” she muttered, sliding back into the driver’s seat and turning the key. Her hair was dripping into her face as she pulled back into the street and we made our way out of town. “We’re going to your grandparents’.”
After that, there was another call to Neil, who apologized and said he would get in touch with Daniel Fox again to make sure the church would be open for us. The next time we found ourselves in the church parking lot, Mom told us to wait in the car while she checked the door, and it was locked again. Thus, our tornado plan became a simple bee-line to Keokuk, where we sat with our grandparents in the lamplight of their living room, only once descending to the basement. None of these tornadoes ever made it to Wayland, and eventually, we stopped making the drive to Keokuk altogether. Instead, when the weather got bad and made my mom nervous, we would all pile into the Blazer and drive around town.
A cold rain chilled us until we got into the car, where the humidity was stifling and we turned on the air conditioning and listened to the weather updates on KMEM. We would drive down Clark Street, where the powerful winds had shaken a sea of pink blossoms down from the Japanese maples. Except the blossoms didn’t look so soft and pink in the storm; they looked lifeless and trampled, like the remains of some bloody massacre, and I didn’t like seeing them that way. We drove through the residential section of Main Street, past the businesses on the corner at Des Moines. We pulled into the parking lot of the County Market Express gas station on Lake Street, just off Des Moines, where it meets Highway 136.
The lighted awning glowed green, and the wall of windows yellow. A plump blond woman stood calmly behind the counter as we parked in front of the big ice cooler and boxes of pop stacked against the front of the building and filed in through the door to the jingling of a bell. We milled around the tiny sales floor, scouring the shelves for our favorite potato chips and candy bars and wrestling bottles of Fanta and Vanilla Coke out of their narrow shelves while the cold glass doors rested against our backs or else filling Styrofoam cups with clunky ice cubes and fizzy fountain soda. Mom paid for it all at the register, smiling in a tired sort of way to the attendant and looking calm for the first time since we had taken to the streets. We devoured our plunder in the car, sipping our drinks and making light conversation to the low comforting voice of on-air personality Rick Fischer and the whistling wind.
One night, a tornado really did come to Wayland. It wasn’t raining, but it was visibly windy as Myrna came down her steps and crossed the street to meet us on the sidewalk in front of our place. “I couldn’t get Paul to come,” she said, rolling her eyes and throwing her hands up. “He’s workin’ on something at home.” The four of us walked down Welsh Drive to Tim and Sheila’s backyard behind the dumpster. Tim came out briefly to meet us before stepping back inside to help Sheila down to the basement with her wheelchair and then to help his mother down the dark steps as well. Mom, Matt, and I stood on the large back deck with Myrna while she called Paul again and again. She tried his cell phone and the home phone several times until he answered.
“You’d better get over here,” she told him shrilly, and finally, “All right, dumbass, it’s your own fault if you get blown away. ‘Bye.”
As she hung up, the wind began to die down. We talked nervously in the new quiet, and Myrna kept glancing toward her front door. “The calm before the storm,” my mom commented. I put my hands in my pockets and looked out at the dark trailer court. All the street lights were motion activated, so the only light aside from Tim and Sheila’s porch light came from the small window in Paul and Myrna’s front door. Many of the driveways were empty, and it occurred to me that I had never been home for a tornado warning before; the whole trailer park must have cleared out. This contributed to the silence all around us. Not a thing moved anywhere, and, with no sound whatsoever to compete with, our voices grew steadily smaller.
And then, all of a sudden, our senses were eclipsed by a great roaring wind all about us. The trees did not sway, rather, they bent straight over, without a moment’s notice. A river of leaves wrenched from their trees came down Welsh Drive in a wave of skittering. I thought of everything I had heard about being in a tornado, about the calm moments before and the sound when it came, like the sound of a freight train, and it didn’t sound like a train to me at all. It sounded like…it sounded like—
“Don’t you go anywhere, Myrna,” my mom snapped. Her eyes were now solidly on her own front door; she wasn’t looking away, she was edging toward the wooden steps into Tim and Sheila’s backyard. “Just call him again,” my mom said, more gently, while I moved slowly between Myrna and the steps.
“Andy, Matt, you get inside,” I heard my mother’s instruction, but wouldn’t move out of Myrna’s way until I knew she would stay.
“He won’t come,” she cried without taking her eyes off that door.
“Call him,” my mother said very sternly, and she took Myrna’s phone and spoke into it. “Paul, you need to get over here, now. I mean, now! It sounds like a freight train.” Then we were all watching Myrna sprinting down the street toward her door, watching her disappear inside.
My mom told me again, “Get in the goddamn basement,” but I couldn’t take my eyes off that door; the last thing I saw before retreating into the house, with great relief, was Paul and Myrna’s emergence into the dark street.
Matt was waiting for me in the doorframe, where I joined him. The basement door stood open just inside, and the unfinished wooden steps descended slowly into blackness. Finally, our feet touched concrete, and we seated ourselves on the cold floor just to the side of the stairs. As our eyes adjusted to the dark, we discerned the figures of two women sitting on the other side of the stairs, in a wheelchair and a rocking chair, wrapped in blankets and looking back at us silently. We all kept quiet. I kept looking up the stairs to the open backdoor, waiting for the shoes and the ankles that would come across the floor, the long bodies that would blot out the porch light as they came to meet us, but none ever came. Neither Paul nor Myrna nor my mother nor even Tim came down those steps. Neither sight nor sound betrayed their continued existence, only the door swinging slowly in the wind as if to confirm that it had not yet been ripped from its hinges. I don’t think we were there more than twenty minutes before we were called back upstairs and taken silently home, but those twenty minutes could have been hours to me. In them, I inherited my mother’s fear of storms, felt it seep into every pore and snake its dense tentacles around my ribs and vertebrae, felt its sharp fingers poking through the back of my brain.
After that, Mom decided to start looking for a house. By now, we liked Wayland very much, so we looked around town, and my mom found a little green ranch house on North Main. The front of the drive was shared with the next house, a big gray farmhouse with a wraparound porch and three huge trees in the front yard. But then the drive veered left, two dirt tracks with a strip of grass between, while the other drive went right in a wide gravel lane to a neat white garage. The garage of the green house was rusty corrugated metal with yellow fiberglass doors. It lay far back across a beautiful tree-shaded lawn from the back of the house. All this we could see from Main Street as we rode our bikes up to the mailbox, gazed at the “For Sale” sign in the tall grass of the front lawn, the narrow concrete front porch which passed in front of a wide front window, and turned around in the thin gravel to head back to town.
When we toured the house, we were all drawn into its charm, although the inside was as dark as the well-timbered backyard. We took the uneven concrete steps up to the narrow porch, walked single file to the front door and entered into a dark, wood-paneled living room with rust stains on the carpet in the corner where a recliner had long sat, but rested no more. The kitchen lay on the other side of the living room wall, yellow linoleum and dark wooden cabinets and three shallow tin-trimmed steps down to the curtained back door and the door to the basement. Nestled around a bath in the back of the house were a blue room with two windows, a yellow room with one long window, and a peach-colored room with a tiny window; the latter was to be mine if we got the house.
In the garage, the air was yellow from the sunlight coming in through the fiberglass doors. The tracks hung rusty and jagged overhead, where strange tools and scrap lumber lay across the rafters. It could never be the piano shed we had in Wayland Acres. Nor could the green house, with its small windows, be as bright as the Tuna Can. My heart and, I think, my brother’s hung wavering between our home at 220 Welsh Drive and the possibility of this dark, charming house with the olive colored, vertical siding and the tree-shaded lawn.
“They’ll never get what they’re asking for it,” my mother repeated time and again over the ensuing weeks. But whatever they got, they got it from someone else, and my mom went back to searching. My brother and I felt simultaneously disappointed and relieved.
Of course, I soon had new pursuits on my mind. In April 2006, I took my first job washing dishes in a diner that had opened on the square in Kahoka. For the first two and a half months, my parents drove me to work, but I turned sixteen in June and began driving myself in a blue Ford Explorer from Kahoka Motors. That summer, my mom and I got a great kick out of pulling our cars up into the grass of the empty lot north of 220 Welsh Drive to wash them by hand with big yellow sponges and sudsy buckets and a long green hose connected to the spout that stuck out the back of our trailer beside the deck.
That winter, Paul and Myrna traveled to Japan to visit one of their sons and left us with the keys to their home. My mother took the mail in every couple of days, and I crossed the street each frosty morning to start Myrna’s car and let it run a couple of minutes while I let my own car warm up for the drive to school. It was a strangely welcome practice in responsibility. When they returned, Myrna brought over a Japanese tea set for my mother—a red pot and four little red cups and a long white platter for it all to rest on—along with four sets of ornate chopsticks. That spring, they let us know that they would be moving to Tunica, Mississippi, where another son lived.
On their last night in Wayland, Paul and Myrna invited the three of us over for drinks after dinner. It had begun to cool off, so we sat around the kitchen table and talked. On our way out, Myrna kissed Matt and me on the cheek. “You don’t have to say anything back,” she said at the door, her eyes brimming with tears, “but I love you boys.”
Matt, embarrassed, could say nothing and offered only a smile before turning and moving through the open door. But after hugging Myrna one last time, I looked down into her eyes and said, “I love you too, Myrna.” They left us a cup of banana peppers and half a tub of cookie dough, and we bought Myrna a fiber-optic angel for their new home.
In May 2007, my mother took possession of a small white house at 221 West College Street in Kahoka and found a buyer for our beloved Tuna Can. We had two weeks to repaint and re-carpet the old house and move. Mom worked late into the night on it, long after Matt and I fell asleep in our beds in Wayland. On the weekends we spent with our dad, she worked the whole weekend long preparing the place. Each time we brought more things to the new house, it looked different, newer, but never quite real, never quite home.
And then one day in June 2007, what must have been only days before my seventeenth birthday and weeks before I would total my first car, we stood again on the sidewalk in front of 220 Welsh Drive and watched a bellowing semi ease a trailer of clay siding and burgundy shutters over the mud. Except this time it looked naked and sad without the white skirting, with its muddy black axles showing underneath, like the Japanese maple blossoms in the storm. We watched it trundle down Welsh Drive and around the bend toward Rose Circle, and then it turned and rolled past the Amish-built bed and breakfast on the corner, and Tim and Sheila’s house on Des Moines, and then it turned onto Route B and then onto 136, and it was gone.
Andy Harper holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska Omaha and is currently pursuing a PhD at Southern Illinois University. His essays have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, the museum of americana: a literary review, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland. He currently lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where he studies American literature and teaches college composition. “The Tuna Can” is taken from his MFA thesis, a collection of interconnected essays celebrating the Midwest while exploring concepts of geographical heritage and the evolving meaning of “home.”