The Mexican Year

Aligning the handgun’s front and back sights, I peer down the barrel at the target.  A virgin can of Bud Light.  It sits on the ground, cheerfully daring me to hit it.  I’ve already emptied an entire clip of .45 caliber ammo at the goddamn thing.  Now I’m reloaded and trying again.  Steadying my aim with regular exhalations of steam.  Even cheating closer, bootstep by bootstep, until I’m only 10 yards away.

I take a deep breath and try for zen-like focus.  See the bullet hitting the target, be the bullet hitting the target.  Then I squeeze the trigger, flexing my arm and shoulder muscles to dampen the recoil.  The Glock always kicks more than as I expect.  But the bullet doesn’t hit the target, just kicks up dirt behind it.  The can is still undisturbed.

Jesus fucking Christ.  I pull the trigger as fast as I can, spamming lead.  Dirt gouts up and falls again five times, once for each remaining bullet in the clip.  It makes for an impressive display, but nothing more.  The can remains right where I left it – upright, intact, and full of cheap beer.

“Let me try,” says a female voice off to my left.

Ruthie Krenzel could be a Guns & Ammo centerfold.  She’s in a modified Weaver stance and aims her Beretta 9mm pistol with deadly precision.  Her blond hair is streaked with highlights and pulled back into a ponytail, revealing a heart-shaped face set with concentration.  Somehow she manages to look curvaceous in a thick quilted vest, flannel shirt, and insulated hunting pants.

A single gunshot echoes in the cold air.  The can explodes like there’s an M-80 inside.

“Nice,” I sigh for the umpteenth time.  Then I make a show of inspecting the Glock, borrowed from my brother’s collection.  “I can’t hit shit with this thing.  I don’t think Brian has the sights dialed in.”

“Maybe you should try the shotgun instead.”  Ruthie isn’t teasing when she suggests it.  Her pretty features are clouding up with disenchantment.  My masculinity is officially in tatters.

We’re plinking beer cans in the horseshoe depression of an old pond bed on my family’s property.  The berm-like slopes are overgrown with scrub oak and sumac turned crimson.  Behind us is our borrowed ride – Brian’s new Toyota pickup truck, parked on a gradual incline to mown cornfields and a distant gravel road.  This was the perfect place for the illicit activities of our teenage years.  Wasting ammo with firearms borrowed from our older brothers.  Drinking near beer we shoplifted from the Stop-N-Go.  Fucking until we were sore and exhausted.  Especially fucking until we were sore and exhausted.  In summer we spread a blanket and lolled under the stars.  In winter we parked and left the engine running, sometimes until it ran out of gas.

“How many times did we come out here in high school?” I ask playfully.  “Dozens of times?  Hundreds?”

I think Ruthie’s hazel eyes flare with memories, but I can’t be sure.  “That was a long time ago.”  She says it neutrally, not really looking at me, but not really looking away either.

It’s been like this all Thanksgiving weekend.  I can’t shift us into flirtation no matter how hard I try.  Anytime I bring up our past or invade her personal space, she deflects me away.  It’s as if all the history between us has been sanitized in an autoclave.  Nick and Ruthie?  Just a couple teenagers who didn’t know each other very well in high school.

I watch her assume a shooting stance again and unload her Beretta at the rest of the six-pack.  Beer cans rupture and skitter.  She misses a couple times, but only a couple.

“Nice, Ms. Krenzel.  You’re even better than I remember.”

She ignores the double entendre.  “Thanks.  I’m sure I get more practice than you.  I belong to a gun club, you know.”

My libido can summon any image of her to mind – winsome in mid-blowjob, splayed wide and giggling, nakedly asleep at my side.  But in looking at Ruthie, there’s no trace of the coltish tomboy I used to know.  She grew up to be somebody different.  Somebody unexpected.  She’s poised and independent, even a little standoffish, in a way I never foresaw.  But she’s still my first girlfriend.  And my first ex-girlfriend, I suppose.

We wander back to Brian’s pickup truck.  Our shadows fade in and out with the weak sunlight.  The scrub oaks shudder, their bare branches catching the wind.  A honking V of Canadian geese passes overhead.  It’s too late for fall, too early for winter.  My father calls this the dying season.

Ruthie seats her Beretta in its foam-padded carrying case and snaps the lid shut.  “The reason I wanted to see you before you left is to talk about Brian.”  She softens a little, acknowledging my bruised expression.  “The main reason, anyway.  But we do need to talk about Brian.”

“Brian?” I ask stupidly.  The conversation keeps going in directions I never anticipated.

“He’s freaking Kimmie out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nick, he’s almost stalking her!  Ever since she got divorced.  He calls so often that she had to block him.  He still drives past her house a dozen times a day.  She wants to involve the cops, that’s how freaked out she’s getting.”

“No shit.”  I can’t summon the disbelief to make it a question – no shit?  Brian would follow Kimmie around like a mooning calf, whether she wanted him to or not.

“And let’s be honest…”  Ruthie tugs on mittens, glancing darkly at the bed of his pickup truck.  “He’s a gun nut.”

I can’t argue with that.  It looks like we’re transporting an arsenal – and I didn’t even borrow half of Brian’s gun collection.  Most of the carrying cases remain locked, the boxes of bullets unopened.  “I know he likes guns.  Way too much.  But he’d never hurt Kimmie, or her kids for that matter.  Never in a million fucking years.”

“Would he hurt Kimmie’s boyfriend?”

“She has a boyfriend?”  I feel like an idiot before the question is out of my mouth.  Of course Kimmie already has a boyfriend.  She got the biggest helping of looks in the Krenzel family.  She’ll always have a boyfriend – or husband, or fuckbuddy, choosing them from a long line of eager guys.

“Seriously, Nick.  Do you think Brian would hurt Kimmie’s boyfriend?”

“Look, he’s just another dude who likes your sister.  A weird dude, yeah.  But harmless.”

I can tell Ruthie is distracted.  She takes out her ponytail, releasing a blond cascade.  “He’s driving you back to the airport tonight, right?  So talk to him.  Tell him Kimmie just wants to be left alone.  No calling, no driving by her house.  Please, make him understand.  Or she’ll go to the cops and get a restraining order.”

I don’t give her the satisfaction of answering.  I replace my Glock in its carrying case and slam the tailgate into place.  Then I drain my beer – a Stella Artois, as opposed to the Bud Light we’ve been plinking.  Finally I peel back my jacket sleeve and check my watch.  “We should get going.  It’s already past lunchtime.”

“I don’t want to see your parents.  Or Brian either.”

“That makes two of us.  You got a better idea?”

“How about you come over to my parents?  We still have Thanksgiving leftovers.”

“Yeah.  Let’s do that instead.”

There’s an awkward moment as we brush past each other.  The wind kicks up, swirling her hair across my face, my lips.  Without thinking I grab her by the elbow.  She tilts up, hazel eyes going wide.  I kiss her, just like I have a million times.  She doesn’t kiss me back.

Afterward Ruthie blushes the color of winter sumac, a hue that clashes with her orange pants.  “You happy now?”

“God, I’m sorry.  That, that was…I don’t know.  Really fucking stupid of me.”

Ignoring my apology, she marches around to the passenger side and clambers in.  I join her warily, starting up the truck with a sidelong glance.  Her profile is chiseled with resentment.  I fumble with the radio, which is playing an inane honky tonk song.  “Just drive,” Ruthie hisses, knocking my hand aside to turn off the music.  Then she leans back in the seat and pinches her eyes shut, as if she’s sick of this old pond bed and its overlay of memories, a place she never wanted to revisit.

This part of Kansas City is a business park maze.  Everywhere I look are short glassy office towers ringed with perfect landscaping and afterthought sidewalks.  Saman is zoning out behind the steering wheel, driving with his usual languor, meandering through the quiet streets toward a familiar destination.  I listen to the rumble of the engine, the hum of wheels on pavement, the blood pulsing in my ears.  Above us the sky is metallic pillows with sunlight peeking through.

Eventually he pulls into a business park of cloned two-story buildings with parking lots like asphalt lakes.  Our car is the only vehicle in sight.  We wind around berms topped with FOR LEASE signs until we reach the very last building, unique only in the street number emblazoned above its entryway – #3129.  Saman eases into the nearest parking spot.  “You wait here.  I’ll be right back.”

An awkward moment ensues.  He pauses with his door open, considering me.  I consider him back.  Then he removes the keys from the ignition.

“I might as well come with you,” I say, trailing after him to the front doors, where he swipes at a card reader.

Inside the hallways are gloomy with murk and eerily silent.  I breathe stagnant air as I follow his shuffling outline.  He turns keys in a nondescript door and disappears into shadow.  I grope after him tentatively, arms outstretched, reaching –

The silence is spoiled by a loud click.  Instantly the suite is bathed in the cold glare of fluorescent bulbs.  We’re standing in a reception area furnished with a couple chairs and a glass coffee table.  The chairs are so unused that a faint sheen of dust coats the faux black leather.  Saman follows the bland berber carpeting into a short hallway of closed doors.  There’s nothing else.

“This is where you work?”  I’m unspeakably disappointed.  Uprooting ourselves every year for this?

“My office is over here.”  Saman pushes through a nearby door.  Inside are four walls and cheap-looking office furniture.  Some kind of building plan hangs above a fake potted plant.  His family stares out from framed pictures on the desk.  I’m only present in our wedding portrait, beaming shyly, my lazy eye carefully hidden behind a hairsprayed sweep of bangs.

He’s busy rooting through a filing cabinet.  “This is where I make it all happen,” he says happily.

“Make what happen?”

He shifts his weight from one tasseled loafer to the other and back again.  A nervous motion.  Traditional Iranian men never discuss business with their wives, or even in front of them.  I can remember being hustled from the room along with the other women in his family.  Back to the kitchen, back to the children, the men are talking business.

“Business deals,” Saman finally mutters.  “I make business deals happen.”

“With your spreadsheets?”  I don’t know what else to say.

“My uncles tell me I have a gift.  They say I can make the numbers dance.”  His smile is a wilting shimmer of pride and embarrassment.

“Is this what makes you happy?  Working like this, wherever your family needs you?”

Saman straightens up with an armful of manila folders.  “I guess so.  I like the variety.  There is always a new project somewhere.  Something new to learn.”  His tone is full of challenge, daring me to protest our itinerant life.

“Where do we go after this?” I ask limply.

“To pick up my mother for shopping.  Did you forget?”

“No, I meant – where do we go after Kansas City?”

“Maybe we don’t go anywhere.  Maybe we stay here.  Or maybe we go to Wichita.  We’re seeking a property there.”  Saman looks at me as if he’s seeing me for the first time.  Nooshin, a messy fact.  An inconvenience.  “Why do you ask?”

I follow him back to the car.  The day is darker now, the sky thickening into lead.  I can’t glimpse a sunbeam anywhere.  The vague dread I’m feeling solidifies into an icy strangling panic when I focus on it.  Escape.  I’m preoccupied with escape again.  Any kind of escape.  Like, maybe I can “borrow” my mother-in-law’s calling card, the one she uses to call Iran.  The next time we’re out in public, I could sneak off and find a payphone and dial Nick’s number, which I’ve memorized.  I want to hear his voice again.  He inhabits the freedom I can only remember.  America the way Americans live in it.

But even if I could really escape, where would I go?  Not back to my parents.  Maybe not even back to Nasrin.  And that’s the end of my list of destinations, especially when the only money I have in my purse is whatever Saman gives me.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend and I’m sitting wrapped in a blanket on the porch, drinking coffee like sludge and squinting at the hazy orb climbing out of the bowels of Wisconsin.  The bucolic quietude of the big rural empty is retreating with the night.  A couple hundred yards away I-35 is flooding with holiday traffic, glinting colorful waves of suburban assault vehicles and overloaded minivans and the occasional barreling tractor-trailer.

The door bangs open and shut behind me.  Brian drops his substantial bulk into the Adirondack chair next to mine.  Its wooden slats make threatening noises of collapse.  “My fucking back,” he grimaces, trying to get comfortable.

It’s always something with my brother.  He’s got a bad back, and recurrent migraines, and knees that ache, and god knows what else.  I keep telling him it’s psychosomatic, the toll of contorting himself into my parents’ fucked-up worldview so he can work the farm with Dad.  He keeps telling me I’m full of shit.

“I wish I’d seen Wendy.”  He says it as if he’s discussing the weather, looking down the swelling girth of his overalls, wiping breakfast crumbs off.

A typical conversation with Brian – I’m already exasperated.  “You can see Wendy anytime, dude.  She only lives in Des Moines.  Why don’t you swing by her place after you drop me off at the airport?”

“Maybe I’ll do that.”

“You ever been to her place?”

“Nah.  I don’t like that creepy boyfriend of hers.  I got the address, though.”  He takes off his blaze-orange hunting cap to scratch his head.  Underneath the greasy blond hair resembles a monk’s tonsure.  He’s less bald than I am, which doesn’t seem fair considering he’s a decade older.  “When do you fly back?”

I pull the blanket up to my chin.  “Not until Monday night.  Do we just get shit-faced until then?”

“How about this?  We get shit-faced today, and hang out at Krenzels’ tomorrow.”

The Krenzels were our closest friends growing up, a Catholic birth control experiment that resulted in five boys and three girls.  Brian was tight with the older Krenzel kids, I was tight with the younger ones.  They were one of those families perpetually on the brink of losing their land, mailbox stuffed with FINAL NOTICE envelopes, every harvest maybe the last.  There’s no such thing as an honest living on a couple hundred acres, not in this era.  You have to plant marijuana in between the corn rows or cook meth in the machine shed.  Now Brian is telling me that the bank finally foreclosed and everything went at auction.  Mr. and Mrs. Krenzel live in the dead-end town of Somber, where families blow in off the land and collect like dead leaves.

“Is Ruthie home to visit?” I ask with wary hopefulness.

“Why?  You still got a boner for her?”

“Maybe.  I’d have to see her again first.  Has she porked out?”

Brian throws back his multiple chins to roar with laughter.  Beneath him wood screws moan.

Ruthie and I grew up together, a simple friendship that got all mixed up and complicated with our cruel, cruel puberties.  One year she was a klutzy teen with braces and really bad skin.  The next year she was a blooming woman-child trying to master her new boobs and the effect they had on boys like me.  Her brothers jovially threatened me with death if I messed around with their little sister.  Like that stopped me when I was a hormonal idiot and she was a heart-shattering vista of desire.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Brian is asking.

“Hell if I know.  Four or five years ago, maybe?”  A sudden thought grips me.  A thought named Nooshin.  “Did Ruthie get married?”

“Nope.  She’s still single, far as I know.”  He rubs his massive hands together and blows into them, making steam leak out between his fingers.  “Remember Kimmie?  She’s here through the weekend.  She finally divorced that asshole.  Cleaned him out.  Got the house and the snowmobiles too.”

“Kimmie needs the money.  Three kids, right?”

“Four now.  All girls.  Just as beautiful as their mom.”

Kim – Kimmie in the Krenzel nicknaming convention – is Ruthie’s oldest sister and the center of Brian’s sad mooning universe.  Ruthie and I were in elementary school when our older siblings graduated together, posing in their rented gowns and mortarboards, blinking into the hot summer sun.  At that age I was struck by Kimmie’s blond gossamer hair, which looked just like the cornsilk Dad had me detasseling.  Now I’d describe her as hot and slutty, and not necessarily in that order.  But she was always chased by guys more rico suave than Brian.

He heaves himself to his boots, encrusted with layers of dried mud flaking off.  “You ready for a beer?”

“Dude.  We can’t let Dad catch us.  It’s not even breakfast yet.  He’ll skin our asses raw.”

“He’s the one who says Mom’s cooking tastes better if you’re drunk.”

“I heard that!” Mom bellows through the door where she’s been eavesdropping, and suddenly I’m so happy I’m practically losing my mind, because I don’t have to subject myself to this troika of dysfunctional misery addicts for another year.

Garbage swirls in the thick breeze as I trudge along the sidewalk in front of Crown Center, a tall facade of steel tubing and acres of glass and colored panels tied with bows.  My mother-in-law is escorting me into the cold dreary end to a cold dreary day.  The pedestrians we meet are hurrying through the darkness with pained looks on their faces.  Taillights brighten and dull in slow retreat from downtown, carrying silhouettes into temporary suburban exile.

Eventually we find a bank of thick glass doors advertised by banner-sized emoticons that blurt ENTERTAIN THE POSSIBILITIES!  We enter into Christmas and stylish tile and expensive brand name stores, with everything reflecting in the dark skylights far overhead.  My mother-in-law is covered in a shapeless black niqab that conceals everything but her face.  I’m wearing a crimson hijab wrapped around my long hair and a gray ribbed sweaterdress that hangs from my bony shoulders.  No wonder people are staring at us – we look like a frowning storm cloud and a windsock on a pole.  We pause at a mall directory backlit with neon, then click-click-click in our dress shoes toward The American Restaurant and its legendary four star cuisine.

I immediately feel out of place in the refined elegance of its interior.  The dinner crowd is thinned by the recession, strung out across plush booths and long tables draped in white linen tablecloths.  Candlesticks flicker everywhere, making wine and water glasses shiny, giving people reflective eyes.  Servers bustle around in uniforms of white dress shirts and black pants, delivering tiny entrees on huge plates and helping people like me pronounce “arugula” and “remoulade”.  I try to make myself innocuous, tilting forward so my bangs screen my lazy eye and patting down my hijab.

The hostess is a statuesque black girl with tiny University of Missouri studs in her earlobes.  She announces “Your party is this way!” in a twangy voice and sails across the dining room, closely followed by my mother-in-law.  I lag behind on backless heels that are supposed to be sophisticated but just feel uncomfortable.

She leads us to a plush semi-circular booth tucked into an intimate corner.  My first impression is three intent faces, six hunched shoulders, a million words flying back and forth in Farsi.  This is what happens when Saman’s uncles – Majnoon, Nasser, and Gamal – gather for dinner.  But Saman himself is nowhere to be seen.  I haven’t earned my phone privileges back so I can’t call and ask him where he is.  I have to settle for being told he’s tardy as usual, dawdling at the office.

As women my mother-in-law and I are greeted with respectful nods.  There’s an outbreak of hugging and cheek-kissing between the men when Saman finally shows up.  He slides into the booth next to me, taking the spot I warmed, blocking me in.  Under the table his hand pulls up my hem and gropes beneath it, checking to see if I’m wearing the garter belt and thigh highs he recently bought me.  As if.

Majnoon looks like a raisiny Albert Einstein.  His swarthy face is centered in a riot of wispy salt-and-pepper hair and his suit is rumpled, tie askew.  He emigrated before the Shah fell, which is cited as proof of his business acumen – “Uncle Majnoon chose to make a fortune in America rather than lose one in Iran”.  Kansas City has been his adopted home for longer than I’ve been alive.  He doesn’t have good things to say about the city, and the city doesn’t have good things to say about him either.  Sometimes his name appears in The Kansas City Star because of his run-ins with the City Council over zoning and assessments.

Next to him Nasser is a cheerful jewelry display who can’t shut up.  He’s involved in everyone’s life, a torrent of gossip and prying questions.  Almost every liver-spotted finger is adorned with a gaudy ring, both his wattled wrists are covered in bracelets.  Loose skin cascades from his chin into his collar, tight with a blue power tie.  My mother-in-law calls him a faldhi – old woman – behind his back, but he just seems like a politician to me.

Gamal is the youngest of the uncles, only a decade older than Saman.  He’s also the most religious, a veritable mullah who can cite extended passages in the Quran from memory and argue the finer points of sharia.  I’ve heard him describe America as godless and make jokes about living in the heart of the Great Satan.  That’s why he spends most of his time in Iran, where his wife and children still reside.  His suit is cheap and ill-fitting and he wears a full beard, “the mark of the believer” as he calls it.  He must get stopped by airport security all the time.

Majnoon is on a first-name basis with the wait staff.  The wait staff are on a last-name basis with him.  “Mr. Aforezeh!” they say with stilted respect whenever he ropes them into conversation about the wine list or some new entree.  Meanwhile I watch Saman for behavioral cues.  He just sits there, a slouching lump of ease, focused more on his mother than me.

I say nothing and try to fade into invisibility.  That seems to work until a waiter glances my direction and asks, “Is this one of the Aforezeh daughters?”

Majnoon chuckles indulgently. “No, Paul.  This is a happy addition to our family.  My nephew’s wife Nooshin.  They’ve been married five years now.  You haven’t met her before because they just moved here.”

Becoming the center of attention makes my skin crawl, but I force a smile anyway.

Majnoon is drinking cabernet that costs $100 a bottle, a corruption associated with his many decades in America.  The rest of us stick to ice water flavored with lemon wedges.  When it’s time to order, the men pause to debate which items on the menu are halal.  Majnoon has gotten loose in his practice – “bismillah” as Gamal calls it, a reference to invoking God’s blessing on food, any food, even pork.  The youngest uncle is an unwavering authority, steering us away from most of the menu.  When Saman orders for me, he chooses the gnocchi with truffle mole.

Conversation turns to male things – cars, sports teams, taxes this and taxes that.  My mother-in-law dozes in an upright position.  Watching me all day has tired her out, I guess.  I notice there are too many forks in my place setting, and maybe too many knives.  Are they breeding?  I eye my solitary spoon suspiciously, wondering if it will suddenly bud into twins through some inexplicable process of silverware mitosis.

I’m relieved when the entrees finally arrive, giving us the perfect excuse to lapse into silence while Majnoon luxuriates in his role as elder, talking in a raspy voice.  He discusses the latest events in Iran, everything from the abortive Green Revolution to gas rationing.  He brags about the family’s status in America, a tenuous foothold in the middle class underwritten by dollar stores and Subway franchises.  He praises Saman for his contributions to the family business, first in Iran, now here in America.  Saman bows his head modestly, a little embarrassed.  My mother-in-law beams with naked pride.

Eventually Nasser tires of Majnoon’s voice and shifts the conversation to me, asking how I like Kansas City.  I glance across the dining room at the massive windows.  They glitter with a nighttime vista of half-lit skyscrapers with navigation beacons pulsing on top, malls trimmed in Christmas lights, illuminated fountains.  The pattern of lights is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.  I start to answer truthfully – this place is still new to me, since I spent last month wandering southern California – but then Saman squeezes my thigh under the table.  Hard.  I’m never to speak of our brief separation.  It never happened.

Gamal picks crumbs out of his beard, nodding sympathetically.  He even sounds like a mullah when he talks, using the measured cadence of a Quran reading.  “Ah, the burdens of following your husband to a new place.  But is it not fulfilling to make a house into a home?”

I say “If you think it’s so great, why don’t you try it yourself sometime?” but just in my head, not out loud.

Nasser’s bracelets jangle as he saws at charred beef flesh.  His gaze slides toward Saman, then me.  “So you lovebirds.  Planning to start a family soon?”

“Yes we are, God willing,” my husband nods.  His hairy hand pats mine fondly.  This is the man who threw away my birth control pills.

The room seems to mist over and I blink rapidly, watching halos form around sources of light.  I can’t fake my period forever.  I wonder how long before any residual hormones wear off, before I become pregnant.  I almost knock over my water glass reaching for it.

His uncles bump shoulders in amusement, smiling at their niece-in-law’s perceived shyness.  Meanwhile Saman is noticing my distress and warning about the late night, the early morning.  That leads to a parting round of conversation, a long Persian goodbye.  I hover on the periphery.  I can’t bring myself to nod, can’t bring myself to make conversational noises.  I just sink deeper and deeper into the cushioned leather, tilting my good eye upward to the glassed-in ceiling.  I’m trying to glimpse the moon through the dark overcast sky, but I don’t know where to look, or even if there’s a moon to see at all.

On final approach Iowa is a cold earth-toned patchwork quilt coming closer, resolving into individual farms bracketed by gravel roads, then blacktop and the occasional subdivision, and finally the exceedingly modest sprawl of Des Moines at the confluence of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers.   The so-called international airport looks like somebody bulldozed the cornfields on the southwest edge of town and paved them over with two gigantic dragstrips for monster truck racing.   The airport’s multistory parking ramps are the highest elevation for miles.

“Can you believe all that green grass?” the omelet-faced businessman next to me wheezes.  He’s been rubbing my nerves raw since we left Los Angeles 1,500 miles ago – making inane smalltalk, snotting into a handkerchief, nodding off against my shoulder.  “Thanksgiving Day and the grass ain’t even dormant yet.  It’s still looking like September down there.  Well, except for all the leaves being gone.  Can’t forget that bit, I guess.”

I listen to tendons snap in my fist, clenching and unclenching and clenching again.

The Iowan diaspora is comprised of gigantic jellyfish stuffed into denim and sweatshirts and seed caps.  They move toward the baggage claim in a slow avalanche.  I’m chasing daylight, darting between their fleshy elbows and hips.  My only luggage – a backpack – is slung over my shoulder.  Finally I plunge through the glass doors and into the narrow concrete alley between the terminal and its parking ramps, a wind tunnel funneling the prairie breeze into an arctic blast.

An antiquated Ford F-150 nudges the curb in two-toned glory, white and aqua velva.  Wendy waves at me through the windshield.  A manager of something-or-other at Meredith Publishing, the biggest employer in Des Moines, and my sister is still driving a pickup with 150,000 miles on it.  An inheritance from Dad.  Same way he gave me the keys to the Ford Explorer when I graduated from high school.  We’ll drive our vehicles until they shred into rust.  You can take the kids out of the parsimonious Roberts family, but you can’t take the parsimonious Roberts family out of the kids.

Wendy is an Aryan pixie with a tragic blond bob and eyes the color of a Beverly Hills swimming pool.  She’s wrapped in a pink corduroy jacket and mashing the truck’s pedals with shearling boots.  A cigarette is parked in the corner of her mouth.  The bright tip jerks in interrogation.  “You have a good flight?”

“Good enough to get here,” I say.

“Good.”  A typical exchange in our family.  Three sentences, three goods.

I’m flashbacking to the driving lessons she gave me in this pickup, back when I was 15 and she was 21.  How to drive a stick.  It was a boiling summer day with heat waves rising off the gravel road.  The windows were rolled down and locusts flitted in and out of the cab like tiny crashlanding helicopters.  She was wild and ponytailed and laughing, even when I stalled out for the millionth time.

The woman next to me is 33 now.  I search her profile for any trace of the bratty artistic girl who drove my parents – all of us, really – to distraction.  I remember stealing into her bedroom and reading her secret teenage diaries, full of triple exclamation points, violently underlined words, and boys’ names written in loops that fanned across several lines.  This Wendy looks like she never has a triple-exclamation-point thought in her head, never feels anything that deserves underlining.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” I ask, genuinely curious.  She’s been AWOL from family gatherings for the last three years.

“Why are you here?” she snaps.  Another typical exchange in our family.  Answer every question with a question.

“I came to say goodbye to everybody.  I’m moving to Mexico next year.  Living in Tijuana.”

“For your research?”

“Yeah.”

Wendy nods to herself, as if I’m confirming all her best – or worst – suspicions.  Then she stabs out her cigarette butt in the crowded ashtray and fumbles another Virginia Slim to her mouth.  “We still live in the same house.  You remember the one.”  She waves in the direction of East Village, a preservation district of slumping warehouses and decaying apartment buildings and nasty old Victorian-style homes.

By “we” I assume she’s including Glenn, her longtime boyfriend.  A misanthropic software geek who looks like he’s made of melted wax.  “I’ve never been to your place.  Only seen pictures.”

The cigarette tip jerks.  “Really?”

“Really.”

That’s it for conversation until we reach the highway, where Wendy can relax and leave the pickup in fifth gear.  The drive up I-35 is a lot of flat stubbled cornfields and not much else.  The only topographical relief is the occasional overpass leading to half-dead towns of plastic sheeting and tarpaper and septic tanks.  Meanwhile she talks my ear off.  Bitching about this, bitching about that, chainsmokechainsmokechainsmoke.

Ames is a brief sideways glimmer of grain elevators and water towers poking above a bare-branched forest of oaks.  On the north side of town we pass the USDA research lab, a low-slung campus of whitewashed cinderblock buildings with steel roofs.  It’s better known as the only place in America that can conclusively test for mad cow disease.  On the opposite side of the highway is an office park advertised by a B-24 bomber on a pole.

I stare out the windshield at a landscape ironed flat.  The miles crawl by.  Wendy is rehashing the litany of parental transgressions against her, imploding with sad grievances.  I relive those scenes from my customary place on the periphery of our family.  Wendy slouching on sharp elbows at the breakfast table, lips whorish with blaze red lipstick, saying “Mom, don’t be stupid, all the girls in town wear it.”  Wendy scandalizing my parents with a crop art panel, the seeds forming a slutty pinup girl modeled after one of Dad’s calendars in the barn.  Wendy high on god only knows what and clutching a cow’s legs.

Our exit, the last before Minnesota, finally creeps into view.  Turn left and you hit 600 of our 800 acres abutting the highway.  Normally I’d just sit back and watch the familial fireworks, same as I’ve always done, but I feel obligated to voice the thoughts in Wendy’s head.  “It’s been three years.  You sure you’re up for this?”

“Not really.”  She downshifts into motionlessness at the top of the exit ramp.  Beyond the stop sign is empty blacktop disappearing toward either horizon.

“You could drop me off and go home to Glenn.  I can get a ride back to the airport from Brian.”  Brian is our older brother who works the farm with Dad.

Wendy exhales a plume of smoke, considering it.  “They’d probably never talk to me again.  You think?”

I shrug.

“Goddamnit.”  She puts the truck in gear, face souring into resignation.

Growing up each of us coped with Mom and Dad in our way.  Brian contorted himself into their dysfunctional ideal of the perfect son, whirling in a stupid codependent orbit that continues to this day.  Wendy rebelled with smoking and bad boys and worse behavior, launching into an adult life underwritten by therapy and Prozac.  I learned to survive in the minefield of my family and use distance – the emotional kind, as well as the stuff you measure in miles – as my defense.

Shadows are lengthening across the farmstead when we finish bouncing down the long gravel driveway into towering oaks and maples that seem stuck into the ground upside down.  Anal.  That’s what you think when you look at this place.  Everything is immaculate, even the wooden outbuildings that were built when Eisenhower was president.  The old farmhouse is the only structure that didn’t survive into the 21st century, replaced by a new suburban-style rambler that looks like it was dropped here by a tornado.  The freshly-mown lawn around it is growing a bumper crop of lawn schlock – mawkish gnomes, posed plastic deer, narrow decorative things on poles that point into the wind.  A dog peels off from the barn and races toward us, barking loud enough to wake the dead.

“You know what?” Wendy says, leaning over to give me a fleeting hug.  “I think I’m just going to drop you off after all.  Happy Thanksgiving.”

She peels out in her haste to escape, spattering my pants with gravel.  Then the front door opens and fills with the huge silhouette of my brother, and I start to raise a hand in greeting, and 85 pounds of German shepherd hits me like a train.