Nebraska
That Sunday, Connor and the second counselor finished the tithing count by 12:45. The walk home from the Crabtree Technology Building (every lecture hall on campus doubled as chapel space) took ten minutes. He removed his tie. Aunt Wanda got the dinner rolls out of the oven, and they were on their way by one.
They drove down from the East Bench to the family home on Fifth North, four blocks east of University Avenue. Lynne, Wanda’s oldest, had inherited the house. The old house required the close attention of a craftsman equal to the man who’d owned the place for sixty years. Lynne had married her equal in that department.
Connor parked the Camry under the canopy of the white maple shading the front lawn. The sound of Mike playing the guitar floated from the living room window: Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.”
Lynne and Glenn completed the restoration of the porch over Spring term. They’d put it off for six years, the six years since the old man died. Connor knew why. Rebuilding the porch was a big job, a This Old House kind of project. The corner posts had rotted away at ground level. They had to pour a new foundation and reframe the entire deck.
Connor had helped tear it down at the end of Winter semester. That’s when Lynne told him, “Grandpa pretty much gave up on the house the last few years of his life, after Grandma died. That’s when we knew. When he gave up on the house, he wasn’t long for this world.”
The front steps no longer teetered. The floorboards were powdered with sawdust, the smell of cut pine like a light perfume. The scent brought back memories as vivid as a photograph. Whenever his family journeyed west on vacation, Connor had camped out on the porch.
He glanced down the long driveway at the garage—a squat, A-frame cabin set apart from the house. He was almost surprised when he didn’t see the metallic blue 1966 Mustang GT Coupe parked there. But not even his grandmother’s Ford Taurus. Only an Odyssey minivan. Connor had to grin. You’ve got a Honda parked in your garage, old man. He wondered, who’d snagged the GT? Who’d plucked the apple of his grandfather’s eye?
Inside the house, though, in the shadowed corners, there were times when he still thought he saw—in the flicker of a failing light, out of the corners of his eyes—his Grandpa McKenzie sitting there hating the world and Connor in particular.
Mike let them in. He was holding his Takamine Concert Classical. “Hi, Grandma,” Mike mumbled and returned to the couch.
“Hello to you, too, Michael,” said Wanda.
Connor got Mike’s Gibson off the stand and sat down on the piano bench. Mike started back on Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven. Connor knew the song. His repertoire had slipped considerably since high school, but he could hit the chord changes and fill in the bass line.
Neither of them sang, though Connor hummed the words to himself. Aunt Wanda came back into the living room and said, “That’s really nice, boys.” At which point both of them stopped playing. They ducked into the kitchen under the pretense of making themselves useful, though with the intent of grabbing something to eat.
Uncle Martin arrived in his Ford F150. The hoist and crane assembly was still bolted to the bed behind the cab. When her ALS got too bad for Aunt Irene to move on her own, he’d rigged up the contraption to swing her and the wheelchair into the cab where the passenger’s seat used to be. He hadn’t put the passenger’s seat back in. The only company he kept these days rode around in a horse trailer.
Glenn got home from church about the same time. He greeted Martin, and Connor joined them on the porch. Martin was having Glenn tell him about the recent work he’d done.
“Yeah, we had to underpin the whole front of the house and jack her up while we ripped out the old foundation. You remember that, eh, Connor? That was a bunch of mud-in-your-eye work.”
At the mention of Connor’s name, Uncle Martin turned to his youngest nephew. “Been a while, Connor,” he boomed. “Been wondering what you were up to.” Even at seventy-five, Martin was a hearty, big-chested man. His perpetually sunburned face was shadowed by a broad Stetson. He was a large-animal veterinarian, retired a decade now. He took off his hat and combed his fingers through his snow-white hair.
“I spent spring term in Japan. The brother of my Japanese professor needed help on a translation project for the Self-Defense Forces.”
“That’s right. I remember your mom saying something about that in one of her emails.”
Mike poked his head around the screen door. “Mom says it’s time for dinner.”
They trooped into the dining room. “There you are.” Lynne motioned to Glenn. “Come get the roast.”
“Anything else need hefting in there?” Martin asked.
“Why don’t you get the mashed potatoes? Connor, here.” She handed him a basket of dinner rolls.
Uncle Martin placed the bowl on the table and sat next to Mike. Connor made room for the rolls. Mike reached over and grabbed one. Connor helped himself as well and moved around the table. He took the chair farthest away from the doorway, his back to the west wall. Where his grandfather always sat, he realized. But it was too late to move.
Elly’s grandparent’s house in South Jordan was the one constant in her life. Everything else changed. After her father quit GE, they lived in Salt Lake for a while. And then settled in the north part of Provo near Rock Canyon. Her father lectured at the BYU business school and consulted for his old employer. He was off to Asia at least once a month. When the mission call came, her mother confided to her, “It’ll be nice to have your father stuck in one place for a change.”
But her grandparents’ house was still there, a block south of Bingham High School. Her grandfather had been the seminary director there before being called as a General Authority. The suburbs had grown up around them. The house stood out on its now-enormous acre lot. The barn was the size of a small house. The long backyard was divided into a pair of paddocks, the picket fences tracing neat, white lines on the alfalfa green.
“I see they haven’t gotten rid of the horses,” Melanie said.
“They’re not the same horses, I don’t think. It’s just to keep the zoning variance.”
Melanie turned into the long driveway and parked her Accord next to a ruby red Z3. “So,” she asked, “did your grandfather decide to chuck it all and rocket across America in pursuit of his misbegotten youth?”
“Knowing my grandfather I wouldn’t be surprised. But no.”
“Then they’re he—re,” Melanie said in her Poltergeist voice. “And somebody’s ri—ch.”
They entered the house through the kitchen door and were immersed in a bouquet of baking chicken and homemade whole wheat bread not long out of the oven. All the memories of the old homestead were suddenly fresh in Elly’s mind.
Her grandmother was on her way to the dining room with the salad. She was wearing the ICHIBAN #1 GRANDMA apron Elly had given her years ago.
The gift of the apron was one of Elly’s earliest memories. It went back to the time when her grandmother babysat her after Emily was born. Her father had gone to Japan to get the house in Hiratsuka ready before they moved. Elly was considered a “handful” at the time, so her grandmother took her off her mother’s hands.
Two years later they were back in Salt Lake for Christmas. When it was Elly’s turn, she gave her grandmother the package she’d wrapped and said, “It was Mom’s idea.” She was not happy about not spending the holidays with her friends in Japan. But her grandmother humored her, as all grandparents humor their grandchildren’s churlishness, disciplining them not being their business, after all.
She opened the present with the requisite enthusiasm and cooed over it the way grandmothers are supposed to. But then she glanced at Elly’s mother and smiled. Her mother responded with a nod, almost a bow. Elly didn’t think anybody in the family saw the bow but her. She knew it meant a lot more than a stupid apron. She didn’t understand what until Sam was born and she was stuck doing much of what her grandmother had done those several weeks.
Her grandmother placed the salad bowl on the table. She greeted Elly with a hug. Melanie got a hug too. Missionary companions were as good as family.
Her grandfather’s stentorian voice boomed out, “The two most beautiful co-eds in the world!”
“Hi, Gramps.” Elly threw her arms around him. He enfolded her in an embrace that lifted her up on her toes. Her grandfather smelled as he always did, of fresh hay and aftershave. Melanie didn’t get a hug from Elly’s grandfather. It was a mutual thing, Elly had noticed. Melanie made married men nervous. The ones she didn’t make nervous she didn’t trust.
The two other dinner guests joined them from the living room. Elly retreated next to Melanie. Her grandfather said, “This is Kevin Whitaker and Sean Jeppson. They’re just back from their missions as well.”
Sean took the initiative and stepped forward, hand extended, a broad smile on his face. “Hi, you must be Elaine.”
Melanie said, “No, I’m Melanie.”
Grandma didn’t let the confusion last. But in the split second before she rescued him, Elly saw Kevin wince. Kevin knew who was related to whom. Kevin didn’t own the Z3. A stereotype, to be sure, but a reliable one in her experience. Kevin must have seen the family photographs on the living room walls. Sean only saw Melanie. Id conquered superego.
Grandma said, “Why don’t you help me with the chicken, Sean? Here, use the hot pads.”
Sean was eager to demonstrate his domestic talents. Kevin was given care of the asparagus greens. Grandpa escorted Elly and Melanie into the dining room. Their role was to be waited on, and the role of the young men was to impress any potential in-laws with their husbandly qualifications.
Melanie said, “Elly’s already got herself a teaching position at BYU.”
“One section of a 100-level class,” Elly quickly added.
Her grandfather beamed, and she could not resist basking in the glow of his approval. “That’s great, Elly! Teaching runs on both sides of the family. You’ve got yourself a double dose.”
With a bit of surprise, Elly realized he was right.
Her grandparents didn’t let them clean up after dinner either. With some small measure of guilt—abandoning Melanie to Sean’s seductions— Elly escaped to the backyard. The bay colt ambled across the paddock.
“Hey,” she heard Kevin say behind her, “Sister Packard said he’d like some of these.” He held up a handful of carrots.
The horse did. “Hiya, boy. Kevin patted the colt’s neck. He said to Elly, “You ride?”
Elly shook her head. “Well, a few times when I was younger. But I’m afraid only because Grandpa insisted.”
“I never rode a horse until I went on my mission. Never got within a hundred yards of one.”
“Where was your mission?”
“Nebraska.”
“I think they have cars in Nebraska.”
He laughed. “Riding horses was definitely against the rules. The family we were living with in Broken Bow—great name for a town, don’t you think?—they couldn’t believe I grew up in Utah and had never ridden a horse. Days of ’47 and all that, figured we must all be pioneers here in Utah.” He said, “You went on your mission to Japan, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, Osaka.”
“You probably expected to.”
“Osaka was a bit of a surprise, my dad being mission president in Kobe and all. That’s about as far apart as Provo and Salt Lake.”
“Mission president? Oh, that’s right. Your grandpa said. Well, when I got my call I looked it up: eight hundred miles from Salt Lake City to Omaha. I didn’t expect to go on a foreign mission—not good enough at the language stuff—but Nebraska? I could practically walk there. It wasn’t exactly an inspiring moment for me. But Nebraska wasn’t anything like I’d expected. Okay, no matter where you go, cities are cities and suburbs are suburbs and shopping malls are shopping malls. What’s different are the places in between.”
“I think that’s true no matter where you go.”
“Anyway, this one time we were driving back from a mission conference in Omaha, headed north on Route 2. It was getting late, the wind was kicking up, whiteout conditions. And we were running on fumes. We spotted a gas station and pulled off. We had no idea where we were. But I remember that they still had Christmas decorations around the store window. And there were two cats curled up under the Budweiser sign. So we called it Two Cats, Nebraska.”
The horse snorted and nuzzled his hands. “Sorry,” Kevin said. “Out of carrots.”
“Two Cats, Nebraska,” Elly said.
“Yeah. Now that’s what I tell myself whenever I start to second-guess a place I’ve never been without going there first and seeing for myself.”
Elly nodded. Nebraska, she repeated to herself.
Melanie’s Accord hummed over Point of the Mountain and down into Utah Valley. Melanie glanced at Elly. “Kevin didn’t look like a jerk.”
“He was nice. He figured out who I was related to right off.”
“See, you always get the smart ones. I end up with the jock prowling for a trophy wife.” Another look. “Girl, sometimes I can read you like a children’s book. Other times you’re a cipher.”
“I’ve never been to Nebraska.”
“What?”
“Kevin went on a mission to Nebraska. He was telling me about how it wasn’t like anything he’d expected. He had that look in his eyes, the same vibe I get from gaijin missionaries in Japan. Chalmers Ch r has it. All those RMs who show up for 301 do. They’ve stumbled into this world they never knew existed. I think a lot of it comes from never having lived in a really big city before. But it’s the culture, the language, the geography, everything that is so not Idaho or Utah or Arizona or California. And then getting transferred to some little town where the people have never seen a real live white guy before.” She said to Melanie, “How about you?”
“It was different and it was interesting.” She shrugged. “I know what you’re talking about, Elly. But I think it’s more a guy thing. Every guy wants to boldly go where no one has gone before. El Dorado is out there, and he’ll be the one who finds it. That’s why they buy SUVs to commute to work in.”
Elly nodded. “Still, someday I’d like to go to Nebraska. Metaphorically speaking.”
Melanie laughed. “Elly, if you really want to go where no man has gone before, you can always get yourself married and get pregnant.”