My Unsentimental Education

daughter of the man who owned the bar by the gravel pit, how she wouldn’t be able to make the place homey. I pictured bean bag chairs, plastic end tables, beer posters. Garnett said, “I don’t mind an occasional party, but if it’s all the time and a rough crew I’ll give her notice.” I smiled.
I was Garnett’s favorite. Had I ever been anyone else’s? We hugged goodbye, and she broke down, tears streaking her face dusty with lavender-scented powder. She took off her glasses, which caught in her hair, her topknot, which tumbled down, dark, undulant.
I wrote to her, and she wrote back. The last time was after my thesis advisor sent me a newspaper clipping—he took pride in students he’d launched, and he knew I’d lived in the almost-ghost-town. It said that Garnett’s youngest son had been smothered while driving a back-hoe in the gravel pit when gravel mounds toppled. I wrote to Garnett. She answered: “Thank you and know that I love you, but don’t worry about me. And maybe it’s good Tim can’t feel the shame his father has heaped down upon us.” Her husband, a randy old man whom even Garnett avoided, had run off with a barfly. I hadn’t lived long enough to know what to say back. My news was trivial, plans coming together, not apart. I never heard from Garnett again, though, as I write this, having run her name through an Internet search engine, she’s alive, a survivor in her eighty-six-year-old brother’s recent obituary.
I found an 1880s photo of the store too, a general store. According to the website, the upstairs rooms where I lived once served as a courthouse for a county seat long since gone. The land is different, no trees; people in front look like characters in a Mark Twain story.
But the building is the same. I count my windows: one for my kitchen where I answered the phone; one for my dining room where I wrote and studied; one for my living room where I listened to records; one that would become the door to the portico roof, not yet built; one for the spare bedroom where I stored relics my mother shipped when she emptied my childhood home. The apartment was a cheap place to live until I could afford better, yet decades later I wake in my king-size bed, and I find I’ve dreamed I’m moving back in, and there’s a surprise-door leading to space I didn’t know existed. The surprise-door is in the spare room, where I’d stashed cargo I cast off when I moved: embroidered dish towels turned ragged; the My School Years scrapbook my taskmaster grandmother sent; bottles of dandelion wine I made using husband #1’s grandmother’s recipe.
That apartment is the second-to-last place I saw my mother for nearly twenty years. I understand now that when I saw her in Kansas our era of telephone-only contact was beginning, but I’d assumed we were just in a short spell when visiting each other was inconvenient.
On the phone with my mother, then, I said I was driving across western Kansas, eastern Colorado, north to Wyoming, west into Utah. I wouldn’t throw away my bed, my books, my desk, my sewing machine, the parquet-inlay table with matching chairs, and a few more pieces I’d earned at Garnett’s store. I was renting a U-Haul truck, towing my small car. My mother must have worried into a froth in front of her boyfriend, not yet her husband. Or, sober, he wanted to be kindly acquainted. My mother called the next day and said to rent a trailer, not a truck, and the two of them would drive from Wisconsin to Kansas, tow the trailer to Utah, unhitch it, then drive down to Arizona, snowbird haven, to check it out for future business schemes, then drive back to Wisconsin. “We love road trips,” she said, a girl in love. I was relieved, grateful. I’d been scared to drive a big rig while towing a car, the last stretch into Salt Lake City so steep, I’d heard, that brakes give out.
I left pots and pans unpacked, and I’d been told to buy specific groceries. My mother’s boyfriend ate only a few foods, canned corn, ground round, and on Fridays—he was Catholic—tuna in white sauce over toast. I’d also been told to have everything else packed because there’d be no time to linger, so the apartment looked as unappealing as it did the next day when Garnett and I would walk through it. Instead of getting kindly acquainted with my mother’s boyfriend, I got bad conversation. The apartment was ugly, he said. How much had I declared on last year’s income tax return? Wasn’t I an adult yet?
He put mirrored sunglasses on and started hauling boxes. So when I said the apartment looked nice with furniture and curtains, that some people praised my ability to make do on a budget, that I was a student, an apprentice, that most of my income was a teaching fellowship, an award, only my mother heard, and even she said we needed to stop wagging our chins and load. I couldn’t object anyway because they were moving my furniture he didn’t like either. I couldn’t see his face as they pulled away. My mom waved—parting, sweet sorrow—as if this was just another Kodak moment in the family annals.
I headed out the next day.
A week before, I’d taken my car to a mechanic and asked him to change the oil, the coolant, the transmission fluid too. The mechanic said transmission fluid was good for the life of the car. “But,” I said— and I concede that there’s a fine line between being preemptive and meddlesome—”won’t new fluid help me shift gears with less friction?” I was about to cross mountains. The mechanic said he, personally, wouldn’t bother. But I prevailed and headed west, fluids refreshed, looking like an Okie with a few fragile home furnishings in the back (a lamp with a glass finial and