I'll Be Home Late Tonight

by Susan Thames

Genres: Family Life; Sagas; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Reminiscent of the works of Kaye Gibbons and Mona Simpson, Susan Thames' I'll Be Home Late Tonight offers an incandescent examination of the bond between a mother and a daughter. During a car trip through the South of a generation ago, two women learn about each other's strengths, failings, and secrets.

Release date: December 21, 2011

Publisher: Villard

Print pages: 224

Sample

Chapter 1
 
It was 1957, I was twelve years old, me and my mother June were gassing up the Buick at a filling station in Welch, West Virginia, on our way to the rest of our lives. Welch was where we’d been for the few months since we’d run off from home—Covington, Virginia, white paint peeling from the clapboard, pigeons nesting in the garage roof, people there who loved you so well and did you so wrong it made you feel like damning them all to hell, my grandmother off, my father gone, my mother sitting right there in that car beside me and for God knew how many years to come, somehow the best and the worst of the lot, close as skin, distant as memory.
 
Six months with June’s cousin Sally and her husband Neil, six months of snit and nerves and bad cooking so I had an itch to go, but I had an itch to stay too, like you do when it isn’t so much leaving as it is leaving for you-don’t-know-what that cuts you in two. On the subject of leaving, June was undivided, but even if she hadn’t been, Sally showing us the door made it a very simple matter.
 
Of course my mother, damned or not, was a very forward-thinking person. “Fate and gumption have made us a pretty pair of travelers, Lily,” she said, and she winked at me as she took a piece of Clove chewing gum from its wrapper. “But never forget,” she added, “a traveling woman with a strong sense of direction has nothing to fear.” She folded the gum neatly into thirds, put it on her tongue and breathed hard, and I could smell the spice and the sugar. I helped myself to a piece—it smelled better than it tasted—and listened to the gasoline meter click off the tenths of gallons and the dollars and cents.
 
“Do you know the difference between north, south, east, and west?” June asked.
 
I turned the gum over in my mouth and wondered if this was one of her trick questions. “The sun rises in the east and sets in the west,” I answered, because, after all, what could she make of that?
 
She yanked at the cuff of her white blouse and puffed up her fine yellow hair to give it some heft and height. “That’s right,” she said, still fussing with her hair. “So if it’s the first thing in the morning and you’re lying flat out on the ground with the sun to your left, then that’s the east, to the right is the west, the south is at your feet, and the north is atop your head.” She turned the key in the ignition, smiled too hard at the pump boy, thanked him for doing such a fine job cleaning the windshield, and pulled out of the station.
 
As we rode out of Welch, I knew I was seeing the place for the last time—the churches and houses, a park, the department store, the five-and-dime—and I wanted to ask June if we could stop, if we could stay just long enough for me to get out of the car and touch the gate in front of the library and smell the steam seeping out the open window of the coffee shop across the street, but I didn’t say a word because I didn’t like to let on to her that I cared. And then, as if she knew, she put her foot on the gas and sped past the sign that marked the limits of the town.
 
We were already crossing the Clinch River when she adjusted the rearview mirror, checked her lipstick, and pointed to the map of the eastern United States open on the seat between us. “Listen to me,” she said. “When you’re reading a map, the east is always on your right, the west is always on your left, and so on and so forth. The weather’s going to start cooling off pretty soon, so we’re heading south. All you have to do is keep track of the towns we pass through. Find West Virginia, and then find Welch over near Kentucky. In Welch, look for a road marked with the number sixteen, and then just follow it. That way, you’ll always know where we’ve been and where we’re going.”
 
“Where are we going?”
 
“What’s the next town south of here?”
 
I set the map in my lap. It took me a while to get my bearings on paper. Route 16 was a skinny pink line that ran north to Mullins or south to Tazewell. “Tazewell.”
 
“Can we get there from here?”
 
“Sure thing.”
 
“And then?”
 
“And then …” I traced south with my finger. “Marion and then Jefferson and then Blowing Rock and then …”
 
“All of those places are south of here?”
 
“Uh-huh.”
 
“Good.”
 
The sky was clear and the air was sweet and dry and the wind talked to my face through the open window. Smoke rose in twisted spirals from fires set at the edges of fields, and children stared and waved from school yards and fence posts and porches. All that day I watched the hills swell and spill into the hollows and let the first fall colors make me happy and sad for their beauty and what they signified: nature’s wonders, the end of summer, me and my mother adrift.
 
June said we’d aim to average two hundred miles a day. She said we could do more, but she didn’t feel like pushing herself. She also said that if she drove too fast, she wouldn’t be able to look at the scenery, and since that was part of why we were taking this trip she didn’t want to cheat herself. On the other hand, the money saved from her afternoons doing the bookkeeping and measuring yard goods at the fabric store in Welch wouldn’t go but so far, and the last thing she wanted was to end up broke in some dinky little motel in Georgia, which was exactly where, just that morning, Sally’d said she’d expect to find us if she ever came looking. I said two hundred miles a day sounded like a good distance, but the truth was it didn’t mean much to me. I suspected that distance was a lie, same as nearness—what was close often seemed so far away and what you’d left behind or what had left you haunted you still.
 
Now, for the first time since I was born, June and me were alone together day and night. We got it down to a routine, planning our route over breakfast, staying at the cheapest motel with a TV—though we hardly ever watched the shows because we were too tired or else because we weren’t tired at all, and who wanted to sit on a lumpy bed and watch television when we could be chatting with the other travelers in the recreation room or the office or going for a stroll to see the town?
 
Taking evening walks worked best to ease us out of whatever we’d troubled each other over during the day. Usually it was something about the past, about Covington, something so silly you’d have to wonder why either of us bothered with it—the color of a neighbor’s new patio furniture, whether we went to the Baptist or the Methodist church last year at Christmas. But every now and then one of us said something meant to cause the other pain, or test her loyalties—whether my grandmother Caroline lied about her age, was my father Nate’s old Pontiac a two-door or a four-door?, and was the upholstery leather or cloth? It seemed like just the mention of their names was all it took for one of us to slam a hand against the seat or the car door or throw something, an empty Coke bottle, a dirty sock, or jump up and down in a fit. And once it began, we could keep at it for a long while, until one swipe at the air too close to somebody’s chin or one word more malicious than the rest silenced me or her and the other was sure to follow, as we retreated to the far sides of the car seat.
 
On her side, June pinched her cigarette tight between her lips, one hand on the wheel and the fingernails of her other hand chipping away at the cuticle and red polish of her thumbnail, her face steeled beyond knowing, though I did study her, reading her with the eyes and ears of my skin trying to sense if I’d gone too far. But if in my mind I practiced the things I could say to make it up between us, I never did speak them, because it vexed me so that I feared her whim or her judgment. Just the same, I worried myself into such a sweat I could feel it trickle from under my arms, and I grew so lost to real things seen or spoken that the sound of her voice startled me when she said, “Dig around in my pocketbook and find me a pack of cigarettes,” or “You want to stop soon or you want to drive a while? Perry Como’s on tonight.” I’d find her cigarettes and we’d pull in at the next tourist court early enough to have our walk, eat some scrambled eggs or share a pot-roast dinner in a coffee shop, and get back to our room in time to join right in with Perry, “Dream along with me, I’m on my way to the stars.”
 
On our first day out of Welch we came to a number of agreements: We’d take local roads, so we wouldn’t wake up some place a hundred miles away and not know the land we’d passed through; we’d stop anyplace either of us wanted to, whether it was for a look or a drink of water or just to stretch our legs; and we wouldn’t pick up hitchhikers, since with all our clothes and the collection of remnants June had saved from her job—white linen, white velvet, white corduroy—the trunk was full and there wasn’t even room for a rider in the backseat.