Home Again

The gravel driveway looked almost exactly as Laura remembered it.

She had been away long enough that she expected to notice changes, but home had apparently made very few concessions to her absence. The barn still leaned slightly to one side, though perhaps a little more than it had before. The cottonwoods along the fence had grown enough to throw longer shadows across the pasture, and one section of fence had been repaired with boards whose newness made everything around them look older. Otherwise the ranch seemed to have continued quite satisfactorily without her.

Laura slowed the pickup as she approached the house. Before she had turned off the engine, one of the horses raised its head from the corral. Another followed, and then came the familiar nickering that had once been so ordinary she barely noticed it.

She sat behind the wheel for a moment and smiled.

At college she had gradually accumulated another set of familiar sounds: doors closing along the dormitory hallway, voices outside her room, bicycles crossing campus, the distant train she had heard on her first night. She had stopped thinking of those things as unfamiliar. It took coming home to realize how completely she still knew these sounds too.

Her mother came onto the porch before Laura had finished getting out of the truck and wrapped her in a hug.

“You've lost weight.”

“Hello to you too.”

“You have.”

“I walk a lot at school.”

“And forget to eat?”

“Sometimes.”

Her mother gave her a look of satisfaction that suggested Laura had just confirmed a diagnosis.

“I had a feeling.”

Laura followed her into the house.

The kitchen smelled faintly of bread, and the kettle on the stove was beginning to whistle. Family photographs still lined the hallway in arrangements that had probably not changed since before Laura left for college. Her father had apparently deposited a stack of mail at one end of the kitchen table despite her mother's longstanding belief that mail belonged somewhere else. A jacket hung over the back of a chair.

Nothing had been preserved for Laura's return. That was what made it feel so much like home.

Her room was another matter. It was still recognizably hers, but it had acquired the peculiar neatness of a room no longer being lived in. The bed was made. The surfaces were clear. A few things she had deliberately left behind remained exactly where they had been, while others had somehow migrated into drawers.

Laura put her bag on the floor and looked around.

When she had left for college, she had thought of this as her room. Now she had another room a hundred miles away with books on the desk, clothes in the closet, photographs beside the bed, and a roommate whose belongings had gradually mixed with hers. Neither room seemed temporary anymore.

She wasn't sure what that made this one.

Dinner lasted longer than most dinners at college because nobody had anywhere else to be. Her mother wanted to hear about classes, her roommate, the dormitory, and whether Laura was eating anything resembling vegetables. Her father asked about her courses and listened while she described professors he would never meet. Laura found herself telling stories she hadn't known she remembered until she began telling them.

She mentioned Scott once without intending to.

Her mother noticed.

“Who's Scott?”

“Someone I know at school.”

Her father continued eating.

Her mother did not.

“A friend?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of friend?”

Laura looked at her. “The kind named Scott.”

Her father coughed into his napkin.

Her mother gave him a look, then turned back to Laura. “I'm only asking.”

“I know.”

Laura smiled and changed the subject.

After dinner she carried a bucket toward the barn. She had done it thousands of times before, but that evening the physical familiarity of the work pleased her in a way it never had when it was simply another chore. She knew which gate would drag slightly against the ground and how far she could open it without letting an impatient horse crowd past her. The horses gathered at the fence with their usual conviction that fairness required each of them to be fed first.

One nudged her shoulder while she was trying to reach another.

“You haven't improved,” she told it.

The horse nudged her again.

At college, nearly every conversation seemed eventually to arrive at the future. What was your major? What were you going to do with it? Were you applying for an internship? What kind of job did you want? Even casual introductions could become small negotiations with a life that hadn't happened yet.

The horses had no interest in any of that. They remembered the sound of the feed bucket and, Laura liked to think, remembered her. Whether she eventually became an accountant, a manager, or something she hadn't yet considered was unlikely to affect their opinion.

Her father came out while she was standing near the fence. He leaned against one of the weathered posts with his hands in his pockets, and for a while neither of them said anything. Laura had always been comfortable with his silences. He didn't use them to force other people to talk.

Eventually he said, “So, how's school?”

Laura looked at him. “I think that's the question everyone asks.”

“Probably because everyone wants the same answer.”

“And what's that?”

“That you're happy.”

Laura hadn't expected that. She looked across the pasture before answering.

“I am.”

He nodded. “Good.”

The answer appeared to satisfy him. He watched one of the horses move toward the far side of the corral, and Laura wondered whether the conversation was finished.

Then he said, “You settle on a major?”

“Business.”

“I thought you might.”

“It seems practical.”

“Nothing wrong with practical.”

Laura picked at a loose piece of wood on the fence. “I just don't know exactly what I'll do with it.”

Her father glanced at her. “Why would you?”

She looked back at him. “Because that's generally why people pick majors.”

“No. That's what people tell you afterward.”

Laura laughed. “There's a difference?”

“Usually.”

He bent and picked up a small stick from the ground, turning it between his fingers while he considered what he wanted to say. “When I started engineering, I had a pretty good idea what I thought I'd be doing. Twenty years later I was solving problems I didn't know existed when I was in college.”

“So how did you know you'd chosen the right thing?”

“I didn't.”

Laura had expected something more reassuring.

“You didn't?”

“No.”

Her father smiled. “I knew I liked figuring out how things worked. I was reasonably good at it. That seemed enough to start.”

Laura considered this. “What if you'd been wrong?”

“About engineering?”

“About the direction.”

He looked toward the horses before answering. “Then I suppose I would have done something else.”

“You make that sound easy.”

“It wouldn't necessarily have been easy.”

He tossed the stick into the grass. “That doesn't make it impossible.”

Laura leaned against the fence beside him. The answer was less satisfying than certainty would have been, but she suspected it was more useful.

Her father nodded toward the barn. “You remember the water pump?”

Laura laughed. “Which time?”

“The time you were about ten and it kept losing pressure.”

“I remember you taking it apart.”

“I remember you asking why.”

“Well, it was broken.”

“You didn't just want me to fix it. You wanted to know why it had stopped working.”

Laura remembered standing near him while tools and pieces of the pump lay on the ground, asking questions until he had finally made her hold the flashlight simply to give her something useful to do.

“I probably annoyed you.”

“You did.”

She looked at him.

He smiled. “Didn't say it was a bad thing.”

They stood quietly for another moment.

“You've always wanted to understand things,” he said. “Not just know the answer. Understand why it's the answer.”

Laura looked toward the pasture.

“Is there a career in that?”

“I hope so. I've been doing it for twenty years.”

She laughed.

He didn't tell her what she should become. That was what Laura noticed later. He could have suggested accounting or management or engineering or any of the other respectable professions that parents seemed to keep available for conversations with college students. Instead he had told her something he had observed about her and left the rest alone.

They stayed by the fence until the light began fading from the pasture. The cottonwoods moved gently in the evening breeze, and the horses gradually lost interest in Laura once it became clear that the bucket was empty. Her father finally pushed himself away from the post.

“Your mother's probably wondering where we are.”

“She knows where we are.”

“Yes,” he said. “That's different from wanting us inside.”

They walked back toward the house.

Laura had been gone only a little more than a year, but the ranch seemed both smaller and more substantial than she remembered. As a child she had assumed home was simply there, fixed in the landscape like the hills beyond the pasture. College had begun to teach her that places did not remain unchanged merely because they waited for us to return. The barn leaned a little farther. Trees grew. Fences were repaired. Parents grew older in ways a daughter might not notice until she had been away long enough to see them again.

And the person returning was changing too.

That was perhaps the peculiar thing about coming home. Laura had expected the ranch to remind her who she had been. Instead, surrounded by the places that knew her best, she became more aware of the person she was becoming.

The next day she would drive back to campus, to classes and friends and the dormitory room that no longer felt strange. Scott would probably be somewhere in that life too, though Laura wasn't yet prepared to decide exactly where.

For that evening she was content to follow her father toward the house. Her mother had left the porch light on, though there was still enough daylight to see by.

Her father noticed it too.

“We're late,” he said.

“For what?”

“I don't know.”

Laura smiled.

They went inside.