She wanted to see the farmhouse.
Even though she knew it had changed ownership and that it was going to be quite a drive out of town, delaying the work she needed to do at her mother’s apartment, she needed to see it. She hadn’t spent a ton of time there, her dad and stepmother buying it when she was already a teenager, but there had been enough summers that she had stayed with her dad on the farm that she had a fondness for it. Despite the fact that as a teenager it was impossibly far away from everything, the small hobby farm had a bucolic sense of peace to it that benefited Mac’s mental health. Mac had even spent one whole summer bottle feeding a calf that grew in short time to be a massive bull, his huge horns spanning further than Mac could outstretch her arms.
Her stepmother had wanted to live away from everyone else and to have a menagerie of animals that she took care of. Among some of Mac’s favorites were the goats. With a couple dozen Nubian and a small handful of Pygmies, the whole farm echoed with bleats and protests for more food or something to climb and chew on. Mac fondly remembered her stepmother crouching down to flip a feed bowl right side up and a goat climbing onto her back and refusing to get down. She loved the sweet molasses smell of their feed mix, and despite the 4am wake-up, enjoyed helping feed the animals. One day, to everyone’s surprise, her stepmother had decided she was done with all of it, her dad, the farm, that city, and was going to move away to the beach somewhere, leaving her dad with nowhere to go and no equity to go with. When her dad was finally forced to leave, Mac didn’t have a space for him, not that he even bothered to ask for her help, so he moved to his own beach with a friend, somewhere he could keep working a similar job without much transition.
The road out to the farmhouse wound through patches of trees littered with creeks and hills. Mac remembered the countless rides in and out of town where she watched the forest depths for some other sign of life besides the occasionally scattered country home. She imagined the lives of the people out this far, having to drive at least an hour to anything resembling a store, and her sense of city life had always come up baffled when she contemplated how people provided for themselves or how they were entertained. Sure, there were giant satellite dishes that could pick up channels, but more often than not, Mac didn’t see the light of a television shining in the windows when they drove by at night. She always assumed that there couldn’t be any children that lived out here because why would someone do that to their kid? Her father’s farm was at least five miles from the nearest neighbor, and that was an older woman with no family that visited or stayed with her.
During the summers, the animals had become Mac’s only friends unless on her way to work her stepmother dropped her off at her grandpa’s house so that no one else had to worry about watching her, despite her being a teen in the middle of nowhere. Her father and stepmother had both been workaholics, something shared by her mother, and when they weren’t at work, they most assuredly could be found drinking. The drinking lessened when her dad and stepmom had moved to the country.
When she was younger, her grandfather used to take her to the bookstore for hours, letting her pick whatever she wanted as long as she was quiet and stayed out of his hair. They would return to his little townhouse with a stack of books and the newspaper, and while Mac read and her grandpa looked over the stock market, they listened to classical music. Many times, Mac received the comment that she was the oldest young person anyone had ever met. It had taken her a myriad of therapists to finally accept that her independence and maturity were results of neglect, not some super power she alone had.
Climbing into her grandpa’s truck, Mac found a classical station on the car radio and headed out of town to go see the farm. She half expected the old woman to be smoking on the balcony again, but Mac was thankfully able to leave without any interactions. After navigating the maze of the apartment complex, Mac hit the highway and headed west for the long drive. The highway was lined with trees, with a wide median that still housed a decent crop of forest running down the length of it. Unlike the streets in the city and suburbs near where her mom lived, this highway cut one long, straight line out to the west, the monotony being broken every so often with a slight curve in the road to accommodate a river crossing.
She missed the random exit that she had to take, confusing it for the second to last one to get off the highway and had to drive an extra 10 miles to the next exit to turn around. Finally on the right exit, she stopped for gas at the last gas station around, wanting to make sure she didn’t get stuck out there waiting for God knows how long for someone to be able to help her. She made sure that her phone was fully charged and had food and blankets in the car. It was winter after all, and even though she wasn’t back home out west where the snow fell several feet, she didn’t want to chance icy east coast winter. With a familiar bell chiming above her, Mac looked behind the counter and recognized the face.
“Well, look who’s all grown up?”
“That’d be me, Reese.”
The two had made the same exchange dozens of times every summer, back when Mac was allowed to run in and buy her dad’s cigarettes for him while he pumped the gas.
“You still want a pack of Marlboro Light 100’s and a bottle of Pepsi?’
“No thanks Reese, I’m off the stuff. How ya been?”
“Oh, you know, livin’ the dream. My ol’ man still expects me to run the place.”
“How’s Rodney doing?”
“Still a bastard, but I love him, so I ain’t going nowhere.”
Mac chuckled. Reese and Rodney had been quite the pair. Before they moved out to the country to take over the family gas station, they had run a junkyard down south. Their new property, about halfway between the store and her dad’s house, probably still looked like hell, cars and scrap metal littering the side. It had been a jungle to rummage through as a kid, her friend exploring with her.
“Hell, it looks like West Virginia.”
Mac remembered her father’s words, how he always had an opinion and some
comparison that made no sense while making the most sense. He was one to talk, his own property absent only of the shells of cars.
“How’s your mama doing? Haven’t seen you around since your dad left the area, so
haven’t gotten to catch up.”
“Well, she died,” Mac said, matter-of-factly.
“Oh, darlin’, I’m sorry. Was she sick?”
“Still not sure. Just got a call a couple of days ago. Still over at the coroner’s, so just a waiting game. Grandpa found her.”
“Aw, hell. Sorry, baby.”
“It’s okay. I mean, thank you ma’am.”
Mac had always been so formal with Reese, her southern accent almost demanding the honorifics despite her not being that much older than Mac herself. Grief and death always seemed to forge an awkward space in any conversation, and despite what Mac assumed would be Reese’s dying curiosity, the woman let the topic float off. A loud crash came from the pumps out front.
“Oh, damnit, Frank! ‘Scuse me sugar, lemme go see what this ol’timer is up to out here. Don’t leave without saying goodbye and giving me your number. I wanna check up on you.”
As Reese skittered outside to the pumps, Mac walked slowly around the store, the aisles in the same place, and the price stickers just stacked on one another without any removal first. Every inch of the store felt locked in time, save a few new items added here and there. Mac remembered counting the floor tiles as a kid, pacing the store while her dad talked and talked. Even though Mac had already come into the store and made the purchase, her dad still felt the need to catch up and gossip every day.
“Sure miss your dad ‘round here.”
“Yeah, miss him too, Rodney. How ya doing, sir?”
“Sir? No need to sir me. But besides this bad hip, doing alright. Where’d Reese run off to?”
“She’s outside trying to manage Frank. I’m sure he’s fucking around out there doing something he’s not supposed to.”
“Good luck to her. I’m gonna scurry back to the garage before she starts hollerin’ at me for something on account of him. Good to see you again sweetheart.”
“You too, Rod.”
Reese was bound to be a while, so Mac left some cash on the counter, her number written on one of the bills, and headed back to the car, cracking open a Sprite and KitKat bar as the bell chimed again on the way out. Reese could call her if she wanted, if she even saw the bill. Mac had figured the roads would be less taken care of out here, some patches of ice from whenever the last snow was, but it looked like the countryside hadn’t gotten anything. She pulled the car out of the gas station and started heading up north on the highway that carved through the hills to her dad’s old property. Driving these roads was a lot different, and while she had memorized the landscape as a child, she wasn’t able to scout her favorite spots as well when she was driving the car. The classical music hit the top of a crescendo nicely as she came over one of the last hills before a fork in the road forced her back towards the highway. It had been one of the most maddening things to her: the layout of the roads meant that you had to drive in a giant trapezoid that went far out and doubled back in almost the same distance to get to the farm.
“It would be easier if they just built and extra exit, though,” she had protested to her father once.
“I know, but the people out here love the land that they live on, they don’t want a bunch of people driving through their fields.”
Sure, it made sense in the grander scheme of things, but the boredom was winning the battle of logic that day. There still was no easier way to get out there, so Mac just tried to enjoy the drive as much as she had when she as a teen. She did take a few moments to stop at this little country cemetery that she had loved seeing on the drives to and from town. It was a collection of little gravestones in a little fenced in area next to the big river you had to cross about halfway after the fork. Mac had always wanted to go examine it but had been nervous to ask to see it, even though her father would have entertained her request. He probably would have had some history lesson or local story about that particular family and the farm they lived on. She pulled the car over onto as much of the shoulder that she could manage, put her hazards on, just in case, and walked out into the field to see the little cemetery.
The headstones were worn, so she couldn’t make out any of the distinguishing information, but she knew from context that these had to be children’s graves; they were too small of plots for anything else. Mac could feel her tears welling up and had to go from that spot. Even though her grief wasn’t for these long-gone children, if she stayed and brewed in it too long, she would lose the edge she needed to get everything done. Leaves crunching under foot, she made her way back to the car, excited for the warmth of the car to welcome her back. She had forgotten how much the humidity chilled the air out east.
“It gets in your bones,” she chattered the cliche to herself as she walked.
Mac took the hairpin turn onto what she remembered to be the gravel road her dad’s farm was off of. It had been recently paved, and as she climbed the hill, she could already see how much else had changed. First, the property looked too manicured on the road-adjacent side, and the white fence that bordered the property was new and garish compared to the fences the other folks had around theirs. Mac remembered the old wood her father had steadily repaired and replaced year after year, forcing Mac to come help him and to “learn a thing or two about fences.” Mac had never once built or needed to build a fence since. The driveway up to the farmhouse had been paved too, but Mac didn’t want to disturb the new residents. Plus, what would she have said? The farmhouse had been re-roofed and newly painted, creating an aesthetic of country house while being devoid of all the things that had made the farmhouse special. She also saw that the above ground pool and deck that her dad had built had been demolished, and the animals must have all mostly been sold off because she couldn’t see pens, just open pasture. Her father and stepmother had once had horses on the property, so she figured that the new owners probably continued that tradition. It must have been a hell of a job to erase all memory of the previous owners.
The thing that hurt Mac the most was that she couldn’t even call her dad to tell him what happened. She hadn’t wanted to bring it up at the gas station when everyone was asking about her family, but her dad had died not too long before her mom did. She could handle people’s sympathy for a third party they didn’t have connection to, but she couldn’t manage people who were actually close laying their grief over hers for her dad, searching for some solidarity in something she didn’t have time to process herself. He would have been disappointed to hear about all the handmade, imperfect but ingenious things of his that had been dismantled or discarded. He would have been especially sad about the roof and how without the green tinge of the old tin the farmhouse disappeared into the countryside. Perhaps that’s what the new owners wanted. Perhaps there wasn’t anything here for Mac after all.
She continued down the road to a spot she could turn around and made her way back to the city, radio quiet and silent tears running down her face the entire way.