Read Online In All Deep Places by Susan Meissner - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Susan Meissner
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in 1902, and the passing of the torch had been tough for the older Halcyon generations. But Abe DeGroot’sfour children had all gone away to college and not come back, and no one else in town knew anything about running a newspaper. It was either welcome the newcomers or let the paper die. They opted to welcome Jack and MaryAnn Foxbourne simply because the other option was too frightening to consider. Besides, the newcomers had wisely kept Lucie Hermann, a Halcyon native, on staff, proving they weren’t completely incom petent.
Two years after dad took on the paper, my parents had a second son, whom they named Ethan Abraham. The movers and shakers in town believed my brother’s middle name was a sign that the Foxbournes were honoring Abe DeGroot and the newspaper’s rich Dutch history. Jack wisely never let on that MaryAnn had picked Abraham as a middle name in honor of the great patriarch of Genesis.
My parents faithfully attended every community event, volunteered at the pancake booth at the Wooden Shoes Festival every July, taught Sunday school at the Christian Reformed Church on Tenth Street, and cheered at basketball games. My mother became the new high school speech and drama teacher the year Ethan turned three, and the panache with which she helped Halcyon teenagers successfully pull off Broadway musicals earned her own fair share of admiration and respect. It had taken a decade, but the Foxbourne family had won Halcyon over.
Mom and Dad were content with the way things had turned out, and Ethan seemed comfortable with his birthplace, but as I grew, I began to feel slightly detached from my Iowa home. Though I’d been born in South Dakota, and summer trips to see my grandparents had given me ample opportunity to see the state where my life began, I was familiar with no other life than this life. And because I knew no other life, I wasn’t entirely sure why I had this yearning to live in a big city, in a place far from Halcyon, and to do big things. Like write a book. Like write lots of books.
I knew from the first day I sat in it that the new tree house would be the beginning of leaving for me, though I did not say anything of this to my parents. I knew that whenever I would need to escape, whenever I’d need to travel somewhere faraway in my mind, all I’d have to do would be climb out my bedroom window, scoot along the thick branch that beckoned me, and lose myself to my imagination within the crooked walls of the tree house. I knew I would look forward to those times. And then some day I really would escape.
Six
N ell Janvik already lived in the house next door when my parents moved to Halcyon in the early fall of 1972. She had lived there since 1948, the year she and her husband, Karl, and their son, Kenny, moved to town from the spare room at her par ents’ farmhouse. She had married Karl Janvik at the age of twenty, four months after they realized she was carrying his child. They had lived with Nell’s parents for the first two years out of necessity since Karl seemed to have bad luck when it came to keeping a job. At least that’s how he saw it.
When Nell’s Grandmother Brooten died, she left her enough of an inheritance for a down payment on a small two-story house in town. It was common knowledge that Nell and Karl got a good deal on the house because it was in a mortgage foreclosure—the previous occupants had fled from their debts in the middle of a nameless night while Halcyon slept.
The following year, 1949, Nell and Karl had another son, whom they named Darrel, and the year after that the paint factory was built. Suddenly, there were jobs for everyone, even for unlucky people like Karl Janvik. Nell got a job there, too. But that was the last year friends and relatives remembered Nell Janvik being happy. By the time we became her neighbors, she had spent twenty-four years in the snot-green house on Seventh Avenue, most of them as a single mother. She had lived there longer than anyone
Two years after dad took on the paper, my parents had a second son, whom they named Ethan Abraham. The movers and shakers in town believed my brother’s middle name was a sign that the Foxbournes were honoring Abe DeGroot and the newspaper’s rich Dutch history. Jack wisely never let on that MaryAnn had picked Abraham as a middle name in honor of the great patriarch of Genesis.
My parents faithfully attended every community event, volunteered at the pancake booth at the Wooden Shoes Festival every July, taught Sunday school at the Christian Reformed Church on Tenth Street, and cheered at basketball games. My mother became the new high school speech and drama teacher the year Ethan turned three, and the panache with which she helped Halcyon teenagers successfully pull off Broadway musicals earned her own fair share of admiration and respect. It had taken a decade, but the Foxbourne family had won Halcyon over.
Mom and Dad were content with the way things had turned out, and Ethan seemed comfortable with his birthplace, but as I grew, I began to feel slightly detached from my Iowa home. Though I’d been born in South Dakota, and summer trips to see my grandparents had given me ample opportunity to see the state where my life began, I was familiar with no other life than this life. And because I knew no other life, I wasn’t entirely sure why I had this yearning to live in a big city, in a place far from Halcyon, and to do big things. Like write a book. Like write lots of books.
I knew from the first day I sat in it that the new tree house would be the beginning of leaving for me, though I did not say anything of this to my parents. I knew that whenever I would need to escape, whenever I’d need to travel somewhere faraway in my mind, all I’d have to do would be climb out my bedroom window, scoot along the thick branch that beckoned me, and lose myself to my imagination within the crooked walls of the tree house. I knew I would look forward to those times. And then some day I really would escape.
Six
N ell Janvik already lived in the house next door when my parents moved to Halcyon in the early fall of 1972. She had lived there since 1948, the year she and her husband, Karl, and their son, Kenny, moved to town from the spare room at her par ents’ farmhouse. She had married Karl Janvik at the age of twenty, four months after they realized she was carrying his child. They had lived with Nell’s parents for the first two years out of necessity since Karl seemed to have bad luck when it came to keeping a job. At least that’s how he saw it.
When Nell’s Grandmother Brooten died, she left her enough of an inheritance for a down payment on a small two-story house in town. It was common knowledge that Nell and Karl got a good deal on the house because it was in a mortgage foreclosure—the previous occupants had fled from their debts in the middle of a nameless night while Halcyon slept.
The following year, 1949, Nell and Karl had another son, whom they named Darrel, and the year after that the paint factory was built. Suddenly, there were jobs for everyone, even for unlucky people like Karl Janvik. Nell got a job there, too. But that was the last year friends and relatives remembered Nell Janvik being happy. By the time we became her neighbors, she had spent twenty-four years in the snot-green house on Seventh Avenue, most of them as a single mother. She had lived there longer than anyone
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