The Place Everyone Left

The Place Everyone Left

by

Jenna Martin

There it is: Exit 45. Home. I flip on my blinker and glide down the off-ramp. I hazily remember to stop at the stickered stop sign, its post littered with garage sale signs and staples, and glance at the overbearing and over-washed sheriff’s car parked overtly in the shadows. Not today, I smile. The road is newly paved, the tread of my tires scooping up fresh asphalt and sending it splattering up against the belly of my car. I wonder who they’re repaving the road for before noting the green metal sign as my headlights flash across its surface. According to it, Pine Valley has no population. I steer onto Old Highway 80, the mile-long drag through town. The streetlights glow gingerly on the black highway, casting Jeffrey pines up like ghostly shadows in the night. The liquor store and the new sports bar are the only other artificial light, their long iridescent bulbs piercing starlight. I note the three cars in the liquor store lot, one of which is pumping gas and has plates from Arizona. One of the other cars I recognize as Al’s, the shop owner, and the other is a truck full of high school boys I don’t recognize. I question why they’re out so late. Ten years ago our bikes were lined up where that truck was parked as we scratched the change out of our pockets for an ICEE. Sometimes Al would let us slide by without a couple of pennies, and we’d slurp on the frozen fructose until our tongues were stained red, blue or purple. I lick my bottom lip, imagining artificial raspberry.

The liquor store stares at Frosty Burger, the only fast food establishment in town, on the right side of the road. The normally red cartoon letters give a black stare in return. I glance at the shape of the Betty Boop cutout nailed to the wall next to order window number one. Back then she beckoned us forth, urging us to order our soft serve, swirl ice cream in one of those cones that oddly reminds you of foam board. Betty Boop with her roller skates and blue server outfit; she always made me want a server with roller skates to bring our melting, chocolate-dipped cones and greasy French fries to our table. Instead, my sisters and I would sit eagerly next to our parents, our jelly sandals kicking the air beneath the mosaic table, until some voice grumbled out our order. And then we were off, stumbling and weaving our way through the people in line to order, to claim the bounty waiting for us at window number two. The lady at the window was the same lady as always, a fleshy woman with matted red-orange hair and bloodhound eyes, and she never failed to remind me of the orangutan I saw at the zoo once. Being the oldest, I was the one who carried out the collection, handing items to my two sisters as the orangutan watched us indolently from her cage. Hands full of delectable goods, we ventured back to the table, licking the melting ice cream from the rim of the cones. By the time we’d reach our parents, my mom would be shaking her head, her eyes laughing over the chocolate and ice cream that had begrimed our shirts and coated our fingers. I crack a smile in Betty’s direction, considering how many times my mother must have had to wash our clothes.

Glancing at my speedometer, I realize how slow I’m going, but there is no one on the road to enforce the 35 miles per hour limit. The word enforcement makes me snicker, as I spy a couple of hollow sheriff’s cars parked in front of the baby-blue police station with its blinds shut snugly. During the daylight hours, the blinds are still closed most of the time while the police officers and firefighters utilize their discount at Major’s Restaurant next door. Nowadays, they’re probably the only business the place gets. The restaurant looks aged like an old photo that is blurred and wrinkled at the edges. It attempts to retain its 1950s era motif with the vinyl records and James Dean posters nailed to its poodle skirt blue walls, but it always revealed just that: an attempt. I push past Major’s, the post office, and the overgrown, feathery meadow behind them, which is ethereally shimmering with gold from the light of the moon. There is the trail ambushed by cattails and sage that we used to ride our bikes on. On summer weekends you could hear the Mexican mariachi music dancing from the park gazebo. It was broken up periodically by children’s laughter and squeaky swings. Sometimes if we were tired, we would stop and watch the festivities, salivating over carne asada and frijoles and listening to a language that was altogether unfamiliar. The trail was our private access to town, a rebellious escape from the road our mother warned us to stay glued to. I want to push back those wild shrubs and track our tire marks that must be imprinted somewhere in the hard soil.

I drift back from thoughts of dirt-caked socks and goat-heads flattening bike tires and have the urge to pull into the clubhouse parking lot just in front of the meadow. The freshly painted white stucco and evergreen wood trim encases the community building like a homemade quilt. I can still smell the itchy sawdust and cool paint lacquer of the two wooden benches on either side of the door as I put my car in park. Who knew that a bunch of twelve-year-old girls could construct such sturdy benches! I hear my dad’s peeved muttering about the futility of turpentine to remove the green paint tiptoed all over our driveway. Adds character, I say about the girl-scout footprints chronicling our messy commission. Would those girls have built another bench since then? The smell of wood brings me to the aged piano inside attempting to stand upright in its own dust. Simple C-major chords fuse into New Age cadences as I listen to one of my piano lessons from five years ago, the notes echoing off the walls of an empty dance floor and spraying dust from its strings. It may have been past its prime, but it still had a voice. You could probably hear that piano for blocks if you really listened. I think of worship songs raising the building to its fullest capacity; the Sundays with churchgoers’ cars overflowing the clubhouse parking lot; and the same wrinkly couples with their years-worn bibles and soft, joy-filled smiles gleaming at me with all sincerity. It seems to be the one time of the week where Pine Valley really has a population. I remember youth group in that church, a group of girls already dealing with persecution and an order of acne on the side. The same group of girls I’d kick a ball around with at soccer practice the next day. And when we made the transition into high school, some of us went to public school while the others went to private schools; some of us held onto faith while others faded into popular secularism. I wonder about them, where they went when they left this little bubble in the mountains. I wonder if any of them wonder about me.

My car engine purrs and I’m snapped back into the dimness escaping the light of my headlights. Tires once more finding the familiar texture of Highway 80, I move on past the Mountain Market, the one car in the motel parking lot, and the sleeping elementary school all on the left side of the road. The school looks so much smaller than it did ten years ago: seven white, dwarfed buildings set in a horseshoe around the blacktop. The distance between chain link fence and building seemed like a mile. These days they call it half an acre. Inside those same buildings I wrote my first words and eventually my first story. On that playground with trees for goal posts, I knew people, people who’ve grown up and moved away to cities and suburbs, to amused, refulgent lights and nameless crowds. In those grounds I learned facts, I learned fiction, and I learned about myself. I, too, grew up.

I turn off main street Pine Valley and wind through an array of houses, all structurally diverse yet all homes. My car surges with a burst of adrenaline when we hit the incline. My house with the blue and white siding is just in the middle of this hill. I see the front porch light like a beacon guiding me home through the waves of night. Pine needles crunch beneath the warm rubber as I pull into the driveway. I’m quick to turn off the ignition and hear the last cracklings of the car engine before opening the door. One foot out and I breathe in the crispness of the September night air and descry the symphonic crickets. Bella, I breathe. The names written in the sky sparkle with bright pride. City lights can’t outshine them here. I turn my head away, dizzied from the awesome vastness of the heavens. This is worth driving 45 minutes for.

The dry manzanita tickles my arm as I hop over a line of industrious ants on my way towards the white, oak door of my house. Pulling back the screen door, I pause and stare back at the pine and oak trees whispering soft secrets to each other, shot up like shadows backlit by stars, and the mountains like undulating waves of obsidian. I smile. This town within the belly of crags is still steadfast. This home is still my cradle, even if everyone else has left.

THE END