Miller's Valley Read online

  Miller’s Valley is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Anna Quindlen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Quindlen, Anna.

  Miller’s Valley / Anna Quindlen.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-0-8129-9608-1

  ebook ISBN 978-0-8129-9609-8

  1. Girls—Fiction. 2. Farm life—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3567.U336M55 2016

  813'.54—dc23

  2015025157

  eBook ISBN 9780812996098

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for eBook

  Cover design: Anna Bauer Carr

  Cover illustration: © Gustavo Garcia

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part 2

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 3

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part 4

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 5

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 6

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part 7

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  By Anna Quindlen

  About the Author

  Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  It was a put-up job, and we all knew it by then. The government people had hearings all spring to solicit the views of residents on their plans. That’s what they called it, soliciting views, but every last person in Miller’s Valley knew that that just meant standing behind the microphones set up in the aisle of the middle school, and then finding out afterward that the government people would do what they planned to do anyhow. Everybody was just going through the motions. That’s what people do. They decide what they want and then they try to make you believe you want it, too.

  Donald’s grandfather was at every meeting, his hands shaking as he held some sheets of loose-leaf he’d been reading from so long that they were furred along the edges. He carried a big file with him everywhere, even when he went to the diner for breakfast. Early on he’d switched out the original file for the accordion kind because the first one got too full. But it was full of the kind of stuff old guys pull together, newspaper clippings with uneven edges, carbon copies of letters ten years old, even the occasional sales receipt for a sump pump or a new well, as though someone was going to be inclined to pay him for all the years he’d spent fighting the water. I always wondered if they wrote him off because his name was Elmer. The government people talked a lot about the future. Elmer was such an old guy’s name, a piece of the past.

  “The best we can do is make sure we get as much as we can out of the bastards,” Donald’s grandfather said at what turned out to be the next-to-last meeting.

  “There’s no need for that, Elmer,” my mother said. She meant the profanity. She was as interested as the next person in milking the government for money. A lifetime working in hospitals had shown her the wisdom, and the ease, of that. She was upright but not stupid.

  My mother was a person of stature in Miller’s Valley. She’d lived there all her life. Her mother had raised her and her younger sister, Ruth, in a one-story three-room house at the edge of the valley with a pitted asphalt roof and a falling-down porch, and when she’d married my father and become a Miller she’d moved to his family’s farm, right at the center of the valley, in its lowest place, where the fog lay thick as cotton candy on damp mornings. She was a Miller of Miller’s Valley, and so was I. People thought my mother could take care of just about anything. So did I, then.

  The government people were all job titles instead of proper names. They dealt out thick business cards with embossed seals; we found them in our pockets and purses long after there was any point to it. There were geologists and engineers and a heavyset woman with a sweet smile who was there to help people relocate after the government took their houses. A resettlement counselor, they called her. She had the softest hands I’d ever felt, pink and moist, and when she’d come toward my mother, her hands like little starfish in the air, my mother would move in the opposite direction. It’s hard to explain to kids today, with everybody touching each other all the time, kissing people who are more or less strangers, hugging the family doctor at the end of a visit, but my mother wasn’t a huggie person, and neither were most of her friends and neighbors. “She can just forget about patting me, that one” is what she always said about the resettlement counselor.

  I felt kind of sorry for the woman. It was her job to make it sound as though one place to live was just as good as another, just as good as the place you’d brought your babies home to from the hospital fifty years before, just as good as the place where your parents had died and, in a few cases that you could tell made the government people really uncomfortable, were buried. They could make moving to a new house with a nice dry basement sound like a good deal, but there was no way they could put a pretty face on digging up a coffin that went into the ground before the First World War.

  When people would talk about the government’s plans, at the hospital, in the market, someone would always say, “Can they really do that?” The answer was yes. “They can do what they want,” my mother said, and when she did, Donald’s grandfather held his file in front of him like a shield and said, “Miriam, I don’t think you understand the situation.” But that wasn’t true. My mother always understood the situation. Any situation.

  “I figure by my breathing I’ll be gone by Sunday,” she said years later when she was dying, and she was right on schedule.

  At all the meetings they handed out little pamphlets with a drawing on the front of people walking around the edge of what looked like a big lake. There were sailboats, too, and a woman behind a motorboat on water skis with one arm held up in the air. Inside the pamphlet said, “Flood control, water supply, hydroelectric power, and recreation: these are the advantages of water management in your area!” On the back it said, “A bright future through progress.” It’s a wiggly word, progress: a two-lane gravel road turned into four lanes paved that makes life a noisy misery for the people with houses there, a cornfield turned into a strip mall with a hair salon, a supermarket, and a car wash. Corn’s better than a car wash. We washed our own cars with a garden hose until our kids got old
enough to do it for us.

  My eldest nephew, the smart one, did a project once about Miller’s Valley, and he interviewed me one afternoon. “Why didn’t you fight?” he said.

  I understand. He’s young. Things seem simple when you’re young. I remember. I’m not like some older people who forget.

  There were people who fought, although there were fewer and fewer of them as the years went by. Donald’s grandfather had printed up bumper stickers and buttons and tried to get people riled up, but there weren’t that many people to begin with in the valley, and by the time it was all over there were hardly any at all.

  I may have been the only person living in Miller’s Valley who had read all the geologists’ reports, looked over all the maps, knew what was really going on. Somewhere there’s an aerial photograph taken before I was even born, and if any reasonable person looked at it, at the dam and the course of the river and the unused land and the number of houses involved, they’d conclude that there was a big low area just begging to be filled in with water. I’d seen that photograph when I was seventeen, sitting in a government office with gray walls and metal furniture, looking at the center point of that big low area, at the roof of our house. I knew better than anyone what the deal was. When I was a kid I’d play in the creek, stack up stones and sticks and watch the water back up behind them, until finally it filled a place that had been dry before. The difference is that with a real dam, sometimes the place that fills up with water has houses and churches and farms. I saw a picture once of a big reservoir behind a dam in Europe that had a church steeple sticking up on one side during a dry spell.

  That’s what they meant when they talked about water management, the government people, except that we didn’t have a steeple high enough in the valley to stick up and remind people that there had once been a place where the water would be. A bright future through progress. There was just a handful of us in the way.

  Everyone was waiting for my mother to fight, although no one ever said that. Everyone was waiting for her to say that they couldn’t do this, take 6,400 acres of old family farms and small ramshackle homes and turn it into a reservoir by using the dam to divert the river. Everyone was waiting for her to say that they couldn’t just disappear our lives, put a smooth dark ceiling of water over everything as though we had never plowed, played, married, died, lived in Miller’s Valley. It wasn’t just that my mother had lived in the valley, had dealt with the water, her whole life long. It wasn’t just that she was the kind of person who preferred to solve her problems by herself, not have some people come in from outside in suits and ties and work shoes that weren’t work shoes at all, to handle things for her and her neighbors.

  It was that she was someone, Miriam Miller. There are just some people like that. Everyone pays attention to what they say, even if they don’t even know them well or like them much.

  My mother went to every meeting the government people held, but she never spoke, and when people would try to talk to her before or after she was polite but no more, asking after their children or their arthritis but never saying a word about the plans to drown Miller’s Valley. I drove up from the city for that one meeting at the church, even though she said there was no need for me to miss school or work, even though my desk was piled high with things that needed to be done. I guess I did it because I’d been there from the very beginning years before, when I was a kid selling corn from a card table outside of our barn, when the talk about turning Miller’s Valley into a reservoir first began, when no one really thought it would amount to anything.

  It’s so easy to be wrong about the things you’re close to. I know that now. I learned that then.

  When the meeting was over my mother and I drove home together down the dark back roads to the farm, and as I took the curves fast, curves I’d been taking since I’d gripped the wheel of the truck while sitting on my father’s lap, she stared out the window so that the sickly green of the dashboard dials just touched the corner of her set jaw.

  “You do understand this, right?” I’d said. “If this goes through they’ll take the house and the barn and the little house. If this happens you’ll have to move. You’ll have to pack up all your stuff. You’ll have to find a place for Aunt Ruth and pack up all her stuff. You’ll have to find a way to get her out of there. Then it’s going to be like none of it ever existed. They’re going to put the whole place under forty feet of water.”

  “I’m not stupid, Mary Margaret,” my mother said. The night was so quiet you could hear the wood doves comforting themselves with their own soft voices in the fields.

  “If this happens they’re going to make the valley just disappear,” I said, my voice harsh in the silence.

  A deer ran through my headlights like a ghost, and I slowed down because, like my father always said, there’s almost never just one. Sure enough, two more skittered out. They froze there, staring, then moved on. I was ready to start talking again when my mother spoke.

  “Let them,” she said. “Let the water cover the whole damn place.”

  I grew up to the sound of my parents talking in the kitchen on my mother’s nights off, and the sound of the sump pump when it rained. Sometimes, all these years later, I wake up in the middle of the night and think I hear one or the other, the faint pounding of the throttle or the murmur of those two low voices. On a wet night the best I could ever make out was a little muttering even if my mother and father were talking loud. If you properly maintain it, and my father did, a sump pump makes a throaty chug-a-chug noise, sort of like a train without the whistle. My brother Tommy always said he liked the sound, but I think it was because it meant he could sneak out at night without anyone hearing. My mother didn’t mind it because her shift work meant she was hardly ever at home at night, and so tired when she got home that nothing kept her awake.

  My room was in the back corner of the house, right over where the sump pump sat on the cement basement floor two stories below. From the window in my room you could see the path up to the back end of the property and the lights through the trees of my aunt Ruth’s house. She kept at least one light on all night long. I liked looking out and seeing that light in the darkness, something that had always been there, that I could count on. It was real quiet most of the time around our house at night, so quiet that sometimes I could tell what Aunt Ruth was watching on television because I could hear the theme song of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

  There was a heating vent right behind the head of my bed, and if you followed it down it stopped at the heating vent behind the kitchen table before it ended up at the old cast-iron furnace in the basement. When I was five I thought my room was haunted because just as I was dropping off to sleep I would hear a moaning sound underneath my bed. Years later my brother Eddie told me that Tommy had put his mouth to the vent and made the noise and Eddie made him stop when he caught him, and all of that made sense, including Eddie saying he hadn’t mentioned any of it to our parents.

  The thing was, listening to my parents through that vent was like a bad radio broadcast, one of those where you’ve got a song on you really like but it’s from fifty miles away and it drifts in and out and you have to fill in the gaps by singing along. I was good at filling in the gaps when my parents talked, and I probably heard a lot I shouldn’t have. If it had been LaRhonda listening, the whole town would have known, too. You could close that heating vent with a little chain at one corner, and I always did when LaRhonda slept over. But the rest of the time I paid attention to whatever I managed to hear.

  She’s got cancer in that breast, my mother might say.

  That’ll be hard on Bernie, my father would say.

  Bernie? It’ll be hard on her, is who it’ll be hard on. From what I hear Bernie has plenty of female companionship.

  Gossip, my father would say. Then silence, and I would fall asleep.

  Or, That baby is going right into the state hospital, no questions asked, my mother might say.

  That’s a sad thing, my father w
ould say.

  Sadder to keep it at home, my mother would say.

  Guess so, my father would say. She was always sure of things. He almost never was, except maybe about the government people and their plans for Miller’s Valley. Over the years there was a lot of talk about that at night in the kitchen.

  Talked to Bob Anderson yesterday, my mother might say.

  Got no business with a real estate agent, my father replied.

  Asking for you, my mother said.

  Fine right where I am, my father said.

  Clattering pans in the sink. Tap running.

  Why I even bother, my mother said.

  “Meems, you up?” Tommy whispered, pushing open the door. When he wanted to he could move through the house like a ghost, even when he was drunk. Maybe especially when he was drunk.

  “How come you’re home?” I said, sitting up against the headboard.

  Not listening to one more word on the subject, said my father.

  “Oh, man, not again,” said Tommy. He sat down on the edge of my bed and canted his head toward the vent so that a piece of hair fell down on his forehead. It was confusing, having a good-looking brother. I tried not to think of him that way, but LaRhonda wouldn’t shut up about it.

  “What are they talking about?” I said. “Who’s Bob Anderson?”

  “Did the water department guy stop by here today?”

  “Who?”

  “Did some guy in a Chevy sedan come by to see Pop?”

  “There’s somebody who came by and had some kind of business card from the state. Donald says he talked to his grandfather, too. He says he went to the Langers’ house and some other places.”