Oh, yeah. So, hi.
I have a pie.
— A Head Full Of Non-Pie Thoughts
I lived in Tonawa for eighteen years, though I was in and out toward the end. Let's call it seventeen and change.
Change.
That's why I had to leave. Tonawa refused to change, even a little, and I was drowning in the sameness.
There were other reasons, of course. After the fire. The third one. People had a different way of looking at me after that. I could see it in their eyes. They had doubts about what I'd done, or if I'd done enough. And fuck every one of them for every one of their doubts.
And, sure, in a small town, you eventually run out of ways to amuse yourself.
The Holmans' homemade porn videos? Seen 'em.
Tanya Ledder's secret love letters? Read 'em.
Derek Shafer's unsigned divorce papers? Mailed 'em. Anonymously. Back to him, I mean. I did it as a joke. I wasn't a monster.
There was only so much fun to be had in a place like Tonawa, and most curiosities were easily satisfied.
Most.
When I was fifteen, I became curious about a lady who lived in an ugly old house behind Lou's.
Tonawa has two bars. The Brass Buckle and Lou's. The Brass Buckle had better food, but Lou's had a better slogan: "You Lou's."
It was a dreary spring day, so I was hitching a ride home from school with one of my teachers. I got confused when she turned half a block past Lou's, and headed down a dirt road I'd never even noticed before.
"What are we doing, Mrs. Pfeiffer?"
"Do you know Linda, Dandy?"
"I didn't know anybody lived back here."
"Just Linda, and she isn't feeling well. I made her a pie."
It was raining, so of course Mrs. Pfeiffer made me get out of the car to deliver the thing.
When I knocked on Linda's front door, I expected to be greeted by some haggard old lady, because this was the kind of house where a granny gets left to whittle away what's left of her days, alone and forgotten. But the woman who answered the door couldn't have been more than thirty-five.
Thirty-five's old to a teenager, but it's not grandma-old. It's not rotary-phone-old. It's not browsing-for-cemetery-plots-old.
Surely this wasn't Linda, so I asked, "Is Linda home?"
"I'm Linda," she said with a smile.
She was wearing an almost fancy blue dress that made it look like she had somewhere to go, but the lack of a car in the gravel driveway said she wasn't going anywhere, and the layer of dust on the welcome mat said nobody comes to see her.
"Is there another Linda here?"
"No, it's just me. I like your shoes."
I looked down and realized we were both wearing the same sneakers. And, oh my God, I owned a dress like hers too. And, oh no, I could feel a meltdown coming on.
"Oh, yeah. So, hi. You're Linda? I have a pie. It's from Mrs. Pfeiffer, from school. She made the pie. For you. And here it is. It's a pie."
I was standing there, handing her a pie, three times telling her it was a pie, because if I said a single word about anything other than that goddamn pie, I knew I'd make the nice young lady in the nasty grandma house cry.
"I hope you like... pie."
Fourth time's the charm, eh?
The inside of my head was swirling with words which could never be said.
I wanted to scream, "Goddamn, lady! How did this happen to you? Why do you live alone in this huge, ugly house down a dirt road where nobody goes? Don't you have any family? Or friends? And if you don't, why do you stay in this tiny, terrible town? Are you trapped? Is this what happens to people who stay in Tonawa? Am I gonna be trapped too, just like you?" But those are questions one cannot ask, though the world would be a better place if we could.
When I handed her the pie, I'd reached the part of our interaction where I was supposed to leave, but my feet wouldn't move. I didn't understand what I was seeing, I didn't know how to stop looking, and, my oh my, I couldn't stop saying pie.
"It sure looks like... a nice pie."
"Would you like to come in and have some?"
"No, no, no. No."
I finally managed to back away, slowly, but I couldn't take my eyes off the scene.
I was staring at the mother of all grandma houses, but Linda was no grandma and she was never gonna be one.
I'm not saying I understood that, at age fifteen. But I knew what I saw, and I knew it was sad. Linda was too young and too alive to be stuck in such a lonely, hopeless house on a dead-end street in a dead-end town.
I needed to know how that happens to someone. Was it going to happen to me? Had my fate already been decided?
When I got back to Mrs. Pfeiffer's car, I said, "What the hell is wrong with her???"
"Dandy! That's not a polite way to ask. She's just getting over a cold."
Oh, no.
I didn't see an old lady with the sniffles.
I saw a young lady in the prime of her life with no life at all. Surely, she could leave that house, and yet, she was trapped. But how? And why?
I said, "It's Tonawa, isn't it?"
"Is what Tonawa, Dandy?"
"Tonawa did that to her. Right?"
"When a cold's going around, everybody's bound to get it."
Mrs. Pfeiffer didn't get it, and I'm not talking about a cold.