Cassis saw me first and started to run toward me, lifting her skinny little legs high as she waded through the snow. She was only eight, and she looked as if she came straight out of those photos of Italian orphans after the Second World War.
“Daddy,” Cassis was crying. “Come help Mommy. Come help Mommy.” She had a cold, she’d been out of school three days that week, and I didn’t like the idea of her out there knee deep in snow. Because Jenny’s so often busy with cases and I’m always around, I’m the one who does the medical appointments and earache-in-the-middle-of-the-night duty. I don’t mind, I’m pleased to do it, actually. There’s some guilt involved in this, Jenny has helped me see: I was far from being a Sensitive New Age Guy when Caroline’s boys were this age.
So I raced over to the lawn, took several big steps through the snow, and picked Cassis up. The snow started to come in over the tops of my shoes, and as I turned to head back toward the cleared part of the driveway, I could feel something give in the tendon that holds your kneecap in place. It’s happened before; I had arthroscopic surgery on it about ten years ago when I tore it pretty badly, back in the days when I was trying to get away from what I was doing to my life by running marathons.
“Shit,” I said aloud. That’s not a word I use around Cassis usually. Working in a kitchen you develop a pretty awful vocabulary, but kids imitate everything you do and say so I watch my language when she’s within earshot.
“Daddy,” she said. “Don’t talk like that.” She had such a shocked and disappointed expression on her face that I had to smile despite the pain in my knee. I lunged through the snow to take her back to the road edge, and when she was safely in the clear I went back to help the snow removal guy. He’d gotten his blade fixed and was now in the back of his truck getting a cable to attach to his winch so he could pull Jenny’s Jeep out.
“No,” she was saying. “No, you don’t need to do that at all. What I need is for you and Rick to push. Just rock me back and forth a couple of times, and then as soon as the front wheels grab the edge of the pond, I’ll be out.”
The guy glanced at me as he continued to fiddle with his gear.
“Come on,” she said to me. “We need to hustle if you’re going to make the plane.”
I slapped the guy on his back. “Yeah, come on,” I said, and I started to wade out in the snow again.
That early in the year snow is usually sloppy, wet, and heavy, the kind that cakes under your feet. Because the air isn’t very cold, it melts quickly and within a couple of minutes you’re wet from the outside in. If you’re working, you get soaked by sweat from the inside out, too. By the time Jenny’s vehicle was out of the hole and headed for the driveway, I was dripping and my feet had begun to ache from the cold. What was worse was the throbbing in my knee.
Jenny leaned over so she could open the door on the passenger’s side. “Where’s your stuff, big guy? We’ve got to move,” she said.
I watched to make sure Cassis opened the side door and got safely in back while I debated making Jenny swing by the house so I could change my clothes. My larger suitcase was in the back, I’d put it there the night before, and I’d have to either get something out of it or paw through my drawers to find something to put on. But we already were a good half-hour behind schedule, so as I got in and put my small bag at my feet I told Jenny to turn the heat up high. Then I took off my jacket and handed it to Cassis before I fastened my seatbelt. “Hey, sweetheart, put this over the place where the hot air comes out,” I said. “Maybe it will dry out.”
Jenny’s cousin had gotten his rig out of the way, and Jenny roared around him and then off onto the highway. The airport at Albany is about forty-five minutes from Kingston, taking a couple of shortcuts we know and the Thruway for part of the way. However, we got stuck behind a snowplow for a good ten miles, and then when Jenny tried to make up time on the straightaway, she skidded going around a corner and ended up in a snow bank. Getting out was no big deal—Jenny just had to back up—but by the time we got to the airport my nerves were jangled.
The kicker was that the flight was delayed because of the weather. Nothing we could do about that, though. I told Jenny and Cassis to go home after they’d stood around with me for half an hour, as I checked in and tried to get good information about whether I’d make my connections in Detroit and L.A.
Cassis didn’t want to go. She always likes airports, but she hates to say goodbye to people. She’s a sweetheart that way, she always looks so pathetic. But there was no point, and besides, I really wanted to sit down with a beer and put my leg up. Because by then my knee had really started to hurt.
My shoes were still wet, and I decided that if I could find a nice corner in front of a radiator I could catch my breath, dry out, and keep the knee from progressing to the next stage of pain. The stiff joint was already making me limp a little—luckily Jenny was so concerned with getting back and finishing the brief she needed for Monday that she didn’t notice—and suddenly I felt myself running on empty. After all, I’d put in a good eight hours already that day, standing in the kitchen making sure that stuff was organized so my sous-chef could run the show for the next few days, as well as doing what I usually do on Saturday, which is supervise the prep for the lunch and evening meals.
Suddenly I was hungry. Airport restaurants are terrible. In principle I have nothing to do with them, because they’re the opposite of what Jenny and I believe in and are trying to create with Chez Cassis. There are times, however, when a hamburger just calls out to me, and so first I wolfed down two Big Macs, and then I retreated to the bar, where I could nurse a beer in front of the window that looked out over the runways. I dozed off, and woke up after an hour when a great gust of wind blew snow against the window beside to me, rattling the glass in its frame. An elderly couple was standing next to me, looking at the three chairs in which no one was sitting.
“May we sit down?” the man asked me.
“Of course,” I said, putting my leg down so the man could pull out the chair on the other side. Shit, I said to myself. I could hardly bend my leg.
So it was clear that it was going to be a long, boring, difficult trip even before I got off the ground at Albany. When we finally got to Detroit shortly before midnight, the storm had blown past, leaving huge piles of snow on either side of the runways and what seemed like twenty-five thousand people milling around inside the airport, trying to get connections on the next flights out. Northwest put on a bigger plane for the red-eye to Los Angeles because so many people had had earlier flights cancelled. But getting all the seating sorted out took time, and we didn’t get in the air until after midnight, which meant it was about 3:00 A.M. Pacific time when we finally landed in L.A. That was a good eighteen hours since Jenny had picked me up, and maybe twenty-five, twenty-six hours since I’d gone to work Saturday morning.
My bags had been checked through to San Diego, but in Detroit I’d been able to get them pulled so I could pick them up in L.A. since there was no way I was going to make my San Diego flight. I’d reserved a car too, which meant that even though my knee hurt so much I had to hobble to the baggage claim, within forty-five minutes of touching down I was out of the airport and in the little blue Neon rental car, which was all they had left at that hour.
Two hours before dawn, in California again and on the freeway. It wasn’t cold, my clothes and shoes had dried out long ago, but I shivered anyway. California has that effect on me.
I was born in California. There are probably 20 million people who can say that now, but when I was growing up there were far, far fewer. In my first grade class, of the twenty-eight students, only five of us were native Californians. Everybody else had come with their parents from somewhere else when the Golden State boomed after the war.
Golden State, that’s what all the newspapers called it, what that first grade teacher said when she told us the story about the discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada back in the old days. No irony at all in her voice, in anyone’s voice. Almost everyone was convinced that they’d found a heaven on earth. The gold might have been all mined out, but there