Winston wanted to touch his boy who was now a man, sitting in front of him, the big strapping hunk of him, wrap his arms around him and squeeze his troubles away. But it was too late for that.
“Anything you want son?”
“Something cold. Screaming headache.”
Winston poured a glass of orange soda and put it in a tall glass with ice cubes. It was always Robin’s favorite. Vera wouldn’t let him have it with all that sugar, but after her death, Winston stocked up on it, bought it in cases, along with those jerky sticks filled with nitrites. Sometimes for no reason, he’d toss the boy a jerky stick or some of that sweet soda and they’d share a wordless smile, a “she should only see us now” kind of secret. Some good things had come from the years without her.
“Thanks Dad,” and as he reached for the glass, both sets of their fingers interlocked around the cold wet shape, and they felt the warmth seep through the cold.
Robin took a sip and the cold and sweet shook him out of his slump. He started talking, offering more details than his father was accustomed to hearing. Turns out the Peardale job fell through. All he really had to do this weekend was a few hours finishing sanding the Sampson’s porch railing, and then over to the Jaekel’s to set the fence posts. It was turning out to be one of the few short Saturdays he’d had in months, and with his dad already committed to taking the kids for the weekend, maybe he could take some time for himself, maybe drive out to Sterling lake, take a rowboat out past the weekend fishermen, past the kids in their rubber tubes, past the smart asses with their drop lines and homemade worms no rainbow trout would take a second look at. He’d go past them all, drop the oars down, where the loons and marsh birds nest, and lie there, naked to his shorts, shaded by the whip grass, let the boat snag up in the thicket and not give a damn if it ever broke free.
“Wasn’t Peardale that big spa job?”
“Contractor said they might be getting divorced. Holding off on the hot tub deck remodel for now. It was going to be a lot of work. I was counting on the money, but I could really use a day to myself.”
“Well this might cheer you up. I got some news about the place across the road. Remember that motorcycle guy who lived there when you were a kid? He’s the one who was killed in that motorcycle crash a few months back. Turns out he left that old abandoned place to his sister. At least that’s what Pete told me. Says he got it straight from Lundale. The place is a dump. Got me to thinking she might need some help fixing it up. Year’s worth of work at that place, easy.”
“Daaaad” the sound that came out of Robin’s mouth was more of a bleat than a word. “I told you not to go making plans for me without asking me first.”
The boy had a lazy streak in him. Here was an opportunity you’d think he’d jump at. But Winston could never tell his son anything. Vera had done every this and that for him, told him he was special when he wasn’t, really. Content to sit around and whittle with that old pocket-knife with the carved elk head handle, he had found it at Pete’s, or came by it on his own somehow, and claimed it with a vengeance.
“What does he like to do?” Winston would ask Vera, as if only she knew the answer to their son’s mind. “Likes to whittle is all I can see, and nothing ever comes of it either.”
But that was not true. Robin had finished an owl’s head while still in grade school, and it actually looked like an owl, with softly curved feathers and one eye that seemed to stare back. Also a raven carved from manzanita, the deep red bark giving it life if you held it under a translucent moon. There may have been others. Winston kept them in a box in the toolshed. He couldn’t bring himself to throw them away.
“I didn’t make any plans for you, just saying it might happen, that’s all. Wouldn’t it be something? Right across the road?”
“Right across the road” it sounded like Robin was saying, hard to be sure since he talked with his hands over his mouth. Still, Winston took it as a sign to keep talking.
“Think about it. Whoever gets that place will need to do something with it, can’t imagine they’d just leave it to rot. I’m just telling you, there might be something there. You should call Lundale, look into it. You have to take the lead on these kinds of things, son.” And just as the words came out, Winston knew he had gone too far.
Robin stood up, righted his chair, it seemed that the headache was gone, or temporarily pushed aside, it was hard for his father to tell.
“I’m going for a walk,” he announced, without so much as looking back.
7.
CALLIE WAS EAGER to head back across the road. There were threats of rain and she had all these seed packets that needed to go in soon. Ralph had hung around this morning longer than she wanted, said he had some business to take care of on the computer. She wished she knew how to use the thing so she could find out what he was plotting. It seemed like plotting, how he never told her anything specific, and next thing she knew, he had her and the baby moved into this place where there was absolutely nothing for her to do. He installed the big TV satellite dish ‘to keep her occupied’ is what he said, that’s how little he knew her.
If she hadn’t discovered that wonderland across the road she’d be going crazy here. Callie knew she was supposed to thank him for buying them this great deal of an investment, at a steal he reminded her, and she did thank him. But she didn’t mean it. Not a word.
Callie waited until Ralph pulled out, waited until the last rumble of gravel echoed its way down their driveway, making sure there were no sounds left, no chance he might have decided to flip into reverse and wheel back again, maybe he forgot a phone number, his notebook, a chance to snag another kiss, grab her ass which he managed to do any excuse he could get.
She put Daphne in the stroller and off they went to that empty plot of land across the road that she discovered not long after they moved in. The dilapidated shack at the end of the driveway looked abandoned, no trace of anyone living in it, the floors littered with dust and broken glass, no signs of life.
But she had only poked her head in. She was much more interested in the spaces along the edges of the driveway that bent every which way, interrupted by snags of wild roses and juniper bushes and that horrid wild weed that nicked her legs and got caught up inside the stroller wheels. Really nothing on this land but a gnarl of undergrowth. But for the penstemon that grew wild and thick, waiving their red and purple shoots, and occasional bursts of golden honeysuckle, there wasn’t much in the way of color.
That ground cover drove her crazy. Shoots ripped through the delicate mat of thyme that she had carefully planted last spring but this ground cover was ruining all her plans. So much for the soft aromatic carpet she imagined trailing along the driveway. Even if the thyme grew, it would be overpowered by the acrid smell of the ground cover, something like skunk but not quite as horrid. It reminded her of her dad—that mixture of Aqua Velva and vomit that suffused the laundry basket because he just threw his shirts in there as though no one would notice.
Well maybe that’s where she learned her sloppy ways. Her grandpa used to tell her she was impossible to teach, but he said it with a smile so she didn’t care. She used to follow him around his garden every chance she got. He taught her the names of plants and let her use his tools, even the sharp ones, and never cared how dirty she got. It was the best way she knew to stay out of her house and not get in trouble.
The woman at the plant store had told Callie all about the rough ground cover that permeated the surface of the landscape. The Miwok who used to live on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada range called it Kit-kit-dizze. According to the woman, it grew nowhere else in the world. The pungent aroma of this prickly mountain weed reminded her of nothing she could name, but when the sun and breeze hit it just right, the bitterness dissolved into something deliriously sweet, as though someone covered it over with a crust of pure sugar. The locals called it Mountain Misery and in a few months of trying to extricate its roots to make room for seedbeds, Callie figured out why. She tried washing her clothes with bleach but the smell stuck. She needed