by Maddy Wells
I didn’t know what I meant by that, but she laughed and I did too.
“Who’s picking you up?”
Why did she think I was a kid who had to be escorted around? Didn’t I just come all the way from Milltown, Pennsylvania basically by myself?
“My dad,” I said.
“What part of Houston does he live in?” she asked.
I didn’t actually know. All I had was the address I glommed from the net. I pointed out the window. “Look! What’s that building?”
The building was the airport and in a second we were on the ground and Mrs. Big Hair Yellow Suit was standing in the aisle giving me instructions on how to navigate the airport because of course I didn’t know that it was the tenth busiest in the whole country and was constantly under construction so it could get even bigger—this was Texas after all!—until I turned on my cell phone and pretended to be texting people and she finally left saying, “Now don’t forget,” and I sat back down until I was the only one left on the plane.
A stewardess was picking up magazines and garbage from people’s seats and putting them in a plastic bag.
“Take everything with you,” she said.
“Got it,” I said. I unfolded myself and retrieved my guitar and backpack from the overhead and walked slowly down the narrow aisle out of the plane, across the jet way, and into the terminal which was frantic with activity and announcements on loud speakers. Everyone was walking with purpose and I started walking fast too so I wouldn’t stand out. But the fact was, I didn’t know how to find The Griffin now that I was here. The flow of people was going in one direction so I followed them—catching a ride on a moving sidewalk—hoping to find the exit and finding myself instead at the baggage carousel where Mrs. Big Hair was reading her phone and waiting with other passengers from the flight for the bags to be unloaded. I quickly turned and started walking in the other direction and found a line of people outside the building waiting for cabs. I joined it. A concierge was stewarding people into cabs, asking them where they were going. I practiced saying the address “17644 Hockenberry Road” that I had never said aloud to anyone but myself. Just saying it made me feel good. 17644 Hockenberry Road. It’s where The Griffin lived with Marjewel. It’s where my half-brother Isak lived. I would be living there soon too. Why hadn’t I done this sooner? I didn’t need to get permission to live with my father. How laughable an idea was that? We would celebrate my homecoming by entering my name as a resident of 17644 Hockenberry Road in Wikipedia and telling the folks at People Search that I was a person connected to The Griffin and please enter that. I put my head back and laughed. The man in front of me in line turned around and smiled because I was grinning from ear to ear. I never felt happier in my life. When I finally reached the front of the line, I asked the concierge how much he thought it would cost for a cab to take me to 17644 Hockenberry Road.
“Hockenberry Road?” He thought for a minute. “That’s in The Oaks, isn’t it?”
“It’s a big house with a swimming pool,” I said, realizing immediately what a stupid thing it was to say.
“A hundred fifty, hundred seventy-five max,” he said. “The Oaks is pretty big.”
“A hundred and fifty dollars?”
He pointed to a line of beat-up cars on the other side of the traffic island. Several drivers were leaning against their cars, smoking. “You can negotiate with one of them if you want. They’re not licensed hacks, but they’ll get you where you’re going a little cheaper than these. If one of them asks you for payment in advance try another one.” And with that he swooshed me aside and put the next person in line into a cab.
I crossed the street to talk to the driver of the first car in line, a beat-up red Honda Civic like Jane used to drive. The driver was listening to Spanish music on an iPhone.
“Hello,” I said and showed him the piece of paper with The Griffin’s address on it. “How much?”
He squinted at it, then at me, and it occurred to me he might not even know where Hockenberry Road was.
“Two hundred fifty,” he said.
“Two hundred and fifty!”
“How much you wanna pay?” he asked.
I started to explain my situation to him, how I was all alone and was there a bus or something I could take when a yellow sleeve came out of nowhere and yanked me away.
“I knew your father wasn’t picking you up,” Mrs. Big Hair Yellow Suit said. “Now tell me the truth. Are you a runaway? I had a feeling you’re a runaway. Are you?”
“No! I’m going to my father’s. He just texted me that he’s in a meeting and can’t pick me up.”
“No responsible father would leave his underage daughter alone at the Houston Airport,” she said. “Where are you going?”
“Okay, look,” I said, looking around to see if anyone was listening to us. “The truth is my dad doesn’t know I’m coming. I’m surprising him. He’ll probably be home by the time I get there.”
“Which is where?”
I gave her the piece of paper. “That’s in The Oaks, I think anyway. That’s what he said.” I gestured towards the concierge.
“My my.” She gave me a funny look. “That’s where the Bushes live.”
“He has a swimming pool,” I said.
“Everyone in Houston has a swimming pool, honey. You would expire here without one.”
She was pulling a suitcase on rollers and she handed the handle to me without letting go of my sleeve to get me moving. “You pull this thing. I’ll take you there.”
“I don’t want to make you go out of your way,” I said.
“It is way out of my way, but I have a daughter, too, and I would want someone to give her a lift if she was stupid enough to land in a strange big city without a clue of what she was doing. Where’s your mother, by the way?”
She glanced back and saw that I was groping for an appropriate answer. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Come on.”
Chapter 50
Mrs. Yellow Hair said Houston was in the middle of a terrible drought and that’s why everything was brown and crackly looking and when I put down my window to feel the air, Mrs. Yellow Hair overrode me with her own controls and put it back up saying, “Mosquitoes.”
What I never could have imagined was that driving from one side of Houston where the airport was to Hockenberry Road would take two hours. But it did. The neighborhoods fanning out from the inner city to the airport were distinct developments. Nearest to the airport were cracker box track homes that could use a coat of paint and had pieces of furniture and other stuff piled on the curb for the garbage men or the neighbors to pick through. Then came middle class homes, a lot of them pretty big ranchers in developments with gates around them, and furthest out, where Mrs. Yellow Hair in her giant black SUV was taking me were immaculately landscaped acres dotted with humongous McMansions that you could only glimpse from the highway because they were encircled by high stone walls and had guard houses in front of gates that looked like they were copied from castles. Mrs. Yellow Hair pulled into one of these.
“Give me that paper,” she commanded.
I gave her the slip of paper with the address on it and she handed it to the security guard, who came out of his shack and peered in the window to get a good look at us.
“I’m giving this young lady a ride,” Mrs. Yellow Hair said. “She’s visiting her father who lives here.”
“What’s your name, miss?” he asked, then went back into his command post and looked at a list.
“Who is your daddy?” Mrs. Yellow Hair asked. “This is a very expensive neighborhood.”
“He’s a musician. The Griffin,” I said.
“The Griffin?” she said. She got a dreamy look on her face then laughed. “I used to have the biggest crush on him. He was so handsome. That was a long time ago, though. Jesus, he must be, how old?”
“He’s at the Toyota Center this week. The show’s sold out.” I felt proud saying that, even though I didn’t know if it was tru
e.
“Well, you might actually have a shot at making it as a musician,” she said. “Not like my Vera. My husband’s a banker. It’s all who you know.”
The guard came out of the guard shack again. “What’s your name, again?” he asked me, and when I told him he went back in and picked up a phone.
“I could just walk in. How far can it be from here? I only have this to carry,” I said, holding up my backpack and guitar.
“They don’t let you just walk into a place like this,” Mrs. Yellow hair told me. “There are security guards with dogs in the back of jeeps patrolling the streets and you’d be stopped before you were out of sight of the gate.”
The gate guard was on the phone for a long time and the awful thought occurred to me that The Griffin was home and he was telling the guard he didn’t want me let in. Finally, the guard came out, walked to the back of the SUV, wrote down the license plate number, and handed me form on a clipboard for me to sign, write where I was going and what time I’d gotten there. He pressed a button by the gate and it opened and we were winding our way past the greenest lawns I’d ever seen and shiny explosions of flowering trees and gardeners wheeling barrels of mulch and sprinklers were on everywhere which seemed really piggy considering that outside the gates there was a terrible drought.
Mrs. Yellow Hair stopped in the circular driveway of a giant mansion which I recognized was the house I’d looked at a thousand times on Google Earth—although the fact was that all the mansions in the neighborhood looked kind of the same.
“Do you want some cash for gas?” I asked. “I have money.”
“Save your money in case of an emergency,” she said.
“You can go now,” I said. “I’m okay.” I didn’t want The Griffin to see Mrs. Cowgirl. He would split a side laughing at her yellow suit and big hair and she would probably blush because she used to have a crush on him.
“I’ll wait to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
And there I was. In a giant circular driveway, looking at The Griffin’s house, as if I had entered the Emerald City and had an appointment with Oz the Great and Powerful.
There was another driveway that shot straight back off the circle down the side of the house. I saw the band bus parked nose out halfway down it. I put my guitar and backpack down on the lawn, my lawn, right? and walked back to look at it. A guy in white pants and no shirt was polishing the grill. There was Bang on the front grill, and Raymond sneering his Cheshire cat sneer under one of The Griffin’s wings, and then there was a third figure leaning familiarly under The Griffin’s other wing. I walked opposite it and stood back so I could see it whole. It was a young boy in black leather pants and open vest. The boy’s hair was painted black as a crow’s and was braided down his back. I was looking at it for a really long time I guess because I heard a horn honking. Mrs. Yellow Hair wondering where I was. I knew who the new figure on the bus had to be without even having to think. It was Isak.
I came back out on the lawn and waved to Mrs. Yellow hair to stop honking and I turned around just as the door opened and a boy was standing in it, a guitar dangling off his shoulders and earplugs on his neck.
“You’re lucky. I almost didn’t hear the phone,” the boy said. “I was practicing.”
I had known Isak existed, forever of course. I had him stored in one of the smallest boxes in my collection. His hair was even blacker than on the side of the bus and his face was broader and had stronger features than the painted face. He had the same fuzzy hair on his cheeks and chin that Tim had.
I walked back to the SUV and Mrs. Yellow Hair opened the window. “I’m okay,” I said. “Thank you for giving me a ride.”
“Who is that boy?” she asked.
I said the words in my head to see how they sounded before I said them aloud: “That’s my brother, Isak.”
I walked back to where I’d put them down and picked up my guitar and backpack and stood for a minute staring up at Isak, thinking it was probably as curious for him to have a sister as it was for me to have a brother I’d never met. Unless, he didn’t even know I existed. But then, he sent me that text message when Jane was in trouble. But how could he know what I looked like? I walked up the steps and stopped in front of him.
“I’m Mercy O’Reilly,” I said. “The Griffin is….”
“I know who you are,” Isak said, stepping out of the way. “Come on in.”
Chapter 51
The house was sparsely furnished, not in the way Jane’s and mine was sparsely furnished because we couldn’t afford much, but in a way that looked deliberate. The floors were marble and shiny as an ice skating rink. Isak led me through a couple of large rooms that didn’t look as if anyone ever used them to the kitchen.
“Are you hungry?” he said, opening the refrigerator and staring into it. “I’m starved. I’ve been playing all morning.”
“Yeah, I guess I am.” I put my Fender and backpack on the floor and climbed onto a stool at a giant granite island in the middle of the kitchen. I hadn’t eaten much of the egg breakfast I’d bought at Nashville and before that nothing since our pit stop in Hagerstown.
“ I guess you’re a vegetarian too,” Isak said.
“No, but whatever you have is fine. Anything.” I could’ve eaten an entire side of beef—isn’t that what they grew in Texas? Isak microwaved a giant plate of rice and beans and put it steaming in front of me. “Napkins and forks,” he said, going to heat up his own plate and pointing to a floor to ceiling wall of drawers. “Third and fourth ones.”
“I didn’t know The Griffin was a vegetarian,” I said. “It’s always pepperoni pizza and Chinese take-out when he’s at our house.”
“You’re kidding? He’s the one who insists on it. I didn’t like it at first but I’m used to it now.”
He pulled up a stool next to me. “Do you like my Fender?” he asked.
“What do you mean, your Fender?” I said.
“Was mine,” he said. “I like my Martins better. I’ve been working out on my D-28. Got it as a present from Raymond. Great resonance. Ever tour their factory? I did. Last year. It’s a trip.”
Did The Griffin actually give me Isak’s hand-me-down guitar? And how come exactly did my half-brother come to the part of the country I live in to tour the Martin factory without me knowing about it? I wondered if Jane knew? The Griffin probably dropped him at the Philly airport on his way to Milltown.
“I mean, the Fender’s a perfectly good guitar, but I said it was okay to move it along. So it’s not like I’m going to confiscate it or anything.”
“What wonderful news,” I said.
“I’m only kidding you,” he said. “You don’t have a sense of humor, do you?”
Didn’t I? Here, I always thought I was a laugh riot.
“But I’m not kidding about the Fender. It was mine. I’m just not going to confiscate it.”
“Okay! Okay!”
Now that I had something to eat I didn’t feel so spacey. I looked around the kitchen for signs of The Griffin. I couldn’t picture him living here. Actually, the only place I could picture him living was in his band bus parked in our driveway in Milltown.
“He isn’t here,” Isak said, reading my mind. “He’s at work.”
“What do you mean, he’s at work?”
“I assume that’s why you’re here. To see him. The thing is I don’t know when he’ll be home. He’s like, getting ready for the tour. They have a shitload of new songs he sprung on the guys at the last minute and they don’t have them down yet, plus he’s working out with a personal trainer. He let himself get really out of shape. He’s an old dude, you know, and he can’t spring back like he used to.”
An old dude? We were talking about The Griffin here.
“So, where does he practice?”
“In town.”
“He has to come home sometime. I can wait here,”
“I guess so. But my mom will be back soon.”
/> “So?”
“Where are you staying? It might be better if you wait there.”
“I’m staying here,” I said, surprised that he wasn’t taking that for granted.
“I personally don’t care,” Isak said, “But my mom doesn’t like surprises.”
“So, call her and tell her I’m here. Or give me her phone number and I will.”
“You don’t get subtlety, do you? My mother doesn’t like you.”
“What do you mean she doesn’t like me? How can she not like me? I never did anything to her. She doesn’t even know me.”
He shrugged. “You want to see my set-up? Maybe jam? On my Fender?”
“Possession is nine tenths of the law.”
“Maybe you do have a sense of humor,” he said.
We picked up our guitars and headed downstairs to what seemed like a whole other house. I saw that it was actually the first floor and that the main entrance to the house was on the second floor. Anyway, it was nothing like the musty old basement stairs that led into the Trap. Isak turned on a bunch of lights.
“Yeah, anyway,” he said, gesturing for me to go first. “Why do you call him The Griffin?”
“Isn’t that his name? What do you call him?”
“Dad?”
Chapter 52
We entered a glassed-in room which housed electric guitars on stands, microphones, music stands, amps and speakers. It was like a professional recording studio and I felt foolish, thinking how I had bequeathed the make-shift amps and speakers in the Trap to Tim as if it were some big deal. Next to this stuff it was just a lot of junk.
“You have a sound board,” I said. I had never actually worked one, but it was high on my list of things I wanted to learn as soon as my real life started, which I guess was right now.
“For a good mix, it’s essential.” He plugged his guitar into an amp. “And for when we record.”
“You record down here?” Tim could’ve just made his demo here.
“Well, you have to wear headphones for everything because the neighbors bitch.” He tossed a set to me. “Even though it’s soundproof. Or as soundproof as you can make it when you’re surrounded by houses. That’s why Dad does metal in town.”
