‘What happened?’ Gram asked, and there was reasonableness to her voice, as if she felt there must have been some unavoidable cause for her daughter’s no-show, as if perhaps another grandchild she knew nothing about had fallen ill with flu (temperature 105 and rising) or a small kitchen fire meant her daughter had to stay home to help the firemen.
And Will shrugged, as if he did not want to be drawn on this, and said, ‘She got real caught up.’
And Gram nodded, which puzzled Jack since his uncle hadn’t answered in any satisfactory way at all. And he wasn’t going to take that: no, if the cat was out of the bag – she’s not coming – he wanted to know why not. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded, since if she were at home then he didn’t care if an earthquake was in progress, she could still come over. Get in a cab – Gram could pay; hell, he’d even pay her back when he got back to Sonoma and his piggybank of spending money – and come over right away.
Will looked at Jack with exasperation and propped both elbows on the table, and normally Maris would have corrected this, jokingly whacking him with a spoon the way she did at home in Sonoma, but she was being awful quiet herself, not saying a word, and Will rubbed his eye with his hand, and then he looked again at Jack with his right eye bleary and said, ‘She’s in Las Vegas.’
‘What?’ said Gram and Jack simultaneously.
And Will held both hands out like an Italian in a television ad, with that sort of helpless ‘what can I tell you?’ gesture of palms opened imploringly towards their audience, and he said, ‘She says she’s working there now. And she missed her flight. She hopes you’ll all understand.’
‘You’ll all understand’. Does that mean me? thought Jack with disbelief. And Will said, almost as if trying to make excuses for his sister, ‘I have to say she didn’t sound real well.’ And he looked meaningfully at Maris, and then at Gram. Gram nodded quietly, as if trying to take this in. ‘Eat your dinner, Jack,’ she said, almost mechanically.
He tried but he couldn’t, and when dessert came and Gram put ice cream on top of his pumpkin pie, even that did not stir his appetite, and though he tried to make the motions to be polite to Gram, he found the disappointment again was like a blockage in his throat. He didn’t want to look at Will, and once he found Maris’s eyes on him and he ducked his own eyes down, not trusting himself not to cry, and Gram said in a tone full of old age common sense and false cheer (he could tell; he wasn’t fooled), ‘Well, Jack, you can be excused if you like, and maybe you’ll be hungry later. Why don’t you look at the football in my room?’
And he was grateful for her tact, as he wanted more than anything not to be in their company right now, while he tried to make sense of what had happened and why conceivably his mother hadn’t come, unless as he knew in his heart it was because she didn’t care. As he sat in the stuffed armchair in the corner of Gram’s bedroom, he tried with a kind of sour desperation to think of another reason she hadn’t come. He looked, as if for the first time, at Gram’s bedroom with its prim single bed and the old-fashioned mahogany headboard, a low dresser with a lace doily along the top, holding hairbrushes and a set of framed photos – of his grandfather as a young man, fresh-faced and serious, Will in his army uniform, his mom graduating from high school, and one of himself as a toddler. The walls were painted a dull light green, and the carpet was brown and threadbare. It depressed him, this room, he realised with almost adult insight into its effect, and he wondered whether it was Gram – with her humourless steady moral progress through life – who had put off his mother. Yes, maybe it was Gram’s fault. If only they had insisted on having Thanksgiving at the farm. How he wished he were there, up on the mountain, where he could have gone outside if he’d felt this upset; he could have parked himself on the diving board of tree stumps and listened to the frogs croak and the wind moaning through the shimmering eucalyptus leaves. Mom would have liked it there; she would have come if they’d had Thanksgiving there; he was sure of that.
But of course he wasn’t, and when he thought of the simple fact of her being in Las Vegas, which no one in her immediate family had even known, his heart sank with another certainty: that if they had held Thanksgiving in Candlestick Park, with a line of trumpeters to greet his mother and Janis Joplin come to life again to sing back-up for her, she still would have missed that flight. I bet she’s drinking, he thought, and for a moment he thought he couldn’t bear it, then slid into a kind of wounded passivity.
He watched dumbly as the 49ers fought back from 21–13 down to 21–19 after two field goals. In the last thirty seconds of play they attempted a final field goal which would have won the game. It was blocked, and he reacted for the first time by laughing bitterly out loud. Fuck them, he thought, taking a small hard pleasure from the words which he had never said before. Will didn’t talk that way, nor Maris, or his Gram. It was his mother who used that word, he remembered, so fuck her too. And he was still laughing about the field goal when Will came into the room and took one look at him and said, ‘Okay, Jacko, I think it’s time we went home.’
And he struggled to thank Gram, who just kissed his cheek and made him do up his coat, even though the car was virtually right outside, and as they drove off he forced a wave since he could not bring himself to resent his grandmother, not really. But he didn’t want to talk, and when they went over the Bridge and the fog had lifted and Will said, ‘Look at that,’ pointing to the lights of Alcatraz Island, Jack didn’t say anything. Later in Marin his uncle asked him a question but he didn’t reply because there was a lump the size of a lead baseball in his stomach, and Maris must have said something because his uncle pulled over, and there on the edge of the highway Maris got out and waited for a gap in the traffic and then came and got into the back seat.
As they rejoined the highway she scooted over and put an arm around Jack. And he didn’t react at first, but then in a minute or two he found his head was lying against her side, cupped between her breast and the sharper edge of her ribs, and he started to cry, then cried for what seemed to him forever. His whole body shuddered as he sobbed, and Maris’s arm tightened its grip around him as he continued his crying and in a high clear voice she began to sing:
Long ago but gentle now,
Let me hold you, Darling.
Far away but gentle now,
Let me show you how to love.
And as she sang his head slid down into her lap and his shuddering stopped and gradually his sobs subsided and he slept.
He woke up in the dark to find himself upside down, with blood rushing to his head, then suddenly he was turned sideways and put down like a sack of potatoes into bed and under the covers. When he next opened his eyes the sun was flooding the deck outside and from his bedside clock he saw it was the middle of the morning. I’m late for school, he thought with a start, then remembered it was a holiday, and then he remembered the events of the day before.
He heard steps and Will came in, looking thoughtful. ‘Morning,’ he said vaguely, and sat down on the chair.
Jack sat up against the pillows and looked at his uncle, whose face was unusually solemn.
‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ said Will. ‘If I’d known that was going to happen, we wouldn’t have gone.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Jack said, and at the thought of his mother’s failure to show, his chin wobbled and he felt teary. Embarrassed he shook his head, trying to drive away his upset.
‘But I need to talk to you about something else,’ Will said, and his air of determination made Jack feel even shakier. Will was looking at his hands as he spoke, slipping and unslipping the fingers together almost ritualistically. ‘You’re going to need to decide something.’
‘What’s that?’ he asked warily. He didn’t want to decide anything.
‘About where you want to live. For now anyway.’ He kept his eyes looking down. ‘You can stay here with us, just like it’s been. Or, you can go and live at Gram’s.’
‘What about Mom’s? Can I go there?’ he
asked, as if the day before had just been a mistake, an accident really, and Mom would get on an airplane and be home soon.
Will looked up from his hands right at him. His expression was not unfriendly, but it was steady and fixed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t.’
Jack realised he had known the answer as soon as he had posed the question, and Will didn’t need to explain anything more. She doesn’t want me, thought Jack. She can’t even come to Thanksgiving so I shouldn’t be surprised. And he blinked through embryonic tears and looked back at Will, expecting the worst. He asked, ‘What do you want me to do?’
And Will didn’t give his characteristic aw shucks shrug, but continued to look at him with atypical seriousness, saying, ‘I want you to do what you want to do.’
And the boy hated this imposition. Why couldn’t they just go along as they had been – wasn’t that easiest? Why did he have to decide? Unless Will wanted him to say he wanted a change. ‘What does Gram want?’
‘Gram would be happy to have you.’ And the slightly oblique slant of this reply actually reassured the boy – not because he was gratified that he could go there, but because he was worried he was supposed to feel obliged to go there. But it didn’t really close the matter at all. He waited a second and when he spoke his voice sounded even to himself half strangled. ‘Do you want me here?’
‘It’s what you want, Jack. That’s what I’m asking you.’ The boy nodded, trying to mask the disappointment he felt crawling inside himself. But he wanted to have one more try, just to confirm that he wasn’t really wanted here either – it wasn’t just his mother then – so he spoke again, and his voice was still weak, almost cracking with the tremulous urgency of his question. ‘But do you want me here or not?’
Here it comes, he thought and tried to distance himself as his uncle’s stare did not waver and his mouth opened with what Jack knew already would be disappointing words. ‘You bet I do.’
Jack almost said ‘What?’ such was his surprise. As relief flooded in he was tempted just to nod, but there was still something missing: when he’d said, ‘Do you want me here?’ he’d meant Will and Maris, so Will’s ‘I’ in reply left a question unanswered. And for Jack it was equally important. So he said with a slightly firmer voice now, bolstered by his uncle’s unequivocal reply, ‘What about Maris?’
‘What about Maris?’ his uncle said tersely.
‘Does she mind if I stay?’
‘Well,’ said Will, and he seemed to be suppressing a smile, ‘you know Maris. She thinks you’re a pretty major pain in the ass.’ And as the boy’s face started to fall he continued. ‘Almost as big a pain in the ass as me. But she did tell me that she’s got used to having kitchen help around here. So you’d be doing me a favour if you stayed, Jacko. I ate cold food too many years in the army, and I sure don’t want to face it all over again.’
Maris, who had gone to town, came back in the afternoon, and she put three peeled potatoes down on the kitchen table where Jack was sitting and handed him a knife. ‘Cut these small,’ she said, ‘I’m making corned beef hash.’ And when he smiled at her without restraint she clucked her tongue. ‘Quit sitting there with a grin on your face like some dimwit.’ Adding with such gruffness that even Jack could see through it, ‘Now how about getting to work.’ And he figured that this was as much answer to the question he had put to Will as Maris was ever going to offer him. It’ll do, he thought to himself. It’ll have to.
Will explained that for Christmas Gram had decided to visit friends in Sarasota, so Jack would be spending it in Sonoma. Jack wondered if after the Thanksgiving fiasco his mother would even be mentioned, but Will tackled the matter head on. ‘I guess you know your mom’s not well again.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jack, thinking, Is that what they call it?
‘She’s been working in Vegas all right, but she’s in the hospital.’
Jack shrugged, determined to show that he didn’t care.
Will looked about as keen to have this conversation as Jack, but he struggled on dutifully. ‘What it means, Jack, is that if you don’t hear from her it’s because she’s sick. It’s not that she doesn’t care.’
On Christmas Day there was the three of them, since Maris decided not go to her family up near the Oregon border as she usually did. And even though he had long ceased to believe in Santa Claus, Jack was happy when he woke up to find stockings hanging from the fireplace downstairs. Maris and Will had coffee while he extracted the candy and toothbrush and Heath bar and packet of cashews and superball and comb (‘Not that you’ll use that,’ said Maris) and pencils and pack of Pez which Maris had stuffed in an old wool stocking she used for hiking, and then they ate an enormous breakfast of waffles and sausage and Maris had him and Will fetch firewood from the barn and light a fire in the big room even though it was over fifty degrees outside and the sun had come out.
Finally they got to open presents and he gave Maris a large bottle of toilet water which Will had him buy in Healdsburg, though he couldn’t believe that was what it was really called (the water, not Healdsburg), and he gave Will new work gloves since Maris had told him he needed them. Both seemed pleased enough so the duty part of Christmas was over and he found a very handsome sweater from Gram which he might wear twice a year if he ever went to church. Then Will gave him a diving mask and flippers so he could explore the bottom of the pond and Maris gave him a set of hand gardening tools – trowel and secateurs and clippers and a sharp pruning knife. He’d never had practical presents before, and they made him feel grown up. There was an envelope, too, and when he opened it there was a note from Will which simply said, This is one present you will have to wait for until spring. And he laughed at the quirkiness of a present that was only promised on a piece of paper, and Will wouldn’t tell him what it was no matter how much he tried to pump him so finally he gave up.
After Christmas the weather turned colder, as the wind shifted around to the north and east, and it seemed to rain for weeks. This part of Sonoma got fifty inches of rain a year, according to Will, ‘and forty-eight of them come in winter.’ He felt stuck inside, which was made worse when his grades came. There were four levels in each subject – Unsatisfactory, Satisfactory, Very Good and Excellent. Will took the envelope Jack brought home and looked at the slips carefully at the big room dining table while Maris stood in the kitchen door watching. ‘Satisfactory,’ Will announced, ‘every single one. That’s not bad, Jacko. Now is it?’ he asked rhetorically of Maris.
But Maris frowned and went back into the kitchen. Later on, before supper was ready, she called up to Jack in his bedroom, and when he came downstairs she was sitting at the dining table, with a book and a pad and two pencils. He knew better than to argue, and thereafter every afternoon ended, no matter what he had been doing, with tutoring from Maris. She concentrated mainly on his writing – not his handwriting, which was adequate, but forming sentences that, according to Maris, ‘actually say what you’re trying to say’.
But that wasn’t all. He found his television time after supper was cut by half an hour, which Maris insisted be spent reading, and in the big room with her there so he couldn’t cheat. He tried protesting to Will – he was his relative, after all, not hers – but got precisely nowhere, Will throwing his hands up and retreating to his office. But Jack didn’t resent it very much, since he liked sitting in the big room with Maris – he just wished it wasn’t schoolwork bringing them together. She justified the strict regimen by saying, ‘The average boy reads for pleasure fewer than eight minutes a day.’
‘If that’s so,’ Jack said, sensing an opening, ‘why are you making me read for half an hour?’
‘Because you’re not an average boy.’ She looked at him triumphantly. ‘“Satisfactory” is just not good enough for the likes of you.’
He saw another side to her through their sessions together, one which was less moody and more giving. She seemed to like going through the exercises she set him, and took more satisfaction from his progress
than he did, since for the life of him he couldn’t really see that he was making progress at all. Fortunately when they sat down to work Maris was usually cooking something, so there were pretty constant distractions. Once a week she made chilli, and he loved the smell as she browned the meat and added onions and cayenne pepper. ‘If you liked to read as much as you liked to eat,’ said Maris, ‘you’d get Excellents in everything.’
And it was true that he loved food, though he didn’t want to explain to Maris that her cooking in the kitchen reminded him of the early years with his mother, before cold cereal and sandwiches became the staple meals she made. Maris loved hot food, even more than Will, and sometimes the chilli was just too spicy for Jack to eat. ‘I forgot to tone it down,’ she’d say. ‘Sorry, Jack.’
Will himself seemed preoccupied. One of his apple contracts had not been renewed, and he heard Will discuss something called ‘bitter pit’ with Maris. ‘I should never have sprayed with nitrogen,’ he said, ‘not when the crop was so light and the fruit so big. I won’t do it again, but try telling Jorgensen’s that.’ And the boy understood that Jorgensen’s, whatever that might be, was what had refused to renew their contract.
Unwittingly, Jack seemed to contribute to his uncle’s worries. They were having supper one Friday night – it was barbecue with Maris’s spicy sauce that she toned down for Jack and early corn from the Central Valley – when Jack piped up, asking, ‘Will, what is sinsemilla?’
Maris exhaled loudly and said, ‘Lordy.’
Will wiped his mouth with about his twentieth paper napkin and pursed his lips like he always did when he wanted to buy time before replying. ‘It’s to do with marijuana. You know what that is?’
‘Of course I do,’ Jack said irritably. When would they understand he wasn’t three years old? Sometimes they acted just like his friends’ parents.
‘Well sinsemilla is sort of like the essence of marijuana.’
‘You mean it’s a smell?’ Jack had heard of essence before; it was perfume.
Keeping Secrets Page 20
