Falling for June: A Novel

by Ryan Winfield

  I’m writing to take you up on your offer to discuss my options before you foreclose. Please come by anytime. But don’t come before Good Morning America is over in the morning. And don’t come after Jeopardy! starts at four. Maybe come late morning if you can. I seem to have more energy then anyway. And besides, there’s nothing on television at that time except cable news.

  Sincerely,

  David Hadley

  After reading the letter, I looked up Mr. Hadley’s loan in our system, but there was nothing unique about it. Plus, to tell you the truth, being that far out in the country, it wasn’t a huge loan by Seattle standards and the potential commission wasn’t enough to get me excited—especially not on the eve of my birthday.

  I keyed the correspondence into the computer, stamped the letter RECEIVED, and tossed it in the bin to be assigned to a more junior foreclosure counselor. Done and done, on to other things. My intention was to never think of it again. But, as I’ve since found, sometimes fate has plans of its own.

  2

  BECAUSE I SPENT most days out in the field making pre-foreclosure house calls, or “sits,” as we called them in the biz, it was my habit to catch up on paperwork by spending evenings in the office. Most nights I stayed until the janitors showed up. Then I’d head to the corner bar near my apartment. The bar is called Finnegans, with no apostrophe, although I never knew why. It isn’t even an Irish place at all. Estrella thinks it was named for the writer James Joyce. But I haven’t told you about her yet, have I?

  This particular night, I sat at the bar dividing my attention between the television and the clock on the wall beside it. As soon as the clock struck midnight, I waved Estrella over and asked her for a glass of their best cabernet. She spells her name with an R and two Ls, but it’s pronounced es-TRAY-yah. It’s a cool name. It means “star of heaven” or something in Spanish. She didn’t tell me all that; I looked it up.

  “I need to see your ID,” she said.

  “Really?” I asked her. I’m italicizing it because I said it really cheekily. “I only come in here for dinner all the time.”

  “Yeah, so what?” she said, flashing me an equally cheeky smile. “You always drink club soda and lime.”

  She was just messing with me, I knew she was, but I could tell that she wasn’t going to let up so I pulled out my wallet.

  “You’re probably just trying to get my address,” I said.

  She took my license but she didn’t look at it right away. Instead, she kind of held it for ransom against my attention and hooked a hand on her hip and smirked at me. She did it cutely, of course, but it was still a smirk.

  “You wish, mister,” she said.

  She’s younger than I am, but not by enough to be calling me mister.

  “But I am wondering why you haven’t asked me out yet,” she added, getting suddenly shy, or at least pretending to. I know she blushed for sure; I saw it. Anyway, then she looked down at the bar and coyly said, “You’ve been coming in here for almost a year, and it can’t be for the food.”

  “I like the atmosphere,” I replied, making a big show of shrugging nonchalantly as I looked all around the bar. It really did have a good vibe, this place. But I knew that wasn’t what she wanted to hear, and it wasn’t really the truth either. I was just stringing her along a little. “And I like you too,” I added after what felt like a long enough pause. “I like you a lot.”

  “You do? Then why haven’t you asked me out?”

  I knew she wouldn’t understand this next part, but it was true. “Because I only ask out girls I don’t like,” I said.

  When she heard that she let her hand fall off her hip in a cute but defeated gesture, and she bit her lower lip a little. She was always doing that, biting her lower lip. Usually when she was carrying a tray or something. Sometimes, after serving my meal, she’d linger awhile and watch the baseball game on TV with me, maybe just for a few minutes, but she’d bite her lip then too. And if our team was at bat, she had this nervous way of twisting up a strand of her hair in her fingers as she watched. It really was cute.

  “So, you only ask out the girls you don’t like,” she said. “Well, that doesn’t make one ounce of sense, even for a man, does it?”

  I’ve noticed that women are always saying things that sound like questions even though they’re not questions at all. Why is that? I suspect it’s because they know they’re right but don’t want to hit us men over the head with it, since it happens so often.

  But anyway, in this case she was wrong.

  “It makes plenty of sense,” I said. “And I’ll tell you why. Love is fun at the beginning, but it always bites you in the end.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I must not have known that you were such an expert about the immutable nature of love.”

  “Immutable?” I asked, raising a brow.

  “It was the word of the day on my vocabulary app.”

  “Well, my point is if I asked you out we’d have a great time, I’m sure of it. For a while anyway. Then we’d get bored with one another, and one of us, most likely you, would move on. And then I’d be all tore up and brokenhearted and where would I go for my dinner? I couldn’t come here any longer after that. And as I said, I really like this place.”

  I couldn’t tell if she looked disappointed or just amused.

  “There are only like three other bars that serve food on this block,” she said.

  I didn’t dare tell her, of course, that I couldn’t eat in most of those bars for the very reason I had just spelled out. I didn’t tell her because while I might have taken to heart my father’s sage warnings about love, I also remembered his stern advice about being a gentleman and all. Plus, the declining state of my local dining options wasn’t really the point, because although I did like the place a lot, I liked her a lot more.

  “And besides,” she added, “your little hypothetical scenario assumes I’d say yes if you did ask me out.”

  We had kind of flirted before, but nothing this direct. Now she was biting her lip, which drove me crazy, and coiling her hair, which made me feel like I was one of those ballplayers up at bat.

  “Wouldn’t you?” I tossed out—meaning Say yes, of course. And as I asked it, I laid on her what I considered to be my most charming smile yet.

  It was dim in the bar, but I swore I saw her blush again.

  “Maybe,” she said, holding my stare for a beat. Then just like that the moment passed and she released her lower lip and let her hair fall. “But then you’re moving to Miami anyway. At least that’s what you keep saying.”

  “See,” I said, “love is already turning on us.”

  “Hey, it’s your birthday!” she exclaimed, finally looking at my license. “Why didn’t you say so? No one should drink alone on his birthday.”

  What is it about people and birthdays, anyway? It’s just another day, really. But she had hardly handed me back my license and she was gone. She came back with the glass of wine I had asked for and two shots of Jack Daniel’s, one for each of us. But I don’t ever touch liquor, so I had to let her down as easy as I could on the shot. Besides, even though it was technically my birthday, I wasn’t really celebrating. And I wasn’t drinking alone either. I was paying my respects to my father the only way I knew how.

  It had been our tradition to have a glass of wine together on my birthday. It started when I was just three, with a finger of cabernet sauvignon in my bottle to quiet my crying when my mother didn’t come home, and it continued until he died. And now I allow myself one glass of cabernet every birthday, just to remember him by. My old man, the sommelier of Belfair. So if I’m counting right, and I’m pretty good with figures so I think I am, that makes thirty-one drinks in my entire life, one for every birthday since I was three, but not one sip of alcohol on any of the days in between. And I’ll tell you straight up, if you could see how white my teeth are
, you’d know I was telling the truth.

  Estrella was a good sport about the shot, of course—she seemed to be pretty easygoing most of the time—calling over the busboy and giving it to him so the three of us could toast my birthday. Then she left me to attend to her other customers and I sat watching the TV while the cabernet worked its way from my belly to my head. And then something happened that seemed simple enough at the time, even though it would forever change my life.

  What happened was one of those commercials for antidepressants came on. You know, the one where the cloud is following the lady around. But then she takes this pill and of course the sun comes out and the grass gets suddenly green and this little red bird flies down and lands on her head and starts singing. Perched right there on her head, I swear. Silly as hell, even for an antidepressant commercial. And that red bird got me thinking about those stamps, and the stamps got me thinking about David Hadley’s letter.

  Hadn’t he written something about God tipping the world like a dinner plate? Wouldn’t that be something to see? I was pretty sure he’d also written that his wife had jumped off of a building. And now he was being foreclosed on. Talk about tough luck. Something in the tone of his letter had come across as endearing, though, and it made me curious about him.

  And that’s all it took—that sappy pill commercial and a little lousy curiosity—because the next thought I had was that maybe I would swing by the office in the morning to get his file and go out and meet with him myself after all. I sure wouldn’t mind seeing the Center of the Universe, I thought, and a drive into the country sounded like a much better way to spend a birthday than cooped up in the office waiting for some clown to show up with a cake.

  Just about the time I had made up my mind to go, Estrella reappeared with a huge cupcake, crowned with a candle. She was singing “Happy Birthday,” and the busboy and then the rest of the bar joined in. It could have been from my once-a-year glass of cabernet, but I felt my cheeks flush. I know, embarrassing, right? People really do insist on making a big deal out of birthdays.

  Estrella wouldn’t let me blow the candle out until I made a birthday wish, even though I reminded her I was turning thirty-three, not three. But she insisted, so I did, and since I liked her so much I didn’t even fake it. I closed my eyes and made a real wish. It was easier than I thought, too, because it was the same wish I had made back in Belfair when I was just a boy, the same wish I had made nearly every day since.

  3

  THERE’S SOMETHING VERY relaxing about driving north out of the city, especially in fall. Maybe it’s the almost imperceptible fade from the gray sidewalks and glass skyscrapers to the golden leaves of turning trees; or maybe it’s the smell of clean, moist air spilling in through the cracked car window; or maybe it’s just the simple relief of knowing that you’re leaving the hustle of the city streets behind for an afternoon. Whatever it is, I felt my mood lifting the farther north I drove.

  It was raining like hell when I left Seattle, and hailing by the time I hit Marysville, but when I finally exited the interstate, I came out from beneath the dark clouds and dropped into a wide sunlit valley, surrounded by pine-covered hills. It was nice, it really was. A rainbow even followed me. I got my first glimpse of Whitehorse Mountain as I rounded a bend. It stood framed between two heavily forested peaks and its shady folds and sawtooth summit infused me with a sense of mystery. I wondered if it was possible to feel nostalgia for a place one had never been before. The mountain played peekaboo on the hilly skyline, appearing here and then there as the road twisted through the valleys of eastern Snohomish County, until at last it was above everything else on the horizon and lit by shafts of morning sunlight piercing through the dissipating clouds. I was beginning to feel glad that I had decided to come. So glad, in fact, that as I passed through the small timber town of Darrington, I was not nearly as bothered by the sight of a lumber mill as I thought I should be, even though the smell of damp sawdust reminded me of my childhood home.

  I consulted my map until I found Whispering Willow Lane. The sign was nearly obscured by the overgrown willow trees, and the overarching willow branches hung so low above the roadway in places that I could see them in the rearview mirror rustling in the breeze created by my car as I passed. I sure felt a million miles away from the city, even though I had left it just an hour and a half before. The road took me across a river on an old covered bridge, and then about a quarter mile past the bridge I came upon the address. His letter had not misled me. The mailbox was red with rust, and it was attached to a weathered-timber archway that leaned so precariously above the gravel driveway that I almost hesitated to drive beneath it. There was a wooden sign hung on chains that read:

  ECHO GLEN

  The property was densely overgrown, and as I drove through it I caught glimpses of its prior glory through the brush—peekaboo orchards scattered with unpruned apple and cherry trees; snapshots of barns and stables in various stages of dilapidation, losing their quiet battles with brambles and brush. I had the sense I was entering a place shrouded as much in mystery as it was in shade. The property opened as the drive turned to follow a fence line up toward the house. The house was white. At least it looked like it had been before years of weather had stripped most of the paint away and turned the wood siding a silvery gray that stood out against the dark trees rising up the mountain behind it. There was a quiet stubbornness to the house. As if it had long stood there at the base of that mountain, guarding the valley against the advancing forest that seemed to press against its back, or perhaps served as a final gateway to the wilder, enchanted lands beyond.

  As I got closer I saw that the house possessed a strange cheerfulness too. Despite the faded paint, it was well kept and bordered by green, freshly cut lawns. Rhododendrons flanked the covered porch, and bright flower baskets hung from hooks in the low porch eaves. The contrast between the manicured look of the house and the wildness of the surrounding property created the impression of a slow retreat by the caretaker to the confines of the home and its four walls. As if he maintained what he could as an act of defiance against the advance of time. I parked in front of the house—backing in for a quick exit if necessary, as was my habit on these visits—and got out of the car. I could hear a creek running somewhere unseen and I paused to breathe in the country air. Who knew the Center of the Universe smelled like wet grass and pine trees?

  The steps to the house had been built over with a wheelchair ramp, and I wondered if Mr. Hadley was disabled. I’d been on a few appointments with homeowners who were and it always made my job much harder. That, or if they had young kids or anything. Or if they had lived there a long time. Actually, it was never easy telling people they had to leave. But as I said before, even though it wasn’t the kind of career one was proud of, I was good at it. And if it weren’t me at their door offering them a check to vacate now, it would be the sheriff in a few months offering them nothing.

  I knocked on the door. I’ve learned to ignore doorbells and instead always knock lightly three times. It’s the least intrusive, I think. I waited, and then knocked three times more. I was just raising my hand to knock a third time when the door flew open as if it were on springs and an old man stood in front of me squinting into the light. He was noticeably shorter than I am, but he had a presence about him that filled the doorway. I guessed him to be in his late seventies or early eighties by the look of his thinning gray hair and the white stubble on his cheeks. You could tell he was really old by his clothes too. He wore brown corduroy pants and a colorful patchwork sweater that appeared to have been knitted by someone who was blind. The door opened so fast it kind of surprised me, though, and I was still taking all this in when he spoke.

  “If you’ve come to preach to me about Jehovah, I’ll kindly tell you as I have the others that I’ll be finding out the truth a lot sooner than you will, young man.”

  His voice was gravelly and gruff, but it was also kind.


  “I’m from the bank,” I said. “I’ve come about your letter.”

  I opened the file I had carried with me from the car and held up his letter. There were two enormous breast pockets sewn into his sweater, made of what looked like leather and both bulging with the weight of whatever personal possessions he felt necessary to store there, and he reached into one of these pockets and pulled out reading glasses. Then he took the letter from me and looked it over, as if verifying that it was in fact his handwriting. When he appeared satisfied, he handed the letter back and said, “I didn’t expect you to come so soon.”

  “Well, I just had to see the Center of the Universe,” I said. “And meet the man who can lick forty-nine one-cent stamps.” Then I stuck out my hand. “I’m Elliot Champ.”

  He didn’t shake it right away, asking instead, “What happened to Mr. Spitzer?”

  I didn’t want to tell him that he’d written to a fictional person and that Ralph Spitzer was just a made-up name for our computer-generated form letters. But I didn’t want to lie either. In the end, I fell back on my training and ignored the question altogether, shrugging and saying, “I’m Elliot Champ, sir, your housing transition specialist.”

  My arm was getting heavy by this time, but I kept my hand out for him to shake. He dipped his head a little so he could look at me over the reading glasses. Then he retrieved a small notebook and pen from his other sweater pocket and wrote something in it. I had the feeling he was taking down my name. Now my arm was really getting heavy.

  “Elliot Champ, you say? Sounds more made-up than Spitzer to me.” He tucked the notebook away in his bulging pocket. Then he finally shook my hand, and when he did, it was as if everything had suddenly changed. He smiled and stepped aside, pulling me into the foyer. “I’m so glad you’ve come, Mr. Champ. You have no idea.” He caught me too off guard for a response. This certainly wasn’t the welcome I was used to on these visits. “May I take your coat?” he asked as he closed the door behind me.