P. S. I Love You

by Barbara Conklin

  “That’s a good place to sit and think and to really be alone. I sit there quite a lot.”

  Elaine smiled and touched me lightly on the shoulder. “I guess I’m a lot like you. Sometimes I need to be alone, too. Thanks for showing me your rock.”

  I never thought I’d see the day that I’d share my rock with anyone.

  Chapter 4

  It took us about one and a half hours to get to Palm Springs, and that’s just about how long I sulked. Kim sat in the back of the car, surrounded by boxes, her nose in her coloring book.

  Finally we got off the freeway and turned onto a narrow road. It wasn’t terribly narrow, of course, but it seemed so after the freeway. On the left of us, we could see flat desert land; on the right of us, mountains with a haze around them, making them look almost purple.

  “Early in the year you can see snow up on top of those mountains,” my mother told us. “Those tiny sticks up there that look like toothpicks — they’re really huge evergreens.”

  “Can we go up on the tram?” Kim asked, noting a huge sign on the side of the road, advertising the cable cars that go to the top of the mountain.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  We passed the sign that says, The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and then we entered the town of Palm Springs. Another sign, Visit The Indian Canyons — Chamber of Commerce, Palm Springs. I didn’t even know there were Indians in Palm Springs.

  Mom pulled the car into a Sambo parking lot. “Let’s eat now and then consult the map Mr. Abbott sent me.”

  “You mean we have to go further than this?” asked the impatient Kim.

  “Not much further,” my mother said, “but I’m hungry, and we should freshen up before we reach the house.”

  “But there’s no one there — much,” I said. “The Abbotts have already left for Europe.”

  The place was so crowded we had to wait for a booth. “I didn’t know so many people came to Palm Springs in the summer,” I said, watching the busy waitresses rushing around.

  “I hear it is getting to be quite popular,” my mother told me. “With everything air-conditioned, people don’t mind the heat. Most of the time they sit around their gorgeous pools anyway. A lot of people come here just to rest, you know.”

  Bor-ing, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. If we had to go through with it, and standing in Sambo’s gave me the feeling that we were there already, I might as well stop sulking and try to be pleasant. But I missed our house already.…

  The waitress was serving another cup of coffee to my mother when my mother pulled out a crude map drawn by hand.

  “We’d better go now,” she said after examining the map. “The handymen are probably wondering where we are. Let’s see,” she went on, “Mr. Abbott wrote it down for me someplace… oh, yes, one is called Old Jim — just that — no last name. He’s almost seventy. And the other one is Paul. Paul Strobe. ‘Just turned eighteen — and a delightful boy,’ Mr. Abbott wrote. Well, I’m sure both of them will be helpful.”

  I finished the last of my Coke. Eighteen. My straw made a bubbly sound as I breathed up the last of the drink. An eighteen-year-old guy from town, making summer money at Mr. Abbott’s mansion. Maybe I’d practice my smile on him.…

  Neat little stores lined both sides of Palm Canyon Drive. Bookstores, lots of clothing shops, florists, interior decorating shops, just about everything you could possibly think of. I was glad there were bookstores. I’d find a way to get away from the Abbotts’ house and check them out.

  The shopping district was several blocks long and a few minutes later I spotted the library. I smiled. They’d get to know me there this summer as a tourist who loved to rummage around their dusty books. Later, maybe later I’d find enough time to drop in — as a well-known writer. Just the thought sent a chill up and down my spine.

  Eventually we came to a sign posted on a fence post. “Skipalot Drive — Private Road,” Kim read. “I like that name.” She said it several times over and over and over. I felt like bopping her.

  I could feel the hot air and sand mixing in

  my throat, as a sudden wind had come up and swirled around our car, causing the sand to fly in the windows.

  “There it is ahead,” my mother called out to us. I was amazed she could see anything at all. She slowed the car down.

  The first house loomed up in the windshield and I could see a wooden sign swinging from a wrought iron post. Abbott, it said. Actually you couldn’t see too much of the house from the road because of the massive stone wall surrounding it. There was a wall surrounding the other house down the road, the only other one in sight. But you could tell they were both magnificent mansions.

  Tall, majestic date palms swayed on all sides of the walls, like sentries guarding the hidden castles. The road went all the way up to the second mansion and then came to a dead end.

  My mother stopped the car in front of the Abbott sign and just sat and stared at the iron gate. Finally she crawled out of the car.

  She tugged at a black box that turned out to be a phone and then she found a buzzer. After pressing it for a moment, a voice came from out of the box. It was a young voice, a boy’s — not Old Jim, for sure, I thought.

  “Yes-s?”

  “We’re here,” my mother said into the little black box. “The Johnsons.” She blushed a little and smiled at us.

  “Wow!” Kim said, peering out of the car window. “They must have scads of money!”

  “Hush,” my mother said, putting her finger

  up to her lips. “They can probably hear everything we say. ”

  All of a sudden the gates began to slowly slide open. Quickly my mother ran back to the car and started the motor.

  “No telling just how long that thing will stay open,” she said, driving the car into the opening.

  Inside the gates, we approached a semicircular driveway with masses of flowers and different kinds of cactus and date palms surrounding it. They would have to have a fulltime gardener, I thought, gasping at the beauty of the place.

  The house was a Spanish villa — like something I’d seen in a magazine once. The outside was a light salmon color, covered by lush green vines. A tilted veranda surrounded the first floor, and when I walked on the tiles, I felt like I was walking over someone’s hand-painted pictures. Each tile was so different, but the miniature flowers in each were blue and white with green leaves.

  The second floor was surrounded by its own porches. From the ledges I could see huge clay pots filled with pink and white and purple geraniums.

  The mammoth, heavily carved wooden front door swung open and a boy stretched out his hand in greeting.

  Paul Strobe.

  He was wearing a faded blue T-shirt and jeans, but that’s not what I saw first, I must admit. His hair hung over one eye and he

  pushed it back like it was a habit. I would write in my notebook later that his hair was the color of the sand I had seen for miles — blond with light brown streaks. It looked so soft, I wanted to reach out and touch it. His eyes were the deep blue of a summer sky, and his smile was so natural and sincere, it was infectious.

  I sucked in my breath and extended my hand when it came my turn. I felt the warmth of his hand, a warmth that stayed even after he turned to shake Kim’s hand. The touch had created a tiny tingle of electricity that reached the insides of my heart.…

  Chapter 5

  “You’re lucky there’s a buzzer hookup out back,” Paul said, smiling again at my mother. “With all the noise Jim and I are making out back, we would have never heard you.” His nose was very straight and just the right length. His skin was evenly tanned and the longer I looked at his eyes, the bluer they seemed to become. I felt the red rushing to my face — surely he could feel me staring at him. Looking down at the tiles, I pretended to study them. I didn’t raise my head up until he was finally ushering us inside.

  We walked on glistening white marble slabs inside the vestibule. At the end of the hallway there was
a magnificent staircase all in white. We’d have to go around without shoes, I thought.

  Turning then to the left, Paul led us into a sunken living room, its thick, deep blue carpeting swallowing up our feet. I swear I couldn’t see below my ankles when I looked down.

  “I’ll have to give you a quickie tour,” Paul said, wiping a streak of ivory paint from his arm. It got on his hand and when he pushed back his hair again, he’d transferred some to his forehead. I laughed out loud, causing him to take a look in the gilt-edged mirror over the

  stone fireplace. I breathed a sigh of relief when he laughed, too.

  “What a creepy sight I am,” he told us. “But like I said, it’ll have to be a real quick tour as I don’t want Jim out in that hot sun alone too long or he’ll just keep right on working until he drops over.”

  “Are you gardening?” my mother asked, still stunned by the plush room.

  “We’re building a gazebo,” Paul told us, taking a rag out of his back pocket. He tried to wipe the paint from his forehead, but only smudged it further.

  “What’s a gazebo?” Kim asked.

  “I’ll show you when we go outside,” Paul answered her, and he reached out and tousled her hair. He stood tall; I tried to figure out the inches between my height and his and I would guess he stood about six feet. He was skinny, too, but I knew he had some good-looking muscles under that shirt. A shudder went through me as I thought about that.

  It seemed so funny that someone was showing us a house. Just a few hours ago we were showing our house to the Gretels. Our little tour had taken just a few minutes, but this one would take a lot more. Maybe we’d never get to see it all!

  The Abbott house had six bedrooms upstairs and three down and each one had its own bathroom and sitting room. The kitchen was as big as our entire downstairs at home and had its own fireplace. The dining room was as formal as the living room, and I knew we

  would never, never eat there unless we planned to entertain royalty.

  Then Paul led us to Mr. Abbott’s study. It was somewhat like a library, with leather everywhere — even on the walls! Another room Paul called the “unwinding room.” In there was a pool table made out of white marble, a television with a screen so large, I thought we were in a private theater, a shelf full of all kinds of computer games, and a huge stereo sound system that covered an entire wall. Wherever you looked there were paintings of boats and fishermen.

  Fresh flowers were everywhere — in ornate Chinese vases on massive slabs of wood Paul called coffee tables and in magnificent containers in various shapes on all the fireplace mantels. (There were six fireplaces throughout the house.)

  “You’ll like Old Jim — Jim Cable,” Paul told us, winding up the inside tour. “Mr. Abbott calls him his ‘lifesaver.’ He’s a man of many talents — gardener, carpenter. They rarely have to call a plumber unless the job gets too complicated. Jim also fixes little things, like a broken rocking chair or a lamp.”

  We stepped outside onto a patio made of brick-on-sand. There were flowers everywhere (now I knew where they got all of those flowers for all of those vases). Palm trees of all sizes graced the back garden, and following the red, brick path, we suddenly came upon an enormous oval-shaped swimming pool. It looked like a dark, rock-rimmed lagoon, with a gently

  trickling waterfall and literally hundreds of plants around it.

  “It’s like a jungle,” I gasped. “And the pool looks like something you’d stumble upon in paradise.…”

  “The tiles in the pool are a smoky black,” Paul told us. “And the bottom and the sides are painted black.”

  My mother peered down into the water. “The illusion really makes you forget that this lush garden is really in the heart of the desert,” she said, turning back to Paul. “And what are all those?” she asked pointing at the jungle itself.

  “Agaves, aloes, bananas, oleanders, palms,” Paul said. “And over here, palms, sedums, and yuccas. It took a long, long time to make it look like this.”

  Paul led us past the pool and further into the jungle of flowers until we came to a clearing stacked with wood and cans of paint.

  An old man was sawing a piece of wood with some kind of electric saw. He switched it off as soon as he heard us coming. “Hello-o,” he called out to us, smiling. “I’m Jim,” he said, extending a blue-veined, wrinkled hand.

  My mother took it warmly and smiled back. He shook our hands so hard, it was like he was pumping for water. He smiled wider, and I could see more spaces than teeth.

  “Jim lives in the little house beyond those trees,” Paul explained. “Trudy, the maid, is off for the entire summer and also Rachel, the cook, will be gone until September. Jim has decided to spend the summer here, though.”

  “I don’t have no place better to go,” Jim said laughing. His face was wrinkled like a dried-up apple, and there were about six gray-brown hairs on his crinkly head.

  “We are lucky then,” my mother said to him. He smiled a broad smile that made his wrinkles break out into more wrinkles. I liked him right from the very start.

  “What we’re doing here,” Paul went on, pointing to the clearing, “is a secret, a surprise for Mrs. Abbott. She’s wanted a gazebo all of her life and Mr. Abbott asked us to build it while they were off on their trip. We couldn’t start on it until last week after they left.”

  “We told her we were clearin’ this place for a hothouse,” Jim told us. “When she sees the gazebo, she’ll darn right keel over!”

  “I was just experimenting with the paint,” Paul said, applying turpentine to a rag and then rubbing off the smudge. Then he leaned over and washed his skin with clear water. “That should do it,” he said, forgetting about the paint on his forehead.

  “Okay,” my mother said to Kim and me. “Let’s go inside and start putting our things away.”

  I looked back one more time as I left the clearing, at all of the stacked wood and paint they were to use on the project. It looked like a big job which meant I would be seeing a lot of Paul Strobe. Things were looking up, I thought, as I reentered the Abbott house. Maybe Palm Springs wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  Chapter 6

  I begged my mother to allow me to stay in an upstairs bedroom.

  “That’s foolish,” she told me, unpacking her clothes in one of the downstairs bedrooms. “You’ll spend all your time climbing up and down those endless stairs! The bedrooms on the first floor are so beautiful!”

  “I want the one with the peacocks on the walls,” Kim said. “There’s a nice window where I can see clear out to the pool.”

  “The Abbotts said we could use any of the rooms except for their bedroom in the east wing,” my mother reminded us. “I suppose you could take one of those other rooms up there, Mariah, but why, when there’s that lovely green and white one next to mine?”

  She had no way of knowing that I had already inspected each bedroom thoroughly. There was one with a backyard view and a window seat that I just couldn’t resist. Propped up against the rose-colored velvet pillows on the wide windowsill I could watch progress on the gazebo (and see some more of this Paul Strobe, too).

  About one hour later, after I’d unpacked all my clothes, showered, and changed into a fresh

  green shirt and white shorts, I checked my mother’s room and then Kim’s. Both of them had fallen asleep in the middle of their beds. I made my way to the back door. I knew Paul was still out there, with the blueprints spread in front of him, placing different sizes of wood into different stacks; Old Jim had finally left, to take an afternoon nap, I guessed. I had seen it all from my perch in the window seat.

  I touched the back door to open it, and then swung around, looking for a pitcher. I’d have to bring him some water — or something, I figured. Peeking into the refrigerator, I whistled when I saw how really big it was inside. I’d never seen anything like it — even in the stores. “Wow,” I said under my breath. “It’s big enough for a restaurant!”

  There were several ca
rtons of Coke, root beer, diet drinks, and orange juice in bottles. I grabbed two ice-cold Cokes and closed the door.

  I took one last peek at myself in a mirror over the sink, and with my fingernails I tried to dig out a few strands of hair, trying to make them whispy looking so that I wouldn’t look tooneat. What I wanted to get was a kind of tousled I-don’t-care-look, so he wouldn’t know how long and carefully I had brushed my hair.

  “Oh, well,” I said in despair to the mirror. “If you don’t have anything to work with — what can you expect!”

  It looked like I had caught Paul just as he was leaving, and my hopes slid into the pits. “Oh, you’re done for the day?” I asked stupidly as he was removing his work gloves.

  He looked up and smiled so that all of his beautiful teeth showed. There was nothing wrong with hissmile, I thought. Oh, how lucky to respond so easily to people. My hand shook as I held out a friendly cold Coke to him.

  “Whew,” he said, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. “You’re an angel — how did you know I was parched? I didn’t think I’d make it home.”

  He tilted his head back and took one long drink. I could see his Adam’s apple sliding up and down. “Come on, Mariah,” he said. No one had ever, ever said my name so smoothly. “Let’s sit around the pool. It’s cooler there.” His blue eyes peered intently into mine as he spoke. I’d have done anything he said at that point.

  We took our drinks to the edge of the deep part and he threw himself down on the cool bricks. I couldn’t help but admire his long, slender fingers. An artist’s hand, I thought, my imagination running wild. For a few moments there was silence. I panicked — I’d have to say something quick or he’d think I was a real jerk! “I just think it’s great, you and Old Jim building a gazebo,” I said, my voice shaking, but then gaining in strength.

  “I love gazebos,” I went on. “I’ve always loved them. They’re found in so many gardens in England. I mean, they’re so Victorian.…”