She goes to the foot of the ladder to the loft and hollers up to Sam, “I’m leaving!”
He leans over the railing. “What time are you home tonight?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Not too late.”The truth is, in the past week she hasn’t been coming home right after rehearsals. She’s too wound up, her mind spinning. It takes her at least an hour to get out of May’s head, out of May’s body and back into her own. The Miss Quimby Diner stays open until midnight every night except for Sundays, and so usually after rehearsals she stops by and has a cup of tea. Reads the paper. She feels guilty not telling Sam. It’s innocuous, she knows. Christ, it’s just tea, but it’s a secret. Time stolen away from the cottage, from Sam and Finn.
By the time they get to the second scene, the headache is rippling through her entire body. Still, she tries to push through the pounding, to the other side where there isn’t any pain. But as she moves, she can feel the headache in her joints: her knees, her knuckles, her spine. Her words feel thick and round in her mouth, like marbles.
“Mena?” Jake says.
She’s standing next to May’s bed, bent over at the waist. The headache is pulling her head down. She can barely keep it up.
“Migraine,” she says. “I get migraines.” It feels like she’s forgotten how to talk. She wonders if this is what it feels like to have a stroke.
“Here, sit down,” he says. He guides her backward onto the bed. And then Anne is handing her a glass of water. She swallows but it’s too cold; it’s so cold it almost burns.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and tears sting her eyes. “I don’t think I can do this tonight.”
“Give me your hand,” Jake says.
Mena looks up at him, through the blurry pain. The fluorescent lights are hurting her eyes. He is holding his hand out, waiting.
She gives him her hand and he starts to knead the flesh between her thumb and forefinger. His thumb pushes, making heavy circles. She is aware of every muscle, every sinew and bone.
“My ex-wife got migraines. This was the only thing that helped. It won’t make the headache go away, but it should make you feel a little better.”
And she does, feel better. As he works that small area of her hand, the currents of pain part, a little, and she’s able to lift her head up again.
“I should go home,” she says, starting to stand. She squeezes her eyes shut, winces.
“You really shouldn’t drive,” he says.
“I’m okay. It’s not too far.”
“Listen, I’ll take you, and you can get your car tomorrow.” Jake is still holding on to her hand. She feels like a little old lady who needs help crossing the street.
“No ... we just have the one car. We’ll be stranded without it. I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I just need to get home and go to bed.”
“You sure?” he asks.
She’s not sure; she’s actually pretty sure she shouldn’t be driving, but she’s also sure that accepting a ride from Jake is not a good idea.
She gets her purse and sweater from the folding chair where she left it and apologizes to Lisa. “I’ll be better by tomorrow. These things pass pretty quickly.”
“Just get some rest and let me know if you need to take tomorrow off too,” Lisa says, and squeezes Mena’s shoulder.
Jake walks her outside and sees her to her car.
“I’m fine,” she insists when he offers once again to drive her home. He leans down to her open window. “See you tomorrow?” he asks. His breath smells like cigarettes and coffee.
She smiles, and the effort of it sends shock waves of pain through the right hemisphere of her brain.
She drives slowly, conscious of every bump in the road, every turn. By the time she gets to the dirt road that leads to the pond, she’s feeling like she might throw up. She slows the car down even more until she is crawling; she has broken out into a cold sweat and her hands are shaking. She rolls down the window and pushes her face toward the cool night air. And then all of a sudden there are lights flashing, blue and red, and she feels bile rising to her throat.
She pulls the car over, but the embankment is steeper than she thought and the car dips down into the ditch. She bumps her head on the steering wheel. The pain of the bump is a strangely pleasant distraction from what’s going on inside her head. She shields her eyes when a blinding light flashes into her face.
“Ma’am, can you step out of the car, please?”
It takes her nearly five minutes and a puff on a Breathalyzer for her to convince the policeman that she’s not drunk. He’s off duty, not even wearing a uniform. He is shorter than she is, thick neck and wrists. When he makes her walk a straight line she is grateful there is no traffic passing by to see this.
“I’ve just got a terrible, terrible migraine,” she says.
“Well, how far are you from where you’re staying?” he asks.
He thinks she’s a summer person. No wonder he’s giving her such a hard time.
“We just bought the Carsons’ old place. About a mile from here.”
“Oh!” he says, suddenly softening. “We’re neighbors! I live just south of you. The red house on the opposite side of the road? I’ve got firewood for sale out front?”
The dog.
“You’ve got a dog,” she says. The pain feels like a saw now, a dull saw inching its way back and forth behind her eyes.
“Old Joe!” he says. “He chase you yet?”
“A couple of times,” she manages. She wants to go home.
“Listen, looks like you shouldn’t be driving anymore tonight anyway. Get in and I’ll give you a lift home.You can come back for your car tomorrow.”
Reluctantly she climbs into the front seat of the cruiser, and he finally turns off the flashing lights. Within a few minutes they pull up at the cottage, and she can see Finn peering out the window at her. This would actually be kind of funny if her head didn’t feel like somebody was using it as a snare drum.
“Nice meetin’ you, neighbor,” he says.
She nods and slams the door to the cruiser behind her, walking sheepishly, like somebody caught, all the way to the front door.
Finn’s first thought is that they’ve found the plants. That he’s about to be busted.
He heard the car pull into the driveway and expected to see the station wagon, but it was too early for his mom to be home. When the car triggered the motion sensor his dad installed on the porch, he could see that it wasn’t the woody at all but a cop car.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he says, standing up and wringing his hands. He has no idea what to do. He paces back and forth across the room, wondering if there’s any way he can sneak out to the field and destroy the evidence. It’s a ridiculous thought, though. It’s too late. Shit, shit, shit.
And so he starts to think about how he can get out of it. He’s gotten pretty good at lying on the fly. Plants? Must be somebody’s using our backyard to grow weed. I don’t even know what a pot plant looks like. Sure, I’ve been in some trouble before, but I’m done with all that. I’m a good kid. Then he remembers all of the printouts from the High Times Web site. They’re all crammed into his backpack.With the last of his weed. Shit. He’s trying to figure out if he can set the papers on fire and get to the bathroom to flush the weed down the toilet when the headlights from the cop car sweep across the room.
His heart is pounding in his throat as he looks out the window again.
But his mother is walking toward the house and the car is pulling away. Jesus, what the fuck? he thinks. Where’s her car? What did she do? His friend Pete got escorted home by the police once. He was Robo tripping; there were three empty bottles of cough syrup in his backseat, but he’d somehow managed to convince the stupid cop he just had a really bad cold. Finn thinks the chances his mom is high on cold medicine are pretty slim, and she was at rehearsals, so she couldn’t be drunk. What the fuck? He can hear his mother and father talking in the kitchen. Their voices are muffled though. He cracks
the door open and strains to hear.
“You okay?” his dad asks.
He can hear his mom crying, and it sends hot liquid down his spine. He hates that sound; it’s the worst sound in the whole world. After Franny died, he’d wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and hear it. It would startle him out of sleep and then, even after it stopped, he’d be wide-eyed, awake until morning, waiting to fall back asleep. That’s when he started smoking pot.
His whole body aches, and he just wants her to stop. He wants it all to stop. To just go back to normal. He covers his ears to block out the sound, squeezes his eyes shut. He listens to the blood in his ears and tries to think about the ocean, about home. He curls up on his bed and hugs his knees to his chest. Franny would hate this, he thought. She’d be curled up next to him right now, burying her face in his back. Make it stop, she’d say. I hate this.
Finn wakes just as the sun is starting to come up. He’d been dreaming that he was out surfing with Franny. In the dream, she was telling stupid knock-knock jokes.
“Knock-knock,” she says.
“Who’s there?”
“Hawaii,” she says.
“Hawaii who?”
“I’m fine, Hawaii you?”
“Ha, ha,” he says.
“Knock-knock,” she says again.
“Who’s there?” he asks, rolling his eyes. And then a wave comes. But instead of getting up on her board and riding it in, she’s sucked under. Gone, just like that.
Dale pulls into the parking lot at Graceland at ten o’clock on Monday morning.
She’d picked up her Bug (“good as new”) as soon as the shop opened and said her good-byes to Troy, who had driven her there.
“Why don’t you stay a few more days?” he had said. “Give your back a little more time to heal.”
The tattoo had taken nearly four days to complete, and her entire back felt like a tenderized steak. Troy had helped her rub the greasy Neosporin across the places she couldn’t reach. Together they’d looked in the mirror, she over her shoulder, at her skin turned into one giant page—at his words, reflected in reverse, covering the entire expanse of her back. They’d screwed in the shower, sitting up, with her straddling him because the sheets stuck to her ravaged skin.
“Stay,” Troy had pleaded, holding his hands together in mock prayer, grinning. And a little part of her considered it. What if she just stayed? She tried to picture herself living here, in Little Rock. Answering the phones at the tattoo shop. Working at the Applebee’s or the Olive Garden on the weekends for extra cash. Hell, she could probably get a job at the Blockbuster right next to the tattoo shop. She even imagined, for a minute, falling in love with Troy, getting married, having kids.
But it was silly, she knew. Troy was just bored, and she’d been a nice distraction. Besides, she was already a week behind schedule. She needed to get back on the road, and now that the Bug was fixed, there was nothing keeping her from moving forward.
She had thought about driving straight through Memphis, continuing on, but pangs of guilt hit her as she started seeing the billboards advertising Graceland. Elvis’s silhouette larger than life. Elvis Lives. If there was anything Dale could understand about her mother, it was this.
She remembered being a little girl and watching her mother in the kitchen, shaking her hips to “Jailhouse Rock,” the little radio next to the wooden bread bin always set to KOOL FM. That was before her father left, when her mother still danced in the kitchen. Dale remembers thinking her mother was so beautiful when she closed her eyes and her hips swayed to “Blue Christmas,” the Christmas lights she’d strung around the windows twinkling. And she remembers curling up in her mother’s arms on the couch on Sunday afternoons, watching old Elvis movies on TV. She thinks of her soft lap, the way she stroked Dale’s hair as she sang along with all the songs. She remembers thinking that Elvis looked a lot like the old pictures of her dad, the ones in the yearbook he left behind.
The tour takes more than an hour, and her head is spinning from all of the garish displays. She realizes she hasn’t eaten yet today and gets a cheeseburger and fries at Rockabilly’s Diner, grabbing a USA Today and checking the weather in Vermont. In Burlington, it’s going to be overcast and seventy-five degrees. In the gift shop she finds an Elvis music box that plays “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” her mother’s favorite song. She has the salesgirl wrap it in Bubble Wrap. Before she leaves, she decides to walk around the grounds a bit, take a few pictures to send to her mother with the gift. She follows a wave of people and finds herself standing in the Meditation Garden, looking at the sea of neon flowers and wreaths, at the aquamarine blue fountain, and the circle of stones marking the graves of Elvis and his family members. Her eyes sting.
The tour guide had said that Elvis always considered his mother the most important woman in his life. He bought her a pink Cadillac with his first royalty check. He took care of her and his father. But as Elvis became more and more famous, his mother became more and more anxious. She was taking diet pills, drinking. But even when he was on the road, Elvis would call her every night, whispering baby talk to her to calm her nerves. Then he enlisted in the army, and six months later Gladys Presley died of a heart attack. Some people say she died of a broken heart.
Dale thinks about her own mother at home, imagines her trying to navigate the house, her life, without Dale’s help. This is the longest she’s ever gone without calling her. She’s stopped listening to her voice mail. She knows she should call her soon, to make sure she’s okay. But she’s so close. She doesn’t want that terrible thread that runs between them to pull her back. Not now. Not yet.
She reads the inscriptions on each stone, circling the perimeter of the grave site. There’s something strangely moving about the way the stones make a perfect half circle, about the way this family, in death, are all together again. She wipes away tears that are running hot down her cheeks.
A woman in a hot pink pantsuit and plastic sun visor touches her arm. “It’s okay to cry, honey,” she coos. “He was the King.”
“We’re coming up!” Monty says, and Sam wishes he hadn’t answered the phone.
“Up here?” Sam asks.
“Lauren says she needs a retreat. Usually that means a trip to the Hamptons, but I think she’s getting adventurous in her old age. The farthest north she’s been lately is the Upper West Side.” He laughs. “Besides, I want to check on your progress. Snoop around a little bit.”
“When?” Sam asks.
“Friday. I think we can get there by dinnertime. We’ll stay the weekend.You got room for us?”
Sam tries to think about where they will sleep. Maybe Finn would be willing to camp out for the weekend. He and Franny used to pitch a tent in the yard when they were kids. It seems sort of ridiculous to kick him out of his room though.
“Come on, Sammy. It’ll be fun. We’ll go on nature walks. Watch some birds. Whatever it is you all do up there.”
Sam looks out the window at the bird feeder he keeps forgetting to refill. There’s a squirrel that’s been stealing all of the bird food. He read somewhere that he should put Crisco on the pole so the squirrels can’t climb up, but somehow that strikes him as incredibly underhanded.
“Let me talk to Mena. She’s doing this play. I’m not sure what her schedule’s like,” he says.
“A play? She’s acting again? That’s fantastic. Can we see it?”
“It doesn’t open until August. Maybe you should wait and come then.”
“Oh, no. Lauren’s got her heart set on getting out of the city this weekend. Maybe, if she has a good time, we’ll come back.”
Sam grimaces. “Let me call you back, Monty. I’m right in the middle of something.”
“Work?” Monty asks hopefully.
“Work,” he says.
Actually, Sam is right in the middle of heating up some lamb souvlaki Mena left them for dinner last night. They don’t have a microwave here, and it’s been in the oven for almost a half ho
ur already. He keeps opening the over door and poking at it to see if it’s hot. Mena has always accused him of the inability to multitask. At home, she’d catch him staring at the toaster or microwave and shake her head knowingly. What she didn’t know was that it was when she thought he was being an imbecile, he was actually almost always thinking about his books. These were the moments when (even if he seemed like he was focused on the toasting of an English muffin or the reheating of leftovers) he was usually caught up in the reverie of whatever book he was working on. As the toaster toasted and the microwave heated, he was imagining. His mother, before she died, would plead with him, “Go do something, Sammy. Play outside.” But he was doing something; he was playing. Even as a little kid, he could look as though he were doing nothing at all for hours. What a relief it was to finally put pen to paper those days, to open up the seams and let the beads of the stories that had been stuck inside spill out.
But today he’s simply watching the souvlaki heat up, no creative ponderings to accompany it. Just cold souvlaki in the slowest oven on earth.
When the phone rings again, he answers, irritated, “Monty, give me a few. I said I need to talk to Mena.”
“Sam?” It’s not Monty; it’s a woman.
“Yes?”
“Hi, Sam, it’s Hilary Ortiz.” One of Mena’s friends, a realtor. “Hi, Hill ... hey, Mena’s not here. Can I have her give you a call later?”
“Listen, I was actually calling for you. I know this might be premature; it might even sound a little crazy. But I have a client who is very interested in making an offer on the Sunset Cliffs property.”
The Sunset Cliffs property. Their house.
“But it’s not even on the market,” Sam says.
“I know. And the market is hardly what it used to be.”
He swallows hard. “How much do they want to offer?”
“We haven’t talked numbers yet, but let me just tell you that you should be able to get whatever it is that you decide to ask. They love the place. They’re a gay couple from LA, they come down to San Diego a lot, and they actually said they’ve always loved the house. That they’ve almost knocked on the door a few times just to see what it’s like inside. One of them is a producer; he’s got money to burn.You and Mena could retire. Finn’s college would be paid for.”
The Hungry Season Page 17
