by Lisa Wingate
It was fairly cold to be working down by the shore. I’d zipped up my coat all the way to the neck, but Clay had on shorts and a rugby shirt, the sleeves pushed up over his elbows. Daubs of paint dotted his skin, and there were stencils lying on a long, skinny shipping crate that had probably held a casket at one time. Roger was sitting in a nearby canoe that was right side up, his tail brushing back and forth across the aluminum seat, as if he were anticipating an adventure. I was careful not to make eye contact, lest he decide to launch himself at me again.
“So what’s all this?” I asked, stopping in front of Clay.
He glanced at me without standing up, his mouth quirking to one side. “I’m . . . painting . . . canoes?” He answered slowly, as in Duh, what does it look like? “And checking them out.”
“I can see that. Why are you painting and checking the canoes?”
“Because they . . . need it?” He stated the obvious in the same intentionally clueless tone. Long curls of straw-colored hair, bleached on the ends by the sun, fell over his neck as he turned his attention to the boat again and began sanding some sort of patching material he’d applied over a hole.
After my three previous unsuccessful talks today, I willed myself not to tumble into an emotional exchange. I would remain calm this time, logical. Logic was on my side, after all. “You know what I’m asking, Clay. Why are you here, hanging around Moses Lake, getting Uncle Herb and Uncle Charley all stirred up?”
“They don’t look like they’re all stirred up.” He shrugged toward the house, where the uncs were crossing a shady veranda that had served as an overflow location for many a funeral gathering over the years.
“Stop toying with me, Clay. This isn’t a joke.” My voice rose slightly, and I willed it back down. “You know what I’m asking, and you know why I came here.”
In the canoe, Roger stopped wagging his tail, dropped his ears, and cast a worried look from me to Clay and back.
Clay continued with his work. “I figured you came to see us—have a little visit with the ol’ fam.”
I heard myself snort, an ugly, cynical sound I instantly felt guilty about, but Clay knew that we never got together just to visit anymore. Actually putting that into words seemed sad, though. “Come on, Clay, be realistic,” I pleaded.
Clay chuckled and shook his head. “You know me better than that, Hessie.”
The pet name, Hessie, pushed past my crossed arms and heavy coat, and plucked a heartstring. He’d given me that name, a combination of Heather and sissie, when he was still toddling around in diapers. He thought his big sister hung the moon back then.
Looking up from the canoe, he smiled that precocious, frustrating, boyish smile that had always accompanied excuses about lost homework, forgotten chores, and times when he neglected to let us know where he was going before he wandered off to play. The difficult thing about Clay was that he was always so darned cute and he earnestly never meant to do any harm. He never intended for me to end up staying awake until midnight, doing grade-school homework he’d forgotten about, or to leave me running up and down the lakeshore, scared to death that he’d drowned. It just happened, because he was such a dingbat. A sweet, hapless, adorable dingbat with a huge heart that got him into trouble time, after time, after time.
Despite all of that, I fought the urge to smile back at him. “Don’t even try to get cute with me.”
“I don’t really have to try.” He grinned again and went back to sanding the canoe. “Cute just oozes out of me. Can’t help it.” He lifted his green-tinted hands, helplessly.
I wondered if the adorable little country girl he was now courting—Blaine Underhill’s cousin—had any idea that she was stepping into a mess way deeper than her cowboy boots. Clay’s history with women wasn’t any better than his history with college degrees or jobs. Some poor female, usually the older and more mature sort, was always taking him under her wing, and they sailed along blissfully for a little while—Clay was one of the most fun people I knew—until the wind changed and blew him onto another new path. He’d left a trail of broken hearts behind him over the years, but never intentionally.
“Can you please just cut it out? You know, when you go off on these kinds of schemes, other people end up getting hurt. People who can’t just go flit off to work at some ski resort or run away with an earthquake relief team. The contracts for the land sale have to go through before the broker offer runs out next week. Uncle Herb and Uncle Charley need this money. It’s not like either one of them has a pension plan. Everything they have is tied up in property. They don’t have time to waste.”
“Why?” Clay sat back on his heels, finally listening. He set the sandpaper on the boat and rested his green elbows on his hairy knees. “What’s the rush? Don’t you even want to take a little time to look around the old place before you throw everything on the auction block?”
His eyes met mine, his gaze a soft, sensitive green, the color so like Mom’s. He looked at me the way she always did, seeming somehow disappointed in who I was. In truth, I guess, we were perpetually disappointed with one another, all of us. “Not at someone else’s expense. Not if it causes problems for the rest of the family, Clay.”
I didn’t want to look around the place, though. I didn’t want it to grow on me or speak to me, or call me back to the past. I wasn’t seeking any reason to miss it when it was gone from my life. Perhaps that was an advantage I had over Clay. I wanted to be rid of all ties to Moses Lake and the things that happened here. How could he not feel the same way? How could he look at this place and not think of what happened to Dad? “The broker won’t wait forever. That’s the way brokers are. If one deal doesn’t work out, they just invest elsewhere.”
Roger sidled out of the canoe and moved timidly to Clay’s side, his large, brown eyes rolling upward as he nudged under Clay’s arm. The two of them seemed remarkably, painfully alike—two lost puppies, looking for something they never could quite find.
I didn’t wait for my brother to come up with an answer, but pressed on instead, driving the point home. “I know it’s hard for Uncle Herbert and Uncle Charley to let go. I know it’s hard for them to move. But it’s reality, Clay. It’s what has to happen. There’s no one here to take care of them.”
“There can be.” Clay tipped his chin up defensively, and I had the sense that he meant well. As usual, he wanted to come to the rescue, but he hadn’t thought things through.
“Clay, come on. What about law school? How many times have you applied for an extension on your thesis? You’re just lucky the school has been willing to work with you. And they did that because you’re so incredibly, amazingly smart that they couldn’t stand to see you drop out. But this is the real world. People’s lives are involved. Mom doesn’t need to be here, either. You know what a mess she was when we lived here. What if that happens again? What if she gets all . . . wrapped up in the past, and she starts to act the way she used to? This sale needs to go through.”
“So they can take the land and . . . what . . . develop it or something?” His hand, which had been running through Roger’s fur, paused, and for an instant we were locked like a pair of players in a chess match. “Stick some golf course or resort on it?”
“What gave you that idea?” I asked carefully.
“Amy works at the Proxica plant in Gnadenfeld. That place is a gossip mill. She hears things.”
“Well, what exactly did she hear?” Disquiet crept up my spine, clingy and stealthy, like a tick looking for a place to burrow in. Amy worked for Proxica? What were the odds that Clay would just happen to be dating a girl with ties to Proxica?
Clay nodded, oblivious to the connections spinning forth in my mind. “She heard that the broker guy’s been all over the county, looking at land. Why does he want our place so bad? What’s he going to do with it?”
I couldn’t come right out and lie to my brother, but the confidentiality agreement wouldn’t allow me to reveal the truth, either. “You know what, Clay, why does
it matter? What matters is doing what’s best for our family.”
“Forget what’s best for the town, I guess, huh?” He stood up, a paintbrush still dangling from one hand. “What’s best for the area.”
I took a step back, dumbstruck as much by the out-in-left-field remark as by the gravity in Clay’s voice. “How do you know what’s best for the area? You don’t live here, Clay. And if you’re looking at this as one of your save-the-world social causes, how about taking a glance at the poverty rate on the other side of the lake, up in Chinquapin Peaks? A broker thinking about development would be a good thing. Look at Gnadenfeld. Look at how much it’s grown in the past sixteen years. There are real stores, restaurants, new housing. I checked out their Internet site the other day. The school has a great big gorgeous performing arts center and a new multi-sport stadium.”
Clay squinted into the distance, toward Chinquapin Peaks and the river channel. “Yeah, look at Gnadenfeld.” His voice held an undertone that I couldn’t read. Maybe my brother was on some kind of back-to-nature kick, ready to throw himself in front of the bulldozers to keep anything from changing around Moses Lake.
“You know what, Clay, if there’s something you want to say to me, just say it.” I squeezed my arms over my chest, shivering.
He seemed to think about that momentarily, and I had the sense that we were finally about to excavate some nuggets of truth.
The sound of a car rattling up to the house caught Clay’s attention just as he was about to speak. Casting a curious glance toward the driveway, he moved his paintbrush to a coffee can and started up the hill. I followed, frustrated by the diversion. My irritation sharpened and took on shape when I recognized the dark head, tan barn jacket, and cowboy boots visible above and below the truck door as the driver exited the vehicle. What is he doing here?
By the time we made it to the driveway, with Roger cavorting happily back and forth in our path, Blaine Underhill was headed up the front walk. The uncs had come around to meet him, and my mother was poking her head out the front door, looking curious.
Everyone greeted Blaine warmly, as if he were a long lost friend rather than a potentially greedy, unprincipled robber-baron wannabe bent on ruining my family. Roger ran across his path and nearly sent him sprawling into the flower bed. Good for Roger. Blaine shook a finger at the dog playfully. “Yeah, I know where you’ve been, buddy,” he said, and Roger stopped frolicking, then sat down and cocked his head, his ears drooping and his tail scrubbing the ground tentatively.
“Anybody here expecting a FedEx?” Blaine asked, and from behind, I could just see the corner of a FedEx box between his sleeve and the side of his coat.
“Me,” I answered. Blaine turned around on the path, seeming to realize for the first time that Clay and I were there. Cradled in his arm, he had the FedEx box—the one that would bring me my credit card, my ID, my iPhone, and my favorite red leather purse. Oh happy day! At least something was going right.
What was Blaine Underhill doing with my FedEx, anyway? “Thank goodness,” I breathed. “I’ve been waiting for this all day.” I reached for the box, and, oddly, Blaine pinched one corner between two fingers and lifted it from his arm, as if it weighed nothing. The box stretched accordion-style, slowly unfolding, until it was one long string of mangled red, white, and blue cardboard, dangling from his thumb and index finger.
“What in the . . .” I muttered, as family members moved in from all sides, the group of us gathering around the remnants of the box like monkeys in a zoo.
“Uh-oh,” Clay muttered.
“Roger!” Mom gasped.
“I told ya that dog chews things,” Uncle Charley added.
Uncle Herbert nodded in agreement. “I dig stuff up in the flower beds for months every time Roger comes here for a visit. Probably got that box right off the porch,” he added in his dry, unassuming way.
“The delivery people aren’t supposed to just leave packages on the porch, are they?” Clay retorted, by way of defending Roger’s honor. “Isn’t somebody supposed to sign for it?”
“Depends on how you send it,” Uncle Herbert answered. “I’ve had whole boxes of supplies left out here, sometimes.”
“I found it tangled in your gate out front,” Blaine offered, studying Roger’s free-form artwork. “Probably blew out to the road after the dog got done with it.”
I just kept staring, unable at first to accept the magnitude of the disaster represented by the pile of cardboard. “The dog ate my FedEx?” I questioned numbly, touching the box, then pulling my hand away. It was slimy, covered with teeth marks and dog hair. “Where’s my . . . my stuff?”
“He buries things,” Uncle Herbert repeated.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Roger slinking away, disappearing behind a holly bush. “My checkbook and my wallet . . . my credit card . . . my iPhone . . . that was a Dolce & Gabbana purse. A seven hundred dollar . . .” I’d treated myself to the Dolce last year, after Mel and I closed a design deal for a high-end sporting goods store. Granted, I’d bought the bag online at a discount, but still . . . I turned to my brother, vaguely aware that my eyes were flaring and my lip was curling. “Your dog ate my Dolce & Gabbana and my iPhone.”
There was a rustling in the bushes, and a quick flash of blond fur between the holly leaves as Roger, quite wisely, exited the area.
My shock swirled into full-blown panic, picking up speed, sweeping away my orderly existence, breaking it into pieces of tornadic debris. “My life is in that iPhone.”
Clay lifted his hands, indicating that this was hardly his fault. “Who knew the delivery guy was just gonna leave it on the porch?” He gave the front door a disgusted look. “He could’ve put it up high, at least. How’s Roger supposed to know not to mess with it?”
Something primal and sibling-related happened to me at that point. With no prior warning and no way to control it, I reverted to being a thirteen-year-old, stuck in the backseat with my little brother while he sang Sesame Street songs over and over and over, just because he knew it would drive me crazy. “How’s Roger supposed to . . . Are you serious?”
“All right, all right!” Mom stepped in. “For heaven’s sake, Heather, don’t be melodramatic. Obviously, Clay didn’t mean for the dog to chew up the box. Let’s just get busy and find your things. Roger can’t have taken them too far.”
“I’ll grab some garden tools,” Uncle Charley offered enthusiastically.
“I’ll get some gloves,” Uncle Herbert added.
The rest of the day was like a family Easter egg hunt. We even had help. Blaine brought over a metal detector from the hardware store, and Amy showed up after work. We combed the gardens, the roadside ditch, and the lawn. In the front flower bed, thanks to the metal detector, we unearthed a lipstick tube and my key ring. The uncs even broke out flashlights as dusk set in, but it was getting colder by the minute, and everyone was shivering. Mom started coughing and sniffling, and Amy’s hands turned blue despite the fact that Uncle Herb brought out coats and hats for all of us. The only one who wasn’t cold was Roger. He was having a grand time running from person to person and acting as if he had no idea why we were pointing at the ground and trying to get him to show us where the bodies were buried.
Finally, we called off the search. Mom thought everyone should come in for cocoa, and Uncle Herb wanted to feed us and stoke up the fireplace. “We got plenty of casseroles,” he pointed out. “And pie, too.”
I hung back, leaning against a porch post and mourning my iPhone, as the group filed into the house. I’d been here a whole day and accomplished absolutely nothing. I was no closer to getting the papers signed for the property deal than I’d been when I left Seattle. Meanwhile, back at the office, Mel probably wondered what was going on. Work-related calls and emails were undoubtedly stacking up in my inbox. By now, maybe Richard had called. I wouldn’t even know it. I was stuck in a communications black hole, living the primitive life. No cell phone. No wireless Internet. Outsmarted by a golde
n retriever.
How much worse could the day possibly get?
I wanted to tell someone about it, to describe the family digging, and raking, and hoeing, the uncs shuffling around wearing baseball caps with built-in flashlights, searching underneath holly bushes, cheering each time they spotted something shiny buried in the leaves. We’d found several soda cans and a Rhode Island license plate from 1955, but nothing else that belonged to me. Roger had hidden his bounty well.
Even if I had found my phone, I didn’t have anyone to share the story with, I realized as I stood staring at the yard. Trish would be busy getting her kids fed, bathed, and ready for bed. And Richard . . . Well, Richard probably hadn’t called, to be honest. I could call Mel, but he would just want the work-related update, short and sweet.
Sighing, I let my head fall against the porch post and tried to move my frozen toes inside my soggy boots. A cold, lonely, miserable feeling crept over me. I wanted to be someplace else, but I didn’t know where. Not home, necessarily. At work, maybe, with my head in a project, hyperfocused to the point that time passed without my even noticing, without my wishing that things were different. That I was different.
“Food’s in here.” The voice startled me, and I realized that Blaine was in the doorway.
Swallowing the prickly, teary lump, I blinked the moisture from my eyes. I was being foolish, standing here feeling sorry for myself, feeling as if my life somehow didn’t measure up. I had everything I’d ever wanted: a good job, a cool place to live, enough money for all the stuff I wanted—a Dolce & Gabbana handbag . . . Well, not anymore, but I could buy myself another one. “I’m waiting for my iPhone to ring,” I said, without turning to look at him. “I’ll track it down by the sound.”
“The battery’s dead by now.” The hinges let out a long, loud complaint, and the door clicked shut. Blaine’s footsteps crossed the porch, then stopped.
